Jiddu Krishnamurti on just Looking

Question: How can you look at a tree without having distance between the tree and you?

Jiddu Krishnamurti : How do you look at a tree? How do you look at it? Do you look at all at anything? Do you look at your neighbor, at your wife, at your children? Do you look at your job? Do you look? Or do you look through your prejudices, through your ambition to fulfill, to become famous?

Do you look at life as a Christian, as a Catholic, as a Protestant, as a communist? How do you look? Do you look with knowledge, which is your past, or do you look openly? Just to look, sir, is apparently one of the most difficult things to do; to look at a tree, and not have distance between you and that tree.

Look at that tree, do it please, as we are talking. Do you look with a resistance, with a line that you have drawn around yourself beyond which you will not go, from a platform which you have created for yourself through your belief, fear, dogma, greed? When you do look in that way, there is a distance between you and the tree; therefore, you are not looking, you are not observing, you are not listening.

But when there is no line, no wall around yourself, of which you may be conscious or unconscious, when there is no line, wall, image, or center from which you are looking, then is there a distance between you and the tree? Find out. When there is no distance, you're not the tree or you're not yourself; therefore, distance has quite a different meaning.

Look, sir. If one is married, with a family and a job, like most of us, one has built around oneself walls of isolation, conscious or unconscious; one has collected knowledge as experience. I know more, and you know less; I am the great man, you are the lesser man. We build around ourselves enormous structures, and through those structures we look at life.

Whether the structure be knowledge, or self-importance, or a craft, a technique that you have learned as a writer, as a poet, as a scientist, or as a lawyer, through that you look. Therefore the distance between you and the tree and your family and your neighbor is quite a different distance from the distance in which there is no center, no line, no fortification.

Source - Jiddu Krishnamurti Book "To Be Human"

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