Erasing personal history means less than it did when Castaneda wrote his books. The world has changed significantly since the mid-to-late 90's when he died.
Now, a lot of people post excruciatingly detailed videos documenting every possible minutiae of their lives, including their location 24/7. We're flooded with so much overly personal information that someone can say the most outlandish and intensely embarrassing personal info, and nobody even bats an eye.
The sea of data drowns out the fears that the black sorcerers (average men and women) will try and stop or dissuade you from this or any path. Nobody cares, or even has the time to care. There's simply too much endless novelty right in front of us, or just around the corner to consume; and too much shit that has to be addressed.
As long as your not spouting dangerous/violent rhetoric, or enjoy being extremely politically incorrect, you're golden in the 21st century.
[-]
u/dissysissy
1 points2019-07-26 03:16
Isn't this exactly what Castaneda was trying to avoid? As a multi-million dollar author, didn't he seek solace in a being a common man? Don't the black magicians, in this case our friends and family, take you for granted. Isn't it, as you say, too much information?
[-]
u/TechnoMagical_Intent
1 points2019-07-26 03:24
Changing your name and moving to another state may indeed be beneficial if you come from a truly controlling family environment. Only you can personally decide if such drastic measures such as you posted are necessary.
But you also need to be wary of feeding the ego, thinking of yourself as important or needing a pure and trouble-free environment in which to practice. Sorcerer's have historically thrived and grown in such harsh environments, against petty tyrants.
Don't deny yourself the challenge offhand. It may wind up being what most propels you, driving your inner resources to emerge.
[-]
u/dissysissy
1 points2019-07-26 03:29
I've had enough pretty petty tyrants in my life, believe you, me. I'm done with that.
[-]
u/danl999
1 points2019-07-26 17:44
Male or Female?
I only ask because, women are taught (or learn) differently than men. And this is the first chance I've seen to mention some aspects of teaching, regardless of your particular sex (or orientation for the sake of the young folks).
As far as I can tell, women are constantly looking outwards at the big picture, while men look inwards at their private goals, often missing the big picture from a social point of view. This is a drastic difference in how their attention is focused! It's not universal however. I've seen women who respond to male teaching methods. But most don't.
Carlos’ teaching method for women seemed to be, get them to commit to physical intimacy in some form, then he’d give them personal projects just for themselves. Based on the results he’d release some of it to his private classes, which encouraged the specific woman by giving her a little more status in the social hierarchy. A kind of feminine approach to motivation, perhaps. A "Do me this favor, and I'll tell everyone about it", sort of thing.
He also downgraded women, although I could never figure out the cause. The Chacmools were supreme for a while, then he brought in some younger women, stuck sunglasses on them, rubbed his fingers up and down one of their bodies in class, and effectively demoted the “Chacmools” to ordinary inner circle people.
Both odd ways of handling the teaching of female students helped to create a huge scandal when he died, effectively breaking up the various groups he’d formed in his classes, the same way Carlos and the other apprentices were broken up when don Juan left. I have no way back to Cleargreen, Carlos saw to that. On the other hand, I’m still active and so are my own cohorts (most of whom are lurkers).
I’ll propose something horrible: You can’t teach women by telling them to shut up and be silent, because they don’t like to learn that way. You have to show them. And then they have an amazing ability to copy, without having put in the time and effort to achieve what they end up doing.
Just a theory…
Edited: once
[-]
u/dissysissy
2 points2019-07-26 03:38
I want to say, be serious about this. Don't just brush it off as whim. You seem discerning. Help me navigate.
[-]
u/TechnoMagical_Intent
1 points2019-07-26 03:45
If you are serious, I would start off by simply moving. And if you're concerned about internet stalking, dial back your internet presence. These most likely will be enough, unless the petty tyrant(s) your seeking to escape have incredible resources.
I'd hold off on that name change though. There are people who specialize in helping individuals start over, such as wives fleeing abusive ex-husbands etc. They know all the tricks and loopholes. Consulting one, or doing some research, may give you some effective options you may not have considered.
