Hey, im from Brazil and been reading castaneda's books for 8 months plus or less, my first contact with the books was from my father who is a practitioner for 20 y+, in these 8 months my first experience was when i was having a dream and suddently woke up during the night and i dont know why but in the moment it was like i wasnt even thinking, i just felt that i was going to be able to wake in the dream at that exact moment, i closed my eyes and immediatly entered the nawal already lucid, my first instinct was to look at my hands and as already said to me, after a few seconds they started changing forms, i quickly tried to look away to something around me, i was at a train station and there was a Guy with a dog in the leash and after a few seconds the around of my vision started to turn pink kinda like a vignette and a lot of flashs started to go on very quicly, the dog on the leash turned into a pig with a cartoonish smoke around it and i lost consciouness, i didnt wake up i just lost consciouness. After that experience i wasnt able to wake up while dreaming again, but at that time i wasnt trying to cultivate my energy, so thats why i think it was so short. For the last 2 months i started to take it more seriously and cultivate my energy, it turned into a priority in my life, i've been trying to stop my internal dialogue with the technic that dan mentioned in one of his posts where you shut it down but when i try to do it i feel like i can only do it while i stop my breath at the same time? I try to do it all day but its like when i stop my dialogue it kinda comes back by me noticing that i stopped it and saying like, i just did it or i am silent rn, it has helped me trying to do as dom juan said in tales of power and unfocusing my vision while taking long walks i feel like this helped a lot more but i still has this feeling where i notice my silence and ruins it. Also been doing dark Room, started 3 days ago doing 3 hours per night, didnt see any energy puffs by now but gonna keep doing it and magical passes of the dream series that dan posted here since my dad doesnt want me to read magical passes right now because im reading the books in the order he tells me to, but i've done magical passes with him since a kid without knowing what it was. Last night after doing magical passes i went to sleep and tried to stay up all i could and relax my body entirely while trying to stop my internal dialogue and for the first time after doing it i felt as my body was falling while spinning a lot, kinda like a freefall and dont know what was that. Apreciatte any help a lot and sorry if my english is bad, its not my primary language, thanks.
31 Comments
If you're a guy, forget about lucid dreams. It's mostly impossible for us to learn sorcery that way.
Being asleep drastically reduces your chances of learning to get silent.
You only give it a try each time you wake up at night. And you're mostly clumsy and sleepy.
We instead want to be agile and awake!
And since we never get really silent by doing lucid dreams, we end up confusing the content of the dreams with actual magic experiences.
Darkrooming is superior in many senses. Like being able to move and keep the body in perfect shape. And seeing the second attention directly in the air.
You can keep lucid dreaming, but only when you intercept a dream in the air while awake, you understand the nature of them.
The second attention is immense. It's not worth getting lost in its eccentricities.
Is there any problem for me doing magical passes or recaptulation while in the dark room? Or should i just be still and trying to be silent?
Yes, you should do both!
The truth is we are in so bad shape, it could take us a entire week of practice to get better and find the purple puffs.
There is so much stuff contaminating our normal perception wich we usually ignore, but moving the assemblage point requires paying attention and fixing it.
Magical Passes and Recapitulation are really helpful practices for that purpouse, and in fact Carlos adviced both of them all the time.
I don't stay still for longer than 30 minutes anymore in my practice. I used to stay sitted most of the time, but moving around has shown to be much more effective.
BUT the most important part is to get silent. Absolutely no internal dialogue.
If you actually do that, sorcery will work even if you are still, not doing magical passes or recapping.
Except no one learns that way.
Is there any series of magical passes that would be better to do during dark room than the dreaming one? Its the one i do the most while in dark room
Every official magical pass is good for darkrooming.
I find it easier to learn them from the videos. In Youtube there are enough to get started.
I see, thanks for the answer
Could you edit the post to add paragraphs and spaces to make it easier to read?
Sure, sorry
"Don Juan had asserted time and time again that the essential feature of his sorcery was shutting off the internal dialogue. In terms of the explanation la Gorda had given me about the two realms of attention, stopping the internal dialogue was an operational way of describing the act of disengaging the attention of the tonal."
