I imagine it Is just about being able to be silent and having a relationship at the same time.. I wonder of anyone here has a partner and still is successful in the practice. Just for curiosity
I imagine it Is just about being able to be silent and having a relationship at the same time.. I wonder of anyone here has a partner and still is successful in the practice. Just for curiosity
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if they arent also a practicioner then theyre not gonna understand why your so emotionally unavailable.
unless of course you use all your energy to convince them that you are emotionally available.
more so, the amount and attention they would be seeking would be taken from elsewhere. And the time. Also the sex. I believe sex may help with energy in some circumstances, but if is is depleting of energy then for sure it does not help.
I wonder if there is any practioner at all around me.
Nope.
Not in a relationship, but have thought about it and have similar concerns as you regarding them.
There’s a lot of good information in this post-
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/1fg2o3u/need_guidance/?share_id=JZ_XgAoURpLnk-btdhI5V&utm_content=2&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1
Also, I’m married and practice every night.
thank you.
If by relationship you mean „some weird dynamic with constant praise, attention seeking, judging and whatnot to compensate for the pain we carry within and are too afraid to face“ as in >90% of relationships then that’s to me the exact opposite of this practice so I don’t really think that’s gonna work out.
I think the more important part when you ask this question is to ask what you mean by relationship or partner.
But if you can make that relationship part of practice and remain silent, sure then why not? But I don’t think a lot of people are there …
Personally I don’t have a relationship. And I couldn’t really imagine having one right now because I’m too much of an idiot which is why i practice…
I posted on an old account a few years ago a pretty long writeup of me struggling with this same question. I also was wondering if one could be a scientist and sorcerer.
turns out, probably? but my practice 10x'd when we broke up for other (likely Eagle) related reasons.
Hey, scientist SHOULD be sorcerers!
Answers to engineering and scientific questions just materialize in the air when you reach silent knowledge.
That's because you are studying and thinking about the problem all day, and when you reach near perfect silence and the emanations start to stream "knowledge", the concerns about scientific questions dominates, and the answers flow to you.
Those don't tend to stir u p the internal dialogue, so they can be present, while you are also silent.
Also, having a "need" that isn't really a "want" is very good for inducing SK flows.
I’m grateful for this post as I recently shared this with my spouse. I have been trying to put in 2 hrs of gazing and doing some darkroom. We talked about balance today. He was like “we need you too.” I think we will darkroom together sometimes. He has done it without know that it is a practice of moving the assemblage point or anything about sorcery.
I am really new to this and it was nice sharing with him what I have learned so far, and I’m grateful he took interest in it. We shall see.
This is something I can answer. I was making decent progress with sorcery until I met my girlfriend. My progress in sorcery stopped completely after that, I know other people have managed to juggle romance and sorcery but I haven't. And I'm not complaining or trying to whine, I made my choice and I'm happy with it, but imo sorcery and a traditional romantic relationship is not an optimal combination.
It's very simple.
If you can find the time to practice daily, and seriously, then everything is fine.
This is a technology, not a religion or belief system.
But finding time to practice seriously, daily, seems to be a tall order when in a relationship.
On the other hand, your partner is surely a big time petty tyrant, which is helpful to sorcerers who are actually succeeding at learning magic.
It rustles up emanations you though you had quieted, so that you have to work extra hard some days, to get the magic to work.
And that's a mandatory process for sorcerers. To seek out people who drive them crazy, or fill them with fear and dread. So that they uncover stuff you thought you had overcome, but clearly hadn't.
The "love" part is of course, a social myth. Just look around and that's totally obvious.
It's a marketing gimmick.
My concern is more about the energy that can be dispersed there instead of somewhere else. I understand that overcoming a tyrant makes you stronger, but also that a warrior picks his fights. Why would I put myself in a situation that on the daily may take away the silence from me? Making me weaker and weaker to the point that one can’t even fight anymore?
Otherwise there would be no reason to avoid sex or whatever until one has full control on his on energy - which perhaps might be what Carlos called the energy body?
I'm not convinced sex drains the energy of males.
