I was reading the introduction to the 30th anniversary of Teaching of Don Juan, and one question came to my mind: what forces inner dialogue in humans?
Is sorcery isnreal and everey human have what is needed to experiment other worlds moving there assemblage point to other fields of emanation, why fixate de assemblage point in one place?
More than that, if moving the assemblage point is something that humans are capable, in other words a natural possibility, why have some persistent inner dialogue that murks our link to intent?
I can't even see clear pufs yet, most rivers of fade purple and yellow mixing in the dark, wich I can only maintain for some seconds while able to focus on them whitouth thinking about it, and to be able to investigate this question, as energetic facts, one problably would need to be able to see from silent knowledge, nevertheless I would like to know better.
The origin of our inner dialogue is the intent of the infinite over our first circle of power?
Or we just learn, from our peers, to intent our world by fixating of our assemblage point using the inner dialogue, and them it, that wich should not be natural, becomes overtime an addiction to overcome?
I would like to know what the heck is that opposing force that seems to fuel the inner dialogue everytime we try to shut it up.
I also wold like to know if there is some source of power to fuel our efforts against this tendency.
I'm practicing that simple exercise for silence, whitouth rocks yet, but whit no great results.
There is any other thing that would help to achieve durable silence?
Recapitulating maybe?
I'm practicing tensegrity, but in the absence of pufs and the ability to be silent and see, or interact whit something, I fell like only doing taichi in the dark hopping to eventually yield some actual result.
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Yeah, I was like you, at the beginning I was like "why tf am I not seeing anything"....I faffed around for about 7 months, sporadic practice, astral projection lol, you name it.
The key to this thing (tensegrity) is to just do it over and over and over again without any expectation. As your mind's letting go of your concerns, you'll start to see colours.
Yeah just be consistent in your practice and don't expect to see anything.
Is it necessary that it is done in the darkroom?
No, you can do it in the daytime. You can also use an eye mask.
You see puffs in the daytime?
Off topic: what is your profile pic about?
Yes, we copy the assemblage point position of our parents and other people as babies. The inner dialog comes into place later. It is natural for any species to share the position of the assemblage point (although our current one may not the best one to be at), but the inner dialog is an external addition, which become an addiction we don't even know we have.
The Active Side of Infinity will give you some answers to the question of what external forces fuel the internal dialog.
Carlos was very curious about this too, especially in regards to why aren't there small groups of people, such as on an isolated island, who don't have the internal dialogue.
It's not natural! Mankind is at least 300,000 years old, and language only 50,000.
So for 250,000 years, we had no internal dialogue.
But there isn't a single place on earth where the inhabitants can silence their internal dialogue.
Carlos believed it was proof that the internal dialogue was "installed" on us, by outside forces.
The levels of magic you get to see once you get rid of it, are beyond anything you could hope for!
But until you can silence the internal dialogue, they seem unattainable.
That combined with how much work it takes, means all of humanity is trapped in stupidity.
I get rewarded by infinity for showing pictures like this, because when I make the picture and post it, I see what's wrong with it (what's not accurate), and then that night when I go to look at it, it's easily "stable".
So for instance, raising your arm does create this ripple, but the arm is entirely white.
Tonight, just because I posted this, I'll get to examine that in detail.
And also figure out what happens to my blue energy body while my hand is raise.
My energy body is that vivid now, but I didn't notice what raising my arm did to it.
With magic this intense, why isn't there a tiny island somewhere on earth, which does what we do?
But there's Youtube videos on all tiny islands these days, and the inhabitants are as big of an idiot as people living in giant cities on the mainland.
Reading about the right way of walking and also a post by Juan about gazing in daylight, I did a modified version of the simple silence technique (no rocks yet, cause there is no river bed near to find them).
I crossed my eyes, while pinching an object with the point of my fingers in a way that if I get distracted it falls, so it demands that I keep my attention focused on pinching the object all the time (just curling the fingers as Don Juan Advised wasn't enough to avoid getting distracted from it).
Then I focused on the periphery of my sight, also keeping attention to my breath.
The objective was to overload the tonal as described by Don Juan.
After a while, most of my inner dialogue went off for some seconds, except for a fricking song that kept turning back over and over and that I could only keep forcing to stop, but just for some seconds.
Nevertheless, after some time I started noticing cloud-like shaped translucent purple hues in front of me, which was hard to maintain, but also started to notice the same hues extending from the objects in front, like some kind of purple fog that was attached to them.
This purple fog looks a lot like the persistent color that registers on the retina after you look at a bright light for some time and then look at a white wall, only purple instead of greenish yellow.
