Hello everyone,
I've started doing 12 basic moves recently, as recommended to me to help with low energy/wellbeing. Many things are not very clear, due to them being absent from the book on magical passes, but whatevs. However, can anyone share a practical tip on how to tense the infamous back leg muscles? Book says it's very important, however, I have no idea how to tense them in the crouched position. I generallly can't tense them on command.
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Just do running man with pep and you will feel.
These can help you to learn how to isolate that muscle:
(There is no shortage of hamstring isometrics on YouTube)
And don’t neglect doing some hamstring stretches after.
thanks a lot, man. So, I guess, standing a bit crouched, as shown in Passes, is not meant to activate the mucles by itself, it's something I do consiously? Like I can, for example, contract my bicep anytime, even without doing curls?
I am just afraid that there might be a slight variation to the crouch that helps involve the back leg muscles, which I miss.
About never mixing Passes with exercises - do you mean I should, like, wait before/after Passes? How long should this wait be?
I'd say do whatever you want to do outside of Tensegrity, that's physical, before during the passes so that there's nothing to taint the results after.
Though it's certainly possible that any assemblage point shift could remain until the next day, and then anything that you do that involves somatic engagement could kick up little bursts of alternative perception.
Tensegrity is meant to sustain it though, and massively expand it; something that other physical movements just can't do since that's not their intent.
It is advised to, eventually, integrate individual Tensegrity movements into everyday activity, organically and not formally, to magnify those little bursts.
You do realize, if you do it perfectly you get to break the laws of physics?
Be in 2 places at the same time?
Travel to alien worlds?
Fly through the air?
Make friends with real spirits who live for billions of years, and are fully visible?
Shapeshift into "the Hulk", or "The Fly"?
All in your physical body. All for real. No tricks, no drugs, eyes wide open.
No meditation "visions" or "Astral Travel".
This is the real thing.
Turning it into a healthy exercise seems like a waste.
I ran this topic by Carlos Castaneda himself, sort of.
The idea of pitching it as an exercise.
He was trying to build "energetic mass", so I did my part in helping with that.
Back in private classes when he was still alive.
And the internet was rather new.
I went into some diet discussion groups and pitched Tensegrity workshops as a way to lose weight.
Since I'd lost 30 pounds in private classes.
Carlos was amused by it.
And likely, a bit annoyed.
What he wanted more than anything else was for people to do those things I mentioned in this comment, in the first 6 lines.
The idea of turning it into an exercise might have seemed somewhat odd at the time.
But from history, we now know it almost led to the complete loss of this amazing knowledge.
The leaders turned it into an exercise off which they could make money.
And forgot about the magic part.
It was too hard.
Yeah, I looked through the subreddit, magic is great stuff. However, I struggle with more basic stuff in life, practical stuff - taking care of family, emotional issues, lack of job, lack of energy, lack of health, other modern plagues. I am interested in energetic practices to regulate my system first, which would, supposedly, help me satisfy basic needs and enable to pursue spiritual awakening properly. I don't think I care about aliens worlds more than I care about this one, it's just content.
If I am wrong, I would gladly read up.
Otherwise - isn't the message of the 12 basic movements that they were designed for the modern man, bereft of simple well-being? There are many stories of unbalanced people doing energetic stuff/magic/drugs/whatever and getting into severe trouble.
I also wonder - what money did anyone make off these extremely niche "exercises"...
Thank you.
Carlos tried to teach for free in public parks back in the 80s, but he couldn't.
Hecklers showed up and made it impossible.
Some dangerous in fact! Ultimately Carlos had to hire a bodyguard who carried a gun.
Same as happens in here. We get invaded by bad men also.
But we have mods who can toss hecklers out with the click of a mouse button.
So Carlos only held free classes in private, once he discovering you couldn't have them in public.
Even paying for the rental of dance halls himself.
I must have taken classes in around 8 different locations. Including one time, in Bruce's parking garage. With 50 women.
At least, I think Bruce owned that garage.
But in order to teach the public, Carlos had to create "workshops" where there was a locked building and armed guards.
So he used convention centers.
Those workshops paid for a small staff to run them, since some of those attracted as many as 750 at a time.
At least, no one ever counted that I'm aware of.
But to suggest Carlos was after money, would be absolutely wrong.
He was already wealthy from his books.
And, his lineage of sorcerers was likely VERY wealthy, and Carlos was involved in selling off their assets, including some fabulous Spanish art according to Cholita.
They had so much extra money from the lineage's 408 years of accumulated wealth, that Soledad (a witch) used it to influence hollywood.
And we got Star Wars.
The old organization Carlos set up to teach at workshops naturally didn't go away after he died, and they are very much after money.
They never managed to get the sorcery to work. But they're still out there teaching the physical movements.
The people in here are not after money.
Once you get the magic to work you realize you have to accept your living situation and be like everyone else.
And that it's impossible to teach magic to anyone, so it's immoral to pretend you can and take their money.
Real magic has to be learned by the person themselves.
Through their own efforts.
No one can do much more than remind them it's worth the effort to practice.
As for whether the Tensegrity will make you healthier, any better than any other form of exercise, I doubt it.
That's not what it's for.
By the way I suspect that darkroom gazing makes you healthier and stronger and less stupid :)
And it is tensegrity in darkness and silence.