It really didn't say that in the books. The warning was to the victims of sex (women).
For the men, maybe their time and money is all that's drained.
Carlos once said, urgently to someone who was being 'generous', "Don't waste money. It's the same as wasting ?????"
I can't recall what he likened it to. Time or energy most likely.
I felt the opposite. In the end, the guy is the one giving the energy, the girl is only receiving. And indeed I find "bored fucks" or where the girl just takes without adding anything, depleting of energy. Sometimes I feel like That girls can transform the energy and that's actually good and energizing, but that would be Good or high-energy sex where she adds something or anyway transforms the energy. Not sure how to word this feeling tho
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Also, didnt don Juan explicitely told Carlos to give up sex or the learning in the books?
Maybe you're thinking of Athina's quote.
However, we also get people asking if they should leave their family.
It's typically just the beginner's book deal mind motivating thoughts like that.
People want to do some "big thing" to indicate how serious they are, but when it comes time to practice, they don't.
So you can end up with a bunch of men who ditched their parents, "conserve sperm", never eat sugar, shun coffee, don't consume alcohol, and are generally experts on what the books say you need to do.
"Annoying Yoga man" types who rinse their noses with salt water 3 times a day, and even do pranayama before each meal, with everyone having to watch them do it at the restaurant.
But who have absolutely no understanding of sorcery at all.
They're just after attention, not magic.
Unfortunately, that includes 99.9?% of our community, including all of our leaders.
If you want magic, none of that side stuff matters much.
You get to work immediately, and then figure out answers like that on your own.
Until you can stand in a dark room and gaze directly into the second attention for 10 solid minutes, which is filled with visible super cool magic including all sorts of sentient beings looking back at you, thinking about anything else is not a profitable enterprise.
wouldn't make more sense to focus on silence before darkrooming?
No.
That failed for our entire community, for the last 57 years.
People lie to themselves about how they're doing. Changing the meaning of removing the internal dialogue, to removing that which you think is bad, and keeping the "good".
Ignoring that they didn't get silent at all, even for 10 seconds.
Even Buddhist "masters" lie to themselves and believe they got silent, when the simple truth is, once you are silent, the world literally STOPS.
Darkroom was designed by one of the two allies of Carlos, specifically to make sure people didn't waste their time on pretending or misunderstanding.
No puffs, no silence.
It makes things very clear.
It also lets you increase the levels and duration of silence daily, by increasing the vividness of the puffs and what you can do with them.
So using silence first is a lot like giving up stuff, thinking that's going to help you learn.
Of course, if people were honest you could do that.
But perhaps 1 million people who were strong fans of his books since 1965, none of them managing to learn any sorcery at all other than the pretending part, proved that people aren't honest.
This is also why all other magical systems are frauds.
Wasting money is wasting energy. You trade your energy (aka work) for money. So wasting money is the same as throwing away the mental/physical energy you spent on nothing (or worse). Since I don't have a Cholita in my life, I've reduced my grocery bill to 47 USD per month.
I think Don Juan would agree since he learned bookkeeping.
Cholita likely spends $47 per day on groceries.
At least, she used to when I was paying.
If it was expensive, and at Whole Foods Market, she headed straight to it when we got there.
If she got home and didn't like it, into the trash it went.
Unless she could return it...
One time in a restaurant near Dance Home, Cholita said she was going to get a discount.
She returned the unfinished half of her meal, saying it wasn't tasting right.
The waitress said ok, and took it off the bill.
Then she ordered desert, ate half, and tried to return that too.
I had to intervene and bribe the waitress on the side to just go along with it.
I got good at bribing waitresses and waiters over the years, until Cholita wouldn't go anywhere with me.
It's possible there had to be a "victim" or she wasn't happy with the situation.
A witchcraft sort of concept.
Someone has to "pay".
Just for clarity for the people reading here that's not correct. If you search for "sexual energy" or "sexual intercourse" at the All in one file you'll find the opposite.
These are the first results I got:
"Awareness develops from the moment of conception," he replied. "I have always told you that sexual energy is something of ultimate importance and that it has to be controlled and used with great care. But you have always resented what I said, because you thought I was speaking of control in terms of morality; I always meant it in terms of saving and rechanneling energy."