Can I take these colors as a sign of some degree of inner silence?
Does it make sense to persist in this kind of exercise?
If so, what would be the best thing to focus on to go further?
The translucent purple clouds detached from anything (wich are harder to see)? Or the purple "auras" around objects?
I decided to investigate silence exercises further, because they are easier to incorporate into my daily routine, and because it feels more natural to me at this moment, I don't know why, but when doing exercises like this I don't get anxious about results, as I do when doing tensegrity in the dark, and this absence of expectation seems to help silencing the mind.
I didn't give up on tensegrity, far from it, but I still find hard to look for pufs while moving that much, besides, it doesn't seem to help me that much in getting silent.
Maybe with time and practice.
I will keep practicing this kind of exercise and posting here any result that doesn't seem imaginary.
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/wu4k02/stick_free_rock_free_silence_technique/?share_id=gTdYKT9_ZqBxMT0b32q5f&utm_content=1&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/bg58m8/the_stick/?share_id=T6CTj8Kzb1f7Zje62ZXRU&utm_content=1&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1
Thanks for this.
Coincidentally I have a stick padded with leather that will be perfect for the stick technique after some trimming.
I wonder if it will be effective to sit pinching something between fingertips, with eyes out of focus, and the chin resting on the padded stick.
For sure it will be comfortable enough, while having lots of things to overload the attention, to go for some hours in a row.
I will try things separated and combined to see what works best for me.
In this live class by Jade, this particular tool/"toy" was presented.. you can watch it
Yes, absolutely!
HOWEVER, do not "diss intent".
Meaning, don't cut corners assuming small details don't matter, and you can skip to the "good stuff" directly and avoid a lot of work.
it's common with new people.
In your case, you seem to have more sobriety than usual, and your chances to succeed are pretty good.
As long as you keep working!
Last night I was using "running man" to "assemble" a very bizarre little man curled up on the floor.
It was the movements. The leg and foot movements, fed energy into the form in the middle, which became very concrete and real.
It was a "running man"! Except he must have gotten cramps and laid down in my dark room, to rest a bit.
That's the kind of amazing magic you get to see, if you carefully follow instructions.
Remembering, the "Men of Knowledge" couldn't move their own assemblage points the way we do, so they used magic mushrooms, a very complicated ritual to prepare the smoking mixture, and finally our own Ally "Fairy", in her original form of "Little Smoke".
A moth.
The RITUAL, in its precise original form, caused the ceremony to produce specific magic. Such as the mushroom shapes representing every aspect of the person you want to "see".
Likewise, doing the tensegrity movements as PRECISELY as you can, cause the pull of intent to move your assemblage point to favorable positions.
I hope you're right about my chances cause I'm not giving up on this.
Since I was a teen I've been trying to find anything that works: chan' tao (it's like Zen, but Chinese, supposedly came from India and take roots in China before going to Japan and becoming more like a religion whit dogmas and hierarchy), tried some witchcraft from a book called Witchcraft Theory and Practice by an Australian girl named Ly de Angeles, tried some African spiritism that exists here in Brazil called umbanda, Chaos magick and all parade of nonsensical things that, in tje end, amounted to no or little result.
Once I lived with a guy who taught me how to feel energy, which feels like breathing with your hands, in which you feel a pressure when moving the hands, as if you were moving under water.
He taught me an exercise that looks a lot like the Pandora box pass, I wonder if it was the source for this guy.
I always liked to do this movement while letting my sight get unfocused and blurry, have done it once in a while all my life, just to not stop doing anything magic-related.
Today I tried doing Zuleica's pass and Pandora box while letting my attention drift to that place where I can feel the pressure, eyes open but lights on.
After some time the only thing that was bothering me was the fricking song that my mind chose to play on repeat today. This is one thing, now that I'm trying to silence my mind I noticed that there's always a song playing in the background, something that I didn't notice before. It appears that my mind thinks that it's of utmost importance to always have a song playing in the background.
I think this kind of background music is a curse, like being rickrolled. You start getting silent only to notice the fricking song playing on repeat.
I found it
I think it's harder to silence than my own thoughts, it looks like an automated pattern that the mind plays effortlessly.
With thoughts I can force my attention on something like my breath, or the feeling of the body moving, or the disturbances in my field of view, and this stops the line of thought on its track after one or two words.
But it doesn't work the same for the song.
