Another form converted to animation.This one looked bad before I put it here, now it only looks slightly bad.
As always, I'll have to adjust mistakes when I deploy it in my copy of Dance Home, in a virtual "private class" with Carlos.
I also need to do this form using Silent Knowledge ("Seeing") to find out what sort of hidden "principles" Carlos put into it.
They ALL look spectacular once you can "see". But there's also some basic idea behind some. That's the part that might be what the original technique, from the Olmecs was.
Carlos put them into a pseudo martial arts format to preserve them, having taken a liking to martial arts in 1970s Los Angeles.
Once in a while a new comer will claim the long forms are the original from the Olmecs, which is total ignorance of the history of these.
Carlos started with individual movements around 1994, and then after a month or two of teaching those, he realized it wasn't working at all.
And the cause was our endless internal dialogue.
So he created the "long forms" and told us, maybe having to use our muscle memory would help us remove our internal dialogues.
It didn't work...You have to FOCUS, and EMPHASIZE removal of the internal dialogue, or it's just going to chatter away, and prevent your assemblage point from moving.
If it was so easy to get rid of the internal dialogue, Buddhist and Yogi meditation wouldn't be so utterly lame and pointless.
They'd have discovered silence too.
But as it is, they never did. They only pretend to know about it, perhaps due to the influence of Carlos over the decades.
Back in the early 70s, I asked the Zen master of Los Angeles why all the pointless rituals, when they could just shut off their internal dialogue.
His head practically exploded.
So naturally, all Buddhists have heard of this and westernized ones openly admit that would bring you "enlightenment".
Except... None of them even got close.
Because when you do, there's MAGIC all around you! Eyes wide open.
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This is from the Fourth Series (the Heat Series) in the book Magical Passes:
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/wiki/tensegrity/core_tensegrity/
I seem to have no continuous videos that are trustworthy to do next...
I looked through my folders.
Tekazano has turned out to be unreliable, as has Gabrielle.
Of course, you can't trust anything from cleargreen, outside the DVDs. And not even the 4th, which they made up after Carlos died.
Jadey has some, but they aren't continuous. My animators won't be able to figure out which part is what they're supposed to animate.
Being from the ground is from 1995.
I suppose I remember the digging, but I don't remember anyone forcing me to go "eep, eep, eep!"
They used Nyei for that part?
Somehow if Reni that that, it wouldn't seem sincere.
And if Kylie did it, it's time to run for your life.
Yes, we always did the calls, with the addition of "STRENGTH!".
When I figure out how to time travel to Dance Home, I'll try to avoid those classes...
Being From the Ground was first presented in Mexico City in 1995, but the earliest notes I was able to are from August 1998:
Have they done the Masculinity Series yet?
[Masculinity Series Playlist](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvLSLokAPYVA8k6C4Ciykgps_edaovxa2&si=akaTKRx3ojANjzqC)
I've got it from Jaday's friend, but then I saw it with sticks, and wasn't sure which one to do.
I have too many folders with names on them to keep track of them all.
That one is likely to get done soon.
The not-doing series probably has the greatest number of demonstration videos of the various categories:
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/wiki/tensegrity/not_doing/
Filling The Gourd, The Legs Rule Vitality, and The Code (supine and standing versions) are available…
Yep, that's a lot of them.
Dan one question. Im trying new approach to remove internal dialogue. Is it supose to be tense and effort demanding? Like phisical effort? Thats what I get sometimes, the muscles contract and the body gets tense with this aproach, intead the other way when I use to do ot tryibg to relax completely.
Yea, it hurts like HELL!!!!
Both at the time, and afterwards.
But later, it's lovely.
Profound, and peaceful!
Everything Buddhists pretend enlightenment is.
Except, you're surrounded by intense magic and can break the laws of physics once in a while. And your eyes are open.
So it becomes what Asian systems intuited it might become, but never actually reached.
Just think of the process of learning to be silent, as being like lifting weights.
