Around 18:45 Russell Targ suggests that all you have to do for remote viewing, is quiet your mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBl0cwyn5GY
There's also a discussion of Nonlocality at the beginning.
Around 18:45 Russell Targ suggests that all you have to do for remote viewing, is quiet your mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBl0cwyn5GY
There's also a discussion of Nonlocality at the beginning.
72 Comments
I'm getting better at reaching silence but when I get there I still have that earworm problem. It takes the place of the internal dialogue. Cheeky. Did Carlos give any advice in classes on overcoming it? Something more rarified than internet advice?
My eyes have no more light leaks to dart to and fixate on, but my wetware audio system seems stuck in a ghost signal loop.
Edit: the obvious answer, which I did begrudgingly try for several weeks, is to stop listening to vocal music; at least that which you choose to listen to, and not elevator or grocery store musak. Instrumental hasn't reared it's earworm hackles yet.
You don't need to stop listening to music!
Keep this in mind: Most meditation techniques merely alter the internal dialogue. They don't shut it off. But even just altering it produces amazing effects for people who meditate.
My technique for visiting heaven is also an alteration of the internal dialogue. But you keep the internal dialogue going (sort of), you don't stop it. And look what you can do with that technique!
So a little ear worm isn't an issue. I'd just go ahead and live with it at first. True, it's unpleasant if you're trying to get silent.
I just walked a lap around my building complex. Usually I can be silent the entire loop, but today I had a song stuck in my head.
The cause of that in my case, is losing the human form. It's fighting back. I woke up this morning, laying on my side, and I wanted to think about stuff. It's cozy to wake up, and think. That's what humans do. And if you are trying to learn to be silent, you wake up, and have to fight your desire to think.
But anything I might have wanted to think about was not interesting, so I didn't. That's sort of what it's like while losing the human form. Part of the process is that you lose interest in the pressing things which obsessed you before. You just sigh, relax, and don't care about that anymore. I guess eventually all human concerns seem distant, thus Genaro's story about trying to get back to Ixtlan.
Given that morning wakeup, I'd expected to walk around in silence today,and even see in daylight. Instead, I got a song stuck in my head. I fought back against it, and each time I did, I saw.
Don Juan's obsession with wind is for a reason, that I can say from experience!
In the case of your earworm, it's likely that your human form (you) will try to fixate on that as an excuse to stop. In the course of reaching silence, the human form will beg, prey, threaten, and in general cause all kinds of chaos which isn't obvious at the time.
Besides, you never get rid of the internal dialogue completely until the assemblage point shifts far enough. Even if you managed to silence it, and also stop the earworm, you'd be fantasizing with images.
Just keep it up until you see enough things from the second attention, that you can try to focus only on them. I think they'll dry up the earworm in the long run.
If you want to give it a boost, try the super hearing that comes from silence. Listen for music in the "real world". Let your hearing stretch to outside your home, to see if someone is playing music in their car. If you don't find any, check for insect sounds.
You might pick up second attention audio. I was doing that a few nights ago, and never could figure out if the music I picked up was real, or from the second attention. But as soon as I heard it, the colors in the room lit up much brighter.
And your experience today was...
I'll listen and see if I can hear any audio from the second attention when an earworm flares up, using it as a boost/motivation to seeing or hearing.
I should also try intending it away, or to get past it's barrier, through A.P. shifting (which is what listening for second attention audio is, just with alternate wording).
This will be very useful! Reason would not lead one to try such an action.
As a side note, have you ever personally heard the voice of seeing describing what one is seeing, or offering hopefully important or at least useful information. You explained it as a repurposing of the internal dialogue, or rather as returning it to it's true and original purpose.
There's also the voice of the dreaming emissary from one of the realms of the inorganics that Castaneda describes telling him incredible things...
Yes, I have. And it's very clear, and quite surprising. It sums something up in a brilliant manner.
The classic example I like to give is from back in the late 80s. I reverse engineered the original Nintendo game machine. Yep, Mario Bros. I took a screwdriver, opened it up, and proceeded to make 35 video games for it.
But after I’d produced and sold game #10, Nintendo got a patent on the shape of the game cartridge, and sent us a threatening letter. We had to stop or they’d sue.
The patent was bogus! It was for putting a 45-degree bevel on the cartridge, so you couldn’t insert it upside down. The slot could only take a cartridge with that bevel.
But if you had the bevel, you violated the patent.
I was out of business, or so it seemed. I went home, sat in a chair, forced myself silent, and waited for the second attention to show up.
I fell asleep, my head jerked forward a bit, I lifted it back up, and right there in the air was a video game cartridge. It was floating in front of my eyes, in full 3D, rotating so that I could see it from all angles.
I stared at it dumbfounded, not understanding what I was seeing.
A voice said, “Hey, LOOK!!! See how it’s flat, but skinny enough to slide over the bevel?” I looked at it and sure enough, the cartridge was simply very thin.
I had no idea if it would really slide over the bevel. I rushed back to work, mocked one up, tried it out, and found out it was true. You could get around their patent.
I’ve heard the voice of seeing come out like that, at least 8 times. It just blurts out the answer to something, while you’re watching it. It almost feels like, if you figured out what you were looking at, it would keep silent. But if you’re too stupid to see the obvious, it comes out.
However, it can manifest in multiple ways. Carlos’ “wall” can manifest images, they can sort themselves out while you watch, and only at the very end does the voice of seeing come in to summarize what you just watched.
While they’re sorting themselves out, you have realizations. This one is the same as that one, that one isn’t needed if the other is present, and so on. Except that, they're abstract so that I couldn't even tell you a single thing about them. You just realize stuff while the visions flow. The realizations seem to drive the movement of the wall, the same way looking at an Ally forces it to change appearance.
In that case, the voice doesn’t actually have to be present at all because you sort of “worry”, in order to see. Your silent mind can use any information you have, conceptualize and visualize it, and give you a super advantage understanding the information. It’s like having the FBI drive up with their special task force high-tech truck, to help you find your lost car keys. That’s what one form of seeing is like, and that form doesn’t need the voice.