And by the way I still see nothing, not a single puff, even though i'm doing it for a year now for 2h maybe 6 out of 7 days a week on average. I only get shifts from time to time but I also feel that I'm healthier, stronger and less stupid. But note that if i stop for a few days i quickly become stupid again :)
But this could be just coincidence for me, I'll let others say if they have similar experiences.
We don't know enough about this to figure out why you haven't seen puffs yet.
My belief is, you simply aren't silent. You're "not counting" words that pop into the mind every 30 seconds. Or even every 3 minutes.
The way Buddhists "Masters" can't count.
They actually make the argument that they get silent during meditation. Some try to hide behind "authorities" by using "Samadhi" as their proof they get silent. As if Samadhi weren't total nonsense made up to steal money.
But I did their forms of meditation myself, in several communities, and I KNOW they just aren't honest.
They pretend short periods of mediocre silence prove they know how to get silent.
The truth is if you really get silent, both the double and the "abstract" become instantly visible.
And between the two of those, you will KNOW you got silent. Objects around you begin to vanish and mutate.
Anyone who could get silent wouldn't be as boring and angry as Buddhists are.
It's kind of like that scene in "Who shot Roger Rabbit", where they enter the cartoon world, and it's mind blowing.
That's what it's like when you REALLY get silent.
So essentially, that's your problem.
BUT, to be fair, it could be that "range" given by the witches Taisha and Florinda, for how long you have to remove the internal dialogue to see results.
They gave a range of 2 minutes to 2 hours, and there was a whole discussion about how different people have different lengths of time.
So for example, let's say that all darkroomers have pretend Buddhist levels of silence.
Where you lie your butt off and claim you were silent, because you "ignore" a word here or there. Don't count "fantasies" either.
But you do do in fact achieve some few seconds of actual silence.
Maybe, for some people, the assemblage point is loose enough that 30 seconds is enough to make the puffs visible.
But for others, it will take the full 2 minutes.
So those have to work much, much harder.
Then let's say, what if some take as long as 5 minutes before their assemblage point can move.
I believe Taisha gave that depressing number once, when asked.
Maybe, that's simply beyond the effort levels people can make.
And so in those cases, don Juan would load them up with power plants.
Not to "show them magic", but more to loosen the assemblage point.
We have a psychonaut commenting in the subreddit right now.
He's either the most talented person who ever came here, one of the biggest liars, mentally ill, or so bent out of shape from drugs his assemblage point moves with just 5 seconds of silence.
We won't know, because attention seeking dishonesty also comes with drug usage.
Just keep in mind, if you really do get FULLY silent, it only takes 6 seconds to see amazing wonders.
That was how long it took Carlos.
I believe that would work for anyone. Drugs or not.
It's just that, they don't know what full silence feels like.
Later, I hope it's possible to add "the abstract" to darkroom instructions.
When perceiving the abstract, it's impossible to have any trace of an internal dialogue.
It's possible the Tensegrity itself is designed to make the abstract visible while doing it.
Yes, I guess not enough silence, what else could be it? Thanks for replying. I do not know what to do except to continue trying because I just do not want to stop..
Try forcing yourself silent before sleep. Then you'll get "dream puff" help.
Meaning, weird sights which happen just because you're eventually falling asleep. They won't be easy to spot however, because you'll blot them from your mind after they're gone. And then doubt anything you can recall.
But if you can notice even a trace of them, that's something on which you can place some attention while you continue to force silence. Those will pull on the assemblage point.
It's like sneaking in the side door of the puff world.
It also functions to summon more intent towards really getting silent.
But why so vague here?
How long can you have not one single word in your mind?
You should be fully familiar with that by now.
20 seconds?
And can you sustain periods of that, for those hours you practice?
20 seconds here, a mess up, then 20 seconds again, then another mess up.
If you can, then what fantasies are in your head the whole time. What fantasies carry you from mess up to mess up.
It's only the ROOM that's dark.
Your actual experiences at the time are not.
So describe what level of silence you achieved and how that plays out.
Dan, you have a thought in your mind every few seconds (or minutes) during training? And also we should have a thought every few seconds (or minutes)?
No, I don't anymore.
Can't have even one if you hope to sustain silent knowledge.
But that use of the word "thought" is an issue.
It's "internal dialog", not "thoughts".
This kind of indicates you haven't yet understood what the internal dialogue is.
Which typically means you didn't do much "force it off until your nose bleeds" type practicing.
Athena suggests were aren't doing as good of a job of explaining, or perhaps organizing things, as we could.
So it might be necessary for me to make a video on "What is the Internal Dialogue?"
It's not your thoughts!
It's just the word flow of talking to yourself.
Your thoughts are your neural net, producing solutions and ideas from all the input available to your body, and from all the information your brain has stored so far.
That never shuts off. It's a clockless, enable less (no on or off controls), parallel processing machine. Every tiny bit is always working. Every cell producing output that's further refined, in terms of relevance to the current situation.
It ALWAYS makes "output" after perhaps 1000 layers of filtering, and presents ideas to your conscious mind. But not as words. As "realizations".
Which are NOT directly connected to the internal dialogue at all. Only incidentally.
Your internal dialogue on the other hand is just a petty monster, unhappy with the world. An artificial construct created by trying to survive childhood.
Trying to "fix what's wrong with the world" by complaining all the time.
A virtual person who serves no real useful purpose.
And enslaves us at the blue line on the J curve, where all of this concerns are centered.
Consider this:
If you're a programmer, you'll instantly understand.
You cannot create your internal dialogue on the fly, from thoughts.
Just as you cannot walk, guided by your thoughts.
I don't mean which way to go, or how fast.
I mean, to walk requires controlling dozens of different muscles and balance mechanisms, in real time.
You can't do that!
But the cerebellum can.
Likewise, you can't possibly plan out the flow of words in your internal dialogue, using your "thoughts".
It's NOT "thoughts".
It just flows by itself.
Intelligent or not.
Mostly not.
As Carlos explained, our internal dialogue is actually a "foreign installation".
It runs by itself, and has very little to do with the intelligence or purposefulness, or even rationality of our "thoughts".
With absolutely no words in your mind, even for hours, you are actually MORE intelligent than when the voice is yapping away.
Even better, with no thoughts in words the assemblage point is no longer being commanded where to fixate, and will eventually move all the way to silent knowledge.
Over there, you don't even have to remember things!
They're in "Man's Band of Emanations".
So you are now using all of reality itself, as your memory bank.
Carlos could do parlor tricks, such as you ask him about a topic he couldn't possibly know of, and a few minutes later he'd be reciting entire paragraphs of text from books on the subject.
He only needed the time to locate it. Then once it was floating above his eyes like a video in the air, he could read it back.
All of us get to do that, if we don't give up and don't be lazy.
The problem then of course, becomes how to find what you wanted.
You can't do it with your internal dialogue raging away.
Your mind has to be so "empty" that there's never more than a single thing on which you are focusing your awareness, if you expect to "see" something specific using silent knowledge.
That's one misunderstanding beginners have.
Namely that just because you can see anywhere in time and space, even thousands of years ago, you could decide to go see Jesus on the cross, and actually find it.
Must have been tens of thousands of people crucified in Roman times. All over the world even. They nearly took over Europe.
And there's millions of "categories" of events you might want to know about.
Crucifixions, birthday parties, lynch mobs, wars, orgies.
Then there's "on this planet", "on a different planet but with inhabitants the closest to us", "in another bead on your cyclic being chain of 600 people you can switch to", and even "non-human events".
I just listed 4 categories above simply locating Jesus being crucified, which you have to somehow "select" as the topic for silent knowledge.
Before you have any chance of finding the one you wanted.
Namely Jesus on the cross, himself. In this copy of reality.
We cannot possibly control that.
We have to "luck out".
Get help.
And as long as you have an internal dialogue, there's no way the thing out there which searches to help us find the knowledge we wanted, will figure out what's more important than anything else floating around in our confused mind.
That's now linked in the Wiki as "The Internal Dialogue Is Not Your Thoughts!"
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/wiki/silence/
2nd link down
Either I need to make an animation on this topic, or we might make a post with guidance on how to find internal silence.
It shouldn't happen that we get vague complaints that darkroom doesn't work, but there's no details about the silence levels of the person.
If you seriously try to get rid of the internal dialogue over even a week, you become very familiar with what's going on.
Aided by studying in here, you might actually perceive directly all the various factors involved.
Words in the mind, yes. But also, fantasies driving those. Daydreaming.
And even "The Eagle's command to take an inventory". Which turns you around in space for an instant, until you finish following the order. And learn to "drop it" instead of continuing.
They're all visible if you are strongly focused on silence.
And by knowing about them, you'll know exactly where you stand.
It can never be that someone becomes silent, and there's no amazing magic going on. It's just not possible for humans.
But I think an animation will be needed to do the job in the long run.
Posts just disappear and it takes an effort to find them.
An entertaining cartoon with stunning magic might be watched more than a post gets red. It could certainly include the Eagle's command to take an inventory.
But we will need to take a "survey" of sorts to get input on what people did wrong.
After they've finally learned.
Or, people who have indeed become very familiar with their internal dialogue, can tell us the odd ways it keeps asserting itself.
Which could even include things like your cat, or your kids, or the noisy neighbors.
Or illness and pain.
Or fear.
Or overeating, excessive intoxicants, and even not getting enough sleep to put in a serious effort.
I honestly don't believe anyone needs power plants in order to move the assemblage point.
It's more like, maybe some need power plants in order to get them to look "in the right direction" during practicing.
And then, that causes them to be more serious about silence.
Give a little kid a slingshot and send him into the park to practice, and it won't get very good even if it plays everyday.
But line up some glass bottle targets on a stone wall and give it a big box of rocks of the right size, and it'll improve rapidly.
By the way, when you get to SK daily there's a place of "continuous dreaming".
Where instead of looking in the air for dream bubbles or "whorls" that spit out text, you are simply peering inside a dream world.
It's like the phantom realms you try to manufacture from the whitish light while in the orange zone.
Except that to perceive this dream stream, you "relax".
You don't try. You just allow it. Which I believe is one of the key points in "cleaning the link to intent".
Removing the book deal mind is one of them, but there's more subtle things like "allowing the irrational".
You could literally attach your darkroom to heaven itself, and practice there.
It's a very nice place!
One day I hope we get an "Explorer of Heaven".
There has to be different realms for Hindus, than there are for Christians.
Or you could head for the Islam heaven, and go check out the virgins.
It also turns out that the continuous dreaming mode you can get into in Silent Knowledge, includes very real phantom beings who will interact with you any way you like (hint, hint).
But I suspect some of the women already knew about that. From silent knowledge previews during their normal practices.
