Seeing can be focused on any "hook" to the dark sea of awareness.
And all of your senses are hooks.
So you could focus on hearing, while seeing, and you'd start picking up all sorts of stuff you can't be sure is a real sound.
Or you could focus on touch, maybe not even on purpose. Maybe the last time you practiced darkroom it felt like a slow moving, fat old fly landed on your back.
So this time you look to see if the fly is still around, and that causes your seeing to focus on things touching your skin.
Which causes you to not only detect something touching your skin, but you can feel it sliding along. And you just know it's a long piece of black cloth around 1/2" thick, with little cloth balls spaced evenly along it.
You realize that it's some cloth trim from a clown suit. Torn off so that it stands alone as a sort of rope.
It doesn't even occur to you that you shouldn't be visually seeing that strip of cloth, since your room is perfectly dark.
Seeing touch, can activate all virtual senses in the second attention. So that the touch you are seeing, comes with a phantom representation in the visual realm.
I suppose that's why people take magic mushrooms and then claim they could see sound, while listening to music.
In addition to your seeing being able to focus on all senses, it can also focus on abstract concepts.
Prejudices about how things ought to be arranged, to make sense. Your seeing can hook to those, and clean up stuff from the second attention which normally would make no sense.
For instance last night it was time to get up and practice, and I heard a voice explain "these things have fallen from the shelf. But not just the first shelf. All of the shelves above the first are dumping their contents onto you. You'll have to deal with each layer one at a time."
I felt stuff falling onto my face, and got up to practice knowing I first had to clear off that stuff.
But that makes no sense!
Once I got a ways into my normal series of magical passes, I noticed I was doing my Tensegrity in a "second attention soup". It was as thick as soups get, and filled to the brink with "stuff".
My seeing had been brought out from inside a dream, into the waking world, and it was focused on space. And how "things" can occupy space.
So naturally, everywhere I looked there was stuff in the second attention soup.
I was finishing my 3rd long form before I started to realize that several shelves of "stuff" hadn't actually fallen onto me.
But more importantly, a scout had followed me out of dreaming and into the real world.
The scout, was the "stuff".
It hooked itself to a "concern". Maybe some worry about an actual shelf in the real world, which had too much stuff balanced on it.
I went to the bathroom and noticed that a dark shadow was following me.
It was no longer confined to being visible on the wall. It was a solid blob, with texture.
And a little face in the middle of it.
I stood watching it for a while, and started to wonder if writing a book about how to explore dreams, consciously, wasn't just a trick Carlos came up with, to give the men a source of dark energy.
Won't do them any good for learning sorcery, but perhaps it charges them up with dark energy, so that any real effort they make outside sleeping dreams, is more likely to succeed.
That book did indeed come late in the series, almost as if it were an afterthought.
Or perhaps, it was a response to noticing that we don't have an Ally, given to us by the last generation.
And will need to go hunting for an ally of our own. Or we won't have a source of dark energy.
But we need to be persistent, and it's highly unlikely anyone is going to run around in the mountains, trying to locate an Ally by waving their palm around.
By trying to "see" touch, using their palm.
Something which, if you can get silent and move your assemblage point, is almost certain to be noticed by an Ally.
They might do that once or twice, but that's all you'd get out of them.
UNLESS, it didn't take much actual work.
Such as, if they could go looking for an Ally in sleeping dreams.
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I had been wondering about this recently. If his later books were 'how-to' books, how did TAoD fit into that scheme? I'm not sure how it could have been instructional since to recreate the results of sleeping dreaming as described, it seems someone would already have to have accomplished some of the results of sleeping dreaming (meeting an Ally, getting access to dark energy, forging the energy body, several im sure im forgetting). It seems men can only learn sleeping dreaming after they are pretty far down the line and I dont recall womb dreaming being mentioned separately as a viable path for women.
It was likely a lure. He wanted to increase the available crowd for his idea of using workshops to gain energetic mass, thus making it easier for people to move their assemblage point.
Which is kind of a famous story in our lineage. About the seers in the past, who took entire cities off into another world where living conditions were better. That's the effect of energetic mass!
His workshops were free at first! Until hecklers showed up and made it impossible to give free workshops in parks, forcing him to use looked rooms with guards.
