"The mistake is looking for the dolphins. Just look at the sea. How you see the sea determines wether you actually see a dolphin."
I was recently captivated by a short interview clip with ethicist Dr. Simon Longstaff where he recounted a lesson taught to him by an Aboriginal elder in the Northern Territory. The elder told him that when people scan the ocean looking for wildlife, they make a fundamental error.
"The mistake is looking for the dolphins," the elder explained. "Look at the sea. How you see the sea determines if you see the dolphins."
If you have spent any time in the modern spiritual landscape, you have probably noticed a heavy obsession with “chasing dolphins”. People flock to intuitive development because they want the flashes of lightning. They want to read a specific future, predict an isolated event, or pinpoint the exact "entity" causing their bad day.
They are hyper-focusing on the objects in the water. But because they ignore the state of the sea itself, they remain entirely mechanical, reactive, and honestly uncentered and unstable.
Object-Oriented Awareness vs. The Field
When we focus exclusively on "dolphins," we are practicing an brittle form of awareness. We look for a singular psychic hit to tell us we are doing it right, or we obsess over a singular problematic energy in our space.
In my work, I understand this through the lens of three distinct bandwidths of awareness we exist in simultaneously. If your space is filled 90% with Mitwelt energy—the emotions, demands, and pictures of everyone else—your sea is constantly choppy, polluted, and chaotic. You are forced to spend all your time reading the room and managing the waves just to stay safe.
The modern occultist Dion Fortune understood this deeply. In her foundational work on psychic mechanics, she emphasized that a practitioner must understand the broader energetic environment and atmospheric hygiene of contextual space, rather than just reacting to isolated psychic events. If you don't master seeing the whole environment, you are forever at the mercy of whatever passes through it.
This is exactly where the practice of Self-Observation comes in. As the contemporary teacher Red Hawk outlines in his work, true self-observation isn't about hyper-focusing on a single passing thought or emotional trigger. It is about witnessing the entire landscape of your inner space simultaneously, without judgment, and without getting hooked by any single object moving through it.
Reclaiming the Sea Through Clairvoyance
Why do we study tools like grounding, running energy, and "Blowing Roses"?
We don't do it to escape reality or become untouchable. We do it to clean the lens of our Eigenwelt (our own-world perspective) so we can see the entire sea clearly.
When you clear the center of your head (the 6th chakra), you stop staring fearfully at or willfully ignoring the individual waves. You step into your own seniority, separate but in relationship to the sea. You begin to perceive the underlying patterns, the currents, and the baseline frequencies running in your aura.
This completely revolutionizes the way you exist in the world. When you change your relationship to the entire field of consciousness, the "dolphins"—the specific insights, the effortless mediumship communication, the clear boundaries—appear naturally. They are no longer things you have to strain, hunt, or work hard to secure. They are simply the natural output of a pristine, well-cultivated sea. They are already present, and when you can see the bigger picture, the important ones make themselves known to you.
🔮 Weekly Practitioner Exchange: Reading the Field vs. The Object
Pair up with a reading partner, or take a look for yourself in your own meditation and reading space. This week’s practice is shifting your vision from object-oriented chasing to reading the broader field of energy.
The Dolphin Check: Look at the readee’s 6th chakra. What specific "object" are they currently hyper-focusing on or obsessing over in their life (a specific conflict, a money worry, a health fear)? Notice how this narrow focus alters the geometry of their space.
The Sea Audit: Shift your vision outward. Look at the entire field of their aura. What is the baseline climate of their space? Is it heavy with survival energy (Umwelt), cluttered with societal panic (Mitwelt), or anchored in their own unique self-affinity (Eigenwelt)?
Healing Focus: Help the readee execute a macro-clearing. Instead of blowing a picture of the isolated problem, give a healing to the entire canvas of their 6th chakra. Help them step back into the wide-angle "seat of awareness," allowing the choppy waves of their space to settle into clear, glassy stillness.
🤳 One Small Step: The Wide-Angle Reset
The next time you feel your anxiety spiking because you are hyper-focusing on a single stressful detail or foreign energy in your environment:
Drop Your Anchor: Ground your body firmly into the earth, letting your physical posture drop out of a straining posture.
Soften Your Focus: Imagine your inner vision widening. Instead of looking directly at the sharp "problem," deliberately expand your awareness to include the entire space around it.
Command the Space: Mentally state, "I am not the passing thought. I am the space in which the thought occurs."
Notice the immediate relief in your nervous system. You have stopped trying to wrestle the dolphin; you have remembered that you are the sea.
📓 Journaling Prompts for Radical Integration
The Chasing Audit: What specific spiritual milestone, validation, or life outcome are you currently chasing like a "dolphin"? How is that intense micro-focus causing you to ignore the baseline health of your daily energetic field?
The Atmospheric Check: If your personal aura was a physical body of water right now, what is its climate? Is it a stagnant pond, a raging storm, or a deep, quiet ocean? What color or texture is running through it?
Reclaiming the Field: George Gurdjieff noted that our attention is naturally fragmented and pulled away by external attractors. How can you practice conserving your attention this week so that your awareness stays anchored in your own center rather than leaking out into the environment?
A blog post can spark a revelation, but a practice builds a life. Information without practical application is just “nice ideas” and doesn’t create meaningful growth and change.
If the concepts of energetic anatomy, self-remembering, and dynamic boundaries resonate with you, let's take them off the screen and into your daily routine. Join a study group to access the complete library of tools, meditations, and techniques designed to help you run your own energy with absolute precision.
For over twenty-five years, I have been driven by a single, uncompromising objective: to strip the illusion out of the unseen world and hand total energetic autonomy back to the individual. My work—both in high-fidelity private sessions and study groups—is to help build your own psychic capacity to interface with your lived experience cleanly, autonomously, and without dogma using your inherent spiritual and intuitive gifts. Book a session.
