If any of this is hard to follow, there's nothing I can do in this short comment.
Go study past material.
But the bottom line is, the path in Art of Dreaming is not much different than the path darkroom takes.
And Darkroom is merely the application of Tensegrity, in darkness, while trying as hard as you can to stop the internal dialogue.
Why it so closely follows the gates in Art of Dreaming, is a little surprising. But other things in sorcery turn out to follow the path of something else.
Could be it's all related to where your assemblage point has moved, so far.
This shows those positions, as they relate to darkroom. You have to move your assemblage point that far, to do what you see to the right of that, while awake.
Asleep? I have no idea if you'd see that the assemblage point had moved the same distance. But the old seers did in fact discover a lot of our sorcery, by observing the assemblage point of people who were asleep.
I'm not sure how we're going to duplicate that. If Cholita woke up and found me standing over her while she was asleep, trying to see her "assemblage point", I'd soon learn where she hid that samurai sword she came up with.
Or her sledge hammer. I'm also not sure where that got off to.
28 Comments
I don’t quite understand why all that hate towards the art of dreaming. Also, finding one’s hands is nowhere near as hard as you describe, especially not for a person in celibacy like you are?! The hard part is to maintain focus and at least some control while lucid dreaming because you often run out of time or get distracted by the scenery. Also, some people get all too excited and then they wake up.
Not towards art of dreaming, but towards pretending.
That nearly caused all of this amazing sorcery to be lost forever.
>Also, finding one’s hands is nowhere near as hard as you describe,
I've been at this 55 years, and talked to many people about finding your hands. Plus all of those talked to other people, and concluded the same thing.
Most average once a year. Talented people might do it every two months.
And yes, waking up is a big problem, but there's a lot of writing on how to avoid that.
I got to the point of finding my hands 6 times a night, and being able to hold dreaming for 12 hours.
The result?
Not particularly pleasant.
And no magic when awake. No ability to stop my internal dialogue.
In fact, I don't believe that path is what people think at all.
The first gate is for beginners, but after that only the advanced (those who can stop their internal dialogue while awake), could ever actually go to the IOB world to learn, on a regular basis.
I doubt you can point to a single person anywhere on the web, who got that path to do anything useful.
I've never seen one.
Mostly it's just people pretending that's going to work for them, because they're too lazy to make a real effort.
Like Jehovah's witnesses believing they're on the right path because they follow their "magic book" and will go to heaven when it's all over.
With nothing but contradictory evidence surrounding them.
They're hooked to the social aspect of their religion.
I got mugged by 4 Jehovah's witness witches in the airport, while waiting for Cholita.
They use social pressure and misinformation, and relentlessness to gain more followers.
You speak of the art of dreaming with a negative tone. It reminds me of Don Juan and his view on using drugs to achieve altered states of consciousness. However, he never expressed anything similar about the art of dreaming.
You've pretty much glossed over the likely context of the entire book.
Everyone seems to have done that...
But you've now added some excuse about don Juan didn't say it was bad, as if the book was written while don Juan was still here.
It's very Jehovah's witnessey behavior. When contradicted on their false claims, they point to a higher authority which doesn't actually apply to the situation. It's social pressure to get you to shut up, so that they win the argument.
Unfortunately, I'm not allowed to give up. I spend an awful lot of time, with no pay, and am not willing to let someone mislead others on what's a viable path.
We don't need sorcery groupies. We need real sorcerers.
No one should have to remind others than everything past the first gate is super advanced. It's obvious when you read it.
And surely requires that you can fully stop your internal dialogue.
Carlos could when don Juan explained each subsequent gate to him.
Another part of ignoring the context of that book, is ignoring that none of the apprentices were learning by that method.
Nor did anyone in human history.
And sorcery pretty much requires that you follow a path someone else took, or there's no way to keep on that trail. You need the pull of past explorers who lit up those same emanations.
Sorcery isn't a pretend magical system where you can memorize rules, and then use those as you like.
It's more like a magnetic pull, from people further along the same path you want to take.
Go off that precise path, and there's no pull.
The new seers learned by the Nagual's blow.
And the old seers were given as small children, to another old seer. They learned as child slaves.
So at what point is there any reason to believe that Art of Dreaming is a path?