Looks like that this something that produces thoughts isn't producing the song, but listening to it, and since it isn't actively engaged in producing the song, forcing my attention to some sensation does nothing to the fricking song (what is it, by the way? Is it the awareness? The foreign installation? My ego?), and if the music doesn't come from this place in the mind, where does it come from?
Stopping to think about it, looks like my mind has three parts: one that generates thoughts, ponder about things and is affected by where I direct my attention (which is a know it all control freak, and that I call "the manager"), one that, for lack of better definition, is my attention, that can be directed to do things, but that seems to be silent, it doesn't think about things, it just does things, and the third part looks like a garbage collector, an automated background routine that is always distracted playing with something that it picked-up from the subconsciou, always something completely random and useless, like those childs that doesn't stop talking for a second, and jumps from one unrelated topic to another randomly and non-stop.
The manager loves to grab whatever this child is doing and think about it.
This child mind seems completely independent from everything: what is happening in the moment, sensations, feelings, and attention.
It’s just independent noise doing its own thing in the corner, most of the time unnoticed, but ready to disturb the silence every time I manage to silence the manager.
But I think eventually it will shut down, because it also seems to be a repeater of the behavior of the manager, so if I succeed in silencing the manager long enough I bet it will get silent after a while.
I'm not hoping for this result after hours of practice, more like months of consistente practice increasing the duration of silence everyday.
Doing the Zuleica's pass: eyes open and unfocused, trying to focus on the peripheryof vision and also in feeling energy (pressure on the skin like moving under water), also focused on breathing, which naturally aligned it's rhythm whit the pass after some time.
After some minutes some things started happening: I started seeing those auras around the objects in my field of view, this time lees purple, more colorless than anything, also started seing a fog in front of me, mostly colorless, kind like water floating whitouth defined edges, with some small glimpses of translucent purple here and there, I noticed this fog because I was fixating my sight on a dot on the white wall, and this fog started covering it, making it disappear, at this point my eyes also started to, for lack of a better explanation, start to auto adjust its focus, like when you point a camera and it stars to adjust its focus, and my eyes started to cros and uncros by themselves.
It was hard to maintain attention on the translucent fog, every time it got in front of the dot, the child mind turn the volume of the song up, messing with the focus of my sight, pulling it from blurred, crossed and peripheral, to clearly focused on the center of my sight, on the dot on the wall.
After some time in this tug of war with the child, being judged by the manager, while I intermittently went back and forth from looking at the dot on the wall, and losing sight of it behind the fog, my legs started shaking and I started to feel dizzy, like before you faint, so I stopped the exercise, because I'm recovering for a surgery to remove my vesicle and failing to the ground problably won't be good for the stitches.
But it gave me new enthusiasm to do tensegrity, I'm daring to hope that this dizziness is a sign of falling asleep while awake?
I'm not that hopeful though, because I just started practicing a week ago and I think it's probably too soon to expect this kind of results? I'm not even that silent yet.
Anyway, after I recover I will do it again to see if I really fall to the ground, and what happens next. I think this will give me more clearer sign if something odd is really going on.
If so, I'll probably try to think of a way to repeat the exercise without the risk of falling to my face, which will probably interrupt whatever odd thing is happening.
It's effective to do Zuleica's pass seated on a chair?
Ps: I have experienced the reaction of people when you suggest that results should be the criterion for any magical exercise. A while ago one person that I studied occultism with, invited me to a group to retake studies in this field. I told him that I would only accept it if, instead of doing anything suggested in a book, we were willing to select or discard practices based on verifiable results. He doesn't looked very happy whit this condition, but said it was acceptable. Haven't heard of him in a while.
Ps 2: I think it would be useful to clarify my objectives here. Not to impress anyone (although the manager would classify it as an achievement), but to avoid communication noise. It cuts some corners when people take your question, dumb as they look, genuinely.
I think that if magic does exist it is the most important thing that a human can pursue.
It's all fine and dandy to try to convince yourself of any philosophy that makes it easier to swim through the river of filth if there's nothing "out there" and life is in fact just some time between nothing and nothing, with no real purpose.
But if there is something more, one could not waste all their lifetime drowning in shit, never touching the shores.
So I'm not interested in stealing, nor selling, nor faking anything, because if magic is real, it is a matter of life and death to learn it, and I don't have infinite time to do it.
It also answers to a belief that I have had for decades, that humans are not designed to die, and that we die because we are convinced on a reality-shaping level, that we have to and because of that we never discover how to not die.
Maybe this is some kind of delusion, but I have always felt that it is possible. Because if magic does exist, why not? Magic is magic after all.
I hope you're right about my chances, cause I'm not giving up on this.
