Those who are now working to restore Castaneda's reputation and trying to change the overall situation in the community seem to follow two general approaches.
There are those who opt for a passive transmission of the message, one that generates enough curiosity in the audience to investigate for themselves and see the whole picture. The "lukewarm strategy".
And those who deliver a strong and controversial message. A forceful, clear, and determined message with the goal of generating impact, authority, or change.
It's abundantly clear what the general trend of this subreddit is...
Except that not all of us share the same approach. We're simply the majority.
Not only when it comes to targeting messages, but also in more political decisions like whether or not to allow problematic users to return, or in our own personal attempts.
In this case, our colleague and moderator Jade is soon giving a Workshop in Argentina, where despite having been a place that Carlos liked, it is a quite deviated part of the community. I have seen it with my own eyes!
Quotes from Armando Torres, invented Magical Passes, blends of disciplines such as astrology, psychology, theater. And a general consensus that "all views are welcome" and that it's okay not to find results.
In a very bold attempt to change this, Jade plans to not only teach the official Magical Passes, but also give a demonstration of Darkroom.
Which is truly historic and groundbreaking.
So everything is sounding wonderful, but what's worrying?
That this introduction to the Darkroom is going to be used as just another condiment in their enormous salad, without even realizing that everything else they do is worryingly useless.
And in a few months, we'll have a gauchoboy, the Argentinian influencer taugh by Miles, teaching invented 'magical' moves while wearing a mask for the darkness. After doing some astrology. And it's going to be accepted as a valid technique from Castaneda.
Something we've learned over the years here is that we have to very precisely delineate when techniques work and when they don't. With the focus on visible magic.
And that approving people who teach things that don't work is EXTREMELY DESTRUCTIVE for the learning ecosystem.
The MEDIA group proposed a message that represents the ideas that have been discussed here over the years, like that not everything went as expected, about false naguals, about darkroom practice, and how waking dreaming can change things.
Which, as expected, turned out to be too controversial for Jade's style and will likely end up being reduced to magic demonstrations only.
But it's still interesting as an experiment, and although I sincerely wish success to this attempt by our colleague, I feel obliged to point out that the lukewarm approach has been used for decades in the Castaneda community, and that we can't expect different results by always doing the same thing.
I can't help but say that there's something brilliant here with an approach that could lead to failure.
Leaving aside our message, I think it is pertinent to suggest a review of the strategy.
According to Chat GPT, strong and controversial strategies, with the right ideas, have been much more effective throughout history.
"Strong strategies win when the goal is to show power, deter, mobilize, or disrupt the status quo.
Weak strategies rarely succeed—except in extremely sensitive situations, where total collapse is a real risk or when real power is lacking.
In life, as in history: clarity, decisiveness, and firmness move the game board."
So, being realistic and understanding how complex personal relationships are in the community, I encourage to go a little further with the forcefulness of the message.
32 Comments
Instead of 'strong and controversial', I think 'using rational argumentation and evidence while being polite but firm' would be the best way of teaching other people. This subreddit has rational arguments and evidence in spades. Starting a movement based on being controversial and having a strong personality might be good for certain things, but if the goal is to convince other neutral parties that Neo-Nagualism is a rediscovered science I'm not sure if that's the best path to take. This isn't a religious belief or cult of personality, this is a technology outside of Western science that explains how the universe truly works.
That's just my two cents.
It's controversial because of how it admits that most people who wrote books based on Carlos sorcery are fakers.
Which we know Carlos himself pointed out!
But the ideas shown are the exact same you can see all over the subreddit.
pretending as well as selfish motives wrapped in magic are their guides (as Daniel mentioned, everyone above in the blue zone wants something else which they usually hide behind magic in order to find many victims)
gauchoboy is looking for male erotic embraces,costanza (the girl who make passes in mexican pyramids as show) is looking for customers for her ebook which sells techniques for dreaming etc etc...
It's understandable that those guys prefer to avoid saying the truth.
They would be losing followers and costumers.
But we have no interest. Let's at least point out when something is not correct!
>But the ideas shown are the exact same you can see all over the subreddit.
I'm happy to hear it and I wish Jade a lot of success in her endeavor, it's a very noble thing of her to do. Religion and spirituality are things near and dear to a lot of people's hearts and they can react pretty violently when they're challenged, especially in such a comprehensive and intelligent manner.
In the sense that fakers should be called out, absolutely. There should be no tolerance for people who take advantage of others ignorance for attention or sex or money or god knows what.
Exactly!
The community has raised the bar.
Let's bring this improvement to every corner we can. It's the least we can do.
Funny, the words "rational" come up over and over in regards to Carlos' idiocy.
Rational argumentation, ultimately, can't get past solipsism (not that solipsism has anything to do with this, since it is possible to see awareness of other beings).
"This is all crazy," I said. "We are rational beings."
"You're rational," he retorted. "I am not."
"Of course you are," I insisted. "You are one of the most rational men I have ever met."
"All right!" he exclaimed. "Let us not argue. I am rational, so what?"
I involved him in the argument of why it was necessary for two rational beings to proceed in such an insane way, as we had proceeded with the lady witch.
