Page 154 - The Buddha‘s Noble Eightfold Path

of the things around us, and have no more than a sort of

peripheral awareness of them. We are not really aware of our
environment, not really aware of nature, not really aware of the

cosmos, and the reason for this is that we seldom or never really
stop and look at them. How many minutes of the day, not to
speak of hours, do we spend just looking at something? Probably

we do not even spend seconds in this way, and the reason we
usually give is that we have no time. This is perhaps one of the

greatest indictments of modern civilization that could possibly
be made: that we have no time to stop and look at anything. We
may pass a tree on the way to work, but we have no time to look

at it, or even to look at less romantic things such as walls, houses
and fences, and this makes one wonder what this life, and this

modern civilization of ours, is worth if there is no time to look at
things. In the words of the poet:

What is this life, if full of care
We have no time to stand and stare?

Of course, the poet has put in 'stare' for the sake of the rhyme.
What he really means is not staring in the literal sense but just
looking and seeing, and the fact that we have no time for this is

something of which we need to remind ourselves.

There is also the difficulty that even if we do have time to stop
and look at something and try to be aware of it we hardly ever
see things in themselves. What we usually see, even when we do

stop and look at something, is our own projected subjectivity.
We look at something, but we see it through the veil, the

curtain, the mist, the fog of our own mental conditioning.

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