seeing

Each thing we see hides something else we want to see.

René Magritte

SEEING is to witness the unknown and glimpse the unknowable. The unknown is veiled from man but is within reach of man’s reason if he is sufficiently polarized and amplified.

Laura Knight Jadczyk, The Wave, Part 12e1

You will see that in life you get back exactly what you put in.

Your life is the mirror of what you are, it is your image. “You are passive, blind, demanding. You take all, you accept all, without ever feeling indebted. Your attitude towards the world and towards life is the attitude of one who has the right to demand and take. Of one who doesn't need to pay or gain. You believe that all things are due to you, only because it's you! All your blindness is there. It doesn't catch your attention. ’It is however what, in you, separates a world from another.

“You have no measure to measure yourself up. You live only between 'I like it' and 'I don't like it'. Which means that you have appreciation only for yourself. You do not allow for anything above you - theoretically or logically maybe, but not in reality. This is why you are demanding and keep on thinking that everything should be cheap, and you can afford to pay for anything you want. You don't recognize anything above yourself, or outside yourself or inside yourself. This is why, I repeat, you have no measure and live only to satisfy your whims.

Yes, your 'self appreciation' makes you blind! It is the biggest obstacle to a new life. One has to be able to pass this obstacle, this threshold, before one can go further. It is the test that separates the 'chaff' from the 'wheat' in people. No matter how intelligent, how endowed, how brilliant a man is, if he doesn't change his opinion about himself, he will be lost for inner development, for the work based on self-knowledge, for a real evolution. He will stay as he is all his life. The first demand, the first condition, the first test for he who wants to work on himself is to change his appreciation of himself. He cannot just imagine, or simply believe or think, but actually ‘see’ things in himself that he did not see before, really see them. Never will his opinion about himself change as long as he will not see inside himself. And in order to see, he has to learn to see: it is the first initiation of man into self-knowledge.

Before anything else, he has to know what to look for. Once he knows it, he has to make efforts, focus his attention, look constantly, with tenacity. By maintaining his attention on it, by not forgetting about looking, one day he may see. If he sees once, he can see a second time, and if this is repeated he cannot ignore seeing. ’This is the state to look for in our observation; it is from this that the true desire, the desire to evolve, will be born; from cold we're becoming hot, vibrating; we will be deeply touched by our reality.

Intro to a meeting from September, 1941: Premiere Initiation, par G.I. Gurdjieff Question de Gurdjieff (no 50) ed. Albin Michel, 1989.

After lifelong discipline and training, sorcerers acquire the capacity to perceive the essence of things, a capacity they call seeing .

To perceive the energetic essence of things means that you perceive energy directly. By separating the social part of perception, you'll perceive the essence of everything. Whatever we are perceiving is energy, but since we can't directly perceive energy, we process our perception to fit a mold. This mold is the social part of perception, which you have to separate.

You have to separate it because it deliberately reduces the scope of what can be perceived and makes us believe that the mold into which we fit our perception is all that exists. For man to survive now, his perception must change at its social base.

This social base of perception is the physical certainty that the world is made of concrete objects. I call this a social base because a serious and fierce effort is put out by everybody to guide us to perceive the world the way we do.

Everything is energy. The whole universe is energy. The social base of our perception should be the physical certainty that energy is all there is. A mighty effort should be made to guide us to perceive energy as energy. Then we would have both alternatives at our fingertips.

To train people in such a fashion is possible and this is precisely what I am doing with you. I am teaching you a new way of perceiving, first, by making you realize we process our perception to fit a mold and, second, by fiercely guiding you to perceive energy directly. This method is very much like the one used to teach us to perceive the world of daily affairs.

Our entrapment in processing our perception to fit a social mold loses its power when we realize we have accepted this mold, as an inheritance from our ancestors, without bothering to examine it.

To perceive a world of hard objects that had either a positive or a negative value must have been utterly necessary for our ancestors' survival. After ages of perceiving in such a manner, we are now forced to believe that the world is made up of objects.

It is unquestionably a world of objects. To prove it, all we have to do is bump into them. We are not arguing that. I am saying that this is first a world of energy; then it's a world of objects. If we don't start with the premise that it is a world of energy, we'll never be able to perceive energy directly. We'll always be stopped by the physical certainty of the hardness of objects.

Our way of perceiving is a predator's way. There is another mode, the one I am familiarizing you with: the act of perceiving the essence of everything, energy itself, directly.

To perceive the essence of everything will make us understand, classify, and describe the world in entirely new, more exciting, more sophisticated terms. Terms that correspond to sorcery truths, which have no rational foundation and no relation whatsoever to the facts of our daily world but which are self-evident truths for the sorcerers who perceive energy directly and see the essence of everything.

