Looking All Around

In a previous article, The Power of Noticing, I talked about extending your awareness of what is going on around you. Do please take another look at that if it’s been a while. In this shorter article I want to treat that idea literally.

Arthur used to have a ritual. If I asked him a question to which he did not immediately know the answer he would lift his head up from the cards, or turn his glance away from me and deliberately, slowly, look left and then right. When he did this he was looking at nothing in particular, but was scanning the room as if the answer were hanging invisibly in mid-air somewhere around him.

Years after I first saw Arthur do this, when I was living in Gloucestershire, I met a ‘psychic investigator’. He spent all his time visiting psychics and readers, trying to work out what they were doing. He noticed that while I was reading the cards I would scan my surroundings left and right (as per Arthur), and told me that he had seen many psychics do the same thing. He reckoned most of them did it without even knowing.

A little later on, when I started teaching numerology at the College of Psychic Studies in London, it was mentioned to me that this same technique, which they called spotting, was taught as part of their How To Be Psychic course. So, now it is your turn to learn it!

First of all, you have to awaken the eyes. This is most easily and safely done by following one of the exercises in the quite fantastic book The Complete System of Self-Healing by Dt Stephen T Chang. Packed with page after page of Taoist energy movements the one we are interested in here looks like this.

Keeping the head straight, first look up to the ceiling then down to the floor. Repeat this several times (choose the number of repetitions that you feel comfortable with) but always move the eyes slowly and deliberately.

Then, again without moving the head, look to the left and then to the right, and repeat in exactly the same way, slowly and deliberately.

Then look diagonally, up and down into opposite corners of the eyes. All these movements should be quite natural, slow and deliberate, nothing should be forced. The head should remain still at all times.

Then rotate the eyes first clockwise, then anti-clockwise, again slowly and deliberately, without moving the head.

At first, maybe do no more than five or six repetitions of each, but over time you can build this up if you like. Conclude the exercises by palming, that is by rubbing your hands together vigorously until they are warm, and then placing them over your open eyes, allowing the heat to be ‘soaked up’ by the eyes.

Dr Chang’s book mentions other eye exercises, claiming the potential for relief from glaucoma, cataracts and liver problems, and you should explore these too, if you feel so drawn, but for now the eye exercises I have explained here will suffice. They should be done regularly. Then, when you are going about your normal daily business, or trying to solve a difficult problem, or trying to work out what a particular Tarot Card of the Day might mean, deliberately and slowly cast your eyes left, right and then back again and notice what comes into your mind.

There’s some brain science going on here, something about hemispheres, but all I know is that by a different type of looking, even though you don’t know what you are looking at, or for, you will ‘see’ all sorts of new and wonderful things.

As always with such practices, the mind is the enemy. All attempts to work out why, whether and how this could possibly be true results only in the destruction of the gift. Try it, faithfully, with high curiosity but zero expectation, and you will ‘see’.

Remember – to practice this look in all directions, but to use what you have practiced simply look slowly and deliberately to the left, then the right, and back again, without moving your head, as if the information you seek is somehow, invisibly, waiting right there in the room with you, and you are simply scanning for it.

Let me (and everyone else) know how you get on.