>"The old sorcerers stayed away from it, because it requires a great deal of detachment and no self-importance whatsoever. A price they couldn't afford to pay."
I feel that this is one of Castaneda's greatest teachings. How does one get over self-importance?
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What I did as a kid and still do is find a bug and get my face as close as possible to it, and marvel at the complexity and magic of it's function and structure, and how it might perceive the universe and it's place in it.
Then I stand up, and I can barely see it. A spec of life, inconsequential. I take a few steps, and I no longer see it at all.
I then picture myself as the fly, from the perspective of something far larger than myself (such as time).
Perspective changes everything. It's calming. You are only a small part of the whole, simultaneously necessary and unnecessary. To fully actualize that perspective we need to reclaim the totality of ourselves, a path that starts by simply choosing to intentionally do it.
Something similar for me. When im engulfed by self pity i kind of unzoom my self. I imagine every living organism around me, from insects to grass, trees and birds as far as the eyes can see - billions and trillions in just the eye field. And there am i and my imaginary problems - makes me humble.
As for people all i aim to accomplish is to not let their words and actions hamper my fountain of intent (you know its like you are hurt by them the source of consciousness is dampened). The next step is to not dwell in the words ( very problematic). I cant say i have gotten over self importance and its self pity ( its 2 sides of one coin). But with these at least i made some progress.
Loose your internal dialogue, presto no more self importance.
It always comes back to that doesn't it. Castaneda really should have placed a bit more emphasis on it, like u/danl999 said. My thinking is that Castaneda believed it would happen naturally on it's own as a by-product of walking the path he laid out, and that changing the way you live by following it's precepts was the vital foundation that makes it possible to eventually be silent 24 hours a day 7 days a week, something inconceivable to an average man with an overloaded internal dialogue.
I believe there is a misconception regarding the internal dialogue debate.
First of all most self importance stems from the dialogue that continually reinforces self worth and in the process burns energy through said practice.
Then there is the internal dialogue which permits you to walk and eat and choose.
Staying 100% silent is an indulgence which is actually akin to self importance so it’s best to seek balance.
Therefore think without thoughts of glorified self worth and if you catch yourself, tell it to shut up!
The real trick is in this recognition.
I stop myself around ten times a day and flood my eyes (180 degree vision trick that shuts down the head banter) this regains my balance and the effects last for a while.
Listening to music helps as well.
Energy is slowly gained and perception is eventually widened and the two forms of thought processes can be separated, it is a classic not doing.
It gets easier but please don’t walk around not thinking, just don’t walk around thinking about how wonderful you are.
What I'm doing now is whenever I feel my negative internal dialogue taking the reins, the overlay that tells me what I am and what I can and can't do, amongst other detrimental garbage loops of thought, I take a Buddhist "mindfull breath" or two and shout internally SILENCE! with that echoing voice that Paul Atreides had in the original Dune, when he chastises the Bene Gesserit Mother Superior; and focus it to the top/crown of the head. Don Juan would knock that spot with his knuckles when he (probably) felt the same thing occuring.
Some good should come from being a movie buff, and that voice effect is burned into my memory.
Can you explain that to me?
Is the "mindful" concept a modern (western) addition to Zen?
Being mindful of the breath, and only the breath. Nothing else. Then I strike out with my silent internal vocal shout of SILENCE! from my calm "center."
Edit: I've tried the "knuckle-knock" to, but I do it when I'm alone. The silent-shout is obviously better in public.
But is that what Zen masters teach about this topic?
I couldn't tell you that. It's what I found myself doing.
Edit: search for "monkey mind" on YouTube, or monkey mind appease on Google.
Thanks, I've taken a cursory glance and it looks interesting.
You mentioned in another thread where I’d brought up hara breathing that with inner silence your breath becomes almost imperceptible, it naturally takes on a perfect rhythm. I imagine you can do the reverse, use consciousness of that breathing to come to inner silence. Or more in line with the subject at hand, use the shine of your eyes? I’d be interested in how that may work for someone with experience of silence, and if it cuts short the foreplay to get there.