I suspect for you guys, the first way you’ll hear the voice of seeing is by practicing silence sitting in a chair. Close your eyes, relax, and force silence. Eventually you’ll shift into the second attention.
It’s very likely it’ll eventually talk to you. But not the way crazy people have voices in their heads. In this case, you’re silent, but you have a thought. And the thought is persistent. It’s clearly not the usual flow of the internal dialogue.
I suggest, it’ll be angry with you at first. Because you’ve banished half of yourself into darkness. When you bring it back, it’s still a bit angry with you. It’ll curse you or criticize you.
All this is likely somewhat personal, although I suspect there will tend to be categories of people. Like farts have one thing happen, pisses have another, and so on. Carlos used to go on about the types of people. Maybe the voice of seeing is the same for all fart type people.
I have one person who writes to me, who has learned to bring out the second attention, using a combination of gazing and sitting in a chair with eyes closed.
He reports that his voice of seeing is prolific. It’s constant, and seems to want to explain every single vision he has.
I guess he got lucky, and it wasn’t all that angry with him for being away so long.
And what about the voice of the dreaming emissary? I believe they come from different sources.
Good topic for today because this morning I ran into “Awesome Sauce” energy around 5AM. It was the only thing that came to my mind when I felt it. It was amazing, and awesome. And tangible, and brownish, if that makes any sense. But especially, alien and weird.
I’d been sitting on the bed, looked over to the left on the floor, and saw a blob of lights. It was the same type of blob that the low energy inorganics appear from, which is distinct from Carlos’ allies.
Usually I don’t see that blob stuck to the floor. It mostly floats around, and likes to sit on the second attention’s assemblage point when I do the harp playing movements there. This time it was stuck to the floor, so I have to assume it was another inorganic and not the one I normally interact with. Maybe it was the small rodent I see occasionally, and I finally got a glimpse of it’s “real” form.
It gave off that incredible weird feeling. When I felt it, the thought occurred to me that this is why humans need their second attention. Just like they need the darkness, and the wind, and fright, they need that weird alien energy, to keep them from becoming too cozy with the world of the tonal. If you combined wind, darkness, and fright, but made it pleasant, you’d have something very close to this alien energy.
Here’s what don Juan said about it after Carlos asked him what the dreaming emissary was.
"Alien energy that has conciseness. Alien energy that purports to aid dreamers by telling them things. The problem with the dreaming emissary is that it can tell only what the sorcerers already know or should know, were they worth their salt."
"To say that it's alien energy that has conciseness doesn't help me at all, don Juan. What kind of energy - benign, malignant, right, wrong, what?"
"It's just what I said, alien energy. An impersonal force that we turn into a very personal one because it has voice. Some sorcerers swear by it. They even see it. Or, as you yourself have done, they simply hear it as a man's or a woman's voice. And the voice can tell them about the state of things, which most of the time they take as sacred advice."
"Why do some of us hear it as a voice?"
"We see it or hear it because we maintain our assemblage points fixed on a specific new position; the more intense this fixation, the more intense our experience of the emissary. Watch out! You may see it and feel it as a naked woman."
"Is this force capable of materializing itself?" I asked.
"Certainly," he replied. "And it all depends on how fixed the assemblage point is. But, rest assured, if you are capable of maintaining a degree of detachment, nothing happens. The emissary remains what it is: an impersonal force that acts on us because of the fixation of our assemblage points. “
So from this I conclude, the dreaming emissary, which oddly Carlos put in italics like dreaming and seeing, is a composite of the things that can happen when your assemblage point is flexible but still homesick, and you encounter something “real” mixed in with your dreaming.
In dreaming, and also waking dreaming (which seems to be an entirely different realm), you often run into strange things. I was once somewhere else, possibly after having stopped the world. My current technique for that is to watch colors and manipulate them in darkness using tensegrity, while forcing silence, and keep it up until the colors are very bright and there’s signs of other worlds on the walls. That indicates I’m in heightened awareness and can stop moving around, because I won’t fall asleep if I remain still. So I go back to the bed and force out any remaining thoughts or mental images. Occasionally that will stop the world.
But the problem is remembering it. One time, I only noticed it because someone shouted my full name. That brought me back from wherever I’d been, but I couldn’t recall even a tiny bit of it. The voice was very clear, but as soon as I noticed what was going in, it had faded to almost nothing. I had to revive it from my memory.
I’ve also been brought back from being blanked out during recapitulation, by a loud knocking on the door. A few times, a telephone rang. But in both of those cases, the sound has a quality that makes it easy to tell it wasn’t really the phone or the door, despite how loud it was. And it didn’t repeat the way a knock or phone ring would. Also, I got tired of getting up to check and finding nothing.
As for Allies speaking in dreaming or in waking dreaming, I can honestly say I’ve never heard them speak. I’ve seen them frantically try to tell me things, including gesturing with their hands. But there was no audible sound. And in truth, faced with Carlos’ pajama wearing ally, the last thing you’re thinking about is turning up the audio.
In dreaming I’ve found myself becoming lucid, while sitting next to a dreaming entity I recognize as a form the inorganics can take. They just sort of hang out as long as they can, as close up as they can, and try to get you to interact with them. In those cases when I become lucid and try to figure out what the situation is, I have the impression that we’ve been talking for a long time. But I still can’t recall any actual sound.
One time I recalled some words, then realized I was probably the one who said those. I got the image of a psychiatrist with a notepad, jutting his pencil a bit to encourage me to elucidate on my last statement. I believed I was in a conversation, but actually the being never said anything.
Here’s an example of Inorganic Being behavior for those of you who are potential dreamers. It’s from what a couple of people wrote to me in the last few days, but I’ll combine it because I don’t recall which part is from whom.
He ran into a bunch of turmoil in dreaming, that triggered him becoming lucid, he looked around, and there were Lego blocks all over the floor. If he tried to take a step, they seemed to move to be under his foot, and it actually hurt! He forced himself to wake up, found himself in bed with his girlfriend, but then remembered she was visiting her relatives elsewhere. That startled him, and he woke up again. This time for real.
