Can this book be read as a stand alone? I just happened to come into possession of this book and am very intrigued by it. I would like to start reading it before I decide whether or not to seek out other books in the series.
Can this book be read as a stand alone? I just happened to come into possession of this book and am very intrigued by it. I would like to start reading it before I decide whether or not to seek out other books in the series.
41 Comments
You can, it narrates some of the same events on the previous 2 books but from another perspective.
No, I would read them all.... from the beginning. It will make you a ride,,, maybe.
Of course, then read tales of power, the continuation of that book and the big revelation about the sorcerer's explanation. Then read The eagles gift and the fire from within. This is where it gets real deep. Of course you will end up reading all of them and several times!
This is one the first Castaneda's book I read and truly enjoyed it.
This was my first Castaneda book to read. It can be a challenging read for the first hundred pages, but by the end it’s incredibly powerful journey. It took me 3-4 tries to start it and get through that beginning to actually get engaged in it.
Having subsequently read some of the others, I’m happy I started with this one. I feel that they all tell similar stories, but from different perspectives.
you can find all the books compiled into an all-in-one-pdf here in the sub under Resources / Booklist & Media.
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/wiki/booklist
Since that book is 90% a trick, you'll get the wrong impression about our sorcery.
That's not the real thing. It's just what Carlos asked don Juan to teach him.
He was rejected out at Morongo Reservation when he approached the shamans there, as what was likely his first stop.
They were already working with UCR, with Carlos being from UCLA.
So Ruby sent him eastward.
Where he found don Juan.
Carlos wanted someone to be his genuine Native American Indian informant on the use of power plants, so he could use it for his PhD. It was a very trendy thing to do at the time. Ground breaking even.
And don Juan had to keep him around at all costs, due to him being a double being.
So that he could teach him in secret, in another state of awareness Carlos was incapable of remembering.
Which may sound fishy, but we do that all night long, everyday!
That state really does exist, and has been verified by man in here.
That's often how sorcery is taught. Outside the apprentices ability to remember. So that they rapidly progress by going directly to the heart of magic. "Seeing".
The whole "Man of Knowledge" nonsense was just to get Carlos to come back, and to keep him entertained.
Those guys did in fact exist, but they were such pests that the Olmec government required them to get licenses. To protect people from scammers most likely.
But we're not "men of knowledge". In fact, those were the bad guys. The enemies, perhaps, of actual seers, which is what don Juan was.
It's roughly like Journey to Ixtlan teaches Carlos to be a Mandalorian.
But in fact, don Juan was a Jedi.
People who fixate on the first 3 books never learn anything real, because the Men of KNowledge were in to show biz, being profiteers, so the fans of the first 3 books tend to put on a Rambo headband, and try to figure out how to steal money from our community. Often using drugs, which damage the users so much, eventually it's impossible they will ever learn any sorcery. Even if they become serious.
So read all of them.
However, naturally Journey to Ixtlan is almost everyone's favorite.
Oliver Stone even named his movie production company after it.
Keep in mind, Genaro in there is not actually the physical copy of Genaro!
It's his double, come out of the dream world and into ours, so that Carlos would be hanging out with the impossible even when he was learning at his ordinary state of awareness.
So don't be too impressed by Genaros ability to defy the laws of physics.
A witch from Carlos' private classes named Cholita can do that!
But she also clogs up our bathroom drains by stuffing socks down them and then insists I have to call a plumber.
And don't fall for Genaro's sob story about "spinning with the Ally".
We have a few dozen who did that in here, without getting all melancholy over it.
What can you tell me about power of the silence?
Not much. Carlos told me to stop reading his books.
However, if you learn to be silent you can surely do everything in that book, even the stuff which seems completely crazy and impossible.
Maybe look at this J curve map. Silence activities are over on the far left, near the purple station along the tracks.
Buddhism and Yogis are at the upper right, barely out the starting gate. They pretty much never get far below that.
Many in here have made it to that red station, and some beyond into the orange zone.
If you have real knowledge of reality, what we do in here is "obvious" and pretty simple to understand.
But I go around trying to interest others, and can tell you with authority, an "enlightened Zen Master", a genuine one will say, "You lie sir" on being told what's possible.
They have absolutely no idea humans are that powerful.
Yogis might claim to be able to do what we do.
But...
They do it with their eyes closed!!!
That ought to tell you how trustworthy they are for what they "can do".
Other systems are dominated by pretty much nothing but pretending, with some minor meditative effects to confuse them into believing it's real.