Since I was a teen I have searched for real magic.
I tried Chan Tao (like Zen but Chinese, supposedly came from India and took root in wush philosophy before it went to Japan and became a hierarchical religion), tried witchcraft from loads of books like Witchcraft Theory and Practice by an Australian girl named Ly de Angeles, tried some African spiritism called candomble that exists here in Brazil, and lastly was studying chaos magick, wich is for sure complicated enough to look like something and sell books, but also looks to much for to little.
I also stumbled across some interesting people on the way, one of whom taught me how to feel energy. A very simple thing that consists of focusing the attention on feeling the skin and "breathing" with the hands, also possible with the whole body.
I have been practicing it my whole life, just as a way of not letting go of any practical magic.
This guy taught me an exercise that looks a lot like the Pandora's box pass, which I discovered today here on the sub, I wonder if this is the source of this exercise.
I also tested this mashing energy to form a ball on people's hands a bunch of times, letting them with their eyes closed without telling them what to expect, just to see if they would feel anything. The results were mixed, some felt heat, some felt pressure, some felt like I was pouring water on their hand, and some felt nothing at all.
I told them that it was an experiment on how the mind can create sensations if one expects something to happen, but always take notice of those cases in which the person could tell whit eyes closed where my hands were when I moved them up their arms.
Doing this feeling energy technique causes the skin to feel pressure, like it were done underwater, and holding the hands together after some mashing energy causes the space between the hands to pulse back and forth, like therapy was a ball breathing between the palms, and if the palms are close enough, almost touching, it gets hot.
Anyway, I tried something today and have some maybe results?
I discovered Zuleica's pass and thought it was simple enough for me to try. Since I had remembered of this feeling energy exercise I decided to incorporate it to the practice (if for no other reason, just to have something to focus on), the exercise is a mish mash of things that I lern here (sorry for that, I know it's important to maintain what really works, but I like to experiment and I think it wouldn't be that bad to mix one thing that work whit another to see wat happens. I will also keep doing things by the book).
I stand in my kitchen, eyes open, looking at a dot on the white wall, and let my eyes lose focus, which makes everything blurry, paying attention to my peripheral vision, and start doing the zuleicas pass, paying attention to the muscle movements and trying to feel my skin (feeling the pressure of feeling energy), at the same time I focused my attention to my breath, wich after some time I noticed that naturally aligned it's rhythm to the movement of the pass.
Doing this exercise I discovered something interesting.
It looks like my mind is composed of three parts:
1 - What I call the manager, which is the part that actively thinks about things and is always evaluating something. He's a know-it-all and a control freak, fortunately, he is vulnerable to the second part of the mind, which controls attention, and if he starts thinking I just need to concentrate strongly on more than one thing (like breathing and movement) and this is enough to make him lose track of his line of thought after one or two words.
2 - The second part of the mind is, for lack of a better explanation, the attention itself, or awareness. It can be directed to something and it's a doer, not a thinker, you hang it on something and it keeps doing it silently, without thinking about it. It cuts through the manager if you focus hard enough on something, or on things enough at the same time (which also causes dizziness).
3 - The child monkey. This is a fricking curse. It's like a garbage collector, always getting distracted whit something that it pulled off from the mind, maybe from the unconscious. It is the source of the songs that are always playing in the background of my mind, and that I only noticed after starting to practice silence. It's like those children who speak nonstop, jumping from one random subject to another, paying no attention to anything at all.
At the same time, it feels like a repeater, sometimes fueling something for the manager to think, but I feel that it is an echo, a delayed side effect of the manager, that automatically reproduces patterns created by the manager.
While focusing attention can interrupt the line of thought of the manager, it doesn't do shit to the monkey.
Focusing attention seems to disrupt the manager by stealing the limited awareness, since he actively produces thoughts, he stumbles when you steal the awareness from him and attach it to something else.
The same thing doesn't seem to affect the monkey, since his noise is a pre-made automation, it keeps playing (mostly pieces of songs) even when I strongly focus my attention on something.
Focusing the attention on multiple things seems to turn the volume up, and interrupt it intermittently, but that is all. It's an automated independent noise, quietly doing its own thing in the corner.
It is a curse because it feels like being rickrolled.
You start getting silent, cutting the line of thought of the manager, only to notice the background noise that you weren't aware of, and that you can't immediately silence because it isn't actively producing the noise, but just reproducing passively an automated pattern.
And the manager loves to divert the attention to listen to the piece of music that the child monkey is playing.
But I intuitively think that, being a repeater of the patterns created by the manager, if I can get the manager silent for long enough it will reproduce this silence.
