Teacher: In meeting an immediate challenge, especially as one grows older, one seems to bring in a sense of anxiety. Is there as one grows older, another approach?
Krishnamurti: What do you mean by "getting older?" Older in terms of doing a job? Older in terms of routine, boredom? What do you mean by age? What makes you old? The organism wears out - why? Is it due to disease, or is it because there is repetition like a machine going on over and over again? The psyche is never alive; it is merely functioning in habit. So it reduces the body quickly to old age.
Why does the psyche become old, or need it ever get old? I do not think it need ever get old. And is old age only a habit? Have you noticed old people, how they eat, how they talk? And is it possible to keep the psyche extraordinarily young, alive, innocent? Is it possible for the psyche to be alive and never for a second lose its vitality through habit, through security, through family, through responsibility? Of course it is possible, which means that you must destroy everything you build. That is what I mean by the long vision. You have an experience, pleasant or unpleasant, that leaves a mark, and the mind lives in that: "I have had such a marvellous experience" or "I have had such a sad life," and there is a decaying in itself. So, experience, and the living in experience, is decay.
Let us come back to my question. As a human being, living in this society, in a world which is demanding immediate action, what is your response to the immediate challenge? The immediate challenge is always asking you to respond immediately, and you are caught in that. How do you, as a parent, as a teacher, as a citizen, respond to it? For, according to your response, you are caught in it. Whether you respond consciously or unconsciously, the effect of that will be on the psyche.
I think he is saying: is there a part of us which is not influenced,in its essence and in its functioning, by time?
ReplyDeleteWhich implies, doesn´t it, that maybe it would not die (and was never born, for that matter).....
He is asking whether it is possible to stop the decaying process of the mind. You are right that implied in this is the whole question of immortality, which he discussed at length elsewhere. We can also ask whether there is something in us that is not affected by time, but he does not seem to be explicitly raising this question here.
ReplyDelete