With the power of silence, you end up doing things which can't possibly be explained.
Like walk through solid walls.
Wow I'm truly fascinated by all of your information, I have so many questions but tried to reduce them, firstly, can you tell me what your ultimate goal of this practice is? To preserve your awareness past the eagle?
Secondly, I'm both in awe and resistant to the link to your image/ J curve map. Something about telling someone that there is only one true path and all others are wrong sprung up my defenses, I know that you are not proselytizing and do not need my approval nor agreement, I just wanted to interact with how you got to your beliefs and to try to learn from it.
It's been years but I have read through Eagle's gift but not Fire within nor power of silence.
Magic.
If you have the goal to preserve your awareness past the Eagle, that's a religious sort of concept and you'll get lazy when you figure out it's no fun shutting off the internal dialogue.
And some Jehovah's witness will come to your door, promise you easy eternal life, and convert you.
It's not a goal that's compatible with actually learning real magic.
Of course later on when you reach silent knowledge, you can actually learn to see death, and figure out your options by direct observation.
Carlos didn't go to live with the inorganic beings, the way Julian did. Even though his allies tried to kidnap (save) him at the end as his illness got the better of him.
And he didn't "burn with the fire from within" to go hide out in the Earth's shell, perceived by seers as a giant dome.
Instead, he found another path which leads to immortality, instead of only lasting until our sun goes red giant and burns up the Earth.
So that having some artificial "goal" like that, didn't actually matter to him in the end.
That J curve diagram, over here:
is just from a lecture Carlos gave us in private classes, advising us that we could do that because two women had done it the day before.
(continued)
No one said it was the "one true path" for the new seers.
In fact, it's a bit annoying when someone believes that. We constantly discuss other alternatives to "darkroom".
You can even use recapitulation for example, except that no one ever does it correctly so that in the last 40 of so years since it was written about in his book, not a single person experienced significant magic using it.
Not even among his leaders at Cleargreen.
You're supposed to be involved in time traveling to your past!
If you do it correctly, that's inevitable.
But no one seems to have even tried. They just said they did when asked by others.
The result was that not a single person in our entire community got any of it to work beyond what lame Asian meditation systems can do.
And we nearly lost everything to the belief that "Carlos Castaneda was thoroughly debunked".
The point of that J curve map is only to motivate people to take it seriously, since everything Carlos wrote in his books actually works just as he described it.
If on the other hand you're referring to outside magical systems, then I am in fact saying, all of those are greedy nonsense and have never worked for anyone.
Buddhism, Daoism, Hinduism, Qabalah, Magick.
None of those work at all, beyond simple meditative effects you can find in the upper right of that J curve diagram.
Stuff only beginners in here care about, and soon they get so far beyond that, that "masters" from those other systems would insist they lie if they told them what they have learned to do using sorcery.
But you can verify that everything outside this is nonsense, yourself!
Practice darkroom, seriously.
You'll be saying the same thing fairly soon if you give it a real try.
There's nothing like daily REAL magic, right in your face.
We even beat Dr. Strange from the movies, for super cool visual effects.
Thank you for your answer, I've mostly been practicing Western Magick and meditation, dream work (lucid practices and a Jungian style of subconscious interacting), with a few times a decade taking psilocybin with spiritual intentions. I had a memorable darkroom experience on one of those trips, but have otherwise not practiced that much, I will review the thread for info unless you have a better link to get started on that, thank you.
The people who succeed usually just start studying older posts.
Keep in mind, of 100 who are as interested as you, only one will actually put in real work.
We have a very good idea after 5 years here, of why there's so few seers in the world.
Unlike the things you mentioned having practiced, it actually takes unpleasant hard work to learn real magic.
And on a regular basis.
Even the people Carlos put in charge of his workshops, failed to ever put in any serious effort. And as a result never learned anything real.
Real is when you're nightly face to face with "The Nagual", fully visible, and from time to time you get to break the laws of physics by walking through a solid wall into another world.
Or swiping away the ceiling of your home to view the night sky right through it, select a star you like, and literally jump in your physical body, to zip through space and go check it out up close.
Naturally you'll be up to your ears in Allies by the time you can do that. Real, visible, and semi solid.
They'll even take you to their world as they did in Carlos' books.
But you have to learn to get rid of that internal dialogue for real, not just pretend you did the way Buddhist masters and famous Yogis do.
The only way to get rid of it, is by viewing amazing magic, with your eyes open, completely sober, and wide awake.
The magic pulls on your assemblage point, and if you increase your levels of removal of internal dialogue, the assemblage point moves further and further.
