THE ART OF SEEING PART TWO

THE ART OF SEEING PART TWO

Copyright Dona Holleman

The brain knows two major functions that we use on a daily basis: thinking and observing, being aware.

The first thing to understand is that these two are MUTUALLY exclusive. That is, the brain that is in the thinking mode cannot observe, and the brain that is in the observing mode cannot think.

I quote here the 2nd and 3rd sutras of Patanjali’s yoga sutras:

Yogas citta vritti nirodah: Yoga is the cessation of the vrittis (movements) of the brain

Tada drashtuh svarupe avastanam: Then the seer stands in his own ‘form’.

We all know what thinking is. It is an electric activity of the brain, but we also have this possibility of observing, like when you observe a beautiful landscape, or observe children at play.

Thinking is a tool, like any other tool, a way of navigating this world, and as such it is priceless, but it is also mechanical, repetitive. It can solve problems of a technical nature, build structures, allowing us to live in this world comfortably, without worrying too much about consequences, but in the end it does not solve our problems as humans. We have remained the same like a thousand years ago. We wage war, are violent.

Thinking has one major flaw, however, which in the end will render it useless.

It is caught in time, while observation is not.

Now there are various types of time:

  1. There is time as measured by the clock

  2. There is time as measured by our personal experience. Like waiting for a bus can last a long time, but when you are late and have to catch that bus the seconds seem to fly by

  3. Time as measured during our life time. There is that famous story of a certain actress who said that in every old woman lives a young girl who says: What the hell has happened?

  4. For the child time stretches endlessly out into the future, and it does not think that it will ever end, but when that child has arrived at old age, the past seems to have blurred past at great speed

  5. And then there is that mysterious time called ‘the Mandela effect’ in which one has two different memories of the same event in time

Time as measured by the clock does not change. The seconds tick relentlessly, one after the other.

Thinking follows this ticking of the clock. Don Juan, the mentor of Carlos Castaneda, calls thinking the internal dialogue. Like in a dialogue it takes time to formulate the words. Actually, thinking is always one ‘tick’ behind the ticking of the clock. Thinking is a series of thoughts that follow each other in an endless stream, one after the other, but thoughts cannot be observed in the moment that they happen. We are aware of having had that thought a fraction of a second after it happened. So there is a time lapse between thinking and being aware of that thought.

I had a lot or problems with that.

The reason is that all of us presume that there is a thinker who thinks the thought, who observes the thought as it happens.

Let us say it this way.

When I observe something outside myself, let us say I observe a tree, that tree is independent from me, so I can see it in real time. This also is not true, but I leave it for the moment. I will come back to that later.

Nobody has ever seen where the thought comes from, where it goes, if there is a thought maker, where the thought maker lives, what the thought maker is made of, so to avoid that problem we invent an ego who thinks the thoughts, not realizing that with that we only kick the bucket down the road, because then we have to ask who or what is the ego, where does the ego live, what is it made of etc.

In the same way that the physical eye cannot see itself, but can only see things outside itself, so the thoughts cannot see themselves directly. What we do is we remember the thought a fraction of a second after it has passed. Thought is forever caught in the flow of time. It is maddening to try to see thought as it occurs. You can’t, you always see the tail end of it.

In the same way you can’t catch the I-maker, like the physical eye that cannot see itself.

So we are left with the fact that thoughts seem to come by themselves without a thought maker. There is no way that you say to yourself: OK, now I am going to think this thought. It does not work that way because that in itself is a thought.

Now a funny thing happens. When you come to the end of a road and there is nowhere to go, like in the case of thoughts, the brain becomes quiet. It has run itself out of options. You are left with awareness, the other side of the brain.. And awareness is NOT caught in the flow of time. Awareness is direct.

Let us take for example a lake in the mountains, surrounded by beautiful woods in full autumn colours. The lake can be in two ‘moods’: if there is a wind, it will make ripples on the surface so the reflection of the woods around the lake is distorted, and continues to change. If there is absolutely NO wind, the water reflects exactly the woods surrounding it. This is the observation mode of the brain, that reflects the world as it is, while the thinking mode is distorting the world like the ripples on the lake.

want here to go into the old Hindu concept of Maya. Tons of people have said what Maya is. I think that Plato did the same thing with his cave analog. Lots of people have speculated. Maybe quantum physics can help us in this.

