I’m trying to clarify what internal dialogue actually refers to in Castaneda’s work, without assuming I’ve experienced anything like true inner silence.
I notice that my mind is almost always active in words — planning future situations, rehearsing responses, organizing work projects, commenting on what’s happening. Even writing this post involved mentally forming and revising sentences before typing them.
So I’m wondering: is all of this considered internal dialogue, or only a specific part of it?
For example:
If I make jokes about myself in my head or comment on my situation in a humorous way, is that internal dialogue?
When I plan a work project and use words internally to structure ideas and decisions, is that the same thing?
If I think of a sentence, decide it’s useful, and then write it down — is that still internal dialogue?
When Castaneda talks about stopping the internal dialogue, I’m unsure what that means practically.
Is the goal to shut off all internal verbalization — no planning, no commentary, no mental rehearsal at all? Or is internal dialogue something more specific than ordinary thinking used for practical tasks?
15 Comments
Theres alot of posts you can go through here that adress that, your mixing up between ideas/thoughts and internal dialogue. Think of it as live commentary on situations that can be both pleasant or unpleasant, something that boost ur idea of one or the other, its also shaped by the river of shit which is daily life and all the beliefs enforced within it. Atleast thats how i interperet it.
Hi. You can find all the relevant information on the subreddit wiki https://reddit.com/r/castaneda/wiki/silence , and as Da-ram mentioned, there's plenty of information to search through in the posts and comments. Cheers.
Yes, that is all internal dialogue. All of it.
You shut it all off to practice inner silence.
You will then start to notice other things that impinge upon that silence that perhaps you would not have noticed before.
That's your "self" suffering away in it's perpetual "poor me" point of view.
Even when doing something, we still frame it in those terms one way or the other, because our reality has been narrowed down to that. It's the only terms in which we can see anything.
It's definitely impossible to think about it, and make it go away. So that's not going to help you other than to make you unhappy that it never stops, so that you keep trying despite making no real progress.
In the long run, it's possible that the only way to stop it, is to intend to stop it.
But if it's true, it's like trying to dig a tunnel with a spoon.
You can't really do that, but if you try anyway, never giving up, something outside of you takes pity and gives you a hand.
Best to stick with something like Tensegrity while trying to stop it, until you have other resources available to you.
Such as being able to "look in another direction".
But you have to see the other direction many times, before you could do that. It's not something you can just "look for", if you haven't seen it enough times.
very good and important question, i think, although i get the sense that a lot of these concepts or experiences can't be pinned down with words so explanation will only take us so far.
Newbie here, so please practise patience and a little tolerance.
Im unique in the sense that an active, well trained man showed me these teachings. He was trying to encourage my interest, but at the time I ignored it...even so much as to fake that I read and attempted.
I was a fool.
The books sat, years, now a decade. Puzzling , I always picked them up, instinctively thoughts crossed my mind and as you said internal dialougues.
I have no finished my first experience, and re reading some passages, out of order.
In addition to internal dialog , do you others find meaning and hints in other places? Like songs and literature?
For example, Silent Lucidity.... .
It makes me believe there are quite a few of us out here, but being quiet is part of it.....internal dialog...
A very nice experience!
It's pretty well-explained that, for example, poetry, is aware of our connecting link with intent, however, that does not make them sorcerers. There are hints everywhere, because, at their core, people are aware of it (to one degree or another), however, they disregard it due to the nature of everyday life. Only sorcerers learn to clean their connecting link to intent, and they should practice daily.
From Power of Silence:
"I like poems for many reasons," he said. "One reason is that they catch the mood of warriors and explain what can hardly be explained."
He conceded that poets were keenly aware of our connecting link with the spirit, but that they were aware of it intuitively, not in the deliberate, pragmatic way of sorcerers.
"Poets have no firsthand knowledge of the spirit," he went on. "That is why their poems cannot really hit the center of true gestures for the spirit. They hit pretty close to it, though."
You can’t win by fighting thoughts, because fighting thoughts is still thinking. The internal dialogue keeps running as long as your attention is fused with sentences and self-commentary. So the goal isn’t to “force the mind to shut up.” The goal is to train your attention to rest somewhere nonverbal until words stop grabbing you.
Start by training tiny gaps. Place attention on something that doesn’t require language: sound as a field, the visual field (Learn gazing so you don't tense up your eyes, usually when they are tense you are in your inner dialogue), or body sensation. Pick one anchor and keep it simple.The one that feels easier.
Listening is a good anchor: hear the whole sound-field at once near and far, loud and quiet, without naming anything.
If you notice yourself labeling (“car,” “voices,” “wind”), don’t argue with the label or judge yourself. Just drop it and return to raw hearing.
Hands are another strong anchor: feel your hands directly; pressure, temperature, vibration, tingling, contact. Stay with sensation, not descriptions. If a sentence starts forming, cut it and return to sensation. Check out the rock silence method in this reddit.
Success is measurable and small on purpose: you notice a sentence starting and you don’t continue it. Half a second counts. One clean interruption is a real win. At first the narrator will keep coming back nonstop. That’s normal. It's what you have been conditioned to follow to the point that it comes back automatically because your attention has been stuck in there since childhood.
Right now your attention is identified with the inner narration, so you’re building a new habit: attention staying put without being dragged into words.
Over time, the gaps become more frequent and longer. You’ll begin to see thoughts as events that pass through awareness, like background noise, instead of something you automatically follow. To the point that you would go back to silence easier and perceive your body, thoughts, emotions as energy fields because you are not describing them. You are sensing, observing them from silence, which has a particular knowing factor. To the point that attention stays there as long as you can hold it. You'll notice that energy is important, but now go slowly. Collect small wins. Learn the felt difference between being inside the narration and being aware with minimal or no verbal stream in one of the "anchors" previously mentioned.
If you drift into daydreaming, your anchor is too vague, use your hands and listen, you can mix them and listen the sound field with your hands ;) . If you get tense, soften your gaze and return to listening. Persist, and the gaps widen.
If you start doubting about doing the exercises correctly, that's the inner dialogue back, back to me, me, me. observe that. Drop that!!! Just do it and keep doing it. With time gradual understanding will come, be patient.
You also have a fundamental misunderstanding though.
"Check out the rock silence method in this reddit."
It works because it is a method that was used by the Sorcerers of Ancient Mexico. Everything in sorcery is about cleaning your link with intent.
I suggest to use the techniques given in the books, you aren't special, and you are deliberately making things harder for yourself by trying to be special. It's easier to dig when there is already a trench formed from thousands of sorcerers before you having already dug there too.
Keep in mind, Don Juan said that hands don't matter, since you could look for your dick if you wanted to, but hands were what he used:
The way I've told you," he snapped. "You can, of course, look at whatever you goddamn please - your toes, or your belly, or your pecker, for that matter. I said your hands because that was the easiest thing for me to look at. Don't think it's a joke. Dreaming is as serious as seeing or dying or any other thing in this awesome, mysterious world.
-Journey to Ixtlan
However, I do see the value in hand training for soothing the nervous system, however, I don't consider it as part of my sorcery to exercise with baoding balls. It is for my nervous system.
I agree the point is cleaning the link with intent, and that the specific anchor doesn’t matter , hands are just convenient (like don Juan said, you could look at anything).
When I suggest “listening” or “hands,” I’m not proposing a new sorcery method. I’m describing a beginner-friendly way to stop feeding internal dialogue long enough to get a first taste of the gap. Without that taste, “silence” stays abstract and people don’t know what they’re aiming for.
Rock-silence is great for the same reason: it gives attention something nonverbal to hold, so narration weakens and the link gets cleaner.
So yeah: the anchor isn’t the goal, silence/clean link is the goal. Anchors are just training wheels that help new people actually feel what we’re talking about. Not about my specialness lol, it’s about making the information digestible when you’re starting out.
I can see how some phrasing might have sounded presumptuous, that wasn’t my intention.
It's not "presumptuous", you are still not understanding.
The specific anchor MATTERS! You want one that is tied to the Intent of the Sorcerers of Ancient Mexico. Are you doing tensegrity?
Your technique of paying attention to your hands won't help you. "pressure, temperature, vibration, tingling, contact." This is barely relevant to it.
"Listening to the sounds of the world" is an exercise given in the books, but you yourself are still busy labeling... "Sound-field"? What is that, if not a label?
If you want a beginner-friendly way, why not try these:
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/aki0db/how_to_see_energy_in_3_weeks/
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/bskqmx/simple_silence_technique/
You are mistaking the description for the act of labeling.
If only “approved anchors” work, then why does the book explicitly say you can look at toes/belly/anything? The object isn’t sacred,the fixation and narration are the problem.
I’m happy to point beginners to your links and to the book methods my point is simply that the skill underneath them is learning to withdraw attention from narration, and beginners often need a concrete handle to notice the difference. That's all.
“Approved anchors” what a funny way to say it. “Presumptuous” is also funny.
You think it has to do with socialization, but it doesn’t. It has to do with Intent.
You are deliberately making things harder for yourself with this talk of “approved” and “presumptuous”.
You still are misunderstanding it.
I know you mean the intent carried by the lineage. It's just for new people that is so hard to understand.
Something that's been helpful for me in slowing down the chatter is, instead of trying to think within the frame of with my thoughts, which usually come in the form of "I should" or "I want", to ask myself "where is the self-pity here?". I've that slows down/interrupts the chatter. Never in a world shattering way, but it feels different than "normal" thoughts, which I take as a good sign.