I've been told by my father's ex wife that in his 20s he was obsessed with the works of castaneda he also struggled with mental illness and he had an obsession with the sun more so an obsession with staring at it. I was told when he tried to refrain himself an not look at it he would hear voices in his head urging him to look. Is there a connection if any to castanedas work and mental illness ? And was it an IOB that was talking to my father. I belive when my father heard about the stories of castaneda being a "fraud" he stopped reading them completely an almost did a full 180 from being a spiritual person to a complete straight edge man who didn't bother with anything spiritual. Unfortunately I can't ask him about any of this now but if anyone has any insight it would be appreciated so much.
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The flair on your post has been changed from "General Knowledge" to "Flyers."
If you don't understand why, read some more of the material and you eventually will.
Thank you I will look in to it 🙏 what do you mean by the "maneuver" i described? Do you mean the voices?
It's too much to get into for someone not familiar with the books and other materials, and the private class teachings/instruction.
You could start with the info on this page, but it was not presented to Castaneda until he was further along and it likely won't be doing you any favors to read it too soon:
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/wiki/flyers/
Okay appreciate the response I feel so overwhelmed by this sub.I've seen purple puffs an have also seen it transform in to objects but when I see more I get this intense feeling of fear last time I saw a purple orb it turned in to an eye looking back at me an I got petrified an had to snap myself out of it. Also had stranger experiences on a high dose of shrooms but those experiences seem to not be relevant to this sub? I struggle so much to finish any books is recaptilation tensegrity and this sub enough to progress without reading the books?
You could try audiobooks instead.
(Link pending)
But yes, you can practice Recapitulation and Tensegrity without reading the books, starting out.
Any shift of the assemblage point is relevant.
It's just not relevant to practice. Meaning it's a one-time thing, and is not anything you can actually work on...unless you want to take high- dose psychedelics everyday?!?
Psychedelics trick you into thinking you're learning something. But all they actually do is crack open the door a little bit, and loosen up people raised under conservative orthodoxy.
Real learning requires daily effort, observing the results, evaluating what's holding you back, and continuing to push further along....
There's no cheat that can get you out of that work.
When I was on shrooms I saw a portal form an a voice said "this is what he saw " somehow I knew he was referring to my father and my brother an then I got a huge sense of fear go threw my whole body i felt like i was going to die an almost had a panic attack an had to just shut everything out of my mind till I sobered up? Does that mean anything to you? I have no idea what the voice was referring to but I knew it was something bad
It's confirmation that fear is the first enemy.
An i see you guys in this sub discredit every other type of beliefs but then for some reason there is a respect for neville Goddard of all people ? Like I said i just get so confused by this sub
The best way to clear up the confusion is to understand that when we appear to be discrediting someone, it's only from the perspective of demanding firsthand results from your efforts.
And not from the perspective of an author who is trying to either entertain or inform.
Adding the understanding that we're not the ones that're making any of this happen.
It's the influence of INTENT. An abstract universal force.
That is when something actually happens, and it's not someone fantasizing, or visualizing. When it's just as real as the world we ordinarily perceive...because it's being perceived via the same energetic "hardware" as normal perception.
Which is what psychedelics make temporarily possible.
Once you accept that, how clear your motivations have to be to that impersonal force, it's hard not to be draconian with your influences and to be diametrically opposed to texts that are little more than esoteric comic books....because they were written by people whose intentions, and personal history, can't support such progress or result.
What's presented here is cumulative over thousands of years. Not a lone individual who decided to write a book to convince people of whatever they want to come across as.
I have been around for about 5-6 years and I have never seen anyone mention Goddard in here. Am I missing something? I am somewhat familiar with his work, but never thought that he would be appreciated in this community. My bet would have probably be Gurdjieff or Gnostics.
Appreciated? No.
I just skipped over the specific person/author they mentioned to make the broader point, which can be applied to anyone who wasn’t in the actual lineage and thus doesn’t have direct association/attribution.
So is Neville’s intention considering clean?
That’s for someone else to determine. Maybe his family.
Whatever his intent was, isn’t the purview of the subreddit.
Well, I certainly doubt he was able to cause any visible magic with his techniques.
Search his name in this sub an you'll see alot of results i did find it quite strange. Apparently carlos was friends with neville
Thanks, I consider myself to be somewhat knowledgeable on Castaneda, as I read basically everything that’s available, but this is a new treat.
Neville Goddard was a total con artist.
There's always men like that who can gather up an audience, figure out what makes them feel inspired, and then exploit it to steal money from them.
But the Dali Lama, the Pope, Alan Watts, and "the Buddha" as a mediocre Yogi in northern India, fall into that category too.
Bad men taking advantage of others, using the pretense of "spirituality".
Taisha, or maybe Florinda, once commented that Jesus himself was an egomaniac.
It's hard to tell that from the writings we have, which were all second hand cult literature.
Created to boost donations.
My take was that the Jews did have a magical system, sometimes taught in caves by women, but that it didn't go further than our "green zone" on the J curve map that Carlos explained to us.
Jesus was merely trying to teach it publicly. And then got hyped up by the apostles, who didn't want to go back to having a real job.
But Jewish magic wasn't any more potent than any other fake magical technique. It just exploited meditative effects.
