---
ai_generation_date: '2026-05-28'
ai_model: gemini-3-pro-preview
audiodharma:
  talks:
  - date: '2022-10-02'
    mp3_url: https://audiodharma.us-east-1.linodeobjects.com/talks/17026/20221002-Gil_Fronsdal-IMC-taking_time_for_time.mp3
    speakers:
    - speaker_name: Gil Fronsdal
      speaker_url: https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/1
    talk_start_time_seconds: 0
    title: Taking Time for Time
    url: https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/17026
    video_unavailable: false
location_city: Redwood City, CA
video_unavailable: false
youtube:
  id: _QnTtEpgnP4
  imprecise_upload_date: '2023-05-04'
  title: Taking Time for Time
  upload_date: null
  uploader_str: Insight Meditation Center
  uploader_url: https://www.youtube.com/@InsightMeditationCenter
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QnTtEpgnP4
---

# Taking Time for Time - [Gil Fronsdal](https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/1)

*This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.*

## [Taking Time for Time](https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/17026)

As I prepare to give this talk, it occurs to me to ask for your patience and your forgiveness for what I'm going to talk about, because I'm going to talk about something that I don't really think I know much about. I'll probably say all kinds of things which are maybe not even accurate, and some of you will know more about this topic than me. If I could, shake your head, or if you have particular perspectives on this topic from your particular studies or something, what I end up saying might not fit that perspective and you'll shake your head. But for all the mistakes I make, my wish from giving this talk is to provide you with a heightened attention to this topic and to be able to think about it, spend time with it, talk to friends about it, and maybe see if there are other perspectives for this topic that might be useful for how you live your life.

The topic is time. Time. What is time? I don't even know how to answer that question very well, but I live in time all the time. I suspect some of you do as well. It's possible to have many relationships with time. It's possible to be time-rich and time-poor, and just to say it that way suggests that time can be a wealth, and that's independent of material wealth. It suggests that there's something very valuable potentially about time, and that maybe many of us live impoverished in time in how we live our lives.

What would it be like to be living time-rich, to be wealthy in time? Do you have to wait until you're well and retired? Some people who retire find themselves with even less time, so that's no guarantee.

I was reflecting about how we have all these terminologies around time that we use, and two of them that I'm thinking about are "taking time" and "giving time" to something. Taking time, that seems kind of acquisitive once I started thinking about it. Taking time for myself, I take time for myself. Where do I take it? Do I keep it? Do I share it? What does it mean to take time, exactly? More importantly, it's just an idiom, but it has other associations to it, taking time, that maybe goes along with a certain kind of self-centeredness. What about giving time? Is it possible to have a generous relationship with time? Does that provide a very different relationship to the world than the notion of taking time for something?

Many people say that time is really a useful resource. To have time for something allows healing to happen. Sometimes psychological healing requires an amount of time for it to happen. Time is useful for processing our lives, digesting our life. Time is a really important quality if you want to be a wise person. I would suggest that if you don't have a lot of time, you're probably not going to have a lot of access to wisdom. One of the characteristics of maybe a foolish way of being in this world is to not give enough time for what you do to do it well, and then you have to do it over again, which takes more time.

There's a traffic sign here in Everett City, I don't know if it's still up, that says something like, "Late? You'll be later if you get a ticket." So this rushing that people do, is it really beneficial? In the short term, it seems like it's beneficial, but what happens in the end? I saw a car accident on the freeway the other day and I wondered if the person responsible was in a hurry. Probably the person was going to be late now. If the person was even alive—there was some question about that as I drove by.

A wise life is a life that has time for time. What does that mean? What does it mean to have time for time?

Some people distinguish between physical time and psychological time, so we could do that. It might be useful to think about cultural time and spiritual time. So at least four categories of time. Physical time has to do with some physical event in the world which measures the duration of time, some way of measuring change sequentially. There was a time when people measured the months by the sequence of the moon, lunar time. Now we have this Roman time that was kind of made up by the Romans in some funny way that we're still kind of trying to grapple with. It's a very confused time because September literally in Latin means the seventh month, October is the eighth month, but for us these are the ninth and tenth months. November is the ninth month, and December is the tenth month. So we're just confused.

So physical time. We have the calendar time that we live in, for example, the year. The year lends itself to kind of a cyclic idea of time, but also we have this linear idea of time from the past to the future. There's atomic time that's used now for measuring things. So physical time is something we can measure.