According to Einstein, Tesla and others the universe is energy, energy which vibrates. Or strings, according to string theory. I have no idea what those strings are, but will come back to them later on. And I want you to remember this article is just my reflections.

So the universe is energy.

Advaita Vedanta says there is only Brahma, and nothing else. One ‘thing’ only.

On the other side of the globe, life for the Yaqui Indians rotated more around things that they knew in nature, like eagles for instance. They imagined that the energy that governed the ALL, was like a huge eagle with wings outspread, the lines on the wings filling the entire universe. Those line were the entire universe. It tickles me to imagine those lines on the wings of the Eagle like strings in the string theory.

I repeat again that this whole article is about my interpretations of things that have been said all over the world, the idea that people had about this mystery of which we are a part.

The Indians called this Eagle the Tyrant. Nothing could stand up to it.

For me the Eagle’s emanations were the energy that Advaita talked about, called Brahman. Their definition for this was ‘Sat – Cit – Ananda.

Sat means existing, Cit means intelligence, consciousnesses, and Ananda means bliss.

There are many scientists today that say that the entire universe is conscious. They call this line of thought Panpsychism. Now this idea that the entire universe is,conscious is a frightening idea. It means you can’t escape. Whatever you do reflects on the whole.

Most religions are dualistic, there is ‘god’ and the world, with ‘god’ having created the world.. This creates a lot of problems. The dualistic nature of religions is what keeps the war machine going, of the ‘us’ versus ‘those’, of the ‘chosen’ ones versus the non ‘chosen’ ones.

So when you look at the tree, without thinking, without recognizing it, you can ‘see’ the tree.

Zoom forward:

According to quantum physics there is no ‘world’ out there, but the universe is, according to Einstein, energy which vibrates at a certain frequency. Advaita Vedanta, the best known form of Vedanta, calls this energy Brahman. No personal god, but only energy.

A’ means ‘not’, and ‘dvi’ is two, so Advaita means ‘ not two’.

It seems that modern quantum physics comes to the same point as Advaita Vedanta. We live in a world of energy. We will come to that what we do with that.

The illusion of reality: Maya (India) or the Tonal (Mexican)

If the world is an illusion, why does it seem so real?

Nothing that you experience is as real as it seems to be. There is an enormous gap between appearance and reality, between how you perceive things and how those things really are. This is called Maya, or the veiled reality.

For example, the sky looks blue, but air is colourless. Space is black. When you watch the sunset, the sun does not really travel downwards, but the horizon moves up as the earth turns on its axis.

These examples show that appearances are deceiving. It is not difficult to believe that our five senses (jnanindriyas) of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch give us an accurate representation of the world around us.

But the fact is, our powers of perception are extremely limited. Experiencing the world through our five senses (jnanindriyas) is like looking through five little pinholes through a blanket on your head Don Juan calls this the coccoon.

We can only perceive a minute fraction of what really exists. For instance, a dog can sniff and differentiate 50 times more smells than we, and our ears can only hear a narrow range of sounds. Our eyes can only see colours from red to violet.

But beyond those pictures and colours lies a vast range of sound and light, and that we simply cannot perceive. The point is, because the range of our senses is so limited we cannot perceive the world around us. Only a tiny part is accessible and there is another problem.

Everything we see, hear, taste, smell and touch is conveyed to our brain by our nervous system. Then our powerful brain produces a mental representation or model of the world. That mental representation of the world is what we directly perceive of the world outside.

To understand this better consider that each of our eyes produces a two dimensional image, our brain combines these two flat images into a three dimensional view that has depth and distance. Look around you, the three dimensional image of the room you are in is actual a mental representation of the room. You are only indirectly aware of the room because your experience is mediated by your brain and senses.

It is really important to ask how accurate is the mental representation of the world produced by our brain and senses. Does it differ in any way from the world around us.

Researchers in psychology and neuroscience have shown that our mental model of the world is based partly on what our senses perceive and partly on additional information supplied by our brain.

Our brain modifies and enhances what our senses perceive. For example, each of our eyes has a blind spot where the optic nerve meets the retina. Any part of the image that falls on the blind spot is lost, yet images in our mind are complete, free from gaps, because our brain fills in missing parts. The brain also transforms the still images to a continuous moving picture. 5.17

Let us have a look at the Jnanindriyas or the five senses of knowledge:

  • eyes

  • ears

  • nose

  • tongue

  • touch

1. The eyes: They are the senses that reach the farthest: we can see the stars at night, the Milky Way, billions of miles away. The eyes discriminate differences in electromagnetic radiation, all varieties of oscillation in the electro-magnetic field.