Don Juan looked at Genaro. Genaro nodded his head in approval.
"Genaro is going to tell you what our benefactor, the nagual Julian, used to say about saving and rechanneling sexual energy," don Juan said to me.
"The nagual Julian used to say that to have sex is a matter of energy," Genaro began. "For instance, he never had any problems having sex, because he had bushels of energy. But he took one look at me and prescribed right away that my peter was just for peeing. He told me that I didn't have enough energy to have sex. He said that my parents were too bored and too tired whenthey made me; he said that I was the result of very boring sex, cojida aburrida. I was born like that, bored and tired. The nagual Julian recommended that people like me should never have sex; this way we can store the little energy we have."
"He said the same thing to Silvio Manuel and to Emilito. He saw that the others had enough energy. They were not the result of bored sex. He told them that they could do anything they wanted with their sexual energy, but he recommended that they control themselves and
understand the Eagle's command that sex is for bestowing the glow of awareness."
I'm not convinced that's not a perfectly ordinary concern, namely that having sex ties you to other people through shared emanations which get bound up in the environment, like any other interaction can cause.
That's a more dramatic interaction, so maybe it functions more dramatically, but in the case of men it's possible you could just recapitulate it, and get that energy back. Afterall, you don't have to wait 7 years for anything to die.
Women on the other hand get those "worms" embedded in them, which continue to suck energy and feed it back to the man (I suppose), for those 7 years.
So the thing with men is possibly more "ordinary" than the thing with women.
At least, that's my theory.
Also, sex uses up time. Not just the 5 minutes (a joke kind of), but all the posturing to live up to the expectations of Hollywood for what sex ought to be like.
And none of us have enough of that, if we have to work a job to make a living. If we could wander around in the Olmec world and live in a palm branch hut, with free food available in the jungle, then we might have enough time to explore the way the old seers did.
But in modern times, the apprentices had a wealthy lineage to give them a means to make a living and still practice the many hours a day needed. Wealth was handed down for generations, resulting in perhaps fabulously wealthy groups.
An interesting side topic here is the sperm thing.
Don Juan covered the genitals of Carlos with a plant extract to increase sperm production.
And Carlos told Amy that his sperm was magical.
There was even the implication that it could accomplish other things in terms of teaching apprentices.
Some quite specific... I pulled a linux password trick there, where the number of dots of the unused password don't match the count of characters in it.
To hide the meaning.
But I won't go into those implications for obvious reasons. There's already enough bad players abusing women in our community. I run into some that the subreddit doesn't hear from, with private messages on social media.
There's very bad men out there.
So the less clear the function of sex in the lineages is, perhaps the better.
HOWEVER, Athina could be right about the meaning of those quotes.
So I don't take any chances, especially since Carlos told me to be celibate.
28 years now, or maybe 27.
It can't possibly be a "perfectly ordinary concern" in this case, when the very next paragraph has everyone almost dying.
"One day, without any warning at all, he opened the curtain of the other world with the help of his own benefactor, the nagual Elias, and pushed all of us inside, with no hesitation whatsoever. All of us, except Silvio Manuel, nearly died in there. We had no energy to withstand the impact of the other world. None of us, except Silvio Manuel, had followed the nagual's recommendation."
Even if it doesn't apply to us as much, because we go slowly (a snail's pace), it still plainly makes a difference. Maybe we can be the snail sorcerers?
That still doesn't rule out my theory.
The women "got worms", and the men "got entangled"
And "curtain of the other world??!"
Talk about a "man of knowledge" point of view...
Doesn't apply much to seers.
I must have been looking at 4 or more "curtain of the other worlds" last night. More than 1 at a time too. Some to human realms, some to non-human, and at least one into the abstract, which I was analyzing to figure out why it had to be so unfathomable when in fact, it was "right there".
For real, no exageration. My big problem wasn't d ying, but rather the realization I couldn't possible remember those the next day, unless I stopped to write it down.