If it's a series of steps, you still have to match the context of the book at each step.
So when you've been dented a lot by a Nagual giving you the nagual's blow, and your assemblage point can move all sorts of places because it's already been there, and when you can stop your internal dialogue from years of hard effort, then go ahead and add AOD to your practices.
But at that point, you'll already be doing magic that's far better than anything you read in that book.
And won't care.
It's nearly an "evil" book because it allows people to delude themselves into thinking their pretending to be making an effort, isn't obvious to everyone else.
If Carlos was still around, I'd hold up the book and ask him "Why the hell did you write that???"
I'm pretty sure he'd understand why I said it.
Because in private classes or at workshops, he always cut people off who started talking about their "dreaming experience".
Cholita herself got cut off in half a sentence.
You're in serious denial here. Or you have some mood disorder condition and today is a "stubborn" personality day.
Cholita is in one of those today.
It's just not a good day to get her to think rationally about anything.
"Unfortunately, I'm not allowed to give up."
Oh no....does that mean you'd like to? Dare I ask why you can't? I saw where you wrote the Allies made you create this....but you are bound forever to that? Or it's a matter of creating an intent and having that be "unbending"?
Thank you for the shit ton of work you do- before this site all we had were the books-that's it!
Hello. You're certainly right about the art of dreaming; I agree with you. But there's also something true: it's a path with many facets that can lead you nowhere, to self-deception and total disappointment. Yes, to walk this path, mastering this art is essential, but only when you achieve inner silence. Otherwise, I can tell you it's worthless. There are hundreds of examples of lucid dreaming on Reddit; many people here end up there, and vice versa. They achieve lucidity by any method, get bored, and then ask how to stop—citing fear, boredom, exhaustion. That happens when you don't have a real goal, a path, a commitment to yourself, a path of the heart, as they say in the books. However, while I'm making this healthy comparison, I don't mean to belittle anyone. Everyone is free to do as they please. The fact that Dan criticizes anyone who doesn't achieve inner silence doesn't mean people in this subreddit hate this art, lol. As I said, it's part of the necessary path, especially for developing the energetic Double. Please don't take my answer personally; it's just a general comment. Best regards.
The solution: https://www.reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/comments/1jub9lj/canadian_inventor_troy_hurtubise_testing_out_his/
Jokes aside, i have a question: In one of your older posts, you mentioned that the "affection for the energy body" pass mixes some tonal energy to the double. Would doing that just before going to sleep help with finding the hands?
I don't believe I've ever heard anyone suggest that. It might be a new idea!
Maybe Carlos' "dreaming series" can do that?
Find out for us!
But honestly, the real way to get in to sleeping dreaming with enough rationality to remember your purpose (to look at your hands), is likely through Silent Knowledge.
That’s actually an interesting idea! Ty! Also, Thank you for all you do Dan, truly, words can not convey my gratitude. 🙇🏻
That idea is kind of automatic over time. Once you get rid of your internal dialogue most of the day (at least when you look to see if it's there), the IOBs seem to take special interest in you, and the instant you lay down to sleep, they're already interacting with you before you even get in.
Possibly, our understanding of Art of dreaming is so very poor, we don't comprehend at all what that's all about.
Except for the first gate. Anyone can play around there.
Beyond that, it's hopeless for anyone who can't actually stop their internal dialogue.
And Carlos himself said so! A man tried to ask him an "at the third gate" question, at a lecture given in a bookstore.
Carlos stopped him halfway through the sentence saying, "That's impossible! Come back when you can stop your internal dialogue, and then we'll talk shop!"
But honestly... It's nearly obscene that I get any arguments about what is extremely obvious.
That people are just pretending to be working in order to extract social pleasure.
That doesn't fully apply to women doing womb dreaming.
They actually get attacked by Allies on the way in! Who hold them in a quasi half asleep state.
So womb dreaming is closer to very advanced male sleeping dreaming. For the men, once you can stop your internal dialogue, you are already halfway into sleeping dreams, the instant you lay down to sleep. And the Allies show up immediately.
But... It does apply a tiny bit to women. If womb dreaming is all they practice. The distance we need to go is too far to be bridged with womb dreaming alone.
