Experience report. Time was around 2am. I recapitulated a few experiences from the day. I started thinking about a specific restaurant I ate at recently, noticed my thoughts kept sticking there so I started working through recapitulating my observations of the different groups of people at the restaurant.
I think I finished going through everyone at the restaurant. I remember continuing the breath pattern and briefly wondering who I should recapitulate about next. Then I was aware of being in a car and looking at the car. The fidelity stuck at low for a few seconds, then it jumped up to high and I was experiencing being in the car, driving. At the same time I felt myself in the bed, trying to do the breath. I can't be certain my head kept moving in the bed, I knew I was meaning to do the breath but I stopped being so aware of the head turning and breath. At the same time I was looking out the windshield from a car, driving in a hilly, winding road.
After driving for a few seconds (at least 10, probably not more than a few minutes), the scene changed and I felt like I decided to stop following the car view. I was "back" in my bed (never felt like I left, knew I was sitting in bed the whole time). I woke up feeling very amazing and annoyed, because my head was leaning back against the wall and the 2 pillows I had for back support did not make for good neck support. I felt a strong urge to get up and post about it here, something like "that was so cool, I should share this with the Castaneda subreddit, they'll love this!" and even stronger was a desire: "I really don't want to get out of bed, I especially do not want to turn the lights on, I am tired, my neck hurts, I want to go to sleep, I don't care how amazing it was, I'll write about it later" and I moved back and forth and felt comedic at how strong the latter desire was.
I still feel amazed by it, I'm not used to feeling I'm in 2 places at once. Both the move "into" the scene and "out" of the scene felt like non-verbal decisions I made.
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That's what I've been hoping for.
Cleargreen people pretend to be doing recapitulation as part of some delusion that "all you have to do is recap and tensegrity", a delusion coming only from Armando Torres. It's not at all what Carlos instructed us to do. I'll copy that at the end here, since I just got an AI to summarize it to answer another person's question. It's NOTHING like what Cleargreen and Armando say.
But I'm perfectly happy to agree with Cleargreen that if you really did that, it might work.
Except, why don't they end up viewing the scenes, the way Carlos and La Gorda did, even engaging in group time travel?
I've done those! That's what recap does, if you really do it.
All I can guess is that people don't, but lie and say they do.
This is what I keep hoping people will disc over.k That recap is every bit as magical as darkroom!
It's astonishing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
But if you're just sitting there with your internal dialogue running, nothing interesting is going to happen, and you'll soon declare yourself done, before you even started.
Here's that AI summary of what we are supposed to be doing. Don't let it bother you that it doesn't mention recap, because if you get recap to do what you describe, you're learning silence, and to let your assemblage point drift towards silent knowledge.
So if you get "videos in the air" style results with you even somewhat relocating into the memory, you are indeed following the instructions Carlos gave us in his copy store bound publications which are over here:
https://archive.org/details/the-warriors-way-readers-of-infinity-1996/page/4/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/carlos-castaneda-silent-knowledge-cleargreen-1996/page/n1/mode/2up
*** From Gemini AI ***
In Silent Knowledge and Readers of Infinity, Carlos Castaneda and his three companions (Florinda Donner-Grau, Taisha Abelar, and Carol Tiggs) reached a unanimous agreement regarding the end of their lineage and the exact instructions left for future practitioners.
Here is a summary of the goals and instructions they established for us to use once Carlos was gone:
The four companions accepted what don Juan called their "fate": the absolute certainty that they were the last members of his lineage. Because continuing the lineage was no longer possible, they assumed the responsibility of "locking the door behind them". This meant taking full responsibility for deciding exactly how to handle don Juan's teachings and carrying out those decisions with absolute impeccability.
In the past, the magical passes were treated with extreme secrecy, hidden within complex, mysterious, and often nonsensical rituals. However, the companions came to the unanimous conclusion that continuing this secrecy was counter to the interests of their fellow human beings. They decided to lift the veil of secrecy and teach the passes to anyone who wished to learn them, realizing it was inconceivable to take secrets to their graves that did not belong to them in the first place.
To make the passes accessible to everyone, the companions had to strip away the highly specialized variations don Juan had taught each of them individually to fit their unique physical and mental constitutions. They agreed to combine and refine these four separate lines into generic, simplified forms suitable for everyone, creating the modernized system called Tensegrity.
For practitioners left without a physical teacher, the primary instruction is to practice whatever Tensegrity sequences or movements they can remember. By "saturating" or bombarding the body with these movements, the magical passes will naturally work on their own to bring unused human resources to the surface and break our rigid, linear systems of interpretation.
Because the human lineage has ended, there can be no new human leaders, teachers, or "don Juans" to follow. Instead, the ultimate goal for every practitioner is to use the Tensegrity movements to attain inner silence. Once inner silence is achieved, it bridges the gap to Silent Knowledge (the Spirit)—an abstract, impersonal force conscious of itself that permeates the universe.
