I’m Dan from Carlos’ private classes. My intent is to contribute to preserving something precious, the accumulated knowledge of Carlos Castaneda.
In the mid 90s, Carlos told us the story of how he’d written a “how to” book. He said it was left in a theater by accident, and lost. He took that as an omen not to write it.
But a year before he died, people in his classes started being privy to things not written before, or at least not emphasized. As it turned out, they had received advanced copies of parts of his last 3 books. Those were his “how to” book, recreated as 3.
The difference between his earlier books and those was a matter of emphasis. In his earlier books, you had to dig though the stories to find techniques. And there seemed to be so many. Which to emphasize? His last 3 books tell you what to emphasize.
To that end, he created “the wall”, which is a beginner’s game of intent. It teaches how to see energy by activating the second attention while awake, with the eyes opened. It teaches what intent is, because you get to see to what extraordinary level intent fills in the missing details of perception. It also provides access to dreaming without all the effort. In fact, you could say that once you learn it, dreaming will come to you. You won’t have to pursue it. Even better, the dividing line between being asleep and dreaming and being awake with the second attention activated, becomes very blurry.
It took me 50 years to learn this, starting from the very first time I ran into Carlos at Morongo. Not to say that along the way there wasn’t plenty of other interesting stuff. But this marks a turning point. If you learn to see energy as filaments, bundles, and bands of emanations, you won’t be drowning in doubt.
Here’s the steps: First, practice recapitulation and dreaming until you have the gist of both. In the recapitulation, you reduce the impact of emotional memories. You’ll need that to curtail the internal dialogue. Recapitulation also enhances dreaming, because you’re practicing focusing your attention on something imaginary, to make it more real. Dreaming teaches you what it feels like when the assemblage point moves, how to hold it in position, how to change dreams, and you get your first encounters with inorganic beings. Yes, some of those phantoms are actually inorganic beings.
That’s the setup, it’s not part of the 3 weeks. But if you haven’t done that, the 3 weeks will be a lot rougher. And hopefully before you try this, you’ve had some experience with shutting off the internal dialogue. If you ask, “How can I shut off my thinking? I’d fall over and be unable to do my job.”, then you need to practice it first, until you realize, that petty internal dialogue is only a bully, a foreign installation. We weren’t born with it and it didn’t completely take over until around age 12.
Meditation is good experience for shutting off the internal dialogue. Every form of meditation I’ve studied works by altering the internal dialogue. It’s just done in a more friendly and comfortable way than doing it directly, probably because people teaching meditation would have no students if they advocated what I’m about to tell you. They’d go out of business. Thus, almost no one is teaching this.
You start by “curtailing” your internal dialogue, all day long. Every time you remember, shut it off. And fight hard to remember constantly. If you forget for more than a half hour, you aren’t trying hard enough. And hopefully there won’t be too many half hour lapses. If there are persistent thoughts, recapitulate them on the spot. Turn the head, do the breath, do your best to eliminate that barrier.
On day 1 it’s excruciating and you’ll try to convince yourself it’s impossible. On day 2 you’ll forget less often, but it’ll still be horrible. On day 3, it’ll be awful but no longer horrible. On day 4, you’ll be thinking, maybe it’s sort of “lovely”. By day 5, it’ll be almost easy.
Go for a walk while doing it. If you’ve attained super hearing, super sight, super smell, and super touch, you’re doing it right. It should be noticeable. It’s caused by the lack of filtering between your senses, and your perception. Of course, nothing really has increased, but you’ve stopped ignoring most of it.
Now you’re ready. Go buy some aluminum duct table, some painters blue tape, and some cardboard boxes. Cover your windows, seal the edges with blue tape, cover over all the LEDs on electronics in the room with aluminum tape, and generally make the room so dark that you can’t move around without touching furniture. You want it so dark that you will actually become disoriented, when you start to see energy. Some leaks, such as a barely noticeable edge of light from the window, can be useful for landmarks, once you start walking around.
That was the “easy” part. Now it gets harder. If you’re married, chances are you can’t do this. You need to find 3 extra hours at night, when it’s dark outside, for practicing “looking for colors”. I’ve found that it’s best done after waking up in the middle of the night, because your assemblage point is looser from sleeping and dreaming. And you can be absolutely sure, if you practice curtailing your internal dialogue all day long, your dreams will get very long, and very episodic. You’ll also start to have guest appearances in your dreams, of characters you vaguely remember. Curtailing the internal dialogue is the absolute best way to “save energy”, something Carlos emphasized daily in his classes.
But you could do it at the start of bedtime too. Sit up on the bed (I prefer cross-legged with pillows behind and below me for support) and stare at the darkness with your eyes open, looking for colors. To save you some time, yes those are the colors. Those vague things you feel stupid for thinking are what you’re after, because they’re probably just how the eye works, or defects, or maybe age-related issues? Those are them! Keep watching, and they’ll get brighter and brighter, over the next few days of practice. When you start to see not only vague puffs, but also vague twisted lines , get up and walk around. Look for more on the floor, on the walls, anywhere you can think to look for them. Don’t worry if they are not “directional”. They might only appear where your head and eyes are looking, but you can be sure you’ll eventually find some that are stuck to one spot and look absolutely real, like you forgot to cover an LED on electronics on the floor. Once you can see them as you walk around, try some very simple tensegrity moves. Mashing energy is easy to see. It actually works, although the amount that gets mashed is kind of pathetic. That’s probably why Carlos said you could do them hundreds of times if you wanted to.
You need 3 hours for this practice, so that your eyes get very used to the dark. You’re employing your “super sight” here, and it works even better when it adjusts fully to the dark. After looking around a bit, go back to the bed and try to scoop up some of the colors. Mostly I see a nearly grey blue puffs, with occasional other colors. You’ll find that your hand can gather it and deposit it on your body, pour it down your face (as in the tensegrity move), or just move it around. It’s even possible to gather up a puff, blow into it to make it brighter, and get it to float off. In one class Carlos tried to show this to us, but no one seems to have gotten it. Carlos realized we thought he'd gone nuts and was embarassing himself, and he gave us a big grin, saying, "No????"
Don’t be worried if you don’t see what I just described. Everyone is different. What you’re doing is learning to activate the second attention with your eyes open. That’s when it becomes possible to see the purple clouds Carlos described, which are part of Patanjali’s lights. I see all of Patanjali’s colors, including the brilliant blue pearl. I used to wach them on the ceiling when I was 5 years old. When I asked my mother, she convinced me to stop doing that.
If you get to see the purple cloud, with twisting and intermixing absolute black, and with red and orange on the edges, you’re talented! It's a lot harder to see when you're grown, than at 5 years old. Pat yourself on the back. In fact, give yourself a big thumbs up right then and there, and anytime you see that purple cloud. I also recommend saying “hello” to the first hypnogogic phantom you see each night. You’ll need them to get some of the effects of “the wall”. I’m afraid, it’s possible that Carlos’ sorcery needs inorganic beings to function properly.
Now to “the wall”. The wall is an effect of the second attention, so you can’t make any rules about what it looks like. While doing stalking and practicing silence in Asia, I once saw the wall for 2 weeks straight, every time I closed my eyes. It looked like bad wall papering from the 1970s. But more common is for the vague lights and colors you see in darkness to sit flat on a virtual surface. A flat surface forms in front of you, perhaps 6 to 10 feet away, and although there may be a real wall behind it, it doesn’t correspond to any actual thing. If you look up, you could see it on the ceiling. If you look down, you’ll see it on the bed. Try to touch it. You’ll see, it’s in front of the actual surface there.
Now you’re seeing the wall. Don’t forget that you had to FORCE silence during all of that.
But what can you do with the wall? Plenty! More later. These posts are limited to 10K characters.
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Intermission time: when I learned to see energy flow in the universe, and especially when I saw that it did indeed form bundles and bands, I became puzzled. All you have to do is be silent, and you see all this? How can it be that no one else does it (a claim of Carlos)?
I did what I now realize Carlos himself did. He used to tell stories about his search. At the time I didn't understand what he was searching for.
Now I do. I went searching to prove that other teachings understood this. How could it be that they don't?
I've found none so far.
But the "The Fire Kasina Meditation Site", recommended to me a day or two ago on reddit, is close enough. They use after-images of bright lights or flames to activate their second attention. And even better, they describe their experiences freely, instead of subsisting in a hierarchical-hazing style Asian organization. There's nothing like western openess in electronics engineering, compared to Chinese engineering. It's occasionally how I make a living. Likewise, if you belong to an actual Asian practice, you're being pushed around too much for no real reason, and you're likely to remain a novice forever.
It's ok to wade into the water on your own.
The kasina practicioners are probably Buddhists, so they're possibly afraid of the boogeyman. But no one's going to exactly match Carlos. Just don't mention inorganic beings to devout buddhists. There's a lot more of that in Asia than we understand here.
(From now on, I won't put "see" in italics. It's too hard to get all of them.)
Now that you can see the wall, what can you do with it?
First, don’t expect it to stick around forever. You’re dealing with the second attention here, and it’ll morph and change, and you’ll learn to go past it. If you get a spectacular result one night, keep doing it every night. Don’t let the human form talk you out of it. You’re in a battle with that very thing. Also, you’re using borrowed energy to see it. Similar to how you can tell someone about dreaming, they find their hands the first night, but never again. I told you about it, so don’t waste the chance by stopping after a few successes.
The wall is the second attention activated with our eyes open. This means that while you can see it, you’re seeing with the second attention, merged with the first attention. Note: resist the temptation to do all this with your eyes closed. It’s certainly possible, but it’ll leave you in doubt for obvious reasons.
In class, Carlos would entice us by “reading off the wall” to give lectures. It’s been a long time, so I don’t remember those lectures in any detail. But it was not uncommon for Carlos to give specific personal advice in lectures, about things he shouldn’t have known. And he’d look the person he was talking to right in the eye.
Reading off the wall will likely occur as follows. Imposed on the wall, possibly to the upper right, will be a little “whorl”. You’ll know it when you see it; the word “whorl” comes right to mind. Text forms there, in the center of that. Don’t be surprised if it uses different fonts! I once saw the font they use for Coca-Cola in Thailand. It was so fancy, I forgot to read the words.
Carlos explained this in class by saying, “We’re readers!” What he meant was, we stare at text so often, our second attention has easy access to that imagery. I’d add, today we’re smart phone users. I would expect younger people to see a desktop with “apps”, and not just a wall.
If you get an “app” landscape, the visual ones of scenes you can look into are dreaming worlds you can access. You don’t need any instructions on how to access those. Your body will know when you can go in. I once jumped right off the bed and into another world. I never did figure out if I actually jumped, which would be a very dangerous thing to do in a dark room. It was distinguishable from the kind of dreaming you do while asleep, because it was absolutely stable, and I remained lucid in it for 3 hours. I only left because it was almost time to go to work.
But little dreaming scenes superimposed on the wall aren’t always for entry. Remember, you’re forcing silence during all of this. But deep down at the base, below the internal dialogue, the human form is constantly visualizing scenes. There’s an endless flow of them, even without speech.
If you were preoccupied with something during the day, those scenes will reflect traces of your concerns. They’ll form some kind of order on the wall, each scene animated like a mini-dream. But all so vague, you can’t really identify any one of them. If you’re lucky enough to get a guest appearance by an inorganic being, they can cause them to circulate and recombine, to produce an answer to your concern. This is seeing, to get answers. When the answer is ready, your internal dialog shows its true function. It’s the voice of seeing. It’s been hiding behind all the petty chatter of your internal dialogue. It’ll sum the whole issue up in a simple phrase, and you’ll have your answer. As Carlos wrote, it’s not something you shouldn’t have known on your own. You had all the pieces. But it’s a lot more fun to figure it out visually, and its far better at re-combining things than you can be in your normal state of consciousness. I suspect, chances are you probably would not have figured that out on your own. The point is, it’s not supernatural information. You had it all along.
This method of seeing the wall is done in the dark and it would be pretty difficult to do it during the day, in full light. Fortunately, you don’t have to. There’s a thing called, “heightened awareness”, which puts the wall at your beckon call, anytime you close your eyes. You get to heightened awareness with silence, trauma, illness, or by any method that creates a longer lasting shift of your assemblage point, to where the second attention is activated.
If I had to describe heightened awareness, it’s sort of like that annoying confidence cocaine users get. Or like someone who’s gone manic and thinks they can do anything. The difference is, there’s no crash from it, and it can last for weeks. It’s a self-induced mania of sorts.
In heightened awareness, everything about sorcery is obvious. You can think of the most far-fetched thing you’d like to accomplish, and you can see a direct path to it. I won’t say that the direct path you see actually makes any sense. But it’s like the first time you become fluent in another language, and no longer have to think before you start a sentence. You just “know” that you can handle the words as you go along. It’s the same with heightened awareness. You feel like you’re fluent in manipulating the world.
