problems exist only in time

Problems exist only in time, that is when we meet an issue incompletely.

The human mind loves problems. In fact, the mind is a problem solving machine. And whereas most of us try to solve an individual problem in our life, Krishnamurti here is really looking into the generic question of what is a problem. And he notes that problems only exist in time. There's a connection between our feeling for time and our feeling of a problem. Because a problem has to have a future in which we can solve it. Even if we know the solution right now, the manifestation of that solution, the action needed to bring it about, is in the future. It might be five minutes in the future. It might be five years in the future. But it's in the future.

So we need this future in order to even consider something as a problem. And most problems have a past as well. We're perhaps comparing the current situation with the way things used to be. Yesterday, my car was working and today it's broken. That's a problem. I need to get it fixed. It's a problem in the mind because we have a memory of how things were, which we liked, the car working, and we want them to be that way again.

Of course, there are many different problems, infinitely many. But they all have this element of time, as Krishnamurti pointed out. If we are really fully in the present, in the present moment, things aren't actually felt as a problem. There's no time in which to change things. There's no time in which to apply a solution. In the present moment, things are as they are. Neither good nor bad, right nor wrong, not needing to be changed or fixed. They're simply as they are.

In this quote, Krishnamurti goes on: that is when we meet an issue incompletely. And this is really a deep insight, a profound observation. And it's perhaps not so obvious. However, it is also my experience that when we meet a moment totally with full presence and respond in the moment, spontaneously, fully, then there is no problem.

A problem is something that we carry, we carry it with us. Something's happened, some event that we don't like, some situation that doesn't feel good, and we want to change it. We want to sort it out, fix it. We want a solution. So we carry something as a problem, until it is resolved to the satisfaction of our mind. But in a way, we're choosing to carry things in this way, to carry the weight of a problem. And so most of us are spending our whole life living with problems, one after another, perhaps many problems at the same time, some the lasting minutes, some lasting decades. But we end up seeing so many things as a problem. And the disadvantage of that is there's a heaviness. These problems are not felt with joy, they're felt as a burden, a weight.

So it's an unpleasant way to live life. And yet that is how so many of us are spending our days: full of problems. And as Krishnamurti is suggesting here, there is an alternative. Really, it's a change of lifestyle, to live without problems, without feeling something as a problem, without that weight, that burden. And as I've hinted at, it comes back to how we live in the moment, how we meet each moment.

If we can meet this moment with presence, and also without clinging to the past, if we can meet this moment in a fresh way, as if we were just born, then something need not be felt as a problem. There may be a response that comes from us, but that response is total. There could be emotional energy in it. There could be some physical action. If we meet the moment in this total way, then the moment is finished. It's as if we've dealt with it there and then.

In a small way, you might have noticed this yourself in relating to people. Perhaps something has triggered you, but you haven't dealt with it at the time, and then it just sits in you, until you can perhaps say something to that person. When you laughed at me the other day I felt offended, whatever it is. Because we didn't respond in the moment, we carry the energy of that moment, felt in a negative way within us, as a problem, something that needs to be resolved.

And of course, traumatic events might sit within us for decades. Perhaps we were sexually abused as children. And only thirty or forty years later do we undergo the necessary therapy to clean that out. It's sitting there within the tissue of our body, as something burdensome, as a problem.

But if we can mature enough, we needn't be taking on fresh problems. We can learn to meet life in the moment, fully, completely. And then, whatever is happening in the moment is not carried as a problem.