The World Through Eyes of Fire:
Developing the Second Sight and the Vision of the Unseen World


Copyright © 2008 By Robin Artisson
All Rights Reserved.



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For Everything That Is Seen…

People often ask me about the development of what they call "second sight". Most people interested in esoteric pursuits, whether it be western sacred "magic" or cultural varieties of sorcery from any corner of the globe are interested in exploring whether or not the capacity of sight an be turned into seeing in the deeper sense of the word. There is, in all cultures, an understood folkloric reality of "seeing" that occupies every echelon of traditional stories regarding the mystical.

Indeed, I've spent a good bit of time discussing the "two sights", and mystics from every era have reported some form of extra-ordinary seeing. I have, over time, developed the "two sights" myself, or as I prefer to call it, my "eyes of fire", though I must say: of all the extraordinary feats I have accomplished, development of this special capacity has been the longest and the hardest.

Do not be discouraged when I use the word "hard"- I don't mean that it took physical, tooth-grating effort. What I mean is that "sight" is a very subtle capacity that requires you to remind yourself, over and over again, that it has nothing to do with how you normally experience visual information. It is easy to forget this, because every day of our lives, we experience the world through our eyes of earth and water, and we are constantly barraged by visual stimulus. This, of course, assumes that you can see normally; the blind may actually have a leg up on this development, as they have never been trained through experience of a visual model to expect the "sight" in those terms.

The path to the "two sights" or to seership is long. I hate to have to tell this to people who are looking for a shortcut, but a lot of dedication is needed to arrive at a point where the Unseen World becomes more in focus (to use a phrase born in visual understanding). The path of development begins in something as basic as how we think about the world, and our relationship to it- and this is a great secret of the development.

A person who wishes to see in the "other" way must begin transforming their basic understanding of who and what they are in relationship to the world that they perceive as "outside" of them. This wall of perception, this fundamental division, is the first and greatest obstacle to the development of the second sight. It's simple: most people believe that "they" are situated within a body of flesh and blood, quite distinct from the world of trees, grass, clouds, rivers, houses, and other people that they experience, spatially, as being "all around them". This basic "situation of perception" is only one way of experiencing one's reality, however.

It is certainly a convenient way. It is enormously helpful when we need to find food, cross the street, run from an angry bear, or any one of countless other situations. But what we gain in convenience from it, we lose in subtle experience and wisdom. It really is a trade off.

Fortunately for us, the development of the "other" seeing doesn't require us to lose this normal "way of seeing". First, we must realize on a deep level that things are not always what they appear, no matter how normalized they are, or how useful they seem. This simple wisdom- "Things are not always as they appear" is the foundational pillar that upholds the path to second sight. I have another version of this saying which I prefer, which was taught to me by spiritual contacts- "For everything that is seen, nine things are unseen." A Cabalist that I know joyfully told me that this favorite proverb of mine was quite true, on more than one level- for every malkuth-level perception, he said, there are nine other spheres unseen! I don't deal in Cabalism, but I was happy that he was able to find some relevance in my little mantra.

"For everything that is seen, nine things are unseen". This statement says much; chiefly, it reminds us that what we normally experience is only the tip of the iceberg. This is a matter of faith, you might say, for the mystic; before one can venture into a condition in which the other sight is engaged, one must trust that what he or she normally sees is only part of the story. Without such a trust, one will not find the motivation or discipline needed to walk the path of development.


Farmers of the Deep Sight

The heart of the path is this: you must break out of the "I am here and everything else is over there" mentality that has been fostered in you by virtue of your "normal" sensory experiences. This habitual mentality is fiercely and firmly entrenched in our everyday thinking, and reinforced greatly by the fact that our linguistic capacity operates on its logic. This fundamental duality of perception is created largely through language, but followed up (and re-affirmed by) sensory experience. To break out of it, and experience yourself in a new relationship to what you once called "your environment" is not something that happens overnight.

And the key to succeeding at this difficult task is not so difficult. You must become a “farmer of the sight”. This agricultural metaphor is the best I've ever found; the ideas that you must accept to find the sight have to be planted in the head, daily, easily, in small seed-forms, and then be allowed to grow in your mind, until the day comes that you find yourself unconsciously and instinctively acting on them. These "seed ideas" have to be pushed down into the conscious mind, and further down into the dark layers below, and allowed to germinate there. The trust you have in the Unseen Realities beyond common empiricism will act as the water needed to feed the seeds, and have them sprout and grow into a strange, new capacity of perception.

So if this path is one you wish to walk, start with these seed ideas:

1. For everything that is seen, nine things are unseen

2. I am not "in" a world; I am this world

3. There is no division between what I call "me" and this world; that division is merely a matter of perception


Push those seeds into the mind, early in the day after you have awakened, and just before you fall asleep, and think no more on them until the next "seeding" occasion comes along. Just let them work their magic deep inside you.


