I totally agree with the need to experience the present moment in the fullest sense possible, but the question then becomes, "why do you see a tree the way that you do?" and, "where does our idea of critical thinking come from?"
You could say that people are born with a critical mind and that people naturally see a thing that they can identify as a tree but there is evidence to show (which I cover in my book 'The Occult Experience') that native peoples that have not been exposed to external 'civilized' cultures, see things in different ways and also seem to have different ideas of what critical thinking is.
In other words, it is perhaps the case that our idea of this moment is already a construct of modern belief structures, so that we have already been indoctrinated as it were into a useful but at the same time limited version of reality. And while these structures might have been created so that we could all work together as a cohesive society, they still limit the potential experience of this now moment.