Unfortunately, you have to have someone else in heightened awareness to fully understand it, and those are very hard to come by. You're likely going to be stuck with what you can use it for when on your own. Its best feature is seeing through the wall. If you see the wall when you close your eyes, you’re in luck. Now you can see in the daylight, just by closing your eyes when needed.
One of the best places to practice this is with a bench situated where people walk by continuously. A bench next to an airport people conveyor is perfect. The people just glide by. Close your eyes, look through the wall, and see the energy of the people.
I was curious about Carlos’ claim of “worms” of energy in people as a result of sex. Sure enough, they were there. But I got a big surprise when I tried this in Bangkok airport.
During the boxer rebellion in China, the Daoist sorcerers believed they were invulnerable to bullets. Unfortunately, they were wrong. A massacre of Chinese sorcerers was the result. If you go back in history, you’ll find such kill-offs of sorcerers are not uncommon, just as Carlos warned in his books.
The sorcerers from China fled to Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Thailand. The largest concentration is in Thailand. If you’re in the Bangkok airport, chances are there’s some sorcerers there too. They might be dressed as Nepalese or Thai monks, but sorcerers they are anyway.
If you’re seeing people’s energy this way, and one goes by, they might say, “Hello”. You won’t ever forget it.
The wall however, is just a launching point. To “see energy as it flows in the universe”, you have to get past the wall.
At this point you’re ready to learn to see past “the wall”. Caveat: I’m putting this in cheesy story form, but it’ll never go like this for you. Something else will happen. But it’ll be just as good, even if you don’t realize it at the time. And I’d like to hear what it is, if possible, so I can refine my advice to other people.
The wall doesn’t have to be present to do this next step. Just seeing the vague colors in the dark is enough to do it. You are simply going to increase your level of silence, by turning your second attention, now activated, in on itself. It’s a tool for intending. Intending fills in missing details. If you turn it inside, you have a tool to visualize the source of the internal dialogue, so you can work more directly on it.
Increasing silence levels is also how you learn to turn the jagged and distorted vague fibers of light you can see in the dark, commonly almost fully grey in color, into brilliant straight yellow fibers exuding awareness. If you succeed in doing this next step, seeing energy as it flows in the universe, your dull vague colors in the dark will start to include nice straight, brilliant yellow fibers. It’s rather surprising, if you got used to the vague colors. Having them combined in this manner, lets you look at things with your eyes, and find the hidden filaments inside. You can also learn to see your own “energy level”, meaning, whether its still stuck down at your toes, or has risen a little. When it gets above your ankles, fun stuff starts to happen
I don’t have enough information from people who write to me to predict the colors you may see. Perhaps you’ll see amber or orange instead of yellow. Maybe the colors you’ll see for the vaguer stuff won’t match mine either.
The most important thing in my opinion, is to “jump”, not the colors or how things look. Besides “saving energy”, Carlos emphasized “jumping” more than anything else in class. Everything he taught there was an invitation to jump. He once told us to walk to San Diego, from Santa Monica. No one would do it. They all had obligations. And in the next class, when we inquired as to what reward we’d get if we did it, he withdrew the invitation. He said it was too late now, meaning, we didn’t jump.
To jump, you have to make the decision on your own, to play with it. Don’t treat it as if there’s something wrong or it’s not enough, or not what you expected. If you have inner silence, whatever you do will eventually lead to a movement of the assemblage point.
For newbies, you can practice feeling the assemblage point move with meditation. Instead of following the instructions of whoever taught you, which often include ignoring “side states and visions” (gurus don’t like trouble makers), you should pay attention to anything at all, and try to get more of it. Odd feelings, the sense that your thoughts have moved down, blanking out, fast visions, seeing glowing light, a very noticeable change in breathing, or anything out of the ordinary, is a movement of the assemblage point. Deliberately try to get more of that, and forget about seeing the “Golden Buddha”, or whatever your meditation technique teaches.
You’ll need this knowledge for the next part, because there’s a wall of blankness between seeing the wall with your eyes open, and seeing energy flow in the universe, where you have no reference to tell if you even still have eyes.
Anyone who’s practiced dreaming is familiar with this blankness. You fall into it if the assemblage point movement is large enough, and if you haven’t somehow accumulated either the practice, or perhaps the energy, not to remain blanked out for long.
What you do is this: You dare thoughts to come. You’ve reached a pretty decent level of “curtailing the internal dialogue” at this point, so if there are any stray spoken thoughts, they should be rare enough that you can “pounce” on them. When one comes, you focus your attention on the trail it left, from where it originated. You’re trying to see the source.
If you can’t, there might be a need for more recapitulating. But that’s ok. With this level of silence, at the very least you’ll bounce back and forth between quick dreams or mini-blackouts, and staring at the dark with your eyes open. The first time you try it in fact, you’ll likely continuously forget to keep it up, because of shifts in the assemblage point that make you blank out or get absorbed by the context of a dream world you’re perceiving.
You need to keep your purpose to accomplish this. And what you’ll see if you succeed, is your externally imposed sense of self. Carlos said it was “a foreign installation”, and he also called it the “human form”.
I call it what your mother did to you as a baby. She forced your attention to focus on what she wanted. You became obsessed with the rewards and punishments of doing or not doing that, until you created a “virtual person” in your head. That virtual person imagines itself at odds with the world, and continuously tries to do something about it, with ineffective obsessions.
This virtual person corresponds to real structures in the brain discovered by scientists. And so, it’s a real thing in the world of causality. But the obsession of it isn’t necessary. It’s supposed to be an aid, not a prison guard. I liken it to a drug addict trying to produce tiny feelings of happiness, in the absense of his drug of choice, by thinking about pleasant things.
Whatever view you find of it, perhaps a frightened child, maybe someone complaining how they’ve gotten a raw deal, or even a full vision of God, the view itself is what you need. Doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it’s concrete enough to visualize.
Remember that it comes with its own “intent”, which is the intent of all the people around you. It’s a rather sturdy and concrete affair, not something you can easily remove.
So, we don’t try to remove it at this point. We’re trying to slip around it by forcing an even deeper level of silence. You have to stop or bypass not just the spoken voice, but what’s motivating it to speak in the first place. It’ll likely be seen as your attention focusing on worries and grievances. Scenes without words.
Those are what gives rise to the words, the same way the voice of seeing analyzes second attention visions, and explains them to you. Your voice of seeing has been hijacked and is clinging to self-soothing messages, from an endless flow of images.
I can’t tell you what you’ll see while slipping past that, because it’s still a blank for me. I’ll be trying to find a way to suppress it, and then I’ll be gone. Nowhere. When I notice that, I’m looking at something extraordinary. It’s a universe filled with bright yellow lines, as if the world were on fire. But I’ve never seen the transition. I merely notice that I’ve been looking at it for a few seconds or so.
At this level of silence, you’re in a “don’t care” sort of mode. You have no reaction to anything you see. It all just is. But shortly you’ll notice it a bit more consciously, and likely you’ll be interested in something in particular, something you’ve wondered about before. Such as, if those are Carlos’ luminous fibers, do they really stretch into infinity? If you consider that, you’ll start to see the spaces between them. They aren’t homogenous. Some are closer together, and running the same direction. Under a group of those, there’s empty space. And yet, the whole thing is glowing with the same yellow color.
The act of noticing the spaces causes our awareness to focus on the parts that are not spaces, and the emanations themselves have the ability to reflect our awareness back to us. Giving them the energy of awareness causes them to make a presentation, to offer you something. They seem to want to be discovered.
They might bundle up and present themselves in the form of a more solid structure. The bundle is a package deal, a whole world you can enter. It seems as if a group of them has some association because of vicinity, and in that group there are so many of them that they can give a complete view of a place.
Just noticing the bundle, which might look like a frozen patch of fire coming towards you, will cause you to feel that world. You’ll get a fast and confusing vision of being there, actually living there, with full knowledge of the context and history up to that instant. If you’re lucky, you can bounce back to view the flame, instead of getting lost in that new world.
If you enter the world instead, you can remain there for much, much longer than in standard dreaming. You’ll be lucid the whole time, although you can certainly start to go along with the new world, and forget your purpose. Experienced dreamers know about going with the flow. In the kind of dreaming you get randomly at night, going with the flow typically leads to losing lucidity. In the worlds accessible from inner silence, you can go with the flow for a very long time, without losing lucidity.
Even a few weeks. While time normally moves the same in standard dreaming, as it does here, there are some levels of dreaming where time moves much faster than it does here. If I had to guess, I’d say you’ve bypassed the normal “Art of Dreaming” steps, and gone straight to one of the deeper levels of dreaming.
After you do this, pieces of bright straight fibers of light will mix in with your vision of vague colors in the darkness. You can make use of this. Learn to scoop the vague clouds, and pay close attention to your hands, looking for other colors. Red in particular for me.
But you can try out your new understanding of how to further suppress the internal dialogue, on any object you see. You’ll then be able to “see” specific things. There’s an odd sound that goes along with the assemblage point moving to where you can see the fibers. I’m at a loss to describe it, but it’s like the sound of intensity, whatever that might be. It might even be the sound of the “wind that can blow your life away”, mentioned in one of Carlos’ books.
This mix of bright fibers of light, with the real-world view, can create the familiar images on the cover art of Carlos’ books. For example, a normal body with a head made out of light.
After you can do this, you’ll also have access to double beings in the world. They’re out there. I figure one in 500. But they don’t know it. The women have so much energy, they form little gangs with friends who like the fallout. The men end up being leaders because people sense their energy and join in their pursuit.
There’s probably nothing you can do about them, except notice their oddity. The oddity of it is that if you encounter one, and get too close, they’ll propel you into this type of seeing where the emanations are mixed with the ordinary view. Just don’t expect not to be completely confused when it happens. In sorcery, there aren’t many “freebies”. You have to work like a dog to make anything happen. Except if you encounter a double being. The results of that are one of the freebies.
I’ve pursued 3 of them in my life, 2 females and one male. It came to no use in the end, the same way It came to no use for Carlos. But it did give me an understanding of how seriously sorcerers take passing on their knowledge. I spent years chasing them, some including very complex stalking schemes.
[deleted]
Hi, thank you so much for your great posts on this sub!
I've been practicing your all day awareness technique for the last 4 days, shutting down thoughts as soon as I notice them and noticed some initial improvements. I am very consistent with this and literally stop a thought every 1-5 seconds with no 2+ min breaks throughout the day. I do however have a pretty important question about this practice at the end of my message and would highly appreciate if you could help me with this.
What I've noticed so far:
-My "loud thoughts" have reduced and are quieter
-My "quiet / background thoughts are still there"
-I am more in the moment and "lucid" in every day life
-I can differentiate between different types of thoughts.
-Day 3 and 4 felt more relaxed than day 1&2, as my loud thoughts decreased
My question:
I noticed that I can do one of 2 things: be hyper aware of my thoughts and stop them, or really focus on the world around me, be present and thereby quiet my thoughts. Option 1 means fewer thoughts but I am very in my head all the time. Option 2 means more thoughts but I can ignore them a bit and snap out of them as soon as I notice them.
Which one is more favourable?
Thank you so much for your wisdom, your many great posts and your time,
-Jack
Carlos preferred focusing on the world around you so as to "flood the senses", believing that would help reduce the internal dialogue. And then he curled his fingers, to further distract his tendency to focus his awareness on "the self" and how it's doing in regards to our social world.
Something you get to visibly see as you advance. It has to do with where the internal dialogue comes from. If you "flood" your senses, you help stop that thing at its "origin". It stops fantasizing, which is what drives the internal dialogue.
It's like distracting a poorly behaved little kid, with something that captures it's attention. To get it to shut up and sit down, and stop misbehaving.
Although it's not as effective as handing a kid a video game machine.
Unfortunately, no one Carlos was teaching ever learned any actual sorcery...
And they all were aware of "flooding the senses".
Mostly no one learned because he died too soon.
And next in line for why it didn't work, is that Carlos assumed the situation was as it was in the lineages. That people actually wanted to learn, and were grateful to have real sorcerers helping them.
They didn't, and they weren't.
Carlos didn't realize how bad it was outside the lineages. The endless capacity of students to pretend, and engage in greedy acts designed to create their own franchise for stealing from others as soon as the teacher isn't looking.
No one in a lineage would dare to engage in that behavior!
Silvio Manuel would pick them up by the neck and hurl them to their inevitable death through the wall of fog. Surviving only if the senior lineage members decided to go rescue them.
By the way, Cholita could do that. So don't doubt it's possible. She's lifted me up into the air a full foot, with one finger.
More times than I can recall.
I thought I was a goner when I got home last night. Cholita figured out that I had been experimenting on her with little piles of cash, and she came after me.
But we haven't got anyone like Silvio Manuel to keep us honest, so in fact not even 1 person learned any sorcery.
How sad is that? After 55 years of the books being available.
My method of FORCING is based on wanting to learn the very fine details of where the internal dialogue comes from, while making sure you can't pretend the results.
But it requires feedback.
You have to see some actual magic, in order to use my FORCE method satisfactorily.