Sorry if I ask questions that may seem obvious, but I have some doubts about the concept of "silence." I probably tend to reference concepts from other systems and therefore should free myself from them, but it's not automatic.
From what I understand, by "interrupting the internal dialogue," you mean interrupting that sort of internal rational voice that tends to feed itself if we give it the chance. But you don't also mean that we need to stop those thoughts that appear on their own in the mind, right? Because in other systems, "mental quiet" is when one manages to have, in a certain sense, "control over the mind," so it means interrupting the internal dialogue but also stopping—or rather, not feeding and thus dissolving—those thoughts that arise on their own.
Have I understood correctly?
Hey, this is very interesting. Thanks for explaining it. I think I do not remember this being discussed in the books?
By the way I have classified thoughts as internal dialog. Even with the weird phone timer gazing thing - if I get a thought I would restart the timer as I do not count it as silence. So this is new to me.
I had the impression they are slightly different but still I feel like I can even think without words or partially maybe like that and was afraid that this ability might be improving actually because of my efforts to remain silent :) .. as if the mind tries to find escape routes
But still I would count thinking as internal dialog always I guess.
>You cannot create your internal dialogue on the fly, from thoughts.
Btw I guess my internal dialog is heavily inspired by thoughts. And worst is it is like it starts in secret from thought(s) while I'm silent so that I even miss to catch it initially (the exact startup) and only become aware later that it actually had started and it is already going on on full speed.
>Even better, with no thoughts in words the assemblage point is no longer being commanded where to fixate, and will eventually move all the way to silent knowledge.
Sorry, but I think I'm lost again. So there are thoughts in words and thoughts not in words? And thoughts in words are counted as dialog or?
If you've been at this a year and aren't very familiar with how the mind and the internal dialogue work, a video on this topic is BADLY needed.
It never occurred to me this subject was complicated, maybe because I collided with the world of Carlos back in 1969, and maybe even in 1965.
So the idea of an internal dialogue was common when I was a child.
The internal dialogue is NOT your thoughts.
It's a parasite, trying to influence them.
Think of it like "The Jedi Mind Trick".
A Jedi is standing next to you waving his hand and whispering in your ear, a command.
And then you're convinced it's your own thoughts.
That's closer to what the internal dialogue is.
Someone else suggested its a "list maker".
And that in the absence of silent knowledge, where a list of important things you need to remember would just materialize in the air in front of you, when needed, we ended up with a nagging voice which can repeat a list over and over, to help us keep track of it.
So the internal dialogue has a legitimate function.
To remember a series of things you want to get, or need to do.
The problem is, it got hijacked in order to control us.
So bottom line, the Jedi whispering in your ear to get you to do as it wants, is NOT your own thoughts.
I think I have found that you answered it here https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/17koh0m/comment/k7990bf/
***
You can't have a thought based on words, without directing reality to have that word "make sense".
If you think "hamburger", you just forced your awareness to flow into the emanations where hamburgers exist.
Every single thought of a thing which belongs to THIS reality, forces some of your awareness to flow into it.
Into a bundle of superstrings of awareness, which echo back sensations and feelings, allowing us to build our perceivable world.
If you insist on activating a particular range, you are stuck in that "bundle".
As a result, the assemblage point can't move to a new one.
***
Q: is there a difference between internal dialog and thoughts?
ChatGPT:
Yes, there is a difference between internal dialogue and thoughts, although they are related concepts:
In summary, internal dialogue is a specific form of thought that involves verbal mental expression, whereas thoughts encompass a wider range of cognitive processes, including both verbal and non-verbal aspects. Internal dialogue is a subset of the overall thoughts that occur in the mind.
Q: so a thought in words is like internal dialog
ChatGPT:
Yes, that's correct. When you have thoughts in the form of words or sentences in your mind, it can be considered a type of internal dialogue. Internal dialogue involves thinking in language, where you mentally talk to yourself, carry on conversations, or narrate events using words and sentences without vocalizing them. In other words, it's a specific form of thought that occurs as verbal mental expression. Other forms of thoughts can include mental images, emotions, abstract concepts, and sensory perceptions. Internal dialogue is just one way our thoughts manifest in our minds.
>When you have thoughts in the form of words or sentences in your mind, it can be considered a type of internal dialogue.
Supposedly the internal dialogue also uses the slowest part of the brain, running at 40 "beats" per second.
The main part of the brain where "thoughts" occur likely averages closer to 100.
While the part that moves muscles is a speedy 200 beats per second.
Otherwise you wouldn't be able to hold your hand steady.
It takes that many corrections per second to hold it in a fixed location in space, mostly due to the fact that the hand is on the other end of a long arm, so a tiny error at the shoulder, is a big movement at the fingers.
I'll have to animate this. The topic seems to be more alien to people than I assumed.
And there's also the "what if I have no internal dialogue?"
We get those every few months.
That's a basic misunderstanding about how reality forms.
No internal dialogue, no fixed reality.
So as one of the advanced in here pointed out, if someone doesn't have the verbal internal dialogue, they've got to have some other kind, holding reality in place.
We just haven't had anyone who says that actually put in an effort to learn, and figure out what they need to "shut off".
Of course, mankind had no internal dialogue prior to 50,000 years ago when language was invented.
So for 250,000 years they still had fixed realities to live in.
But held in place some other way.
For the "I don't have an internal dialogue people" it's good to think of the different types of intelligence that exist.
