In the early days when I dedicated myself to the path, I didn't practice Toltec techniques. I would simply sit in meditation and allow myself to fall asleep while trying to quiet my internal dialogue. I wouldn't force it but rather do the "brain sinking into the body technique" that Daoists talk about.
Several times, I would wake up and see the room around me. My eyes would be closed but I would be aware of my energy body and would see the room wavering and could hear things.
Does this correlate to Castaneda's heightened awareness?
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It is analogous, or rather both what you experienced and what a self-professed Nagualist would experience are one and the same underlying "super reality," the second attention; the perceptual awareness that we as a species have been trained since birth to suppress and forget.
Now you should keep at it! That's one of the defining characteristics of this path. Unbending intent, and efficiency. You should try and find or make some Silence Stones. Search the posts here for more info. They absolutely work. And the more you use them, the easier it gets to reach inner silence even without the stones; the body remembers what it feels like to be silent and is less and less resistant to reaching it.
Edit: I'll have to look into that brain sinking into the body technique, sounds interesting.
And you should read the books by Taisha Abelar and Florinda Donner, they are more specifically geared toward a woman's perspective and are extra helpful.
One thing that has kept me on this sub is that people here can look at the essence of other people's techniques and ideas, and not get hung up on 'branding'.
Cheers.
Rituals and dogma were a trait of the old seers. The new seers have discarded that in favor of working directly with intent.
Remember Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. They're the guide for stripping off foreign socialization and analyzing something dispassionately until it works. Or to put it more plainly, removing the Asian social nonsense so that you won’t be hazed by the monks or the master, just because you actually want to understand.
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu kicks Japanese and Chinese butt, that’s the bottom line.
I'm not sure why they couldn't have also gotten rid of the part where 2 sweaty men are crawling all over each other, but to each his own.
>the body remembers what it feels like to be silent
It can even get visual (seeing). I found a very (extremely) pleasant level of silence last night. It's just before stopping the world, the place where the second attention is easiest to merge with the first attention. Carlos pointed us to that with his poster. (I have someone trying to track down that poster, possibly painted by the Blue Scout, and given out at one workshop).
The state I got into last night was as if "the wall" was dripping happiness. I suspect that's the kind of thing that gets exagerated into the idea that enlightened people are happy all the time. Like Maharashi Mahesh Yogi playing in a bubble bath.
I can't image that becoming permanent, but there are moments when you understand how the exagerations came to be.
(Because it sells stuff)
Yes. You're near extricating awareness from your body. Try feeling yourself float up and out of your body - intending exit sensations.
Absolutely! Yes, yes, yes. What you described IS heightened awareness. But it's a continuum; sometimes it's more impressive than other times, but it's always great to be there. Or "be here now" as they say.
I'm in heightened awareness right now, from practicing trying to turn my Fairy into a "Familiar Spirit" last night, for 8 hours. So I'm a little annoying today.
Words are like tangets to the circle of essence. There are countless number of tangets to a circle, yet without the center of the circle tangents cant define the direction . So this is what words do , they give a general direction as a tangent, they dont pierce the essence -just touch it. The point is that meditation, silence, stoping the internal dialogue are just tangets to the same circle. We can come up with infinite more numbers of these tangents but they are just that - a touching point to the circle.
The essence behind these tangets is that they give a direction to dive/swim into the circle of self. The deeper you dive the greater the distance from words is - this is where heightened awareness begins. Deep inside resides something more precious than any super ability - its your core self - unchained from tangents.
The nature of this world makes us drift away from the center to the outer part of the circle. Words are hooks to the outer part of the circle. You are asking if this is the right tangent , but that doesnt matter - what matters is that its the right circle. Leave the tangets behind and go get tighter with yourself - surely you know what i mean. In the "tightness with the self " resides the best advisor you have at your disposal and its your duty to have that connection "cleaned up".
Don't forget what don Juan said, that we need our second half, the second attention. Without it, our lives are pathetically impoverished.
