r/castaneda

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If any of this is hard to follow, there's nothing I can do in this short comment.

Go study past material.

But the bottom line is, the path in Art of Dreaming is not much different than the path darkroom takes.

And Darkroom is merely the application of Tensegrity, in darkness, while trying as hard as you can to stop the internal dialogue.

Why it so closely follows the gates in Art of Dreaming, is a little surprising. But other things in sorcery turn out to follow the path of something else.

Could be it's all related to where your assemblage point has moved, so far.

This shows those positions, as they relate to darkroom. You have to move your assemblage point that far, to do what you see to the right of that, while awake.

Asleep? I have no idea if you'd see that the assemblage point had moved the same distance. But the old seers did in fact discover a lot of our sorcery, by observing the assemblage point of people who were asleep.

I'm not sure how we're going to duplicate that. If Cholita woke up and found me standing over her while she was asleep, trying to see her "assemblage point", I'd soon learn where she hid that samurai sword she came up with.

Or her sledge hammer. I'm also not sure where that got off to. 

I am only attempting to silence the internal dialogue at this time, the closest I think I've come has been a slight chill that kinda starts below the point in my spine between my shoulders that emanates through my body.

Is there a physical feeling that accompanies the silence or am I attributing the wrong things to my practice?

Why do we assume Carlos and Co were the last of don Juan's line?

Just because Carlos said so?

I have no doubt don Juan's said so to Carlos, but we also know he was crafty and knew the ways to protect his lineage.

don Juan's mentions his other apprentices, and while we assume Taisha and Florinda, we also know he had Emillio.

We also know don Juan's kept his apprentices separated, except in heightened awareness.

Who's to say don Juan did not produce another group of apprentices based on a 4 pronged nagual, of which Emilio was one.

I feel don Juan would have had a contingency plan once he discovered he had himself a 3 pronged nagual in his midst.

We only know of Emilio because he came into don Juan's orbit while Carlos was present, but they were separated quickly enough after that.

Also the only reason Carlos wrote of him, because he was the only one he knowingly met.

But, there appears no real reason another lineage might not be continuing on, silently in the background.

I like the idea of it, and that somewhere out there the lineage and knowledge and power and history continues.

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With Cholita back, which means a witch in my home and more "energetic mass", I had so much power last night that the foot tapping from the recapitulation series actually produced ripples through reality. Making an alternate version visible.

I suppose theoretically this is no surprise, but when you see it for real, FULLY AWAKE ( don't cheat yourself with sleeping magic), it's still unexpected.

All I could think of was don Genaro walking Carlos into hell by going in a circle, doing the gait of power.

But don't get confused and start banging the floor with your foot! It's not going to work.

In fact if you expect it, look for it, hope for it, or in any way contaminate your latent expectations, producing a "dirty link to intent", this will never work.

You have to have stopped your internal dialogue for a long time, perhaps a full 30 minutes, before you see sights like this for the first time.

And if you must pretend your sleeping dreams are magic, then you might be able to try this out if you just woke up from a dream a second ago. Don't move at first, and then try flopping your foot or hand on the bed to make a tiny shock, while watching the darkness.

It could be that your assemblage point is still moved from having come out of a dream, and you can get a sample of what it means for a physical shock or vibration, to alter the reality you are perceiving.

But please...

Try to learn at least some sorcery, awake???

Or I might send Cholita after you one of these days.

The very night she returned, Fairy and Minx made a short appearance.

Or as Cholita calls them, "Uuuhh... those guys..."

So i am pretty new to this and as i am about to finish second castenada book i wonder about reading other minds like don juan did to carlos? Did castenada also could do that and taught? Is there more info on it later on in books how don juan learnt that? I tried to search up keywords by "reading thoughts" but nothing really showed up. What is guys your expierence that are more advanced?

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The left is someone taught by a lineage.

The right is us.

Frankly, I'd rather be us if I were 30 years younger. We aren't controlled by fixed paths.

But it's definitely discouraging to beginners.

And advanced people should keep in mind, we aren't going to find the precise same destinations that the lineages found.

Even if we get in the vicinity of an old path, we won't be on it precisely.

That's a nice motorcycle...

Maybe I can talk Cholita into getting one so she can explore the Sonoran desert?

These days there's google satellite, so you can just look for interesting places to investigate, such as "Why", Arizona.

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When I post pictures of our real magic, I often get even more of it.

