| By Daniel Lawton What happens to me is that when I force myself silent, a blank period occurs where I lose track of where I am, and then I find myself absorbed in a completely visual scene, so completely absorbed that I might even think I’m part of it physically. The scene is composed of fibers of light, like you would see through a microscope, around a single-celled creature. Exactly like the picture they drew of the luminous egg for the last workshop, except that the fibers aren’t as vein-like. An honest description of the effect is to say I’m “seeing” because it’s completely visual. And what I’m “seeing” is energy, because it has no mass but is lively and bright. So when I say I’m “seeing energy” it’s really for me just a coincidence of words, the best words I can find to describe it happen to match the words the Nagual used. Whether it’s the same thing he was doing I don’t really know. He always used to say maybe we’d do something different, he even encouraged it. At first this frustrated me because I wanted to make sure I was doing the correct thing for sorcerers to do. And the things I saw didn’t match with much the Nagual had described. Then, about six months ago, I got around the Cleargreen people long enough to get some energy from them, and since then I’ve been seeing things that fit with what the Nagual described, so much so that I’m not wondering if it’s seeing anymore. But I do believe there are two ways to see, as described by don Juan when he talked about seeing the eagle’s emanations. Remember that he said you had to see them from dreaming, because it was dangerous otherwise.I always thought that “seeing” was conquering an object, staring it down until it yielded it’s secret essence. I’ve never done that. What I do is blank out (without falling asleep), then I suddenly find myself staring at a perfectly concrete scene of something utterly abstract and unrelated to what I’m actually facing with my body. Yet it always has something to do with what I’m engaged in at the time. So I believe my seeing is from dreaming. My current point of view is that “seeing energy” is not what you expect. That’s my experience. But to back it up, remember that in the Nagual’s books don Juan said it was different every time, and that even the luminous cocoon was not the same. And Carlos kept adding details in his later years, like the teapot thing, and the two otter’s development of the pointed head. Also, use your dreaming experiences to realize that a couple times of finding your hands isn’t going to make a big difference. I’m probably on time #1200 finding my hands and walking around in dreaming, and I still haven’t gotten very far. Seeing is the same. I’ve only seen energy a couple dozen times, you’d have to spend years looking to see the kind of details that Carlos has described. Seeing energy isn’t something you can focus your attention on that easily, your attention is not so localized, so it’s not like you could look at a particular spot as you do when awake. You get to notice whatever you get to notice, it’s almost out of your control. Or to put it another way, there’s something made out of energy fibers in front of you, and you have an all encompassing view of the boundaries of it, and a general idea of what it is and what it is doing. But that view is also accompanied by a complete change in your own point of view, such that you are pretty much absentminded and not caring much about what you are seeing. In that mode, you see whatever is presented to see and you don’t even realize it until it’s nearly over. Sometimes I can manage to bring in some logic, so that I have an opportunity to examine deliberately. But that’s risky, there’s the constant threat that interjecting some reason will put it all to an end. Not so in “dreaming” by the way, where interjecting reason strengthens things (after a little practice). If I succeed in bringing in an inquisitive mind, instead of being able to deliberately focus my attention on what I select, in a tunnel vision manner as we do in waking, it drifts around on it’s own, attracted by what stands out at the moment. The only real volition I have is switching what I’m viewing. I don’t get to select what to view, I just get to cause a switch by noticing something else.It’s like dreaming only in that you become aware of a fully visual scene that makes you unaware (or less aware) of the room you are in. If you go into dreaming tonight and declare “I’m really hungry, is there anything good to eat around here?”, your entire dream is likely to be influenced by that statement. I couldn’t do such a thing when seeing energy, it wouldn’t even occur to me. The part of a person that associated with the linear thinking voice is gone, and what remains is the steady flow of feelings we are all acquainted with. I don’t believe seeing energy is very much influenced by suggestion, as a dream is. It’s influenced by interpretation, but that isn’t quite the same thing. And it’s frustratingly easy to learn to see energy, I wish some of you would believe that and give it a try. It just takes a lot of time, that isn’t the same thing as being difficult. Here’s the super lazy man’s technique to learn to see energy. You don’t even have to make time for it, do it in bed. Dead tired doesn’t hurt it. While lying in your bed, on your side, pinch your thumb onto your curled up forefinger, just like the technique in the long pass that produces silence. Do both hands, squeeze as hard as you can. The Nagual said to do it in bursts, but I recommend doing it so hard that your fingers get numb. It reminds you to keep it up. And force your thoughts out really hard. After about 20 minutes, when your thumb and fingers are practically paralyzed, you can let up on the pressure, because even a little pressure feels like a lot by then. If you’re new at this, I’d recommend that you keep it up for a few days, each night, before you even consider it to be in progress. In the beginning, it took me days to start moving, so that I could continue where I left off learning last time I stopped. Once you get good, you can make it work even if you haven’t done it for months. Last night I used this technique to retrace a trip I took to Mexico. I walked back over the same streets, but this time there were blue blobs of energy visible on the sidewalk and in the by-ways. It wasn’t like regular dreaming at all, it was really strange. The difficulty in holding it was not like holding dreaming, the energy I kept seeing startled me so much that it felt like an electric jolt, and I had to squeeze my thumbs and force silence constantly to get back in after each jolt. It’s well worth learning and a lot less boring than putting all your emphasis on Tensegrity. |
