S01/E27 – “I Am Looking” – Seeing Without Projection

Introduction

Previously, in Episode 26, we explored listening as the first Post-Martfotai discipline. We discovered echoing. How attention anchored in sound displaces the mechanical narrator. How presence emerges when that channel fills with conscious reception rather than automatic commentary.

Something shifted for those who practised. The listening buffer established itself. Space appeared between hearing and reacting. Others felt received completely, perhaps for the first time in years. One of our listeners, wrote about discovering that sound has a useful right-now capacity for summoning presence that the more contiguous character of sight lacks. They noticed echoing gave them a whole other sense for coming to presence.

Today we turn to looking. Direct seeing. Clear attention that meets what is here, free of the usual overlays of commentary and judgement.

Few of us have developed this capacity. We live in a world where what we call seeing is actually interpreting. The eyes register shapes and colours whilst the mind immediately begins its work of labelling, categorisation, comparison, and evaluation.

Look at the person across from you, if you can. Before you consciously recognise who they are, the mind has already decided how it feels about them. The mechanical apparatus runs constantly. It sees the face and immediately accesses stored associations. Friend or threat. Attractive or plain. Safe or dangerous. The actual seeing lasts a fraction of a second before interpretation takes over completely.

This happens so automatically we no longer notice. We think we see the world directly whilst actually perceiving through thick layers of conditioning, preference, and history. What we call reality is heavily mediated experience.

The capacity for direct seeing remains available. Present in every moment. Yet mechanical habit dominates so completely that fresh perception rarely occurs. We see what we expect to see. We confirm what we already believe. The world becomes a mirror reflecting our accumulated patterns back at us.

Today’s exploration reveals how to see freshly. How to look without the automatic overlay of interpretation. How presence stabilises through visual attention just as it did through auditory reception.

This matters profoundly. Because how we see determines what we find. Projection creates the world we think we inhabit. Direct seeing reveals what actually exists.

Section 1: Seeing, Looking, and Viewing

Before we begin the practices, a distinction needs clarity. Three layers operate in visual perception. Understanding them reveals where presence can enter.

Seeing is given: light enters, images form.

Looking is chosen: eyes and attention direct together.

Viewing is looking with presence: the eyes rest while awareness receives the whole.

Most of the time, we see without looking. The eyes register information mechanically whilst the mind occupies itself elsewhere. We walk through a woodland trail whilst replaying yesterday’s argument. We see the trees. The path. The light filtering through branches. Yet we look at nothing. Our looking happens in imagination. We look at mental images of the conversation. We look at visualisations of what we should have said.

The eyes see one thing whilst attention looks at another. This is the fundamental misalignment that prevents presence.

What we attempt through these practices is simple. To align what we look at with what we see. To bring attention back to the visual field actually present. To stop looking at mental imagery whilst eyes mechanically register current reality.

When alignment happens, something shifts. The world appears differently. Fresh. Immediate. Alive. Because for the first time in perhaps hours, days, years, you actually see what stands before you.

Now, let’s make this real. The following exercise shows, directly, how the eyes can see one thing while attention looks at another. It turns theory into felt experience. And from that, the rest of the practice begins.

Section 2: The 360-Degree Viewing Exercise
This practice reveals the difference between seeing and looking with exceptional clarity. It also strengthens your ability to hold attention steady even when the eyes begin to wander. Take this slowly. Treat it as a guided session rather than a technical drill.

Sit or stand upright. Let the spine be naturally tall. Keep your head steady and relaxed. Allow your eyes to move freely and without tension. Attention remains soft, steady, and alive.

Choose an object directly in front of you. It can be anything. A cup on the table. A picture. A tree outside the window. Whatever you choose, look at it now.

Let the eyes see the object. Let attention look at the object. Allow the two to rest together for a moment. Seeing and looking are aligned.

Now we begin.

Part One: Moving the Eyes while Holding Attention Still

Keep your attention firmly on the object in front of you. Hold that inner focus as if you are gently touching the object with your awareness. Do not tense. Simply remain present.