I don't believe you can. In my opinion, it's like dressing yourself the way wealthy people do, thinking that's going to help you become wealthy.
It might help a little. But it can also hurt you by pacifying your mind into thinking you're on the path, when you aren't.
The breathing techniques are likely just merchandise for meditation sellers.
This has nothing to do with moving meditation or martial arts, where breathing is important.
Also, once you can get silent, you'll be very pleasantly surprised to find you can quickly have the perfect breath, just by reminding yourself not to think. No one even has to have taught it to you.
Remind me about the shine again. I searched my searchable pdf but the word shine comes up often. But I did find this, which is very apropos to our conversation:
Don Juan:
"We sense, from the moment we are born, that there are two parts to us. At the time of birth,
and for a while after, we are all nagual. We sense, then, that in order to function we need a
counterpart to what we have. The tonal is missing and that gives us, from the very beginning, a
feeling of incompleteness. Then the tonal starts to develop and it becomes utterly important to
our functioning, so important that it opaques the shine of the nagual, it overwhelms it. From the
moment we become all tonal we do nothing else but to increment that old feeling of
incompleteness which accompanies us from the moment of our birth, and which tells us
constantly that there is another part to give us completeness.
"From the moment we become all tonal we begin making pairs. We sense our two sides, but
we always represent them with items of the tonal. We say that the two parts of us are the soul and
the body. Or mind and matter. Or good and evil. God and Satan. We never realize, however, that
we are merely pairing things on the island, very much like pairing coffee and tea, or bread and
tortillas, or chili and mustard. I tell you, we are weird animals. We get carried away and in our
madness we believe ourselves to be making perfect sense."
The point here is, this is why we're "impoverished". We're so impoverished that a very successful life might be considered one where you don't end up on Prozac before age 90.
It's that damned internal dialogue, a gift from your mother. She had to do it, but maybe she could have taken us as toddlers into another world occasionally, and explained that to us.
It's from The Power of Silence, chapter 9:
And there's a bit more in the rest of the chapter and book. I advanced searched for "shine of the" btw, there may be other mentions with other searches.
You mean shiny cocaine user eyes?
Heightened awareness seems to activate some of the same parts of the brain as the power plant, "Coca leaves".
I'll look into it. I forgot about that.
Sorcerers seem to use every single thing they can! Shiny eyes too?
Eyes have their own memory! Who'd have thought it. It's one of the lines that's always stuck with me. Helps when things get moody, can just pull yourself out of it by shining those eyes.
I believe, you hit the jackpot with that!
Maybe it's not just an example of the way sorcerers recall a particular position of the assemblage point, but maybe this is their main technique.
That's a difficult task without some clue like this.
For example, I can reach heightened awareness just about any night I have enough time to practice. But the positions of the assemblage point that you'd call, "heightened awareness" vary wildly.
In one, you might be asleep but awake. Snoring isn't out of the question. Note: It's very puzzling to hear yourself snore, when you didn't realize you were asleep. The brain has the ability to mask that sound out, and you'll think someone else is snoring.
In another position of the assemblage point, you close your eyes and see wonderful things. Yogis call that "cosmic consciousness".
In another, you see "the wall".
In another, you see something abstract and unrecognizable, but somehow you know what it's for.
In some, you're surrounded by different worlds you can access.
And my favorite, you get super confidence that you can accomplish anything, because when you think about how to do it, time becomes a corridor with all the possibilities lined up along the way, and you just have to wait for your cubic centimeter of chance to select one outcome.
It would be nice to be able to alter which one you're using.
Speaking of shiny eyes, Carlos had that going on. His left eye was a little different from the right. And the shine of his eyes did change. When he was reading off "the wall", there was a particular shine I can recall to this day. I just thought it was the direction he was looking, since there were windows letting in sunlight behind us, but it wasn't even.
very cool, i won’t be able to ‘feel’ the shine of silence yet though I can do it hit and miss with jhanas but perhaps it’ll be a fast track once one knows the shine of the place of no concern.