That’s an Ally following him through dream changes. Could it have spoken along the way? Seems to be a tossup.
I'll venture my opinion on inorganics: They're everywhere! We're up to our ears in them. They aren't rare or hard to acquire.
If Carlos' allies are different, it's probably mostly a matter of energy.
Myself, I like the ones that aren't as scary.
Edited: twice
How do you enter into one of those worlds, from waking dreaming? Do you focus on the view of a particular one and get sucked in? Do you dive in? This is very different from lucid-type dreaming from sleep, reached through the gates of dreaming.
Waking dreaming is a bonanza, if you've been trying to do the gates of dreaming techniques.
I've talked to many people over the years, and the average person wakes up in a dream only once a year. And usually in response to someone else lending them energy by talking about it enthusiastically. To get to the point of successfully becoming lucid every night surely requires many hours of effort over months of time.
That's one reason I'm a little negative regarding the gates of dreaming. While it's easy to spot a "social media sorcerer" by that fact that they're pretentious and phony and only quote the books, it's harder to spot someone who's making up stuff about having passed various gates of dreaming.
However, if someone really has passed some gates in dreaming, you ought to hear something like, "Oh my god man! You have no idea how much effort that took. I practically had to bleed each time I wanted dreaming. Here's my technique. Maybe it'll help you to."
If you hear something like, "Yea dude, I'm up to the 3rd gate of dreaming", you have what I consider the perils of "The Art of Dreaming”. You can essentially stop yourself from ever learning sorcery by pacifying your mind with ordinary dreams hand selected to match what’s in that book.
Waking dreaming does not take more effort. But it’s a less obvious effort, perhaps not as immediately rewarding as believing you’re doing something wonderful, like trying to pass all the gates.
Both need the same kind of effort: concentration.
For more lucid dreaming, you need to concentrate on trying to enter dreaming manually, while you lie on your side in bed, or sit in a chair. And for that to succeed, you need silence. Then, you need to learn to go back into dreams, by remaining still, and visualizing the last thing you saw. And finally, you have to desperately hold on to any dreaming you get, carefully learning what makes you lose lucidity. If you practice all of those, you’ll learn to change dreams, which is what really helps sustain it. It’s fairly easy to remain lucid in dreaming for hours, or to bounce from one dream to the other, for half a day.
Waking dreaming requires the same kind of effort. Zuleica’s technique is the model. She’s from the planet of the dreamers in don Juan’s group.
But the advantage of Zuleica’s technique, over the “Gates of Dream” method, is that you enter into heightened awareness first, and then into the dream.
That insures you won’t lose lucidity. In fact, there’s no effort required at all, other than not to get too obsessed with the dream storyline, or you might believe you live there.
Another bonus of waking dreaming is that you are not asleep. You’re awake. Or maybe sleepwalking. But definitely not asleep, as you can end that dream at any time, just by turning your head to face back into the real world.
How you get offered to enter the worlds you can assemble with silence and darkness? I haven’t figured that out. If you can go in, you just know it. If you can’t, you also know it.
If you try to fight about not being able to enter, you’ll soon discover that although you can see the world you want to enter right there on your wall, it is in fact further away than the actual wall of your room. And it remains at that distance as if you were sitting on a rock watching it, even if you try to walk towards it. It’s always at the same distance.
It has to become “directional”, or “located at that spot I can see there”, in order to enter it.
The best analogy I can come up with is, if you are looking at an 85” television screen view of a village, you don’t get confused into believing it’s an open window view of the same scene.
Methods of entry I’ve tried: Walking in, leaping in if the location of the new world is downwards and at an angle (in other words, you really could leap down there if you weren’t afraid of injury), and just “being” in the new world as a result of having noticed it, but also being here at the same time. You sense your presence in both.
Then you have a choice, and that old head turning thing from Carlos’ books takes on meaning. It really does feel like you just turned your head to face a new direction, and that direction was into the second attention.
With Zuleica’s technique, you are guaranteed to get dreaming every single night, as long as you have enough hours. With Gates of Dreaming method, you’ll often go weeks without success, even if you make a strong effort.
Edited: once
This is likely to come off as supremely stupid, but are you leaping in with your dreaming body or physically leaping in? There's no doubt at all that you have to be in it to "understand" it and my rational tonal just can't grasp that separation of bodies, other than mainstream astral projection imagery.
My confusion comes from the fact that during dreaming and astral projection training the eyes are closed. But with the eyes open the entire time, I find the transition bamboozling.
Specifically do you have to make sure, before leaping in, that your physical body isn't contorted in a weird neck-angle in a chair or standing on your feet without moving for hours, which is likely to create acute foot pain (I speak from experience).
Edit: Answering part of my own question, in order to physically enter into another world you first have to stop assembling this one; something that isn't exactly a piece of cake or everyone would be doing it! So it must be the dreaming body that's involved in, if you can call it run of the mill, waking dreaming.
I wish I knew. It feels like the real thing.
I know everyone is concerned about whether the Tonal can go away for a while, and then come back somewhere else, seemingly violating causality. But in the end Carlos’ techniques still work well, and are plenty rewarding. It could be that the answer to that question isn’t found until much later in practicing, perhaps when you finally don’t care about the answer.
The assemblage point is VERY sticky. I fear that will hold some of you back, as you stare at colors in the darkness, but nothing spectacular happens in the time you have for practicing. Even with silence, Carlos warned us that it takes from 1.5 minutes to 2 hours for something to happen. He seemed to start to emphasize that in response to one of the witches. Maybe they wanted him to make it clearer that eventually it can take even longer than at the start.
I wondered why the big range of time, and it seemed to disagree with what I’d heard before. And Carlos’ explanation of curtailing the internal dialogue not being the same as “inner silence” didn’t help.