Fascinating. I had no idea… thank you for the thorough information Dan.
That reminds me of a story from about a week ago, when I first found my hands, even though I wasn’t even trying to. Usually, I stick to darkroom practices and Tensegrity; I’ve never really cared much for dreaming stuff. But that day, my darkroom session went completely sideways for some reason, so I went to bed feeling pretty annoyed. After going through the usual random, nonsense dreams, I suddenly found myself in my backyard, and it hit me with absolute certainty - I was dreaming. Right then, I remembered the instruction to look at your hands, and I found them without any trouble at all, being almost fully aware of what was happening. Then I started walking around, switching my focus from my hands to the buildings and trees and back again, all while trying to fight off my emotions and internal dialogue (which, turns out, you still have in dreams). A few minutes later, I lost my grip on reality and slipped into darkness, which then faded back into just another regular, nonsense dream.
See how long until you do it again, and let us know.
But remember: Look at your hands, then at an object, then back to your hands, and try to look at at least, 2 objects.
Otherwise you might just be dreaming about doing that, but without the rationality we're trying to send into the dream.
We need to send tonal awareness in there, to join up with the Nagual awareness.
And for the sake of others (not you), just because you saws your hands, doesn't mean you remembered to follow the instructions.
As far as I can tell, the worst fakers when asked if they found their hands, will ponder the entire dream, remember a situation where they had to open a door, and then theorize that if they opened the door, they must have seen a hand.
And then lie and say it's easy to find your hands.
Sleeping dreaming is an INSIDIOUS attention seeking affair.
that's perhaps why Carlos wrote that book, JUST BEFORE he started giving workshops.
He didn't care how he hooked people. He just wanted to get more at a workshop, in hopes of building enough energetic mass, for group tensegrity to produce his hoped for outcome.
Towards the end of private classes, I used to get little flashes like this, of us being on a mountain top.
The workshops themselves might even have done that once or twice, but none of us can remember it.
Bjut Cholita insists she can't remember visiting me in my room, using her double.
Even though it was as obvious as could be, and her double gave me information about her tonal that I didn't have before.
Sorcery comes with that inability to remember, no matter which path you take to learn it.
Yeah, I definitely remember following the instructions to alternate my gaze between my hands and the objects around me. Honestly, though, the whole thing caught me completely off guard, just because I didn't expect it to happen without me actually intending to. I’ve had dreams in the past where I realized I was dreaming (dating back to when I was a kid, plus I’m a chronic sleepwalker) but this time felt totally different from my previous experiences. Either way, I’m going to stick with my darkroom practices and not replace them with dreaming.
Recapitulation also works to produce STUNNING magic if you do it while trying to stop your internal dialogue as best you can.
But it produces next to no results at all if you don't, which makes it the ideal religious substitution for darkroom.
Cleargreen is doing that. Pretending recap produces no real results, despite what the books say, and is merely about improving yourself, whatever that means. The fake 3rd Armando agreed with that, causing Cleargreen to embrace that fraud. Promising Carlos will rescue you when you die.
Here's what recap actually does if you do it properly. The goal is to retrace every assemblage point position you ever had. And it does that for real, where you get to walk aroun din fully stable sleeping dreaming about your past.
Once in awhile we get a visiting Cleargreener who tries to turn all this back into a religion, by giving bad advice to people.
But surprisingly, once in awhile a Cleargreener who did that in the past, returns and admits he was wrong and this subreddit is 100% right about the situation. Namely that Reni went horribly bad and destroyed Cleargreen just as Carlos predicted.
I pointed the video directly to the recap part, but it shows 3 kinds of magic you can pursue, with darkroom last.
Once you stop pretending daily motivation comes easy. Or it did for me. Many sessions I don’t get past seeing some faint puffs. But the times when I do, it’s just incredible and that’s motivating.
I’m also doing random stunts like I’m in my 20s again - Darkroom Tensegrity is souping up my balance and physique.
Carlos explained how doing breathing with the saber toothed tigers caused him to get more muscular.
Which he was! I once saw him lift his leg up to his chest while holding a notebook, just casually to tease me.
It stuck with me. I keep perfectiung my recapitulation series leg raises by remembering more details from him doing that.
He was 72 years old.
