Silent Knowledge Puffs can Extract Elements of SK

I did manage to go back and look again, and noticed that once you get to "separating" things in SK, you can find individual elements and maybe use them for something else.

So for example you could manufacture a pair of pliers, if you could find a magical reason to make one of those.

I've made hamburgers, but so far no tools.

I was trying to follow SK entities off into sleeping dreams for an hour last night, but it gets too confusing. When you don't have a womb, it's easier to go directly into dreaming if you have help.

​​D(SK) = Practical Magic

But we knew that from reading the books. Just never noticed it?

This picture captured what Carol Tigg's "tunnel" looks like. She pushed 2 people into it, back when Carlos tried to get us to perceive magic generated by his group.

His direct attempt was "Pandora's Box" magical pass, which I've been manually smoothing out to make a final version I can add magic to.

It compresses intent. When you release it, SK forms something.

La Catalina seems to have had an awful lot of "power". I'm not sure all this is true, but I searched all of the books using Gemini and it gave me stuff I didn't remember at all.

I wonder if there's 2 "La Catalina" witches in the books? I certainly don't remember La Catalina being 200 years old! But that popped out during one of my inquires, and now I only find that she was over 100 years old.

*** From Gemini ***

Question: Find all mentions of La Catalina and give me some surrounding context. I believe there's one mention which makes no sense to me, where she's said to be a healer.

Gemini Notebook:

It makes complete sense that her appearance as a professional, clinic-operating healer feels completely incongruous. Across Carlos Castaneda’s books, La Catalina is usually cast in wild, dramatic, and terrifying roles—a shape-shifting blackbird, a giant coiling worm, or a fierce "worthy opponent".

The "healer" mention you are remembering comes from Taisha Abelar's unpublished manuscript, Stalking With The Double, and it highlights the ultimate, sophisticated stalking masquerade.

1. The "Curer" Masquerade (Sonora's Best Healer)

In Stalking With The Double, Carlos takes Taisha to a clinic in Sonora to treat severe, virulent flea bites on her legs, introducing doña Catalina as "the best curer in Sonora".

The setting and her behavior are highly professional and structured, which is what makes it so bizarre compared to her other wild appearances:

• The Clinic and Nurse: Catalina runs a neat, busy clinic where local Mexicans and Indians wait in line in a clean courtyard. She has a young Yaqui girl assistant dressed in a clean white nurse's uniform with white sandals, who files client names, dates, and medical issues on index cards in a metal box.
• Her Professional Attire: When Taisha enters the inner room, doña Catalina is dressed as a modern medical practitioner, wearing a professional white smock over a blouse and straight skirt, with her jet-black hair held neatly in a high bun.
• The Abdominal Examination: Catalina has Taisha lie "face up" on a narrow cot draped in a clean white sheet and gently begins massaging Taisha's abdomen in a circular fashion with a soothing lotion.

Why This Facade?

Carlos explains that Catalina is not a faith healer or a magician utilizing sleight of hand. Instead, she cures by using her dreaming and stalking abilities to change the reality around her, altering her patient's awareness to create a temporary, alternative "consensual reality" where physical laws change—allowing her to perform "bloodless surgeries".

However, her gentle, ministering "doctor" persona is ultimately a stalker's technique designed to put her patients completely off guard. The second she massages Taisha's stomach, she senses that Taisha’s energy does not flow in a standard human pattern and instantly reverses her behavior. She blocks the exit, her hair falling wild around her shoulders and her eyes burning with fury, as she accuses Taisha of being an ally of don Juan sent to "steal her power".

1. Surrounding Context: Her Other Roles Across the Books

To see how this "healer" persona fits into her broader history, here is the surrounding context of her other major mentions across the books:

