Another way to learn how to do dreaming is by learning gazing. If you gaze at a pile of leaves for hours your thoughts get quiet. Without thoughts the attention of the tonal wanes and suddenly your second attention hooks onto the leaves and the leaves become something else. The moment when the second attention hooks onto something is called stopping the world.

The difficulty in gazing is to learn to quiet down the thoughts. Once you can stop the world you are a gazer. And the only way of stopping the world is by trying. Combine gazing at dry leaves and looking for your hands in dreaming. Once you have trapped your second attention with dry leaves, you do gazing and dreaming to enlarge it. And that’s all there is to gazing. All we need to do in order to trap our second attention is to try and try.

Once dreamers know how to stop the world by gazing at leaves, they can gaze at other things; and finally when the dreamers lose their form altogether, they can gaze at anything.  First after leaves, gaze at small plants. Small plants are very dangerous. Their power is concentrated; they have a very intense light and they feel when dreamers are gazing at them; they immediately move their light and shoot it at the gazer. Dreamers have to choose one kind of plant to gaze at.

Next gaze at trees. Dreamers also have a particular kind of tree to gaze at. Next gaze at moving, living creatures. Small insects are by far the best subject. Their mobility makes them innocuous to the gazer, the opposite of plants which draw their light directly from the earth.

The next step is to gaze at rocks. Rocks are very old and powerful and have a specific light which is rather greenish in contrast with the white light of plants and the yellowish light of mobile, living beings. Rocks do not open up easily to gazers, but it is worthwhile for gazers to persist because rocks have special secrets concealed in their core, secrets that can aid sorcerers in their dreaming.

A second series in the order of gazing is to gaze at cyclic phenomena: rain and fog. Gazers can focus their second attention on the rain itself and move with it, or focus it on the background and use the rain as a magnifying glass of sorts to reveal hidden features. Places of power or places to be avoided are found by gazing through rain. Places of power are yellowish and places to be avoided are intensely green.

We hold the images of the world with our attention. Let your attention go from the images of the world. If you don’t focus your attention on the world, the world collapses. Instead of fighting to focus, let go of the images by gazing fixedly at distant hills, or by gazing at water, like a river, or by gazing at the clouds.

If you gaze with your eyes open, you get dizzy and the eyes get tired, but if you half-close them and blink a lot and move them from mountain to mountain, or from cloud to cloud, you can look for hours.

The position of the body is of great importance while one is gazing. One has to sit on the ground on a soft mat of leaves, or on a cushion made out of natural fibers. The back has to be propped against a tree, or a stump, or a flat rock. The body has to be thoroughly relaxed. The eyes are never fixed on the object, in order to avoid tiring them. The gaze consists in scanning very slowly the object gazed at, going counterclockwise but without moving the head. The idea is to let your perception play without analyzing it.

The effect you are after in gazing is to learn to stop the internal dialogue. To do that you can focus your view as gazers do or, as I’ve already told you, flood your awareness while walking by not focusing your sight on anything. That is, sort of feel with your eyes everything in the 180-degree range in front of you, while you keep your fixed and unfocused eyes just above the line of the horizon.

The essential feature of sorcery is shutting off the internal dialogue. Stopping the internal dialogue is an operational way of describing the act of disengaging the attention of the tonal.

Once we stop our internal dialogue we also stop the world. That is an operational description of the inconceivable process of focusing our second attention. Part of us is always kept under lock and key because we are afraid of it. And to our reason, that part of us is like an insane relative that we keep locked in a dungeon. That part is our second attention, and when it finally can focus on something the world stops. Since we, as average man, know only the attention of the tonal, it is not too farfetched to say that once that attention is canceled, the world indeed has to stop. The focussing of our wild, untrained second attention is, perforce, terrifying. The only way to keep that insane relative from bursting in on us is by shielding ourselves with our endless internal dialogue.

Dreamers can gaze in order to do dreaming and then they can look for their dreams in their gazing. For example you can gaze at the shadows of rocks and then, in your dreaming, you might find out that those shadows have light. You can then, while gazing, look for the light in the shadows until you find it. Gazing and dreaming go together.

Prev: Setting Up Dreaming

Table of Contents

Next: Not-Doing