The most basic training for a beginning practitioner is to try to purify the eye consciousness. Sometimes I ask people to look at things, or at people sitting across from them. I ask them to look attentively, but to refrain from identifying or categorizing the object. For example, in observing people, a practitioner tries not to perceive an individual as male or female, stranger or friend. To do this, one must refrain from using one's memory, ideas, or any previous experience. Like a camera, one must look without discrimination. If one has been practicing well, it is possible to see things in this different way.

A couple of years ago I used this method during a retreat in upstate New York. I told the people to go outside and look at anything that caught their attention. One of the participants looked at trees so attentively that he did not feel he was a human being anymore. He had become a tree. When I told everyone to go back to the meditation hall, he did not move from his spot. I said, "It's time to go. It's very cold."

He answered, "How can trees go anywhere?"

During a retreat in Taiwan, I told everyone to look attentively at the outside environment. A monk from Malaysia stared at a public cemetery in the distance. While he stared at the tombstones, I told him to drop his preconceptions and stop thinking about what he was looking at. Eventually, he stopped forming ideas, and he saw people in the stones. After the retreat, he went outside for another look, but it looked like an ordinary cemetery again.