If you're outdoors, you MUST see some "weirdness" as you practice silence, if you want to copy my methods.
Otherwise if people do that during the day with no real magical feedback, they'll just pretend the results.
That doesn't mean it won't help.
Any actual efforts to shut off the internal dialogue will accumulate as skills which might pay off later on.
But at some point, you need to prove it.
With magic.
So it's a tricky balance there.
During darkroom there's nothing to flood the attention with, which is precisely the point.
If there's no magic, there's nothing to see at all. It's pitch black.
Instead of flooding your awareness with the brightly lit daily world, which is all blocked out by being in a dark room, you flood your awareness with the Tensegrity movements, and how it feels to move those specific muscles.
You "saturate yourself" with muscle memory.
Which Carlos said, "Don Juan has high hopes for muscle memory".
So my method is "somewhat" similar to what don Juan advised us to do, using the Tensegrity.
You can take your pick of approaches.
Just make sure you insist on actual magic as the result.
And when you get out to the purple zone on the J curve, come ask again.
There's a whole new set of challenges out there.
I must have discovered at least 4 new "techniques", none of which I can mention in here.
People will skip learning to be silent, and try those instead.
And they won't work, without silence.
Thanks so much for your fast and extensive reply, I really appreciate it!
Good to know that flooding the senses is the way to go. So far what I've been doing his observing if there is a thought, stopping it right then and there and then focusing on my surroundings, hoping to suppress further thoughts. It works in the sense that I am more lucid and and in the moment, but I can only sustain this awareness and silence for 1-5 seconds.
Of course I'm only on day 4 and I am aware that this is gonna be a long term practice that I will have to do. I am prepared to do that :)
Do you have any tips on how to flood the senses? Is it just about placing string extreme focus on whatever I am doing, noticing the feelings, sensations, sights etc?
I noticed that whenever I try to really focus on a sensation of something I am doing, my brain starts to comment and reationalise what's going on: "ok focus focus. Yes, this feels very cold. What do I smell??" You get the point. I think the goal is to get rid of this voice.
From your own experience, how long does it take until silence starts to establish in people's minds?
I find it fascinating what stories you have to tell from your times of learning with Carlos. I strolled through the other posts on your page. Lots to learn there
I have no experience on how long it takes, because I was doing it for 30 years before it started to work well.
I first ran into Carlos back in the 60s and heard endless discussions by jealous anthropologists, about what Carlos had written.
And there wasn't anyone serious about learning to be silent until recently so I didn't realize how hard you had to try.
Anyway, it doesn't matter.
You have to do it regardless of how long it takes, if you hope to escape your current predicament (stuck in the river of shit).
As for focusing on what you are doing, it's possible you've been contaminated by Asian systems which tell you to "be here now".
Part of their strategy to turn their followers into slaves.
And that's the worst advice you can give someone.
The complete opposite of sorcery.
In whatever systems tell people to be "present in the moment", no one ends up doing anything worth learning. It's all just pretending.
Present in which moment? Where?
4000 years ago?
You can be present there too! I've done it more than once.
There's no procedure or place to go, to go back in time 4000 years.
You just go, by focusing your attention there.
Of course, you have to first notice it.
But there's 1 million things you could notice, so being "in the moment" won't help at all.
"Be here now" outside the galaxy, on another planet?
I've been there.
Frankly, Ram Dass' "Be here now" is a death sentence.
That's what we're trying to escape!
It's more like, you need to fall asleep while still standing up with your eyes open.
Do something we've all been trained very hard NOT to do.
So you flood the senses in order to reduce your focusing of awareness on the things of this reality, so that the assemblage point can drift to a new one.
And if it drifts a tiny bit, you "notice" that change.
Which is not "here", or "in this moment".
It's "over there", where almost no humans go anymore.
Ok, do I understand this correctly, that you are trying to flood your senses with things that "aren't from this world"? Instead of focusing on the water coming from the tap that you're using to wash your hands and really feeling the sensations, you're saying that I should focus on something else?
If so, how do I access this something else in my every day life, all day long as you described to flood my senses and silence my inner monologue?
No, that's not quite it.
Don't we all wish we could flood our senses with magic!!
I get to, after working daily for hours. For years without fail.
But even that isn't enough to reach Silent Knowledge.
It really all boils down to completely eliminating the internal dialogue.
Once you "seem" to have gotten rid of it, you then realize you never actually did.
Not even for a minute!
Despite making it all the way to the deep orange zone.
So we're lucky that there's a "good enough" level that's nowhere near completely getting rid of it.
What I meant was, if you are doing "the right way of walking" or some mutation of it, you NEED to see some magic.
If that's your only technique.
Or you aren't doing it right.
That could just be a little "weird" sparkle.
But usually you might doze off for a half a second, and have a tiny little dream scene in your mind.
I'll give an example.
I like to walk around my business park, and gaze down a little ahead of my feet, at the asphalt.
It's a uniform surface, moving along as I walk.
I look for "eye junk".
A piece of plant fiber dust perhaps.
If I can find a little "dot" or "worm" down there as I slightly cross my eyes walking along, the eye junk seems to be flying above the asphalt.
It creates the illusion of a real tiny little "thing" flying along.
If I get completely silent, it'll turn into something!
Last time, it was a little man riding in a hot air balloon.
But just for an instant!
Outdoor gazing is not my thing, so I can't give you better examples.
However if you gaze at leaves, at the shadows and light coming through a fern plant for example, your eyes might cross slightly and combine the wrong part of the fern, with some other part.
Because the shapes can seem to be the same one, with your eyes slightly crossed.
And you can end up creating a sensation of depth there, on a "real" object, which is not there at all.
The same can happen if you are looking through a chain link fence, and have the wrong triangulation angle on your eyes.
So that you merge unrelated parts of the fence with another, through each eye.
Once that happens it "puzzles" the mind, because the depth of the 3D feeling is off, and the second attention can come out to help.
Your dreaming copy comes to help!
You're trying to lure your double out, so that you can borrow his eyes.
It likes that kind of thing! Or in fact, it likes anytime you aren't fussing and feeling sorry for yourself.
Which is what the internal dialogue is.
Once you interrupt all that self-pity, "the double" might come around and overlap with you.
And you can end up seeing something weird.
On ferns, maybe some highly colorful triangle attached to a circle.
Something not there, but which your dreaming attention created while trying to explain what's going on with your real sight.
But if the assemblage point drifts, just about anything can appear there.
Now, if you are doing "all day" silence it's not possible to keep that kind of concentration up.
But any effort to get silent will help out later, when you can do it alone with privacy.
You can't "earn" sorcery by "doing your chores".
It's only attained with creativity and hard work.
Eastern Meditation systems try to convince people "it's only a matter of time", even if that takes 3 lifetimes. Just meditate twice a day, perhaps for 20 minutes, and they claim that'll transform you.
They lie!
And there's no second chances. One life is all we get. So the idea that it might take more than one lifetime, is totally obscene.
But they have people meditating daily for 10 years before they realize they were lied to and it doesn't actually work as promised.
By then they've weeded out serious people, and all that's left are the attention seekers who want their own franchise, and are willing to call "bliss" and minor visions during meditation, mostly caused by dozing off, "enlightenment".
All fake magical systems use a similar trick.
"Do the work".
Or "My journey".
They hypnotize people with romantic make believe.
What you need, to insure you aren't being fooled, is super cool impossible magic.
But at first all you get is a little man in a hot air balloon flying over the pavement for half a second.
I suppose the takeaway for you is, all day silence won't do the job.
That's just practice for the evening, when you have to find a technique which reliably produces magic.
Then you use that magic, to perfect your silence.
It grows daily due to the nature of how sorcery works.
So ideally, in the case of that little man in the hot air balloon, the goal would be to get him to return daily, until you can leap down into the balloon and go riding with him for a few hours.
In your physical body.
But that's not a likely path, and it's very hard to repeat stuff.
Usually it's best to just accept the magical gifts you get, and not care if you can repeat them.
Then another one will come along as if you are being taught by don Juan, who does demos for you which you can't repeat.
We inevitably learn by the same methods all sorcerers learned in the past.
Another of the laws of sorcery.
You can only follow an existing path, to get that far into other realities.
No one can forge their own path in a single lifetime.
But the same is true of technology. No one can recreate computers from scratch, all by themselves.
Thanks again for the extensive explanation. I will keep at it and stay consistent ;)
Would you say at some point when you silence the inner monologue, dreaming automatically starts happening? Usually in a dark room I assume but sometimes during day time?
In a way that would be like dreams leaking into reality, that you have to jump onto I assume?
All the best!
Not as much as you'd like.
Sorcery actually requires working hard and being creative, every tiny step of the way.
There's no point at which you "arrived" and everything becomes easy.
I'm pretty sure people believe in that because fake magical systems have leaders which no longer even practice their techniques at all, and who have pretty much given up.
So they just claim they reached the point where it's all easy, to explain why they don't have to actually do what they're telling others to do.
So they can keep creating new workshops or courses, without people questioning their sincerity.
But you will get occasional "easy successes".
Which causes you to try to figure out why things went so well that particular practice session, hoping to repeat it and save yourself a lot of hard work.
At some point you can ALWAYS use hard work to get extreme results. Such as you have seen in the past.
But on a bad night, it might take 4 hours!
It's very nice when it takes 15 minutes. So you try to figure out why that happened.
And in so doing you discover how to "save energy".
In the case of men, you might discover that women can give you energy at a whim.
Without them even losing anything from it.
I believe they have that ability because of their biological role.
But it still works at the magical level.
How exactly do you save energy? Is that in your day to day life? Do I physically have to do anything?
That's not something you can teach anyone.
Because they'll pretend the results.
Most magical systems have endless rules of behavior their followers endure, so as to confuse them into thinking they're on the right track.
Daoism is horrible in that respect, controlling so much of your life for absolutely no purpose.
Working with the Chinese, I'm around religious Daoists often.
It's a very ugly belief system, void of any real magic.
So you have to discover how to save energy yourself, by learning to produce real magic you can visibly see, and then learning over time what behaviors make that harder to do, and which enhance it.
But generally, cut back on feeling sorry for yourself and don't eat like you were stuffing a freight train unless it's a really good all you can eat buffet.
If you hear someone advise you "don't eat sugar", you have a pretender there.
Got it. Thanks so much for your help!
I will keep at it and read some more of your posts :)
Wait People are afaid of inorganic being? How is that different from an organic being? A Being is Being is it not? Or am i just crazy? Could it be that Carlos or one of his associates has been guiding me my whole life whithout me realizing it? Or maybe something else? Is it possible to be able to dream and all this stuff from birth? Im really curious.
We start out as sorcerers, and then are talked out of it by our families as we grow up.
We start with all magic available to us, but no sense of rationality or purpose.
We have most of the power of our double. Our dream body.
But we get hazed and bullied into thinking there's only "the real world", and anything which contradicts that point of view is not real.
Including spirits, which everyone meets in their dreams constantly.
To learn sorcery, you have to slowly convince yourself that what you were led to believe by your family as you grew up wasn't true.
By working to remove that talking voice in your head, and replace it with near perfect silence.
And to remove the fantasies that will cause that voice to start talking again.
Then you get to see what's really there in front of you. How amazing reality really is.
It's very hard work to remove that voice talking away in your head, so most people refuse to change and go somewhere else that has pretend magic.
So they can go back to sleep.
Good thing Im used to suppressing my thoughts for a couple of years now. Well in the past it used to be so that I don't have to confront myself with all the messed up shit I had to deal with all these years in childhood :D. You know now pretending to be normal in front of judges and clinicians at the age of 9 if I remember correctly so that the ongoing child sexual abuse done to me doesn't come to light :D. Lovely Mother of mine. Guess she won't make it too long ahead. Seems like the guilt finally eats her up. But Its like I don't allow self to access the full memory yet because the necessary preparation within myself has not been done yet by me. But that's just a hunch. I also tend to let stuff like that kind of rise to the surface of the canvas of my own being so to speak. Siphon it from the corresponding place in the body where it wants to go. I can't really explain it as I'm kind of swinging it. Like going out into the world like a child and just exploring stuff. Just in the realm of self exploration and through that the exploration of the rest of existence. Kinda like so within so without despite there not really being an inside or outside which always confused me to this day because I don't understand it. This separation so to speak. From myself? Like someone has put a heavy black blanket over consciousness at birth and now after years of trying to find stillness and quietness which I associate with peace and I always craved peace my whole life. But I feel like I'm nearly there. Like I'm close to seeing reality for the first time and I have been waiting so fcking long to return to this inner knowing of peace and tranquility within the frequency of my own being so to speak. Sorry for offloading. You can delete this if this has no place here. I'm still unsure about what is excaptable for this gathering of beings. Kind of tired of getting ostracized from everywhere to be honest :D
Thanks for this, I appreciate you taking the time to spell this out.
It's really more of a motivational thing, despite being a true account of what you can learn to do.
If someone had been telling me that 20 years ago, I might not have put so much emphasis on dreaming for so long. Dreaming is a sink hole, a realm all of its own.
