OBSERVATION AS LEARNING
Observation implies to see without the accompaniment of previous knowledge. To look at something as though for the first time. Afresh.
If you observe things afresh, then there is not the cultivation of memory. Because each time you observe, and throughout that observation, you learn, store it up as memory. Then the next time you observe, you are observing through the pattern of memory. You never see anything fresh.
Leisure is extraordinarily important. Not have a mind that’s constantly occupied, constantly chattering. It’s only in that unoccupied mind that a new learning can take place. Which is entirely different from the cultivating memory, storing it up as knowledge, and acting from that knowledge.
But there is the other kind of learning that is to observe the trees, the sky, beauty of the mountains. That observation, if stored up as memory, will prevent the next observation being fresh.
If you observe your wife or girlfriend, can you observe without the previous recording of the incidents and all the rest of it in that particular relationship? If you can observe or watch the other without the previous knowledge, then you learn much more.
Can you look at your wife or husband as though for the first time?
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Can you look at your wife—or girlfriend, or husband or boyfriend—without the word wife, without all the remembrances that word contains?
See the importance of this: that you look at her, or him, or the river, as though for the first time. When you wake up in the morning, and you look out of your window and see mountains, valleys, trees and green fields, it is an astonishing sight when you look at it as though you were just born, which means to observe without any bias, to observe without any conclusion, prejudice. You cannot do this if you are half awake. If you see what is implied, you do it easily. If I look at my wife from all the images, incidents, memories, and hurts, I never look at her. I am always looking at her through the images of past memories.
Can you look at your wife or husband as though for the first time without all the images, memories?
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Krishnamurti • From This Light in Oneself