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Preliminary Note

This guide is written for the stone oval at Monte Pocilgais, but its principles apply to any site where a charged landscape presence has been recognised and prepared through repeated attentive visits. It is not a ritual in the theatrical sense. It is a protocol of attention, a sequence of practices that progressively narrow and deepen perception until the practitioner is available in their own inner world, as we call it the ultrasubjectve hyperspace, USH, to whatever the place discloses.

Nothing is guaranteed. The stone does not perform on demand. What this guide offers is the correct orientation and the correct sequence. The rest depends on the quality of attention you bring, the honesty with which you report your experience to yourself, and your willingness to sit with weight and silence without filling them prematurely with interpretation.

Read the guide fully before you go. Then leave it behind. You cannot read and attend simultaneously.

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Phase One: The Threshold
Arriving, pausing, reading the space from outside

Do not enter immediately. First, walk slowly around the structure.

Stand at the boundary of the site, at the point where the stone formation first becomes visible or perceptible to you. This may be a gap between trees, the edge of a path, or simply the place where your body registers that something has changed in the quality of the space ahead. By seeing the stone or stones and the opening up of the landscape for you.

Stop here. Stand still for at least five minutes. First direct your attention inwards. Watch your standing, is it relaxed, strong, yielding, crooked, upright. Also whatch your breath, is it deep, in the belly, in the chest, is it quick, is it slow? Also watch your body temperature. your hands. No bring your attention towards the landscape.

Do not yet look at the stones directly. No focus. Let your gaze rest on the space as a whole, unfocused, taking in the entire field of the site without fixing on any particular element. Especially try to be aware of the periphery of your sight.

During this pause, attend to the following:

What does the body register at this boundary? Not what the mind thinks about the site, but what the body feels at the threshold. A change in temperature, a shift in the quality of sound, a slight heaviness or lightness in the chest, a change in breath. Note it without interpreting it.

Where does the eye want to go? Not where you direct it, but where it moves of its own accord. That movement is information. The eye is already responding to the organisation of the space before the mind has caught up.

Where does the body resist going? Equally important. Resistance is not a reason to avoid a place. It is a signal that something significant is present there.

Is there a directionality to the space, a sense that the site is oriented, that it faces somewhere or opens toward something? The Pocilgais oval lies on an east-west axis with the eastern end higher. The passage between the stones opens west to east. Feel whether the space seems to pull in any direction before you have verified that intellectually.

When the five minutes have passed and you have noted what the body registers, you may enter.

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Phase Two: Moving
Walking the perimeter before sitting, finding the body’s response to the space

Enter the site slowly and walk slowly around this kind of island in the field, before doing anything else. Do not go to the stones immediately. Walk for instance once more the outer edge of the oval, following the shape of the formation, clockwise or counterclockwise as the body prefers.

Walk slowly enough that each step is felt. The ground changes within an enclosed site of this kind: softer here, harder there, damper in one place, unusually dry in another. These variations are part of the site’s organisation. Attend to them without explaining them.

As you walk the perimeter, attend to the following:

Where do the feet slow? Not where you decide to slow, but where the pace changes of its own accord. These are the places of concentrated presence within the site, the nodes.

What is the quality of sound inside the oval compared to outside it? Enclosed stone formations frequently alter the acoustic field. Cicadas, wind, birds, all may sound different inside the boundary. This is partly physical and partly something more difficult to name. Note what you hear and where you hear it differently.

What is the felt difference between inside and outside the landscape structure? This boundary is one of the most important phenomenological facts of the site. It may be subtle or pronounced, but it is almost always present. The inside feels different. Stay with that difference without rushing to describe it. And walk slowly insde the structure.

After completing at least one full circuit of the perimeter, stand at a more central spot of the oval for a moment and feel the space around you. You are now inside the site. The threshold has been crossed. The perimeter has been read. You are ready to choose your place.

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Phase Three: Choosing the Place
Where to sit, found through bodily attention rather than preference

You are not looking for the most comfortable place to sit. You are looking for the most charged place, the place where the body registers the highest concentration of whatever the site is emanating.

Move very slowly through the interior of the oval. Move without destination. Let the body lead. When the feet slow or stop of their own accord, pause. Stand at that point for a moment and register what the body feels. Then move on and repeat. Do this for several minutes, covering the interior of the site at a slow, attending pace.