[-]
u/dissysissy
1 points2019-07-26 03:50
I am not running in fear, however, and I think the intent matters. True, they may offer tricks, but I am looking with a hand toward releasing my personal history, notably, my identity or my identity with "who I am" and "what defines me".
[-]
u/TechnoMagical_Intent
2 points2019-07-26 04:07
Changing your name won't do that. Recapitulating will. I'm not the expert on that though, see if u/danl999 comments tomorrow (don't overwork him though, he seems stretched a bit thin at times...there aren't many at his level)
[-]
u/dissysissy
1 points2019-07-26 04:15
I have, indeed, released a lot of my emotional holdings through recapitulation (though I find there is more that I can do). I now feel a distance between my and my family and close friends that wasn't there before. I think this is really positive. I feel I am kinda defined as a "self" now rather than, I dunno, maybe a "nother" (emphasis added).
Thank you. I am going about my name change with little or no guidance. I'm working with what works for me and what I feel is meaningful while at the same time scared to commit to it. Maybe I am scared to claim my power?
This gives me a lot to think about in a new, positive direction.
[-]
u/TechnoMagical_Intent
1 points2019-07-26 14:06
I guess if your given birth name is truly terrible, then changing it would be a good idea:
All my life, I have been erasing personal history, without erasing my personal history. How? I didn't know it was a concept, I didn't know about Carlos nor his books until 2016. It just turned out that I have moved countries and cities, just due to my international life since early childhood. When I was in my late teen years, I could feel how "friends" and people hung out with, were holding me back from moving ahead and achieving the things that I wanted. When I had enough, I just changed my number and moved to another town, or just changed my number. There is nothing wrong in that imho. Today I selectively contact some of my old friends, just to be in touch, they can't drag me back anymore, and it is good to speak again with people from the far past, they can remind one about important things, which one has forgotten. For example situations which are healthy to recapitulate etc. Changing a name is like giving one self a new piece of software. In my experience, once a baby is given a name - a certain destiny is chosen. I genuinely think that if you have chosen to change the name, there must have been something in your life that has been bothering you, and now, your fear has kicked in, you are about loose your identity and values. But a new name means a new set of values and identity. Sounds exciting but it is scary :) fear is the first enemy of man, and very hard to beat :)
[-]
u/danl999
3 points2019-07-26 17:04
I took don Juan to heart, and ditched everyone I knew for 17 years. Eventually Carlos told me to go back to my family.
I'm glad he did, because now I know enough to explain to others what your friends and family can do. And how to deal with it.
They drag you back to the oldest positions of your assemblage point they can find, in an effort to manipulate you for their own gain. If they see you changing and it isn't better for them, they try to convince you it's a bad change, and you need to cut it out. If things get out of hand from their point of view, they spread rumors to get other family members and friends to help push you back to where they want you to be.
On the other hand, dealing with that is good stalking practice. Carlos was probably advised to dump his friends and family mostly because don Juan was zapping him in the background, taking him to the space between worlds, and giving him to Zuleica to learn dreaming. None of which he was aware of in his daily world. So the urgency of leaving everyone might have been related to don Juan worrying Carlos was going to skip town in the long run.
Conclusion? I have none, but I think you can make it work either way. You'll need to recapitulate to reduce the ties. And then pay attention to their behavior, rather than judge it.
Just like the recapitulation, you don't remember past events and curse or thank people based on the event. You just try to understand the events, and what sort of pattern there might be, especially involving your own behavior. And a wonderful bonus of recapitulation when done while learning silence is, you can actually learn to see the emanations leaving as you exhale, and being sucked back as you inhale. You have to get to heightened awareness, but that's not so difficult.
For formulalife’s sake I have to point out, when I see an opportunity to put out more info, sometimes whoever triggered it ends up looking like the straw man. It’s not intended.
[-]
u/danl999
3 points2019-07-26 16:35
If you missed my mention of it, in private classes Carlos told us to stop reading his books.
I didn't understand at the time, but now it's perfectly obvious. People get wrapped up in his books, and don't actually learn sorcery. They just reshape their behavior to appear to be practicing. Or you could say, they practice what they understand and which is very easy to do, and ignore the hard stuff like learning to get silent.