For long enough I don't expect it to happen after hours of practice, probably after some months of consistent practice.
Do you know what this monkey mind is?
You're "looking in the wrong direction".
We're sleepwalkers!
So until you are fully asleep, but walking around as if you were fully awake, the things you are expecting to be happening, won't.
It's one of the sad things about sorcery, for those who try to help others but just can't get them to "turn and look that other direction!"
The techniques you mentioned are also all looking in the wrong direction.
You'll figure this out once you can get to the red zone on the J curve, get to see super amazing magic no one will believe, and from there you strive to be able to repeat it, but can't.
That's when you slowly realize it's all happening because you moved in a different direction.
Part of why we use tensegrity, perhaps.
Man it's disappointing to hear this, I really thought it was something worth investigating further 😅
Not a problem though, I think it's only natural to get lost with things while I'm not able to see enough to stop guessing and start seeing when things are really working.
Well, I guess that posting things here to be corrected is one of the purposes of this community. Thanks for pointing out that I was looking in the wrong direction. Although it doesn't really clarify how to look in the right direction, and also the red zone seems pretty far from here on the blue station.
What would you change in the exercise?
I was doing the tensegrity zuleica pass, eyes open, gazing at a spot on the wall, with eyes unfocused, paying attention to my breath and movement of the body, also focusing on feeling energy (but I will drop this since it's probably visualization that may lead to side shifting of the assemblage point?).
Probably you will say that it is better to do it in the dark, which I accept, but to be honest I found that I get more anxious and my inner dialogue more active when doing tensegrity in the dark, also... Juan did a lot of daylight gazing, so I think that would be at least valid to try tensegrity in the daylight to try.
I will still do tensegrity in the dark every opportunity that I have, and persist in the exercises for silence.
Besides the simple silence which I'm doing even without the rocks, and considering to grab some eucalyptus stick for my left hand, I will start to try the stick on the forehead technique, I just have to cut a leather-padded stick that I have around here to the right length.
I need to read those exercises again, I forgot whether they're to be done with eyes closed or open.
Also will be doing the right way of walking at least once a week.
I'm also considering investigating further the daylight gazing that Juan registered in a thread. I'm really less anxious in the light, maybe it's the adhd getting in the way.
And ok, I know darkroom is the foundation and I will give it the due importance. I'm considering these side practices as preparations and reinforcements to the darkroom, to maybe help reduce my anxiety while doing darkroom tensegrity, and help to achieve silence in the dark, which is harder for me than doing it in daylight.
I also think that it is better to try everything that I can, every opportunity that I have, instead of just doing darkroom once in a while when it's possible for me.
And I'm also constantly forcing silence every time I remember it, as you advised in how to see puffs of colors in three weeks. Which for sure is not easy, and I'm pretty confident that it will take more than three weeks to get there, at least for me.
But thanks for your input, it's probably annoying to be answering clueless beginners, I really appreciate it.
You're still looking in the wrong direction...
Follow the instructions for a while, and give up everything you think you know.
Because that's guaranteed to stop you from making any progress.
Your drowning in make believe created by bad men, in order to steal your money.
Keep it to the sorcery basics!
Last night I even realized, and then got a long seeing lecture, why we can't repeat stuff at first, and how harmful it is to try to do that even at advanced levels, when you can.
You're injecting your "self" into the mix. Even having gotten rid of it, you can still try to behave as if you had one, favoring the rational over the abstract and unknowable.
After realzing that, and stopping it, I was able to extract an object from a dream, and place it on my bed. On which I was sitting up on pillows gazing into the darkness.
I'd been trying to repeat remote viewing on the bedspread, and because of that I hadn't moved on from that, to snatching objects from dreams the way Elias could do.
In your case, you're boiling over with "self".
So keep it simple, until the self is gone as evidenced by astonishing magic the likes of which no other system even dreams of.
Not as evidenced by what you feel, or think you ought to feel.
REAL MAGIC.
In other words, keep it to basics until you no longer have any questions because you have visual, physical magic right in front of you. And all the answers flow from infinity, when you actually need them.
It's also possible you've substituted guru attention seeking for actually doing the hard work of learning to remove your internal dialogue.
As Carlos was dying, Taisha, Florinda, and Carol (or one of them) told us that Carlos had failed, and all the workshops had succeeded in doing was turning Carlos into a Guru.
Which killed him (my addition to that story).
Thus he left us, after telling me "I'm dying, and no one believes me."
That's how I ended up in here. To fix that.