"You're rational, all right," he said fiercely. "And that means you believe that you know a lot about the world, but do you? Do you really? You have only seen the acts of people. Your experiences are limited only to what people have done to you or to others. You know nothing about this mysterious unknown world."
Who am I to argue against Don Juan, he's correct.
These concerns didn't stop Carlos though. I understand that our fellow men are aggressively overwhelming with their onslaughts from " the known", and that there must be an aggressive mode for deterring that. I am very thankful that this community has zero tolerance for fakers.
Before the Saturday classes I only managed a few moves in 37 years. Now I find myself being able to keep up with the classes, I can trust the lessons. The way Jadey teaches I find phenomenal. It' s a lot different approach than the official tensegrity videos and I think will be much more succesful.
So I can't help but think that it's too soon for concern. Isn't that an attribute of the flyers mind, that it makes us doubt, worry? Tells us we can't do something, that we' re not good enough..and then agrees with itself?
Wouldn't it make " fake" more obvious now that the real thing is becoming increasingly available?
It's not too soon, given that these things have been happening for at least 10 years.
They're based on facts. On observations and actual people.
But it's just a healthy request for review. It's part of the purpose of this subreddit.
..but, what's new are these classes. It's groundbreaking and hasn't been done before. So there's a blow to stagnation. This is going into unknown territory, bringing the magical passes out of its secrecy. I would be more concerned if Jadey wouldn't be doing the classes, someone else might " have a go", with some kind of sinister business plan in mind. It wouldn't surprise me that if " we" don't do it, someone else might who would think nothing of attempting some kind of brand name to darkroom.
Perhaps this is going to be a little like how internet started up..free and " rebellious ". I can't help but think it' s a bit like the chapter where Carlos claims knowledge as power on that hill.
I mean, if anyone gets it into their skull to teach fake stuff for money, their going to have to get over a huge barrier now that these classes are out there.
It's such a good thing and there's no doubt about it.
But this isn't something new. The divulgation of magical passes started a long time ago!
I've seen Jade performing those around 2020.
And our decisions reflect the direction of the community.
We must be critical. It's our contribution, our feedback based on real experience!
Here's what Tensegrity looks like when you can "externalize" your internal dialogue, onto the movements themselves.
It's what Carlos meant when he said to focus on the muscle memory, except that darkroom practitioners have the added aid of visible magic to look at.
So you gather your awareness and don't allow it to focus on any words in your internal dialogue, and to keep it anchored away from words you focus it heavily on "what's happening" due to the movements.
This of course is the best I could get ChatGPT to draw it, and even then I had to edit it in GIMP.
I had been doing some Tensegrity passes with a dark mask for a few months, and I hadn't been able to see the puffs that intensely until I tried putting them in energy pouches. In other words, I "pretended" to put them in, following my hand with my eyes.
But at one point I noticed that the puffs were still on my stomach and didn't move! And I tried to stretch one, and it filled my entire vision with purple light.
As it turns out, stuffing the puffs in the stomach is also an important aspect that I was missing.
I have to remind myself of that all the time, especially on days when it's hard to get stuff to happen.
But in fact, it's always a good idea to start off your session by doing that, once you can see the puffs at all.
And to reach out around you and "scoop" more of it up.
It's basically "treating it as real", which produces a sideways movement of the assemblage point, which helps increase your silence levels.
There's a way Carlos came up with to publically call out bad behavior.
Sorcery Theater.
Maybe I'll make a cartoon eventually where a virtual Gaucho boy steals some real technique such as darkroom, and then corrupts it in a quest for money.
Or put it into the first Westerly Witch cartoon.
The idea there is to focus on specific fake magical situations and make fun of them.
For instance, after Sad Guru, westerly witch will run into a group of "Annoying Yoga men", who have turned all of the behavior into virtue signaling things like fast pranayama in public, being vegetarian, and so on.
I could stick Gaucho boy into one of the booths outside LA Library, where Westerly Witch is headed. There's a park there which could have a magic boothes and demonstrations event going on.
That would be very funny!
I literally got to watch some of it on "DarkFlix", the Silent Knowledge channel.
It's such an absurd thing, I double checked how visual it was to make sure I wasn't misrepresenting it.
Was it vague, and I was accepting that I simply "knew" what was playing?
Or was it fully visible?
Once I tried to see if it was "concreted", I was sucked right into the scene!
I suppose that's a hazard of Silent Knowledge, and one reason Carlos suggested we not insist on "concrete".
He implied if you go for concrete, you burn off your dreaming attention faster.
BUT, there's always more than one way of looking at sorcery explanations.
So to say you burn off your energy faster is a bit of a contradiction, since the advice is to keep from insisting things have to be concrete.
If you are willing to accept them not being concrete, isn't that just setting yourself up, to have less dreaming energy involved in it?
So out of worry about losing concreteness later, you lose it right now???
But I think there's more to it than Carlos said, and the bigger problem is that if you get sucked into such an SK (silent knowledge) vision, you lose lucidity for an instant and when you are kicked back out again you aren't as focused as you were before.
Darkroom Tensegrity is all about keeping your awareness focused on the movements, instead of on your internal dialogue.
