This is in the first chapter of The Problem of the Wire Cage, by John Dickson Carr. The book is one of what he is known for, a fair play detective novels, meaning the reader has the clues to solve before the end of the book. All of the stories are "grounded in reality", that is, they don't contain "supernatural" elements.
So, this capitalization of "Dark Room" surprised me, as the author usually doesn't make Special Case Exceptions to communicate concepts. The hearing voices talking reminded me of the internal dialogue, with the dying in self pity worried about money.
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I also read some stuff that has slight Castaneda references, I guess. For example, I remember that in "Think and grow rich" by Napoleon Hill there's a story of a man who drew ideas and knowledge from the silent knowledge or the nagual, let's say; he would sit in a totally dark room, with a chair and a table, with a notebook and a pencil and quiet his mind for hours, every night. And without using the rational mind he would just transcribe to paper what came to him.
I also remember reading in another book that Nikola Tesla used a similar process; he would visualize what he pretended and with silence he made concepts come to work in his mind's eye. (Same as DJ when he said to hold a singular vision while you fall asleep, it becomes a command to choose the starting point of your dream.)
He would see prototypes work, see them failing and why, and would correct the failures and improve the mechanisms, electrical or electromagnetic devices. He had a workshop working only while dreaming awake!
You found the secret in the book think and grow rich, congratulations. It's true there is a force that seems to help you with your endeavours. Whether you want to help yourself, harm yourself, or keep yourself trapped in your life- events seem to conspire to assist you... It's spoken about here sometimes but it's hard to grasp until you notice it for yourself. That's the secret that's "on every page" He wasn't talking about money when he was talking about being "rich" and the vast infinite intelligence that we can access is a very real force. All of the "manifestation, law of attraction" mumbo jumbo actually does scratch the surface of something real, however misguided or corrupted it is. Don't try to use it for cash and fame but use it to evolve yourself and you'll find the events that need to happen for you to extricate yourself from your current situation will come to pass!
I was shocked in 2007 when I saw The Secret movie for the first time, it was recommended by an online friend who was a practitioner of the CC teachings and he told me it really helped him to understand Intent better.
So I saw it and it had a huge impact in me, I knew Intent from the CC works before, but this was a game changer, you know in the books it's not really well explained, it says its an impersonal force that permeates everything and it can be manipulated by man, but everything was so vague and hard to understand.
Here it was crystal clear, the problem is that I was corrupted into materialism and self gain, as they promote in the movie, and that even distracted me from the warriors way.
But I notice now there was a lot of stuff I was doing right, I felt light hearted, I was aware of how I felt in my solar plexus area, excited to be alive and grateful to live in this beautiful Earth, I felt a connection to something above about there, I emitted emanations of love and gratitude, I erased personal history at that time (I had a very, very negative background) I laughed at myself instead of taking offence, I was aware of the power 24/7, and aware that anyone could use it, they are just unaware of it. I believe this behavior is correct and aligned with the description of the mood of a warrior in the Wheel of Time, my deviation was just inflating my ego and craving material stuff, and attention from others.
Now I do my best to Intend the path of knowledge, to increase silence, to perform rigorous darkroom sessions, to become a sorcerer, to clean my link to Intent.
Just attracting material stuff is entertaining for the self, but it leads to a dead end. This is just the path of the average man.
My path is the one of a Warrior-sorcerer. Now this is how I set my Intent.
Not in fiction but Dark Room has similar concept with the Isolation tanks of John C. Lilly.
There was also a film with the isolation tank and shapeshifting. Was called Altered States
Exactly! Altered states. It also has the sensory deprivation experience
Yeah. It seems like all of the "altered states of consciousness" discussion derive their beliefs from a materialist worldview. "You are the brain" or "you are consciousness bound to a body, and you should try to maximize your body's experiences according to the social mores around you" (getting money)
All children have "dark room" experiences. That's why they get scared and want to sleep in the bed of their parents.
Many, if not most, see the puffs.
All of them see Allies materialize when they're awake. They're called "The monster under the bed".
We're born sorcerers. You can see it in the eyes of newborns as they look around.
We have to be brainwashed and hazed out of it, by our family. Ridiculed, punished, and threatened to make us stop claiming there's magic in the world.
Other than the socially approved "child magic" of Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny.
