The effect of staring at someone or something is not far from actually socially mixing with that person or thing.  Gazing is an iconic activity from the desert experience of the Hebrew people narrated in Numbers 21:4-8.  Gazing becomes deadly when the accompanying mental juices are covetousness,  jealousy and envy.

No one can ever become all that God is. The prospect would destroy divine unity and bring a profound cheapness to divine majesty.  We become Christlike to full and mature levels without ever becoming all that he is. Managing the excellent gift of a sinless record has no human contribution.  We have no blood to shed as payment for sin.

If willpower could achieve our wishes we know where we would be, what we would be doing, and who we would be with, but willpower is not designed to bring success in temporal or eternal matters.  Certainly in the fantasy world there is that deadly gaze: lots of people gazing at the stars of business and entertainment and changing their lives to mirror the stars’.

17) Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. 18) But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.

2 Corinthians 3:17-18

Prolonged gazing at our peers is deadly and comes close to being similar to mingling with dogs and wondering where fleas came from. One look at the bronze serpent in the Numbers 21 episode saved lives; kept people from dying. One look at the Son of Man brings the dead to life.