For such sorcerers, the most significant act of sorcery is to see the essence of the universe. The essence of the universe resembles incandescent threads stretched into infinity in every conceivable direction, luminous filaments that are conscious of themselves in ways impossible for the human mind to comprehend.

From seeing the essence of the universe, sorcerers go on to see the energy essence of human beings and depict human beings as bright shapes that resemble giant eggs and call them luminous eggs.

When sorcerers see a human being they see a giant, luminous shape that floats, making, as it moves, a deep furrow in the energy of the earth, just as if the luminous shape had a taproot that was dragging.
The decisive finding of the sorcerers of antiquity and the crucial feature of human beings as luminous balls, is a round spot of intense brilliance, the size of a tennis ball, permanently lodged inside the luminous ball, flush with its surface, about two feet back from the crest of a person's right shoulder blade.

The luminous ball is much larger than the human body. The spot of intense brilliance is part of this ball of energy, and it is located on a place at the height of the shoulder blades, an arm's length from a person's back. The old sorcerers named it the assemblage point after seeing what it does. It makes us perceive. In human beings, perception is assembled there, on that point. Seeing that all living beings have such a point of brilliance, the old sorcerers surmised that perception in general must take place on that spot, in whatever pertinent manner.

What they saw that made them conclude that perception takes place on the assemblage point was first, that out of the millions of the universe's luminous energy filaments passing through the entire luminous ball, only a small number pass directly through the assemblage point, as should be expected since it is small in comparison with the whole.

Next, they saw that a spherical extra glow, slightly bigger than the assemblage point, always surrounds it, greatly intensifying the luminosity of the filaments passing directly through that glow.

Finally, they saw two things. One, that the assemblage points of human beings can dislodge themselves from the spot where they are usually located. And, two, that when the assemblage point is on its habitual position, perception and awareness seem to be normal, judging by the normal behavior of the subjects being observed. But when their assemblage points and surrounding glowing spheres are on a different position than the habitual one, their unusual behavior seems to be the proof that their awareness is different, that they are perceiving in an unfamiliar manner.

The conclusion the old sorcerers drew from all this was that the greater the displacement of the assemblage point from its customary position, the more unusual the consequent behavior and, evidently, the consequent awareness and perception.

Notice that when I talk about seeing , I always say "having the appearance of" or "seemed like." Everything one sees is so unique that there is no way to talk about it except by comparing it to something known to us.

The most adequate example of this difficulty is the way sorcerers talk about the assemblage point and the glow that surrounds it. They describe them as brightness, yet it cannot be brightness, because seers see them without their eyes. They have to fill out the difference, however, and say that the assemblage point is a spot of light and that around it there is a halo, a glow. We are so visual, so ruled by our predator's perception, that everything we see must be rendered in terms of what the predator's eye normally sees.

After seeing what the assemblage point and its surrounding glow seemed to be doing, the old sorcerers advanced an explanation. They proposed that in human beings the assemblage point, by focusing its glowing sphere on the universe's filaments of energy that pass directly through it, automatically and without premeditation assembles those filaments into a steady perception of the world.

How those filaments are assembled into a steady perception of the world, no one can possibly know. Sorcerers see the movement of energy, but just seeing the movement of energy cannot tell them how or why energy moves.

Seeing that millions of conscious energy filaments pass through the assemblage point, the old sorcerers postulated that in passing through it they come together, amassed by the glow that surrounds it. After seeing that the glow is extremely dim in people who have been rendered unconscious or are about to die, and that it is totally absent from corpses, they were convinced that this glow is awareness.

The assemblage point and its surrounding glow are the mark of life and consciousness. The inescapable conclusion of the sorcerers of antiquity was that awareness and perception go together and are tied to the assemblage point and the glow that surrounds it.

I can't explain to you why, but there is no way sorcerers can be mistaken about their seeing . Now the conclusions they arrive at from their seeing might be wrong, but that would be because they are naive, uncultivated. In order to avoid this disaster, sorcerers have to cultivate their minds, in whatever form they can.

It certainly would be infinitely safer for sorcerers to remain solely at the level of describing what they see , but the temptation to conclude and explain, even if only to oneself, is far too great to resist.

When the assemblage point is displaced to another position, a new conglomerate of millions of luminous energy filaments come together on that point. The sorcerers of antiquity saw this and concluded that since the glow of awareness is always present wherever the assemblage point is, perception is automatically assembled there. Because of the different position of the assemblage point, the resulting world, however, cannot be our world of daily affairs.