Psychological time is the time that our mind somehow calculates or lives in and works in, and it's amazing that our mind can, in certain kinds of ways, measure the duration of time between events. Apparently, they have never discovered any place in the brain that is the timekeeper. It's some kind of an intuitive sense, maybe a way of looking at patterns of things, that the patterning of the mind as it coordinates can get a sense. So for example, the time it takes for a beach ball to reach you is very different than the time for a baseball to reach you when you're at bat. A baseball player has to have a very acute sense of how long it takes for that ball to get over home base, and if you don't have the right timing, you've missed the ball. A beach ball flies through the air, and sometimes you can just keep your hands in your pockets for a second or so because you know it's taking its time to float there to you. But the volleyball that comes over the net, you better be on it quickly. Somehow you don't pull out your stopwatch and calculate. You have smartphones now so we can probably do all kinds of calculations, but there's no time to do the calculations, let alone figure out the physics of time and weight and mass and all these things that have to be calculated to figure out when the object's going to reach you. Is it going to reach you on your left or the right or higher or lower?

The mind has this amazing capacity to have a sense of the duration it takes for things to come without any of us consciously calculating it. So the mind has a capacity for figuring out something about time. They also say that people can have a spatial sense of time. What's interesting is that people in different places in the world, different cultures, have very different ideas of how they imagine time spatially. So for example, I think in most English-speaking books where they're going to do a chronology of history, it goes from left to right. The old times are on the left and you get into the future on the right, and maybe an arrow that's pointing to the right for the future. That makes some sense because we read in that direction. Cultures that read in the other direction actually see time as going to the left.

What's interesting also about this is the reference point for this image of time is personal. It has to do with your physical body, left and right. There are some cultures who don't use left and right, which is a bodily personal reference point, but they use things in nature. There are places in the world, islands that people live on, where the future is up the mountain where the river comes from, and the past is the ocean where the river goes to. The source of everything is in the future in a certain way, and then it goes to a place where there's a big repository for the past. The past contains so much, have you noticed that? And you're contributing to making it bigger and bigger. So that's kind of interesting. No matter where you are on the mountain, whatever direction you're facing, they always have a sense that if they're going to talk about the future, they point up.

Some of the Aboriginals in Australia, if they were given a whole series of photographs of themselves over their lifetime and were told to put them in chronological order, many of us here in America, at least in the West, would probably do it again from left to right. Baby pictures on the left and whatever age you are lately closer to the right. Apparently, some Aboriginals in Australia are asked and they always do it from east to west, where the sun comes up and then it goes down. No matter what direction they're sitting, if they're pointing south or they're pointing north, they always have a sense of where east and west is and they'll lay out the chronology in that way. So these people with the mountain and the ocean, and the east and the west sense, they're not measuring time from the personal reference point that people in Western cultures are often doing. Right and left is always personal in some way; it has to do with the body and our hands and how we see things. Does it make a difference that we have this anthropocentric idea of time directionality, spatial idea of time, or having some reference point in nature that's beyond our anthropocentric concerns? I don't know if it makes any difference, but it does show that we have different senses of time, ideas of time, concepts of time.

I asked a friend recently about this thing about left and right, where does she see time. She thought to me, "No, time comes at me." It kind of goes through her from the future. It comes directly at her and through. One way I think of time is as an hourglass, and I think sometimes that time comes from above and goes through the hourglass, this big funnel, and then it goes out again at the bottom, and I'm sitting at the neck of the hourglass. That's where I watch everything going through the neck of my experience.

So psychological time, but psychological time is also related to cultural time. Part of the burden we have in living under time has a lot to do with our cultures. We are living in the legacy of the Industrial Revolution. That's when really strict ideas of time through the day really became institutionalized. They had all these shifts in the industries that were being built as huge manufacturing places, and they would have these horns that would blow, and people would know when their shift stopped and started, and they had to show up all at the right time. So it became much more regimented than it had been before there were just big industries and big groups of people to organize.

From what I read, it was from the industrial example of how they organized time that was translated or applied to the school systems. I don't know before the Industrial Revolution how time was at school, but certainly at the time of the Industrial Revolution, it became clear to the industrial countries that it was important to educate people to make them prepared for this industrial world that we were growing into. So then there was a massive movement to educate people, and they borrowed very regimented ideas of time that the students have to live under. Is that healthy to do that? Is that useful to do that?

I met a kid up in the islands outside of Vancouver some years ago who had never been to school. He lived on a farm and his parents had never required him to go to school, and I don't think they made any particular efforts to educate him either. He just kind of roamed around and worked on the farm a lot. He seemed very smart and knowledgeable and engaged and seemed like a really fantastic lovely person, but had never been put under the pressures of this regimented time that so many of us, I believe, have probably lived under.