Any silence technique that stops your internal dialogue is worth it! In my case, it took almost a year of focused effort on that alone, and I am fundamentally transformed. When I found this subreddit and discord, I made the decision to try tensegrity in darkroom, it took me about a month to set foot in it after making the decision (I'm not exactly sure what my hangup was), but right away (less than four minutes) I had a full experience deep in the green zone.
Keep intending silence!
What technique you use for silence?
I mostly used "the right way of walking", but eventually it becomes second nature.
What is the second nature?
If something is second nature to you, you are so familiar with it that you can do it easily without needing to think very much about it.
uma coisa instintiva
Oh i see, didnt know it was called second nature in english, thanks for the help
I don't understand this logic of father and son practice, because the father will need to get his edge back and be complete so he can achieve the totality of himself in order to reach total freedom.
The son will need to keep his in order to reach the same goal, only one of them will be able to be complete energetically.
I guess you skipped that chapter on The Second Ring of Power.
Do you know what chapter is that?
All in One PDF
The Second Ring of Power
Page 44
Page 55 (when Carlos and La Gorda enter the cave)
Page 62
Page 73
Page 111
Page 113
I will take a look, thanks
You should post the quotes, but in any case, it seems one of those stories told with specific purpouses of teaching, and not relevant to confuse beginners over here.
Carlos always either laughed disdainfully, or smirked quietly, when someone mentioned "lucid dreaming" or claimed that their dreaming was a path to sorcery knowledge.
It never is.
The witches Taisha and Florinda felt the same way, and always lowered their head a bit when someone started to talk about lucid dreaming. Knowing it was going to be nothing but temper tantrums from this point forward, as they tried to lie about making magical progress.
Lucid dreaming "could be" a path to sorcery, as Juann implied.
But never will be.
Because it's fraught with making up stuff to get attention, and in lucid dreaming you are only 1/1000th lucid, as compared to waking dreaming where you are at least 75% lucid.
This is all about mixing your tonal awareness with that of our Nagual, and using them in that combined form, to explore alternate realities.
Lucid dreaming is about attention seeking, and pretending any dream you can remember is a "success".
The goal if you want to enter dreams as a technique is to do it fully awake, and leap into "videos in the air" which materialize as a result of viewing the dark sea of the emanations, without any thoughts at all in your mind, to alter what is transmitted back to you.
It's about our relationship to reality itself! As a participant, which is where we're trapped right now, or as a spectator who is learning every detail of how it works, without being involved in it themselves.
In intermediate states of "Silent Knowledge", you are both outside the dream you are watching, with your eyes wide open and fully awake, but also inside the dream, getting a closer look. Or even touching the objects of the dream to get more information about them.
Lucid dreaming sinks you deeply into the world of sleeping dreams, and makes it even less "integrated" with your waking world because your dreamer just goes further and further away from your physical body.
Waking dreaming (such as "Darkroom") merges your dreaming body with your waking body so that it's visible as puffs of brilliant purple clinging to your torso, giving you rapid access to dreaming realms in your physical body.
No lucid dreamer even dares to think about such possibilities. In fact, they get very angry if you even mention them.
But what about doing the gates of dreaming? Should i try to progress them in the darkroom?
Those are NOT a pleasant path to take. I can't imagine anyone enjoying that as a beginner's path. Might even lead to suicidal tendencies.
What you're talking about is PRETENDING to be following that path, while COMPLETELY ignoring the instructions.
So that you can misrepresent ordinary dreams as progress, to get attention with people.
4 gates dreaming is INEVITABLE once you reach Silent Knowledge, because you can walk right into a sleeping dream, directly from awake.
thus "the third gate".
Which can ONLY be reached when you ahve silence levels hight enough to go directly into the dream, without going to sleep.
Thus "the twin positions" technique.
But at the second gate you MUST go to the inorganic being's world, FOR REAL, and perhaps 100 times or more before you can pass that gate, learing from them each visit. They do in fact teach so fast that it's frustrating and impossible to remember it all.
NO ONE every does those two. They just lie and say it happened once, and then claim they passed that gate.
Even worse, NO ONE finds their hands each time.
At the first gate.
That is MANDITORY in order to merge your tonal "reason and purpose" with the double's supernatural powers of dream exploration.
So people don't even do 4 gates dreaming at all.
They just lie.
Finding your hands every night, is next to impossible.
I managed to do that, and even as many as 6 times in a single night, but only because I put in an extraordinary effort.
