It is possible at a certain depth to be able to see your hands through the darkroom mask. It usually shows up purple but can show up differently.

If you don’t see your hands it’s because you haven’t gone too deep but not to worry. Maybe try practicing with the mask off for a bit until you have the hang of it.

Wow, this post is like a setup from infinity!

Around 2AM today I was witnessing the most obvious ways intent can be manipulated while doing tensegrity. The whole time realizing, I can't post about it because people take the intent of anything they understand, and try to bend it towards profiting in some way. Until all they see, is the profit. And the intent becomes invisible

Intent can't be learned for profit!

It's more like the cash register, rather than the cash itself.

I even complained an hour ago in advanced chat, that there's no way I could post what I was looking at last night.

>However, during darkroom practice, we are required to wear a blindfold, which makes it impossible to see the movements of our hands. 

But you CAN see the intent of moving the hands.

We've been calling those "arm echos".

A vague whitish copy of your arm, hand, or leg which is clearly visible while doing tensegrity in silence, in the dark, but which our internal dialogue motivated mind censors out immediately.

Over time you can learn not to censor that and it becomes more and move visible, until the tentacle body also becomes obvious.

Removal of the censorship is perhaps 30% of cleaning your link to intent. Which is what sorcery actually is.

But the arm echo isn't the same thing as the tentacle body.

It's just the intent, of moving the arm.

You can tell it's not the same thing as the tentacle body because the intent of the heel tapping on the floor during recapitulation series, can light up a little spot down there as if you kicked something and it started to glow from your little tap.

And in fact, all of Tensegrity is almost entirely based on the manipulation of intent.

The manipulation of the feeling that you can do something.

Doesn't matter at all what you are doing. Just that the expectation of doing, makes a visible manifestation of what you are expecting is able to do that.

Then after an "intent delay" you might get the emanations at large to respond to your intent, and show something else. Something more concrete, like a woman's face or a scene of a remote location.

Or you could simply light up the emanations associated with your moving arm, just a tiny bit more than usual. Which makes it "brighter".

And of course, you can even shout "INTENT!!!" to help you along the path of sorcery.

But not while your spouse is sleeping...

Let the "Annoying Yoga Man" types blother others with the "spiritual" noises they make.

Originally, according to don Juan, we were created free to explore the entire dark sea. We were a blob of the energy of awareness encased in some kind of shell, which we've come to learn isn't as solid as we'd envisioned it.

It's likely made out of awareness too, and only gives the illusion of being a solid egg shape.

Solidity is just a range of emanations which can glow, along with whatever else is glowing to produce your reality.

But the luminous shell itself, is likely just made out of more awareness.

As awareness which was created and encased so as to be free to explore everywhere, as a "being", we bumped into this realm.

This particular bundle of glowing emanations.

Which is a busy realm filled with the intent of doing specific things, for specific rewards.

We got captured by it, took a birth (no one explained how that happens), and then got brainwashed into believing this was the only realm available to humans.

When there's far too many to count!

As for what's the best way to practice, Carlos wanted us to stop our internal dialogue and do the original Tensegrity movements which were entirely composed of single movements.

All of those are listed in order, in a handwritten document I made back when private classes first started.

It's in the wiki if you want to see the "original" tensegrity.

But it wasn't working. That's fairly easy for a seer to actually see, visually.

Carlos was constantly watching that accumulation of our energy, down by your toes, to see what kind of reaction it was having to doing the tensegrity.

He concluded, we weren't stopping our internal dialogue enough to benefit from it. The assemblage point can't shift, unless you reduce your internal dialog. Or better yet, stop it entirely.

So Carlos created the long forms, and told us to focus on our muscle memory. On that part of the brain that actually moves our body.

He explained that don Juan had "high hopes" for muscle memory and that if we had to remember a "long form", it might engage that better. And then if we focus on it, it will be easier to stop our internal dialogue.

Didn't work...

Despite people trying to rewrite history, Carlos died believing he hadn't taught a single person.

The witches seemed to agree, and said that all the workshops had accomplished, was to turn Carlos into a Guru.

Which was close to the worst insult they give out.

Gurus are despicable attention and money seekers. And never actually teach anything real.

But as an emergency measure Carlos taught us about the J curve, "The Whorl", "The Wall", "Videos in the Air", and reading text as a "reader of infinity".

And gave us instructions to move our assemblage point to the other side of our body, and into alignment with the assemblage point of our double.

Darkroom does all of those.

For all people?

We don't know. People lie their butts off about how much work they've put into things.

That was the main problem Carlos had. People just weren't actually practicing what he taught them.

But now, there's no celebrities to hang out with. No organization to raise you up in status.

Just us. With no hope at all.

It's the ideal situation for people who will actually put in the work needed.