You are looking for the place where the following converge: the feet slow, the breath changes slightly, and something in the chest or solar plexus registers a shift that is neither pleasant nor unpleasant but simply present and significant. That convergence is your place.

When you have found it, sit down. Sit in a position you can hold without discomfort for at least thirty minutes. The body must be stable enough to disappear from attention during the later phases. If you are working with a specific stone, let your chosen place put you in a natural relation to it: close enough to feel its presence, at an angle where your gaze can rest on its surface without straining.

Before proceeding, take five slow breaths. Let the sitting position settle. Let the body register that it has arrived. Then begin Phase Four.

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Phase Four: Entering the Stone
Gaze-based deepening into the chthonic layer

This phase has three movements: establishing the gaze, sustaining the gaze until the shift occurs, and then following the shift deeper without losing it.

Establishing the gaze.

Choose a specific surface of the stone that faces you. Not the whole stone. A specific area of its surface, roughly the size of two hands placed side by side. It should be an area of relatively consistent texture and colour, without strong contrasts that will pull the eye around. Grey stone in natural light is ideal for this work.

Let your gaze rest on that area with what is called in contemplative practice a soft focus: not staring, not scrutinising, not analysing the texture. Simply resting. The eyes are open but not effortful. The gaze is held but not fixed. Think of it as the quality of gaze you might bring to a fire, present and attending but not working.

Do not blink deliberately and do not suppress blinking. Let the eyes do what they naturally do while maintaining the soft focus on the chosen surface area.

Sustaining the gaze until the shift occurs.

Hold this gaze for as long as it takes for the peripheral vision to begin to change. This is the primary phenomenological marker of the trance deepening that this method produces.

What typically happens: after a sustained period of soft focus on a stone surface, the peripheral field of vision begins to soften, to lose its hard edges, to become less distinct than the central field. Colours in the periphery may shift slightly. The boundary between the stone and the surrounding air may seem to become less definite. The sound field may change, either narrowing toward a particular sound or expanding into a kind of general resonance. The breath will typically slow without any deliberate instruction to do so.

None of these changes need to be dramatic to be significant. A slight peripheral softening combined with a slowing breath is sufficient. You are not aiming for visual hallucination or theatrical altered state. You are aiming for the specific quality of attention in which the ordinary categorising, interpreting mind steps back and something more directly receptive comes forward.

When this shift begins, do not mark it with any internal commentary. Do not think: it is happening. Simply continue. The moment you begin to narrate the experience you step back out of it. Stay in the gaze.

Following the shift deeper.

When the peripheral shift is established, allow the gaze to soften further without losing the stone surface entirely. The stone surface remains the anchor. It is what keeps the attention from drifting into sleep or free association. But around that anchor, the quality of perception has changed.

At this point direct your attention, not your gaze but your interior attention, downward. Not inward in the usual sense of turning toward thoughts or feelings. Downward, as if attention itself had weight and could sink through the surface of the stone into what lies beneath it.

This downward direction is the specific gesture of approach to the chthonic layer. It is not a visualisation. It is a direction of attention. Follow it as far as the depth of the trance allows. Do not force it. Do not manufacture images of underground chambers or geological strata. Simply direct attention downward and attend to what, if anything, arises.

The quality of what arises at this depth, when something does arise, is characteristically impersonal, heavy, ancient, without narrative. It is not a being in any recognisable sense. It is more like a texture, a pressure, a quality of presence that predates personality. This is the Neolithic layer, the raw chthonic force of the stone itself, the first stage described in Chapter Five. If you reach it, stay with it. Do not interpret it. Do not try to communicate with it. Simply let your attention rest in its weight.

This phase may last ten minutes or forty. There is no correct duration. Stay in it until the gaze softens naturally into the next phase, or until the depth simply ceases to deepen and the attention begins to rise again of its own accord. When that rising begins, you are moving into Phase Five.

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Phase Five: Availability your own inner world, your ultrasubjective hyperspace
Pure receptivity, no agenda, no questions

The trance state produced by Phase Four has opened the USH. You are now in the interior phenomenal space where contact with the spirit of the place becomes possible.

Your orientation here is simple and absolute: pure receptivity. No agenda. No questions. No intention to receive any particular kind of experience. No expectation of a figure, a voice, an image, or any other specific form of disclosure.

You are simply available.

This is harder than it sounds. The mind wants to ask questions. The imagination wants to generate content. The practitioner wants something to happen. All of these impulses will arise. None of them are to be followed. Let them pass through the field of attention without being pursued, in the same way that the contemplative practitioner lets thoughts pass without following them.