It's possibly cooler than you think.
I always stood at the front of Carlos' classes, amazed people weren't fighting for that spot.
One thing I saw, was Carlos' shiny eyes. I'm saturated with them.
Maybe that's on purpose? Is it possible to retrace the position of his assemblage point, by recalling the shine?
There was one lecture in particular which was particularly puzzling. He used a new girl to demonstrate a complex movement of the assemblage point, even rubbing her crotch a bit (well, at least I hope so). His finger traced the very long path so slowly, it was a little puzzling.
Maybe he left that "crotch marker" to make sure we'd remember, but while showing how the assemblage point moves, he himself had moved there.
Maybe we can recover that. (not the crotch, but the assemblage point position).
More info on this: the eyes are designed to select objects by focusing on them. Try this: look at something near, then further away, and "feel" it.
That's how they select a position of the assemblage point. That feeling. But you have to blank your mind when you do it, and then focus in a different direction. You're focusing into the second attention.
If that sounds strange, it shouldn't. Everyone does it all night long in dreams.
You could practice it in dreaming by staring at distant objects, until they suck you over. Being sucked over is really just a slight change in the position of the assemblage point.
It seems that everything our bodies can do in the Tonal, has a corresponding use in the Nagual.
For example, our right calf is very sensitive so that we can sneak through cracks in rock without scraping off our skin.
But also, in the second attention it's a center of perception.
Very odd, I may be imagining it but seemed to feel it between the shoulder blades. I do have a rather nasty flu mind and get a bit dizzy when moving eyes in any direction.
More on eyes from "Moving the Assemblage Point" in The Power of Silence:
Remember that. If you practice silence, occasionally you'll feel a movement of the assemblage point as if someone pushed you on the back, minus the feeling of touch.
The ally can do that. I'll be having trouble getting anything to happen, even after forcing silence for an hour or more. Then I'll perceive something black zipping from my upper right, to my lower left, and my back will feel like someone pushed me forward. My head even jerks a bit.
But the Ally can also cause a shift that's felt in the leg muscles. There's a little jolt, things get a bit fuzzy, and then my leg muscles twitch.
I was actually worried about things like that in the beginning. I kept thinking of "That stuff can give you epilepsy", from one of Carlos' books.
Another time I assembled a negative world. Light and dark was reversed. Afterwards I was worried it might be a stroke, caused by internal silence.
Fortunately, we also get silent while asleep, and it seems really unlikely you can hurt yourself by learning to get silent. On the other hand, if we don't, we're hurting ourselves all day long, expending our energy on fussing and worrying.
I managed to stay in inner silence for a number of hours recently, and noticed when I looked directly at the edges of walls or other straight edges, they seemed to vibrate or oscillate..like the optical heat waves you'd see over a dry desert lake bed. But it was a very precise and focused/contained oscillation.
Some in Carlos' classes described things as "bubbling". Carlos said that's what you see early on, and he did too, but it goes away. (He was being polite so that he didn't lose any Europeans.)
I'd say, it's possible you're trying to "outstare reality". I don't know for sure, but it's a good thing to talk about.
People badly want to SEE so that they can finally get that book deal. They try anything they can, except for learning to be silent. As far as I can tell, they sit on the toilet and stare at the wall, trying to will themselves to "see". I call it, "bathroom seeing", and it's not uncommon.
The result is jumpy details. You've succeeded in shaking up the visual centers, but the assemblage point is still fixed. Maybe it vibrates a little, but it doesn't shift enough to see.
Seeing is in the other direction. The exact opposite direction!
You don't see by gaining more control over your mind. You see by falling asleep (moving the assemblage point).
It feels more like you are about to doze off than that you are concentrating very hard.
Part of the black magic that was used to blind us requires us to be unconscious whenever we leave the cookie hunting arena. And so we have "sleep", "awake", and maybe "deep sleep". But in fact, "sleep" is a wide range of assemblage point positions, and as far as I know, you don't have to be unconscious in any of them.
