Seeing
“The difficulty,” says Castaneda, “is to learn to perceive with your whole body, not just with your eyes and reason. The world becomes a stream of tremendously rapid, unique events. So you must trim your body to make it a good receptor. The body is an awareness, and it must be treated impeccably.”
Seeing is an operation – one of the many steps on the way to knowing the energies that comprise the true self. In his early apprenticeship, Carlos was inducted into this world by means of hallucinogenic substances. Later his teachers, Juan Matus and Genaro, beckoned him into this world on his own accord – a exercise in testing his impeccability and his art of “saving energy”, two of the admonishments he was given for the life of a warrior.
One of the key factors of seeing, was the ability to stop the world. In the parlance of “moving the assemblage point”, this was a minor shift, that allowed our constantly-running interpretation of reality to re-align itself to a different energy.
And, key to stopping the world, was an interruption and silencing of the internal dialogue, the multiple layers of voices inside of us that continually construct and maintain reality in the familiar architecture of our day-to-day life: the first attention.
“The world has been rendered coherent by our description of it. From the moment of birth, the world has been described for us. What we see is just a description.”