What you are holding is an open interior space. The USH, fully open, without the practitioner’s agenda filling it. This is the condition in which the spirit of the place, whatever form it takes, can enter the field without being shaped by the practitioner’s expectations.

What may arise: almost anything, and nothing is more or less valid than anything else. A quality of atmosphere that intensifies or shifts. A sound that acquires significance without being explainable. An image that appears without being constructed. A word or phrase that arises without being thought. A physical sensation in the body that does not correspond to anything external. A profound sense of presence without any specific content. Or simply: silence, weight, and the continuing sense of the stone at your back or before your eyes.

Nothing arising is also valid data. The absence of content in the USH is not failure. It is a report. The stone is disclosing itself through the quality of the silence, through the texture of the weight, through the very absence of anything that could be mistaken for projection.

Remain in this phase for as long as the trance state holds. Do not extend it artificially when the depth begins to lift. The lifting is natural and will come. When it does, move into the closing.

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Phase Six: The Closing
Returning deliberately, documenting honestly

The closing is not an afterthought. It is as important as the entry. You have been in contact with a chthonic presence of considerable age and depth. The return to ordinary perception must be deliberate, respectful, and complete.

When the depth of Phase Five has naturally lifted, bring your gaze back to the stone surface with a slightly firmer focus than the soft gaze of Phase Four. Let the peripheral vision firm up. Let the ordinary acoustic field return. Take three slow, full breaths, letting each exhalation be slightly longer than the inhalation.

Then, before standing, take a moment to acknowledge the place. Not with theatrical ritual language but with simple interior recognition: you were here, something was present, you attended to it as honestly as you could. A moment of silent acknowledgment directed toward the stone is sufficient.

Stand slowly. Do not rush away from the site. Walk the perimeter once more, this time in the direction opposite to your entry walk. This reversal is not symbolic decoration. It is a practical technique for resetting the body’s orientation to ordinary space after a sustained period in the altered field of the site.

When you reach the threshold again, pause as you did on arrival. Stand at the boundary for a moment and feel the difference between inside and outside. Then step out.

Documentation must happen within thirty minutes of leaving the site. Not later. The specific texture of what arises in Phase Five fades rapidly, not because it was illusory but because it belongs to a different register of perception than ordinary waking memory can easily hold. Write down, in plain language without interpretation, what arose: what you felt, what you perceived, what was absent, what surprised you, what the quality of the silence was if silence was what came. No interpretation yet. Only description.

The interpretation comes later, across multiple visits, when a pattern begins to emerge from the accumulated documentation. The spirit of the place does not disclose itself fully in a single session. It discloses itself across time, to a practitioner who returns, who documents honestly, and who brings each visit the same quality of pure availability that Phase Five requires.

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A Final Note on What You Are Doing

You are not performing a ritual. You are not casting a circle or invoking a deity or following a grimoire. You are doing something older and simpler than any of those things.

You are sitting with a stone that has been understood as inhabited for six thousand years, in a landscape whose folk tradition has consistently described what happens when a sensitive person sits in such a place, and you are attending to what is actually there rather than to what you expect or hope to find.

The Moura at the bottom of the spring in São Brás de Alportel has been waiting beside her golden bed for longer than any of our frameworks for understanding her have existed. The chthonic presence in the grey stones of Monte Pocilgais predates the Moura Encantada tradition, the Celtic mythological imagination, the Neolithic cultures that first marked these hills, and certainly predates Jung and Corbin and the USH.

All of our frameworks, Jungian, Corbinian, phenomenological, are tools for approaching something that was already there. They are useful tools. They give precision to the approach and honesty to the documentation. But they are not the thing itself.

The thing itself is in the stone. Phase Four will take you to its surface. Phase Five will make you available to whatever it chooses to disclose. The rest is attention, patience, and the willingness to return.

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This guide is part of the ongoing series New Landscape Holistic Project: The Magick Megalithic Circle Phenomenology, documenting the esoteric landscape practice developing around the stone oval at Monte Pocilgais, Quinta Quixote Meditation Centre, eastern Algarve.

The theoretical foundations for this guide are developed across the preceding chapters of this series, particularly Chapter Two on genius loci, Chapter Four on the historical tradition of beings in the stone, and Chapter Five on the three-stage developmental arc from chthonic presence to the anima of the stone.