I did a little proselytizing the other day. Not a good idea. But I was targeting a bi-polar individual, whom I saw as merely talented. The others see that person as a worry and a problem. As Campbell was quoted by someone here, (paraphrasing), mystics revel in the sea of madness, while psychotics drown in it.
I was hoping to convert someone from drowning, to reveling in their talent.
Unfortunately, I only see that person in a social setting. I can’t remove that person's captors.
I tried to bring up sorcery (that person was very interested), but the other people in the room censored it. One screamed, "He's trying to teach hallucinations to a psychotic!"
I tried to explain; people need magic. They need their dreaming selves or they aren’t happy!
Everyone disagreed. As I looked around I saw, bitter ex-meditation practitioner who’s decided that was a fraud, and is now dying from a mysterious auto-immune illness, person on Prozac to keep from crying at night, person on several anti-depression medications for general suicidal thoughts, person (also on anti-depressants) practicing catholic meditation techniques and hoping to become a priest, so he can help people (get that book deal to help solve his depression).
But they didn’t need the second attention at all. They had heightened awareness in pill form!
When people (not the one you were trying to reach) are that far gone there's no convincing them with words, but you had to properly try anyway...impeccability demands it. Only a magical experience would be remotely capable of shifting them. So pitiful that the influence of those like them is so prevalent in our degrading society (a view that the media often chooses to reinforce) and that the soul-sucking idol of materialism hasn't delivered them from their suffering.
I also firmly believe that the new idol SAFETY is just as degrading. When safety in all things becomes foremost, it by definition diminishes quality living and change/growth. Life becomes something to be survived (utterly preposterous!) rather than freely pushed to and beyond self-imposed limits. It also perpetuates a constant state of mental fear, and makes one easily manipulated.
I'll start preparing those plastic $0.50 girl's soccer trophies, in case the upcoming safe generation takes a fancy to Castaneda. "Best Sorcerer on the Team."
Everyone gets a trophy!
Might be a good idea actually... Could satisfy that lust for a book deal.
I want one :/ Poor me , plagued by greed to be seen as worthy.
This seems to be exactly what that person needs to know. People are desperate for their second part and will have it, with medication or drugs into a deadend , or with allowing oneself to expererience the self unchained of the imposed social norms.
The way I see it, getting into heightened awareness changes your bio-chemistry for hours or even days. Aside from the overconfidence (annoying overconfidence), you get an obvious excess of endorphins and dopamine. The pleasure chemicals we all crave. That produces other changes.
Last night for example, I was trying to figure out where my Fairy had gone to. She seemed to be hiding from becoming a cat. Or maybe she was exhibiting cat behavior and I didn’t realize it. They never obey!
I was slowly turning my head all the way around the room, to see if any of the puffs of purple and orange had extra details in which she could hide.
I leaned my head left, and all the bones in my neck popped. That's never happened to me before.
I realized it was because my entire neck was absolutely relaxed. Even more, I remembered multiple occasions where I was forcing myself silent in a chair, and my head just clicked a bit, and fell closer to my spine. There was a fairly loud “pop” sound.
Carlos had written about that. Don Juan had told him that the second attention comes out when you hear that pop.
Probably it’s more like, when you get into heightened awareness and the second attention comes out, your body will return to normal human breathing. You get that “perfect” breath everyone is obsessed with selling to meditation students.
Keep your money; you can’t fake a perfect breath, and there’s no reason to try unless breathing is part of whatever you’re doing.
Aside from perfect breathing from silence, you also get a much deeper level of relaxation than you normally experience.
It makes sense. Our obsession with language has our tongue ready to twitch every second, trying to form the words in our minds. That has to alter the breath too. If it can mess with the tongue, the breath is sure to be on the list, since that’s part of talking.
And the constant thoughts of the internal dialogue are virtually all worry, thus the stress in the body and unwarranted tension in our muscles.