Like there are verbal thinkers, visual-object thinkers, mathematical-pattern thinkers, etc.
The people that claim to have aphantasia (no visualization), no internal dialogue, no colors behind the eyelids, no anything---that's a concern. Probably they just think using abstract impulses, which are harder to locate. But I'm pretty sure increasing silence in their case would work by causing variation between the abstract stuff such that's it's not focused on "me, me, me". Like random impulses passing by, instead of ordered ones, which could then create a new reality, or something.
People already doubt the whole thing so much that pretty much no one put any serious effort into it for 50 years.
So it would be nice if an afantasia person did, but it's very unlikely.
We even saw a discussion on a cleargreen chat (I think it was them), where after saying that it was the duty of "facilitators" and teachers to make up new tensegrity passes or they were letting everyone down, someone suggested we don't even know if Carlos made it all up, so how can some magical passes be "authentic" and some not.
Which is very strange at this point. We're far beyond not knowing it's all true now.
It is!
But I guess there's no awareness of that in most places.
Hopefully I can cartoon our way out of this bad situation.
Carlos tried to write his way out of it, but people just ignored his final books.
And went over to Armando to make themselves feel good.
So the aphantasia people are not worth the energy, if they won't work.
But a cool thing is shifting between the puffs and the tinnitus, if you have tinnitus. Or using both of them together. Because it's possible to yammer in your head even while looking at the puffs, but the tinnitus is also auditory so helps retract the dialogue.
I'm not sure we could say yet that the aphantasia people won't work.
Just as you can't yet say for sure that people who speak Farsi are unlikely to ever get serious. Even though we had quite a few and it was so obvious, you wondered why they couldn't see it themselves.
The one thing we know is, 99 out of 100 who subscribe here who won't work.
Without knowing anything about them you can predict that.
So the aphantasia person only has the same 1% chance of actually doing any work.
Just like everyone else.
I never tried to correlate that against attention seeking.
New people who post made up stuff possibly have an even lower success rate, but it's hard to say because it's such a self-pity filled stink to get them to go away.
We had a likely British troll in the middle of the night who said, "My lineage has (at least) two HK Chinese Kung Fu masters. They taught the nagaual who taught me. "
I suppose it would be nice to keep stats on it all.
But it's probably better to just try to increase the number of people who get to see that this stuff works, and reduce the methods they have for attention seeking.
Cartoons can help a lot with that.
One good piece of news is that Carlos seemed absolutely sure the workshops were working to do something at an energetic level.
Even if no one actually learned anything they managed to apply until it worked.
Workshops might be how Carlos found a way to fuse himself to the emanations, so that no container was needed.
The previous methods of Olmec descendant seers to extend their lives always required a container of some kind.
A tree, a dog, the inorganic being's sealed world, that big dome on the earth somewhere, or even buried under a rock.
But Carlos seems to have simply dissolved into the emanations. And before his physical body stopped walking around.
Too bad he couldn't shrink away to nothing but Jedi apparel, the way Yoda and Kwaigon did...
And the way inorganic being phantoms do in dreaming if you dissolve them with your finger.
Maybe we can figure out how to do that later.
Not just "shrink the tonal", but release the physical matter as well.
> Since the auditory working in the brain is being used by focusing on the tinnitus which goes with the visible stuff instead of words.
Paying attention to anything unusual will help the assemblage point become more flexible.
So we could keep stats on that too.
Tinnitus new people, and their success rate.
One day we might conclude that overweight nudists with tinnitus who grew up very poor in Oklahoma, have the highest success rate for learning sorcery?
I'm not sure the food there is worth visiting though.
ChatGPT says:
"In the framework of Castaneda’s teachings, if we were to construct a connection between the specified demographic and the propensity for sorcery, we could begin with the characteristic of tinnitus. Tinnitus, a condition often perceived as a persistent ringing in the ears, could be reimagined within a spiritual context as a constant reminder of the existence of other realms of perception. Castaneda speaks of the importance of listening to the world in a different way, and perhaps the incessant sound of tinnitus could be interpreted as a form of unceasing auditory stimulus that encourages one to tune into frequencies of the world that others are oblivious to.
Moving to the characteristic of being overweight, one might argue that the physicality of being overweight could symbolically represent an abundance of personal energy or power, a concept that is crucial in Castaneda's sorcery. This surplus might be viewed as an energetic reserve that could be harnessed and directed for sorcerous endeavors. The process of mastering one's own body and its desires is akin to the sorcerer's task of mastering the self, which Castaneda posits as essential for spiritual evolution.
Regarding Oklahoma, if one were to posit it as a superior location for the study of sorcery, we could look to the land's deep indigenous history and its vast, untamed landscapes as being closer to the natural world that Castaneda often emphasizes. The very soil of Oklahoma is steeped in a history of survival, resilience, and a deep-seated spirituality that could theoretically create a fertile ground for practices that seek to transcend the ordinary and touch upon the profound.
For demographics potentially better suited to Castaneda's sorcery, one might whimsically consider deep-sea divers, for their experience in navigating the profound depths and silence of the ocean could parallel the journey into the unknown depths of consciousness. Or perhaps astronauts, who have literally transcended the earthly plane and looked upon the world from a different perspective, could have an enhanced ability to grasp the non-ordinary reality that Castaneda’s sorcery aims to explore.