I'm not in the attention-seeking business, I'd rather have people let me alone to do any strange thing that I like without anyone bothering with stupid questions. I'm more of a hermit type. Don't wandering away just because I have to eat, have some clothes to wear, and a shelter over my head.
The instructions are plentiful in here.
Try studying more.
Yes, they are, so plentiful that it gets confusing.
There is no step-by-step material (which Don Juan criticized Castaneda for looking for once), lots of practices to do, in lots of ways, and not much consensus on details.
You, Juan, and Techno (the three that I identified as a solid source of advice) here and there have different opinions on how things should be done: eyes open, eyes closed, hanging attention on something, not hanging it on anything, gazing first, darkroom first.
You're right, the sub is a plentiful source, but it's also a lot, even more because it's flooded with opinions that range from people who learned directly from Castaneda, to nobs like me that dare to say shit about things they don't really know about.
Which for sure is wonderful for advanced people who already get somewhere and are sharing different perspectives, but is a mess for beginners like me.
Not complaining, although I am, just pointing out that: study more, which I'm doing, doesn’t solve all the confusion.
You have to learn to move your assemblage point to the red zone, to remove your confusion.
Green zone isn't going to do it, since Yogis and Buddhists get there.
In fact, the green zone leads to stronger delusions.
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/wiki/introduction/
I personally like the subreddit statement, but might as well direct you to the entire introduction.
Anyway...
Other than noticing this division in my mind, I got some results from the practice.
After some time in a tug of war with the monkey mind, arbitrated by the manager, I started seeing the "auras" around the objects in my field of view.
Not so purple that time, more colorless. Also started to see a translucent fog in front of me, a cloud-like shape made of thin water, but with undefined edges, dancing in front of me with some small hues of translucent purple.
I didn't notice it a first, with the child singing Gwen Stefani nonstop, I just noticed it because it got in front of the dot I was looking at, and I noticed that the dot had disappeared.
I tried to focus on the translucent fog and something odd started happening.
My eyes started, for lack of a better explanation, trying to autofocus, like a camera, going back and forth, blurring and refocusing, crossing and uncrossing, the dot showing and disappearing. While the thug of war went on, me against the monkey and the manager.
After some time my legs started shaking, and I started to get dizzy, like before fainting, then I stopped the exercise, since I'm recovering from a surgery to remove my vesicle, and falling to my face would probably do no good for the stitches.
I wonder if this getting shaky and dizzy is a sign of that thing of falling asleep while awake. I don't know, cause I think it's too soon for these kinds of results.
In any case, when I recover I will try again to see if I really faint, and watching happens next. I think this would give a clearer sign if something odd is really going on.
If so, I'll probably have to think of a way to repeat the exercise in a way that doesn't involve faceplanting, which for sure would interrupt anything odd happening.
Doing Zuleica's pass seated in a chair would be an option?
Ps: I have some experience with what happens when you tell people to cut the bs. Some time ago a person with whom I studied occultism with long time ago, invited me to a study group. I told him that it would only make sense to me if the group agreed on selecting and discarding practices based on real results.
He didn't seem to get happy with this answer. He said that it was acceptable, but I haven't read of him since.
Pps: I think it is useful to clarify what my objective here is. Not to impress anyone (although the manager would classify it as an achievement), but to prevent communication noise. It cuts some corners when people take your question, dumb as they are, genuinely.
I'm here because I think that, if magic is real, then it is the most important thing for a human to learn. It's all good to believe in any made-up philosophy to comfort you if life is nothing more than a slice of time between nothing and nothing. But if there is something real out there, learning it is a matter of life and death. Not doing this would be wasting a lifetime drowning in filth.
I have no interest in stealing, nor selling, nor faking anything, because there is no time for it, and the stakes are too high.
It also answers a belief that I have had for decades, that humans are not designed to die. We die just because we are convinced, on a reality-shaping level, that we have to. So we never learn how not to.
Maybe this is a delusion of some sort, but I believe deep down that it's possible not to be obliterated.
If magic is real, why not?
Magic is magic after all.
It's to do what is deemed impossible, right?
I think in the most primitive humans the internal dialogue was probably looser, but I think language has to be innate in some way.
Like, if humans everywhere around the world have arms, it probably just means humans have arms because of their DNA.
We have DNA for speech, while some primates do not.
But the internal dialogue is NOT speech.
It's something else. Something foreign.
I read in a post somewhere here a conversation between Castaneda and Don Juan, where he asks Don Juan if it would be possible for a child to maintain its silence and not develop its inner dialogue.