This is from another thread but its big time info that i can confirm with my limited experience. I'd like to thank you DanL, for assuring us that Heightened awareness(HA) is not something mythic or unreachable condition of mind, its right there ( sustained watching of elements coming from the second attention) . I had it happened to me at some points in the past , either as random events or delivered with the help of drugs. Probably all the people had many HA states. But its doable on demand! Im slowly getting the hang of it, i dont have an unbelivable story as you wish - but yesterday i realised that i have something like a invisible "tentacle " that can move and "touch" "things". I realised that i've worked with it all my life. The book deal is strong so i cant break forward yet, however its up to me and thats satisfying.
This gets speculative and technical but as ex coffee junkie i think that the feel to the "trip" is very simillar to caffeine. Caffeine works on adenosine A2 receptor which is like a " up valve" for other neurotransmiters - mainly dopamine and glutamate. Adenosine A1 receptors is the opposite "down valve" reducing the overall neurotransmission - its required to get to sleep.
But caffeine has nasty side effects ,its addictive and with prolonged consumption -less efficient. The withdrawl is unpleasant - headaches, tiredness , sleepyness etc. Naturally induced HA delivers afterglow instead of withdrawl( as you pointed out). Thats amazing!!!
Perhaps on the physical scale silence induces changes in the neurotransmission gradually, thats why you need sustained practice.
Ah yes the feeling after letting go of an unpleasant thought and realising that half of the body is tweaked due to it. And then another one , with no lesson learned :(
Howard Lee believes that by holding a specific position of heightened awareness, he can live to 150 years old.
I'd like that very much, but it seems unlikely for me. If there's anything bad humans can do, I do it regularly. With relish.
And yet, I certainly have the best health in my family.
On the other hand, Carlos was diagnosed with liver cancer while I was in his classes, talked about jumping grooves to try to fix it, but failed. 6 or 8 months later he was dead.
(As I recall the events).
People fear death even more than pain. It's strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. Yeah, I guess it is a friend. - Jim Morrison. And a guide.
Have you found that position? Have you seen his LOL book? (“Light of Life”, a nice pun!)
Howard showed it to me himself. He just moved my assemblage point, and there it was.
He was probably as surprised as me.
Usually he just moves people's assemblage points until they can feel it. But I got a full view of it, courtesy of Carlos' techniques.
Let me add that the simplest form of heightened awareness is present when you close your eyes, or while meditating already, and the blackness you see, with your eye lids in the way, takes on depth.
You're first looking at flat blackness, and maybe if you are talented you see some vague colors or lines. But it's just flat, the same as always when you close your eyes.
Then suddenly it's not flat. It has depth. If you try to figure out why it has depth, or what that could mean, you can sort of feel magic flowing in there. Corey wrote about it in the workshop notes posted a month or two ago.
The depth is the main thing. That's the second attention. I shouldn't make this analogy, but it’s a useful construct for explaining the depth you see, which doesn't yet come with any dreaming images. Don’t add this analogy it to any book deals; we don’t want to mislead more people.
The analogy is that your second attention body activates, you perceive the depth, but the second attention’s eyes are still closed. Same as your first attention eyes.
So you see blackness twice. The second attention’s blackness is derived from your whole bodies’ ability to perceive, and so it has more feeling of depth than you are used to. The second attention is not "directional" much of the time, and especially in the beginning.
Once that depth comes, you can feel that you now have the "second sight", or "third eye".
It’s just closed.
Fortunately, if you can focus on that depth while continuing to do whatever technique got you there, it’ll move your assemblage point a little for each minute you watch it.
Bad news: if you fully realize something cool is happening, and that it’s a necessary step to seeing, you’ll hit a book deal in your own mind, your internal dialogue will start writing the opening dedications, and you’ll be screwed again. All gone.
This makes me wonder, with all the new manuscripts coming out from the me-too regurgitator naguals, how can they ever manage to get into heightened awareness? I don't believe it's possible to get there with book deals on your mind.