2. The ears: Hearing relies on the percussive impact of molecules of air. They give information about events at an intermediate range of distance. Hearing discriminates differences in waves that move through matter. These vary in both amplitude and frequency. Changes in amplitude determine the volume of the sound, changes in frequency determine pitch.

3. The nose: The sense of smell relies upon air as the medium of transmission, it detects changes in the chemical compositioin of air. It gives information about the world close by the perceiving organ.

4. The tongue: With taste we go deeper inward. It detects the chemical composition of molecules dissolved in liquid or detachable from the surface of solids. To do this the tongue has to be in contact with the substance

It is the mind that is not tied to language.

According to quantum physics we ourselves create our world, the world that we live in. We do that through language. When the baby is born it does not know language.

grow we learn the ‘description’ of the world through language from the parents, family, society. But we forget that the description is NOT THE WORLD, the menu is not the meal, the map is not the road.

To ‘know’ the world we need to for a moment put the description to the side and ‘see’ the world as it is, not as we have been described that it is.

Yogis, Buddhists and other practices have been very clear about this.

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.

Panta Rhei’ in ancient Greek means ‘everything flows’. The term is known as part of the philosophy of Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher of the late 6th century BC. He said “no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

We and everything else are in Constant Motion (panta rhei) , constant change, or rather, everything is constantly created from moment to moment. With this Heraclitus means that we can never have the same experience twice, as everything is subject to continuous and relentless mutation, changing, flowing, flowing on and on and on…..

So seeing is when you look at something and do not recognize it, do not compare it to something you have seen in the past. Therefore you do not have words for it, language., description. It is the Unknown.

This does not mean that your mind is a blank. On the contrary, it is extremely alive, aware, paying total attention to what is in front, but without spoiling it, without comparing it with something else, withoutcc corrupting it by words, by the description.

How do we apply this to our yoga practice?

In total attention the mind is completely occupied with the movement of the moment. As the Zen Buddhist says: ‘When you eat, eat, when you sleep, sleep’. There are no thoughts or distractions, no referring to descriptions of the asana. It is the mind that does something for the first time, even though it has done it a thousand times before in the past.

What does this mean?.

Every movement that you do is the first time you are doing it, every asana you do is the first time you are ever doing it.

There is no referring to other times in the past that you did this movement, this asana, there is no ’re-cognizing’. ‘Re-cognizing’ in Latin means to ‘again know’, so it refers to the past, when you ‘knew’ this movement.

Instead in total attention you do the movement, the asana, as if it is the first time you are doing it, and therefore the mind is free, fresh, innocent, curious.

With the mind in this way, innocent and free, the physical exercise, the asana, becomes a meditation in action.

Without total attention there is only repetition, there is no learning, no discovering.

What is learning?

Learning is not accumulating knowledge, it is not something that you can retain.

Learning is a break in the continuity of an action or a thought.

This is different from acquiring knowledge. Acquiring knowledge takes time and effort, accumulating information about something or someone. It can be stored, remembered, to be used at a later time, and re-cognized in the future.

On the other hand, learning is the moment in which the past and recognition are absent. It is a catastrophic break in the continuity of thoughts, emotions and memory, in which you are left with something totally unknown, not remembered, not-recognizable.

Only in that moment, when memories and recognition are absent, can the mind see that which is in front of it.

ourselves create our world, the world that we live in. We do that through language. When the baby is born it does not know language.

Panta Rhei’ in ancient Greek means ‘everything flows’. The term is known as part of the philosophy of Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher of the late 6th century BC. He said “no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

We and everything else are in constant motion (panta rhei) , constant change, or rather, everything is constantly created from moment to moment.

With this Heraclitus means that we can never have the same experience twice, as everything is subject to continuous and relentless mutation, changing, flowing, flowing on and on and on…..

  1. So seeing is when you look at something and do not recognize it, do not compare it to something you have seen in the past. Therefore you do not have words for it, language., description. It is the Unknown.

  2. This does not mean that your mind is a blank. On the contrary, it is extremely alive, aware, paying total attention to what is in front, but without spoiling it, without comparing it with something else, without corrupting it by words, by the description.

  3. How do we apply this to our yoga practice?

  4. In total attention the mind is completely occupied with the movement of the moment. As the Zen Buddhist says: ‘When you eat, eat, when you sleep, sleep’. There are no thoughts or distractions, no referring to descriptions of the asana.

