Just Look

Can’t I just look?

Can I look without the word at every problem: the problem of fear, the problem of pleasure? Because the word creates, breeds thought; and thought is memory, experience, pleasure, and therefore a distorting factor.
This is really quite astonishingly simple. Because it is simple, we mistrust it. We want everything to be very complicated, very cunning; and all cunning is covered with a perfume of words. If I can look at a flower nonverbally—and I can; anyone can do it, if one gives sufficient attention—can’t I look with that same objective, nonverbal attention at the problems which I have? Can’t I look out of silence, which is nonverbal, without the thinking machinery of pleasure and time being in operation? Can’t I just look? I think that’s the crux of the whole matter—not to approach from the periphery, which only complicates life tremendously, but to look at life, with all its complex problems of livelihood, sex, death, misery, sorrow, the agony of being tremendously alone—to look at all that without association, out of silence, which means without a center, without the word which creates the reaction of thought, which is memory and hence time. I think that is the real problem, the rea
l issue: whether the mind can look at life where there is immediate action, not an idea and then action, and eliminate conflict altogether.

Khrishnamurti