Wait... Now that I see the advantage for being short, I'm starting to rethink his amazing balance...
On the other hand, there was a man who saw his "gait of power" calf muscles. I'll see if the AI can find that interesting detail from all the stuff Techno collected.
Bummer... That story didn't make into the notes, unless the AI is being lazy again.
*** (from AI) ***
I cannot find any story in the provided sources about Carlos Castaneda showing unusually large calf muscles to a news guy friend in Mexico as a result of practicing the "gait of power." The specific anecdote you are looking for does not exist in the provided text, and if it is an accurate account, it must come from outside of the materials currently loaded in my memory.
However, the sources do contain several highly similar encounters involving journalists, Castaneda's leg muscles, and his physical prowess that you might be remembering or conflating:
***
Naturally by Kung Fu, Carlos means tensegrity. However, that gets a bit confusing since Taisha also referred to it as kungfu from time to time, and one of the senior witches studied in Hong Kong, as I vaguely recall.
Let's ask the AI
*** (from AI)
*** (from AI)
***
If Carlos had a black belt in Aikido, then I did in fact meet him in Aikido classes at UCR in the early 1970s, when the UCLA black belts visited.
They had a roaming exchange program, which is common for martial arts taught in colleges.
And there was in fact a kind of small guy in there.
Aikido from the Ueshiba crazy branch centered in Hawaii, took over the UC system the same way Shotokan took over for Karate, and caused me to run into Taisha and Florinda in the early 1970s, because UCLA would visit UCR karate class, and vice-versa.
Dude…..the Ai made CC too short. He was short, but not that short? Thought he was 5’4”ish
He was built and stacked like a shit brick
house. Those females……
**I remember the interview where the fella mentions CC’e calves were like footballs. He went out to an area of the desert with a news anchor. It’s on YouTube, somewhere.
Tensegrity is “not-doings” exercising the energy body and improved physical well being is a byproduct? I’ve done martial arts and variants most my life. I’ve noticed its influence in Tensegrity. Silencing Internal Dialogue and practicing in total darkness is the game changer. The not-doings in the passes really force you to rewire muscle memory, especially for those with martial arts background.
Hey Dan, we’ve talked about gazing a few times. Maybe, I’m finally picking up what you been putting down with gazing from the dreaming body.
Using Gazing in daily awareness in darkroom via dreaming awake and gazing at what you gazed at in daily awareness?
(lol gazing word salad).
I suppose the confusing thing here is that since the room is fully dark, you're gazing at objects that aren't really there at all, in terms of your daily awareness.
And certainly some of them are there because you saw them at another time, but other objects are clearly something you've never seen before, and couldn't really describe if you tried to write about it the next day.
They're not yet "concrete".
Eventually you stop having the prejudice of whether it's possible to be seeing so many things in the darkness.
In fact, we had to learn to block that out, as infants!
In sorcery you just care if you can perceive it, not why. There is no why! You just can.
Naturally gazing evolves.
In the purple zone, you realize that there are different gazing situations. Depending on the precise location of your assemblage point, at that moment.
One is where your gazing also makes the abstract basis of your current situation visible.
That's somewhat like this picture, although the abstract literally can't be depicted.
The "abstract" part is that shelf the person is gazing over.
The objects we gaze at in darkroom there in the position of the assemblage point from previous gazing? I didn’t mention when I asked the question initially, that gazing at previously gazed objects actually lead to other similar objects I’ve never gazed at, which you nailed in the reply.
This morning, I was in darkroom when a presence dumped a big pile of candy in front of me, offered me some, but when I went to grab it, I lost it all. I think the act of grabbing at the candy confused me, made revert to logical and common sense. When I have to act I lose it all.
No, a new position of the assemblage point for SK style gazing in the purple zone, will likely come from waking up to practice.
I believe don Juan mentioned waking up from sleep at a fortuitous assemblage point position.
You can't really make much use of that until you can stop your internal dialogue very easily.
So people wake up to go to the bathroom, and once in a while the room is buzzing with little lights swirling around.
If you could hold that, you could use it during darkroom.
But once you gaze at silent knowledge every day for long periods, you might wake up, feel too lazy to do tensegrity yet, and just sit on some pillows and gaze at what might become visible in the darkness.