  5. It is the mind that does something for the first time, even though it has done it a thousand times before in the past.

  6. What does this mean?.

  7. Every movement that you do is the first time you are doing it, every asana you do is the first time you are ever doing it.

  8. There is no referring to other times in the past that you did this movement, this asana, there is no ’re-cognizing’. ‘Re-cognizing’ in Latin means to ‘again know’, so it refers to the past, when you ‘knew’ this movement.

  9. Instead in total attention you do the movement, the asana, as if it is the first time you are doing it, and therefore the mind is free, fresh, innocent, curious.

  10. With the mind in this way, innocent and free, the physical exercise, the asana, becomes a meditation in action.

  11. Without total attention there is only repetition, there is no learning, no discovering.
  12. What is learning?

  13. Learning is not accumulating knowledge, it is not something that you can retain.

  14. Learning is a break in the continuity of an action or a thought.

  15. This is different from acquiring knowledge. Acquiring knowledge takes time and effort, accumulating information about something or someone. It can be stored, remembered, to be used at a later time, and re-cognized in the future.

  16. On the other hand, learning is the moment in which the past and recognition are absent. It is a catastrophic break in the continuity of thoughts, emotions and memory, in which you are left with something totally unknown, not remembered, not-recognizable.

  17. Only in that moment, when memories and recognition are absent, can the mind see that which is in front of it.

  18. With the mind in this way, innocent and free, the physical exercise, the asana, becomes a meditation in action.

  19. Further on I will discuss this more in detail.

  20. (state of the manomaya kosha ) This state of mind is mentioned in the first sutras of Patanjali which say: In practice it is the absence of thoughts and emotions and therefore of psychological time and is based on choiceless awareness. Choiceless awareness is a term frequently used in scientific papers and includes being aware of things without attaching words, images or feelings to them.

    Seeing or understanding is not a matter of time, it is not a matter of gradations. Either you see or you don’t see.

    The moment there is experiencing there is neither the person who is aware nor the object of which he is aware, there is neither the observer nor the observed, but only a state of observing, experiencing: The Observer, the Observed and the Act of Observation (Jivan, Saksi=Witness

Knowledge implies a sense of accumulation, knowledge can be acquired and, because its nature, knowledge is always partial, it is never complete. Therefore, all action springing from knowledge is also partial, incomplete.

  • Learning is a cultivation of memory, which becomes mechanical. Like a machine it is not capable of learning.

    A mind that is learning never says: ‘I know’. When I say: ‘I know myself’, learning has come to an end in accumulated knowledge. Learning is never cumulative; it is a movement of knowing which has no beginning and no end.

    There must be a totally new factor which is not recognizable by the mind. The mind is the instrument of recognition, and anything that the mind recognizes is already known : therefore it is not the new. It is still within the field of thought, of memory. So the mind must be in a state where it perceives without the process of recognition. it is a state of perception and nothing else, that is, a state of being ( SAKSI ?)

  • In Advaita Vedanta, Saksi (or Shiva consciousness) is the witness, pure awareness, that witnesses all things and events. It witnesses all thoughts, words and deeds without affecting them or being affected by them. It is beyond time and space and the triad of the experiencer, experiencing and experienced.

    Ways of knowing the world with the 5 Jnanindriyas: Eyes, ears, nose, tongue, touch.

    Vision: gives access to the whole universe. It discriminates differences in electromagnetic radiation.

    Hearing

  • Seeing and looking as two distinct manners of perceiving. Looking refers to the ordinary way in which we are accustomed to perceiving the world, while seeing entails a very complex process by virtue of which a man of knowledge allegedly perceives the essence of the things of the world.

    He pointed out to me that my view of the world cannot be final because it is only an interpretation.

    I see both ways. When I want to look at the world I see it the way you do. When I want to see it I look at it the way I know and I perceive. Things don’t change. You change your way of looking.

    Whenever you look at things you do not see them. Since you are not concerned with seeing, things look very much the same every time you look at them. When you learn to see a thing is never the same every time you see it, and yet it is the same.

    Once a man learns to see he finds himself alone in the world with nothing but folly.

    We talk about our world. In fact, we maintain our world with our internal talk.