I've lived in different cultural times. A fascinating time for me was I lived in a Zen monastery that used a time system from long ago in Japan, maybe China, which was a five-day week. It was measured by the days of the month. So there were the one days, the two days, the three days, the four days, and the five days. We worked for four days and then the fourth day was off. Then five, six, seven, eight, and the ninth day was off. So we would talk about four and nine days. Like some people talk about weekends, we would talk about four and nine days. So rather than having two days off, we would have one day off and then go back to work for four days to keep the monastery schedule. It was fascinating to live in this alternative sequence of time, and I lost touch with what days of the week it was. Days of the week were irrelevant. I didn't know if it was Sunday or Monday, because I just knew it was all by the date. That was interesting. I've done long retreats where I had no idea what day or month it was; that kind of concern just completely dropped away.

I lived on a farm for a while, and I loved living on the farm for a number of reasons. One of the reasons was time wasn't regimented. The work time and off time and playtime kind of flowed seamlessly between each other. We would go out and work in the fields or take care of the cows, and then we would have time off and do something, but it was never planned, it was never strict. Rather, it had a wonderful organic feeling, just flowing between what we were doing. The only thing that was a little bit strict was by dawn you had to have milked the cows, and by dusk you had to have brought them back to milk them. But that was following the light. So to have that experience of this fluidity of schedules between personal time and work time and having it so porous was really a fascinating thing for me.

And then we have spiritual time. What is spiritual time? I think there's a common story of going to some wise spiritual person and saying, "What's the most important time?" And the answer is "Now. Now is the most important time." We have a spiritual practice, this Insight Meditation practice, that is really based on being firmly rooted, grounded in the present, in the now. An important part of that practice of attempting to be in the now is to discover how difficult that is. How difficult it is because of concerns about other times, concerns about the future, concerns about the past, and how difficult it is to be resting or alive or feeling a sense of real attentional vitality to this moment here without a need to leave it behind, without a need to lose track of it by our distractions and our thinking mind or our rushing around.

So we start discovering the challenge we have with the present moment. Some people attribute that challenge to the challenge of a distracted mind, some people have the challenge of having a full schedule of things to do or a long to-do list. But it's also a challenge of our relationship to time and maybe not understanding how valuable the present moment is, how much is available here.

I think of a timeline where it's a line from, at least here in California, from left to right. That line is impoverished. It's just very thin, narrow. Rather than the present moment being a dot on that, the present moment is not even an axis that goes through it that makes it two-dimensional. The present moment is three-dimensional, or maybe there are more dimensions, I don't know, but three dimensions. As opposed to there's something about the past and the future that maybe fits into a line, the present I think is three-dimensional. It's the difference between going from a black and white movie to a color movie. It's that dramatic. If you're old enough, you remember *The Wizard of Oz* going that direction. Suddenly it's alive.

So this spiritual time, I propose, has a lot to do with our relationship to present moment time, the time that's unfolding here and now. That three-dimensional time means that it's never a little pixelated dot that you've passed through quickly. That spiritual now has a duration. How long is the duration of the now? If you're relaxed and present and really embodied, or inhabiting the present moment without veering away into the past and future or preoccupation or fantasy, but really here to experience this moment in its three-dimensional fullness, what's the duration of now?

Some of you have probably never considered seriously how long the now is. How long is the moment? Is it just like a snap of the finger, that's all it is? A famous American philosopher and psychologist named William James[^1] talked about the "saddleback" of the present moment. The saddleback means it's kind of like a U-shape. So the present moment somehow is, maybe if there's a timeline, the present moment is like this U-shaped dip, and that saddleback lasts for a while, but how long is that while?

And then we have spiritual people who want to talk about the timeless now. What is a timeless now? And what good is it? Because if it's timeless, if time measures change, how do we deal with change if it's timeless? Well, maybe time and timelessness can coexist. But what is this present moment that we have, that we live in? What's the duration of now? It's possible, by getting a sense of the present moment now, that then we can start living in time.

The expression "living in time," I think, has two delightful meanings. One meaning comes from music. The music is in time, I'm in time with the music. So living in harmony with time. To be in time is not just to show up on time, but to be in harmony, or to be in the flow or find a rhythm with time, as opposed to missing the present moment. I suspect most of us here have missed a lot of moments. They went by without us noticing them. So to be in time, in harmony with time.

