So, if this is the actual and you see that the actual produces such immature responses, then you must pursue the other. Knowing that you must respond to the immediate and also that you must have long vision, how do you bring this about as an educator? Nobody is concerned with the other; no educator is concerned with the long vision, the long view. Education today is concerned only with the immediate. But if you are dissatisfied with the immediate, then how would you pursue that and not neglect this? Do you see the urgency of it?
Shall I put the problem differently? How can one keep the mind young, never let it grow old and never say, "I have had enough," and seek a corner to stay in and stagnate? That is the tendency and that is the actual fact. To get a position is difficult, but once you have got it, you stagnate. Everything about the world is destroying the long vision. Books, newspapers, politicians, priests, everything influences you, and how does one walk out of it all? You are being contaminated and yet you have to function and you cannot walk out of it.
Life is destruction, life is love, life is creation. We know none of it. It is a tremendous thing. Now how would you translate all this into education?
Teacher: Is it possible to pursue one vision at the cost of another? Is it possible to do away with the short vision?
Krishnamurti: The problem is not to run away from all this misery or to see how to combine the two. You cannot combine the little with the big; the big has to take in the little.
Teacher: But is it not better to follow the little in the beginning and come to the big later?
Krishnamurti: Never. If you say the little is the first step, then you are lost, you are caught in the little. Think it out for yourself. If you accept the little, then where are you? You will be caught, won't you - little family, little house, little husband, little money, little clothes? You have made the little important, the little first and so you have little responsibility in society. You are all so terribly respectable. Why do you put the little first? Because that is the easiest way.
Teacher: How does one grasp the little and understand it?
Krishnamurti: You can only grasp the big, the little is not at all important, but you have made it important.
it is a very delicate thing, a subtle thing, to have capacity and not to be a slave to it, to respond immediately to things you have to respond to, and to have this extraordinary depth and height and width.
Deny the little. Do you know what it is to deny? Deny not because you have got the long vision but because what is denied is false.
It seems at first glance as a small point, but this question of the "immediate" and the "long vision" is quite far-fetched....
ReplyDeleteAfter reading this question, I have been looking at myself, and it seems that we are quite concerned,most of the time, with the immediate, a thought, a feeling, the immediacy of what other people feel or think, etc
Maybe he is not saying more as we might confuse "long vision" with a "sense of programing the future" (something he always was against, psychologically). But I think it is something different....