Now, slowly move your eyes upward. Physically raise the eyes until you feel the natural limit of comfortable movement. Do not strain. Allow the eyes to settle wherever they reach with ease.

As the eyes rise, attention stays exactly where it was: on the original object.

You are now seeing what lies above you, whilst looking at what lies ahead.

Pause for a moment. Then slowly bring your eyes back to the centre.

Now repeat this in the opposite direction.
Keep your attention on the object. Slowly allow your eyes to move downward. Move them gently until you meet slight natural resistance. No strain. Simply lower the gaze.

Notice that your eyes see what lies below, but your attention continues to look straight ahead at the original object.

Slowly return your gaze to the centre.

Now move your eyes to the left. Attention stays in the centre. Let the eyes travel only as far as they can without strain. Hold for a moment, then bring them gently back to centre.

Now to the right. Again, attention stays on the central point while your eyes see something completely different. Hold for a moment, then return to centre.

You have now experienced seeing and looking operating independently. The eyes are free to roam. Attention remains steady and unmoving. This is happening all day long, but rarely with awareness. Now it is conscious.

Part Two: Moving Attention while Keeping the Eyes Still

Now reverse the process.

Keep your eyes completely still on the central object. Let them rest comfortably on that single point.

Now take your attention upward. Do not move your eyes. Simply allow awareness to rise through your field of vision. Let the ceiling or sky come into attention without the eyes shifting. Hold it for a moment.

Bring your attention gently back to the centre.

Now let attention drop downward. The eyes stay fixed. Attention looks below. Hold for a moment, then return to centre.

Now shift attention to the left. The eyes remain steady. Only attention moves. Hold. Return.

Then attention to the right. Hold. Return.

You have now split the process from the opposite side. Attention moves. The eyes stay still. Both directions of separation are now clear.

Part Three: Expanding the Whole Field

Take a slow breath.

Now hold your gaze on the object in front of you, and at the same time soften your awareness outward. Become aware of what lies on the left and the right at the same moment. Do not rush. Let the field widen naturally.

Then allow above and below to be included. All directions held gently. The central object remains clear. You become aware of everything the eyes are capable of seeing without letting the eyes dart around.

A good indicator of success is when you can hold left and right together, then include above and below, while staying completely relaxed.

Now slowly raise your hand in front of you. Keep your eyes fixed on the central object. Begin to move your hand outward to the side. Notice how much of the hand enters your awareness without drawing your eyes away from the centre.

Something may shift in the atmosphere. The quality of light may change. Stillness may deepen. Aliveness may become more vivid.

This is expanded visual awareness. You are seeing everything without forcing the eyes to scan. Presence increases. The world moves. You remain steady.

This completes the exercise.

Section 3: Soft Gaze and Direct Perception

In Episode 19, we explored soft gaze practice in depth. The exercise revealed how the mind creates images when direct stimulus fades. How projection operates constantly. How the world becomes transparent when mental commentary ceases.

We will build on that foundation here.

Relax your eyes. Hold attention on the air just in front of an object. Not the object itself. The space before it. Trees work well for this. Grass. Bushes. Anything with texture. Most of the time, eyes flick constantly. Grabbed by shifting visual events. Attention gets pulled. This time, we direct attention onto nothing.

Relax the gaze.

Now become aware of movement. Keep the eyes at rest. Allow movement to arrive. As leaves move in the breeze, simply allow motion to arrive. Stay still. Look softly.

The world begins showing subtle waves. You may see the movement of wind. Patterns in chaos. If you remain still in this way, awareness catches every motion. Tiny flickers in branches. Shifts in tone. Air becoming visible.

You are still. The world moves.

Instead of eyes constantly scanning, which makes the world appear chaotic, you become still. The world reveals its actual movement. Its shape. Its continuity. Its coherence.

This demonstrates pure perception operating without mental commentary. When the voice that names and explains everything falls silent, the world becomes transparent. The mirror of perception no longer reflects mental activity. It becomes clear, allowing what exists to be seen directly.

Section 4: Visualisation and Mental Control

Just as echoing displaces the narrator in listening, visualisation displaces projection in seeing.

