Questioner: What do you mean, the observer?
Krishnamurti: Are you looking at it from a centre with all its conclusions of like and dislike, opinion, judgement, the desire to be free of this emptiness and so on - are you looking at this aridness with the eyes of conclusion - or are you looking with eyes that are completely free? When you look at it with completely free eyes there is no observer. If there is no observer, is there the thing observed as loneliness, emptiness, wretchedness?

Questioner: Do you mean to say that that tree doesn't exist if I look at it without conclusions, without a centre which is the observer?

Krishnamurti: Of course the tree exists.

Questioner: Why does loneliness disappear but not the tree when I look without the observer?

Krishnamurti: Because the tree is not created by the centre, by the mind of the "me". But the mind of the "me', in all its self-centred activity has created this emptiness, this isolation. And when that mind, without the centre, looks, the self-centred activity ends. So the loneliness is not. Then the mind functions in freedom. Looking at the whole structure of attachment and detachment, and the movement of pain and pleasure, we see how the mind of the "me" builds its own desert and its own escapes. When the mind of the "me" is still, then there is no desert and there is no escape.