Did you also start working on forcing silence a lot later? Or, was that something Carlos recommended at all times?
Were there times you had doubts if any of this works when attending the private classes?
No, I started working on forced silence around 48 years ago. But I didn't understand that you need to find a "hook". Some visible magic to prove you are doing it right.
Sure, everyone doubted in private classes.
And even once you start doing real sorcery during darkroom, the kind that blows away even what the Buddha was said to be done, but you can do it with your eyes open, you'll still have doubts.
Doubts are what hold us to the blue line.
But you can't "believe with all your heart" and get any help that way.
Because "all your heart" is more river of shit thinking.
There's nothing you can do but see more, to convince yourself.
And even then, that stuff happens "so far away" that if you remain at the blue line too long again, it'll barely be a memory.
At some point, people learning sorcery become VERY serious about reaching permanent silence, and do something like spend a year homeless as Taisha did, or become a fry cook as Carlos did.
To break away from the routines that keep activating that internal dialogue.
I believe there's "another way" to accomplish that. Using Tensegrity.
I wrote a hint at it in the advanced subreddit, but I'll probably put it on facebook too. Not in here though, we need to "stay on the path" at this level.
It's just a hint though.
The idea behind it is likely good, but it's not explained well enough.
The hint is not from me. Carlos gave it to us in his "Magical Passes" book.
But we didn't notice.
Did you also undergo something similar?
Is it normal to feel overwhelmed at all the tensegrity passes? I love the lifesaver pass, mashing energy and running man. But, I am not sure how long are you supposed to do each of them? It it wrong to think of it in those terms and just do what feels "right"?
>Did you also undergo something similar
Not yet, but Cholita might insist.
>Is it normal to feel overwhelmed at all the tensegrity passes?
I suppose so. I used to learn them easily, but now if I need to learn a new one, it takes me a couple of weeks. I don't put a lot of time into it though.
If you want to know how to do Tensegrity, look at my facebook today. That should explain it.
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=2293970747428699&set=a.1585701564922291
By the way, don't EVER do "sorcery tasks" until you know precisely why to do them.
Don't ditch your parents, don't erase personal history, don't stop eating sugar, become homeless, or anything else which just amounts to pretending instead of working.
There actually isn't ANY case of that in the books. People just misread them to be what they want them to be.
Stuff you can pretend.
So in the case of all of the "warrior's way" nonsense, Carlos was being taught by Carlos in secret, using the Nagual's blow.
From the very start.
Without that, any behavioral changes are virtually pointless.
As they have been in our community, for 50 years now!
You'll see what I mean when you can move your assemblage point very far, and realize that the real thing is obvious.
And pretending never gets you anywhere.
Some guy on youtube just now posted this nonsense. He was arguing that Kylie said the passes could be used for good exercise.
She never said that. What she said, isn't worth arguing about.
In fact at the time, I went into weight loss forums and was promoting it for the same reason, which is likely what prompted Kylie to say that. Carlos was even amused. I'd lost 30 pounds, so it seemed fair to claim it could be used for weight loss.
But when I corrected the guy because it sounded like he didn't want to do any actual work, mentioning Kylie's comment, he came back with this bizarre message.
Hopefully you can now see through it. He was responding to me asking if he liked the reputation of Carlos to have gone into the toilet, because no one did enough work to learn real magic.
He said,
***
Hi Daniel. To answer your question, no I don't like it. It's very frustrating. It would be a lot easier for all of us struggling to reach the 3rd attention if more people were aware. But considering what's out there, in the Universe at large, it's not surprising. The "ones who shall not be named" have a strong hold over all of us. I've "seen" them a lot lately, and it's terrifying to say the least, once you realize how many of them there are. I would say that Carlos and the rest of the sorcerers were aware this would happen. Years ago, Miles told a friend of mine that worked with him at Tilo that the Nagual told them Cleargreen would probably last about 10 years after he left, so the fact it's around at all is a good sign. Not to mention, Kylie did say this quote in the 90s, so they knew it would happen. I'm sure they are upset about what's happening to a degree, but once you get out in the universe, beyond the safety of the 1st attention and beyond that seductive world of the inorganics, that will trap you in the sweetest of ways (at least us men), the Universe is highly predatory. It takes all of their attention to continue on, so I'm sure they are focused on that. Apparently, they are having some success in the classes/training certification they are doing at what used to be Cleargreen, so that's something. In the end, it boils down to detachment. One can only do one's impeccable best and be detached from the outcome, as difficult as that can be. Keep on keeping on, brother. I think your efforts are making a difference.
***
Technically he's a "Comrade type" bad player, pretending his magic while being a name dropper.
Notice how he goes for the "bad ass" topic as his supposed goal, claims he's part of a group, when from what he says it's clear he can't even move to the green zone.
But he's denying himself inorganic beings to show how hard he works.
Interesting! That definitely has a lot of bad player traits. Did you respond to him or just ignored him?
He's on youtube. No moderators there.
He'd throw a giant tantrum.
It would be impossible to restore sorcery without mods. I suppose it's the same as Carlos discovered. He couldn't spread sorcery on his own. Needed outside people to do the bulk of the work.
It's weird how sorcery repeats history, but if you consider that all realities are just awareness flowing in the emanations, then it's not so strange.
Just hard to believe.
"At some point, people learning sorcery become VERY serious about reaching permanent silence, and do something like spend a year homeless as Taisha did, or become a fry cook as Carlos did.
To break away from the routines that keep activating that internal dialogue.
I believe there's "another way" to accomplish that. Using Tensegrity."
You said many times if i understood well that Tensegrity was NOT to be used to reach silence so do you mean here that magical passes disrupt routines and enable to force silence more efficiently after performing them when gazing for instance ? Maybe as not-doings may also do ?
I'm asking because when doing the Life Saver pass my mind falls instantly in silence without forcing it and on the opposite when i do daylight gazing i see myself struggling a lot to force silence and find myself very soon "watching the clock" and even if i pesist it happens again and i give up.
Both are true. That Tensegrity is USELESS to learn silence, but also that it's the very key to permanent silence.
There's a "gremlin" hidden in that message. That's why the contradiction.
Try reading my Facebook again, if you already did. That will answer the controversy.
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=2293970747428699&set=a.1585701564922291
However, I don't like to leave people in the dark.
Tensegrity is not much different than Chi Gung, Tai Chi, or Yoga stretching exercises, if you consider it as just mere physical movements.
In that sense, you'll fantasize, stare at the person in front of you hoping for a "hookup", worry about bills and relationships, and generally be just as full of self pity and anger as usual.
The exercise aspect won't stop that.
In fact, I'll go out on a limb and say Yoga stretching techniques are BETTER exercise than Tensegrity.
There's no "Chi Gung" effect in anything. Not even in Chi gung.
Physical exercises don't activate your "hidden magic inside".
Otherwise Chi Gung people would have some actual magic and be a lot more fun to talk to, instead of self-entitled anger and bullying if you try to talk about it.
But there's also no "vitamin effect" either, and people swallow those all day long.
And I'm sorry to tell everyone, probiotics make no sense at all. And there's never been a single real study showing any benefit at all. You have 9 pounds of natural probiotics in your system already, with 200-600 varieties.
Adding 1 gram (.00002 of the 9 pounds by weight), to that total, with no more than 90 varieties, none of which are natural to your situation, is absurd.
Makes no sense! And has never been shown to be beneficial. In fact, it's often harmful.
But there are plenty of "sponsored" studies saying it works.
So as humans we're "saps" for doing some easy to do thing daily, and thinking it's "making us better".
It's "hope" in the river of shit. The destruction of magic lies in false hope.
BUT, the tensegrity does move your assemblage point and it does stir unused emanations shared in common with the old seers.
Ones in the dark sea with some latent awareness still hanging out there.
Think of it as a "good" power object.
Compared to the rock with a hole in it that Pablito found near a Mexican pyramid, by noticing the "sparkle" using silent knowledge. He saw it under the ground.
La Gorda couldn't resist hogging it. She clutched it in her hand.
It was "Bad voodoo".
But Tensegrity is "good voodoo".
That's why it can lead to permanent silence.
But you have to "Help it out" by noticing the weird little men coming after you with their sharp little knives, to eat you alive.
I still don't get why that bothered La Gorda...
I'm all for it!
In the case of Tensegrity, what you have coming after you will be magic.
Outside thought.
Not as interesting, but still nice.
Thank you for inserting vitality into the fight. I feel I need to continue the lingo and I feel assured that that my steps are in a meaningful direction. Many sites and subreddits although they employ some techniques dont have the right intent, I feel they prefer cotton balls and bunnies. Thanks for the guidance.
Don't forget about reposting cute kitten videos and rainbow unicorns. I'm afraid some of Carlos' group mostly does that sort of thing these days.
My intent is to foster dialogue, as this is the warrior's dialogue that propels us forward. Don't figure ineptitude for lack of interest.
Thanks for this knowledge!
Can't wait for the next part and know what one can do with the wall.
Really really appreciate this.
In any complex endeavor, you never learn so much as when you try to pass it on to someone else and have to clarify it in your own mind.
Many thanks for sharing, Dan.
Did you go to any of the Tensegrity workshops? I went to three: Culver City, Pasadena and UCLA. They were invaluable to me, especially UCLA.
I believe I went to all of them, except for one. Can't remember why I didn't attend that one. But besides that, I attended about 100 classes with Carlos, while he was designing the techniques. There were a lot more techniques than made it into the workshop. Personally, I prefer the simple ones.
Naturally there's always a little discord where people are concerned. And so when Carlos started to move away from the simple ones, creating very long forms, some people in classes were complaining that Carlos was using Howard Lee's Kung Fu. Even Howard was a tiny bit unhappy about it.
But of course, if you've studied a few Asian martial arts you realize they're pretty much all the same. (Aside from the grappling vs striking styles).
And Carlos' sorcerer's movements could have been embedded in anything. He just chose martial arts because he enjoyed being a member of a Riverside County martial arts association, which was closely associated with Marshall Ho, a very famous Tai Chi instructor. Howard Lee (HYL from the fire from within), was also big in that group.
Since Marshal Ho was active in the movie industry on some level and so was Bruce Lee at the time, Carlos told a story about making a "home movie" with Bruce Lee and Howard Lee, wherein Carlos was the bartender. I didn't believe that story until recently when I got to correspond with Marshall's daughter.
Coincidentally, Marshall's home was right next to Morongo Reservation, where Carlos visited occasionally. They had a devil's weed sorcerer and a dreaming sorceress. I used to hang out with them as a kid, back when Carlos was visiting. The entry road to the area with trailors is lined with Devil's weed, and if you go to one of the lobbies at the Casino, you can see there is probably still an active Devil's weed group there.
Carlos was also known to attend picnics with the martial arts association. My guess is that Taisha and Florinda were members of the UC Systems Shotokan karate association. I saw them at a tournament back around 73. Carlos knew them at the time, maybe he was interested in martial arts because they were interested in it.
I forgot to mention what I've seen of "great bands of emanations". Believe it or not, there really are emanations, bundles of emanations, and great bands of emanations. I just don't know if anyone who got silent would see them, unless they had tapped into "the Intent of the Sorcerer's of Ancient Mexico" (what a mouthful). Carlos emphasized that so many times in his last books, it almost seems like a warning. Or maybe an explanation.
I've only seen the great bands twice, possibly because they require a different perspective. And oddly, even after seeing those (more than 20 years ago), I still had doubts about the whole thing. Maybe the human form tries to hide as much as it can, even when the truth is staring you right in the face? If it does, it comes out as a very odd dullness.
Once was in a tensegrity workshop. We'd been doing movements for a while, and I became aware that everything looked a little misty or "lit up". Nothing you'd write home about, but it was different.
I blanked out while standing up with my eyes open, and found myself staring at lines of yellow light, running parallel to each other, going upwards at a 45 degree angle. Actually, I'd been staring at it for a while, unaware that I was doing that.
I couldn't see the end of it. It was obviously going far out of the building. The vision wasn't separate from what I was seeing with my eyes, it was rather superimposed over it. But if I focused on the lines, they seemed to start to move, like they could pull me along into infinity if I let go.
The other time I saw a great band of emanations was when I was discussing seeing with Howard Lee. He explained that his seeing wasn't visual. Then he somehow showed me what he sees. Howard can do that. I saw the same sight I'd seen at the workshop, except that his band of emanations was light blue. I mentioned the color to him, and he seemed to agree.
Howard's thing was that if you can focus on that specific band of emanations, you'll get a sense of health and happiness. He said, "When I live to 150, then people will listen to me." His main technique consisted of leaning backwards while standing spread legged, with your arms out. The leaning bent the spine, and maybe is similiar to Carlos' sorcerer's movements. In that position, you can feel his band of emanations, if Howard is around to introduce you to it. Later you can feel it on your own.
Coincidentally, I was doing a tensegrity movement that utilized that position somewhat, when I saw the band of emanations for the first time.