But also to live *in* time is kind of to inhabit time, as opposed to living under the weight of time. To live in time is more like floating on the water. To be in the water, for most people, is they're floating on the surface, unless you're a scuba diver or diving down for a few moments. But to be in time, to be floating on time, maybe time is weightless as opposed to the weight of time. What are we really weighed down by when you talk about the weight of time? Because time is, I think it's weightless. Last time I tried putting it on a scale... [Laughter]

And if time is weightless, and we have some intuitive sense of time—the mind does construct a sense of duration of time and a sense of time—but if it's weightless, and you somehow can feel that or sense that, does that make a difference? Or are the preoccupations of the mind so strong that you're pulling away, out of this moment, that you don't have time for this talk even? I mean, this is such a silly talk, ridiculous, when you could probably be figuring out what stocks to buy tomorrow or today, I don't know if they're open on the weekend. [Laughter]

But to be in time, and be present for the duration of the present, the moment now. And how long is the moment for you? Sometimes I've thought that my moments last about as long as it takes to say the word "now." Sometimes "now" is the duration of how long it is for me to have an in-breath. That's the duration of a now. Sometimes I have a sense of some timeless now, timeless presence, but generally it doesn't last. In theory, it lasts outside of my being aware of it. But is it there? Is time there, timelessness, if we're not aware? Does the tree that falls in the forest make a sound if there's no one to hear it? Is there time if there's no one to be aware of time?

I think not, at least spiritually. There's a way in which we could talk about awareness time, where awareness and time are inseparable. They kind of arise together. So this richness, this three-dimensionality of time, awareness time, what is it? What's the time in which we're aware? What's the awareness that exists in time? The awareness that exists in time can only exist in the present. Your awareness, which is such an important part of this practice, cannot exist in the past, it's gone. The only awareness of the past is our memory, and we're aware of the memories. The only awareness we have of the future is our prediction and forecasting the future, which again, we can be aware of those thoughts and ideas, but to be aware of time is to be here. And what are we aware of?

It's fascinating that it's possible to be aware of the recognition of now. "I'm in now, I'm now, I'm here." And it has a beginning, and it has a middle, and it has an end. And then you do it again and again. That somehow, an act of awareness, a clear, concise, distinct recognition of the moment, has a duration that appears, it's there for a while, and then it disappears. What happens to time when the recognition of it has faded away? Physical time, you can go look at your watch and know exactly what happened. But this spiritual time is time that has time, lots of time. It's spacious time. That's where time becomes a richness, a wealth. Here, where the mind is not rushing off, is not preoccupied, where the mind senses and feels what's here is available for something that's different than what we're controlling, what we're directing, what we're wanting. That doesn't fit into industrial time. It doesn't fit into even this kind of idea of time that's very personal, where the spatial sense of it is very personal from left to right or right to left. To feel the time here, now.

What is it to not live under the burden of time, the pressures of time? What is it to live in a luxurious time? And these are such important questions for people doing this meditation practice, because at least when you're meditating, that's the time to give yourself over to time, to live in time, to live in the time of this moment here, where awareness and time are coterminous. Awareness and time arise together, no separation. Where there's no hard and fast measure of time, requirements of time. Where we can sense the comings and goings even of time, in a sense the awareness of time.

It's almost as if there's a vast ocean. If time is not a line but a vast ocean, a two-dimensional surface, and maybe the present moment is a wave that somehow gets energized, gets lifted up and has some prominence for a moment, and then the wave passes and settles down again. So what is that wave? What is this coalescing or coming together or rising that happens here and now, in this time now? What do you feel? What do you experience? What's available for you when you're living in time, in the moment, here and now?

So I hope that these ideas will give you something to think about and to reflect on. How might you have a new relationship? What is your relationship to time, and is there a new way of seeing it, and is there a new way of engaging in time when you're meditating? Is there a way of living in a spiritual time or a luxurious time, a generous time, when you're meditating? And what would it take to do that, to have a sense of that, to be in there?

I hope that this will support your meditation practice in a dramatic way, that kind of opens up a new dimension of it that maybe you're not so well attuned to because we don't really give a lot of time to think about time. But to give time for time, imagine that. Give time for time.

So that's what I have. And maybe if some of you stay now for a discussion outside, maybe we'll find out if it sparked any interests, questions, reflections on this topic, or anything else you want to bring up. So thank you all very much.

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[^1]: **William James:** An American philosopher and psychologist (1842–1910), often regarded as the "Father of American psychology." He coined the term "saddle-back" to describe the present moment as having a certain duration, rather than being an instantaneous point.