If you lift weights to build muscles, it SUCKS!!!!
It's HORRIBLE. And each time, you're sore for 2 days!
But those muscles do in fact grow.
The same for learning to be silent.
It SUCKS!!!!
Now the good news.
Going down the hellish path to learn silence through forcing it (instead of diverting your attention onto something else), provides benefits.
You "unmask" what causes the internal dialogue.
It's something like "greed" or "anticipation".
A part of your "self", beaten into you by your family.
A never ending need to keep focusing your attention from one thing to the other, to try to protect yourself from attacks, or from having your fair share of family goodies taken away by a sibling.
It's an underlying obsession with keeping track of what's going on at all times, with emphasis on worry.
If you get fully silent, you can still identify that mechanism below the internal dialogue, and further solidify your silence by focusing that greed and worry, on manifestations of seeing.
When you can "see", focus that horrible aspect of your "self" only on what you see.
It's so simple...
Look at what's actually there! And nothing else.
It produces amazing results.
"DarkFlix" being one of those.
Which is very entertaining.
I could theorize that the only time we stare at something that isn't real and won't really gain us anything, is when we watch TV.
So if you focus on your "seeing", it's a common activity that your body understands.
And comes to believe that you "must be watching streaming media".
So then you are!
I’d like to share my experience with these movements. I’m a beginner so please don’t consider this as a guide. For me, they began happening on their own after I tried to release the knots in my shoulders and chest, almost like turning my collarbones into wings and preparing them for flying. I followed my inner silence, which I describe as a sense of balance, like finding the center of gravity of a triangle resting on a needle. From there, the movements unfolded by themselves, as if solving a Rubik’s cube, with the purpose of untying knots and allowing the bones to “crack” in the right sequence, one that avoids injury or discomfort.
At first, my body resisted with significant pain in the sternum (not injurious but more like pain in muscles after working out), drops in energy that forced me to rest a lot, and a strong need to eat more. But now it seems to have passed the hard part.
In short, my compass has become following whatever movement that sustains inner silence, while keeping the goal of loosening energy knots and letting the bones crack in the right order.
Carlos once demonstrated the leg lift of the recapitulation series, where you bring your knee up to your chest, and rotate your foot.
He was just standing there between two women who arrived to private class with him. Carlos was holding a folder.
I didn't realize it at the time, but what he did was IMPOSSIBLE!!!!
He had absolutely perfectly balance, on the spur of the moment.
It's this movement, except Carlos had his knee all the way up, level with his chest. What you see here is animated from a real person who learned it in private classes, and you can see that even then it's not lifted as high as Carlos did.
And he rotated his foot perfectly, without his body wobbling.
The only way to pull that off was to have practiced that movement for decades, or to use your tentacle body to stabilize you.
But at the time, I was such an idiot I didn't notice that was an amazing demonstration of magic, that no one would notice.
Anyway, that movement transforms your physical body because people just don't pull one leg up to their chest, and rotate it.
It takes all sort of changes to the muscles of the stomach and leg.
I suspect it's close to what primitive man might have done, climbing trees to get food.
So the tensegrity does indeed seem designed to make actual positive changes in the body that you wouldn't notice, the same way I didn't notice when Carlos did something impossible, just 2 feet away from me.
He was grinning. There was no reason for him to do that. He'd just arrived, and no one had been discussing anything.
I suspect he just realized he could get away with doing something magical, without that causing a stir among the class.
Thanks for mentioning this move, it also seems like a preliminary step to performing the gait of power.
That might be why Carlos was so good at it!
If you didn't see it, a journalist/friend of Carlos in Mexico city wrote about Carlos pulling up his pants leg to show some unusual muscles that Carlos said came from practicing in the mountains in the area.
They seemed to be proof he spent a lot of time doing physical movements that the lineage taught him.
I can't recall for sure if it was the gait of power, but the account is somewhere in the wiki.
Most likely it was the gait of power.