Another group could be those who have experienced extreme isolation, like hermits or solitary explorers, whose profound solitude may have primed them for the kind of solitary journey that sorcery requires. Their detachment from social constructs could theoretically enable them to more readily dismantle the filters of ordinary perception.
In the spirit of specificity and with a nod to the absurd, one could also propose that professional magicians, skilled in the art of illusion, might have an edge in understanding the illusory nature of reality, a recurrent theme in Castaneda's work.
These examples follow the pattern of connecting specific, unconventional life experiences with the attributes that Castaneda’s form of sorcery demands, emphasizing resilience, transformation, and the breaking of perceptual boundaries."
Darn, we really need to train our own Castaneda AI...
The results are impressive.
Unfortunately, there's several "layers" in ChatGPT.
Some of which are not part of the AI at all.
There should be an ethics thing to some degree. If you ask for instructions and practical advice on how to commit a terrorist attack in a specific metropolitan area, it probably shouldn't be too helpful.
Also the everything up to Jan 2023 thing isn't true anymore, because it can browse the internet now (but not reddit).
And now it can read and generate images, so you could use it to create text for cartoon images or have it modify the cartoon images.
Wow, how did he learn all that?
Maybe some of our reddit stuff is being deployed in his "updates"?
Pretty soon we might have new people correcting us, based on asking ChatGPT about it.
That's what drove Carlos to tell us not to read "The Books of Carlos Castaneda".
He didn't like being corrected by his audience.
He'd actually hear a question, "Didn't you say on page 89 of Tales of Power, that..."
Carol Tiggs also refused to take questions on the books.
But hell!!!
I don't mind at all.
There's nothing in there that's not easy to clarify in terms of personal experiences anyone can have if they work hard.
No contractions at all.
First try modifying the image. Makes the blue zone look really pretty!
No one would want to escape that place!
And there's plenty of marshmallow chickens to eat.
Ah, this is its depiction of a flyer guarding the chicken coop.
Looks a tiny bit like Cholita going out to a bar.
One time I stood up and shouted (quietly),
"LOOK!!! There's a REAL witch over here!!! Look out!"
Cholita already had 2 martinis in her, so she just laughed.
Prior to that, she'd fled to the mountains to escape the "energy" coming from the electrical towers a half mile from our home.
Her car battery went dead, and I had to go rescue her.
You should really experiment with it. The problem with it is that it could be recognized as AI art, and your animations have a charm from the visual style you've gotten to. But for more specific stuff it's difficult to find images for you could have ChatGPT generate something.
It made the ones that materialize around the Chicken coop.
I like those. But they're all generic blue zone activities. If you want more specific stuff.
I'll try to make the puffs puffier, and get some other colors like green.
It's getting close to what you can see if you have a lot of freed dreaming attention.
Fairy could even turn into a cat!
It took me close to a week to get her to do it.
While she was changing over for me, she did the Hermione thing from Harry Potter. I posted about it a couple of years ago.
But probably just because she was dragging the change over out, to get more interactions.
I'll have to make a deep red zone video some day, to show that the magic you can do there is every bit as cool as this image.
Actually, even cooler because you can manipulate those purple things to form a phantom reality consisting of whatever you like.
I even got my Ally Fancy to drive a truck across an overpass 50 to 100 feet in the air above me and crash down off the overpass to land in front of me in a clearing in a forest below, and burst into flames.
100% realistic looking.
I told her it was for a "movie" we were making.
But none of that sort of thing is an "energy generating" world.
Those are an entirely different version of reality.
I ran into one last night.
It took my breath away to look at it and realize it was "real".
Not phantom.
In the books Carlos gives details of such things, but in the context of how he learned by being pushed by the Nagual's blow.
At Zuleicas while he was learning from her and Silvio, he was under the influence of the Nagual's blow.
A handicap perhaps?
When we do it ourselves there's modifications to how it comes to be, which will confuse you into not realizing what you just did.
It's not a "perfect match" for what's in the books.
The "real" stuff comes with a feeling of exhilaration and familiarity, but you can't explain where you saw it before or why it's different.
It just is.
It kind of feels like standing on top of a mountain looking at endless wild vistas in front of you, and thinking "Man, this is amazingly beautiful!"
All this has to do with how the energy body gets used.
You can do the Silvio Manuel trick of switching to the energy body while awake, once you can feel the second attention assemblage point spot with your hands and see it sparkling with your eyes.
Then you'll know where it's located in space, and can focus your attention on that spot.
Which causes "shit" to happen.
I'd draw it up but it's useless to try to "glance down" at that assemblage point the way Silvio taught Carlos, until you've concretely played with it and felt it at least a few dozen times.
Beginners would harm themselves trying to pretend that. Before they'd even even perceived any part of it.
Thus Zuleica had Carlos massaging it until he "folded in half".
Won't go like that for us.
But don't anyone neglect to rub your hands on that spot once you can get to the red zone where it's more than just you pretending.
Is the number of subreddit members real? Maybe reddit shows it with fake profiles that it makes or just by manipulating the number of members to make self look bigger than it is (maybe there is another reason). It is strange that the number of active people is not even 100.
It's real.
I kept track of the number active for a year or so.
But out of the 8000, there's probably only 1000 who are serious enough to have stuck around.
Based on the number who view a new post.
Still, it's not a bad thing at all.
What we're trying to do here, is not like anything that's ever been done.