But I can now tell everyone the answer to that. If you get silent for a couple of minutes, and haven’t been doing that a long time, any tiny shift of the assemblage point releases energy, and you get a boost. It’s almost like you’re a golf ball sitting in a little dip in the ground. If you roll up the tiny dip just a little, you can then roll down fast on the other side. But if you keep rolling around like that on the ground, pretty soon it’ll be flat, and you won’t get a boost from just a few minutes of silence.
The good news is, 2 hours will move it just fine, even after you’ve used up all the easy to access energy. Plus, you can use tensegrity to redeploy what you have (by scraping with your hand as far out as you can reach all around.)
As for what it felt like, that kind of thing doesn’t happen until the assemblage point shifts quite far, and at that point you don’t have the petty aches and pains in the real body. Your awareness is focused on the second attention. In that condition its very hard to tell what of your perception is your Tonal, and what’s the Nagual.
I’m not a big fan of those terms, because they’ve been stolen by social media sorcerers who’s attention is entirely focused on money.
But they make sense. You can actually switch back and forth between the 2, while sitting in silence. That’s another technique.
That’s the whole point of doing it with the eyes open. There’s just something more “real” about that.
Real is important, to get everyone out of the habit of pretending to be a sorcerer. Once they see real results, they can figure out what’s pretend and what’s real. It’s sort of like giving a very poor person, who’s been pretending to be wealthy, some real money. Their behavior will change drastically.
As for the position of the body, if I were in a weird position I probably wouldn’t be looking through a window to another world. Typically, if I end up in a crumpled-up position, but I’m still forcing silence and watching the room with open eyes, what happens is that I see entities coming to visit me up close.
I guess they like that I’m not about to jump into another world. Or maybe the more compact body shape.
And we're back at that individuals suggestion of setting up an infrared babycam to prove it one way or the other to our scumbag imposed minds.
I like the idea less and less the more I think about it, ruining the magic and whatnot. Plus with CGI these days most will only half-believe what they see on video anymore, and with Deepfake and A.I. generated footage in the future they'll believe it even less.
What variety or "species" of entities are drawn to us when in such a crumpled position? Are they distinctly different from your fairy's true form or those brown blobs?
I'll try to pay more attention. You have to keep in mind, whatever they look like when you aren't superimposing your own intent on them is different than you normally see. Or at least, in the beginning. And you rarely see the deeper level, unless you make an attempt, which requires an even deeper level of silence and more time spent on that single thing.
There’s so much to see that deciding to stop and try to see something better feels like a waste.
So I mentioned a curious rodent, but there’s also lines, fuzzy patterns, portals, black holes, and little dots buzzing around. Not to mention, if you can put in that level of effort to get more silent, you might as well just stop the world.
But there's no doubt there's 2 different kinds around. And someone who writes to me has seen the rodent kind, so there’s verification of those “stable” blobs of light coming by.
Those are quite persistent. If you find them sitting on something, they stay there. Maybe even for hours.
The fairy on the other hand floats around, and rarely stays anywhere. When she does, wow! Tingles up my spine (release of energy from a new position of the assemblage point).
Just a thought. Someone who writes to me mentioned making a cell phone ap to teach sorcery. My initial reaction was, we don't know enough yet. And also, is this just another book deal in disguise?
But, if we had 10 dreamers in here, it would be possible to design such an ap. I think it should start like this:
Check which apply:
I've practiced Zen
I've practiced Buddhist meditation
I've practiced...
Then we pick an initial small task, and question the results. Depending on the results, we give another small task.
Nothing big like, "Stop thinking to yourself forever!!!"
That's a big leap.
But, "Walk out to your backyard without thinking, and report which thoughts were hard to remove."
Small movements. With fabulous prizes at each stage.
(For the Ferengee mind).
Even better, we could have characters show up to recommend the next task, and let Quark be one of them. Maybe Yoda for another.
Two issues I can see are how they would be drawn to it and the level of interest. Casual would be unlikely to produce results impressive enough to hook them. I doubt even someone drawn to Zen or Buddhist meditation would make the leap to a direct search for an app tagged 'sorcery' (remember Carlos's struggle with naming the knowledge, and reluctantly sticking with 'sorcery' instead of 'the mastery of intent' etc.).
You would have to use stalking techniques applied to the design and marketing and engineer a set of clever hooks that lead them to think they're pursuing something that's a boost to their existing path/interests, and not guru chastized demon sorcery mishegas.
Incorporating pop culture characters is a fairly universal and likely solid strategy. Everybody likes Yoda!
Edit: there's even a couple of church/temple clubs for Jediism in the UK and New Zealand:
https://www.templeofthejediorder.org
https://www.jedichurch.org
They started up after a surprisingly large number of people wrote-in their religion as Jedi in an official government census in the United Kingdom.
And might I suggest it be named The (insert) Holocron:
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Holocron
If we could figure out that thing about moving objects by merely looking at them, we'd attract them.
One of the original Chacmools was going on about that in an interview, but I didn't watch enough to find out if she was claiming they'd figured out how to do it, or just repeating what Carlos said in response to questions.
From the Art of Dreaming:
Shoot, read more and tell us. Was he telling him to push or pull allies in their own world?
I sure hope so, because that means doing tensegrity on colors in darkness might lead to that ability.
It reminds me of the matrix: As soon as you learn there is no spoon...
Pushing and pulling on inorganics teaches you there certainly might not actually be any spoons in this world.
Yes, in their own world, this was on a visit to the "tunnels". It's on page 64 of the book, or 1225 in that all-in-one pdf, chapter 6, The Shadow's World.
There's a great tip just before that from the emissary, for dreaming but interested to hear how it may work with Zuleica's technique. Some meditations involve it too:
I'll try it out!
If that's how you learn to move objects, I'm in a good position to do it. That little low energy inorganic has taught me to visit her world. I was already visiting other worlds, but her world seems to show up sooner, making it very tempting when I haven't much time left.
I'll try pushing and pulling multiple inorganics around from now on.
Another interesting excerpt in that chapter:
While gazing it seems like this, “the blink of an eye”, a light draws awareness suddenly into it and something dreamlike occurs, it feels like just an instant, but after there's a remnant of something that happened while there, like when trying to recall a dream after waking up. It feels like just a flash, but there's also a depth to it that I'm still unable to recall much of afterwards; immediately afterward there's definitely something, sometimes expressible, but as with dreams, that doesn't last at all, and it's rare I can recall anything of the flash beyond the session.