Here's a cartoon explaining that J curve, and how it relates to religions and fake magical systems.
My friend, if you want clearer and further instruction on the teachings you can also check out Theun Mares works, it will expand your perspective on what castaneda already shared.
No one in this sub seems to have mentioned apart from dan negatively? Are u sure its a good author to read?
It isn't. Again, only from the perspective of someone who wants it to actually work and not to merely be entertained or theorize.
I have read all castaneda books, I have read all Theun books, you need to get out of doubting and fear and see for yourself. What you are expressing now is fear an superstition but there is a whole world beyond tha you are missing. There is a lot of people here who act like fanatics and all they show is self importance unless they are doing it for stalking purposes, concepts you won't be famiar with of you dont immerse yourself in the mystery. You have to be very careful because if the teachings already reached you it means you are ready in this lifetime to start the path of knowledge but the road is full of shady figures dressed as guides. See for yourself my friend or you will be at the mercy of more powerful forces, and some of them are dark and dangerous.
Thank you for the comment I had a religious upbringing so I feel it doesn't help with superstition (huge fear of demons and demonic forces) I do find some people on this sub strange I've looked at other castaneda subs on reddit an there are people who completely disagree with some of the things that are stated as fact by people in this forum so it can be hard to know who's telling the truth or who's lying but maybe it's not that black and white
Do you disagree with the people who say theun is a con man ?
A very common error people make is trying to fit the toltec teachings into the common view of the world, we all have had our own upbringing, but it trying to view the toltec teachings through the lens of the common view of the world is like wanting to fit the whole internet information into a 16 gigabytes USB drive. It is just not compatible. The world is not static nor solid, what im trying to say is what can appear as a demon to one person in might appear as an angel to another, and one might be hallucinating as another might be tapping into an actual foreign awareness, but people get lost in their own self importance if they do not apply the teachings. Something you can only learn by following the disciplined life of the warrior. If you do not learn to see, you will remain lost and at the mercy of your fellow man who will be able to manipulate your awareness without you even knowing. Not everyone is capable to live the disciplined life of the warrior and they will blame enything or anyone before acknowledging they themselves are the only ones to blame for their laziness and ignorance, so take courage, reading words has never hurt anyone, but remaining stagnant, doubtful and fearsome can be your demise.
Appreciate the comment
All supposed magical systems and "spiritual" paths are besieged by the mentally ill!
But so is everything else... Ask anyone who has to employ more than a few people.
I'd suggest that in here, mentally ill people tend to go away because they can't pretend their results without being corrected.
On the other hand, in the lineages mentally ill people fulfilled specific roles which made their lack of rationality useful.
In the books that would be Zuleica, Zoila, and Josefina.
Two of those were arguably the most powerful dreamers in the books of Carlos. Their irrationality allowed them to go where rational people won't.
And MOST of the realms of alternate realities are "irrational".
Some are even "abstract". And impossible to speak about, write about, or even think about. They can only be experienced as an activity that makes sense at the time, but then 20 seconds after that it's hard to remember even a single fact about what went on.
Other realms are alternate timelines of "you". As someone else in an alien world. Rationality causes you to disregard them the instant they become visible. It takes a long time to learn not to do that.
Rationality is a big problem when you get advanced and begin to notice what it does!
When you're gazing at infinity and "stuff" starts to materialize, something I do daily for close to an hour (so that you know we aren't theorizing here), rationality tends to make things go away before they can finish forming enough to make use of them.
We "pounce" on something as it starts to appear, with our rationality trying to explain it, make it go away, turn it into something else, or figure out how to profit from it with other people.
One comes to realize that rationality is a side effect of being trapped in this single reality we were born into, due to taking on a physical body, and growing up in a human family.
And it's part of what you have to overcome, from direct observation of its effects and how it limits your magic.
That's the way to see the advantage of something like schizophrenia. To see rationality's effects directly, at the point of "assembly" of alternate realities.
But the problem with mental illness is, it prevents having enough focus and reasoning ability to steer a path that goes as far as the Olmecs got.
This magic took thousands of unbroken years to develop. It's a technology, not a belief system.
So mentally ill people are kind of like specialists in irrational reality navigation, within the lineages from which our knowledge came. But on their own, they couldn't hold together a sorcery group which was pursuing a real magical path.
I'd suggest there's always at least 2 in any lineage of 15.
We have Cholita. Carlos made sure of that.
Read up on what she can do!
Of course, she runs away from time to time.
She's in Mexico these days.
So, She hasn't came back yet?
Nope.
Might never come back. No way to say.
As far as the IOB question, everyone talks to IOBs most of the night.
As scouts!
If a dream character is following you around and annoying you, perhaps pretending to be your third grade teacher correcting your actions, or perhaps your mother, or both at the same time, that's almost surely a scout.
We pick them up as very small children. It's the "monster under the bed".
And until our family talks us out of it, they're fully visible. Awake.
Presumably they stay with us for life!
Ordinary dream phantoms, which are NOT IOBs, can't be sustained past a dream change. And dreams change continuously.
But the scouts can follow as long as the dream change isn't too drastic.
Mentally ill people are somewhat "sleepwalking", and so you can see them talking to IOBs during the day.
But they can't really learn sorcery though that.
Cholita had several at one point, but in her case I could see them too.
From time to time.