And Don Juan said it would be possible only if the child lived amongst new seers, or else he would get lost and entangled in the problem of man's silence, or something like that, which would be worse than getting trapped in rationality.
I didn't really understand the conversation, but I guess this is why we have to start our inner dialogue to fixate our assemblage point, because it would be worse not to do it away from these new seers.
Hope to understand the dialogue eventually.
Witness the internal dialog without judgement. It's a form of contemplation. Do it continuously, all day long.
After what may take years, the internal dialog diminishes.
But you may find gaps in the inner dialog much sooner than that. Power of intention. These are known as satori in Zen.
The inner dialog is like clouds in the sky. Comes and goes.. .
Inner Silence is the goal.
"The internal dialogue can’t do shit." : https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/1eyj6k4/point_of_view_on_inner_dialogue_nothing_new_just/ -Comments
Forcing Silence: https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/1e5b6zr/forcing_silence/ -Comments
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/1nwltrv/pull_your_actual_self_out_of_the_river_of_filth/?share_id=KdaDGZBNUxC1Kexxv4bmE&utm_content=1&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1
It seems to me that the internal dialogue is similar to a computer. It's a great opportunity, but most people use it for gossip, eroticism, and games. People are very dependent on computers now. We are merging with the virtual world. But the computer and the internal dialogue are something that can be turned off.
Don't worry, I'm not giving up on this.
Since I was a teen I have searched for real magic.
I tried Chan Tao (like Zen but Chinese, supposedly came from India and took root in wush philosophy before it went to Japan and became a hierarchical religion), tried witchcraft from loads of books like Witchcraft Theory and Practice by an Australian girl named Ly de Angeles, tried some African spiritism called candomble that exists here in Brazil, and lastly was studying chaos magick, wich is for sure complicated enough to look like something and sell books, but also looks to much for to little.
I also stumbled across some interesting people on the way, one of whom taught me how to feel energy. A very simple thing that consists of focusing the attention on feeling the skin and "breathing" with the hands, also possible with the whole body.
I have been practicing it my whole life, just as a way of not letting go of any practical magic.
This guy taught me an exercise that looks a lot like the Pandora's box pass, which I discovered today here on the sub, I wonder if this is the source of this exercise.
I also tested this mashing energy to form a ball on people's hands a bunch of times, letting them with their eyes closed without telling them what to expect, just to see if they would feel anything. The results were mixed, some felt heat, some felt pressure, some felt like I was pouring water on their hand, and some felt nothing at all.
I told them that it was an experiment on how the mind can create sensations if one expects something to happen, but always take notice of those cases in which the person could tell whit eyes closed where my hands were when I moved them up their arms.
Doing this feeling energy technique causes the skin to feel pressure, like it were done underwater, and holding the hands together after some mashing energy causes the space between the hands to pulse back and forth, like therapy was a ball breathing between the palms, and if the palms are close enough, almost touching, it gets hot.
Anyway, I tried something today and have some maybe results?
I discovered Zuleica's pass and thought it was simple enough for me to try. Since I had remembered of this feeling energy exercise I decided to incorporate it to the practice (if for no other reason, just to have something to focus on), the exercise is a mish mash of things that I lern here (sorry for that, I know it's important to maintain what really works, but I like to experiment and I think it wouldn't be that bad to mix one thing that work whit another to see wat happens. I will also keep doing things by the book).
I stand in my kitchen, eyes open, looking at a dot on the white wall, and let my eyes lose focus, which makes everything blurry, paying attention to my peripheral vision, and start doing the zuleicas pass, paying attention to the muscle movements and trying to feel my skin (feeling the pressure of feeling energy), at the same time I focused my attention to my breath, wich after some time I noticed that naturally aligned it's rhythm to the movement of the pass.
Doing this exercise I discovered something interesting.
It looks like my mind is composed of three parts:
1 - What I call the manager, which is the part that actively thinks about things and is always evaluating something. He's a know-it-all and a control freak, fortunately, he is vulnerable to the second part of the mind, which controls attention, and if he starts thinking I just need to concentrate strongly on more than one thing (like breathing and movement) and this is enough to make him lose track of his line of thought after one or two words.
2 - The second part of the mind is, for lack of a better explanation, the attention itself, or awareness. It can be directed to something and it's a doer, not a thinker, you hang it on something and it keeps doing it silently, without thinking about it. It cuts through the manager if you focus hard enough on something, or on things enough at the same time (which also causes dizziness).
