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 focusing 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.
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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.
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A warrior has no compassion for anyone. To have compassion means that you wish the other person to be like you, to be in your shoes, and you lend a hand just for that purpose. The hardest thing in the world is for a warrior to let others be. The impeccability of a warrior is to let them be and to support them in what they are. That means, of course, that you trust them to be impeccable warriors themselves. If they are not then it’s your duty to be impeccable yourself and not say a word. Only a sorcerer who sees and is formless can afford to help anyone. Every effort to help on our part is an arbitrary act guided by our own self-interest alone.
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The problem for you as a challenge is whether or not you will be capable of developing your will , or the power of your second attention to focus indefinitely on anything you want.
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The Eagle’s Gift
Our total being consists of two perceivable segments. The first is the familiar physical body, which all of us can perceive; the second is the luminous body, which is a cocoon that only seers can perceive, a cocoon that gives us the appearance of giant luminous eggs.
One of the most important goals of sorcery is to reach the luminous cocoon; a goal which is fulfilled through the sophisticated use of dreaming and through a rigorous, systematic exertion called not-doing . I’ve defined not-doing as an unfamiliar act which engages our total being by forcing it to become conscious of its luminous segment.
To explain these concepts I’ve make a three-part, uneven division of our consciousness. The smallest, the first attention, or the consciousness that every normal person has developed in order to deal with the daily world, encompasses the awareness of the physical body. Another larger portion, the second attention, is the awareness we need in order to perceive our luminous cocoon and to act as luminous beings. The second attention is brought forth through deliberate training or by an accidental trauma, and it encompasses the awareness of the luminous body. The last portion, which is the largest, is the third attention. It’s an immeasurable consciousness which engages undefinable aspects of the awareness of the physical and the luminous bodies. The battlefield of warriors is the second attention, which is something like a training ground for reaching the third attention.
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The compulsion to possess and hold on to things is not unique. Everyone who wants to follow the warrior’s path has to rid himself of this fixation in order not to focus our dreaming body on the weak face of the second attention.
The dreaming body , sometimes called the “double” or the “Other,” because it is a perfect replica of the dreamer ‘s body, is inherently the energy of a luminous being, a whitish, phantomlike emanation, which is projected by the fixation of the second attention into a three-dimensional image of the body.
The dreaming body is as real as anything we deal with in the world. The second attention is unavoidably drawn to focus on our total being as a field of energy, and transforms that energy into anything suitable. The easiest thing is of course the image of the physical body, with which we are already thoroughly familiar from our daily lives and the use of our first attention. What channels the energy of our total being to produce anything that might be within the boundaries of possibility is known as will .
At the level of luminous beings the range is so broad that it is futile to try to establish limits–thus, the energy of a luminous being can be transformed through will into anything.
We are not merely whatever our common sense requires us to believe we are. We are in actuality luminous beings, capable of becoming aware of our luminosity. As luminous beings aware of our luminosity, we are capable of unraveling different facets of our awareness, or our attention. That unraveling could be brought about by a deliberate effort, as we are doing ourselves, or accidentally, through a bodily trauma.
The old sorcerers deliberately placed different facets of their attention on material objects. By unraveling another facet of our attention we might become receptors for the projections of ancient sorcerers’ second attention. Those sorcerers were impeccable practitioners with no limit to what they could accomplish with the fixation of their second attention.
Be fluid, at ease in whatever situation you find yourself. Your challenge is to deal with people with ease regardless of what they do to you. Remember what I have said, that it is of no use to be sad and complain and feel justified in doing so, believing that someone is always doing something to us. Nobody is doing anything to anybody, much less to a warrior.
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You must let go of your desire to cling. The very same thing happened to me. I held on to things, such as the food I liked, the mountains where I lived, the people I used to enjoy talking to. But most of all I clung to the desire to be liked. Those things are our barriers to losing our human form. Our attention is trained to focus doggedly. That is the way we maintain the world. Now is the time to let go of all that. In order to lose your human form you should let go of all that ballast.
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Dissipating a mood through overanalyzing it wastes our power.
If you have the same vision in dreaming three times, pay extraordinary attention to it. When a dreamer dreams that he sees himself asleep he must avoid sudden jolts or surprises, and take everything with a grain of salt. The dreamer has to get involved in dispassionate experimentations. Rather than examining his sleeping body, the dreamer walks out of the room.
In dreaming what matters is volition, the corporeality of the body has no significance. It is simply a memory that slows down the dreamer . If you do not stare at things but only glance at them, just as you do in the daily world, you can arrange your perception. That is, by taking your dreaming for granted, you then can use the perceptual biases of your everyday life.
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Wait before revealing a finding. Wait for the most appropriate time to let go of something that you hold.
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Losing the human form brings the freedom to remember your self. Losing the human form is like a spiral. It gives you the freedom to remember and this in turn makes you even freer.
A warrior knows that he is waiting and knows also what he is waiting for, and while he waits he feasts his eyes on the world. The ultimate accomplishment of a warrior is joy.
Accept your fate in humbleness. The course of a warrior’s destiny is unalterable. The challenge is how far he can go within those rigid bounds, how impeccable he can be within those rigid bounds. If there are obstacles in his path, the warrior strives impeccably to overcome them. If he finds unbearable hardship and pain on his path, he weeps, but all his tears put together could not move the line of his destiny the breadth of one hair. Fulfill your fate as a warrior not as a petty person.
Detachment does not automatically mean wisdom, but it is nonetheless, an advantage because it allows the warrior to pause momentarily to reassess situations, to reconsider positions. In order to use that extra moment consistently and correctly, however, a warrior has to struggle unyieldingly for a lifetime.