• The Blackbird Enemy (The Teachings of Don Juan & A Separate Reality): In the first years of Carlos's training, don Juan introduces her as a dangerous, "fiendish black-magic witch" who can turn into a blackbird (chanate). He claims she dislocated his ankle during a moment of weakness and takes Carlos on a desert stakeout to wait for her.
• The Prearranged "Worthy Opponent" (Tales of Power & The Fire From Within): Don Juan eventually confesses that Catalina was never his enemy. She is actually like a "cousin or aunt" to don Juan's lineage, belonging to the Nagual Julian's party. Because she possesses massive stores of personal energy, don Juan set up a prearranged agreement with her to act as Carlos's "worthy opponent" to violently jolt his assemblage point loose without him needing to be in heightened awareness first.
• The Giant Worm (The Fire From Within): In a dramatic demonstration of a "shift below," Carlos and Genaro take Carlos to a hill to meet her. She shifts her assemblage point lower into the "area below," transforming in the second attention into a grotesque, giant coiling worm. She pulls Carlos's assemblage point with her, and the two cavort and play as worms in a weightless world of sponge-like sandstone rocks. Genaro winks that she learned this "worm bit" from the Nagual Julian, who "used to do that to her".
• The Naked Hilltop Routine (Stalking with the Double): Carlos reveals that she accumulates her phenomenal energetic power by walking five miles before dawn to a hilltop, where she stands naked to absorb the energy of the earth and the wind.
• The 100-Year-Old "Spring Chicken" (The Second Ring of Power & The Fire From Within): La Gorda notes that Catalina is "from the Nagual's cycle" but looks as if she is only thirty. Genaro explains that she is "no spring chicken" (being over a hundred years old) and that her youthful appearance is a deliberate sorcery manipulation taught to her by the Nagual Julian. Don Juan also drops a highly revealing clue about why she chose the healing profession: the Nagual Julian himself was a fabulous curer who helped thousands of people, but he chose to let the female seers of his party take all the credit.

🌀 Since Catalina's sudden aggressive turn during that "curing" session left Taisha with severe, long-term energetic side effects (including chattering teeth and waking hallucinations), we could explore how Carlos helped Taisha neutralize Catalina's invisible pursuit. Would you like a breakdown of that energetic battle?

***

I'm left wondering if La Catalina might not have been Panchita?

Fear shifts your assemblage point horizontally, likely to the right.

You keep all of your rationality only in the middle of man's band.

Or at least, that's what experienced darkroomers have concluded. Juann was the first to notice this.

Carlos only told us what was to the left and right, but I don't recall him commenting on why you'd be better off to stay in the middle of man's band.

You shift horizontally by treating the magical effects of a new assemblage point depth, as real. Which includes reacting to them as if they were real. Fear treats them as real.

Unfortunately, eventually you realize all of it is "unreal" from the point of view of your physical body, which exists in our expected form only up at the blue line.

You have bodies all along the way, and they seem to be the same, but they get further and further away from the physical matter and space of the blue zone.

I'm convinced that you can't take your physical matter along with you, when you die and your awareness manages to survive.

So that even sorcerers who reach the 3rd attention leave a dead body around somewhere.

They just hide it because it can be manipulated to have some "pull" on them, wherever they go.

Or maybe they can pull it somewhere inaccessible, the way the inorganic beings do when they kidnap men. First they kidnap the double, then they go back for the body.

Our personality, or even "us" is a result of tendencies left in the blob of awareness the Eagle encapsulated in our luminous shell.

You can't be "you" without those connections to this life.

Without those, you'd just be "perpetuated awareness" allowed to go free by the Eagle after the death of the physical being. But that perpetuated awareness spreads out too thin to be sentient.

And presumably gets reused, according to some things one of the witches said about alternate timelines, and people having "old souls".

Man... Some of that would piss off the women who ditched us.

Now I'm paranoid. You have to watch what you say in here, if it's not "standard canon".

Interesting, but it's a BIG mistake to believe that our physical body is what produces sorcery effects.

We don't want to be like Deepak Chopra and make books on "Quantum healing". Trying to justify that nothing Chopra teaches produces any real effect beyond what praying too long can produce.

He tries to use science, to con more people out of their money.

Let's see if I can find what Carlos said about this. But it's a thing you'll verify for yourself, when you do something utterly impossible such as walk through a solid wall, or leap across tree tops, and can't explain it in terms of what we believe about how the world actually works.

Nope. Couldn't find the quote. Gemini notebook is working poorly today. I tried 4 times to get it to find that passage.

It's in one of the forwards to Carlos's final books. He said that causality is just an illusion created by the assemblage always being held at the same level.

So it's a mistake to try to explain sorcery experiences in terms of normal "blue zone of reality" thinking.

Sorcery doesn't need justifications from science.

You either learn to do it, or you don't. No one cares if you don't learn it. And no one is going to be happy with you, if you do.

If we're right then everyone else is living a crummy, pointless life. Which only leads to old age, depression, and permanent death.

Which I suppose they mostly are.

Scientists included.

So people don't like sorcery. They prefer Chopra's scientific pretending.