Visualisation operates on the same internal channel as mental imagery. When you consciously create visual images in imagination, the automatic projection mechanism cannot operate simultaneously. Like echoing with sound, conscious visualisation occupies the space where mechanical imagery usually runs.

Most mental chatter comes wrapped in images. When you worry about the future, you see scenarios playing out. When you replay past events, visual memory activates. When you judge someone, you hold an image of them overlaid with emotional colouring.

All of this operates mechanically. The image-making function runs constantly, creating an inner cinema that distracts from direct seeing. Conscious visualisation gives this function purposeful direction, stabilising attention and creating space for presence to emerge.

Watch your mind for one minute. Notice how visual imagery accompanies nearly every thought. Planning tomorrow’s meeting shows you the room, the people, yourself speaking. Remembering a past conversation replays the scene visually. Even abstract thinking often attaches to visual representations. Numbers appear as written digits. Concepts get visualised as diagrams or symbols.

This constant visual stream operates below conscious awareness. It fills the internal screen without permission. It creates a parallel reality more vivid than present perception. When this happens, you look at imagination whilst eyes mechanically see the room.

The following practices interrupt this mechanical stream. They give the visual centre purposeful work. They demonstrate the difference between passive reception of mental imagery and conscious direction of internal vision.

Simple Visualisation Practice

Close your eyes. Imagine a simple geometric shape. A golden sphere, perfectly smooth and reflective. See it clearly in your mind’s eye. Hold the image steady for ten seconds.

The mind will resist. The image will waver, fade, morph into other shapes. Thoughts will intrude suggesting you have done enough. Gently return to the visualisation. Rebuild the image each time it dissolves.

This shows how lively the visual centre is, and how quickly it steadies with practice.

Practise daily. Two minutes to start. The sphere remains your chosen object. Each time you practise, the image stabilises more quickly and holds more steadily. This builds capacity for sustained mental control whilst simultaneously revealing how mechanical most visual mental activity actually is.

Progressive Visualisation

As basic capacity strengthens, complexity increases.

Visualise the same golden sphere. Now add rotation. See it spinning slowly on a vertical axis. Maintain the image for twenty seconds.

The difficulty increases significantly. Holding a static image and adding movement requires enhanced control. The mechanical mind strongly prefers passively received images over consciously directed ones. This practice contradicts that preference, building genuine will.

These practices seem simple in description. In actual execution, they reveal the profound difficulty of sustained conscious direction of the visualisation mechanism, the emotional part of the intellectual centre. They also demonstrate what becomes possible through regular practice. What seems impossible at first becomes natural through repetition.

Section 5: Two-Way Vision and the Observer

This follows Russell A. Smith’s teaching on the centres: sensation notices, meaning interprets, conscience widens the field.

Hold both: the other in view, yourself in awareness.

Ouspensky called it the double arrow of attention. Most people’s awareness flows entirely outward. The eyes see external objects. Attention follows completely into the visual field. The seer gets lost in seeing.

Two-way vision divides attention. Half remains aware of seeing itself whilst half engages with what’s seen. This creates the gap where presence lives.

Try this in conversation. Someone speaks to you. Maintain visual contact with them. Receive their words. Let echoing operate if you have established that practice. Simultaneously, maintain awareness of your own internal state. The physical sensations in your body. The quality of your breathing. The arising of emotional responses.

Hold both perspectives simultaneously. External and internal. The other person and your own experience. At first, attention will collapse into one direction or the other. Either you are fully absorbed in them or fully withdrawn into yourself. With practice, both can be held together.

This practice prevents automatic identification. When someone’s emotional state becomes intense, you do not get swept into it completely. When your own reaction arises, you do not lose contact with external reality. The bridge remains stable between inner and outer worlds.

Gurdjieff emphasised this repeatedly. Consciousness requires intentional contact between these two realms. Most people live entirely outward, reactive to every stimulus, or entirely inward, lost in their own mental activity. Real presence requires the bridge. Awareness that includes both without collapsing into either.