Here's info on where Carlos would have gotten a black belt in Aikido, if the magazine articles from long ago are correct.

Last night I was "seeing" why Carlos liked martial arts. He saw the potential to manipulate intent, even if asian martial arts were clueless about real magic.

They had the "potential"...

It's plausible that I'm correct about where Carlos would have learned Aikido.

Taisha and Florinda were studying Shotokan with Nishiyama due to its association with UCLA's karate class. Nishiyama was a woman hating japanese hard karate "master". And as far as I know (I studied in the same school system), they were the only 2 women at the LA branch. At least, they were the only 2 women I ever saw in class.

We called them "the pixy twins" back in the early 1970s, for their super short hair. None of the men would admit it. but anyone with any male hormones had the hots for them. It was just the short hair that "killed the deal".

Cholita noticed the same thing. Once her hair was cut, she was no longer whistled at when she walked down Santa Monica Blvd.

Nishiyama traveled to the Budokan with his students, which is described by Taisha in a book.

The famous picture of Taisha and Florinda doing karate, was taken by the magazine associated with Nishiyama's school. At UC Riverside instead of UCLA, as far as I know. I was there when they were taking pictures of the Pixy Twins.

But also at UCLA was one of the earliest Aikido schools in the USA.

And it was the form of Aikido that doesn't actually work at all. But is 100% an attempt to manipulate intent.

It would have appealed to Carlos. And there's pretty much nowhere else for him to have gotten a black belt, if he got it after moving to Los Angeles.

Here's that school. I'm hoping to find pictures of the black belt students they had back around the 1970s, and expect to see Carlos in one of them. I studied with that Aikido school also, and remember a rather disturbing short mexican man who gave me the creeps.

But it could be another man. I'm face blind, so I can't connect that person to Carlos.

*** ChatGPT ***

The teacher you are remembering is Harry Kiyoshi Ishisaka (1928–1978). Born in Kealakekua, Hawaii, he was a massive figure in the early days of martial arts in Southern California.

He founded the Orange County Aiki Kai (often referred to as OC Aikido or OCAK) in 1964. While the dojo originated in Westminster and Garden Grove, it eventually moved to its well-known location in Orange, near the historic Orange traffic circle (Plaza Square).

The University Connection

You mentioned students visiting UCLA and UCR to teach for free. While there were many traveling Aikido demonstrations during that era, historical records specifically credit Ishisaka and his students with forming the first Aikido societies at UC Irvine (UCI) and Cal State Fullerton (CSUF). Because of his close ties to the local universities, his students frequently used college facilities to give demonstrations and hold training sessions.

A Few Historical Notes

• Famous Students: His most famous pupil from that 1970s era was actually a teenage Steven Seagal, who trained intensely under Ishisaka before eventually moving to Japan.
• Tragic Passing: Sadly, Harry Ishisaka died very young at the age of 50. He suffered a fatal heart attack in January 1978 while giving an Aikido demonstration at Irvine College.

Despite his early passing, his legacy remains strong. The Orange County Aiki Kai continues to operate to this day as a non-profit organization, and they still hold an annual memorial seminar in his honor.

Nothing in our reddit site advice is "gospel". There are no hard rules for anything. Everything here is a "recommendation".

To be honest, no one person's advice about what someone should do is going to work because we all are different and this site has drifted far from some of the best advice which is this : "get into a dark room and play"!

A better question which I have not seen in a while is, "should I pay attention to those black puffs with the red burning edges or only the purple/colorful puffs?" That tells me someone not only is practicing and beginning to get somewhere, but are on the edge of discovering some really exciting stuff.

Be careful of being so rigid in practice. You are supposed to be having fun! We adults have forgotten how to let go of time, purpose and social reward systems.

I just read a really depressing article about how school destroys curiosity in children, particularly the American Standardized Testing that started in the 90's. Fighting that and the influence of the screens in people's lives and we all have a huge mountain to climb. We are trying to restore our awareness to a state before language effed us up into defining everything in our environment.

Advice like what mask is helpful in tiny ways, but detremental if it becomes dogma and we become rigid because of it.

TL:DR Have Fun, Play, and Break Some Rules!

I definitely look at my hands when they're moving and my head follows the path of the movement (Nowadays it's automatic and I don'tthink about it). Other times your head is just razor focused directly ahead, like the blonde woman in those videos. 

Like others have said the blindfold is optional, but you CAN keep it on and follow the movement. I don't use a blindfold. In fact one time I was having a frustrating practice, my thumb (I don't think it was accidental cos it was the cleanest move I ever felt) came from the back of my head and caught the corner of the Justablind mask and knocked it off. Like literally 1 minute later I saw the clearest purple puff I'd ever seen.