Carlos called Howard, "the death defier" a few times in class, and made ovetures to get him to join the group. But Howard wouldn't do it. He had his own thing going. Also, Howard didn't exactly approve of Carlos' doings. Particularly with women. But who would if they weren't interested in learning sorcery?
Howard lives in Italy now.
Is this the same Howard Lee?
There are lecture notes on why Carlos dedicated a book to HYL.
It wasn't because of Howard's vast knowledge
Howard not only never learned to see, but liked to believe in a pretending form of it.
He's a daoist.
Subject to Daoist delusions.
Such as he'll live to be 150 years old.
That video kind of makes that seem very unlikely now.
Carlos took some event with Howard as an omen, and he and the witches agreed they had to do whatever he said.
As a gesture to the spirit.
Carlos gave Howard "a blank check".
I got three of those myself!
Howard abused his blank check.
And like Tony Lama, turned down being the leader in place of Carlos, out of greed and ignorance.
So we got lucky.
We have no more leaders.
No more excuses.
So far one person has reported success with this technique. If anyone else has success, play with it until you can make it happen regularly (don't worry if it mutates), and then try the "Gift to Maui" pass in the workshop notes I uploaded.
When you first learn this technique, the "wall" is in a fixed perspective. A kind of perspective you're used to in daily life. We're surrounded by walls. And we like to read flat things right in front of us.
But we're also used to other perspectives, such as standing on a cliff looking down at a flat valley filled with things (rocks, structures, plants).
That pass teaches you to change perspective. It's the act of seeing the energy balls, and making them move.
But you have to visually see the energy balls to get the full benefits of that technique.
Last time I tried it I saw a small village made out of adobe or clay. I had no idea where it was, or whether it had any real existence. But it's always good practice to activate the second attention with your eyes open. It's a lot more convincing then dreaming.
Hi, I am wondering why is the internal dialouge a foreign installation? Can you elaborate on this? Thank you
Yes.
We were created by "The Eagle" as awareness inside an egg. Or a bubble.
We were free to explore the dark sea of awareness. You can do this again in the darkroom, and then you will understand. It means, you gaze at the emanations, and intent skims them for you. It creates a reality. And you can explore that reality.
We got "stuck" here. There are billions of people who are perceiving this, so it glows very brightly with awareness.
We took a birth. We did not need to, but we did.
I believe, the Eagle made us like seeds. He wanted us to get "stuck". But he gave us a choice of which reality.
As babies, we could perceive everything a sorcerer can perceive.
But we did not understand it. It as not "real".
The parents want the baby to smile at people. So they can be proud.
So they teach it to stop looking at infinity, and look only at people.
They lure it with treats and toys, until it has nothing magical to look at, and becomes obsessed with getting more rewards.
And the baby has to battle with other people for the rewards. Brothers, sisters, even parents stop it from taking all rewards it wants.
The baby begins to plan. How to get more rewards. And how to protect itself from harm.
It creates the idea of a "self" in the mind.
Buddhists like to call this the "ego". Like it was natural for us.
It is not. It was created by our family.
As our "self" becomes more real, all of our attention is focused on it, and how to protect it, and how to get more rewards.
By age 12, we have an internal dialogue, mostly about "the self", or "ME", and it will not go away.
It is a foreign installation.
At our position of the assemblage point, it is a glow of awareness between the toes. In the middle.
All of our attention is focused down there.
We have to move it forward. Lower the assemblage point, so that the beam of awareness goes out and forward. We leave the "ME", spot.
Carlos has said, the fliers created that "foreign installation".
But all they do is lick our awareness.
Maybe they lick it down so low, there is nothing else we can see. Only the small spot on the floor, where ME is in the middle.
So you could also say, "the fliers" created it, by removing all possibility to look outside the small spot on the floor.
You can help yourself by trying to remove "ME" thoughts. Don't fantasize about yourself, your fights with people, bad memories, good memories.
Don't think about ME at all. Find something else.
Best it to remove the internal dialogue.
But if you cannot, remove all "ME" thoughts.
First step: Learn what those are. Which ones are ME, and which ones are not.
A beautiful sunset is not ME.
Watching ants on the ground is not "me".
Gazing at clouds to find shapes and faces is not ME.
Unless, you begin to fantasize.
Our fantasies are all about "ME".
Until you learn to see energy.
Once you can see energy, there are 1 million other things to think about, besides ME.
So then, it's natural not to have that thought and the assemblage point is free to move.
Your knowledge of Buddhism is clearly lacking.
Edit: LOL. I am banned from this reddit for pointing out something obvious. What is wrong with you people?
I'm just a skeptical person. I'm skeptical of people who claim they can fly but I'm also skeptical of claims that flying is impossible. IDK. One thing I know for sure is that flying (if possible) is certainly not easy for the simple fact that I don't see people flying around. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.
However, making up BS is easy.
So, considering probabilities, when someone claims to be able to fly, it is much much more likely that he is making up BS. If you can fly, than just do that and prove me wrong. I will be happy to see that happen. Please come flying to me and I will accept you as my teacher. I'm sure you can find me with your sorcery.
Edit: Still waiting...
Not at all. I understand it better than the Buddha did. It's a modern crap magic system designed from older stuff that had succumbed to greed, and lost its power.
A very recent thing at less than 3000 years old. Our magic is older than 13,000 years, and easily traceable to 10,000 years in the americas, using DNA evidence to boot.
It's premoney, so it's the real thing. No reason to make it up the way the Buddha and his disciples did. There was nothing to gain by lying, and not stupid city dwellers to confuse.
Go away. You don't belong in here, it'll only cause you grief.
Come back when you figure out you're chasing attention from other people, who merely want your money.
Buddhism an obvious scam. And Zen the worst of it.
Zen people tend to turn catholic if I tell them what I do at night, every night for hours in fact, and they begin get out their cross so they can shield themselves from evil.
For instance, last night I was figuring out how to break the laws of physics on demand, instead of accidentally. Turns out you can trigger that effect without having to go by a routine that summons it over the course of 3 hours.
But instead of being interested, as a genuine seeker would be, Buddhists get angry on hearing that, like you just did.
Buddhists are very angry people. I've been all over trying to encourage real magic to return to the world.
And Buddhists in particular, more than others, they don't like to hear there's real magic out there.
After calling me a liar and showing they're clueless about reality, they eventually try to cancel me. Ban me from their discussion group for example.
There's a post in here from a Thai guy about what happened when he tried to get the rinpoches to teach him actual magic.
That's what they use to advertise, so there should be no excuses. It's what drew people to the Buddha in the first place. The Thai are swimming in belief in Buddhist magic.
But when there's none, they fall back to the religion part.
The religion part was added on like handcuffs.
He got the typical run-around that comes from any system with no magic, when a student asks.
First, the magic is up there, on those far away mountains.
Next, we don't teach you guys magic because it's too advanced.
Then, we keep it secret because it's harmful.
Then, you have to work your way over there.
Endless crap excuses.
It ought to be obvious, if some monks had magic, they'd be on TV night and day, trying to cash in on it.
They wouldn't hide it!
Oddly when a Zen guy does accidentally discover some magic, he's been brainwashed to ignore it.
My favorite spirit was "Fairy", and 4 inch tall pretty woman with a sort of pale color like a thost, who would stand on my hand and do tricks.
Given to me by Carlos Castaneda.
She created this subreddit. If you read around you'll see it's true. And she's helped out several in here, as she promised.
Over here on youtube you'll find an enlightened guy, with emphasis on Zen seeing as how since we both studied with Joshu Sasaki in Los Angeles. Me back in the 60s, him more recently.
He has a fairy standing on his hand in one Youtube video, and makes fun of it like it was delusional and beneath his dignity.
That's your people.
Pretending what we call beginners effects (the green line on that J curve map), into delusions of grandeur so they can lord it over other people.
Then over here, he advises his followers that what we do in here is the fastest path to enlightenment, but it's too hard.
Frankly, you're up shit creek, and loving it.
Not only loving it, but attacking those who could fix the situation for you.
I'm not angry at all, but very much amused.
I think I will stick around some more. You are funny.
That's the "self-entitled" buddhist belief.
That their system is "intellectual", and "tolerant".
You're talking to a "different animal" here.
Someone who's actually looked at all the religions, using google, and who actually possesses what they only pretend to possess.
I can see you coming a thousand miles away.
The sad part is all the cool magical discussions going on in here, and all you can see is that someone disrespected your obsession with the worst form of magic of them all.
Zen.
Asian Hazing gone religion.
So, how do you trigger that effect?
Edit: I must see you pee in your hand and fly, and only then I will take you seriously. Until then, you are a medical case.
There's a post on it.
But if you had read the books of Carlos, it would be a lot more meaningful.
There's example after example of how to do that, and the consequences.
For instance, there's a technique for flying.
One which I suppose you ought to believe in, even being a magic denier Zen guy. The story of Milarepa which Buddhists seem to use as a recruiting tale, has him with the ability to fly.
Always someone else who has the magic, and the learners just have to shut up and keep donating time and money to the church!
I hope you don't do that too. They have nothing to teach. You need to realize that.
La Gorda, a rational witch in the books of Carlos, who also moved to Los Angeles where we got to see her favorite sights from time to time, learned to pee into her hands and flick the urine into the air at night in the moonlight.
The moonlight caught the drops of urine going up into the darkness, and the sparkle trail allowed La Gorda to see the deepest layer of reality humans can see.
The super strings. Or "the lines of the world" is another way to name them.
They aren't really like physics superstrings, but it's a fun analogy.
Among those superstrings are some intense red ones.
Most look yellowish white.
If you can "grab" the red ones, they pull up up into the air.
La Gorda demonstrated that technique to Carlos, by telling him to grab her. Then she grabbed the lines.
I set up a place in the backyard for my witch friend Cholita to do that with me, but she's quite insane. Once she demonstrated levitating me, and objects, at a Chinese restaurant.
I got too excited, so she stopped talking to me at all, for the most part.
It's kind of nice when you have real magic, as opposed to just pretending as you do. Don't you think?
Carlos flew into the air with La Gorda for real!
But when they landed, he found he was laying on his back on the ground. Didn't recall having fallen over.
The answer is partly in there.
On another occasion the Nagual Julian, a teacher in our lineage which goes back thousands of years, picked up our favorite old timer don Juan, and tossed him into a deadly river, to be carried away by the current to drown.
But having practiced sorcery don Juan was merely split into 2. His "nagual" copy, the one that runs around in dreams and visions, found its way into the "real world" to watch the copy of him made from organic matter being carried along in the river.
By the way when you ask "how" I have to think you're prejudiced by your Buddhist understanding that all of this is just words on a sacred scroll.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
It's what we do! Daily. For hours.
It's Olmec! It's ancient.
It's not asian mystical con games used to steal money, real estate, corrupt politics, and control prostitution.
Like Buddhism.
Go to youtube and find tournaments of the most famous Chinese martial arts masters, getting knocked out in 10 seconds by an average MMA chinese guy.
Asian magic systems are 100% fraud.
You should see that with your own eyes.
It's kind of sad to watch them go down so quickly. Usually they show them in their kungfu school, winning in battles with all the students.
Then you see them go down so quickly, even a high school boxer or wrestler would have lasted longer.
THAT'S "the buddha". He was a fraud too.
He doesn't do what you say he does.
I watched the video. He doesn't make fun of it nor treats it as if it is below his dignity. He simply avoids calling it real or non-real. He leaves that discussion to the philosophers and clearly states he is interested in the pragmatic side of things. Is it useful? He never says it is useless. He is dropping plenty of hints there for people with ears to listen.
Yes he does. He implied it was imaginary, and only fit for explorers of philosophy.
He had a spirit helper there! Not something you want to pass up. You need their dark energy, to travel to places in reality our normal human energy cannot go.
He also sees what we call "Tree spirits" in another video, and just ignores them.
Walks along, after witnessing an amazing miracle, and an entry way to endless levels of reality, some of which you can choose to live in.
You're brainwashed, and won't let go.
Meaning, you don't care about what you pretend to care about. Learning about reality and human consciousness.
You care about seeking attention from Buddhism.
And you're putting a judgemental spin on things in this reply, to try to shame people into obeying you.
Like Buddhists do.
Just go away. You lack the sobriety to fix yourself at this time.
Get worn down another 20 years, and come back.
If you get to sit on a little throne and pretend to be enlightened, send us a postcard.
> If you forget for more than a half hour, you aren’t trying hard enough
Is it okay to use a timer that reminds you every 30 mins or is that cheating?
Remember the mirror in the water trick in the books?
The point was to make your own mirror, not to find a purple blob inside it.
Same as Carlos told us to walk to San Diego (130 miles), but no one wanted to do it, before they heard what the reward would be.
You can't learn sorcery. You have to lure the spirit with your bold actions.
Asking pointless questions about stuff, doesn't lure it. It chases it away.
Jadey just did that! Lured the spirit.
I hope she posts it. Got it on video.