It certainly seems awareness can be trained or exercised like a muscle, and slowly trained to explore things that hitherto seemed totally insignificant if perceived at all (such as flashes of light) but can become whole worlds of perception when “awareness is fixed on another world”.
Your urging to do the work is so spot on. Nobody expects to bench press 200 pounds without any training and just because they want to look buff; so neither should we expect to get anything from these techniques without any effort just because our tonal wants the Facebook likes.
That's the assemblage point moving! You can feel it now.
The mistake is to think you just dozed off for an instant.
Yes, those two feel the same. But when you doze off you're merely losing consciousness. When it's the assemblage point shifting, you go through "the veil", which means, you blank out.
But read this with a grain of salt. I'm trying to distinguish the two, but they might actually be the same, and what you're learning to do will modify both situations: falling asleep and blanking out from silence.
It's a good analogy, but also don't forget how our brain works. There's 100 billion times 3 thousand little wires hooking it all together. A specific wire off in a strange location hardly ever gets any signals reaching it. But when it does, it widens up a little, to make signals going there stronger.
So you could start out barely being able to perceive a new world materializing on your bedroom wall, but if you keep watching that over months, pretty soon it'll be easy to see. Because it's formed new neural pathways.
Or to bench press 200 pounds because you went on a "special" diet, got weight lifters clothes, and signed up for a gym.
You actually have to go to the gym. That's what's missing in the Castaneda world. Going to the gym everyday.
I'd start calling myself, "Coach Dan", except for the bad associations the term "life coach" has.
Maybe "Cheerleader Dan" would be more like it, but then you have the LGBTQ movement to confuse that title.
Bummer.
I'd better say, it being moved by gazing or forcing silence is intrinsically different than when it moves in darkness, watching colors with your eyes open, and while walking around the room.
That gazing method will mostly lead to dreaming. That's not a bad thing at all, but don't compare my accounts of watching colors in darkness to the results of what you're doing now. They'll be different enough to cause you doubt.
Don't. What you're doing is the best thing you can be doing right now. I did it also, but more like 25 years ago.
I saw the other day why it's different, but I can't recall the “magical” explanation right now. It was clear as anything, but abstract as seeing tends to be.
It was something like (but not precisely), if you force silence while stationary and focused inward, you're simulating going to sleep, or resting. As a result, that's where you'll go. Into dreaming or unconsciousness.
If you force silence while imitating your daily behavior (being awake and active), the dreaming will have to come to the waking world.
If you want to try something (I wouldn’t due to laziness), get a bag of sharp rocks and sit on that. Don Juan used that with the apprentices, to keep their stationary gazing from feeling like a sleep situation.
He even implied it wasn't necessary, but that they were in a hurry. I'll add that he probably didn't have time for them to discover how not to fall asleep, as valuable as that might be.
Might the act of holding your silence stones be enough to keep the body from feeling like sleep during waking daylight gazing? Or does the sensory signal need to be stronger ? The forehead pole might work too, while gazing at something on the floor.
It might also be enough to be seated on a kneeling meditation style bench (inclined is best). It induces a straight-back Japanese-style posture that isn't conducive to sleep (if you have no master to wack you with a stick when your head dips).
Yes, both of those are enough!
But remember, the point of the forehead pole is to keep your head from falling forward, when you "fall asleep" while practicing.
I'd say that the stones "extend" how long you can go without falling asleep.
BUT, the only thing that will guarantee you remain awake is to reach heightened awareness.
Up until recently, we all had to worry that the most intense techniques in Carlos' books only work if you start from heightened awareness. And for that you needed a nagual.
Now we don't need to worry. We just need to force silence for long enough to have it shift into heightened awareness.
I've gotten there with the pole and the stones, but I tended to rest with my eyes closed afterwards, so I could see the results (dreaming images). From there, it seems to have shifted more and I fell asleep.
So both of those techniques are still pointing in that direction (sleep).
I just heard a great quote from Jerry Lewis talking to Jerry Seinfeld about painstaking labor, in his case comedy writing:
"The tedium doesn't let you move on, the tedium forces you to stay till it is no longer tedium."
Remember that. You'll need it!
>If you have no masterr to wack you with a stick when your head dips
A warning to Japanese Buddhists.
That's just hazing. It's not cool tradition. It's not "discipline".
What do you supposed is the intent of being hit with a stick?
It's hazing pure and simple. Asia hasn't yet figured out that hazing is bad. Go read up on junior high in Japan if you don't believe me. Try "head in dirt".
Tendancy is that Japan runs 10 to 15 years behind us on removing primitive things like that (including junk science), and the rest of asia runs 10 years behind them.
Thus Japan is just now figuring out gluten allergies, but Taiwan is still clueless.
So next time that 6th degree blackbelt in your dojo hits you with a bamboo sword, kick him in the balls and tell him we ought to have nuked the rest of Japan too.
He'll either laugh, or you'll get some real discipline.
That must contribute to why the Chinese, and other Asian countries, still believe the body parts of rare and endangered species will give them virility or long life.
It's an entrenched problem that needs to go the way of the Dodo, before we do as well.
It will.
Social media is huge with young asians, and they seem to want to imitate westernized people.
There are some who claim that if larger asian cities didn't follow the oppressive asian socialization, their society would collapse.
I don't know if it's true, but they have a doozy of a fliers mind controlling their behavior. Westerners can't even begin to fathom it. It should probably be called, "the dragon's mind" in their case.
I'm hostile to it because they have so many cool techniques that could be similiar to Castaneda, but instead of eagle feathers and medicine bags, their motivations are stuck on the idea that they can get hazed into enlightenment.
With that placebo on their mind, they're just like us. They won't actually do the work. They believe that talking and moving up in a social heiarchy is the same thing.
You can see a hint at all that from the "Intent Gone Wrong" post.