The companions' final instruction is that this force is our only true guide; from a state of total inner silence, each practitioner must decide for themselves what their "next step" will be, completely free from any outside coaching or human authority.
Makes sense that if the internal dialogue is what's keeping a world present, getting rid of it would suppress it.
For the recapitulation I've made it a point to move into recap as soon as I feel my mind wandering, like I mentioned about the restaurant. So whenever idle chatter pops up, I counteract it by recapitulating. Keeps me practicing and focused on the practice instead running the chatter.
I've noticed the longer and more interesting recap and darkroom gazin sessions have been when I'm intending to do the practices, and going in with that mindset. When I'm thinking about plans for the next day, I usually fail to get focused.
Yea, that's the "appropriate mood" thing.
Carlos liked "Kylie Fierce" but that might just be because Kylie had those oddly light colored eyes, and with her hair cut short she looked a bit scary.
If anyone believes I'm being harsh or inappropriate here, you weren't in private classes to hear what Carlos said about that.
He once pointed to Kylie after she was being "fierce" during some new Tensegrity, and asked "Who'd want to wake up in the morning and see that face??!?"
One of the other inner circle women (they were encouraged to be rampant lesbians) said, "I would!"
Fortunately I'm face blind, so I never remember who said what.
Or as Cholita once complained, "They keep changing their names, so who can remember anything about them?!"
Kylie I could recognize though, because of those eyes.
I don't recommend "fierce".
You can just as easily be "curious". Or "relish" the results.
But those require there to actually be some visible magic going on. So if there isn't, I suppose "serious" is a good choice for mood.
"Distracted" definitely is not.
I have a question that’s kinda unrelated to all this. I wasn’t sure where else to ask, so I figured I’d just ask it here in the comments.
I remember reading here that you said Cholita has an unpublished book by Taisha Abelar that she doesn’t share with anyone.
So that book isn’t available to anyone else, right? Like, it was never published?
And if that’s the case, is there any chance you could share some of the stuff from it here with us?
Here it is. Missing a page unfortunately.
I pretty much know where Cholita's copy is, but I'd have to rummage through a witches boobytrapped belongings to get my hands on it.
And Cholita's a "corn kernel" type witch. Meaning, she lays booby traps that only require you to pick something up.
She even leaves money around hoping I'll reach down in the trash to rescue it.
Cholita won't fetch it for us. I haven't asked in years, but I'm pretty sure the answer is the same.
But I picked it up and examined it several times back around 1999. She left it out in her apartment.
It was just a standard Kinko's copies style binding.
I don't believe they handed out more than 50 of them, but the people who gave them out back in private classes aren't around to ask anymore.
https://archive.org/details/21-19-stalking-with-the-double
You can read it on that site, but it's better to download it.
It's honestly amazing to me that you're not scared of her.
She's seriously weird and scary, but also kinda cool!
I really didn't think the book even existed, so I was super happy to find out it actually does—and I just downloaded it.
Thanks, Daniel!
Thank you for sharing! A really, really cool experience 🙂
Of course, you might have to take care not to obsess over it too much with how amazing it sounds like that experience was for you, but the more you keep at it, the more used to being in more than one place at a time you'll be! It will be more natural-feeling, which will be helpful for discovering even more amazing things in your practices! 🤩
Yeah! I was really surprised at how "normal" it felt at the time.
Happy for you this sounds like one of those ‘wtf just happened’ experiences.
I’ve had similar craziness from recap, at first they would catch me off guard because I was not expecting that type of occurrence to happen during recap.
Also reminds me of when I went on a flying tour of los angeles, I could feel and see the lawn chair i was sitting on but everything around me changed, vivid colors, a true gift.
Do you recall seeing anything when you were “back” in bed?
I suppose it’s a good reminder to expect the unexpected from any session.
Whenever i experience something like this, I get the sense it’s important to do some passes afterwards to put ourselves back together.
Happy for you, keep pushing and practicing!
Thank you. You mention at first being caught off guard, I guess you became accustomed to them later on? I've fallen asleep / woken up barely doing the breath before, not remembering what happened.
I felt way too tired to do any passes right after, all I wanted to do was sleep! I'm doing daily passes though. In the last few months I've made it a point to make time to do recaps and passes, even if for relatively short sessions. I've found that doing passes feels like "catching up" on feeling relaxed as in, if my internal dialogue was running rampant, focusing on the passes relaxes it. They're fun to do. Thanks for your encouragement to do more passes. Yesterday I had a funny "huh.. I could intentionally do these practices more often and expect to see more results" thought. It's really cool seeing the practices work.
I appreciate reading this because it normalizes the feeling of being in two places at once, which I’m realizing used to cause a lot of panic and confusion (and I think almost seizures) for me, but I’m finally getting used to it and this actually helped me a lot to read. Appreciate it, good work keep it up.
Cool. I think it's helpful to share our experiences from practicing.