Here’s a video showing how the fantasies of people who weren’t really practicing and were just making stuff up about the books got passed down to bad players, creating a destructive cycle in the Castaneda community that was pretty much killing the real magic.
the Spanish version is already up on Insta,
and the Persian one will be posted on the Persian page tomorrow.
65 Comments
Great video. Very clear and concise.
Don Juan made it very clear numerous times that sorcery was the movement of the assemblage point through the use of intent. Dreaming is in my estimation it closes approximation of magic most people will get. I see lots of people on this forum staring into dark rooms and overlooking many of the other simple practices outlined in the series.
I don't understand why you get downvoted.
Because the guy obviously has zero knowledge of the community situation.
No one ever learned sorcery by "close approximations" in dreams.
To say such a thing is almost an insult to the cultural battle we are waging here.
Even Don Juan in the book the art of dreaming said that the old sorcerer learned numerous knowledge from the IOB in the dreaming attention.
There is no cultural battle. The knowledge does not bound by culture. It is UNIVERSAL. It is based on the laws that governed the UNIVERSE.
And you too have just come out from under a rock?
The Castaneda community has been in tatters for a long time.
No one made the techniques work. Everyone started accepting that it's okay not to work, and therefore no one else was learning anything.
What you see out there are bad people pretending.
Carlos left very clear instructions, giving us a very specific destination.
In 25 years, no one has reliably reached that destination using lucid dreams.
I just joined a month ago. Sorry.
I am basing my learning thus far from the books. I am not even preschool yet. Apologize.
That's why I say "cultural."
There's news in the community. We've identified WHAT went wrong, and how to fix it.
But we have to spread that knowledge somehow.
That's the whole reason we're here!
We're not here for fun. After four years, it's not so fun to humiliate the confused...
You won't believe the amount of people making a living from Castaneda who is teaching the wrong thing.
There's no gray area here. It either works or it doesn't.
So we have some kind of war with them. Take a look to our Black List!
I believe from the deep of my heart that it works. If I can not make it work, the fault is on me, not on the fact that it does not work.
That's a wonderful approach. I wish everyone saw it that way.
It's usually more like "I'm doing something else but I'll pretend it's Castaneda's sorcery so I can make some money and impress my friends".
Anyone who does it for money is a fake one.
My understanding is that you can not offer your service or knowledge for money.
How do I know? My uncle told me that he could not accept any form of payment for his service. Gifts, but not payments.
Also, anyone who does it to impress their friends still has too much of self importance and need to seek a petty tyrant so they can discard or lessen it😁
Having read all the Castaneda books about Don Juan I cannot recall Don Juan providing any exercise to stare into dark rooms. Reading the various books took me years so I do not have perfect recollection of all of them and their materials. I have yet to make a full review of the sub. Maybe someone here can point me to the book and chapter where Don Juan outlined this method.
Darkroom was given to this subreddit by the Inorganic being "fairy" who is little smoke and the moth in the books. Carlos gave the ally to members of his private class who are now in this subreddit.
Darkroom is a system created by a hyper intelligent millions+ year old entity, designed specifically to teach sorcery to humans in our modern condition. Darkroom is designed to use visual indications as milestones of progress to combat our socialized tendency to be pretenders. If you do not see real visual magic in your darkroom clear as any other physical object, then you have not made progress at silencing your dialogue as the rational world falls apart around 2 minutes of silence and you begin to fall asleep with your eyes open. You cannot get anywhere in darkroom while pretending, which is something we will otherwise absolutely indulge in indefinitely and make no progress. I pretended that I was forcing silence in darkroom for around 400 hours before I started actually trying.
Beautiful. Thank you truly for this.
Is 2 minutes the baseline requirement for, as you put it, "rational world falls apart??"
Meaning you have to first force inner silence for 2 (I assume unbroken) silence with no thought in between?