How important is (in priority)
1) time passing by itself = just waiting in silence
2) attention/curiosity, exploring by moving eyes
3) moving hands, playing harp on right point
4) paying attention as if something tremendously important is happening (difficult to sustain for long?)
1). Time passing: I don’t understand this question. You mean “lost time”? That happens when you stop the world and don’t remember it. Or an Ally pulls you somewhere you aren’t advanced enough to remember.
You’re skating on the edge and it’s pretty easy to step over without realizing it. Might feel normal at the time, but later it’s all gone.
But if you mean, use up time just waiting in silence, that’s going to be a lot harder at first than if you find something to interact with. Even better, move around.
You’ll fall asleep if you get to a certain level of silence and your assemblage point hasn’t shifted to heightened awareness yet. We’re used to falling asleep when it moves. By the time you get to heightened awareness you are in fact asleep, but without being unconscious. That’s why heightened awareness is useful for this technique. You’re already asleep.
Eventually of course after playing around you’ll return to the bed and finish off the job by stopping the world. Or you’ll get waylaid and notice another world you can assemble, and go off there instead of stopping the world.
That happens when, after hours, you understand what’s keeping you from the very deepest level of silence (you’ll figure it out), and you go do what has to be done to get to that. You’ll IMMEDIATELY stop the world if you get there. That’s how it stops. We stop making it.
This assumes you keep going for many hours. And I’m sure that sounds hard, or impossible to everyone who hasn’t done it. But ask yourself, can you watch TV reruns for 5 hours?
This is even more fun than TV once you get good at it. 3 hours will go by in a jiffy. 5 will only feel like you gave it a good try. 8 is what feels like you worked hard at it.
Remember Carlos mentioning that the fliers mind is only driven off with discipline? Or that we only lose the human form through a sustained effort.
Sorry to tell you, this is what that looks like. You can't for example, avoid stepping on the cracks on the sidewalk, stop eating ice cream, and then expect to lose the human form. That's not the kind of discipline that will make noticeable progress.
Just as people were expecting something unattainable to be "heightened awareness", but hopefully now realize, it's not that big of a deal, "discipline" is also kind of obvious.
You actually have to work, instead of just thinking about how it will feel when you finally decide to work.
2) Exploring: This is important for my method of doing it. Zuleica just had them find colors, and then figure out how to pull the colors closer.
But remember, THEY WERE IN HEIGHTENED AWARENESS. They couldn’t fall asleep.
I never tried cocaine, but imagine if you snorted a shitload. I had a girlfriend like that. No way she would fall asleep, and she had so much confidence that she’d climb dangerous rocks without blinking.
That’s heightened awareness.
We have to modify the techniques because we aren’t in heightened awareness.
Interacting with the second attention is what will move your assemblage point into heightened awareness, instead of falling asleep from being silent.
Doesn’t much matter how you interact, as long as it feels like you are indeed “doing something” with stuff that normally shouldn’t be there. If you have limited resources, I suppose you could just turn your head slowly and look at stuff.
Once you get into heightened awareness, Zuleica’s technique will be a piece of cake. When you tickle it, and force a deeper level of silence, you’ll see your hands move in dark energy.
That’s not using light to see them, but maybe just your mind knowing where they should be when they wiggle like that, and being nice enough to show it to you.
If you see the dark energy waves of your finger wiggling, the assemblage point of the second attention will become visible. It'll be a little spiral galaxy looking thing, but not as filled in.
Warning: to see the dark energy movements will need a level of silence beyond what you'll be able to manage at first.
I'd say for this technique there are at least 3 levels of silence:
A) Good enough to see colors but they're not bright enough to form hypnogogic images.
B) Good enough silence to see very bright colors, and they can easily manifest details.
C) Good enough to see the movement of things that can't possibly be seen at that light level.
