THE ART OF SEEING PART ONE

Copyright Dona Holleman 02/03/2026

Not without hope did I ascend upon an amorous quest to fly,
and up I soared so high, so high, I seized my quarry in the end.
As on this falcon quest I flew to chase a quarry so divine,
I had to soar so high and fine that soon I lost myself from view.
With loss of strength my plight was sorry from straining on so
Steep a course, but love sustained me with such force
That in the end I seized my quarry.
The more I rose into the height more dazzled, blind and lost I spun.
The greatest conquest ever won I won in blindness, like the night.
Because love urged me on my way I gave that mad, blind, reckless leap
That soared so high and steep
That in the end I seized my prey.

Juan dela Cruz

Those of us who were so fortunate to be around in the nineteen sixties may remember the name of Carlos Castaneda. He was a Peruvian student of medicinal plants who became a pupil of a Yaqui Indian, called Don Juan, who was, according to his own words, a brujo, a ‘sorcerer’.

Carlos Castaneda recounted his years with Don Juan in about 8 books, of which the first one was ‘The teachings of Don Juan’.

I heard his name the first time when I was in Gstaad for the yearly Talks with Jiddu Krishnamurti. Everybody was talking about this book and there was even talk of inviting Carlos Castaneda to Gstaad, but apparently he already had other engagements and could not make it.

I ordered the book, and from then on I studied the teaching of Don Juan parallel to Krishnamurti and yoga. I must confess that the for many years I had not the faintest idea what they were all talking about, what this seeing was that they all mentioned. I even asked Krishnamurti, but did not get any wiser.

In this series of articles I will try to give my interpretation of this seeing with the help of various disciplines of the East and the West, which I gradually came to understand. In reality seeing, like hearing, is extremely simple. The problem is that it is never only seeing, but the seeing is always contaminated by thought, the hearing is always associated with the past. We never see or hear in the moment.

When we look at something, a tree, a person, we do not look; we recognize.

The word recognize in Latin comes from re-conoscere, meaning to know again. So somewhere in the past we came to know something, and afterwards when we come across the same thing we re–recognize it.

I would like to take two examples from the opposite sides of the world: From Vedanta and from the teachings of Don Juan.

Both teachings say that the world we live in, that we think is real and ‘out there’, is actually a construct that we ourselves make in our heads. In reality it does not exists. For most people this is very hard to accept, if not impossible. The chair we sit on, the computer we write on, they feel solid and existing. Yet quantum physics say that is not so.

Vedanta says that our world is made of two things : Nama and Rupa

Nama means name

Rupa means object

1. I do not know what a new born baby, just out of the womb, sees. Personally I even doubt that it sees objects. Maybe it sees only energy. Then ‘something’ comes along and says: Mama mama mama. After a few times the baby gets the idea and repeats the word. Then something else comes along and says: papa papa papa and so starts the game of nama-rupa, pasting words onto objects.

   Each object presented to the child gets a name, so gradually the child ‘learns’ his world.

   This process then goes on for the rest of his life, learning new words and what they stand for. Thus a bubble is created in which the child is trapped for the rest of his/her life. This bubble is his life.

   This bubble however has a time line and is part of different cultures.

   The time line/ or opening for learning a language and creating that bubble is about three years. After three years it becomes much harder for the child to ‘learn’ new words. Now compare different languages. A child born in Italy learns Italian in no time. At three it has already quite a vocabulary. Then, when at twenty it goes to China, to learn Chinese is incredible hard, because the ‘opening’ for leaning language is gone. This ‘opening’ for language was called by the biologist Konrad Lorenz imprint vulnerability, a period in life that is particularly ‘open’ for a certain imprinting.

On the other side of the world Don Juan said the same thing, that the world is made of words.

As he says, from birth on we learn the description of the world through language from the parents, family, society, and we forget that the description is not the world, the menu is not the meal, the map is not the road. He compares this as when you go to the restaurant to eat, and you get the menu from which to choose. The menu is not the food, it is only the name of the food, which is a random name invented by someone. You do not eat the paper, that is only a guide.

This bubble created by language in which we are trapped is called by Don Juan the island of the tonal.

He said that this island is suspended in an ocean of unknown energy, and that the main goal of human beings is to discover that energy.

We spend all our life living on this island, in this bubble, without realising that there is another world outside it.

Now we get to a tricky part. During the Covid crisis an American called Robert Malone coined for the first time for he general public the word: Mass Formation. I never heard of that word, but discovered that it stood for Mass Hypnosis. Now I knew something about hypnosis.