I was going to capture Cholita levitating dishes in a restaurant, but she figured out I was going to do that, and never ate out with me again.
Little smoke used to play poltergeist in our home. For a good 6 months I believe.
Juann ended up with her, but she seems to have taken an interest to Jadey.
Just because Jadey took some bold actions all by herself. I suggested to try something, and she went overboard.
Little Smokes loves Cholita, maybe she'll like Jadey too.
Is it possible to share what her bold action was to understand what it entails?
Read the books.
When Julian threw Carlos into the river, that was a bold action.
Although I suspect his double was following him the whole way and would have rescued him.
At a smaller level, when I build my phantom room each night using tensegrity, I can "make additions" to it, by "announcing" something new.
Such as "Over here is a lovely porcelain vase, decorated with detailed blue cobalt glaze!"
And after that, it's always here.
As long as I daily "illuminate it" with awareness.
We all have that idea when starting out. But setting a timer to keep things on schedule or on your terms…is the opposite of abandoning your self.
As Dan pointed out in the above reply.
Best to pick a time of day/night when you have nothing pending. And if you always have something pending, think about reshuffling your priorities.
I am typing here to thank you for sharing this... the way i found it was so odd... but ok. I'm walking up a strange staircase and i found another place to step up to... I've been staring at the puffs when i close my eyes lately and i know im trying to achieve something... ive been awakening for the past 4 years and its speeding up now. Sage has been calling me and you have shown me the way, thank you!
A very good comment for those new to Darkroom:
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/ykus8i/comment/iuxoweq/
I am going to try the total room blackout. Thanks for posting this guide.
Hi, after about five minutes in the dark room I can start seeing very bright purple, black, red and fluorescent green clouds, and close to the ceiling some white spotlights which disappear as soon as I turn to see them, despite the fact that it's total darkness I can see light, my hands, and illuminated areas around me with the corner of my eyes, it's like if your eyes had internal lights, then I see a purple and a black puff merge next to each other and start spinning around each other, also a white or gray fog appears against the wall in front of me, on my third session I experienced being in a place that looked like in the times of the wild west with very mean people, it felt so real and different than a dream, I could think, feel and conduct myself for the duration of the episode. I've been doing dark room practices for about three weeks, but no more episodes like this one, but I will keep trying. I've read all books by Carlos Castaneda, and I had never thought I could've experienced all these or that I had some psychic abilities, my goal is to experience this fantastic and wonderful world and I feel privileged and that I can learn from this community.
There's something else going on here, to make you so talented.
But your user history seems sincere as far back as I bothered to go look.
So be honest, keep it up, and see where it leads!
The good news is, you can "test" yourself by a simple fact.
Eventually, with sorcery, you'll break the laws of physics!
It's not make believe like everything else out there!
So it has "proof" within.
Which is sort of what don Juan did for Carlos.
Set him up to break the laws of physics from time to time, so he knew it was real.
We have to do that for ourselves, to fight off bad human tendencies to lean towards attention seeking.
Until you do fairly regularly, consider yourself on probation and possibly at risk of self-deception.
Hi Dan, thanks for your reply, I am just sharing my experiences to see if someone has had some similar to mine, or if I may be wrong and it's not what I think, but I know I have some abilities I didn't know I had, I've explored into my internal world through meditation and I found out I could see and feel energies, I discovered these beings all around me and don't know what they are, but I know they can perceive and become aware of you, I call them IOB because they are inorganic, I see them in the sky and everywhere, I just have to change my perception and there they are, they have different personalities and I recognize about 5 different types of them. I wonder if anybody can see the energy fibers which Carlos Castaneda describes and what they look like, I see cobwebs of fibers which look clear or dark depending on the angle you observe them, first I see this dark spider looking cloud or it can be a IOB in the sky, then it moves towards me surrounded by these cobweb of fibers, which Carlos Castaneda's refers to in his book the art of dreaming". I am determined and I will succeed in learning all this magic, thanks for your observations, best regards.
I gaze at the emantions nightly, for perhaps 30 minutes!
If I miss a night, I fit it into the middle of the next day. And then still do the next night.
There's pretty much nothing in the books of Carlos which hasn't been verified by someone you can trust, at this point.
So no need to wonder. It's all proven.
We kick butt! The Buddha himself would only be a troublesome, delusional beginner in here!
He'd probably get banned in a couple of weeks for being harmful to others by promoting false Hindu religion as "the truth". A belief system which will prevent learning sorcery.
But you're mistaking one thing for another in your experiences, in order to self-flatter.
Reinterpreting what you see to fit something from the books which makes you feel more advanced.
Which is typical of a beginner.
Just try to have some sobriety and keep working hard, and it'll all correct itself.
We start out where we stopped growing up as children.
Around 14 years old for the lucky ones. And 12 for others.
After that no one grows further, except extremely slowly.
Because there's no standards by which to correct their behavior.
Just others who never grew up.
Fortunately with sorcery, you have something real to measure your progress by.
Something real to force you to change your ways.
So that's how you finish growing up.
By learning magic, which REQUIRES impeccable behavior or you waste the energy needed to do it.
Before cities, money, and agriculture were invented, humans naturally learned magic, wandering around collecting food.
We only got stuck as big self-pity filled cry babies in the last 10,000 years.
Thanks. I believe this is where I will begin. I’ve been reading posts for some time. Using my own discernment whether this is a deeper initiation than I’m currently undergoing, and if all this talk about others only making it to a “green zone” is possible.
In truth, I believe I am convinced. Only because nothing I have ever done has been able to mimick my experiences with psilocybin as a youth. And I know THATS real magic.
I’m pretty good at Chi balls, charging them with intent, and what you would call “pretend magic” (even though I think psychosomatic convincing of your will is magic in it of itself). Im here for a reason though, everything in life goes deeper even if you think it doesn’t. I can handle your attitude, Dan. At first it didn’t sit right with me, not that you care lol. Now it feels like a grumpy uncle who actually cares an awful lot.
Blessings.
I'm beginning today. I won't report back until I have something worth writing
All have to do is look into texture darkness behind closed eyes while suspending the impetus to be a projected solid sense of self as protagonist in a newly assembled dream scene, which is at the heart of the second attention
Suspension of self-importance allows the third attention to emerge as formless expressions of animating energy at large without locality
It’s really just a very deep letting go while upholding observational state of looking into the dark, kind of thing
It just gathers momentum on its own. However many weeks or whatever is beside the point.
It paces itself!
Not quite.
Eyes are open in the darkness of darkroom. Always.
You shouldn't even be thinking about the concept of the third attention, much less postulating about how it would emerge.
It is far afield, and decades away for all of us.
And it doesn't so much pace itself, as present opportunities for advancement. For navigating further each night (and day).
Third attention has been seen a bazillion times
The Gateless Gate dissolves the sense of a localized sense of self amidst the array of myriad lines of conscious intention
There is no “decades” away. It’s right here and now! All perceived conscious content is born of that fundamental state of affairs and it’s no further away than your left hand.
I.e. It gets what It wants and “power decides” is the rule, no matter what.
Decisions are on the hands of the holder and the third attention reveals the source of deciding quite handily
From the post titled The Three Attentions:
"In order to explain these concepts, don Juan made a three-part, uneven division of our consciousness.
He called the smallest the first attention, and said that it is the consciousness that every normal person has developed in order to deal with the daily world. It encompasses the awareness of the physical body.
Another larger portion he called the second attention, and described it as the awareness we need in order to perceive our luminous cocoon and to act as luminous beings. He said that the second attention remains in the background for the duration of our lives unless it is brought forth through deliberate training or by an accidental trauma. He said the second attention encompasses the awareness of the luminous body.
He called the last portion, which was the largest, the third attention-an immeasurable consciousness which engages undefinable aspects of the awareness of the physical and the luminous bodies.
I asked him if he himself had experienced the third attention. He said that he was on the periphery of it, and that if he ever entered it completely, I would know it instantly because all of him would become what he really was; an outburst of energy.
He added that the battlefield of warriors was the second attention, which was something like a training ground for reaching the third attention. The second attention was a state rather difficult to arrive at, but very fruitful once it was attained."
That is coming from some other system of understanding and causing the confusion in much of the rest of what you write
Second attention’s not a training ground for anything. It’s just a latent , residual echo of the impelled sense of self’s contraction, seeking traction amidst an unraveling dream.
If shadow’s had echoes! Dreams within dreams of the solid sense of self’s contraction, seeking relevance amidst its own unraveling irrelevancy 😂😄👋
The notion that this state of affairs, apprehended, is “decades away” is just self-importance protracting the inevitable: It’s own demise.
Which is beside the point because it never really existed in the first place. Which calls to mind the quip “No one is doing anything to anyone….” - Don Juan Matus
Something dreams myriad someone’s, cut from It’s own cloth…namely, Power…for lack of a better word
Go away butthead.
When the time is right, Beavis! 😂🤞👋
You don't have any control over that.
This place would be destroyed if it didn't have aggressive mods.
That's why you don't see any real magic anywhere else.
Real magic requires aggressive mods, to stop people on gigantic ego trips like you, from confusing beginners so much that no one ever succeeds.
The fact that you don't realize it, is proof you don't know anything about real magic.
Anyway, an average of 3 per week for the last 5 years got banned for at least a month, and most for 6 months.
The mods always have hope people will realize what they've given up with their bad behavior.
But as far as I know, none ever has.
Also you should know, nothing you write will do anything but amuse the others in here, who have succeeded in learning the real thing.
So you're kind of prancing around in diapers, throwing a hissy fit.
Seriously... Ask them!
“You don’t have any control over that”
Precisely the point
The source of intention itself controls everything happening all the time. This dream, right here and now…is a product of Intention at large and unravels itself in accordance with its own rule
Apropos to seeing Energy As It Flows….raveling and unraveling on its own, seen as myriad luminous lines of light, all in perfect parallel and in perfect unison with its adjacent lines, twirling and curling, irrepressible and frictionless, forming and dissolving conglomerations endlessly to its own delight
This “monstrous ego”, as said? A transient conglomeration utterly composed of a momentary inflection of Power itself
The Big Fat It In The Sky has the upper hand, here
And It gets what It wants, as mentioned
We are the product of It’s procession of processes
We've been waiting for you for 2 days.
What took so long?
Carlos himself warned us about you.
It's the "attack of 3s".
When someone makes good progress, along come 3 idiots to try to destroy the progress.
You can see what triggered it in my last post. Silvio manuel style magic.
I watched Carlos point out "the attack of 3s" in private classes, at least 6 times over the years.
It sure seemed to be true!
So we watch for it in here, since it's "free" magic. You don't have to work to see it. It's a result of work you already did.
In your case, you attack by making magic seem like it's just lame pretending.
I almost thought we'd run into an attack that was 1 short!
Until you came along 2 days late.
One of the mods says, it can be up to 5 days.
The other 2 attacks are in the recent posts. You could go look at them if you felt like it.
I believe Techno had to ban both, and one of them tried to evade the ban with a fake ID.
I’ve interacted with myriad “mods”. A real “knee-slapping head-smacker” when “their” voice became my own
The Mod Squad is simply another pranky trick if the light. It’s why the pranky trickster motif of Toltec shamanism is a delightful mirroring of what’s happening in this crazy fun house.
Subterfuge points to something fundamental about itself. It’s a prank! And it’s a good one 😂
So it's mental illness here...
I don't hold that against people, since a witch Carlos trained name Cholita lives with me, and breaks the laws of physics from time to time.
Or allows me to.
But she's totally mad, like Josefina or Zuleica.
Canyou give some examples of breaking the laws of physics? Why do we never see any of this, wouldn't it be the best way to stop doubt (as you emphasize so often in your posts)?
Sure. But those are all through the posts. So don't be lazy. If you've ever read any other religious or magical texts, you were reading pure delusional make believe. Actually harmful to you because of the misunderstandings they cause in your mind.
Everything you read in here, helps educate you on what the real thing is.
And don't fail to notice, no one in here is compensated in any way. So you can't attribute the same deception to anyone in here, that you could, for example, to that evil man Yogananda. Or Osho. Or Maharshi, Chopra, or the Dali Lama.
I can't think of any famous Daoists or Zen masters, but those bastards are on the list of deceivers too.
All highly compensated for tricking you.
So, there's 4 categories of breaking the laws of physics I can think of off the top of my head.
One happens inside the second attention, full awake and not knowing how you got there, but in fact you split off into some kind of bizarre second copy of yourself, the rest of the world froze or was suspended , and then there you are, seemingly just in the normal world but it's now empty of people, other than the ones who went into there with you.
Others can come along, so you can't conclude those alternate realities, aren't "real".
And you can do anything. Leap over mountains, float up in the air, turn into a Jaguar, or even pick up a car in one hand.
You have to keep in mind, this isn't some delusional Yogi vision you have while taking a nap with your eyes closed.
(continued)
You were awake, actively engaged in some waking activity (like shopping in my case, when it's Cholita doing the pulling) and you get sucked into an alternate copy of reality.
