The endlessness of the weight of the self[1] is linked to another thing as well[2]. It is that the self is acutely conscious of and constantly measures itself against what is called time. There are two things that need to be noted in this context. Firstly, the self likes to behave as if it is never going to die, as if it is immortal. Secondly, it likes to behave in this manner because this thing called time is considered by the self to be endless, to be itself immortal. Measuring itself in terms of this time that it thinks is immortal, the self tries to approximate time but is always defeated.

Why is this defeat inevitable? For two reasons. One is that the self is mortal. The second is that there is no such thing as time.

If there were such a thing as time, and if this thing were immortal, the self would behave like a creature which is bound by time, a creature which is bound in it. That is, a creature which is born at a point in time and dies at another point, a creature which would not behave as if it is outside time, as if it is against it. In fact, in such a situation the self would not need to perceive time: it would perceive only itself–but as a creature which, without ever thinking about time, merely is, and which, having lived its life, comes to an end, dies. In other words, if there were actually a thing called time, then for the self there would be no such thing as time, then for it time would not exist, nor would it try to imagine time: such a thing would not occur to it.

To be able to imagine time, the self must live without time, it must spend its days in the deprivation of time, it must feel that there is not enough time, that hardly is it born and already it is time to die. To be able to imagine time, the self must have desire for time, it must have desire for more time than it has, or it must have the fear that it may soon have to leave behind whatever time is there.

This is exactly the fear the self has: it feels that time is something it does not have, or that it has very little time. That is why, out of this time that it feels it has, it spends a lot of time thinking about time. It thinks about time, or rather imagines it, and having done that it believes that there is actually a thing called time.

But why does the self imagine time? Why does it believe that time exists, that it is there, outside its mind?

* * *

The self believes in the existence of time so that it can measure itself against something which is weightier than itself, or, if it is a thing that cannot have weight, is mightier, stronger, lasts longer, lasts endlessly, as time is supposed to do. But why does the self wish to measure itself against time? It wishes to do that in order to feel its own weight and to feel that its weight is no less, is not lesser, than that of time. And if time has no weight, if it is an entity which is weightless, then the self wishes to feel that it is not without the endlessness of time, that this endlessness is within its reach, is in fact in its grasp, or is almost so.

This wish on the part of the self is not surprising. It is only by measuring itself against a thing like time that it can illumine for itself the possibility of a life without end–‘life’, not just in terms of a physical entity that lives for ever but also a ‘mind’, a ‘selfhood’ that does not die, that overcomes time or at least is not defeated by it.

Let us put it in straightforward terms: the self does not like to countenance the idea of defeat. In fact, it does not like to be defeated. But we can go even further: the self, the way it perceives itself, likes to win. But how does the self perceive itself? What is its vision of itself? What is its dream? Its dream is to dominate–to rule over–not only the things that it can see but also the things that it can think about, the things that it can imagine and not yet imagine, the things that it can conceive, invent, conjure up, the things that it can concoct–images, ideas, concepts and words, representations, notions, but not only these. The dream of the self is to master the things that it can create.

And time is a thing that it has created.

The self has created time, and it has created it in order to illumine for itself the possibility of immortality. But having created it, it would like to dominate time–it would like to dominate it and rule over it, to be its master. Given the way it perceives itself, nothing less would be acceptable to the self.

However, is time a thing that the self can dominate? Is it a thing that would allow the self to be its master? What kind of a thing is time? And how realisable is this wish of the self to be able to rule over it? Having created it, this relation that the self strikes with time, how sensible is this relation?

Let us straight away put this down: time is a thing which is unlike any other thing. In fact, we can go to the extent of saying that time is not a thing. Unlike things, it does not have a substance–a substance which is material or even spirit-like. If time is there, it does not manifest itself: it is visible neither in itself nor in any other thing. Then, in what lies the existence of time? In what way does time exist? What is time?

The best that we can say is that time is an idea, a notion that exists in the mind of the self.

Nevertheless, this is not the way the self looks at time.

Time is a notion in the mind of the self. As such, time does not exist. Or it exists only to the extent that a notion–a fancy–can exist: as a thing which is an illusion in the mind of another thing, a fantasy, a delusion, a false impression, a daydream, a figment of imagination, a mirage, an apparition, a hallucination.

The fact remains, however, that the self does not look at time as any of these things.

For the self, time is real, as real as the self itself is.

But in reality it is only a fascination with something which is beyond its grasp. It is a thing which has come over the mind of the self, which has taken its possession. It has possessed it in such a way that in this possession it appears to be real, as real as a thing that possesses can appear to be real. Let us take note of this: it is never a thing that possesses; it is always a mind which gets possessed. And it gets possessed even when there is nothing to possess it. The thing that possesses is an invention of the mind: it lives in imagination. It lives there or gives the impression of a life which is, actually, not there: a life not lived, not liveable, a caricature.

But the self believes that time has a life: a life longer than its own life, much longer than it, a life that goes on beyond its own life and was already there when it was born.

And the self cannot bear it.

The self cannot bear, not its own life, but the life of time, a life which makes an appearance in its own life and disappears beyond it, a life before whose disappearance its own life disappears. This disappearance of its own life before the disappearance of the life of time the self cannot bear.

The self cannot bear it.

In its inability to bear, the self gets weighted down by its own creation. Time, which had no weight, begins to acquire a shape. A shape that grows. Till now the self was the only thing that had weight. And its weight was enormous. But now time displaces it. It becomes weightier than the self. This, too, the self cannot bear. It cannot bear this weight, too. This weight crushes it– the only thing which is crushed by this weight of time.