Think of encountering a puddle on the ground. Sensation notices it. Meaning interprets depth and consequence. Morality considers how stepping in it might splash someone nearby. Three layers operating. Each adds dimension to simple seeing.

When these centres cooperate, presence extends beyond survival and reaction. It begins to include relationship. With others. With memory. With truth.

Section 6: The Seeing Buffer

Previously we explored the listening buffer. Echoing creates protective space where words arrive in your own voice first before triggering mechanical reaction.

Looking develops an equivalent capacity. The seeing buffer.

When you establish the practices described previously, something changes in visual perception. You begin seeing people, situations, environments more clearly before automatic judgement activates. A gap appears between registration and interpretation. In that gap, conscious response becomes possible.

Someone walks towards you with a particular expression. Normally, immediate interpretation occurs. They are angry. They are disappointed. They want something. The projection happens faster than conscious awareness can catch it.

With developed seeing capacity, the process slows. The face registers visually. The expression appears clearly. Before projection adds meaning, you see just what’s actually present. Lines around the eyes. Tension in the jaw. The set of the shoulders. Raw visual data without story.

This creates remarkable freedom. You respond to what’s actually there rather than to your projection about what’s there. The other person feels seen accurately. They sense someone looking at them rather than through them. Communication quality transforms.

Imagine yourself driving. Someone cuts you off in traffic. The mechanical response triggers instantly. Anger. Honking. Perhaps shouting. The whole sequence happens before conscious awareness even registers. But with the seeing buffer active, something different occurs.

You see the car move into your lane. You notice your body’s immediate reaction. Tension in the shoulders. Heat rising. The impulse to honk. All of this registers clearly before mechanical expression. The gap creates choice. You can still honk if appropriate. Or you can simply adjust your speed, maintaining presence rather than collapsing into reaction.

What becomes protected is presence, the clear space where choice appears.

In that gap, assessment happens through clarity. Is this criticism accurate? Partially accurate? Completely projection from them? The seeing buffer allows response through understanding rather than automatic defence.

Section 7: Daily Integration

These practices require integration into ordinary life. Not reserved for special sitting time. Active during regular moments.

Morning Vision Reset

Before the day properly begins, spend twenty seconds with soft gaze at a fixed point. Eyes rest. Attention opens.

This resets visual perception to direct contact with reality rather than expected imagery. The mechanical tendency to see through memory patterns gets interrupted. Fresh perception becomes possible.

Conversational Seeing

During conversations today, practise two-way vision for ten seconds before any high-stakes interaction. See the person whilst tracking your own internal state. Both held together.

This builds capacity gradually. Ten conscious seconds per conversation. Tomorrow, perhaps fifteen. The practice strengthens through repetition. Eventually it operates automatically, providing constant access to both inner and outer reality simultaneously.

360-Degree Awareness Moments

Several times daily, pause and expand awareness. Notice what lies in your entire visual field. Left, right, above, below. All held simultaneously. The eyes stay soft. Attention expands to include everything visible. This trains spacious awareness that sees without grasping.

Evening Visual Review

Before sleep, take three breaths with soft, expanded awareness.
Recall one moment today when you saw clearly without projection. Simply acknowledging it strengthens the capacity.

These practices work together. Morning resets the machinery. Conversations test under pressure. Awareness moments expand the field. Evening consolidates the learning. Each strengthens the others.

Now we clarify through distinction. Certain contrasts sharpen understanding. They reveal what conscious looking is by showing what it isn’t.

Section 8: Positive Contrasts

Certain patterns emerge as this practice develops. Understanding them prevents confusion.

Presence vs Hyper-Vigilance

Presence feels spacious and at ease. Hyper-vigilance feels tight and exhausting.

Some people, particularly those with anxiety patterns, will try to watch everything constantly. Scanning for threats, monitoring every detail, never resting. This is mechanical fear operating, not conscious seeing. Notice the difference in felt quality.

Analysis vs Seeing

Seeing receives. Analysis interprets.

The thinking centre loves to take over any practice. You look at someone and immediately begin analysing. What are they thinking? Why did they wear that? What does their body language mean? Real seeing receives without immediately processing through thought.