Edit: In case it wasn't obvious, this is about former class members and where they've gone off to, for consuming more placebos. Some traded their medicine bag for cloth kungfu shoes.
I would say it is hazing nowadays, especially in the West, probably always. But at one time there was another reason for it too. I'd suggest that gaining good posture, relaxed and attentive, also moves the assemblage point. Practicing to get there undoes muscular kinks the tonal has accumulated with its assumptions (that make us tighten up), along with the assumptions themselves if we can breathe right (a sort of recapitulation). I'd guess at one point the master with the bamboo stick could actually see obstructions (or more like obsessions, as they're not external, but caused by one's own intent) and help bat them away with a strike. I concede I may just be looking for similarities though!
Edit: Nowadays I think they're just copying what others could do in the past with actual understanding and good effect; as with so many rituals, bowing, kneeling, praying, chanting, even martial arts and tensegrity, the essence is lost. By themselves they're not going to get you far.
I fully agree with all of it. Howard Lee himself told me, the acupuncture points were discovered by someone who could see them.
We also have stories of men like Yabu Kentsu or Morihei Ueshiba who could talk to wind or insects. Oddly, most martial artists make fun of them for that, showing how absolutely clueless they are. It’s a terrible pity.
I say it’s a pity, because if you practice getting rid of the very last remnants of internal dialogue and images from the mind, you’ll soon notice that slow movements of just about any part of the body activate some kind of dampening field on those remaining remnants.
What it feels like is, you’re absolutely silent, except that occasionally you fuss over some image. Mom saying something incorrect, friend who isn’t fair, whether to refi the house, etc. All the usual junk.
Those are what prevent assembling other worlds, because each one is like a magnet for the assemblage point, back to this living hell of the self-pity induced internal dialogue.
Or the human form if you like.
If you get almost to the point of perfect silence, then slowly move your hand or turn your torso, concentrating on the smoothness of it, you might find our own “animal” awareness.
That’s our awareness minus the human form. It’s rather alien for us at this point. If you’re curious what it feels like and can manifest hypnogogic images, some of the brightest ones will reflect it back for you.
I suspect Carlos’ plan was to use that in tensegrity to give people an easier way to learn to manipulate energy and build the energy body. But for that to succeed, participants had to emphasize silence. He knew that the “muscle memory” as he called it, was another form of awareness all to itself, and could help us focus away from the human form, if we only added silence.
It seems we didn’t.
Just about any slow-moving martial art would work as well, minus the energy manipulation. Carlos added that to direct the movement of the assemblage point, and also as a secondary aid to getting silent.
I remember the first workshop after Carlos died. I saw a great band of emanations.
I assumed it was because of constantly forcing silence, and it was in part. But more to the point, it was the “energetic mass” that he was always talking about.
We had enough collective intent at that workshop, to move our assemblage points.
Then, we forgot about it and went back to chasing cookies. Even worse, along came the internet, social media, and cute kitten videos.
We’ll have to change that! If anyone wants to help, just practice, practice, practice.
The internet waylaid Carlos’ plans, but now it’s suitable to amplify them. He put all the information out there. We just need to work hard, get results, and let everyone know it’s worth pursuing.
The cool part is, it agrees with everything else you could practice. They all do the same thing! Except, this one works.
But I've got an earring with a feather in it! That must count for something.
Obi-Dan? Not quite right for a stormtrooper maybe, unless it's a diss on the pompous jedi.
If I learn to levitate pears, then I'll go looking for a good name.
Or a hot girlfriend like Princess Leia's mom. With all the alien makeup.
We'll have to see what the next film (and the last, at least for a little while) does to the legacy of the nearly obliterated Jedi. Luke Skywalker stated emphatically to Rey that the Jedi had to end. What springs up in their place...
Sound familiar with the (possible) end of don Juan/Castaneda's lineage? Or rather it's explosion across the world into a new form...
So Rey is Dan?? Maybe we can get bit parts!
It's very Tao that a dark side by rule has to emerge along with the force, and the only way to defeat it is to remove the counterpoint in an ultimate sacrifice.
Joseph Campbell, the mythology scholar, was also a heavy influencer of George Lucas when he wrote the original script in the 1970's.
That makes a lot of sense! If you wanted to write a blockbuster, basing it on universal archetypes from myths would be the way to make it resonate with as many people as possible. There are archetypal elements in Castaneda's work too of course, which may be why it has captured the imagination of so many.
I read that there's a script advisor in Hollywood that consults with the writers on major big-budget special effects type movies, and compares their script against The Hero with a Thousand Faces to see if it jives. If an element is off, they'll adjust it to fit with what's layed-out in Campbell's work. That's how much the studios swear by it.
I've never watched them! So I had to up look up the reference. This is very Buddhist too (I know I'm a bore, but I'm very much on the esoteric and philosophical ends of the Buddhist spectrum, not the shave your head end). Whatever we perceive, we're perceiving it with our mind. Nothing that we perceive or know about can be outside of mind, or what would be perceiving it? This of course extends to our body (and spoons), which is perceived by our mind, and as far as we can ascertain, exists for us only as a thought.
I had a Chinese friend ask me a good question, after I pointed out the references to obscure and powerful (magical) Buddhist sects occasionally pointed out here. Especially, someone mentioning that the Buddha himself used super powers as a marketing ploy to spread Buddhism.
He asked me, so what happened?
From his point of view, the Buddhist leader community runs powerful political organizations controlling local prostitution, minor opium production, major land and building deals, and is absolutely devoid of anything but fund raising desires. They take in children for sex, and keep them as hoodlums and workers.
He grew up walking to elementary school, and passing the allyway behind the temple where they had little buildings for "confession".
Even in respected places like major Buddhist temples in Japan, the 15 year old "tea ceremony" girls are essentially prostitutes for wealthy donors. But with a happy Asian face on the practice.
I guess I shouldn't complain about me-too naguals too much. Degradation of esoteric stuff seems universal.
Important edit: That wasn't said to discourage the Buddhists among you. In fact, I've been very encouraged by them. I had no idea Buddhism was so close to Carlos' techniques.
