The Clock That Is You:What Jiddu Krishnamurti Says

Imagine your friend Roshan sitting in front of a hot plate of biryani. But Roshan is not eating. He is replaying a fight from last Tuesday, worrying about a bill next month, planning what to say at the next family function. Twenty minutes later the biryani is cold. Roshan was physically there but mentally somewhere between 2019 and next year. That is all of us. Every single day. And a man named Krishnamurti spent sixty years pointing at exactly this and saying — there is a voice inside your head that never stops talking, and that voice is never talking about right now. It is always yesterday or tomorrow. It is always a story about you, never the actual you. He called this psychological time. And he said something that sounds simple but hits hard once it lands: thought and time are the same thing. The voice is made of old memories and future fears. They are not two problems. They are one.

So what do you do about it? Roshan tries to meditate. Ten seconds in he is thinking about his back pain, his gym membership, and whether enlightened people have EMI payments. And that is exactly the trap Krishnamurti warned about — you cannot think your way out of thinking. Every plan to silence the voice is made by the voice. But he said there is one thing that works: just watch it. Not fight it, not fix it, just notice it the way you watch rain from a window. Because the moment you are watching the voice, you are no longer inside it. And in that small gap — between you and the noise — something goes quiet. The past stops pulling. The future stops threatening. The biryani is hot again. That is all Krishnamurti ever pointed at. Not enlightenment, not spirituality, not a better Roshan. Just Roshan, here, now, actually present in his own life.

Dr Abhinandan Ballary

Writer & Lawyer , Mumbai