THAT'S when you can get lucky, and wake up with an advantage as far as your assemblage point position.
It's going to move, but as long as you keep focusing on the side effect of that, such as that "shelf" with the current abstract content of your vision, it'll stay.
Trouble is, you can't keep focusing on it.
I have no idea why. Imagine if you woke up, and the entire Fairy forest was in your bedroom throwing a party, designed to please you.
But after a minute or two, you decide to look out the window instead, maybe to see if Cholita's car is leaving.
It's quite surprising. We just can't seem to focus on magic for too long, before something makes us look away for an instant.
And your assemblage point will move. So you might lose what you were looking at.
"Advanced" might be considered to be when you can get it back, even after it vanished?
Sorry for delayed reply.
I can turn my internal dialogue off on command with certainty. The struggle is how long can I keep it turned off? That varies….but you also just explained why. Damn you’re good dude!
I practice randomly and constantly throughout the day, so it’s not just in DR.
> “We just can’t seem to focus on magic for too long…”
I’m noticing this. I can get easily distracted and pulled back to daily awareness. Or reason kicks in like it did in the post I’m about to do.
I went for it this morning. Woke up. Decided to force silence and fell back asleep to some nonsensical regular dream.
At later stages you lose a lot of what you learn, to not being able to remember it. That's why sleeping practices are much less effective.
And at first, you can't even recall enough to realize how much you are losing to knowledge that only makes sense when your assemblage point is shifted very far.
If you're awake it gets "attached" to real world things, and so remembering it is a bit easier.
So for example if a golden being from infinity materializes and explains something about horizontal shifts of the assemblage point to you, if that took place in a dream, it's lost forever.
If it took place while you were awake, at the very least you'll remember where in the room you were when the being materialized, and how it came to be standing right next to you. And maybe remember that you were worried about bumping your head into a shelf on the wall. And perhaps had to pee and were putting that off because the magic was so intense.
As a bizarre experiment, if you could drug someone to sleep, transfer them to another city, wake them up enough to be somewhat functional, show them magical stuff, and then drug them again and return them to their normal life, would they even remember any of what took place in another city, when there's no rational way for them to believe that actually happened?
Multiply that problem of remembering events in an isolated city that has no continuity to their normal routine, by a factor of 10.
And that's how much you lose, by practicing your magic asleep.
Maybe this seems attractive to people because they believe sorcery is "a binary system" where perceiving any magic at all is significant.
Like our "wonderful me" poster of last week with his "nagual" user name.
Totally confused on what sorcery is, believing any experiences you have, even in a sleeping dream, are significant progress.
When in fact, this path requires spectacular magic DAILY, for a perhaps a decade. If you hope to reach the level of someone in the lineages.
But I suppose that warning people away from sleeping sorcery, is like warning your teenage daughter not to hang out with the "bad ass cool" local drug gang members.
She's not only not going to listen, but she'll be angry with you for trying to keep her from being "happy".
Dude 😂 😂 I always look forward to your replies. You do a helluva job mixing it up 👏🏼
I’m in my “over the hill” era, not enough time left to reach any level. It’s taken me over a year just to get a sniff/wiff of SA. I’m fine with it. There’s so much to this practice that serious and consistent effort is adding a quality to my life that I was never experiencing prior. I’ve changed me. I owe this sub support and gratitude 🙏
I fall into the category of perceiving any sorcery is a good thing. It takes serious effort to enter from daily awareness - I’d like to bypass binary and imposing my reasonable interpretations and make my way into the dimensional or is it emanational, or Nagual? There’s a lot of words in English to confuse, disrupt and keep us firmly grounded in daily awareness.
The “wonderful me’s” are the byproduct of human mass reproduction. I suspect they’ll all be Soylent Green before they even realize they willingly headed to the cracker factory.
Can plants or flowers be used as an extra awareness around to enter dreams? or have them as energetic mass?
If you manage to make friends with them, possibly.
As long as they're still perceiving using their own awareness, there's no reason they couldn't add to your energetic mass.
On the other hand, I doubt you'd have very good results trying to enter dreams in a Gerbil Farm. I once rented an office next door to a gerbil farm. Very smelly...