In 1950 I went with my mother and brother to Bali, a small unknown island in the Indonesian archipelago, then known only to a couple of famous painters. There I saw the ‘Kecak’, a traditional dance unknown to foreigners at that time.

The Kecak is part of the great epic Ramayana, and deals with the kidnapping of queen Sinta by the demon prince of Ceylon (now Shri Lanka). The King of the monkeys, Hanuman, is sent to Shri Lanka to find out where she is. Within this story takes place the ‘kechak’, the monkey dance. About a hundred men were stripped to the waist by the village priest who was specialised in hypnosis and before the performance placed them under hypnosis. They sat in a circle and were given a sword and began to point the sword against their chest and then press as hard as they could. Due to the hypnosis the skin on the chest was like metal and the sword could not go through, even though the men were sweating with the effort of trying to pierce their skin. However, every now and then one of the men ‘fell’ out of his hypnosis and died, pierced by his own sword. Later on this practice was forbidden by the government for this very reason.

In hypnosis the rational mind is pushed to the side and another part of the brain takes over that has no discerning power, so it believes anything that is presented to it. This is the case of the new born baby. It has no ‘old’ information against which to measure the ‘new’ information, so it takes everything at face value, it believes everything. This goes for every species. A dog learns ‘dog language’ soon after birth, a horse learns ‘horse language’ soon after birth, etc.

Thus each one of us is hypnotised from birth on, and it is extremely difficult to get out of that. We are all victims of Mass Formation, whether we like it or not, and those who have been hypnotised in their turn become the hypnotisers for the next generation and so on and on. If you don’t like the word hypnosis you can use the word conditioned.

Personally I think that the Hindu word maya means this. It is supposed to be the veil of illusion that the Universe puts on humans so that they cannot see, but maybe it is us ourselves who do this, not some malevolent divine power.

I will call it by different names, hypnosis, mass formation, blinding vision to the real nature of the universe. It makes people believe that what they see, hear, smell, is the ‘real’ thing, while in reality it is the image that we have of a universe that we ourself create. Like Plato and the cave we think that the shadows on the wall are the ‘real’ world.

We talk about the real world, as if that exists. This is the human arrogance that thinks only of itself, as if our world is the world. Everything I perceive is a lie, my conceptions are based on my perceptions which are human perceptions. What does the world look like to a dragon fly, to a chameleon, to a snake. What does the real world like? That is a silly question, because there is no such thing, there is no real world. Each species has his own real world!

To know the world we need for a moment to put the description of the world to the side and see the world as it is, not as we have been described that it is. We need to step out of the bubble, off the island of the tonal (Don Juan), and look. And this is the problem. To not see the label, the description, but the real thing.

We never see things as they are at this moment. We only see the memory of those things, the words we have learned, the description, the accumulated ideas that we have about those things, the likes or dislikes. In other words, we see everything through the screen of words, through language, through time.

Specially in our modern world, the brain’s main function is to think. The daily world demands that we are always on top of the world, we need to eat, sleep, work, so we need to spend most of the time thinking how to solve all our problems. Knowledge becomes the most important part not only of our daily life, but of the whole educational system, to the point that the phrase: Cogito ergo sum, ‘I think, therefore I am’, (Descartes) became, and still is, almost a religious credo that nobody questions.

However, we never really pay attention to what thinking is, or where it comes from. We take it so much for granted that we never question why we are so much under its dominion to the point that wars have been waged in the presumption that one way of thinking is superior to another.

We take words to be true without looking further. We never look further than our nose.

World wars have been waged to protect a piece of land that I think is mine. Birds fly from Scotland to Africa without passing any check point for birds. For them it is all one land.

Children spend years and years in schools that teach them totally useless things, like who was king of which country hundreds of years ago, or where one country begins and the other ends, with sooner or later the temptation to change those boundaries by war if necessary.

And the worst one is when children, who are totally innocent, are taught which religion is the right one, thus laying the ground for hatred and discrimination. We have seen this over and over. I remember when I was a child going to school, catholic children were prohibited to play with protestant children, and vice versa. Thus the parents and schools already laid the foundation for hatred.

Thinking, thought, is a tool, but like a sharp knife it can do enormous damage. A knife in sé does not do damage, but in the wrong hands it can do enormous damage.

So philosophers from times past have occupied themselves which this problem.

END OF THE ART OF SEEING PART ONE