u/PreciseInstance

I remember reading the passages where don Juan talked about Silvio Manuel as if he was something almost impossible to classify, not just a man with unusual seeing, but someone who had gone very far into the realm of inorganic beings and come back altered by it. I also remember don Juan describing him as being one with intent, or at least so aligned with it that the distinction almost stopped mattering.

The reason I bring that up is because I had an experience a while back that made me think of him very strongly, and I still don’t fully know what to make of it.

During practice I asked a new ally to take me to the world of inorganic beings, or to what people here sometimes call the tunnels. Almost immediately there was a very strong energetic sound, and then I was moving through what looked like geometric hexagonal tunnels. It’s hard to describe properly. It was like a tunnel made of color and structure at the same time, the walls composed of hexagonal plates, but with that impossible quality these things sometimes have where they seem finite and infinite at once.

Then things shifted. The voice of seeing started communicating with me, and I found myself perceiving what looked like a palace, or maybe a gate, or some kind of threshold structure. Technically I was still in my room, but the perception overlaid the room and extended far beyond it. That part is unusual for me. Most of what I see tends to come in miniature, symbolic, or abstract form. This did not feel miniature at all. It felt vast, like the space around me had opened into something with no clear boundary.

At some point I saw a slender shadow figure, and the voice of seeing told me it was Silvio Manuel.

That’s where it gets strange, because my immediate reaction was not really belief, but confusion. It did not feel like I was simply “seeing Silvio Manuel” the way you would see a person standing in front of you. It felt more symbolic than literal, but not symbolic in the weak sense either. More like I was being shown a configuration, a presence, or a relation, and the label “Silvio Manuel” was the closest translation my awareness could produce.

I stared at that figure for what felt like one very dense second, but it had that peculiar quality some experiences have where you know more happened than you can account for. Almost like there was a gap inserted into perception itself. A missing span. As if an enormous amount of time, or content, had been removed, and what remained was just the after-image of contact.

So what I’m trying to sort out is this:

When something like this happens, are we actually talking about encountering a specific being in any ordinary sense, or are we dealing with an overlap of emanations where a particular figure, in this case Silvio Manuel, is the form through which something much larger becomes perceptible?

Because what I perceived did not feel like “a dead sorcerer hanging around in the inorganic realm” in any simplistic sense. It felt more like an omnipresent force or intelligence taking on a recognizable mask, or maybe using that configuration because it was the nearest thing I could understand.

So I’m curious how others here would parse this.

Do you think Silvio Manuel can still be encountered as an actual individual awareness within that realm, if that’s even the right way to phrase it? Or is “seeing Silvio Manuel” more likely to be contact with a zone, current, or field of intent associated with him, rather than with the person in the ordinary sense?

I’m not looking for armchair psychology answers here. I’m asking within the framework itself, for people who have actually dealt with allies, tunnels, overlays, missing time, or those moments where seeing gives you a name but the thing behind the name feels much bigger than the label.