What would an outsider see?
I have no idea.
In another case, you have been practicing alone, doing darkroom, and a window materializes on the wall.
Looks real enough, but you sure aren't going to try to stick your head out that window, since you know full well there's a solid wall there.
But, the curtains on the window blow from wind, you can hear that it's literally windy outside your home, and you can feel the breeze coming in.
You look outside to see where that window leads, realize it's 15 feet above a desert road, and without thinking, you run at top speed and leap right through the solid wall.
Again, no lame "Buddhist Master" meditation is going on. You were likely just doing Tensegrity movements. No way to lay down on a bed and forget you fell asleep doing that.
And if you worry, you can walk over and turn on the light to the room, to see if there's "really" a new window addition to your home.
After leaping through a solid wall and landing in another world, where you can walk around for hours and it doesn't behave like a dream where you lose lucidity and things get weird fast, it's absolutely real.
And the next day there's no bruises on your body from bumping into the wall.
Then there's Cholita. She can levitate small objects, even in a crowded busy restaurant. Without touching them, she can make them jump up, or slide around, on the table.
I haven't seen her make them float like Anakin in Star Wars, but I suspect she could.
Except, she's been taught, "NEVER DEMONSTRATE MAGIC".
It gets you killed almost for sure.
I left out teleportation, where you walk into that alternate reality I described earlier, but you come out of it, thousands of miles away.
All of these are fairly common, if you work hard. They aren't "achievements" that get you your own little Buddha boy throne to sit on.
They're just "todays cool thing", and soon forgotten.
Our path is very long, but all along the way, the levels of magic increase.
And the first few steps pass far beyond anything else we've found on the internet.
This is pretty much all there is as far as anyone can tell.
Thanks for your reply. I stumbled upon this subreddit per chance, linked from a psychedelic subreddit. I am currently not following a particular system or tradition, although I looked into many. But what I found was more confusion than clarity - as you pointed out yourself, there is so much dilution and grifting in all of these in the meantime that it is difficult to find some truth.
Thus, I have relied on psychedelics to gain some wisdom myself, albeit to be honest assembling my own practice with all kinds of building blocks of other traditions. I am not sure how far this has gotten me. But I find psychedelics to be valuable teachers. I guess they offer a glimpse into what is possible and 'out there'....but beware of unearned wisdom.
This community really sparked my interest, not least because of what you point out - the lack of apparent profit seeking and central gurus. But I will be honest, I am not sure what to really think. Some of the secrecy, belittling of other traditions (while not really providing any proof of 'results' yourself) and, at least at times, silencing and hostility towards newcomers and questioning really gives me a bad vibe. That said, at the same time I can see how this may be part of why this actually 'works'.
I guess there is not much to loose in following the advice that seems to be given often here - to just give it a fair and open try it for a couple of weeks. Two things that are in the way for me personally as I see it. First, even after reading quite a bit on these pages here, and even with quite well organized resources on practices and concepts etc, I am not sure I get much of the techniques. Second, I sense that my ego and (materialist) desires are a big reason of why I am interested in this. And I currently cannot really see a way of overcoming these. But I guess one can only really do so by practicing and through that 'learning' that it is worth it.
If you use too many power plants like shrooms, you'll never be able to learn.
the assemblage point gets stuck in the red zone on the J curve, pushed far to the side.
And if you blieve there's another tradition that has real magic, please point to it...
You won't be able to. No one has in the last 6 years.
The question itself, forces them to ponder what they believe is "real magic", and on doing that, they realize all the web pages they would point to, have none other than some founders making weird claims, with no actual reasonable path and instructions, to get there.
Meditation doesn't count. That's closed eye, people doze off, and make up all sorts of stuff.
Which doesn't even count as a talented beginner's level in here.
I'm not sure what more proof you would want. It ought to be abundant in the posts.
Certainly no one is going to put in the time to track down people and "prove it" to them. Those people will never learn anyway, and you'd get yourself killed.
Here's the map of magic that we know of. And we've searched everywhere for decades looking for more.
Didn't find any.
You're going to get yourself stuck just shy of the tunnel down at the bottom right if you keep up the psychonaut path.
That's what drugs do. Get you stuck.
We don't use any.
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/mtfwhb/even_better_j_curve_diagram/
Many thanks again for your response. I think I can relate to your suggestion of all the traditions making a lot of promises, while we can actually find very little actual results. Or at least results remain somewhat 'meh', even though people dedicate entire lives to it.
But I think you will also be able to relate that this particular community here might look pretty similar from the outside for a newcomer. For instance, I myself am very much reminded of Daoist Internal Alchemy communities where there are also huge communities of practice that claim to achieve all kind of supernatural stuff. And they also have a very elaborate system (claiming) to 'get you there'. And then you have shamanistic/psychedelic communities where people are similarly talking about communing and summoning spirits, magically heal cancer, travel to and navigate different worlds and timelines or the past and future.
Again, without trying to sound too skeptical, but from the outside it is just looking very similar - especially when directly told that I will not get any "proof". But as said, I am very much happy to give it a try. And your system, as well as some of your premises, indeed look very convincing. So, I happily accept that the only proof there will be will be ones own.
The thing with letting go psychedelics is tough though for me - and it is part of what I was talking about above when referring in my last comment to desires and ego. But I think I can see where you are coming from. I think these plants have their place - but they themselves often warn of 'unearned wisdom' when one listens closely and openly to their messages.
I love those plants in many ways, and they can certainly show you fascinating things. But I think I would be more than happy to refrain if I get a glimpse of the possibility to get to these places they bring you to through your own sorcery.
If you dont mind me asking, and since you seem to know the Castaneda story quite well - I am wondering how this played out in his particular case. As far as I knew, Castaneda himself was a pretty heavy user of these plants. Did he ever get somewhere with his sorcery? And, if so, how, when they "get you stuck", as you say?
>Daoist Internal Alchemy communities where there are also huge communities of practice that claim to achieve all kind of supernatural stuff.
Show me. I suspect that what you believe, won't turn out to be true. That doesn't mean there won't be men beating their chest somewhere, but that's not at all what you would see if it was real magic that was working in a community of practitioners.
Also, I have an office in a Chinese country and know well what fakers Daoists are.
And evil too.
Many chinese neighborhoods suffer from a Daoist priest sucking money from them, and even telling them what to eat. One I knew from a family there would get old women to mortgage their homes, and give him the money. With promises of heaven.
In Thailand they even have a police group that deals with Daoist fortune tellers, who commonly take advantage of senile old women.
There's no magic in Daoism. That's why I can say confidently, you can't point to any.
Not to mention, Daoism is entirely made up. Just study the history. Lao Tzu never even existed.
Just like the Buddha... Buddhism is a Chinese crime syndicate, not a real "thing" based on actual history and knowledge. It just got out of hand, and the original con artists died, leaving a growing monster to spread over Asia like a virus.
>As far as I knew, Castaneda himself was a pretty heavy user of these plants.
That's a misconception.
Carlos needed a genuine indian informant for his PhD thesis, on the use of power plants among native americans.
Back in the early 60s, that was the HOT TOPIC for anthropologists.
He first went to Morongo looking for a native american who could help him, brought there by my father's occasional girl friend, Joanie Baker.
An anthropology groupie woman as far as I know. Carlos later pranked me, after 40 years, by having me shake the hand of my father's likely mistress.
Carlos was fully aware of who my father was.
My father was already studying the Indians at Morongo along with Lowell Bean, who wrote a book about them, and my father had even set up a publishing company with them. Malki Press. Allowing them to publish their own books on Morongo reservation indian traditions and mysticism. They also published my father's book (still do), which was later made into a movie and filmed partly out there.
Carlos attended the filming. I'd just snapped a picture of the sexy actress in the film, using a polaroid camera, but she lifted her skirt up to show her panties in the picture. I was only 12. I turned to my father and said, "She RUINED the picture!!!" and at that point I heard someone say, "Isn't that Carlos Castaneda over there, with that young woman?"
He occasionally attended festivals there.
Ruby, the Shamaness at Morongo, told Carlos that they couldn't be his informant because they had a deal with UCR, which is where my father was from. Carlos was from UCLA.
She sent Carlos east, where he found don Juan.
(continued)
Just remember, Star Wars is based on his books.
If you see it in those movies, you can do it.
Just not instantly, and as dramatically, unless you want to stunt your growth by focusing on a specific magic type.
There's hundreds of types of magic you get to do, on a daily basis.
But randomly, so that you cover the whole range.
Last night for example, I was tapping my heel on the floor (It's in one of the "magical passes") and a door materialized in front of me each time.
I didn't know that technique could do that! I'll see if the AI can draw it for me so you know how real it was.
No closed eye meditation, no drugs, no self-deception based on sleeping dreams or going into a Taoist "trance".
I just tapped my heel because Carlos taught us to do that in that part of the movement, and the door materialized.
But there's so many other crazy things going on when you practice, what seems like a big deal to an outsider, is only a curiosity.
I have no doubt you could learn to tap your heel on the floor 3 times, and the door would open for you to walk through, leaving your practice room without going through the door or a window.
Just leaving the room using magic!
Happens from time to time.
Mad Prophet who is in here somewhere, lent me her spirit, who taught me to "leave the room" during practice.
Through walls, or the ceiling!
For real. No Daoist delusions.
I am well aware of the history and current state of Buddhism and Daoism, happening to have studied this as part of my scholarly profession. I think you are somewhat misrepresenting, overgeneralizing, and simplifying here. But it does not matter - let's leave aside any other traditions. I did not come here and ask questions to debate about these. If Castaneda's work is the real deal, I guess it can be without discrediting other traditions.
But just to be sure - yes, in my experience there is a lot of chest drumming in contemporary Daoist circles, at least those that are accessible over the internet. Maybe there are a handful of people hidden under some rocks in the mountains who actually really practice to supernatural degrees. But I feel the whole thing is overall blown up a lot - at least in the timeline that I am currently traveling, haha. :-) Buddhism is yet another story as I see it, as it is - even more than Daoism - not a single but so many things, many of which are not making quite a lot of outlandish/supernatural claims. I guess many 'enlightened' masters would not argue with where you put them on the J path.
Anyways...
What I am more interested in enquiring about is your evaluation of whether embarking onto the Castaneda path - in the sense of 'trying it out for some weeks' - is even a worthwhile endevor in my particular context. Just to briefly expand, I am working an academic job which leaves me quite a bit of flexibility in my days. However, I also live in a romantic relationship, have friends, a 'healthy' and functional relation to family and friends. And I will probably have kids in a couple of years.
Let's hypothetically assume that I have any talent in this, and do not give up and actually see some real results initially; do you think it is it realistic to take it to anywhere serious/worthwhile in this path without giving this up? Or am I better off to not even embark on it, as I will not be able to keep up the level of dedication and practice required? I hope my question makes sense.
Out of curiosity, I would also like to know more about how exactly psychedelics are dysfunctional. You mentioned that they can lead you off the path in the red stage. I can see this, as high doses bring you to states and places that you cannot reach without their help. I guess the risk of dependency and delusion is very real.
Now, while respecting that you might not be willing to discuss this along these pages here, I will still ask: Are there no ways at all that these substances can be usefully incorporated?
For instance, I since some time have used them in low doses to develop my meditation practice, to get in a meditative state and calm the mind during every day situations. Subjectively, I feel it has been quite worthwhile for this; and that it has helped me to reach a quiet mind much more consistently and for longer periods - even without the use. I like the metaphor of training wheels - they can show you how to ride a bit, making it easier to replicate. The current neurological and neuropharmacological research on how these substances affect brain plasticity seem to support such a theory.
Given that calming the mind is such an important part of your practice, I would guess that changing your brain in ways that support such calm and focus might be beneficial. Again, I am talking about very low doses here - nothing 'out there' at all.
Obviously, I cannot at all replicate anything remotely close to a DMT breakthrough without the help of the actual substance. But I can consistently get where low doses would bring me to - no closing eyes and sitting cross-legged needed. Something that, for example, years and years of very consistent Daoist or Vipassana meditation practice (alone) have not managed to get me to. Thus, theoretically, could it not be that using low doses to move you gently across the J path be useful; if you only take them occasionally as training wheels to just move that slight bit forward from wherever you are currently at?
Again, I can understand - and fully respect - if you do not want to discuss this here, as it is not how you as a community envision your practice. But I hope that you excuse my curiosity. If anything I try to become a bit less ignorant about this reality and the tools it offers.
>I guess it can be without discrediting other traditions.
Actually, that's not quite right.
You haven't been in here long enough to see how people come with some ugly claim they got something else to work, to duplicate what Carlos was teaching, trying to gather students for their own "how to make Castaneda work using Chinese sage wisdom" group.
It's endless! I suppose Zen people are the worst we've seen so far.
Anyway, nothing out there even gets even a tiny bit close to what sorcery does.
Not an itsy, bitsy, tinsy, tiny bit close.
Nothing!
But until you are staring into infinity yourself and it all becomes fully visible, you can't possibly intuit that.