Favour Consistency Over Perfection

Small, regular moments compound into stability.

The visualisation practices will challenge most people significantly. The image wavers, dissolves, refuses to stabilise. This is normal. The practice is the repeated returning to the image. Each return builds capacity. Progress happens through consistent effort over time.

Work in Moments; Let Them Widen

Take brief moments often. The field widens by itself.

You cannot see everything all the time. The practices create moments of direct perception, gaps in mechanical projection. These moments expand gradually through practice. Eventually they begin appearing spontaneously in daily life. This indicates the capacity is establishing.

These distinctions clarify what you’re building and what to avoid. They prevent confusion about effort and outcome. With these understood, we can now explore how the individual practices unite into a single functioning capacity.

Section 9: Integration and Stabilisation

The practices work together, building on each other. Listening and looking are not separate skills. They are complementary capacities that support unified presence.

Someone speaks to you. Echoing operates, receiving their words without interpretation. Two-way vision maintains awareness of both them and your own state. 360-degree awareness keeps you connected to the full environment rather than collapsing into tunnel focus. The seeing buffer creates space before projection adds meaning.

All of this functions simultaneously when the practices mature. At first, conscious attention on one element. Gradually, they begin operating together naturally. Eventually they activate automatically when needed, just like any well-practised skill.

This is the meaning of discipline in the Post-Martfotai sense. Not forced effort. Not rigid control. Natural capacity that emerges through consistent practice. The word discipline shares roots with disciple. One who learns, who practises, who allows teaching to reshape function.

These practices teach by doing. You cannot understand them conceptually then apply the understanding. You must actually practise them, allowing direct experience to reveal what concepts can’t capture.

The seeing that emerges through this work differs completely from ordinary perception. It is simultaneously more immediate and more spacious. More connected to what’s actually present and less trapped in interpretation. More alive and more still.

This is real seeing. Direct perception operating without the constant overlay of projection, judgement, and comparison. Reality registering as it is rather than as you habitually interpret it. This changes everything whilst changing nothing.

What you see determines what you find. Projection creates limitation, conflict, suffering. Direct seeing reveals what actually exists. Fresh in every moment. Available completely. Never trapped in past patterns or future anxieties.

Conclusion: Presence Through Seeing

Something fundamental changes when seeing clarifies.

Others sense it immediately. You look at them and they feel genuinely seen. Not examined. Not evaluated. Not judged. Actually received as they are. This is rare enough that people remember it. A conversation where someone truly saw them. An encounter where pretence became unnecessary because clarity made it irrelevant.

This is transmission operating through sight rather than through words. Your presence changes quality. Clear. Stable. Without agenda. People relax around you because projection has stopped. They can be themselves because you are seeing what’s actually there rather than what you imagine or expect.

In relationships, this transforms everything. The person you have known for years suddenly reveals aspects you had never seen. Because you were not seeing them. You were seeing your accumulated image of them, maintained by selective perception and habitual projection. When direct seeing returns, they appear newly, moment by moment.

Conflicts resolve more easily. You see what’s actually happening rather than interpreting through wound and defence. The other person’s behaviour makes sense when seen clearly rather than through projection. Often what seemed like attack reveals itself as pain seeking acknowledgement.

Your own clarity stabilises. When you see accurately, appropriate response becomes obvious. The constant second-guessing quiets. Did I handle that correctly? Should I have said something different? The question loses power because you saw what was actually needed in that moment. Clarity eliminates doubt.

This is practical mysticism. Profound transformation occurring through simple practices. Direct seeing rather than conceptual understanding. Reality meeting awareness without distortion.

Next we continue with the third discipline. From listening and looking to union. From receiving sound and sight to experiencing the fundamental unity that awareness reveals. The refinement continues. The work deepens. Presence stabilises through practice.

Until then, carry these practices with you.

See what is here. Hold the field, gently. Let clarity do the work. Presence looks. The world reveals.

This is Martfotai. I’m Gary Eggleton.

Seeing is presence. Clarity is transmission.

And if you wish, play this episode again whilst practising 360-degree viewing or soft gaze, and notice what shifts.