C) is where you can find inorganic beings (spiny or wavy lines of bright light), open a portal to a dreaming world only accessible with silence (one where you're always lucid), or you can even stop the world.
But to get started playing and moving your assemblage point, you only need #A.
3) Moving hands: The harp is just a recommendation by Zuleica. But do it at first.
When you can see your hands wiggle there, and the second attention's assemblage point becomes visible (you’ll slowly figure it out), then you can just pull the colors. Grab them like a rope, and pull as much as you like.
If someone gets there and doesn’t figure it out, and I’m not dead yet, just ask. There’re more tips I can give on that, than reddit will allow in a single post.
4) paying attention: I don’t understand this one, but I fear you are going the wrong direction.
Imagine an archer, staring at the target, not moving, his concentration absolute. He's mastered the very expensive "perfect breath", so that nothing at all can interfere with his aim.
Wrong direction…
I never saw a Zen archer, and I hear they actually aren’t good enough to justify the mystery they evoke. And that weirdness with flaring the nostrils seems kind of painful. I sure wouldn't want my nostrils flared.
But from what I’ve heard, they don’t even aim at the target.
That’s the right direction.
However, this doesn’t mean you can afford to think about Aunt Ethel’s old car, the argument you had with your boss that was really unfair, or why you ate that whole pizza.
You have to be there, watching the colors, and suffering horribly each time you realize, you started fantasizing again. Shit.
Well… I hope you suffer horribly when you start the internal dialogue by mistake, or I won’t get any of you guys to stop the world, which is when my job is done.
Now some good news! Once you can stop the world, you can actually talk while doing this. I give commands to my Fairy all the time. I even call, “Here kitty, kitty, kitty!” when I’m trying to find her, after she’s half cat and half Fairy.
Some of the rules go out the window once you get there.
Someone suggested I put a camera in my room, in case I jump into another dreaming world. They expected to see me disappear.
Problem is, mostly you’ll see me on the ground looking at something that isn’t there, stroking its fur that also isn't there, saying, “Oh, you’re such a pretty kitty!!!”
That kind of evidence might even hold up in court.
Edited: five times
Thanks!
So i figured that sometimes as i look down towards the torso i get this switch on "real me " feeling, thus while i cant exactly see it i can understand why its called second attention's assamblage point. Holding these moments gives me impression that next time this would be easier(cleaner), which probably is getting that point closer to the body.
There's a lot of fibers to feel around there, and they're actually connected or associated with the right calf. I'm always amazed when I notice that. Very strong feelings, literally like a spider web stuck to my ankle and being tugged, or ants crawling there. And often in response to me feeling around the stomach area, doing Zuleica's technique.
About the "dark energy waves". I believe I have those figured out, but it's rather technical.
Everything going on here is about eye defects or fixed pattern noise at first. But that's just what you use to gaze. As you gaze, it gets amazingly bright, so that you can no longer dismiss it as just physical things going on. (Reminder: takes 1 hour for eyes to adjust to darkness).
But the "dark energy waves" you can see if you get fully into heightened awareness (colors are extremely bright, and hypnogogic images are easy to find) are another thing.
I suspect, they don't come from the second attention, but that the signal is pathetically weak.
It's a differential motion detection algorithm in the neural net. If any programmers have written one of these, you subtract one image from the other, and amplify the differences. That produces white lines (after you desaturate it because random noise can be very colorful, and of course take the absolute value of the differences first).
And those differential lines are not as subject to amplification limits, because noise tends to cancel out due to the subtraction. If you blurred the results before processing, noise nearly entirely cancels out, and you can see motion at very very low light levels. Maybe even a single sodium ion, since in the absence of white noise in that part of the neural net, a single ion could trigger a response.
Or to explain it for non-programmers, our abiity to detect motion in darkness is more powerful than our ability to detect faint light levels on stationary objects. I suspect the faintest levels of our motion detection register in the brain as fear of a dark space, but you don't know why. When you're perfectly silent, you can pick up the actual visual data.
