data_sources/data/generated_krishnamurti_observation.txt

Title: Observation Without the Observer

We are accustomed to thinking of an observer and the observed. 'I' see the tree. 'I' feel the anger. 'I' experience the joy. This division between the thinker and the thought, the experiencer and the experience, is the root of much conflict, both inner and outer. The observer is the past – the accumulation of memories, prejudices, conclusions – and this past is always interpreting, judging, shaping the present. So, what we see is not the thing as it is, but the thing as colored by our conditioning.

Is it possible to observe without this observer? To see the tree without the word 'tree', without all the botanical knowledge or the aesthetic judgments that immediately arise? To feel anger without saying 'I am angry,' and thus identifying with it and either suppressing or expressing it? This means an observation in which the centre, the 'me', is absent.

When there is such observation, there is no evaluation, no comparison, no condemnation or justification. There is only 'what is'. This state of seeing is a state of learning. Not accumulating knowledge, which is of the past, but learning in the sense of a direct perception of the truth of the moment.

Consider conflict. If I am in conflict, and I try to resolve it, the 'I' that is trying to resolve is itself the product of conflict, of duality. So, the effort to resolve often creates further conflict. But if there is an observation of the conflict without the observer who wants to escape it, change it, or overcome it, then the conflict itself reveals its whole nature. In that direct perception, is there conflict?

This is not a mystical state or something to be achieved through practice or technique. Practices and techniques imply a goal, a future, and therefore a continuity of the observer who is practicing. It is rather an immediate awareness, a seeing of the falseness of the division between the observer and the observed. When the thought 'I am suffering' is seen not as a separate entity evaluating a state, but as the suffering itself, then the energy that was consumed in division, in resistance, in trying to escape, is wholly present. In that total attention, that which we call suffering may undergo a radical transformation. The mind becomes extraordinarily quiet, not through enforcement, but because the sources of its agitation – the fragmentation created by the observer – are understood.