After achieving this level of inner silence the purple puffs appear? On their own, or do you have to do something else for you AP to move? tensegrity?
Not really...
However, there's good news at the end of this answer.
The 2 minutes comes from Taisha and Florinda, who were asked "how long do we have to stop the internal dialogue".
A totally obscene question, but you won't realize that until you can do it.
It's like a spoiled brat little kid asking how long it has to help clean the house, before it gets ice cream.
In fact, there's no chance in hell for a beginner to even get close to stopping the internal dialogue.
It's nearly utterly impossible, and many Yogis and Buddhist Masters have said so.
Which is why they never even tried.
And also, why they never got anywhere at all other than some minor meditative effects that aren't even worth thinking about.
You can better get those with long praying.
Anything which interrupts the internal dialogue, will move your assemblage point and you'll be perceiving magic of some kind. you can replace it with praying, a mantra, or contemplation of some obscure topic.
All will produce a noticable effect.
It's just that, the closed eye meditation kind isn't worth all the work.
You have to actually STOP the internal dialogue. Not replace it.
So that when asked for a number, and with Carlos looking right at them raising his eyebrows to dare them to answer, one of the witches said, "From 2 minutes, to 2 hours."
Indicating it depends on the person.
BUT, that wasn't actually the answer to the question the person was asking!
What the person really wanted to know, was how long they have to try, to get proof it will cause magic to happen.
So that if it took longer, they could give up and go elsewhere.
One of the witches was actually talking about how long it takes, to move the assemblage point very far from its normal location.
And NOT about actually stopping it.
Ignoring the simple fact that if you really stopped the internal dialogue, all of reality would collapse.
It's only held in place by your internal dialogue.
Then after that, the person who did it wouldn't recall any of that.
It would be useless to them.
So the good news is, any effort you make, any serious attempt, is noticed by some force out there, which likes people to explore the unknown.
And it will "gift" you with magic, as long as you are engaged in a ritual of some kind, in which it's possible for it to manifest magic that fits the path you have chosen.
Comments are limited on reddit, so if this isn't clear ask what you like about it.
[deleted]
It's quite clear, thank you for this detailed response. <3
Here;
Thank you also for noticing what I really wanted to ask & providing the distinction of "stopping the world" vs simply "getting proof of magic happening."
This "proof" is what I am currently after & purple puffs seem to be the first stepping stone, from what I gathered reading this subreddit.
This is actually the perfect analogy for how I feel about all this.
I read the post you wrote 7 years ago, which is pinned to the side of this subreddit (How to see energy in 3 weeks). My aim is to speedrun this process form a (relative?) beginner to seeing purple puffs.
However, while the process of trying to stop the internal dialogue is mildly exciting on some days, it is a very hard uphill battle most of the time... Maybe even one of the hardest things I've tried to do + without a clearly visible payoff at the end.
So I just wanted to have some perspective on how much to endure. I imagine it taking more than 3 weeks though. What you describe is the perfect path with lots of effort & don't think it'll be that efficient for me.
Right now my main strategy is to go for walks and intensly focus attention on sounds coming from environment + steps on the ground to stop the thoughts, but i usually only lasts 5-20 sec before the next thought interrupts the silence.
Thankfully this is still noticeable improvement from first few days, where I would "forget" about thoughts going off on their own for minutes and minutes without me even noticing.
At least this is somewhat inspiring:
If you never give up, a day will come when you can walk for miles without a single thought.
Why?
Not willpower.
Not because you're super cool now, and ultra disciplined after all of your hard toils!
You'll still be the same crummy person as before. Just one that's able to stop your internal dialogue.
The problem is, how to get there?
No one was taught this way in the past.
We're the first generation of sorcerers who have to work that hard, on our own.
In the far past, sorcerers learned as 3 year old children given to some scary "old seer" wizard.
They either looked in the directions their owner wanted, or else bad things could happen to them.
And being children, they were still flexible as far as reality goes.