Maybe that move in the recapitulation series was the "stretch" to get good at the gait of power.
It really does transform your stomach muscles, although it takes a year or two of doing it.
Comment from six years ago about the Mexican writer’s story regarding the muscle in Carlo’s knee: https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/euqup3/comment/ffzy6yj/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Recent thread with the video links and subtitles of José Agustín’s story about Carlo’s physique: https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/1ler6kl/comment/mykg8t1/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Even if you might notice something strange, you’re never prepared for “the impossible”, so no one says: “Hey, nice tentacles you’ve got”.
Cholita can do that. And in a normal "tutu" instead of some drug implying plant skirt.
Although Cholita only rises around 1/3rd that high.
Be careful you don't start thinking of magic as occurring only in fairy tales.
It looks perfectly normal when you've facing the real thing.
Hopefully someday I'll go back and animate all the things Cholita used to do, before I pointed out that her double was visiting me regularly, and she stopped it.
Never tell someone when their double is giving you free magic demonstrations!
I suppose that's like telling your best friend that his little sister is coming to visit, and showing off in her bikini.
Not good to tell him that...
I overlooked the reference to drugs. Last night the illustration seemed to me like a “floating grandmother”, and now it feels more like a “shaman from a sleeping dream”. Thanks for pointing it out, I don’t want my lack of rigor in illustrating to turn out counterproductive.
The first times I perceived magical things in the everyday world, they seemed pretty normal, but I realized there was something “strange” because I felt that “cold” that makes your skin crawl (like IOB pressure). With time I found it had a good taste, and now I’m grateful that somehow my body still warns me. If we want to advance in Olmec Brujería, we must get used to the strange…
And you’re also right about the double — I consider myself a “shameless one” but still I felt “violated” when a witch told me she had been doing things with my double, and whether it was true or a lie, I tried to channel it into other activities…
It's a Maria Sabina type view.
Poor Maria was exploited by bad men like Gordon Wasson.
Who liked trying to destroy Carlos, out of Wasson's jealousy.
And pretty much ruined Maria.
At one point, there was even an attempt to turn her into a Disney cartoon character, and while she was still alive!
Imagine a shroom peddling Disney "DEI" cartoon based on Maria.
Poor María, even her chants have been remixed for “raves” and her face is still stamped all over hippie paraphernalia…
And to the ills we must add the proliferation of mushroom sellers and dishonest shamans, as well as the terrible environmental damage in the Mazatec Sierra and the damage that could have been caused on their own by the thousands of people from all over the world who attended mushroom sessions, felt “healed” and “enlightened”, and then went on being shit anyway.
Gordon Wasson was trash, a JP Morgan banker, the “Christopher Columbus of hallucinogenic mushrooms”. María even had problems with the law and died in misery: https://www.elmundo.es/papel/historias/2025/07/10/6868c3f8e4d4d8fb158b45a5.html
And the “local bad guys” failed with Cleargreen’s “M faction”: https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/127kbg0/verde_claro_mexico_cleargreen_goes_evil/
That's all I saw from there, but I'm pretty sure it only gets worse than recommending senile rinpoches to sorcery students.
One day maybe I'll send Cholita to spy on them.
But Carlos had already written off Claroverde long before it was inevitable he would die.
He snubbed a phone call with their leaders, in favor of going to a movie.
And made the obvious so word would get back to them for sure.
Brujería is intentional work. Carlos did well to go to the movies and make them aware of it!
I think the bad thing about Mexico is the strong counter-intention and misguided intentions.
Sometimes we feel so “full of magic” (cheap and from the blue zone) and so “full of history” (from the last 700 years), that we are hardly willing to “work like dogs” to rescue and promote Olmec sorcery. Nowadays, most people feel like “Toltecs by birth”.
I think it would be kind of boring to spy on Verdes Claros… Well, we’d get some gossip about who sleeps with whom… But I think Cholita could find something more interesting in the indigenous territories...