That reminds me of the time I told a Russian woman about Buddhism in Chinese and Japanese areas. I told her the honest truth. But she never talked to me again (so far). Russians are touchy...
Haha, I'm not sure you can blame that on Buddhism, that's just people being shitty. No more than you'd judge Zuleica's technique based on the cat videos on a wannabe nagual's facebook page.
True. But being born into a Christian nation, I like to hear that the Buddhists are just as perverted as our priests.
Plus, the Buddhist "confession" booths are highly tempting. I have to force myself to walk by, and not go check out the offerings.
Fortunately, a white guy in the areas where those are located is the ONLY white guy there, so everyone is curious which product or service motivated you to visit. Can't get away with nothing...
I've had dogs going by on scooters bark at me, being the only "threatening" looking person they could identify at scooter speeds.
Absolutely, as you point out, degradation of esoteric stuff seems universal. As soon as the tonal gets its hands on it, it becomes skewed. It's the tonal's predilection to look for patterns and commonalities and then apply them in the hope that the mysterious events of the second attention might somehow be replicated. It can do the most horrendous things when it thinks it's acting on good principles.
Random thought, what are you wearing during excursions to different realities in waking dreaming? The same clothes you have on, pajamas? What about bare feet? Do you walk around in non-linear time for weeks ala shoeless joe? This may offer a litmus test as to which body your consciousness is occupying.
I can't recall checking that out. It's pretty startling to be awake and go into a dreaming world. Local fashions hasn't come up yet.
But I did notice carpet in one of the worlds. It was like an endless antique concession mall, where each little room has its own personality because its a different vendor. Except there was plenty of water around. Bath tubs, saunas, ponds even. Lots of beings lounging around in water.
I just hope I don't end up naked in bed with Carlos, the way Carol Tiggs did.
I found the perfect pic for this!
https://imgur.com/rxqoGA7
Someone suggested this might be the dreaming emissary. That would explain why it chatters so much for some, and also the anger. The voice of seeing, in it's useful form, is just "matter of fact".
We should be able to find this out fairly soon, since all you have to do to encounter it is learn to be silent enough to fall half asleep. The hard part isn't doing that. Forcing silence with eyes closed in a chair is super boring. Sure to put you to sleep.
The hard part is stopping in the middle where you retain volition, which of course is a form of heightened awareness. A sleepy form.
The more people we have learning dreaming, the faster we can go helping other people.
Fascinating stuff, and he says anyone can learn it. PDF of one of his books here if anyone wants to try!: Limitless Mind: a Guide to remote viewing and transformation of consciousness
RUSSELL TARG
The site where that pdf is found, the-eye, has LOADS of free books and other resources too, including most of the Castaneda books plus old interviews and the like with him. Look in the federaljack folder or even easier do a site search on google: "site:https://the-eye.eu castaneda".
"Self Liberation through Seeing with Naked Awareness" that Targ mentions is by Padmasambhava, the guy who introduced Buddhism to Tibet, converting all the inorganic beings that had been bound to older shamanic traditions as he went, and can be found pretty easily.
I bet Targ has seen some stuff! He alludes several times to remote viewing and the like having been pushed, seemingly intentionally, out of our world view. Any ideas why?
They've only been pushed out of Western cultures and any current cultures that have erroneously chose to or have been forced to adopt Western cultural mindsets.
Various Eastern and certainly most Indigenous cultures across the globe never pushed anything out.
I think it was necessary for Western cultures to develop along the current material-world-minded path in order to solve the most pressing real world problems for all of humanity. The sciences have absolutely allowed for a much better quality of life for the masses of humanity.
But now we're stuck with a mindset and outlook that are no longer serving us, but instead restricting us to a path that will inevitably lead to obliteration. The goal has been largely accomplished (though there are obviously a lot of adjustments still to be done), but we're still playing by a set of rules that largely blind us to better alternate paths.
The current path the world is on can also be described as utilitarian, which raises the question of why something that has proven so useful is not more prominent, one of Targ's points in the video though he never offers an answer, and backed up by his lecture being removed from Ted. And perhaps also why sorcery techniques tend to be restricted to secretive societies in the west (masons, etc., scientologists, certain religions). I wonder if the explanation is as simple as their having been drowned out by sciences or if they're intentionally suppressed or withheld from the general population for whatever reason.
This may sound a bit sexist, but I think one of the reasons is the whole 'keeping up with the Joneses' mindset that most women fall victim to, and that most men cursory fall victim to if they want a relationship with such a woman.
The lion share of history's greatest visionaries and outsiders, both scientific and mystical, were bachelors. They recognized that the price that most women ask, what you would have to give up, is too high.
There are women that aren't so material-minded, but they're a relatively rare breed in my experience.
Most men aren't that complicated, and seek to cover their simplistic primal desires before any other considerations. In other words, if you want to know why more people don't know or practice these things, look no further than the penis.
I don't believe in global human 'illuminati' type conspiracies, I think it gives people too much credit. We are, in our current state, not that powerful on a spiritual level unfortunately. We have been debased for too long...
The global ones seem a reach, certainly. Someone posted a link to an forum interview with an alleged member of an "elite insider family" from some message board, and it was interesting but didn't contain any secrets I'd guess not available to a midlevel mason; lodges and similar societies exist on local, regional and national levels all over the world. On principle, if something does offer an evolutionary advantage over others, it makes sense a group would try to keep it for themselves and avoid others getting it.
That was me. But I still believe that no secret group has the power to stop someone determined to uncover the truth. The plot of The Matrix is a good example. The machines are literally jacked into Neo's cerebellum, and he still breaks free by choosing to do so.
The truth always gets out, eventually. The will and energy to pursue/search for it is another matter. It has to come from somewhere, and it's usually not available while tied to the concerns of the "utilitarian world."
Yes, and the proof of this may lie in this forum. Or in many of the books in the-eye and other online repositories. It's definitely out there, but in the west at least, as you note, you're generally seen as a bit of an oddball if you show much interest. It's not necessary to stop everyone. As Chomsky says, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” Remote viewing has been successfully removed from acceptable opinion.