The reason is the very same as the reason this not-doing works!

But you'll have to discover that for yourself.

Those "emanations" really do exist, and it's possible to add awareness to those which are rarely used, and make them easier to perceive.

In fact, we're merely trapped in a range of the emanations that all of humanity has evolved to perceive.

Making it close to impossible to look in any other direction.

That's what produced the "Tonal/Nagual" divide.

Something you can partially overcome by learning to stop your internal dialogue.

I suppose, you can't fully overcome it until you leave this physical container and become what Carlos called a "specialized form of inorganic being".

You can use "seeing" (aka silent knowledge) to try out other techniques, which seem a bit far-fetched until you realize they actually work.

Such as pressing on the crown of the head. Or grabbing your sides and pinching, just under your armpits.

You can do it, and see what happens!!!

But that's not useful to beginners, because pretty much nothing is going to happen until you can reach silent knowledge.

Might be some subtle effect, but that won't keep a beginner going.

It's much more convincing when you can see a drastic effect, while doing the technique.

Now I'm wondering if we can't duplicate even the shroom based techniques from the early books, but without the shrooms.

Maybe the techniques in the early books aren't off our list afterall.

Such as the one where you make a spooky sound in the woods, and wait for the response.

I'll see if "NotebookLM" can find it for me. If I do, I'll put it here.

***

The technique you are referring to involves the use of an object don Juan calls a "spirit catcher." This object is described as a "whitish cord" or fiber that don Juan loops around his neck, stretches taut with one hand, and plucks with his other hand while letting out a peculiar yell. The combination of the tense string and the human voice produces a "weird, unearthly reverberation" that echoes off the canyon walls. Don Juan uses these eerie calls to tap into or "wake up" the spirits of water holes, mountains, or "allies," whose voices or presence then respond from specific directions.

When don Juan played the spirit catcher for Carlos, he gave him specific instructions on how to physically position himself, how to listen, and how to perceive the messages hidden within the sounds.

Here are the quoted instructions given to Castaneda:

• On physical posture: He was told to "sit with my left leg tucked under my seat and my right one bent, with the knee in an upward position. My right arm had to be by my side with my fist resting on the ground, while my left arm was crossed over my chest. He told me to face him and stay there, relaxed but not 'abandoned'".
• On how to look and listen: "Don't look at me when I play... Don't close your eyes, though. Not for anything. Look at the ground in front of you and listen". He was also instructed to "yell a specific word if I began to feel that something was coming at me".
• On how to receive the spirit's message: On a later occasion, don Juan instructed him to "focus all my attention on listening to sounds and do my best to find the holes between the sounds". He emphasized the word 'holes', explaining that "inside them a sorcerer could find all sorts of messages and directions".

Regarding the use of magic mushrooms: Yes, magic mushrooms were absolutely essential to inducing the state needed for this experience. The sources explicitly note that just prior to searching for the "holes" in the sounds, Carlos smoked don Juan's mixture: "When I had finished smoking he said that we were there so I could find out the kind of game I was supposed to hunt". Similarly, the first time he encountered the spirit catcher in the canyon was initiated because he had specifically asked don Juan "to let me smoke once more to find the guardian".

The sources reveal that this smoking mixture—which don Juan referred to as his ally humito ("the little smoke")—relied on a fine powder made from dried hallucinogenic mushrooms belonging to the genus Psilocybe (specifically identified tentatively as Psilocybe mexicana).

***

So... WE CAN DO THIS TECHNIQUE ALSO!!!

But you need SK, to make up for not using the magic mushrooms.

If that doesn't make sense, keep in mind that Silent Knowledge "presents" whatever information you're looking for, as long as you really did stop your internal dialogue and aren't contaminating your "intent" with other thoughts or goals.

And you can find out if you can do that, using other "pressure point" techniques.

When you can get some of those to work immediately on trying them, you might be able to make spooky sounds in the woods, and see what Silent Knowledge streams for you as a result.

Being in daylight, or in the woods, isn't really a barrier to SK.

The only barrier is your link to intent, and how well you've cleaned off all the turmoil of your internal dialogue.

You might say, we're drowning in a complex multi-topic question asked to SK, via your internal dialogue, which never ends. The question just goes on and on, so that no real knowledge about the world around us can flow.

We're "shouting in anger and despair" at the talking lizards.