  • My view of the world cannot be final because it is only an interpretation.

the description

  • For a sorcerer, the world of everyday life is not real, or out there, as we believe it is. For a sorcerer, reality, or the world we all know, is only a description that has been pounded into us from the moment we are born. Everyone who comes into contact with a child is a teacher who incessantly describes the world to him, until the moment when the child is capable of perceiving the world as it is described. From that moment on, the child is a member. He knows the description of the world.

    People tell us from the time we are born that the world is such and such and so and so, and naturally we have no choice but to see the world the way people have been telling us it is.

    The reality of the world we know is so taken for granted that the basic premise of sorcery, that our reality is merely one of many descriptions, is hardly taken as a serious proposition.

  • The internal dialogue is what grounds us. The world is such and such or so and so, only because we talk to ourselves about its being such and such or so and so.

    Things are real only after one has learned to agree on their realness.

    The flaw with words is that they always force us to feel enlightened, but when we turn around to face the world they always fail us and we end up facing the world as we always have, without enlightenment.

    Seeing happens only when the warrior is capable of stopping the internal dialogue.

    The world does not yield to us directly, the description of the world stands in between. So, properly speaking, we are always one step removed and our experience of the world is always a recollection of the experience. We are perennially recollecting the instant that has just happened, just passed. We recollect, recollect, recollect.

    Solidity, corporealness are memories. Therefore, like everything else we feel about the world, they are memories we accumulate. Memories of the description.

    The crux of sorcery is the internal dialogue; that is the key to everything. When a warrior learns to stop it, everything becomes possible.

the description

  • We are perceivers. We are an awareness. We are not objects, we have no solidity. We are boundless. The world of objects and solidity is a way of making our passage on earth convenient. It is only a description that was created to help us. Our ‘reason’ forgets that the description is only a description and thus we entrap the totality of ourselves in a vicious circle from which we rarely emerge in our lifetime.

  • We are perceivers. The world that we perceive, though, is an illusion. It was created by a description that was told to us since the moment we were born.

The Tonal and the Nagual

  • Every human being has two separate entities, two counterparts which become operative at the moment of birth. One is called the tonal and the other the nagual.

    The tonal is the social person , the organizer of the world, everything we know and do as men is the work of the tonal. It is everything we are. Anything we have a word for is the tonal. The tonal begins at birth and ends at death.

    The tonal is what makes the world

    The nagual is the part of us which we do not deal with at all. The nagual is the part of us for which there is no description – no words, no names, no feelings, no knowledge. The nagual is there, surrounding the island.

  • You would say that the nagual and the tonal are within ourselves. I, myself, would say that they are not, but neither of us would be right. The tonal of your time calls for you to maintain that everything dealing with your feelings and thoughts takes place within yourself. The sorcerer’s tonal says the opposite, everything is outside. Who is right? No one. Inside, outside, it does not really matter.

    The tonal, since it is keenly aware of how taxing it is to speak of itself, has created the terms ‘I’, ‘myself’, and so forth as a balance and thanks to them it can talk with other tonals, or with itself, about itself.

    The first act of a teacher is to introduce the idea that the world we think we see is only a view, a description of the world. Every effort of a teacher is geared to prove this point to his apprentice. But accepting it seems to be one of the hardest things one can do. We are complacently caught in our particular view of the world, which compels us to feel and act as if we knew everything about the world. A teacher, from the very first act he performs, aims at stopping that view. Sorcerers call it ‘stopping the internal dialogue’, and they are convinced that it is the single most important technique that an apprentice can learn.

    Sorcerers say that we are inside a bubble. It is a bubble into which we are placed at the moment of our birth. At first the bubble is open, but then it begins to close until it has sealed us in. That bubble is our perception. We live inside that bubble all our lives. And what we witness on its round walls is our own reflection. The thing reflected is our view of the world. That view is first a description, which is given to us from the moment of our birth until all our attention is caught by it and the description becomes a view.

    We have one single issue left. Sorcerers call it the secret of the luminous beings, and that is the fact that we are perceivers. We men and all the other luminous beings on earth are perceivers. That is our bubble, the bubble of perception. Our mistake is to believe that the only perception worthy of acknowledgment is what goes through our reason. Sorcerers believe that reason is only one centre and that it shouldn’t take so much for granted.

Colour green

And the self that you having these thoughts watching this video trying to make sense of it, that sense of identity, of continuity, of ‘I am’ it is a story that your brain writes, edits and rewrites with every- heartbeat. You likely never question these things, most of us don’t, we assume colour is objective, time is linear and the self is solid, but none of that is true.