3 - The child monkey. This is a fricking curse. It's like a garbage collector, always getting distracted whit something that it pulled off from the mind, maybe from the unconscious. It is the source of the songs that are always playing in the background of my mind, and that I only noticed after starting to practice silence. It's like those children who speak nonstop, jumping from one random subject to another, paying no attention to anything at all.
At the same time, it feels like a repeater, sometimes fueling something for the manager to think, but I feel that it is an echo, a delayed side effect of the manager, that automatically reproduces patterns created by the manager.
While focusing attention can interrupt the line of thought of the manager, it doesn't do shit to the monkey.
Focusing attention seems to disrupt the manager by stealing the limited awareness, since he actively produces thoughts, he stumbles when you steal the awareness from him and attach it to something else.
The same thing doesn't seem to affect the monkey, since his noise is a pre-made automation, it keeps playing (mostly pieces of songs) even when I strongly focus my attention on something.
Focusing the attention on multiple things seems to turn the volume up, and interrupt it intermittently, but that is all. It's an automated independent noise, quietly doing its own thing in the corner.
It is a curse because it feels like being rickrolled.
You start getting silent, cutting the line of thought of the manager, only to notice the background noise that you weren't aware of, and that you can't immediately silence because it isn't actively producing the noise, but just reproducing passively an automated pattern.
And the manager loves to divert the attention to listen to the piece of music that the child monkey is playing.
But I intuitively think that, being a repeater of the patterns created by the manager, if I can get the manager silent for long enough it will reproduce this silence.
For long enough I don't expect it to happen after hours of practice, probably after some months of consistent practice.
Do you know what this monkey mind is?
Other than noticing this division in my mind, I got some results from the practice.
After some time in a tug of war with the monkey mind, arbitrated by the manager, I started seeing the "auras" around the objects in my field of view.
Not so purple that time, more colorless. Also started to see a translucent fog in front of me, a cloud-like shape made of thin water, but with undefined edges, dancing in front of me with some small hues of translucent purple.
I didn't notice it a first, with the child singing Gwen Stefani nonstop, I just noticed it because it got in front of the dot I was looking at, and I noticed that the dot had disappeared.
I tried to focus on the translucent fog and something odd started happening.
My eyes started, for lack of a better explanation, trying to autofocus, like a camera, going back and forth, blurring and refocusing, crossing and uncrossing, the dot showing and disappearing. While the thug of war went on, me against the monkey and the manager.
After some time my legs started shaking, and I started to get dizzy, like before fainting, then I stopped the exercise, since I'm recovering from a surgery to remove my vesicle, and falling to my face would probably do no good for the stitches.
I wonder if this getting shaky and dizzy is a sign of that thing of falling asleep while awake. I don't know, cause I think it's too soon for these kinds of results.
In any case, when I recover I will try again to see if I really faint, and watching happens next. I think this would give a clearer sign if something odd is really going on.
If so, I'll probably have to think of a way to repeat the exercise in a way that doesn't involve faceplanting, which for sure would interrupt anything odd happening.
Doing Zuleica's pass seated in a chair would be an option?
Ps: I have some experience with what happens when you tell people to cut the bs. Some time ago a person with whom I studied occultism with long time ago, invited me to a study group. I told him that it would only make sense to me if the group agreed on selecting and discarding practices based on real results.
He didn't seem to get happy with this answer. He said that it was acceptable, but I haven't read of him since.
Pps: I think it is useful to clarify what my objective here is. Not to impress anyone (although the manager would classify it as an achievement), but to prevent communication noise. It cuts some corners when people take your question, dumb as they are, genuinely.
I'm here because I think that, if magic is real, then it is the most important thing for a human to learn. It's all good to believe in any made-up philosophy to comfort you if life is nothing more than a slice of time between nothing and nothing. But if there is something real out there, learning it is a matter of life and death. Not doing this would be wasting a lifetime drowning in filth.
I have no interest in stealing, nor selling, nor faking anything, because there is no time for it, and the stakes are too high.
It also answers a belief that I have had for decades, that humans are not designed to die. We die just because we are convinced, on a reality-shaping level, that we have to. So we never learn how not to.
Maybe this is a delusion of some sort, but I believe deep down that it's possible not to be obliterated.
If magic is real, why not?
Magic is magic after all.
It's to do what is deemed impossible, right?
I would say socialization is the cause for inner dialogue to start and persist. I do remember the time (day) when I noticed my inner dialogue and got slightly annoyed by it. I was probably 7 year old. Before that time I was free of inner dialogue. All child's are free of inner dialogue.
So silence is actually the default. Inner dialogue comes after.