…thought is only a reaction, a response of memory; and thought breeds time to cover the space between what is and what should be. The what should be, the ideal, is verbal, theoretical; it has no reality. The actual has no time; it has no end to achieve, no distance to travel. The fact is and everything else is not. There is no fact if there’s no death to ideal, to achievement, to an end; the ideal, the goal, are an escape from the fact… The fact, the what is, and the what should be are two entirely different things. The what should be involves time and distance… Death of these leaves only the fact, the what is. There is no future to what is; thought, which breeds time, cannot operate on the fact; thought cannot change the fact, it can only escape from it and when the urge to escape is dead, then the fact [i.e., what is] undergoes a tremendous mutation… When there is destruction of time, as thought, there’s no movement in any direction, no space to cover, there’s only the stillness of emptiness… Then being is timeless, only the active present but that present is not of time. It is attention without frontiers of thought and the borders of feeling... Life is always the active present… It is this life that is immortal, not the life in consciousness. Time is thought in consciousness and consciousness is held within its frame.

~ J. Krishnamurti

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Only in the sense of limit, of a barrier, is time real. As limit it inflicts violence on us, or more specifically, on the part of us which dwells in thought (Platonically speaking, the part of the soul which is weighed and divided by existence). “Time leads us whither we do not wish to go,” (Weil) because we have not yet learned true obedience and have not submitted to non-existence in the ever-present now. However, if desires and fantasies (thought about future and past) are abolished, what remains is the timeless now – dynamic and changing, to be sure, but a now imbued with eternity. “Time’s violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters” (Weil, again).