Edited to add more jokes
This is great info! But I honestly wasn't intentionally trying to see. I was just casually observing and noticed the optical effect. It was more enjoying being free of that damn oppressive dialogue!
No book deals for me! This path is too engrossing and substantive to trivialize by trying to monetize it. I believe that offends INTENT/The Spirit, never a good idea.
Castaneda's profits from his books were more of a happy by-product, but maybe I'm a bit naive.
I know. But I can't resist a good teaching situation. Carlos did that also; I guess I'm sort of copying his style in here.
I'm even starting to swear more. After years around Carlos, I had a very foul tongue. I had to let the black sorcerers shame me out of it again.
Care to elaborate? Or is it too personal?
Edit: you probably mean the collective power of average men and women who Don Juan often called the true black sorcerers.
The black sorcerers are your friends and family. Or anyone out there, but those are the ones with the most power over you. They know best how to push your buttons. Carlos separated some of the women from them, but he told others to return to their families. So it is possible to deal with them as petty tyrants.
In one set of lecture notes, Carlos refers to a dark energy floating around his group. You can indeed learn to see the actions of some of the people around you as a dark band of energy, powerful and intertwining in everyone's doings. Not all petty tyrants are of the same low energy level. An important step in learning to live with them, is to identify who's band of energy is the darkest. Follow that like a black ribbon through the group, and odd behavior won't be as surprising.
They find all sorts of ways to censor anything they don't want to hear or know. You can't make a hard rule about how or what, but if you consider Carlos' descriptions of the categories of "farts" people fall into, you can probably make some predictions.
Some of the things they try to suppress are probably a good idea. While Carlos often swore like an intoxicated sailor in private classes, it's true that he would have had to account for his audience, if given a chance to lecture on medieval sorcery at a catholic seminary.
But most of what the black sorcerers try to suppress is any knowledge of escape from the internal dialogue hell they live in. That’s their realm of power. They don’t like competition or threats. And they want to have as much company as possible, while they wait to die.
My theory is that instead of recognizing that they’ve become oppressive and willfully ignorant, they only focus their attention on the slightly positive things they try to suppress, like swearing in front of your grandmother. If you were to argue with them about their oppressiveness, they'd refer back to those “good deeds”, and ignore the rest of your arguments.
That's why stalking becomes mandatory, once you learn to stop the world. The black sorcerers will try to restore your internal dialogue, any way they can.
Edited to add black ribbons of energy
Is this at all in the ballpark of what these black ribbons are perceived as when seen?
I can't really say what they'd look like to other people. I never got to ask Carlos about that.
But take those black things and make them more like a smooth black ribbon surface (jet black, not shiny, about 1 foot wide), and twine them around all the people you know, as if the ribbon were as long as it needs to be, to go from person to person. It floats around waist level, threatening to strangle the people it encounters if they don't move just right. But the threat of strangulation isn't quite right. It's more like, whatever type of petty tyrant that is, is what the threat from the black ribbon will be. A petty tyrant who oppresses with sadness (the most common type), threatens to drown anyone who doesn't obey, using sadness and self-pity.
The main vehicle of the black ribbon is gossip. Gossip embeds itself in the internal dialogue and does its damage. It's pretty much one of the very few tools that the black sorcerers have at their disposal.
Some aspects of sorcery involve converting something too complicated to handle, into a less complicated form that's easier to deal with. It's how we deal with the world in general. Our brain makes some kind of image that's concrete, ignores all the data not needed for that, and we can deal with it at that level. That's how the Tonal works.
The big mystery seems to be, what happens to the stuff that was ignored? Apparently, it just works out.
Thus to move my own assemblage point, I got Carlos' Ally to form the image of a fairy, so I could avoid the frightening aspects of Allies and convince it to teach me to toss balls of awareness inside my own luminous shell. Otherwise, I had no idea how to move it on demand.
By seeing your world of forced interaction with petty tyrants in another way, you can deal with it in that way and avoid becoming dragged into the details.