The Fundamental Point

Now, while they are in the earth of your mind and growing, you have other tasks. You have the important task of "walking to and fro upon the earth" of your everyday life, and really trying to open your mind up, and accept the world, with all its countless forms, as not ultimately separate from you. For me, the path began years ago when I was a child, the day I realized (while sitting in my back yard) that "I" wasn't some foreign being living on a planet, living out some temporary existence; this world was just as much my native world as a tree or a cat or a dog or the plants in the garden.

For so long, I had succumbed to the notion that human beings were "above" the natural order, and while plants and animals were parts of the natural environment, we humans were not.

Such an idea, so common in the minds of most people, is not only devastating to the development of mystical capacities, but also deadly to our existence. The wasteful destruction of the natural world, as well as the wanton destruction of other forms of life, is born in this "foreigner" thinking. When we "re-situate" ourselves right where we are, where we came from, and where we belong, we discover not only a powerful peace of mind, but we begin to discover some extraordinary capacities about ourselves.

One of those capacities is the ability to relate to our world and all its forms in ways that transcend the ways we typically relate to other human beings. We have other connections between what we call "ourselves" and what we call the "plants" or "animals". We have intuitive connections, and even connections that go beyond our ability to label or intellectually understand. And those connections- truly invisible yet real threads- tie us to everything. If you were to tremble one of those threads, just one- it would affect something else, which in turn would tremble and affect other things, and this would spread out to the furthest reaches of what we call "space" and "time". It is a touch mind-blowing, but it is a reality; it is this connection that is the basis of communication, intuition, and even sorcery.

This connection can never be broken. Death does not break it; in fact, the web-work of subtle connections are simply the roads "walked" or glided upon by the consciousness-principle of a dead being, as they move in a new freedom into new conditions of experience. They are the "faery roads" or "trods" that sometimes line up well with the features of the landscape that we all wander upon in our daily lives.

You may wonder why I am driving this point quite literally into the ground. It is because this point is the fundamental point that contains the key to conscious mystical sight, of any kind. Until you have literally "overflowed" the boundaries of perception set by your everyday life, those boundaries that keep you trapped behind a nose and eyes, perceptually "inside" a head on top of a body, staring "out" at all the things you "see", you cannot have access to the sight. The eyes of water and earth, comfortably situated in the skull, cannot see very far. But the eyes of fire, not situated "within" anything, can see whatever the heart can accept.

And to get to the "overflow" point takes time, for most people. For everyone, really; aside from those whom folklore gives "natural" mystic sight to, I have never met a living person who was born with the eyes of fire naturally engaged. It may be that children, not so conditioned by language and concept, wield a natural form of the fire-sight, but by early adulthood, it has gone dormant for most, a smoldering cinder buried under the ash of society's mental and spiritual pollution.

If you believe that “second sight” must come in only your previously understood models of “visual experience”, you will never achieve it. If you believe it must come in obedience to some “dualistic” model of mind, you will never achieve it. If you think that it is impossible or too hard to achieve, you will never achieve it. It is time to break out of doubt and break out of the trap of paradigmatic programming, and reach into unknown places for power you never knew you had.

It takes time to "reprogram" yourself- but don't be fooled into thinking that this re-conditioning is primarily a consciously willed effort. It isn't; it is partly a willed effort of conscious awareness, but mostly an unconscious development, a fundamental shift of intuitive worldview. It is a shift in the most basic, unstated assumptions that shape your entire "way of experiencing" the world.

This is why the "seeding of the deep mind" is needed, and why you must remind yourself, everyday of all that I have said, and push that constant repetition into your deepest ground of being. You must literally brainwash yourself (or should I say mindwash) into believing that you wield capacities of awareness that are not tied to the eyes and body of earth and water; you must become convinced, not just on a conscious level, but on a deeper level, that your mind, on certain levels, is far more connected to all things than you could have imagined. Your mind, on certain levels, communicates with things you cannot consciously imagine or even deal with; on other levels, your mind is involved in wonders and mysteries beyond easy reckoning.


The Blossom and the Secret

You must, in a sense, wait for the sight to "come to you", for the plant to grow up from the depths, and blossom in your awareness gradually. It will happen, so long as you keep the program of conditioning going. It may take years; it took years for me, and I find that many people hate to hear this fact. But the wise have long known that nothing worthwhile is free or easy.

There are two more salient points that I have to make before ending this work. The first is this: when the "other sight" begins to blossom, to open up in your awareness, you must not stop your "farming"- you must continue on, as though nothing had happened. Many stop their efforts when they get the first hints of the Unseen; this is devastating. One inch of sight may seem amazing, but hundreds of miles must be opened before you can enjoy the stable capacity that can be of use to you. Do not let early success throw you off.

The second point is deeper, but most important: understand that the "sight" I am talking about is not something that reveals visual images to you, as you normally understand them. It is a mystical experience I am talking about, not a visionary state in which you see invisible people or beings as literally as you see "ordinary" people or beings. The second sight is not the ability to see "light" or "auras" glowing around people or places; such descriptions of sight are couched in visual terminology, and they have a way of deceiving people.