I'm not sure how much of our forced assemblage point position comes entirely from the brainwashing, how much is from billions of people on the planet all sharing the same position up at the blue line, or how much is from some external inorganic beings manipulating us.
The normal "Allies" do in fact hang out with you pretty much all night long, once you can reliably get to Silent Knowledge. But they tend to be beneficial. Just tedious, like an annoying little brother who follows you around everywhere.
And they're masters of manipulating you to move your assemblage point in the direction they prefer.
I had an idea on how long you can live in the inorganic being's realm, past death. Last night.
I was trying to reach SK, and it occurred to me that if you're in the inorganic being's realm for ten thousand years, your physical body is long gone.
Castaneda followers like to ignore that part, so they don't think very analytically and miss hidden topics in the books. Such as why the death defier made Tula.
And Carlos gave differing estimates on how long you can live on there in the inorganic being's realm, if you don't escape it the way the death defier did.
One was 5 million years.
Later he said 100,000 years.
Finally he admitted, no old seer has ever died there so they can't really say how long you can live past death if you take that alternative.
But, the old seers have only existed for 10,000 years.
If anyone wants to update this post in 100,000 years after checking how the old seers are doing in there, feel free!
That is interesting, why the death defier made Tula?
He needed a container, once he had escaped from the inorganic being's realm.
He could stay there.
Of course, he could also have gone around body snatching for 750 years before he struck a deal with our lineage.
No one told us.
However, we likely can easily find out in Silent Knowledge.
Was Tula the location? not a physical body but a world?
I suppose several old seer methods to extend life were based on finding a new "container".
We get to keep our awareness past death, but it dissipates because your energy body can be "blobby" (the puffs), and each one is sentient if it's of sufficient size.
I've made as many as 5 "somewhat sentient" beings from mine during darkroom practice.
Not imaginary! Fully visible, very creepy, standing right there in front of you.
Pandora's box magical pass can be used to make those.
Here's a poor rendition of it. I have yet to round the hand movements.
https://archive.org/details/pandoras-box-segment
So it's inevitable that the awareness of dead people, tossed aside by "The Eagle" after it extracts how they felt about life in the sea of emanations, goes exploring and gets stuck and divided into pieces until it's too spread out to be sentient.
So you need a new container once you lost your physical body.
The new seers use that giant dome.
The old seers used the inorganic being's realm most of the time.
And the old seer ("The death Defier") somehow escaped the inorganic being's realm, found a body or managed to "hold it together" for long enough to create a phantom copy of the little city at Tula, which started to be populated around 1550.
We don't know if he often had a body he snatched, but we do know that the nagual who first met him, worked for a church. So it kind of fits with the story.
Or, he created the church after meeting the first nagual in our lineage.
Some day one of us will find out using Silent Knowledge.
Manfred the dog (from the books) had an old seer in him, although we weren't told how it got in there. Could be don Juan's group rescued him from the inorganic being's realm, and arranged the dog for him.
Some old seers turned into trees to escape dying.
We have that technique. It's the first part of Stellar Hatch.
But what that's like we weren't told.
Carlos had a lemon tree taken from a cutting of one of those tree people down at Zuleika's house, near Vicam (but I think more towards Fort Ortiz).
So we know that one of the two fruit trees in the books, was a lemon tree.
Which is fascinating because lemon trees arrived in Mexico during the Spanish colonial period around 1500, so while a lemon tree might seem impossible at first, if this was a Toltec empire old seer, it's possibly kind of a "flashy" choice. Maybe he wanted to make sure someone took care of him once he was a tree.
But lemon trees don't live very long. Better off to pick one of those old trees in California, such as the bristlecone pine. Those live 4 or 5 thousand years. Maybe more.
This one is that old.
100,000 years from now would be some "far future" sci fi. Maybe I shouldn't say fiction there.
About children being sorcerers - I've heard friends say their kids have "imaginary friends" and are waiting for them to grow out of it. Only 1 seems to listen respectfully to their child's reports.
I remember asking a family member about "seeing oxygen" - little black dots swarming in the air. I remember seeing them very clearly and the family member told me that whatever I was talking about, didn't exist.. I felt an immediate rift between us. I felt betrayed, to be denied even a conversation.
i thought perhaps some authors might be inspired by the sub, but then i looked it up and found out that this author has been dead for quite some time. john dickson carr (november 30, 1906 – february 27, 1977)
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dickson_Carr
Yeah the book was published in the late 1930s