So you get "honest feedback" through that method.
It was designed by "Little Smoke" from the books, who was frustrated everyone was just pretending their results.
She claimed that "darkroom" doesn't allow you to fool yourself, since it's 100% visual results if you do it right.
First you'll find a "puff".
That's the "green station" on that map we have.
The "green zone" is just meditation effects, but done with your eyes open those are a lot more meaningful than they are with closed eye techniques.
But just beyond that is the red zone, where shapeshifting and viewing other worlds on the walls of your practice room indicates clearly you've gone beyond what any other magical system does.
So maybe find a post on "darkroom" and follow the instructions.
Darkroom MUST include Tensegrity, or it's going to be 10 times harder.
The Tensegrity lures your double to come into this copy of reality, and stop roaming around in infinity somewhere.
And he's completely visible, from the deep red zone and onward.
There's no visualizing or pretending in this magical system.
You might even find you have a 3rd arm helping out out while doing Tensegrity movements.
I get it and to be honest I don't feel that my will is telling me to devote my life to this. I am hungry for understanding and gnosis, feeling and experience based knowledge. I am trying to clean up my programming, remove any energy blockages and go towards what I am naturally drawn to/curious about. I am learning many lessons from my personal relationships, my career, and my body, and I am giving a good faith effort to openly face life and remove self importance and connect with spirit. I don't doubt the power of what you mention, and the fact that Castaneda's books can contain, as you mentioned, either inconsistencies, or intentional errors, yet still pull so strongly on way they explore consciousness and the universe is impossible to ignore.
What are you talking about??? Just last night I saw what can only be described as a tunnel through reality with a red hand waving at me from the other end while wide awake and completely free of drugs. How has your Western Magick practice been going for you compared to that?
He was obvious from his first appearance in here.
I hope you saw it too.
I mean it is completely obvious pretending. I do very little at all to speak of and I am completely filled to the brim with wonder at what happens. So it sounds ridiculous to mention all of this other blah blah blah he is talking about.
It's the "comrade type" MO.
Their self-image is tied to being knowledgeable about magic, even if they aren't.
So they show up pretending to be interested, but really they want the conversation to get around to their amazing abilities.
Which has been fine until now!
Everything out there was fake. So everyone was pretending.
The could get away with it before this subreddit came along, and be no more to blame than the Dali Lama himself, who is also just pretending.
But since there IS real magic now, that schtick doesn't work.
And most haven't caught up to what's going on in the world of magic.
Thank goodness. We'll get a hoard of angry Buddhists if it became widely known that this place puts them all to shame.
This guy at least tried to be polite at first, in an off handed way.
Our 3 attackers this week were rather mild compared to the usual ones.
Could be the tropical storm. It's having strong effects from here to Texas.
Even my pet crows didn't come around today to get vienna sausages.
Dude these are your words
"Since that book is 90% a trick, you'll get the wrong impression about our sorcery.
That's not the real thing. It's just what Carlos asked don Juan to teach him."
You also said that Carlos told you to stop reading his books, so that's what I was referencing. I loved reading his books which is why I checked this sub.
I'm not angry with you, or your system, I came here with openness because I'm interested. I mentioned other things I've learned so as to try and build a point of reference, and I will honestly read and try the earlier posts and writings and practices due to that interest. I mentioned my defenses because I do think that, overall, one should be wary of anyone saying that all other systems are false. This interaction comes from an openness, it comes from me thinking, you and this sub know something that I don't, yet I also am simply not pulled to just gobble up what you are saying without interaction or questioning, which, to me, was quite central to Carlos' interaction with Don Juan.
You can ask how my Western Magick is going, its going fine I enjoy how I feel after doing the middle pillar and LBRP ritual, and I have no doubt that your practices have taken you further into the actual nature of the universe, so really I guess I feel a little misunderstood but also that I'll just lurk and let you guys do your thing.
So you did come back to throw a fit after all.
Just get lost bad man.
We get 3 like you each week, and have for the last 5 years.
Go pretend elsewhere.
Are you sure you’re not mistaking me for someone else?
So, you're a gleeful magic pretender like everyone else.
I think there's always a way to deal with them without being hurtful, like the IOB Carlos wagging his finger at you.
Just tell them to work to turn off their internal dialogue. Not silence. But absence of the internal dialogue.
And then all their confused deeply entrenched perspectives and training and habits of reaction will fall off.
Yea, the "silence" usage is a bad idea.