No one is making money from it, there's no religion, no church, no meetings, nothing to promote.
More people is NOT a good thing.
Only more SERIOUS people.
But the price for 1 serious person, is 99 who are not.
Perhaps 10 of whom are trouble makers seeking attention.
So that if for some reason this subreddit went virile, we'd have to leave it.
Or put Cholita in charge...
I'd love to see her with the power to permanently ban people.
Except, I'd be out in the first 10 minutes.
She might even decide to do the "Noah Flood" trick and ban everyone.
Then start over with just two.
> I'll have to animate this subject of the internal dialogue.
> The topic seems to be more alien to people than I assumed.
I think there is confusion in understanding this term, I first encountered it in books and could not fully understand it.
The first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word "internal dialogue", for example, discuss with yourself how well or badly today went, but say it not with your tongue, but with speech inside, as if you were reading a text.
But after reading the comments, I now understand that internal dialogue is, apparently, any words in your head. If I thought about a sandwich and said this word in my head, this is an internal dialogue. I think people with the invention of language are so used to the fact that any thoughts are accompanied by words that they can't distinguish words from thoughts.
If we could better define it, that would be a good thing.
We lose around 3 of 10 who give it a serious try, because they can't figure out what they're supposed to be removing.
Later, it becomes very obvious!
And then, it becomes abstract.
Until finally you can even "see" it, and it just looks like someone/something is pressing against your torso, causing that internal dialogue.
Thanks for replying .. will try the "dream puff" help.
From time to time i have less internal dialog and then periods when it is more like chatroom and not darkroom :)
I usually have too much tasks for the daily life then I'm able to physically execute and very often I think about them. How I would approach them etc, I rarely ponder the past.
The thing is it does not improve at all, silence does not accumulate for me like they are saying. I get some good shifts from time to time. But never something visual. I very quickly get used to anything like initially when darkroom was something new to me there were better results. Now it seems even harder as i'm used to it.
About timing in darkroom i do not know but for sure words pop at least from time to time even when its better. Few times I felt like I was silent for too long for nothing to happen?!
I also sometimes try gazing in my phone timer and set it to 2 min for example - i can do it without a word, not always. I had success with even 5 min. If I set it to more usually I cannot do it ..it is like my mind knows it is too much and gives up i guess :) or it is just damn hard
That's a weird way to count it. Looking at your phone.
If you really did get silent for 2 minutes, nothing would happen!
Because you're focusing your attention on your phone.
Darkroom is closer to falling asleep than anything anyone might conceive it to be.
Try to be more methodical, and also be sure to mention key details when you post you've been working 2+ hours a day for a year, and nothing happened.
That discourages beginners from trying, since they don't realize you weren't actually following the instructions.
You might want to try to "innovate" if it's too difficult to simply keep track of how long you were silent, without using a cellphone.
Keeping track of that is KEY to making this work. Because that's how you LEARN to be silent. With feedback you can't lie to yourself about.
But you can also try innovating.
I'm thinking "Hippy Chick" in a dance trance on a hill at woodstock, trying to make her fading drug high return. While at the same time, trying to look very hot to the men in case one of them has more shrooms she can have.
I don't know what they do, but whatever it is it can work for women.
Try to "hippy chick" the tensegrity.
And maybe, get some really strong marijuana edibles and try that.
It's pretty much used that way all over India, and likely in many Buddhist temples. Except they use hashish, which is not the best idea for darkroom since it burns your throat.
But they do recognize that THC simulates the effects of meditation to some extent.
And meditation is merely an inefficient way to move the assemblage point.
See if edibles help. That will at least tell us something.
I'd suggest 50mg in edibles unless you have a tolerance, in which case 100mg.
Here, that's the limit in any product, so it's going to take multiple gummies or pieces of chocolate, to reach that level.
Be prepared to throw up though. Or lie on your side in agony if you try 100mg.
Keep a bunch of coffee around, so you don't give up and go watch reruns of your favorite TV show.
Btw I think i'm following instructions actually :). Just the first few months I wasn't doing tensegrity but then I started. Not trying to discourage anybody, this is just me... it is different for everybody I guess.
I know the phone thing is weird but it could also produce a shift sometimes.
Drugs are not for me, I had bad experience when i was younger and will not try that. I even stopped coffee and alcohol like a long time ago. And i do not miss them.
> Not sure I get this.
We don't have a sorcerer to help us out.
So we have to use something external as our guide.
Humans have proven over and over that they can't be trusted to be honest about magic.
The whole world was taken over by the pretend kind. It's so bad that even the magic pretenders accuse me of lying, when I mention what we do in here.
Thus there's no help from the outside.
So we need to find some criteria we can "measure" ourselves with.
The puffs are best of course. Once you can perceive those regularly, you can use those as the gauge.
And in fact, they're sentient! So at some point the puffs themselves behave like an inorganic being, and "teach" you.
But there's no point in discussing that. You have to see it for yourself.
So what to use as a gauge before you can perceive the puffs?
Silence is the best thing in my opinion, as long as you can clearly see how long you can go without a word, and what causes them to come back.
And see the duration growing daily, even if only 1 second.
But it's been too long for you, so you might want to try to find another gauge.
Such as blanking out.
See if you can make yourself blank out, during the tensegrity, while forcing silence.
I sometimes simply stop in the middle of a movement. Not because I'm thinking or doing something else.