* * *

The self is the only thing for which time has weight. This is so for two reasons. Firstly, for no other entity does time exist. Secondly, the self itself is a weightful entity. In other words, if the self were an entity without weight, time would be weightless. This means that the weight of time has a connection with the weight of the self. It is only because the self is a weightful entity that time comes to acquire weight. That is, if the self were weightless, it would not experience time as if it had weight–a weight that crushes it. The self experiences time as such, it feels crushed by it precisely because it has a substance that can be crushed by time, in a way that this crushing, this being crushed, is felt by the self.

But this is not the only reason why time is weightful. For time had weight even at the time the self had created it: it was conceived by the self as a weightful entity. The crushing by time, the devastation at its hands, came later. It was a consequence of the weight of time created earlier. Therefore we can say that the devastation that the self experiences at the hands of time is its own creation.

However, is it possible that it was precisely to experience this devastation that the self had created time?

This is a peculiar thing about the self: it does not like to be defeated but it inevitably gets into situations which would lead to its defeat. And it gets into such situations because it is aware that, no matter what it does to avoid getting devastated, devastation is its fate. This awareness turns the self into a reckless and impudent creature. In this recklessness it does everything to mock its fate: it mocks it and challenges it till its provocations spur its fate to devastate it. Each moment of this devastation is experienced by the self as a blow that crushes it: for the self is not merely impudent, it is extraordinarily delicate. It is sensitive and proud and tries to hold its ground till the devastation lasts.

But this devastation cannot be stopped.

It can neither be stopped nor be stopped from coming, for the self, because of the very inevitability of the devastation, takes steps to bring it about.

This is how it created time.

* * *

It is curious to think that the self, which will in any case die, takes steps to bring about its own destruction. This shows that the self wishes to die even before it meets its death; it wishes to die in order to bring its death closer; may be it wishes to die straightaway, at this very moment. Does this wish to die have something to do with time? Is it likely that–now that time is there–the self wishes to die also because it wants to put an end to its engagement with time?

If this latter is true, then, is this the proper way to disengage with time? The proper way to do so is: not to die, not to choose death for oneself but rather to let time die, to let it pass away, to let it pass out of the mind, the imagination.

Let us not forget that time lives in the mind of the self, in its imagination. In fact, it is the self itself which gave this life to time. The self is the one which had created it, and then established it in such a way that it has acquired a life outside of the mind of the self. Actually, however, the only life it has is inside that mind. As such, it is the self only which can bring it to an end, which can push it out. In order to do that the self has to learn to live without time, to live as if it had never created time and given it a life, to live as if there never was a time when time was there. In other words, the self has to kill time: it has to kill it to clear those vast stretches of space in its mind which are now occupied by time. But does this mean that it will have to clear out its memory itself, its story, its history? Does the self have no memory, no past without time?

To say that memory and past–memory and history–are things that exist in time would amount to saying that they are things in imagination, for time itself exists only there. However, this is not the argument we are going to put forth here. What we are going to put forth is this: Memory and past are things that do exist in imagination–in fact, they exist only there–but they have nothing to do with time. Past comes to an end the moment it becomes past, and as such there is no such thing as past, nor, as a consequence, is there an entity which remembers past. What then is ‘past’? It is images–stored in what is called memory–that denote certain events. These events, in turn, when the self ‘thinks of’ them, evoke feelings and emotions, thoughts. And all this happens in imagination. Therefore, when the self clears out time from its mind, it would leave intact both the ‘past’ and the ‘memory’: they are secure in the mind of the self; no harm will come to them with the killing of time.

However, will the self ever kill time? Or will it rather kill itself? But by killing itself, the self would kill, too, its own story, its history. Therefore may be it would prefer to kill time?

The self is faced here with a great difficulty. Both its story–its history–and time exist only in its mind. As such, they do not really exist. And if this is so, it should not at all matter which one of them is killed. But will the self dare to kill its own story? Will it dare to take that step when it can, rather, kill time? The self which is a weightful entity and has no compunctions about increasing its weight–will it dare to kill its own story when that story is all that it cares about? Its story is more or less what the self thinks it is, and when the self increases its weight, this story is what gets lengthened, what runs parallel to the length of time. As such, this story is what brings it the grandeur, the glory that it craves. Therefore, will the self be imprudent enough to cut short this story, interrupt its course?

The answer to this question is ambiguous. The self may not kill its own story fearing a loss of its weight. However, in the very pursuit of such weight it may push itself beyond its endurance and die before its time, thus putting an end to its story.

It appears that this is the course the self is most likely to adopt.

Time will go on till the story of the self, its history, comes to an end, that is, till it is brought to an end by the self itself.

This behaviour is characteristic of the self. It will not kill its own story. As a consequence, it will not kill time. However, precisely because of this dual act, it manages to kill both of them and dies in the process. By this refusal to kill–because this killing will kill the self as well–the self ends up killing itself. In this killing the self dies before its time. As such, this death appears to be untimely. Nevertheless, it is also simultaneously a timely death. It is a death in which the self, while dying before its time, dies, too, along with time: the self and time die at the same time. Thus it appears to be an appropriately timed death, as also a death which is appropriate. It is neither a suicide nor a death which comes at its own time, but rather a death which is brought into existence to time with the end of a life which, having created time, lived in mortal fear of it and yet tried to use it to increase its own weight.

Notes

[1] Which, from another perspective, is not actually endless; for the self dies and along with it its weight comes to an end.

[2] For what has gone before in this connection, and for an elaboration on the notion of the weight of the self, see my unpublished essay ‘To be Regardful of the Earth’.