The first question:

Osho,
How may I live gracefully in time? In my times?

Grace comes out of eternity. Grace is never a part of time. Time creates hurry, time creates tension, time creates anxiety. The more you are conscious of time, the more neurotic you will be. Time is a neurosis. When you are not conscious of time at all, when there is no past and no future, when time is irrelevant to you, when you are just herenow, grace arises.

Grace is part of the eternal. Grace is a quality of God – and God is not in time. In time is mind, in time is ego, in time is misery, hell. The way of the meditator is how to go beyond time, how to drop time, how to become oblivious of time. I don’t mean the clock time, I mean the psychological time. Clock time is perfectly okay, utilitarian. If you have to catch a train, you have to remember the clock time. But that is not a problem. That doesn’t create anxiety, that doesn’t destroy your grace. The clock is perfectly okay in its own way. But when you become entangled in psychological time, then you lose grace.

What is psychological time? To live in the past is psycho-logical time. And then out of it arises another problem: one starts living in the future. Past starts projecting itself into the future. You had some experience yesterday, you would like to have it again tomorrow. You had some experience yesterday that you did not like, and you don’t want to have it again tomorrow. The tomorrow comes out of the modifications of yesterday. It is a refined version of yesterday, of all your yesterdays.

What are you hoping for in your life in the future? What are you going to do tomorrow, or the next year, or the next life? Sometime look into it – what are you going to do? And you will find your whole past clamoring to be repeated – in a better way, of course. Some depressing moments have to be dropped, some dark corners have to be made light, some ugly states are not to be repeated again, some faults not to be committed – and some joys have to be strengthened, prolonged, made more joyful.

Your future has been chosen from the past, so in these two you are entangled. Either you are entangled in the past, thinking of that which is no more, or thinking of that which is not yet. And meanwhile you are missing the present. And the present is part of eternity. The present is not part of time at all.

Be herenow and grace comes of its own accord.