The "black ribbon" is of course, just the emanations that get stuck in us, and which we stick in other people and places, as a result of interactions of awareness. The ribbon form appears when you consider those interactions as a whole, and the path they follow. If you follow it back to its ultimate source, you'll find a powerful black magician.
You can untangle it with recapitulation, but that takes a lot more work than stalking it.
Edited: Three times because a lot of you are householders
I'm reminded of when Don Juan stalked a man who had "no redeeming qualities" the definition of a true Petty Tyrant, in The Fire From Within:
""The man knew only violence, with which he terrorized. If his violence was
neutralized he was rendered nearly helpless."
The events then proceed as Don Juan engineered, resulting in the man's quick self-inflicted death.
Not only was it impossible to recapitulate away his violence, his actions helped all those who were being or who were to be tyrannized by him in the future. And he only did it at the behest of his benefactor, not out of an egotistic desire; and the Nagual Julian Osorio was himself, as an impeccable and truly egoless seer, being directed by Intent.
Except don't try that on your gossipy grandma. She probably deserves it for making it to that age without realizing she's a petty tyrant, but her actions are part of what holds the family together. Hellish as it might be.
The passage is about dealing with the kind of extreme tyrant that most people don't encounter, because in a modern society such an individual would most likely already be in jail or dead. Justice was hit or miss, or non-existent is ages past. Maybe some of the old seers fancied themselves as "Texas Rangers," bounty hunter's for Intent.
Edit: and used it to hone their stalking skills toward perfection. And, I think I just described the Jedi in Star Wars.
I'll be astonished to find out who I am when I can consciously choose to set aside all the social and intellectual programing I've accrued over a lifetime.
This is kind of off topic and in the realm of fantasy, but I believe a good portion of fantasy writing and illustration is actually the residue of Nagual consciousness that can never be fully suppressed, or we'd literally die.
Comic book heroes and fantasy/sci-fi heroes etc. are often depicted with eyes that shine/glow when they are in their power-state. Also in the film The Shadow (1994) he enters his power-persona and his eyes take on a magical mysterious shine like mercury in moonlight.
Here's two screenshots:
We're always trying to make up for the loss of our Nagual.
Prozac? Increases perception of the second attention.
Fantasy Fiction also activates it, but we suppress actually seeing what we're fantasizing about, maybe roughly starting around age 20. But if you remember back to being a child, your ability to fantasize and actually "see" the images was much greater. We call it, "playing".
Around age 29 or so, people pretty much stop playing. I could explain those ages, but that's a long discussion.
In Carlos' classes, and during a period when I was recapitulating 4 to 6 hours a day, I regained my ability to visually see what I was fantasizing about. And it is indeed a shift of the assemblage point. I didn't understand it at the time, but I knew the feeling.
[deleted]
>Here's two screenshots
Carlos' eyes shone like the one where the guy has a red bandana and a black hat.
Now that I think of it, his eyes did seem to shine a bit more than normal.
I was pissed off at Carlos for the antics with women for a long time. He even broke up families to steal the wife.
But the more I know, the more I understand why he did it. He almost had to.
Why he didn't emphasize silence above all else escapes me now, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it turns out to have been the right thing to do.
I know you are talking about IRL classes . However in the books its very well explained in one particulate quote by DJ that all of the sorcery is in the silence. All the other techniques are just there to give proper stabilisation of the person or enhance said silence. The ancients knew of that and they tried everything there is to reach that silence - gazing in fire, water , mists , clouds etc . So if the search for freedom is the defining difference , then i must ask what is this freedom ? Free of human form ? Of desires ? Freedom of perception ?
Freedom of Perception first. Free From the Human Form an eventual second. Free From Desire? I don't know about that one. Your basic personality and ability to emote are only altered in A.P. positions like the place of no-pity, but there are MANY MANY positions.
I remember an audio podcast I listened to on Testosterone. In it a guy had a medical condition that caused him to stop producing it, and as a result he literally had no desire. He would just sit and stare at his table for hours without the impetus to do anything at all. Not a productive long term condition if you ask me.