The trouble with the sight is that when a sighted person must report what they have seen, they have no choice but to use visual metaphors, at least in most cases. You must bear in mind the gap between experience and the metaphors used to communicate experience, and don't let yourself be fooled. Wait with patience for the purity of the experience that I am describing, and with discipline and devotion to effort, you will not be disappointed.

There is a final secret I'll discuss here, now. Don't worry about secrets; as a gentleman in Ireland once told me, the best way to keep secrets is to tell them to everyone, and make them as obvious as you can. Plain sight is the best hiding place, because the eyes of the unwise seldom see the plainest things. And even if they did see the secret, they'd assume (wrongly) that they then understood it or possessed it- forgetting that for everything that is seen, nine things remain hidden.

The secret deals with poetry. Poetry, since ancient times a sacred capacity, refers to more than just rhyming couplets or love poems; it refers to the fire of creativity, exploding out of a heart wrapped in its flames, and appearing in the shape of words. Those words give us keys or invitations to enter into a frame of mind that was (hopefully) in some way similar to the poet's inspiration, but it doesn't always work. True poems seem to be like invitations from the Otherworld, sent into this world through the minds and lips of the inspired, but only intended for a select audience. Many will hear, but few will understand or be transported to a different place.

When the true sight opens up in a human being, that person has no choice but to enter the realm of poetry. This is because the "Eyes of Fire" and the fire of inspiration are the same fire. There's the secret; poetry and seership are not just cousins; they are twin brothers. When you engage the "other sight", you are engaging a landscape of inspiration. You don't "see" like the eyes of earth and water see; you "see" something mysterious, something that swims into your mind with words and understandings, but before it was words and understandings, it was something that I simply cannot write about. It is there; its immensity and power is indisputable and unmistakable; and the experience of it is bliss; but the "first half" of the experience is impossible to describe, only the "second half", the half expressed in metaphor, can be described.


The Oak King Sits Upon the Gate Below

I shall try my best to give an example. This very day, I sat before my hearth and slid into an "overflow" by using the Hissing of the Serpent- a powerful technique that I have written about extensively in many other places. In that long, endless hiss, the awareness "phases out" of the perceptual trap of body and floods into the great fullness of things; in that fullness, the familiar spirits that serve a sorcerer can be called with simple ease. This is because your call echoes into every corner of reality. If you wish to think spatially, your call echoes into the furthest and most distant reaches of the worlds above, here, and below. If you wish to think from another angle, your call actually becomes what all things are.

Either way, if you are identified with a familiar, it has no choice but to "arise" into your new awareness-experience. Did you call it from a distance, or did you simply awaken the awareness that is whole, and so always aware of the familiar? Either way, the attentions of that allied power are upon you, and at this point, I can feel it coming from "deep below", and entering my chest and head.

A simple request for the Eyes of Fire to open is easy at this point; the familiar can affect this change. I experienced my own home in that extraordinary way, and I saw two things inside, and two things outside. Bear in mind that what I "saw" can only be described in terms of words, limited words which are all I or any other human has to use. The paradox is powerful: It wasn't this, and yet, it was. Inside, I could see that my hearth radiated some strange power at its center, the place where so many offerings had been made, and so many fires lit to create doorways into the unseen world.

Also, I saw perhaps fifteen or twenty tongues of what looked like solid fire flames floating near the ceiling, above the hearth. My familiar told me that these were powers attracted by my work over the years. Actual spirits taking a form to my inner sight! It was quite exciting, as I had never seen them there before. I realized that my home didn't have a single spiritual entity acting as the "house spirit" that I have worked to contact and propitiate; it was a choir of several powers. Some were from this place; others were literally followers of my spiritual work, answerers to my calls throughout the years, who were attached to me, now.

Outside, I saw the powers (very stately, to my vision) of the oak trees and Dutch elms that line my street; I could sense their vast lives and intelligence sitting there, observing the world in a deep way that only they can. Above some of the trees was a trod, a pathway unseen, stretching from whence to where I have no idea. It's mystery was translated by my own mind, (and by my words now) as a golden strip of light. Two more things caught my inner attentions: the fact that the spirits of the large hedge of holly bushes to the right of my door were watching me intently (no surprise, as I make offerings to them and contact them in trance often) and I could feel how protective they were of my home. Thorns are always protective, when arrayed around a home, but these immense bushes were even more so, bolstered by my months of work here.

The spirit of the oak tree nearest to my door was the most vibrant thing I encountered; I could literally see it "squatting" on top of an entrance to the Underworld, created by its large root system. It was guarding it! I had never sensed this entrance before, even though I intuitively knew that large root-systems make such entrances.

Beyond all these things, one final vision came to me, a powerful sense, feeling and direct sight of the immensity of the Underworld. I could feel the vast chasm of darkness that is under the feet of all human beings, and under the roots of every tree. The crust of our planet is just the thinnest of coverings for the vastness of the dark space below, which is the source of things, and the concealer of all mysteries, personal or transpersonal. How majestic! How it destroys our sense of the ordinary, and endows all things with a timeless presence, and the promise of magic!

But remember, in the grip of sight, what is "personal" and what is "transpersonal"? Therein lies the key, which I hope that you will have received from reading this account.