So you can see your hand tickle the assemblage point, even though you can't actually see your hand. You see after-waves of dark and light, like ripples in the air.
By the time you can see this faint signal, you'll be able to pick up faint signals from the second attention also. Like that assemblage point.
But I have to put in a warning here. I said it looks like a spiral galaxy.
I have a problem with my little inorganic being pet moving into that area, to watch what I'm up to. I could be seeing her sitting on that spot, and not the actual assemblage point. Maybe she likes to absorb the energy.
She's welcome to it, as long as she materializes in full size. Which she did last night.
I don't believe anymore that she's one of Carlos' allies. I think I just picked up a stray inorganic, of a very low energy level. She sticks around for the energy, as a few other inorganic beings do. The others just hang out on the floor.
That means, all of you can get your own pet. And maybe because they're such low energy, they're more like "beginner's allies".
Edited to get more nerdy
Technically it seems that the second attention should be called first attention, and vice verse. Goes to show how disconnected and clogged we are, unable to experience oneself...
I have a theory. Not proven! Don't add it to a "The New Nagual Woman" book or such. Make up your own material.
The theory goes like this: the first and second attention, and the assemblage point(s), were "conceived" by sorcerers.
Meaning, their existence is no more real than anything else.
But that means, everything we experience was conceived at some point.
Possibly, that makes intent the key power in the universe.
Now a wild speculation: instead of the assemblage point, we could conceive a control panel. With buttons that are much easier to use, in the absence of a nagual to move that point.
Maybe a little rotating dial on the upper left shoulder, and you can turn it yourself.
Possible? I don't know. But the old sorcerers didn't have electronics, or I'm sure they would have gone hog crazy with it. They'd have power object Sony Walkmans.
(Did I date myself?)
I recall the tale of how when the first ships of the Conquistadores (or just European explorers) arrived off the shore of the new world, the First Nations peoples literally didn't see them. The concept of a ship like that was so alien to them that they literally couldn't see it. It took a shaman going to the shore and seeing a vague shimmer on the ocean horizon, and coming back over several days until he finally perceived SHIP. He them told his people that there was something out there, describing it in terms they could conceptualize, and then they saw it too.
This was all depicted in a scene in the documentary "What The Bleep Do We Know!?"
Edit: to reconceive the assemblage point as something internally manipulatable without the express intervention of an external agent would require more than a single individuals intent, no?
Then again, some things are true whether you believe in them or not, and are likely not accessible to intending from our less influential viewpoints.
I don't know. Too bad we all didn't work harder while Carlos was around. We could have asked him.
About not seeing the ships. I read a very weird article saying that "blue" didn't exist until recently. Or maybe it was green.
The idea was that the two were considered the same color, until at some point, someone decided they weren't. So now we have blue.
They "proved" this point by examining historical literature.
Maybe there are other colors we ignore?
I recall a similar piece that boldly stated after studying historical literature that the moon didn't exist until around 2500 years ago or something. It was a reference in a "the moon is an artificial satellite/spaceship" article. It also stated that we were engineered by the aliens that came in the moonship, and that it's now their long-term observation post and that most UFO's come from it.
Oh how I love human imaginative logic! Which usually has an element(s) of truth.
I'm hard pressed to explain the bible. 1500 prophecies of the future, none demonstrated to be wrong. We can argue about which were right, but there's some stunning examples, like the Russian Royal family being tossed into a pit and covered in lime. Or Israel returning, surrounded by enemies on all sides.
Or the future land people would migrate to, which is divided by rivers, where the iron eagle flies, and the people are "peeled" (clean shaven).
The best explanation I can come up with is technology. Manipulation of the past. We now know, with almost certainty, that time travel is perfectly possible. It just takes too much energy.
But information travel does not.
On the other hand, the Jews were sorcerers plain and simple. Just very proper and well educated sorcerers, and tending to remove any information about that, which would be detrimental to society in general.