Besides, darkroom allows you to pass all 4 gates, while awake!
If you give it a serious try, I'll point out when you passed one.
It's kind of obvious, but people never seem to notice.
I made a picture of the dreaming emissary teaching me in her realm, but while I was awake.
She taught me dozens of times like that, before I moved beyond that assemblage point position.
By the way, they take on whatever form they believe keeps your interest best.
That's "Fancy", my untamed Ally from childhood.
Not particularly "nice" like Little Smoke, but a very good teacher.
I see, will try and progress more on dark room from now on.
Any tips on how i can try to stop "ruining" my silence by noticing it?
And can tobacco be bad for my learning? What about marijuana? I've heard that they can kinda "lock" your AP in place ig you smoke a lot or make it harder to loosen it, is it true?
Tobacco is one of the things which actually helps darkroom.
Marijuana is neutral. Might help get to the green zone, but it pulls you back slightly from the red.
And no, it's not true that they lock your assemblage point in place. Whoever is saying that, is a pretender.
But if you use it too much, you'll have doubts about the magic you manage to do.
And the magic is always more vivid, if you avoid marijuana.
Also, marijuana makes it very hard to get up to practice, in the middle of the night.
The best time for it.
How can tobacco help me?
And what about me noticing my internal dialogue, i never seen anyone talking about that.
Try some nicotine gum before darkroom practice.
But it's not any help once you get past the red zone at the bottom.
And insignificant compared to being very sincere and regular, in your practice.
As for what no one ever talks about, "you noticing your internal dialogue" is what "darkroom" practice is all about.
There's not much we can say, except that you have to have absolutely no words, not a single one, in your internal dialogue while practicing darkroom, for at least 2 minutes before you should expect your assemblage point to move.
And you MUST find some puffs or glowing colors, to get it to move further than just enough to see them.
You use the second attention sights (the puffs of color) to pull your assemblage point down your back.
But if you have an internal dialogue going on, that prevents it.
Because each word focuses your "attention" on this reality.
You need to let go of it.
The way we can tell when a new person is never going to learn, is that they don't quickly know precisely how long they can go without words.
Or if they say, "10 minutes".
Or even "3 hours" as one guy claimed yesterday or the day before!
No beginner is likely to go longer than 10 seconds, and most can only 2 seconds.
If you don't know how long you can go after the first practice session, you're doing it wrong.
You can find out right now. Get the second hand on a clock, let it go to the top, and then see how far it goes, before a word pops into your mind.
2 seconds is my bet.
Lol, the max i've done while dark rooming or during the day was less than 10 seconds, in talking about my record, normally i cant go more than 2 or 3 seconds.
What i can't understand is how i can have absolute zero words in my head if all i can do is 5 seconds max and they come back, and that is when i use a technique i found that helps me more where i cut the word going on in my head in the middle and stop my breath at the same time, but when inhale again it comes back.
Will i be able to see energy puffs with that much silence? And if i do, what should i do after they pop up?
When you notice your thoughts/fantasising coming back you just stop them. And continue to force silence. Again and again. That's it for all of us. Silence is gained through continuous practice.
With continuous practice you gain more seconds of silence and you just progress with it.
You'll see how this applies in action as you do it in Darkroom and in your daily life.
Yeah, not that I disagree of course, but by the time i notice that it had actually started, it might have been going on already for a long time. How do you shorten that time (of noticing it fast enough)?
And at one hand I know there is nothing that we can say about it but on the other hand I guess that is the only thing we have here to share... just a few written words..
I think I still do not try to force silence during the day and I noticed that it might be not appropriate when you go to a party for example, at least not when almost everyone knows you :D
With practice and becoming aware of yourself often within the day. Do a check in on yourself often. And actually intending it.
Silence is better to be done all day. It's a matter of practicing. Is like training a muscle to lift with progressive overload. You wont lift the same at the first week as you will after 7 months of lifting.
I understand everyone goes by their days and such, so is better to do your work and chores forcing silence. They get better and easier to do.
Since you saw where silence is not appropriate for you, don't do it there!
As Athina just told you, sorcery takes a lot of patience.
It's real.
Unlike other magical systems which are pretending. So that the kind of concerns you have, are valid in those. Where you can just redefine things, to claim victory.
Not so if you are after the real thing.
And you don't need more instructions, just more time doing it.