If you're asking me, I can't answer that. I once heard someone who was practicing Zen until he was disillusioned by an "enlightened" person say, "You can't change yourself."
I was puzzled by the comment. Who's trying to change themselves? Certainly not me.
I'm also not looking for freedom.
I just like to do cool things! It's a technology. That's all. We don't ask our computers to help us find freedom.
(setting aside that you can google the topic)
Well im sure that at the very least a person can rediscover him/herself, as society and internal dialogue really narrows the perception of what we think we are.
Or maybe, continue our journey. I hate the use of that word in the Castaneda context. It smacks of a book deal.
But I'm quoting Carlos there.
We started out as navigators, crawling around and looking at everything we could find. We even managed to keep that up for a few years, before our mom's turned us into full blown cookie hunters.
Why did he? So he doesn’t become this godlike guru that people think is more then human?
I think it's even more than that. I was just too prudish to see it, but now I do.
I'll tell a story. It never happened. Just keep that in mind.
One of Carlos' students ran into a double woman. She was helping people understand the self-checkout terminals in a retail store. She figured he was a confused old man who couldn't understand computers, and came over asking if he needed help to work the terminal. Actually, he'd been studying the machine to try to figure out if it was windows or Linux based.
He looked up to see who had asked, and discovered she was a double woman. "I always need help!", he told her.
He spent a year figuring out how to get her to hang out around him, so he could see what could come of it. The energy given off by a double woman is very useful.
He discovered that she had 4 or 5 close friends she commonly went bar hoping with, all of whom were of complementary personality types. Together with her as the center, it was a complete group of witches.
He spent the next 2 years trying to get them all together at once with him around. That was difficult, because they were all at least 30 years younger than him and only interested in partying. They had learned to use the energy of the double woman to attract men (and trouble) in bars, and when she lost energy and started to crash, they all surrounded her and propped her back up, using their own energy.
They had already formed an energetic group on their own. Getting them together to redirect their energy towards something better seemed like a promising idea.
He succeeded, but while they were together all the omens were wrong. They got lost, they fought, some made passes at him, and then they got jealous of each other, and the group fell apart.
If he'd just gone with their tendency to try to figure out who's considered more desirable, the main concern they had in life, they might have been able to hold up.
Carlos merely created a social structure that could hold up, seeing as how he didn't have all of don Juan's cohorts at his disposal, to form personal bonds with the apprentices.
That didn't work out for the sorcerer in this imaginary story, but years later he told me that during the course of the evening with the 5 women, he saw an omen that held the answer for how to perpetuate Carlos' teachings.
Any time you "jump", and try something farfetched, which only a sorcerer would attempt, intent is likely to support you. You may not succeed at what you try, but the next step is likely to become obvious.
In this case, intent didn't let him down. He was just a little too dense to realize it at the time.
The women were all sitting on a bench, waiting for a seat in a nice restaurant. He was standing near the entrance, waiting to be called. He started to wonder how on earth he could keep 5 young women entertained so that he could repeat this, should it be a success.
He looked over to where the women were sitting, and all of their faces were bathed in a bright blue light. They were literally glowing! They seemed to be hypnotized, not moving at all. They were all looking down towards their feet, and in no further need of entertainment.
He'd never seen such a sight in his life! That's when he realized, they were holding cellphones.
It's no longer the 90s. The way to perpetuate Carlos' knowledge is via the internet.
Edited: four times
The mystery of what self-importance is, and what the position of "no pity" is, becomes really obvious once you can get silent and use the second attention.
I'm looking forward to hearing about self-pity from those of you who learn to be dreamers. It'll plague you, even after you can easily become silent and summon the second attention.
It only goes away in heightened awareness. That's the bottom line.
(But heightened awareness is a broad spectrum of positions of the assemblage point).
Honestly I think it just depends on your level of maturity. Life can be very humbling and crush that self importance, especially if you have a responsibility to take care of family members
We're "householders". Just gotta live with it.
(Sigh...)