Convention centers mostly.
But private classes always remained free.
We have the same problem with hecklers in here, although it's been greatly reduced over the last 6 years.
Carlos made it clear to us in private classes, that the books were a hook. That he was deliberately trying to gain potential students.
Then he told us to stop reading them, since we were already "hooked" and had him right there, in front of our eyes.
But Art of Dreaming is definitely an "advanced" how to book just as you said. I'm having to go back and do that.
But with the advantage of going directly from awake, into a dream.
Notice the sleeping mask on the cover of that book! Carlos used one of those, perhaps because he could stop his internal dialogue and go directly into sleeping dreaming, as long as there wasn't distracting stuff going on.
It works very much like this! I was counting dream scenes that materialized, just last night. Trying to figure out what it takes to go inside. I concluded the body had to fall asleep, and then you'd be sucked inside automatically. I reached a count of 9 such dreams floating in front of my eyes, before I lost rationality.
The other problem you have to overcome...
But as a path to start from, it's definitely useless to male beginners.
Kind of like Eastern Meditation.
A total dead end which results in bad understanding and a gigantic self-pity motivated ego.
Check out how close my picture is to the book cover! Carlos was clearly telling us that you need to learn to go directly into the dream, from awake.
After you mess around with the first gate beginners might have the ability to access.
So in case any beginners want to learn this, go ahead and find your hands in dreaming, by accident.
No one ever said you shouldn't do that.
But DON'T pretend you can do that each time. That's absurd. All I can figure is, people lie. Or are so confused, when you ask them if they "found their hands" they pretend that as long as they saw them at some point in the dream, that's the same thing.
It's not at all the same thing! "Finding your hands" is really about merging as much of the tonal awareness, with the dreamer, as you can possibly manage.
Otherwise, it's just an ordinary dream.
But when you go in directly from awake, by stopping your internal dialogue and moving your assemblage point to SK, then it's a completely different animal. You are looking AT the dream scene, with your tonal awareness.
Then the problem is figuring out how to get sucked in, and remember where you came from.
Which you can try to do dozens of times each night if you carefully manage your time.
Darkroom (tensegrity + silence) first, then when it's time for bed do what you see on the cover of Carlos' book.
And in the book you can see that he was doing that, when he complains at one point that it took him 10 minutes to get in. He'd planned to meet Carol Tiggs in dreaming, so they could raid the inorganic being's realm for dark energy.
What's your opinion on this guy?
I left him a gift.
Seems like it got deleted
It is a UK charity, so they can run their business however they would like to do it. It is not this particular person's channel.
Too bad that doesn't work for Chopra... I've left him "gifts" on his YouTube videos.
Chopra also is going around claiming things are "quantum".
And cheating people out of a lot of money.
Cholita gave Chopra a try.
She was impressed with his super expensive compound down near San Diego.
But saw through him.
And Yogananda too.
More specific criticism might be appropriate.
It’s interesting that in the earliest books from Carlos, Don Juan emphasizes the necessity of allies and interacting with them to be able to do what sorcerers do. Then in books after the first three, they aren’t mentioned so much or seemingly given as much importance to learning sorcery.
Until near the very end of his life, as you pointed out.
My dad always talked about the Warrior’s Way and “impeccability”, but had completely forgotten about the Allies and inorganic beings, and still does, whenever I bring them up.
Without any sorcerers to teach any of us, it makes sense Carlos would have tried to do anything he could to give us the chance to get in touch with the original teachers of sorcery.
I get to see an entity helping me out nearly all nights lately, but I had to go pull them from Silent Knowledge.
What they really are, I have no idea.
And they don't seem to supply dark energy by themselves.
You can also just make a waking dream that's concrete enough for your "scout" from sleeping dreams to show up.
That works! And dark energy flows around them somewhat, except it seems confined to the little dream you materialize.
But it's not as vivid as a beginner in the red zone for the first time.
I suppose that's a bit like saying, Disneyland is never as amazing as the first few times you visit it.
Which soon wears off if you go back too many times.
I had friends who figured out where inside Disneyland, you could get drunk.
Which says something important about humans, but I don't know what it is.