I do my best to show what that's like in pictures. Nothing inaccurate in any of them, other than what I don't have the skill or tools to draw right.
The truth, is outside everything we know of. We got stuck in this single reality, but it's a vast multiverse out there.
And most of it can't even be translated back to this reality, and make any sense.
I have to go, I'll take a look at the rest of what you wrote tomorrow.
I have an appointment with Cholita.
She's been lending me vast amounts of dark energy the last couple of days, to pay for her trip to Mexico next week.
And I'd like it to continue.
It's not something imaginary!
Dark jet black clouds show up while I practice, swirling around the room, and exposing passages to other realities.
Literally.
In particular, it seems to cause Mad Prophet's Ally "Lily" to show up. She's in here somewhere. Mad Prophet that is.
A visit from her spirit "Lily" is like having Dumbledore show up for real, to teach you how to use a magic wand!
The original Dumbledore .
Not the gay new version who wants to have sex with Grindelwald, in that last movie...
You seem so kind and respectable that I just can’t bring myself to call you a “junkie academic”...
Haha, and yet you brought yourself to it. But no worries, people on the internet call each other all kinds of things. I have learned to not be offended by that.
I also trust that your comment comes more from a point of ignorance, as opposed to hostility. ;-)
It may sound incredible to you, but it’s not “hostility.” It’s a way (a rather crude one, I must admit) of trying to motivate you to stay and practice here… I wouldn’t want to attend a university where the “academic” trying to cleanse me of ignorance is completely high or is being manipulated by “zen scammers” that even the most “ignorant” “peasants” would know how to avoid…
Oh I can see where you are coming from. I guess sort of a way to 'weed out' those that really have an interest to learn and bring some commitment vs. those that will just slow down the rest.
I like what you did there in the second part of your response. I think you would make a good academic. ;-)
Although I invite you to look into psychedelics a bit more - many of whom we regard as the smartest human minds have used them; and many of what we believe to be the most brilliant ideas have sprouted under the influence. I know that my best ideas have...although they are probably far from 'brilliant'. :-)
> happening to have studied this as part of my scholarly profession.
Yes, but don't forget there's AI now, and ChatGPT knows more about this topic, and loves to explain things, than 1000 scholarly professionals who study this topic.
You've been put out of business...
Basically there never was a Buddha. the Chinese made him up.
There WAS a mediocre, and very common Yogi, who came up with a political gimmick regarding who is of a lower social rank.
But nothing he taught was every written down. And despite what Buddhists like to claim, oral traditions are fabulously inaccurate. Each new generation of guru leader, modifies the "teachings" to optimize donations.
2 or 300 years later, the Chinese took the idea, converted it for Confucianism and Taoism and Ancestor worship,. twisted it to fit their hierarchical social structure, and exploited people back at home.
It got out of hand and now we have the ugly monster of Buddhism, deceiving westerners who might otherwise find something real.
But that's true of all Chinese mysticism. It's all crap.
Based on feeling sorry for yourself. Buddhism's sacred precepts read like a self-pity manual for the needy.
It's poison to sorcery. That's the very thing we have to let go of,k in order to perceive real magic.
No buddhist will every get past that red zone on the J curve map, and nearly all of them will only get to that green zone up at the top, which we don't even count as being worth much.
That's their "enlightenment".
So while you don't see any reason to "demean", that's just your self-pity driving your behavior.
We're at war in here! Trying to save real magic from being buried alive.
Buddhists and Yogi types have been attacking Carlos since he wrote his first book!
I'm in the revenge business, on his behalf.
(continued)
Paying back debts (both ways) is mandatory in sorcery, or else you can't escape the pull of our socialized reality.
Which pulls you based on self-pity and guilt, into a hellish river of shit.
>The current neurological and neuropharmacological research on how these substances affect brain plasticity seem to support such a theory.
There's a group in Texas which has had amazing success with PTSD treatments using some African root.
But that's nothing to do with learning real magic!
Drugs are just self-deception on the path of magic.
In the books, the drugs DID NOT produce the amazing results people read about.
It was the Ally Little Smoke, and the Devil's weed entity.
Daily, we learn from them. But without the drugs.
If you tried to repeat those power plant ceremonies from the books of Carlos, daily, pretty soon you wouldn't be able to hold a job.
I got an amazing lesson from Mad Prophet's Ally "Lily" last night.
The only substance I'd been abusing was papaya and mulberry wine, watered down to 4% alcohol.
I ferment the sugars out.
Not enough alcohol to even give you a buzz. I drink it for the vitamins I don't get on a keto diet.
>You mentioned that they can lead you off the path in the red stage.
That's too complex of a topic to explain. You'd have to read the books of Carlos, and then a lot of the posts.
But, our reality is a "flat spot" amidst hundreds of thousands of alternate realities we can perceive.
And 600 so real, we could go live there instead of here.
(continued)
Our reality that is up at the "Blue Station" on the J curve map, is held in place by billions of people who live in it.
In fact, those billions of people suffering there, and praying to a God, have created a God you can actually visit, if you're a sorcerer.
When you use drugs to move into super cool "heroic" territories along the J curve, you begin to burn a "flat spot" there.
Which is why you can get flashbacks!
That flat spot becomes a second barrier to moving to where we need to go, in order to see how reality itself is constructed.
You're experiencing bizarre versions of reality that most never get to see, but not learning at all how reality is constructed in the first place.
Or what we actually are, in relation to it.
It's as if you jumped over a barrier to get onto a long road leading to magical realms.
But you didn't do it on your own. Instead, you got magically transported by the drug, to a place only a mile away, where an even larger barrier was erected to make it easy for you to go to that spot.
A barrier you'll never be able to cross, if you do that too many times.
Our of laziness, you screwed yourself.
But that's what drugs to!
>years and years of very consistent Daoist or Vipassana meditation practice
Those are both nonsense designed for stealing money from the naive. Just religious crapola, no better than hitting the snooze button in the morning, and enjoying being half asleep.
Those will turn you into a mindless zombie at best, and at worst convince you that magic doesn't actually exist, so that you give up, or join the con artists and steal from people by teaching them yourself.
Just look around! The truth is out there these days, since the internet rose.
Hint: There's no Buddhist masters in Tibet, making all of their magic work... Not a single one. It's the same old socialized, self-pity filled modern humans.
Thanks for your answer, and apologies for my late reply. You mention some interesting things that I will try to respond to.
Don't forget that when you ask about Castaneda, it will tell you that also most of his stuff is entirely "made up" - both as an ethnographic account (including main characters) and as supernatural magic. So I guess we can agree that ChatGPT is maybe not the be and end all. ;-)
But, again, I did not come here to discuss other traditions. I also did not come here to hear some 'chest drumming' about what was achieved last night, when I have absolutely no way to verify what I am told is true or made up. As we already noted, such making up seems to occur a lot throughout the internet.
What I came here is to figure out whether it makes sense for me to embark on this journey for some weeks to find out myself if this is worth pursuing further for me. I wrote a quite particular question regarding that in my previous comment - do you think you could answer this for me? I have a sense that you are very questionable and could give a honest judgment in this regard. Thank you already!
What you write about the use of psychedelics (for purposes of magic) is interesting; and I think I can somewhat relate to that. However, I am curious as to where this knowledge comes from. Are there accounts where one can read about personal experiences of people combining magic and psychedelics? How do we know that psychedelic use creates 'flat spots' on the J curve. Your notion of that "this is why you can get flashbacks" or the metaphor of creating "barriers" that are hard to later cross are illustrative and accessible, but they do not really constitute convincing explanations at all.
Sorry about all those questions, but I guess my academic curiosity gets the best of me with this fascinating topic.
May I ask about your own experiences with psychedelics? Did you ever try, for instance, a DMT breakthrough? Especially with this substance, one often gets a phenomenological sense of 'how reality is constructed'. I do not claim that these experiences have validity, but it sure - at least - feels very much like that in that moment.
Again, thanks a lot for this conversation - I find it very interesting!
I'd say, it's not worth it for you to try.
You aren't actually interested, and you've taken the "lazy path".
So based on 6 years experience in here, your chances of making it work are so close to zero, it's not worth typing in all those 0s after the decimal point, to estimate the percent chance you have.
Besides, you have a weird attitude problem.
I'd say, according to the categories of people Carlos explained to us, you're a "piss" type.
There are piss types, pukes, and farts.
Pisses seem helpful and nourishing, but if you drink what they're dispensing you realize they aren't...
I don't know who in here would want to deal with that.
Maybe the women. They always like lost causes.
Haha, that's great - I just looked up this categorization and I believe I have come up with a similar one in context of my work. I'll let in your consideration of me being of the piss type. I guess there is something to learn for me in that.
May I ask in what category you see yourself in? I have a sense but would like to hear your own self-reflection.
Many thanks for your evaluation. As already stated earlier - I can relate somewhat to the reasoning of taking the easy path.
Although, I am not sure if you understood my question entirely. I was rather interested in whether Castaneda is complementary with my general 'lifestyle', i.e. family, friends, job, etc. I think the psychedelics I would not have a problem giving up (when realizing that there is something that brings you to the same place without the substance - I mean they become kind of unnecessary anyways, right?).
Giving it a try, I will do anyway. I mean a couple of weeks or months should be doable to put my mind and energy on that. Usually, this is enough to see whether something clicks or not.
>What I am more interested in enquiring about is your evaluation of whether embarking onto the Castaneda path - in the sense of 'trying it out for some weeks' - is even a worthwhile endevor in my particular context. Just to briefly expand, I am working an academic job which leaves me quite a bit of flexibility in my days. However, I also live in a romantic relationship, have friends, a 'healthy' and functional relation to family and friends. And I will probably have kids in a couple of years.
All you need to do is practice moving your assemblage point. Lots of people have relationships, etc, some have kids. I got on the Dean's list in accounting after having previously failed at university, etc.
This is quite complete:
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/wiki/index/statement/
I'm obviously a fart type.
As far as I've seen, pisses are more rare.
As for whether "something clicks", our system is not like that at all!
You can 100% see how you are doing.
There's no doubt at all, even the first time you give it a try!
And the experienced in here, can pretty much tell from a person's account of their first practice session, whether they'll ever learn.
It's no mystery.
You have to remove your internal dialogue!
That means, not a single word for 2 minintues minimum, before magic starts to happen.
Buddhism cheats and they substitute something for the internal dialogue,w hich produces the meager results they get, but has no possibility to let you change realities.
So they just get minor visions and bliss with their eyes closed.
A beginner, will be SUFFERING the whole time they practice, until they finally get serious, and then something will just "click" (maybe literally), and they'll see "something that can't possibly be there".
But if it's not dramatic, it's just wishful thinking or pretending.
Typicically we can ask a single question of a beginner after a few days, and prove whether they're actually practicing, or they've decided to pretend to be practicing, perhaps using drugs, or delusional Asian techniques.
We just ask, "How long can you go without a single word popping into your mind?"
If the answer is, "Gee, let me see. Maybe 10 minutes?"
We know that's a faker. Yanking our chain.
If they say, "10 seconds", we know they lack sobriety, but probably did put in some work.
A good answer is, "2 seconds!!! It's horrible. I don't know what's wrong with me."
Oh that is interesting. I kind of always was skeptical about meditation techniques that advocate putting your attention somewhere. Yes, it stops your mind wandering violently, but just because it is very busy with something else.
And then there are various traditions that are more about really doing nothing at all - no technique, no concentration, no nothing - such as the Daoist Zuowang.
I can very much relate to what you are saying and would be curious as to how 'your' technique of calming the mind differs from, say, Zuowang. Is it 'just' the matter eyes closed and sitting. Or why would you say that these do not work?
Daoism is a total fraud, so there's nothing to discuss!
Might as well be discussing Crowley.
Or the TV show "Bewitched".
I have an office in a Daoist country so I know exactly how they are.
They go into convulsions pretending to be possessed, as teenagers being pressured by their cult follower mom, and the local evil Daoist who's sucking up money from their local neighborhood.
They do the pretend possessions in order to get onlookers to put coins in their little "exorcist chest", once they go out into the world to earn a living.
Often beating themselves with a board with nails, to prove they're trying to drive out the demons.
You can see them walking the streets a small child or two they molest, who are "apprentices." Typically small boys, under the excuse that sex with a boy doesn't steal your "chi".
Not only is there nothing to discuss in terms of their magic (since they don't have any), but their history makes it plain what's going on.
They came about to justify the divine authority of the emperor, and then decided to cash in by selling fake longevity potions, and pretending they could take evil spell off people, or chase away ghosts.
And they managed to get the emperor to endorse their new religion.
It's total nonsense not based on anything at all real.
And Daoist writings are pure nonsense.
Designed, the way the Chinese have learned to do such things, to "inspire" while appealing to greed in the listener, and their desire to lord it over others.
Daoism is the laziest of such Chinese fake magical systems.
But none of them produce any results more than just hitting the snooze button in the morning, so you can explore being half asleep.