When that was ancient cultural phenomena of giving kids to random men was no longer sustainable, sorcerers were trained by using "double being" sorcerers, who could whack them on the left shoulder blade, and instantly propel them into intense magic.
Including visible puffs and inorganic beings.
So the generation before us, was taught to "look in a different direction" by even more direct force than the children given to the old seers were.
People with someone would whack them the way a Nagual can do, but if you read between the lines in all of the books, that's actually an ugly form of coercion, which leaves damage you have to fix later on.
We're the first to try to learn by ourselves, with no help.
In our case when you can go for long periods without a single thought, it'll be because slowly but surely you "noticed" other directions on which you can focus your attention.
While practicing. And working hard to stop the internal dialogue.
But later you'll have all sorts of "directions" to look in, which make stopping the internal dialogue easy.
Unfortunately, no one can force someone to "look in a different direction".
It's like we live in a 2D world, and can't conceive of 3 dimensions.
Someone from 3 dimensions tries to tell you, "JUST LOOK UP!!!"
But it's meaningless to someone who lives in 2D all the time.
Sorcery has a "depth in reality" dimension.
Which, once you can "feel it", adds to the other directions.
So you get 3D, with "reality depth", and are surrounded by too many magical sights to even count.
Thus when the day comes that you can walk for miles without a single thought, it'll really be because you were hunting a magical creature and all of your attention was focused in "other directions", which make the internal dialogue meaningless.
So it stops by itself.
1.) Would you say the internet & technology culture we perpetuate made it worse? I've noticed over the years my attention span is reduced, these days even reading long paragraphs is hard. Add to that the addiction to scrolling social media & stuff and the attention gets fragmented much more then what humans in the past had. Meditation/forcing inner silence is the exact opposite process of that, because you are tasked with keeping attention on one specific thing for hours at a time.
---
2.) Is living in the second attention somewhat similar to going from 2D to 3D or 3D to 4D? Does your perception shift that drastically?
1) We don't know... Keep in mind, there's no greedy gurus in here who pretend to have answers they absolutely don't, in order to steal more money.
No one in here makes money in any way from their efforts.
Most even spend their own money to help out. I must have $50,000 in animation tools and resources.
2) Yes, when you're experiencing the second attention you have a permanent ability to look in a 4th direction.
You can gaze directly into "the Nagual".
It's like gazing into "Fairy Land"!
I'd be terribly said if i didn't get there each night, because without experiencing that daily humans tend to get more and more depressed as they age until they need psychiatric drugs just to live the remainder of their life, and die in relative peace.
I've watched that happen in my own family.
But it's hopeless to tell them, "You just need to gaze into infinity daily! And then life is wonderful."
I appear to have found the answer to my question (which my first post was hinting at) It seems The Eagles Gift might outline darkroom practice. Its been years since I read it so I will make sure I get back to that one soon.
How did you arrive at that conclusion? The dark room gazing involves all the other practices like inner silence, tensegrity, recapitulation, and dreaming. Gazing at daylight sparkles is a bit overlooked, though…
I derived my belief, that for the average person dreaming is their closest approach to the sorcery as outlined in the 10-12 books of Castaneda, from observation of average people. That average people witness the spirit in various ways is obvious, and this is addressed in the books.
All I was stating is that the average person will not engage in most of the other methods outlined in the series, but that dreaming remains, and may well be the average person's only intentional ‘magical’ experience. Additionally, it happens frequently enough and in a natural manner, to be, in a world absent mentors, many’s only fore into the spirit world.
"There's nothing that you and I can do about it," don Juan said in a grave, sad voice. "All we can do is discipline ourselves to the point where they will not touch us. How can you ask your fellow men to go through those rigors of discipline? They'll laugh and make fun of you, and the more aggressive ones will beat the shit out of you. And not so much because they don't believe it. Down in the depths of every human being, there's an ancestral, visceral knowledge about the predators' existence."
