genuine question, is this stuff for real? i've been reading about it and finding it fascinating and something about it just feels like there's something important to be learned here but also reading about how Carlos and others in this space are frauds etc. is very discouraging.
if possible, i'd like to hear from any practitioner here their experience on their journey. is this for real? what convinced you personally it was real? what experiences or advice do you have?
(to be clear, Don Juan doesn't need to be real, i understand the utility of parables, i more care about the veracity of the teachings themselves.)
thanks!
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hey, I am a real practitioner here.
Drop the bias you may already picked up about Carlos.
Read up on the material in the wiki.
Do the work required to shut off your internal dialogue.
F around in the dark room and find out for yourself about this tech; it is real.
I never doubted it in the first place. I used my intuition to correctly identify the moment i lay hands on the books that i had found the book of ages. As much a power seeker that i am, finding a book like that produces a peculiar feeling.
But first time i could confirm beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was real, was after i had been trying to find the "spot" for literally 2 months, until i saw the colors Carlos was seeing. Purple and some green. Then it was too obvious that it was real, although i already had felt it prior.
Interaction with IOBs.
Learn inner silence. Without inner silence, nothing has a purpose.
could you describe your experiences with IOBs?
There are descriptions of IOBs archived on the subreddit you can search for. The Art of Dreaming by Carlos Castaneda talks about them quite a bit as well.
i am aware of them and have read them in the books too, i was just curious about your personal experiences if you wanted to share.
IOBs seem to have a certain tendency to appear in animal forms, especially insect stuff. There was an annoying buzzing bumblebee that bothered me for a while when I was falling asleep, once I got hypnagogic. Or a super-fast, vampiric moth which attacked my neck. And a giant silverfish under the couch that turned into a skunk when I threw it out the window. And if you grab an IOB too tight, it discharges and you get kinda electric shock which feels somehow disgusting. Oh, and of course the monster under the bed, but probably everyone had that at some point, before parents canceled it as unreal.
The bigger question might be whether I've written that for nothing, or whether you're actually going to practice inner silence now.
What motivation could there be to lie about it?
No one in here takes money to help people learn.
There's no church, no group, no cult, no youtube interviews, no books.
Absolutely nothing to compensate for the endless hard work by the people arranging this for you.
Nothing to compensate for the endless attacks, by greedy men who are trying to earn a living by tricking people with fake magic.
You've never seen a place like this before. Look closer.
You can read how people react, and learn. It's all out in the open just for the small chance we get one more person to be serious.
Which unfortunately, we estimate to be 1 in 100 who subscribe, and probably only 1 in 300 who lurk.
Real magic takes real work. That's the problem.
But we DO like to hear wha tyou said!
It's kind of like a beautiful woman liking to hear, "Are those boobs real?"
If they are.
You won't insult her.
I started reading the books back in the 90s. I tried my best to live as a warrior. Sometime in my early thirties I started to have very strange dreams. At some point I realized that I had read about them already in Castanedas books, referenced as "the gates of dreaming". A particularly intense series of dreams led me to this sub. Darkroom has been exactly as you see it described so far, though I am only so far as handling purple puffs and seeing "things". Yes, I believe things are exactly as described.
Since I read my first Castaneda book in as a teen, the reality described was the ONLY one that perfectly fit my experiences, and I was called insane, medicated and hospitalized because I was not conforming to society's vision of who I should be. Everywhere I go, I feel like a stranger or misfit and encounter rejection.
I have never taken anything on faith. But the moment, during a Darkroom session, an IOB that had been following me all of my life and teaching me how to cope gave me a name that so encapsuled all of my questions about her in a way that was beyond any mere coincidence, I was completely floored. There was no way that even an intelligent person could have come up with a more elegant and genius solution to convincing me that IOB's are beings that have remarkable resources when it comes to teaching us, than this one did with one word. But to tell you the story, because it was so personal and self-referential, it would do nothing to convince you. It was there to convince me.
Furthermore, as I have practiced Darkroom, I have seen things that are shared by every person who is seriously working on this sub. How could we have so many sharing the same hallucination? You can't.
If I were to condense the most important elements of this sub, I would say you can go very far with the improved picture of the J-curve and practicing absolute Silence of your internal dialogue to move your Assemblage Point and follow that J-curve. You would be amazed that one little map can take you so deep into different realities and predict exactly what you will encounter just during Darkroom Practice.
Is it easy, no. Why? Because of our socialization. Even here in this subreddit, we have people more interested in making friends and impressing people than actually getting magic who have been posting for over a year now.. Why? Nobody sane could tell you. It boggles the mind how contradictory we are.
Magic is not cozy, and everyday is a fight to keep your fellow man from pulling you back into the river of Shit. Go read the post today about families and how detrimental they are. Now imagine that every person you encounter is there to sow doubts in your mind about everything you think. That is what any person drawn to this path has to deal with daily.
But humans need magic! It may be the only antidote to the everyday insanity of our socialization.
I don't know if what I saw was real (another AP position or simply a phantom projection) but when you see it and jump in fright.
You realize that everything you see in this "real world" is just a position of the assemblage point, that's all.
I recommend you practice and see for yourself.