People think being a monk with a vow of silence is what we're talking about.
Those guys of course, have RAGING internal dialogues.
Taking a vow of silence makes those worse in most cases.
Carlos talked about that once, but not for very long.
It goes hand in hand with being "mindful", which surely has to screw you up very badly, in terms of internal dialogue.
Focusing all of your attention on the blue line reality thinking that's going to lead to transformation.
It's a bit like deliberately going out looking for a black widow type manipulative girlfriend to marry.
You mean that Don Juan and Julián and Carlos each went a different way?.
Is Don Juan finally successful and freed? Or, as Gorda said, he was captured by inorganic beings?
From https://poe.com/CastanedaBot , paraphrased:
According to Castaneda's teachings, the ultimate goal of Olmec sorcery is to leave the living world completely, but with the totality of one's being intact. This is not simply dying, but rather a transcendence of what we know as ordinary reality. As stated in the retrieved documents, "The objective is to leave the this world; to leave with all that one is but with nothing more than what one is."
(The intermediate goal is to reintegrate our double, our marooned resources, from the periphery of our luminous sphere, and thus live as we were meant to. A complete being.)
This goal is achieved through a process of unifying the two attentions - the everyday awareness and the second attention, which is associated with heightened perception and magical abilities. When a sorcerer can fully integrate these two aspects, they reach "the totality of oneself."
The path to this goal involves various practices and experiences that may seem extraordinary to the uninitiated. These include "Summoning visible beings, intercepting people's dreams, opening portals to other worlds you can reside in, and numerous other non-ordinary experiences." These practices are not merely for entertainment or power, but are steps on the path to achieving the sorcerer's ultimate objective.
Thank you, I feel like this is similar to what Damien Echols describes in his teaching of western magick, to build the solar or rainbow body, and transfer consciousness into it at death.
Except it’s the Dreaming Body that is our true self! (matter is the most confusing thing for us mortals)
And it’s already *extant: “(con)currently or actually existing,” and doing its own thing in parallel right now. It’s just spread out from us, and thus largely inaccessible.
Which is what we seek to rectifying, via our sorcery efforts, and clear intent.
I love holding this concept, thank you! Is there something you would recommend one does to meet and or integrate with this self? Would you say there is any relation to the Jungian capital S "Self" (as opposed the the lowercase self that is limited, fractured, and mostly ego centric)
First and foremost, this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/wiki/silence/
Superficially. But the other self, the true self (nagual) is completely “off of the table” to use Don Juan’s analogy from the books.
It isn’t just absolutely unknown to us, it’s the entryway into the truly UNKNOWABLE.
Thank you for your link and knowledge!
Why are you writing in code? Also a big fan of doing the opposite of doing, myself😉
I Read the book in my native tongue. in case terminology is off by a little, language barrier is the course.
I don't write in code much.
I use VHDL. That language generates hardware circuits.
You can't replace AI's obsession with GPU cards with code.
You must begin with what you have.
You could, but why not read them in order ? The teachings of Don Juan was one of my absolute favs.
NO. The 9 Books have to be read with chronological order. Although the first 4 books are the basics since they talk about the first attention while DJ was still alive. In The Second Ring of Power a new chapter has begun and CC explain us how he got back to Mexico and meeting his fellow apprentices after the 'Final Meeting'. This chapter ends IMHO with The Art of Dreaming. The other 3 books are not essential since almost everything has been already described in the first 9 books.
On the last 3:
The Active Side of Infinity is the closest thing to a memoir that Carlos wrote. Though it's much more than that. Of the last three, this one should not be skipped!
Magical Passes is very pragmatic, and the only book that is akin to a manual, other than The Art of Dreaming.
And The Wheel of Time is essentially a recap of the first 8 books up to, but NOT including, The Art of Dreaming.
Exactly! That's why one can omit Magical Passes and The Wheel of Time and read The Active Side of Infinity but only after he read the first 9 books.
I guess you can consider Magical Passes and The Wheel of Time as being more for people who are truly into it….but it’s hard for many of us to understand how you couldn’t be so
I have read them all, several times, over the last 10 years, they change my life, I woke up, and I practice several of the teaching, if you are serious about them read them all
you will love them, can change your life too! All are my favorites, also there are three more to read after you finished those The autor is Armando Torres. 1) Encounters with the Nagual Image of The Secret of the Plumed Serpent: Further Conversations with Carlos Castaneda
2)The Secret of the Plumed Serpent: Further conversation with Carlos Castaneda 3) The Universal Spiderweb. Great books to read