I'll add that women, not men, control the world. That's because, they control the formation of the internal dialogue in most people.
I don't mean that women can change the crummy nature of brutish men. Men are still going to beat them and do bad things.
But as an example of women controlling things, in Taiwan, women used to bind the feet of their daughters, so they couldn't be mistaken for farmer's daughters, which were a dime a dozen. They'd tie up their feet and let them grow up with their feet horribly restricted. The result was that they could only wobble when they walked.
Men joked it was so they couldn't get away, and I guess that was part of the lure. You have permission from the family to do as you will.
But it was the grandmothers binding feet, not the men.
The Japanese took over, did horrible things there, made an educational system, created railroads and government buildings, and generally made Taiwan prosper despite Japanese brutality. And they put a stop to foot binding.
What was the reaction of the women? They taught their little girls to take very small steps when they run. Visit a Taiwanese office building and see for yourself. The women over 50 will do that funny running.
A good question to ask in this regards is, who actually supports the oppression of women in the middle east? Couldn't mothers end it in one generation if they wanted to?
When it comes to sorcery, I suspect women are vastly superior. But it's not #1 on their minds. That's the problem.
Can you quote what he said about being pushed out of our world view?
He alludes to it more than saying it explicitly, but I may be inferring too much.
Around 4 minutes he talks about his work at SRI (Stanford Research Institute, I think), and how his colleagues and he were eager for their peers not to think them nuts, and mentions they published their work in the most prestigious places and concludes "I just want to emphasize that at the time we were doing this work, this was mainstream, written up in the New York Times, published in the premier journals in the world."
Around 22 minutes, perhaps more subtly: "If you look at google right now […] and search for remote viewing, you'll find more two million pages, […] quite a lot for something that many people think don't exist."
Around 28 minutes he talks about making bank off some futures trading, which got on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and was the feature of a BBC Horizon program (long-running science and philosophy sort of program), and concludes: “In the 1980s ESP still existed.”
Hi Danl999 I'm Flx from Spain.
I was wondering if you could answer a couple of old questions I have about CC, in private. This is mail:
Thank you for the wonderful work you are publishing, and your time.
Regards
I'm a little too old to decipher that email address. Could you put it on one line so it doesn't look like 5 different strings separated by spaces?
But yes, I'd be happy to answer any questions I can, if it causes people to want to practice Carlos' techniques more.
Sorry Dan
is:
is great that you wanna answer my questions. Some of them are over 20 years old :-)
Thanks!
The pity is that we don't have others to answer questions, as far as I know.
What have they been doing for the last 20 years? Eating kittens?
I stumbled upon a sustained action page of questions and responses from I think Corey Donovan when looking up dreaming awake. What I got from his vitriol, in the late 90's, was an inability to separate Castaneda the man and his antics, from his work (Nagualism is as good a word as any). So it goes both ways. Separating the saintly prophet from the corruption of their message by individuals over time...as well as the separation of the imperfect prophet from the perfection of their message.
But if you take "I Was Carlos Castaneda" by Martin Goodman as 'gospel,' perfection isn't necessary to transcend death.
Corey was suicidal when Carlos left us. On the other hand, Carol Tiggs moved his assemblage point and he noticed it.
But that kind of thing isn't enough. I floated up to the ceiling last night, and even that experience isn't enough to produce much benefit in the long run.
It's what don Juan said would happen. When he was young he said he could toss around boulders that a team of men working together couldn't budge, and chop the tops off of tall trees with his leaps. But all it did was scare the Indians around him.
Miraculous feats are hallmarks of progress and reconnection, but the most meaningful changes that this path can bring about are internal ones. Very similar to the Buddha's path, who also developed Siddhis (supernatural powers), but chose not to use them reflexively.
Once, while dreaming, I saw that huge dome Castaneda describes as being an afterlife meeting place, a rendevous spot. Enormous doesn't even begin to describe it.
"Get to a point where thoughts are like thieves coming in an empty house...there's nothing to take." (Thieves are not interested in empty houses, so eventually they stop coming.)
Padmasambhava, aka Guru Rinpoche
Recapitulating "empties the house" so thoughts can't find enough strands/threads/emanations to latch onto, and if they can't get any traction and dig in intending can steer them instead to evaporate before developing.
At least this is what silencing the inner dialogue feels like to me. Unfortunately we're all packrats and have shitloads of webs in our houses!
Thoughts aren't what we're looking for during practice. The analogy of not being able to fill up a cup that's already full seems accurate too.
The good news is, eventually you'll be able to actually see those strands, as you recapitulate. I'm not sure where the balance is between watching those, and going into the potential dreaming scenes that recapitulation can generate. So it's probably best not to look for those fibers, and just follow the instructions given to us by the witches.
But when you can finally see them, you'll be surprised. There are "micro-bundles" there, not just individual strands. The micro-bundles of emanations give off a full fledged "meaning". It almost makes you wonder why we then take those, and group them with more, and end up with very complex things, like an airplane making too much noise in the sky.
Then, given that complex thing, created from other things much smaller, we use our internal dialogue to have an opinion about it. For instance, maybe that airplane is spraying chem trails, as part of a vast conspiracy to reduce the world population.
If we could just not add that extra layer of internal dialogue, we might be able to take apart the things we see, to sense constituent parts. But it's hopeless once we're lost in meaning that has no direct connection to the actual thing we're perceiving. That meaning holds the assemblage point at some unhappy place.
Not to get too Buddhist with a complex explanation like that. We don't need more wise things. It's just that, you HAVE to get rid of that darned internal dialogue, or you'll never see what's going on.
Fire Kasina practice by people on the dharmaOverground (dhO) forum, ongoing explorations:
https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/13519742
Thanks! I was worried they weren't continuing because I didn't see any workshops.
That guy is aware of me. I put a comment on his webpage, and he kept it there. It sort of read like an endorsement for followers of Castaneda. I'm sort of hoping he finds his way here.