Listen to those crows. Do listen. If you listen completely, is there a centre from which you are listening? Your ears are listening. There is the noise, there is the vibration and all the rest of it, but there is no centre from which you are listening. There is attention.

Therefore if you listen completely, there is no listener; there is only the fact of that noise. To listen completely you must be silent, and that silence is not something in thought, created by thought.

When you listen to that crow that is making the noise before it goes to sleep, so completely that there is no listener, you will see that there is no entity that says, ‘I am listening.’

Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Collected Works, Vol. XVI, p.59 ‘Choiceless Awareness’ Bombay 1966

Tom’s Comments:

Listening is the same as seeing. It goes to the heart of the teachings, it is a complete teaching in itself. If this one teaching is fully understood, penetrated through and through, then that is the entire teaching.

When you truly listen, you are simple seeing things as they actually are, not as you project or interpret them to be. Without the verbiage of your mind with all its opinions and judgements, you see life as it truly is.

This is the living truth. And in that truth it can be seen there is no doer or thinker. The entity that we take ourselves to be can be directly seen to be false – it never existed apart from in our thoughts and imagination.