Wait... Can we do that technique also, but without the devil's weed???

Cholita has an airline ticket for tomorrow.

No guarantee she'll get on the plane, but maybe I should look into buying 2 lizards, just in case.

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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.

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Seeing can be focused on any "hook" to the dark sea of awareness.

And all of your senses are hooks.

So you could focus on hearing, while seeing, and you'd start picking up all sorts of stuff you can't be sure is a real sound.

Or you could focus on touch, maybe not even on purpose. Maybe the last time you practiced darkroom it felt like a slow moving, fat old fly landed on your back.

So this time you look to see if the fly is still around, and that causes your seeing to focus on things touching your skin.

Which causes you to not only detect something touching your skin, but you can feel it sliding along. And you just know it's a long piece of black cloth around 1/2" thick, with little cloth balls spaced evenly along it.

You realize that it's some cloth trim from a clown suit. Torn off so that it stands alone as a sort of rope.

It doesn't even occur to you that you shouldn't be visually seeing that strip of cloth, since your room is perfectly dark.

Seeing touch, can activate all virtual senses in the second attention. So that the touch you are seeing, comes with a phantom representation in the visual realm.

I suppose that's why people take magic mushrooms and then claim they could see sound, while listening to music.

In addition to your seeing being able to focus on all senses, it can also focus on abstract concepts.

Prejudices about how things ought to be arranged, to make sense. Your seeing can hook to those, and clean up stuff from the second attention which normally would make no sense.

For instance last night it was time to get up and practice, and I heard a voice explain "these things have fallen from the shelf. But not just the first shelf. All of the shelves above the first are dumping their contents onto you. You'll have to deal with each layer one at a time."

I felt stuff falling onto my face, and got up to practice knowing I first had to clear off that stuff.

But that makes no sense!

Once I got a ways into my normal series of magical passes, I noticed I was doing my Tensegrity in a "second attention soup". It was as thick as soups get, and filled to the brink with "stuff".

My seeing had been brought out from inside a dream, into the waking world, and it was focused on space. And how "things" can occupy space.

So naturally, everywhere I looked there was stuff in the second attention soup.

I was finishing my 3rd long form before I started to realize that several shelves of "stuff" hadn't actually fallen onto me.

But more importantly, a scout had followed me out of dreaming and into the real world.

The scout, WAS the "stuff".

It hooked itself to a "concern". Maybe some worry about an actual shelf in the real world, which had too much stuff balanced on it. I have one like that in my closet.

I went to the bathroom and noticed that a dark shadow was following me.

It was no longer confined to being visible on the wall, like a normal shadow. It was a solid blob, with texture.

And a little face in the middle of it.

I stood watching it for a while, and started to wonder if writing a book about how to explore dreams, consciously, wasn't just a trick Carlos came up with to give the men a source of dark energy.

Won't do them any good for learning sorcery, but perhaps it charges them up with dark energy so that any real effort they make outside sleeping dreams, is more likely to succeed.

That book did indeed come late in the series, almost as if it were an afterthought.

Or perhaps, it was a response to noticing that we don't have an Ally, given to us by the last generation.

And will need to go hunting for an ally of our own. Or we won't have a source of dark energy.

But we need to be persistent, and it's highly unlikely anyone is going to run around in the mountains, trying to locate an Ally by waving their palm around.

By trying to "see" touch, using their palm.

Something which, if you can get silent and move your assemblage point, is almost certain to be noticed by an Ally.

A person claiming to be learning sorcery might do that "vision questing" like activity once or twice, but that's all you'd get out of them.

Or anyone else for that matter! Don't be fooled by "vision questing".

It's absurd... A fake prize sold by fake shamanism teachers.

So it's very unlikely anyone who wants to learn our sorcery, would go out into the world looking for an Ally more than once or twice.

UNLESS, it didn't take much actual work.

Such as, if they could go looking for an Ally in sleeping dreams.

And if one wanted to be a bit paranoid about it, you could notice that Carlos assigned "womb dreaming" to the women, shortly after watching the result of his teaching efforts.

I don't know if it was in a book before that, but it was emphasized perhaps 1 year into his serious teaching efforts.

Perhaps womb dreaming is also intended to put the women into contact with the Allies.

I think all the answers to my questions exist and the issue I have is I have not read or learned enough. I think I want to ask questions as a way to interact with community not because I need answers. When should I reach out and ask for help?