Time is created by the movement of the mind, just like the movement of the pendulum. Mind moves, you feel time. When mind is nonmoving, how can you feel time? When there is no movement, time cannot be felt. So scientists and mystics agree on this point: that movement creates the phenomenon of time. If you are not moving, if you are still, time disappears, eternity comes into existence. Your clock is moving fast, and the mechanism moves from one extreme to another.
The second thing to be understood about mind is that the mind always longs for the distant, never for the near. The near gives you boredom, you are fed up with it; the distant gives you dreams, hopes, possibility of pleasure. So the mind always thinks of the distant. It is always somebody else’s wife who is attractive, beautiful; it is always somebody else’s house which obsesses you; it is always somebody else’s car which fascinates you. It is always the distant. You are blind to the near. The mind cannot see that which is very near. It can only see that which is very far.
And what is very far, the most distant? The opposite is the most distant. You love a person – now hatred is the most distant phenomenon; you are overeating – now fasting is the most distant phenomenon; you are celibate – now sex is the most distant phenomenon; you are a king – now to be a monk is the most distant phenomenon.
The most distant is the most dreamy. It attracts, it obsesses, it goes on calling, inviting you, and then when you have reached the other pole, this place from where you have traveled will become beautiful again. Divorce your wife, and after a few years the wife has gained beauty again.
A film actress came to me. She had divorced her husband fifteen years ago. Now she is old, less beautiful than she was when she and her husband were separated. Their son was married last year, so at the marriage she met her husband again, and they had to travel together. The husband fell in love with her again, so she came to me and asked, “What should I do? Because now he is proposing again, he wants to get married to me again.”
She was also fascinated. She was just waiting for me to say yes. I said, “But you lived together, there was always conflict and nothing else. I know the whole story – how you were fighting, quarreling, how you were creating hell and misery for each other. Now again…?”
The distant always becomes fascinating. You can move into the same rut and then again you will start thinking of the opposite. Remember, mind always thinks of the opposite, always fascinated with the opposite. So if you are rich you will have a fascination for poverty. All rich people think that poverty has such a freedom no rich man can enjoy. Whenever a king passes and he looks at a beggar sleeping under a tree – the traffic moves but he is not disturbed, he can sleep even in the market, what beautiful sleep – and the king feels jealous. Kings are always jealous of beggars, and kings always dream that they have become monks, sannyasins.