Here's where I was watching in my cartoon when I got sucked in.
And just now, getting a google street image, I see that they do indeed let people set up little booths there.
Except in the version I was sucked into, they had the little guru and spiritual type booths.
Instead of using ChatGPT, I think you should resort to silent knowledge instead. Especially because you consider yourself to be one of the cornerstones of this community.
Maybe you are jealous because your only 2 posts in this subreddit didn't survive to our mod team?
That alone says a lot about your knowledge of the community and the techniques.
Let me see if I can draw what I saw last night, doing the "Affection for the Energy Body" pass.
Which is a fraud.
A fake.
Made up by two women in private classes just before Carlos died.
Only the "opening move" is real.
And yet, here's what I saw while doing it.
I can't explain why it works so well.
Maybe because it draws from other movements, in how you "form" the double. Maybe, because Carlos was fully aware they were making up a fake magical pass, and found a way to give them input.
Maybe, there's another reason I don't know of. Such as, it's always ok to become "playful" with your double.
But still, look at what I saw!!! (As best I can draw it).
The double gets so real, I often speak to it.
Stretching and pandiculating generate spectacular results as well, without being a sorcery thing by themselves.
That's why we have that rule that "it's ok to make your own passes, as soon as you don't share them".
Meaning, that we motivate to use everything people have at hand to stop the internal dialogue and get results.
The trouble is in the opposite direction!
When bad people create movements that are suppoused to be sorcery, when they never produced any kind of result, neither in their own practice.
I'm afraid they just show them because they look cool, or give them a badass feeling.
That's an issue...
I'm pretty sure the two women who created that never saw any results, or they would have eagerly mentioned it to others.
But there are passes that form the energy body similar to how they did it in their fake pass.
So maybe that's why it works.
The magical passes are tricky!
There's simple "principles" behind most of them.
Such as, the energy body WANTS to play with you, and it's defined by action, not by talking.
Or, if you gaze above you looking for a baseball sized ball of glowing light, you stretch your luminous cocoon upward, when you succeed at seeing that glowing ball and intend for it to go up.
Or down.
The luminous shell is "stretchy".
Two very different principles. And I'm pretty sure we're going to find dozens of them inside the tensegrity, when more people can "see" them in action.
But hearing that doesn't let anyone learn sorcery.
They need to "discover" it themselves, by using the fixed movements.
That you have to discover the principles yourself, has the unfortunate side effect of convincing people it's some magical ritual, rather than just what Carlos used as a vehicle for the principles.
So that we end up with 99% of our population, just doing the movements and thinking it's ok if there's never any magic as a result.
It never occurs to them that "Hey!!! Why isn't this stuff working?"
But then, people in religions never seem to wake up and notice that their religion is total nonsense.
I think it would be good to show how the practices work and why we have such good results here. It should be emphasized that following the authentic intention with the authentic tensegrity is the key. They could be hooked by the presentation of the results from us here so that they can be convinced of the validity of our claims. Maybe the wider community is not ready to hear the truth about their situation but at least they can get a taste of what makes magic really work.
I agree. It could omitted the false naguals thing and instead then let them see our spectacular blacklist here.
But we definitely need to be forceful in differentiating that this approach is not the same as everything else out there.
Perhaps mentioning the need for a nosebleed from so much forced silence? Or being clear that visible results are key to identify that it's working?
Uh, who is this gauchoboy? The workshop sounded very interesting but I could not travel that far now.. The energy of the recordings felt great, they were on and doing a really good job showing stuff. unfortunately i was too busy to watch all.
Gauchoboy is a young Argentinian who earned a Being Energy certification and makes a living from giving workshops related to Castaneda.
He sells a mix of Magical Passes with his interpretation of the books, some astrology, and his own gay history.
There's a video of him interviewing Miles on YouTube, which implies he has his approval.
It's unfortunate that a leader appointed by Carlos himself would endorse such an aberration.
That's what we were trying to avoid by offering the subreddit structure to Jade.
We're already done here. Anyone who joins this community has the material and finds people with common sense who moderate who can participate and who can't.
One thing we've learned is that all men want to dominate, and women look for a place to belong. That's human behaviour and is something that can't be changed, but if you prioritize the search for authentic results above all else, you minimize the downsides.
Jade decided to manage it herself, and is respectable.
But at least she needs to be aware of what she's getting into, and how bad it would be to brand people as gauchoboys.
After all, she's a member of this community, and she's supposed to understand how bad things have gotten and that there's a viable path to change.
Jade is the real thing. As for Miles and Aerin I know them and this is not a surprise. They mix all sorts of stuff into their workshops, some of it does make sense in a way. This was supposedly the main objection of the others at Cleargreen, that they mixed in things from Asian traditions etc. It was kinda hilarious when Aerin as part of one class showed people how to use these abrasive gloves that are for skin care. They want to keep people, their community around so they can make some money on classes and having them as clients/patients. They want to claim the knowledge they got from Castaneda by teaching it, saying that teaching is the best way to learn something. I remember Miles making this point and then with typical bluntness telling people to teach it (a form) to a chair if they did not have anything else. They want to keep people around more than anything else,
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