But I had curtain #1 in one hand, curtain #2 in the other, and realized I might stop and write down one of them, but not the other.
There was no chance I could recall what it was, once I was no longer in Silent Knowledge.
Thus the quote seems in applicable to us, from my point of view.
As you suggested yourself.
I'm surprised that was in book #4. I usually only complain that people are stuck on the first 3 books, but even Tales of Power wreaks of "Man of Knowledge".
Our enemy, the same as they were for the seers of their time.
Wanna cut the magical pretenders with little knives and eat their flesh? To use power and give it back to the real thing
\^ an ally
Minx does in fact like his fur stroked. But to freak you out, he turns a pinkish purple and puffs up.
It's very disturbing.
I think you are overthinking the whole subject and there is no point to it. If you find a relationship a waste of energy and resources then just don't do one.
Some of us had already relationships when we got here so we made it work. You waste more energy thinking and wondering about it rather than being in one and monitoring your attention. Healthy boundaries work in good relationships regarding time and quality of interaction. Practising does not make you cold or emotionally unavailable, it gives you more clarity and perception. You can't avoid getting upset, fighting with people, getting sad, or having waves of self pity either in relationship or not.
Silence is not determined from who you have around but how you exist on your environment.
”It rustles up emanations you thought you had quieted, so that you have to work extra hard some days, to get the magic to work.
And that’s a mandatory process for sorcerers. To seek out people who drive them crazy, or fill them with fear and dread. So that they uncover stuff you thought you had overcome, but clearly hadn’t.”
Question for someone who can see emanations: Is ’overcoming’ the calming of emanations?
When one says recapitulation recaptures, or frees up, energy, this is really overcoming/calming of emanations?
For this to fall into place, is it a precondition for getting silent and/or maintaining silence? How does the state of emanations affect movements of the the assemblage point?
That rustling can hamper movement is easy to imagine, hence one needs to have ’overcome’. Detached and at ease. But a lot of things are easy to imagine.
I wouldn't say that the emanations calm, although they are "bottlenecked" with awareness contained inside the luminous shell, and don Juan did described them as "fighting to break free" or something like that.
Which makes no sense, because they're infinite.
What agitates them if you can really call it that, is just your awareness focusing on those particular ones stirred up by the petty tyrant, blocking your assemblage point from moving away from our cozy but horribly sorrow filled grief stricken normal reality.
Where our only "cure" in our own eyes is attention seeking from others also trapped there.
>this is really overcoming/calming of emanations?
That's personification of them.
Each one is just a feeling so tiny, you couldn't even describe it.
So they can't get "uncalm". They just get stuck transmitting, due to us continuously sending awareness into them, as part of some larger "bundle" we consider part of reality.
>When one says recapitulation recaptures, or frees up, energy, this is really overcoming/calming of emanations?
No, and avoid that point of view because it's going down a completely wrong road which only leads to more fake magical systems.
I can see it now! Dr. Whale "calms" your emanations with his blue crystals, for $200 a 10 minute session.
With recap you simply see where you keep focusing your awareness over and over, and learn to "give it a rest" though being bored with that topic.
But the "topics" consist of billions of emanations, not a single one.
>How does the state of emanations affect movements of the assemblage point?
You've boxed yourself into a corner here, which is why I suggested you might go down the wrong road with this mistaken understanding.
You can also simply "drop" and interest in ranges of emanations by dropping "meaning".
Meaning is possibly the only thing making us obsess over the past.
No meaning, no past.
No meaning, no awareness flowing excessively into a certain bundle of emanations.
Here's one imaginary approach to the emanations on the left, and a better one on the right. The actual goal of sorcery is to let the puppies play, but learn how to manipulate them into playing the game you want, without trying to control them.
I use my relationship as a barometer. To measure my commitment to intent. When I was at the very beginning of this path it was really really bitter. So I had to choose. This path is a total one.
Yes, I've been married a long time now. He keeps me grounded, otherwise I'd be lost in practice. I wouldn't eat, etc. I practice every night and every morning, and throughout the day. I'm very thankful he takes care of me. I don't think I could work a "regular" job, and maintain that for very long.