Hey everyone,
Just wanted to share last night I had possibly my 'clearest' experience yet with the darkroom.
I'd been working on something before bed, couldn't sleep, and found my thoughts racing; all of a sudden I felt compelled to open my eyes and gaze for a while. Almost immediately after I did so the room seemed to 'fill up' with little white dots, then turned into sparkling lights like stars. This immediate experience caused me to try to focus my eyes on the sparking lights, to which they started disappearing, so I forced myself back into silent observation, using "soft eyes" (the periphery). The lights started sparking again, and soon after a cluster of geometric squiggles appeared on the ceiling above.
I looked up a comparison point this morning: these squiggles are best imagined as being close to the Greek art style called Meander, although they were arranged in different patterns. Geometric lines were moving across the ceiling out of the cluster. Again, I started thinking about what was happening, and the image faded, so it was back into forcing silence. The squiggles reappeared, and this time blobs of purple light starting moving vertically through the squiggles.
My persistent brain kept wanting to think about what was happening, so I closed my eyes and all activity ceased afterwards.
I've always noticed that throughout practice, a light in the hallway behind my door always seems to get brighter (there's no light out there other than a tiny sliver of faint light through the curtains that sometimes reflects on the wall above the door). It's this reflection that seems to brighten, and when I stop practicing it seems to 'fade' back to normal, faint luminosity again.
It was really cool, and possibly the clearest experience of seeing I've had practicing darkroom so far. A couple of years ago, I had a spontaneous experience during meditation where I (as I discovered later in the books) entered into the first and second state of dreaming, seeing the wall of fog (at the time I described it as an infinite veil of mist) then seeing a static image. I kept looking for an explanation (meditation subs, books etc.) of what happened but was none the wiser, not until I picked up my first Castaneda book a few months later to find Castaneda talking about the 'wall of fog' and later in the eagles gift the four states of dreaming, including the static image!
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That light in the hallway you mention sounds just like when Castaneda had to find the perfect spot on Don Juan's house in the first book.
Thank you for sharing your experience, helps me to start again doing darkroom, stop being lazy.
Interesting, thank you for the pointer, I recently got a copy of the first book so will look it up - I can't remember why but I read a random one first and carried on that way.
Definitely continue! I'm still working on consistency as well, but after a while it feels strange not doing it.
Project Ixtlan chose that very chapter for their first “episode.”
Project Ixtlan - The Spot - YouTube
Meander looks a tiny bit like Olmec pottery designs.
I always worry about the "white dots" because they aren';t clearly something other than "eye junk noise".
But actually, even eye junk noise can be used during darkroom, as long as you're convinced it's magic, and you focus mostly on stopping the internal dialogue.
Anything that puzzles the mind can be made to work, and thus Taisha's "not-doings" where you grab the air to the left, and compare it to t he air to the right, looking for differences.
A bizarre thing to do, but just doing it causes new emanations to glow.
Thus so can the "eye junk".
But then you got undeniable magic, which included your energy body coming to play. That's the purple blobs.
Keep in mind, you can stall out at the "well, it's a little cool but it's no teleportation or helpful supernatural beings materializing!"
Just don't worry about that, things get VERY real when you first start out.
One day you'll walk through the solid wall and not be able to explain it later on.
Or zip outside the galaxy.
But EVEN THEN, it won't be enough to satisfy your rational mind.
So that there's never any guarantee you've "seen enough magic", that there's no way you'll stop going onward.
Our belief that if seeing REAL magic hooks you for life, and you just keep going on and never go back is completely wrong.
We already saw all this magic as small children.
Our friends and families put an end to it.
And they'll do that again unless you keep fighting.
I suppose the old seers had a remedy for people trying to stop them.
They ate them alive...
As far as I know, the "new" seers gave that up.
And instead, just hid out so well, no one knew they were sorcerers.
Hopefully we don't have to do either.
What is “soft eyes”?
What is “soft eyes”?
Condensation of Google Gemini output: