From what I've read, it can immediately nullify most ways to see magic and stands as a big barrier in you and magic. Now I know you guys get this question very often and I'd like to let you know, I mean it's qualities :D. If internal dialogue can bar someone accessing magic, then would that mean that the internal dialogue is stronger than magic? And if so, would utilizing and manipulating the internal dialogue not make a big change in your reality?
From what I’ve seen about it, it seems like it’s an inherent property of reality itself. Something that grounds you? Making the reality ordinary? I’d like to know how when you go see a movie, and your internal dialogue is changed for a bit; acting like a filter you think thoughts that are Aligned with how you feel?? I add the question marks to signify I have no idea what I’m talking about…
Another thing I would like to talk about but is not exactly related is how on a post somewhere here, people were asking why people who practice don’t help people with it. And the answer was because when you are practicing magic, that is not even a thought that crosses your mind. To help people in a war stricken place for example. People who have that kind of thinking don’t get very far in magic is very Largely paraphrasing what I read on the post. If that is the case, what do people who practice it, practice it in mind with. Some people said curiosity but why would that not make someone want to help someone in a war? I’m assuming because they are so far attached from the problems of other people’s day to day, that they simply don’t care?
It’s my first post here…I ask that you have mercy.
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No, this comes from a misunderstanding.
The internal dialogue is not important. Inner Silence is important. The internal dialogue is only worth discussing because it is the most egregious example of what we do that runs counter to Inner Silence.
The position of the assemblage point determines our reality. Inner Silence provides the conditions amenable (and in most cases, necessary) to displace the assemblage point and fix it on a new position. The internal dialogue keeps our assemblage point fixed on this world and this way of being. While the internal dialogue often refers to the way we talk to ourselves internally, anything that counters Inner Silence will also keep us fixed here (such as thinking in images and fantasies instead of words).
The internal dialogue is not an “inherent property of reality”. And this statement sounds exactly like something that the internal dialogue would produce, talking about itself so much that it crowns itself essential. You have not practiced silence with any intent or diligence for this to be your conclusion.
I would recommend that you read the books to familiarise yourself with the essentials, and to practice silence. Prolonged and meaningfully.
This place exists to help people. But it is not a primary school. Many who ask for help have no interest in helping themselves, they just want to talk. You are expected to take responsibility for your own practice.
When it comes to helping others in dire situations, a lot of us do. But going out into the world with a saviour complex helps no one. When faced with a dire situation, we know if and in what way we can change that situation, and then we do it and move on. Fantasising about hypotheticals defeats silence and makes us poorly equipped to help anybody if such a situation does arise.
Absolutely fair…I know how you guys feel when it comes to hand holding and was hoping I wouldn’t get absolutely shredded which you know, not as mean as it could’ve been. Thank you for the comment and I greatly appreciate it. But also talking about inner dialogue and things that can counteract inner silence. Would changing your inner dialogue do anything? Would it change the position of your assemblage point or would it have no effect and simply isn’t connected?? Like the assemblage point changing can change the inner dialogue but the inner dialogue can’t change the assemblage point? Also what do you think about the point where your inner dialogue changes after watching a movie?
Also, you say thinking in fantasies counteracts inner silence, but if not that, what do you have in mind when doing inner silence. Just curiosity?
Have you read the Carlos Castaneda books? They answer all of these questions
Second this. I’m glad people are answering your questions. We also want people to put in the time and that means both practicing and self-learning, including reading the books. My personal recommendation is The Active Side of Infinity for questions about the inner dialogue.
Changing your inner dialogue might let you change your moods and feelings, but it won’t lead to sorcery.
I don’t think anything about the inner dialogue changing after watching a movie.
When practicing silence you have nothing in mind. That is the point. I start by keeping my attention focused closely and continuously on my breath to prevent it from wandering. Practicing silence is difficult but it gets much easier with time.
See that’s the thing that almost stumps me? That when you practice silence, you have nothing in your head. And especially no fantasies or internal talking. But when you do things you do things to achieve something else? With what you want to achieve in mind. In that way, what makes you practice inner silence. Although people say fantasies should not be had while you’re trying to practice it, why do you do it?
What internal dialogue does a baby have when it decides to try walking?
It intends it. Your internal dialogue is telling you that it is important, that's all.
Intending does not require internal talk or fantasies. Much like muscle memory, one does not think or imagine putting one leg in front of the other in order to walk.
Let’s look at this from a different angle. Say I want to talk to a spirit. I know that I need my assemblage point to move for that to happen. I can imagine talking to them all I want but that won’t get me to my goal. I can even just keep my goal at the forefront of my mind, but if I can’t move my assemblage point I still won’t achieve it.
I know that to achieve my goal I need inner silence. So I forget my goal for a while and focus only on silencing my mind of all thoughts. If I keep silent while my AP moves, I will begin to perceive things. When I then perceive the spirit I wanted to talk to, I can move my focus to them and talk to them.
It’s a bit like hunting. It involves a lot of patience. If you are waiting in a blind, focusing on your goal of hunting a deer is not going to make the deer appear any faster. You know you are going to have to sit in that blind before you can reach the rewarding part of your endeavour, so you do it. (But if you let yourself get distracted you might not notice when the deer arrives as well.)
There's a passage, well one paragraph really, in the books where don Juan says something that has really been a stumbling block to me when compared to Dan's experiences and advice/explanations in particular.
The take away for me is that "the mind" is a framework, and is separate from thought. And that you can think without it being from, or of, the mind; and thus not disrupt perception of the second attention.
It's how you can say a word out loud, and actually have things intensify because of the intent associated with that. Whereas if you thought about that in your internal dialogue, things would begin to dissipate immediately.
Maybe it's as simple as the fact that talking is directly linked to actual thought, and comes from a different center.
This is from chapter one of The Art of Dreaming:
..."By separating the social part of perception, you'll perceive (that energy is) the essence of everything. Whatever we are perceiving is energy, but since we can't directly perceive energy (with our eyes), we process our perception to fit a mold. This mold is the social part of perception, which you have to separate."
"Why do I have to separate it?"
"Because it deliberately reduces the scope of what can be perceived and makes us believe that the mold into which we fit our perception is all that exists. I am convinced that for man to survive now, his perception must change at it's social base."
"What is this social base of perception, don Juan?"
"The physical certainty that the world is made of concrete objects. I call this a social base because a serious and fierce effort is put out by everybody to guide us to perceive the world the way we do."
"How then should we perceive the world?"
"Everything is energy. The whole universe is energy. The social base of our perception should be the physical certainty that energy is all there is. A mighty effort should be made to guide us to perceive energy as energy. Then we would have both alternatives at our fingertips."
And what exactly is energy?
Ah! I’ve asked that exact same question myself, on multiple occasions!
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/wiki/terminology/energy/
It’s good that you don’t gloss over that.
Really good comment. Thanks for posting it. You’re getting at what I think a lot of people miss when talking about what inner silence truly means.
Inner silence doesn’t just mean that your mind isn’t “chatting” with itself. It also means, like you’re saying, that it’s not filled with images and fantasies.
In addition, inner noise also means identifying the objects and scenes that you’re seeing with your open eyes. This form of inner noise is why don Juan recommended the “correct way of walking”, which consists of crossing your eyes slightly.
an excerpt from most recent post (regarding the last part of this post)..
if you really take it seriously, you will suffer a loss of rationality, changes in mood, coldness, greater attention to what you have done, you will detect other people's thoughts/feelings, manipulations, problems with friends and family, boyfriends/girlfriends, etc. due to the apathy it generates, and everything else that remains unsaid because once you start to keep quiet, many things come to the surface, not to mention everything that Recapitulation brings out, but that's another story.
D: Is there no way for me to stop that? I am selfish, I see what it can do for me and that makes me want to do it. My goal is not getting into inner silence but using what it can do. It is not my priority which is probably something that would piss a lot of people here as my lax attitude. Since a lot of people have the no handholding thing in mind and against people who aren’t ready to completely immerse themselves in the practices, but that’s me. Is there any way not to develop an apathy to things around me? I love the ego, it attaches me to things that I would not otherwise care about. I don’t want to develop an indifference to the things I partake in. And yes that is my inner dialogue talking but I like it. Can there not be a place for both of them?
My theory is that the inner dialogue does whatever it can to survive. Including your rationalizing that you do, in fact, want to maintain an inner dialogue.
The inner dialogue is antithetical to these practices.
The internal dialogue is "circular intending".
Possibly a feature of the multiverse since it can help hold us in a new reality we just barely managed to assemble.
But once it's stuck going in a circular loop for too long, you end up trapped in that reality. Because the energy you have in it, refers to other energy you have in it, until it's like being tied in place by ropes.
Fortunately you can fight and fight and fight to get free from the bonds to your normal reality, and once you stop the internal dialogue well enough, the results are astonishing.
This picture is no exaggeration. In fact, it's far less than I wanted. I just don't have enough time to fix it.
And such views of how many realities are available to us, once the assemblage point is in alignment with that of your double, can't even be described.
Although with enough time, they could possibly be animated.
Here's my attempt using the AI, to draw what I was watching for around 2 hours last night. I was trying to find out why some sights you see can't be watched for longer than 10 minutes, before you vanish, go "somewhere else", and return with amnesia.
Unfortunately, what I was looking at was more like the "switchboard" of new realities, and it seems that you can look at that, as long as you like.
Making such sights a way to perfect your silence, using magic as the test of how well you've stopped the internal dialogue.
If you don't use visible magic to test your silence, you'll lie to yourself and say you have it, when you don't.
Humans are "goal oriented" like greedy Chimps, and that doesn't work out well when you're trying to free yourself from your normal reality.
As magical as this sight is, it's easy to get lost in all the possibilities in front of you. Then your internal dialogue tries to return, and it fades away.
But if you can maintain silence, each object on the walls all around you, to which you add energy, becomes stronger and begins to expand, and you find an entire reality in there.
I had a question specifically about why inner silence is done, things are usually done with something in mind to achieve. I’ve heard you say that it is curiosity but is there anything else you practice it with?
Reality is held in place by focusing your attention on something in that specific range of emanations.
This video shows that if you wait for the part with the "dark sea" of awareness.
Notice the "flow" from the dark sea which produces our reality.
A sorcerer can refocus their awareness,l and assemble a different reality.
It's not a story! There's dozens in here who can do that enough to be pretty fun!
But if the internal dialogue isn't stopped, it just keeps focusing your attention on this old reality, and you're hopelessly stuck here.
So the goal is to recover our natural ability to experience the multiverse freely.
Two of Florinda Donner's responses to questions asked after a 1997 workshop, with better translation from a native Spanish-speaking practitioner:
https://reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/p8wu3g/la_senda_del_guerrero_no_2_march_1998_florinda/
I recall in at least two instances from the Carlos Castaneda books recounting what his teacher Don Juan said, that might be related to your very specific question; one of them was when he tells Carlos to tell himself an inner dialogue to give himself confidence, to counter his existing inner dialogue that he was inadequate. So he advised him to try for a few days the opposite thoughts. He then said after that week to ditch both ideas and the point of the exercise was to realize that either belief one way or the other were arbitrary, and ultimately the only power came from having no thoughts at all.
The other instance I recall was that Don Juan's own teacher, Nagual Julian, believed he was supposed to have the "right thoughts", but Don Juan believed that was erroneous and accounted for some of the indulging nature of his teacher. Don Juan said there are no good or bad thoughts but to progress in sorcery you had to stop the mind completely. Both as the constant inner chatter, and also the fixed ideas that we learned to believe (like political, religious attitudes, opinions, etc). He goes further to explain that in sorcery one has "nothing to defend", and explains that it means there's no idea or belief to hold it together. When Carlos Castaneda asks how then is the idea of the Eagle eating all living beings experiences at death, Don Juan said that is not a "belief" to defend, it's a reality seers experience directly.
From all this I gather that in his own lineage there were some diversity of opinions and ideas (ironically) but only valid after they had been able to see energy as our flows, not just because they read about it or made it up.
That means the act of intending inner silence shouldn't be tainted by a single thought, though that has been attempted by "concrete" sorcerers looking for material gains, in a self contradictory, self destructive effort. I guess if you only hold a single thought or intention you could achieve some kind of magical ability about such issue, but it's recommended it's not something too greedy, like winning the lottery, rather something more impersonal or practical like finding your keys.
I might have some of this wrong but that's what I get from the books. Practice without an ulterior motive, beyond the ultimate purpose of freedom.
@op maybe I missed it but I don't think you answered whether you have read any of the books. They have a poetic beauty to them that at times is achingly beautiful. Many people say, as do I, that the third book Journey to Ixtlan is a good one to start with. Then either read one and two and onward, or two and onward. Book one is a good read, i am sure definitely be red, but it's rather dry at times. Three and eight are my favorites but they are all great.
As for practicing magic for its own sake, that's something that I can totally understand, and that is something that the ego wants. Speaking for myself, I used to fantasize about being able to do magical things in front of people, to impress them; to show off; to win their favor; to be loved. Such thoughts were born of emotional and psychological problems I had-- and still do have to an unknown (to me) degree.
There is a lot more of that could be said here but I will leave that to others.
Read the books.