Maybe they just saw it.
Sounds like good material for a future companion post to the "Buddhism Meets Sorcery" one, by someone who is more versed.
I would truly love that! I think we have some budding Qabalists in here.
I'll point out: Urim and Thummim
Also, Ezekiel's lesson from God on where he is, and where he is not.
Or prophets living in the desert wearing goat hair robes and eating honey and locusts. What the hell were they doing out there?
Or how about the secret Jewish college in a cave, which one of the wayward kings had to resort to, to find out what the Jewish laws in his storage chest were all about.
As I recall, a sorceress showed up to explain it. (ok, it didn't say she was a sorceress).
What about Balaam and the talking donkey?
How about the witch of Endor? I patterned my manifesting technique off what I read about her.
Or Enoch for heavens sake! He's the basis of most of western magic. They just removed the best of his books from the King James.
We need Leigh...
Where can I read more?
I'm guessing but djinns may have been inorganic beings. Sufi scholar, and possibly sufi adept, Idries Shah wrote some books on magic. Richard Burton (not that one) wrote about meeting adepts who'd stored their physical bodies in tombs (mummies) and roamed the world in their dreaming double. Sorcery is all over the place!
I like the Shephard's Chapel guy on nighttime off-channels. He's dead now, and his son isn't as good. Find the old geezer with the flowers background and the blue text, and just listen to him a few hours.
Essentially all he does is read the bible, and explain the historical context and who the people were, and correct some bad understanding of what it says there.
For example, Eve had sex with Satan, and so did Adam.
Anyone ever told you that?
He proves it, and in the end it's so obvious you have to wonder what happened to the churches.
Another: When Ham uncovered his father's (Noah's) nakedness, it's a euphemism for having sex with his step mother. The nakedness of your father is your mother (like ownership of her reproductive rights). Ham got both of them so drunk they passed out, then raped his own mother.
But what do you hear in a normal scholarly discourse on this topic? Noah was a drunk.
What???? The hatred of their own mommy's socialization on them, has infected even the scholars. They can't think honestly anymore. Let us not make that mistake too.
The Shephard's chapel guy also goes over the "Witch of Endor" story and points out, the "spirit" she materialized was for a person who wasn't yet dead. Likely it was her familiar spirit (inorganic being) coerced into looking like Samuel.
Tip for everyone's peace of mind: Don't fight with your own religion. There's no reason to. People only do that when they're insecure about their own beliefs. But we don't have a reason to be insecure. Ours is just a technology, and it works better than any other such thing.
(In other words, stop rebelling against your mother, she'll win every time)
Here's the kind of interesting thing you can find, if you embrace Jewish magical traditions. It's an analysis of the Witch of Endor story:
"This person is traditionally called “the witch of Endor,” presumably because she was well known in that area. The name Endor may itself suggest a place that had a reputation for necromancy.[6] That Saul has clearly crossed a theological Rubicon is crystal clear because he had earlier sought to eliminate all such diviners from Israel with the death penalty.[7] He is openly defying the word of the Lord, and by consulting the medium pronounces his own death sentence.[8] "
Someone came into this subreddit, and likely is still around, asking for magical books.
As it turned out, the major ones weren't what they were looking for.
I felt the same way on realizing, most books on magic are western magic, derived from the book of Enoch.
It's a disappointment. But it shouldn't be. That's just because we're unhappy with our old garbage socialization. Jewish magic is at the heart of it.
Edited: once
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I feel that the actual biochemical component in this is a release of various neurotransmitters in the brain. And that there are varying degrees to it too. I’m sure if someone were to take a spinal fluid sample during heightened attention they would see a massive increase in dopamine and other transmitters...sort of like how a persons body gets flooded with endorphins during a runners high
There is probably increased blood flow and activity in the frontal cortex. As well as change from alfa and beta waves to delta waves in deep silence.