Imagine your body has become coated in a semi-transparent film. It coats your skin and covers your eyes and ears. It has a very subtle opaque, smoky quality, and it distorts, fuzzes, the perception of anything beyond it. You can make out the objects around you – there’s your cell phone, your water bottle, your shoes, your lamp – and you feel yourself to be seeing them all quite clearly. You can pick them up, examine them, touch them, taste them, analyze and describe them. You have learned to entirely ignore the opaqueness.

In fact, you don’t even need to ignore it. You’ve learned to adjust your eyes to simply focus on the film itself instead, rather than attempting to perceive the objects beyond. So while you may feel yourself to be looking directly at an object, you are actually looking directly at the object’s reflection in the opaque film and confusing that for the direct object itself. As a result, you spend your time dwelling in a reflection of reality rather than in direct contact with it. You are like the prisoner in Plato’s Allegory, watching only shadows on the wall, thinking them to be objects in-and-of themselves.

What is the film made of? How did it get there? Can it be removed?

The film is not a physical object. It is a mode of consciousness. To remove it, you must adopt an alternative mode of consciousness. Modes of consciousness are notoriously difficult to explain with words. Like the finger pointing to the Moon, thinking, pondering, and conceptualizing within one mode of consciousness is rarely a productive means of exiting that mode of consciousness and entering another. This would be like explaining the color blue to someone using only words and shades of red.

Let’s try anyway.

First, understand that the mode of consciousness you are attempting to adopt is no different from “being here and now” or “attaining mindfulness” or “waking up”. It is also no different from “opening the third eye”, which in an apt metaphor, focuses the mind directly on the experiences rather than allowing it to be lost in the duality and illusion of the everyday mode of consciousness. The trick is not actually achieving this state – it is recognizing the state we are currently in. Attaining the meditative and enlightened mode of consciousness happens quite intuitively and naturally and does not need to be forced. Being able to see the everyday mode of consciousness, and not simply ‘tuning into’ it and thereby confusing it with the direct perception of reality, is far trickier and quite necessary.

So, naturally, the next thing you must do is accept, acknowledge, feel, and digest the fact that all of your perceptions are indirect, fuzzy, opaque, distorted, illusory. Conceptualize your perceptual field – especially your field of vision and your field of thoughts – with that opaque film. Come to persuade your intuition – which may resist quite strongly – that though you always think of your current mode of consciousness as a direct channel to reality, it is not. Allow your eyes to unfocus, and consciously conceptualize the world around you as a 2D surface, as lacking substance or depth, as being a mere reflection. Dwell in this state for some time. It is not our instinct to see the illusion for what it is and it takes time and reflection and contemplation for our minds to adjust on a deep and visceral level.

Then, re-focus your eyes and proceed to stare directly and intensely on a single point or object while focusing sharply and pointedly on your own breathing, re-focusing every moment. Each instant, replicate your action of the previous second: focus on where you feel the breath in your body right in that instant, and focus on looking straight at the point or object. Don’t allow instinct to take over. Don’t allow yourself to go on auto-pilot. Keep re-upping your attention. If distinct thoughts arise in your mind, if self-reflection begins, if you start to conceptualize your breathing or the point, your perception has tuned itself to the film again. You can repeat the practice and try again. The practice is successful when the point or object is seen directly – when all perceptions become direct perceptions (when the distance between self and object vanishes), and when thoughts, internal dialogue, and self-reflection fade away.

Hallmarks of this direct perceiving, tuning ‘past’ the illusion, include: a sense of awe or wonder at the 3D-ness and vividness of the perception, a sense of playfulness or spontaneity, a sense of being aware and attentive to all thoughts or perceptions, of clarity, a sense that perceptions are malleable, flexible, impermanent, or intangible, and the sense that one is having a dream or dream-like experience. Perhaps the strongest test of one’s own mode of consciousness is the perception of other beings. If other people are felt to be purely external, made of something other than what you are made of, originating from a different source than you originate from, or if solipsism feels potentially valid, you are not perceiving directly. If others feel internal, or if the internal-external dichotomy feels invalid, or if others are felt as originating from a similar source to yourself, or of ‘self’ is a concept which doesn’t apply to any particular human point-of-view, including your own, you may be seeing directly, perceiving attentively, awake to your direct experiences.

No magic, no alteration of reality, no occult practices, are feasible without first attaining this mode of consciousness. From the everyday mode of consciousness, such acts are performed on the wall of the Cave – they miss their targets entirely and the performers will not understand why, or become convinced that magic is impossible.

This is a basic teaching. It is a beginner’s teaching. If you can’t master this, don’t bother going anywhere else. You can read about the truth and speak about the truth and contemplate the truth, but none of these indicate your own perception of it, your own attentiveness to it, your own awareness of it. And the talk and reading will all be vanity without that direct perception.