AnnaG,
huh?
Thought takes time but they are not the same. That's like saying the suitcase is the same as travel; related but not the same.
Thought is a movement in time and space. Thought is memory, the remembrance of past things. Thought is the activity of knowledge, knowledge which has been gathered together through millions of years and stored as memory in the brain. If you observe the activity of your thinking Anna ,you will see that experience and knowledge are the basis of your life. knowledge is never complete, it must always go together with ignorance. We think knowledge is going to solve all our problems, whether the knowledge of the priest, the guru, the scientist, the philosopher, or the latest psychiatrist. But we have never questioned whether knowledge in itself can solve any of our problems - except perhaps technological problems.
Knowledge comes through time. To learn a language you need time. To learn a skill or to drive a car efficiently takes time. The same movement of time is brought over to the psychological field; there too we say, 'I must have time to learn about myself.' 'I must have time in order to change myself from 'what I am' to 'what I should be.' Bringing over the activity of the external world into the psychological world means that time is a great factor in our life - tomorrow, the past and the present. Time is thought. Time is required in the acquisition of knowledge through experience, both externally in the world and inwardly. That is the way we have been programmed.
Being so programmed we consider time is necessary to bring about a deep, fundamental change in the human structure. We employ time as thought - 'I am this, I shall be that.' You would also say in the technical world: 'I do not know how to construct a computer but I will learn., Time, knowledge, memory, thought, they are a single unit; they are not separate activities but a single movement, Anna .