There's a lot of watching, involved in learning sorcery.
First of course, you have to find the second attention FOR REAL. You can't watch it, until it's actually there.
We aren't "visualizing" stuff. Which is why it's best to do your sorcery with your eyes wide open. If it helps, you can use a dark room. Just make sure there's no visualizing.
This shows why visualizing is death to magic.
Magic comes from OUTSIDE of you. Not from the inside.
So by using darkroom techniques (tensegrity done in darkness while forcing silence and paying attention to the formation of your energy body), you will eventually succeed at restoring it.
And then, after each tensegrity session, I recommend sitting up on pillows or in a chair, to just watch. Don't try to do anything. Watch, and keep deepening your silence.
At first your internal dialogue will intrude, but after practicing this a lot you'll win that battle.
At that point, "concerns" can intrude on the magical sights of the second attention.
The Nagual, contains everything.
Including any energy you lost in the past, which creates a modern "concern" of the type that recapitulation is designed to remove.
Those concerns can focus the energy of your awareness on those emanations in the past, and if you are absolutely silent, you'll be transported there.
To watch the past again, and unravel what exactly "concerned" you.
Here's some speculation.
If you don't do a good recapitulation, but still succeed in "darting past the eagle", a significant portion of your awareness will be lost to the emanations.
8 Comments
It's there a time frame recommendation for the magic passes and for sitting in dark room for someone busy starting? Complete beginner recommendation for specific magic passes? Not looking for huge time investment from you, more of do this and this and then go from there
The third series from the book Magical Passes, also known as the Westwood series, was Castaneda’s choice of focus in his Silent Knowledge publication:
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/wiki/tensegrity/core_tensegrity/
Center for Decisions
Recapitulation
Dreaming
Silence
Just making sure, go through all these series, be able to do them without inner voice, and in daylight first?
The variety of available passes is, in part, to alleviate the boredom risk of doing one pass over and over for 20 minutes or more….night after night (after getting the movements down in the daytime, which is easier). To keep our interest and challenge muscle memory which, while being engaged, makes it more difficult to engage in an internal dialogue.
Gotcha learn 1 pass in daylight, then do it in dark room, silence dialogue, and sit in dark room to further silence. If bored switch it up.
Twenty minutes if done continuously, is enough.
However, Jadey found that giving a workshop that was more like the old days, when Carlos would do 4 to 6 hours in a row (with lunch break) also has good results.
Without darkness! But you DO have to emphasize removal of the internal dialogue, or it's impossible for magic to become visible. Your words block out any reality that doesn't match the context of this one.
On the other hand, these days I can move my assemblage point all the way to all the cool magic you see in my pictures, in thirty seconds.
So as you can imagine, and at my age where it's really painful to get up and do Tensegrity in the middle of the night, it's tempting to just sit up on the bed, doing no tensegrity at all, to play with the magic.
Which, just to keep you honest, you have to earn over months of hard work actually doing the tensegrity! Don't make the beginner mistake of just looking for magic in the dark, thinking you don't have to actually practice our technique.
Unfortunately, and this is very advanced so that you won't understand it yet, the Tensegrity has more purpose than just to lure your energy body to visit you from the dreaming realms, and even more than to just manipulate it to "form" a blue bubble of doubled awareness around you.
The Tensegrity keeps your assemblage point in the middle of man's band, so that you don't get "bent out of shape" when it slides off to the side, because you're just sitting up in the darkness, playing with real, visible magic.
Just manipulating magic, pulls your assemblage point sideways and you end up in very bizarre situations.
The Tensegrity "keeps you honest" by giving you "doings" the whole time.
Let's see if I can get the AI to draw an analogy of what I almost jumped up while practicing, to go draw for a post today.
Good thing I didn't because it was too high in "abstract" content, and wouldn't make any sense at all when drawn.
I found a "secret of new forms of cool magic", with two "mini-me" versions of it, which were needed to make it work.
Naturally the magic was real, and not just a sacred chinese scroll. But the insect eggs looked mostly like that.
I believe at the moment of death, our life "flashes before our eyes" and we spontaneously recapitulate it. If we have no prior experience with it then we are surely overwhelmed and swept up in that movement. If like you say, we have some level of incomplete recapitulation experience then maybe there is still a chance? I don't know.
The implications from the books are that you might escape, but lose some of your energy to the emanations.
Interestingly, in Goodman's book, Carlos came back partly to recover some energy he left in the jungles of Brazil, when he was a child. And also, to get Goodman to write a book about his return.