Why are you concerned about the majority of people in the scope of the entire global population, when Don Juan acknowledged there is nothing to do about it.
That's the difference. In all this time, no one has learned by "close approximations." Not even you, apparently!
Here we go for the real deal. The full experience and the exploits in the books.
It will take some time to read through the years of posts here but one first impression I have is its focus on darkroom gazing, with an apparent lesser focus on other practices. Dreaming being one such practice, and to my point above, the practice that is most approachable to the average person in terms of transcendent experiences and occur naturally for many people. I will reserve judgements or propositions until I better understand this sub and its membership and would politely request you extend me the same courtesy.
It's fine to look for "proof," but it's not enough to learn.
So we can't advice that. Without awake practice it turns out to be a dead end.
Dreaming is an excellent way of learning for example seeing and manipulating energy, learning to interact with IBs and travelling with the energy body.
Different goals and self-importance are the root of all those problems.
The books clearly delineate different approaches to sorcery depending on the goals.
HOWEVER, the true teaching of Don Juan's goal is FREEDOM. The books tell you the possibilities created through the practice of sorcery, but it also tells you the pitfalls to avoid if you want to reach the goal of freedom.
You don't need a middleman, including IOB. Most importantly, you need unbending intention, imppecability, and to get rid of your self-importance.
Your will is truly your command.
Not freedom, but freedom of perception. Lots of empty talk, is there anything relevant? How many people have read books and how many people have analyzed them like scientists, and now write which of them have achieved visible results?
Nope. It is not freedom of perception. It is freedom to go past the Eagle toward the mystery of the unknowable.
It is VERY relevant.
Sorcery or the techniques taught will give you or lead you to freedom of perception. When you are able to move your assemblage points on your command, you have freedom of perception. You are no longer bound by the ordinary world.
I don't know what to answer to this, I'll just keep quiet.
I got that goal from the book. There are the known, the unknown, and the unknowable, according to Don Juan.
We can make the unknown become known through practices and moving our assemblage points. The move can be just a shift or lateral.
But we can not make the unknowable known. That is beyond us as long as we are still in our human form.
The practices for the warriors are to prepare them to be able to offer the experience to the Eagle without losing their awareness or be devoured by the Eagle. Thus, they can fly past the Eagle to the infinity with their awareness intact. It is in the book.
"And what do you call the abstract?"
"The search for freedom, freedom to perceive, without obsessions, all that's humanly possible. I say that present-day sorcerers seek the abstract because they seek freedom; they have no interest in concrete gains. There are no social functions for them, as there were for the sorcerers of the past. So you'll never catch them being the official seers or the sorcerers in residence."
Question:
If you don't have freedom to perceive, how can you have freedom?
Are you saying that the intact awareness that we are able to possess when we fly past the Eagle will allow us, or will provide us with the freedom to perceive even in the unknowable?
In that sense, you can't have freedom without freedom to perceive. For otherwise, we are not individualized.
Thank you.
No, I'm suggesting that if you don't have the freedom to perceive in daily life, you are not prepared for darting past the Eagle.
The second attention is our training ground, just like Don Juan suggested.
Agreed.
The "freedom to perceive" can be understood in various ways, I think. In order to be more precise, I would venture to say that a clarification of what "freedom to perceive' is, follows in the quote above. That is, the freedom to perceive is the freedom from obsessions that then constrict or control our reactions to perception. These obsessions are not ours, they are alien and they must be driven out of town, so to speak. Then we have the "freedom to perceive" that counts. If we can direct our perception but remain affected by obsessions (that shape our reactions to these perceptions that we instigate) then we do not yet have the sought-for freedom. Would you agree?
What do you think is humanly possible? I would disagree with your interpretation of it is just this blasé stuff you posted because I know it is humanly possible to perceive much more. I know because I do it.