The old sorcerers were capable of distinguishing two types of assemblage point displacement. One was a displacement to any position on the surface or in the interior of the luminous ball; this displacement they called a shift of the assemblage point. The other was a displacement to a position outside the luminous ball; they called this displacement a movement of the assemblage point. They found out that the difference between a shift and a movement was the nature of the perception each allows.

Since the shifts of the assemblage point are displacements within the luminous ball, the worlds engendered by them, no matter how bizarre or wondrous or unbelievable they might be, are still worlds within the human domain. The human domain is the energy filaments that pass through the entire luminous ball. By contrast, movements of the assemblage point, since they are displacements to positions outside the luminous ball, engage filaments of energy that are beyond the human realm. Perceiving such filaments engenders worlds that are beyond comprehension, inconceivable worlds with no trace of human antecedents in them.

This business of the assemblage point is an idea so farfetched, so inadmissible that there is only one thing for you to do. See the assemblage point! It isn't that difficult to see . The difficulty is in breaking the retaining wall we all have in our minds that holds us in place. To break it, all we need is energy. Once we have energy, seeing happens to us by itself. The trick is in abandoning our fort of self-complacency and false security.

It is just a matter of having energy. The hard part is convincing yourself that it can be done. For this, you need to trust the nagual. The marvel of sorcery is that every sorcerer has to prove everything with his own experience. I am telling you about the principles of sorcery not with the hope that you will memorize them but with the hope that you will practice them.

Our link is with the spirit itself and only incidentally with the man who brings us its message. The assemblage point has nothing to do with what we normally perceive as the body. It's part of the luminous egg, which is our energy self.

It is displaced through energy currents. Jolts of energy, originating outside or inside our energy shape. These are usually unpredictable currents that happen randomly, but with sorcerers they are very predictable currents that obey the sorcerer's intent .

Every sorcerer feels them. Every human being does, for that matter, but average human beings are too busy with their own pursuits to pay any attention to feelings like that.

When the assemblage point moves outside the energy shape it pushes the contours of the energy shape out, without breaking its energy boundaries.

The end result of a movement of the assemblage point is a total change in the energy shape of a human being. Instead of a ball or an egg, he becomes something resembling a smoking pipe. The tip of the stem is the assemblage point, and the bowl of the pipe is what remains of the luminous ball. If the assemblage point keeps on moving, a moment comes when the luminous ball becomes a thin line of energy. What makes mankind homogeneous is the fact that we are all luminous balls.

[…]

Mankind perceives the world we know, in the terms we do, only because we share energetic uniformity and cohesion. We automatically attain these two conditions of energy in the course of our rearing. They are so taken for granted we do not realize their vital importance until we are faced with the possibility of perceiving worlds other than the world we know. At those moments, it becomes evident that we need a new appropriate energetic uniformity and cohesion to perceive coherently and totally.

[…]

When seers see the human energy shape, they see one single ball of energy. If there is another ball next to it, the other ball is seen again as a single ball of energy. The idea of a multitude of luminous balls comes from our knowledge of human crowds. In the universe of energy, there are only single individuals, alone, surrounded by the boundless. You must see that for yourself.

Carlos Castaneda, The Art of Dreaming 1993

"What is seeing, then?" I asked.

He replied that seeing is alignment. And I reminded him that he had said that perception is alignment. He explained then that the alignment of emanations used routinely is the perception of the day-to-day world, but the alignment of emanations that are never used ordinarily is seeing. When such an alignment occurs one sees. Seeing, therefore, being produced by align-ment out of the ordinary, cannot be something one could merely look at. He said that in spite of the fact that I had seen countless times, it had not occurred to me to disregard my eyes. I had succumbed to the way seeing is labeled and described.

"When seers see, something explains everything as the new alignment takes place," he continued. "It's a voice that tells them in their ear what's what. If that voice is not present, what the seer is engaged in isn't seeing. "

After a moment's pause, he continued explaining the voice of seeing. He said that it was equally fallacious to say that seeing was hearing, because it was infinitely more than that, but that seers had opted for using sound as a gauge of a new alignment. He called the voice of seeing a most mysterious inexplicable thing.

"My personal conclusion is that the voice of seeing belongs only to man," he said. "It may happen because talking is something that no one else besides man does. The old seers believed it was the voice of an overpowering entity intimately related to mankind, a protector of man. The new seers found out that that entity, which they called the mold of man, doesn't have a voice. The voice of seeing for the new seers is something quite Incomprehensible; they

say it's the glow of awareness playing on the Eagle's emanations as a harpist plays on a harp."

Carlos Castaneda, The Fire Within, 1984