ABOUT THIS EPISODE
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What is time?
We all experience it, organise our lives around it, and watch it pass, but what exactly is it? In this episode, I explore the strange and surprisingly slippery nature of time through the lens of philosophy, yoga and modern physics.
Beginning with a simple film-reel analogy, we look at Jiddu Krishnamurti’s provocative statement that “time is thought”, and the distinction between chronological time and the psychological time created by memory, anticipation and our constant sense of becoming.
From there, we explore Advaita Vedanta and māyā, the timeless nature of awareness, Brahman and Ātman, before moving into Kashmir Śaivism, Buddhism, the ancient Greeks, Augustine and the fascinating implications of Einstein’s relativity, the block universe and entropy.
But this isn't simply an intellectual investigation. The real question is: what does any of this have to do with how we actually live?
What happens when we stop measuring this moment against the imagined next one? What if the sense that we are constantly behind, becoming, fixing or searching is itself something constructed by thought?
Perhaps the clock can keep ticking while something much more fundamental in us remains completely still.
A philosophical exploration of time, consciousness, thought, awareness and the possibility that what we fundamentally are has never actually been moving through time at all.
RECOMMENDED RESOURCES
- The Ending of Time — J. Krishnamurti and David Bohm (their extended dialogues on this exact subject)
- Freedom from the Known — J. Krishnamurti (the clearest short introduction to his teaching)
- Confessions, Book XI — Augustine of Hippo (his meditation on the nature of time)
- The Order of Time — Carlo Rovelli (accessible, poetic, rigorous contemporary physics)
- The End of Time — Julian Barbour (the more radical physics position — time as fundamentally non-existent)
- The Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 11 — trans. Barbara Stoler Miller or Georg Feuerstein (Krishna's cosmic form and "I am time")
- The Power of Now — Eckhart Tolle (an accessible, contemporary voice covering closely related ground)
- Swami Sarvapriyananda — YouTube, Vedanta Society of New York (for the Vedantic treatment of kala and maya)