In The Art Of Dreaming he addresses this 'offer of experience' as deriving from recapitulation, performed in two different manners. This sounds quite unpleasant to the mind and I wonder how many people here have undergone even one of these passes.
In more than one book Don Juan states his objective is to maintain his freedom and he outlines things he has avoided which might have provided power, but with limitations to his freedom.
Nice work, Media Group! Good message, illustrations, and music!
Wow that's a really good video
Intent is everything...it's clearer than language...you can't hide it...
Nobody needs "The Teacher", we need many teachers. Don Juan was an exemplar of the mentor in order to show readers how important it is to seek out mentorshop and place oneself in the role of the students.
it's wrong
you don't need a teacher
no one here is a teacher
all you need is someone to show you the "way" and what you really need. from there on out the "steps" are purely your own personal hard work as we are talking about experience and experience is not learned you just experience it.
I don't agree, it seems to me that that's a fallacy perpetrated by the formal education system. That system (while not without merit) ingrains us with the notion that everybody learns the same way and ought to learn the same things. It was designed to augment the industrial economy, did its best to discredit the notion of personal mentorship and apprenticeship, I see the evidence of that right here: Casteneda wrote a brilliant series about a master and an apprentice, then you read it and tell me "we just need the steps".
Nothing but isolated, contextless steps.
What we really need is personal human connection with people who can guide us based on who we are and where we are at in the moment.
there are no more naguals among us
and everything I wrote to you is a simple true paradox
to learn magic you don't need a teacher
it's that simple
read some posts here (start from the oldest) and you will discover for yourself that this paradox is true!
"I can't repeat often enough that every man whose assemblage point moves can move it further," he began. "And the only reason we need a teacher is to spur us on mercilessly. Otherwise our natural reaction is to stop to congratulate ourselves for having covered so much ground."
This subreddit does the role of spurring on mercilessly quite well. I doubt anyone here feels "congratulated" for having covered so much ground.
exactly
but I'm referring to many teachers who are paid and don't motivate their students daily
or motivate them towards pretending
this subreddit is exactly what you mention a teacher but all the members are their students too and those who have covered enough ground learn something new every day
no one can complete the entire journey as there is no "terminal station".. So there is no complete teacher, which is probably what the user is looking for from what I understand
someone, that is who knows everything..
even don Juan did not know things that along the way Carlos discovered on his own without him by his side.
100%, this user is looking for an excuse not to practice, that's all. He could start now.
This AI slop hurts my eyes
Why do posts of this nature always bring out crazy people?
We actually discuss this in the private chat, making semi-joking bets on whether we'll get the infamous "attack of 3s".
in fact, someone just pointed that out in chat saying, "Well, we got one. Now we'll see if there's 2 more."
For the crazy people attacking, Carlos warned us about the attack of 3s in private classes and pointed them out each time it happened, probably for the sake of our future endeavors like this subreddit.
He originally tried to teach in public parks (likely in Santa Monica) for free, but got so many crazy attackers that he couldn't do it.
He had to create paid workshops with locked doors and armed guards.
Or risk being assassinated by "me-too" Naguals such as you see in this cartoon.
What do you think of Anaam? The Nagual zone teacher?
What do you people think of Anaam(thr Nagual zone) and M.Baston?
Their videos and classes(involves contribution)?
Total bs. 100% bad player. Run the other way from that nonsense.
Is it your analysis based on their teachings or just a robotic response coming from something like pride "oh everything else is bs, here is the real deal"?
If that's pragmatic analysis plz share your view about them 🙏🍀
You asked about them. I gave my opinion, and i have zero interest in debating them or diverting from the focus or intent of this community.
One of the biggest mistakes many of us made after watching this video was trading one belief for another...
Yeah that's a big mistake, considering the whole point of the video is to learn to get silent by yourself and actually put the techniques into practice.
It would be as if you didn't pay attention to the content at all, or you decided to ignore it.
what's the background music ?
The American dawn ( slowed & reverb )
Thanks!