You have to adjust to facts: you can’t have a nation, you can’t have a society, in which everyone is always occupied in intellectual and computational pursuits. A few people have to be around who know how to handle the material world in a gracious way. And for these people we provide only regretfully, as an afterthought.
We want to get as fast as possible from one place to another; to get rid of space and to get rid of time. And the result of this is, of course, that—as we get rid of space and time, as we make all places almost immediately accessible by jet aircraft—all places become the same place. So naturally, the tourist who is beguiled into taking a holiday in Honolulu asks, “Is Honolulu still ‘somewhere else?’ Is it still a land of girls in hula skirts, and naked breasts, and palm trees, and luaus, and so on?” Well, they’ll make it like it is, vaguely. But of course it isn’t. Honolulu is the same place as Coney Island, Atlantic City. Tokyo is just the same: it is simply an extension of Los Angeles; one of our suburbs. Because the faster you can get from place to place, the more you have conquered the limitations of time and space, the more everywhere is the same place.
We are busily fouling our own nest.
There is no point whatsoever in making plans for the future except for those people who are capable of living in the present.
Education, then, is a progressive letting of children into adult life, not a preparation for adult life. The whole idea of preparation should be discarded; there is simply increased participation in what we are doing.
We’re—may I say—ass-backwards: we are living for the children with nothing to give them because we do not have a real enthusiasm for our own vocation, or profession, or whatever it is in life. If you make it central—the idea of the Hindus, of your svadharma (or, in the Christian terms, vocation), and that’s the thing you really live for, not children—if you really have that with you, the children will catch it from you, and be inspired by it and join in with it.
When you get materials—you’ve got some onions, you’ve got some fish, you’ve got a slice of beef—you can’t cook that properly unless you love it. All those are dead creatures which have died in your honor; what’re you going to do about that? The only way to deal respectfully with a creature that has died in your honor is to give it an honorable cooking. The dead cow you are eating is becoming you, and the least you can do for it is to let it enjoy itself as you. And therefore, the stove in the kitchen is an altar, and you are a priest at that altar, and you should reverence that gorgeous thing. Look at a beautiful mackerel that has been caught and prepared for you; handed out by the supermarket: you’ve got this thing; it’s a living being that’s died to give you life. The best thing you can do for it is to prepare it royally, and you should brood over your stove with an act of love and see that it’s exactly right.
People are looking for ways of living whereby they don’t live this fragmented, abstract, work-life that is completely cut off from all the rest of their truly human associations. And so we are facing a very big revolution in which our young people want to return to reality. And even though what they do may make very little money, it will at least have the satisfaction of being an actual relationship to the real world in which we live now. I don’t know the detailed answers to all that, but this is what is coming. It will be very disruptive of things as we know them, but better by far. Better by far to live in contact with the actual here-and-now than to live a life of perpetual suspense, waiting for a gorgeous thing that’s going to turn up—but never, never does.