We experience color, time and self that only exists because we are conscious. Neuroscientists have said so for decades but knowing the theory and seeing the truth are two different things. This is about waking up to the strange truth which is out there that this is beyond reality, a space where perception and mystery collide. You walk through the forest at sunset, with all the colors, it all feels real but none of those colors exist without your perception, they enter your eyes as a vibration, a wave moving through space, the green is just light with a wavelength of about 530 nano meter but green itself, that is something the brain paints upon the world.

This is biology, when the light waves hit the retina, they activate the brain interprets them, copies them, fills in what it expects to see, what makes the most sense given context memory and light conditions, color is never just receives, it is predicts and the predictions vary wildly. A dog would see fewer colors, their world is yellow, brown muted, a bee would see ultraviolet patterns hidden in flowers. Color is a translation, and every species speaks a different dialogue. Even within our own kind perception wavers.

The brain filters light not for truth but for function. From an evolutionary perspective you do not need to see the world accurately, you need to see it in a way that helps you survive, find food, avoid danger, recognize patterns. Color is part of that system, a tool, a useful lie, and yet we live by it, we fall in love with eyes that shimmer green, we choose foods by color, we signal danger with red, calm, with blue, freshness with green, these shape our choices beliefs and identities. This does not make color meaningless, it makes it more precious, like a dream we all agree to share even though we never quite see it the same way. The senses show simplified representations, not reality itself.

Color is one of the clearest examples, remember that what you are seeing is not the world, it is a version of the world your consciousness is creating for you moment by moment

Seeing

In his system of knowledge there was the possibility of making a semantic difference between ‘seeing’ and ‘looking’ as two distinct manners of perceiving. ‘Looking’ refers to the ordinary way in which we are accustomed to perceive the world, while ‘seeing’ entails (Page 14)a very complex process by virtue of which a man of knowledge allegedly perceives the ‘essence’ of the things of the world.

When you ‘see’ there are no longer familiar features in the world. Everything is new. Everything has never happened before. The world is incredible! Nothing is any longer familiar. Everything you gaze at becomes nothing! Things do not disappear. They do not vanish. They simply become nothing and yet they are still there.

Once you learn, you can ‘see’ every single thing in the world in a different way. I see both ways. When I want to ‘look’ at the world I see it the way you do. Then when I want to ‘see’ it I look at it the way I know and I perceive it in a different way. Things don’t change. You change your way of looking, that’s all.

In his system of knowledge there was the possibility of making a semantic difference between ‘seeing’ and ‘looking’ as two distinct manners of perceiving. ‘Looking’ refers to the ordinary way in which we are accustomed to perceive the world, while ‘seeing’ entails (Page 14)a very complex process by virtue of which a man of knowledge allegedly perceives the ‘essence’ of the things of the world.

-(Page 16)Don Juan’s task, as a practitioner making his system accessible to me, was to disarrange a particular certainty which I share with everyone else, the certainty that our ‘common-sense’ views of the world are final. He succeeded in pointing out to me that my view of the world cannot be final because it is only an interpretation.

Once you learn, you can ‘see’ every single thing in the world in a different way. I see both ways. When I want to ‘look’ at the world I see it the way you do. Then when I want to ‘see’ it I look at it the way I know and I perceive it in a different way. (Page 43)Things don’t change. You change your way of looking, that’s all.

-Whenever you ‘look’ at things you do not ‘see’ them. You just ‘look’ at them, I suppose to make sure that something is there. Since you are not concerned with ‘seeing’, things look very much the same every time you look at them. When you learn to ‘see’, on the other hand, a thing is never the same every time you ‘see’ it, and yet it is the same.

For a sorcerer, the world of everyday life is not real, or out there, as we believe it is. For a sorcerer, reality, or the world we all know, is only a description that has been pounded into us from the moment we are born. Everyone who comes into contact with a child (Page ix)is a teacher who incessantly describes the world to him, until the moment when the child is capable of perceiving the world as it is described. From that moment on, the child is a ‘member. He knows the description of the world.

The reality of our day-to-day life consists of an endless flow of perceptual interpretations which we, the individuals who share a specific membership, have learned to make in common.

The reality of the world we know is so taken for granted that the basic premise of sorcery, that our reality is merely one of many descriptions, is hardly taken as a serious proposition.

He was teaching me how to ‘see’ as opposed to merely ‘looking’, and ‘stopping the world’ was the first step to ‘seeing’.

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