Wherever your attention alights, at this very point, experience.
- Prerequisite — develop real attention first: silent alertness with no thought intervening between you and the object. Ordinary ‘looking’ is actually thinking about the object; you are absent, already moved elsewhere. Without genuine attention the technique cannot ignite.
- Build attention in ordinary life: while travelling, eating, showering — simply be there, looking, without narrating or planning. Zen monk Bokuju: ‘While I eat, I eat. While I walk, I walk. I never interfere.’ Stop thinking; just be with what is. This is the only preparation needed.
- Mechanism: looking throws life-energy toward an object (hence exhaustion after a day of distracted looking in a busy street). When attention is thought-free and you are present to receive the return, that energy bounces back — like a ball off a wall. Coming back it carries the experience of the experiencer: object and looker both become objects and you become the witness of both at once. The look forms a circle.
- Marker that it is working: reading or working in total attention never tires the eyes; energy is not lost but returned and reabsorbed (Osho reports reading twelve to eighteen hours daily without eye fatigue). Any tiredness of the eyes is the sign that thought was running, not attention.
- Why ‘wherever’: the whole of existence must become a mirror — you are too vast for ordinary mirrors, and only when every point of existence reflects you back is a glimpse of yourself possible. ‘Unless the whole existence becomes a mirror, you will not be able to get a glimpse.’
- Pitfall (from the Q&A on gazing): the eyes can be fixed and ‘looking’ while the mind has slipped away — consciousness and object never meet, so nothing happens; or one falls into sleep/auto-hypnosis with open, stony eyes. The working state is the third one: alert as in waking thought yet silent as in deep sleep.