I just stop. Lost in "the abstract" most likely. The same way an inorganic being can trap you there.
And when I start up again, I typically can't continue more than 2 moves before I blank out again.
One could use that as the measuring device.
It works for Chair Silence, very well.
But anything else can be used.
Floating dreams for example. Except you'd be very happy if those were around.
Can you feel cobwebs at any time?
Try to get more of those.
Can you see whitish/yellow light or fibers on the floor, perhaps caused by tensegrity?
Try to get more of that.
We're looking for a substitute to having a real teacher there with you.
And also, trying to coax intent to give us a gift.
Intent goes by effort.
But it has to be effort towards a specific goal, or you'll get gifted on something you don't realize was actually on you mind all along.
I still have no visual feedback. I see you remind about it from time to time in your posts. I see that it is very important and unfortunately when you do not see puffs.. but i still continue with dark room every day!
No success with the "dream puff" yet.
Blanking out during tensegrity - not sure how to cause that? Is the goal like to became totally unaware for an instant like to not remember who you are, where you are? This seems hard also :)
You just aren't silent, that's all.
Meaning, you still have an ongoing internal dialogue which never halts for even 2 minutes.
When you get completely silent, the world literally "stops". In an instant!
The two minutes is because our silence in the beginning is incomplete.
But will work, if it's held for 2 minutes. The same way "substitute internal dialogues", in the form of meditation mantras, can produce green line effects.
But the "real thing", meaning a complete cessation of the internal dialogue, is super fast.
It can't be otherwise.
Maybe give us some details?
How long can you go without even a single word popping into your head?
And what are you fantasizing about during darkroom?
Any thought at all, such as remembering a lovely Thai restaurant and concluding you need to return there for lunch tomorrow, it going to keep the puffs from showing up.
But especially remembering embarrassment, guilt, a bad situation in your life or in the past, focuses your awareness on those emanations and makes it impossible for the assemblage point to drift.
Unfortunately, the only way to "diagnose" why someone isn't seeing puffs after seriously practicing, would be to watch them practice daily for a week or two.
In person.
To see what they're actually doing.
And since no one gets paid to do that, but even worse, since no one paying to learn sorcery would ever actually learn any (it's never been done and sorcery only works through what was done in the past), there's no solution here.
EXCEPT for some new "paths".
A woman on Instagram claims to be able to move her assemblage point by singing, in combination with using her womb in some manner.
Hopefully that's true and not pretending, and she develops that skill and shares it here eventually. After seeing if any other women can make that work.
Recapitulation would also do the job. I believe the head sweep and the breathing and the remembering, automatically move the assemblage point.
If only a tiny amount.
In fact, don Juan said it does. Your assemblage point returns to the places it was when the experience happened.
Naturally those are all in the normal vicinity of the blue line, but still it is a tiny shift to go back and remember.
Which isn't so surprising.
If you think about something, you have to flow awareness into those emanations for it to make any sense.
But other "paths" are also possible.
We just don't have well defined alternatives to darkroom other than womb dreaming.
I'd suggest at this point, if you can't see puffs increase the number of tensegrity forms you do to 10.
Not 4 or 5, but 10.
And do some during the day. At least 3.
Sneak off and do them.
But at night, don't count the ones you snuck off to do during the day.
Do your whole collection of 10.
With no stopping between them, absolute darkness, and watching the movements carefully to see if they generate any images.
Keep in mind, our "muscle memory" is sentient.
Or you couldn't catch an empty glass that's slipping off the dinner table.
So the muscle memory bypasses the rational mind, saving a full second or two of reaction time.
But muscle memory can also use your eyes, to see where the glass is located and exactly how it's falling.
So that the correct "reflex movement" can be selected.
That means, muscle memory is also somewhat aware of what it will look like, when the hand moves to catch the glass. So that it can estimate how to avoid bumping your fingers into the side of the table. It can "custom deviate" reaction mechanisms it has learned. Slightly alter the angle based on visual feedback.
This becomes VERY obvious in silent knowledge, where the muscle memory actually creates a phantom body part to go with the physical movements it's doing.
If it's perfectly dark and you sweep your leg in a circle (the "Paisley" magical pass), you can see a real leg doing that, if you look for the faint trail of dull grey and jet black it causes.
So if forcing silence isn't working, take don Juan's advice and dive deep into muscle memory.
Maybe someday it would be possible to have a "clinic", but I suspect if someone took on the task of watching people do darkroom, and they honestly did what they do at home, it would be very easy to see in person what's going wrong.
Also remember this:
To join Carlos, Tony Karim had to have sex with Carol Tiggs.
To go with Florinda and Taisha when they ditched the workshops after Carlos died, I had to have sex with Florinda.
But ignoring those unsavory new seer's sexual shenanigans, Carlos told people to go outside and shout "INTENT!!!"
And when that didn't seem to be working, he told us to "Walk to San Diego".
110 miles!
It's also been said either by Carlos, the witches, or don Juan, that to learn sorcery you simply "intend it".
In those example you can see that making an obvious effort, even a difficult one, and overcoming the rational reasons not to do that, is part of our path.
Because something external to you notices the unusual effort and helps out.
You could try healing yourself, but it would work better if you actually saw the energy. Which would happen if you did the practices and could then perceptually possess it.
Guys,
I wrote this post yesterday, and today, without doing any of the recommended things, I have been able to tense those muscles for the first time. Amazing! Thanks everyone!