Some then go out in public and parade around, so that others will marvel at their sorcery powers. Some give themselves cool “Indian” sounding names. Some manage to get a little fame, at which point they start to make up new material, so that people will have a reason to keep returning to admire them, and give them money.
I hope some of those actually practice sorcery, but it’s easy to see on social media that the usual course is for them to become obsessed with getting more social media likes. They retweet cute kitten videos and angry politics because that gives the strongest results in terms of people responding to their wonderfulness.
And so instead of learning to be silent, they’ve learned to be so noisy that they infect the population of people actually interested in learning sorcery. They mellow out the angry politics with the kitten videos, which only re-enforce the human form. Rather than being a benefit to teaching Carlos’ techniques, despite being frauds, they become a detriment to it by making it seem like a noisy mess of stuff that doesn’t really work.
That’s what can go wrong with Carlos’ books. There’s the real secret behind sorcery, then there’s all the fluff don Juan added on.
Some of the fluff can’t possibly be serious! It’s all good advice, but you have to wonder if don Juan wasn’t sitting around with Genaro joking about what sort of back story they could make up, to get Carlos be behave better. And to keep him from being sucked back to his old life by his friends and family. They had a lot invested in him, and couldn’t afford to lose him.
Best way to avoid all this is to watch out for being all hat, and no cowboy, as they say in Texas.
On the other hand, stalking is a very powerful technique. I’m too lazy to do it often, but while stalking you pretend to be someone else, and if you’re really good at it, you become someone else.
That’s every bit as powerful as any form of meditation I’ve seen, considering that all I’ve seen simply alter the internal dialogue in some manner. Becoming someone else is the ultimate modification of internal dialogue, and when it’s modified (or better yet silenced), your assemblage point will eventually drift.
All sorcery cool stuff happens because the assemblage point has shifted. It doesn’t much matter how it got shifted. Drugs will shift it, fright, a sorcerer pushing it, an Ally, or my favorite, looking at things from the second attention while holding silence.
I can’t advise you on the name change, but there probably won’t be much benefit from that, unless you change who you are to go along with it.
Any new behavior lights up emanations you haven’t used before. I’m not quoting from the books here, I can see it. That releases energy, or maybe more precisely, it gives you a little shock, and then more movement of the assemblage point is possible.
As a technique, stalking is supreme (but not nearly as cool as dreaming).
By forcing silence and gazing at colors and inorganic beings in the darkness, I can hold heightened awareness for a full day (sometimes). And while it only lasts a day at most, I can repeat that as long as I'm willing to practice for a few hours in the middle of the night.
On the other hand, the last time I went stalking, I held heightened awareness for 2 weeks as a direct result of it. I only lost it because it’s damned hot and humid in South East Asia. They don’t they spend much money on air conditioning. I got shocked by being overheated, and that pushed it back to normal (more or less).
So stalking is harder to set up so that you get the best results, but lasts longer. Myself, I prefer the one day method. I'm lazy. (For the sake of intent, I'll add, lazy like a programmer, where it's considered more positive than negative.)
Edited: once
[-]
u/TechnoMagical_Intent
2 points2019-07-26 17:42
Do you have a new name picked out? If so you could try, as an exercise in Stalking, moving to a new and totally unfamiliar area for a few weeks and stay in the new Stalking persona. A trial run as it were.
You could pattern it off those past, and maybe present, scumbag dudes that have two separate families in two different states. Then having two names would be better than one, and legally changing it would be an unnecessary (to you) hindrance.
Don Juan and Castaneda had different names for their different realms of activity and/or Stalking personas. I don't think either ever legally changed their actual birthnames.
17 Comments
Erasing personal history means less than it did when Castaneda wrote his books. The world has changed significantly since the mid-to-late 90's when he died.
Now, a lot of people post excruciatingly detailed videos documenting every possible minutiae of their lives, including their location 24/7. We're flooded with so much overly personal information that someone can say the most outlandish and intensely embarrassing personal info, and nobody even bats an eye.
The sea of data drowns out the fears that the black sorcerers (average men and women) will try and stop or dissuade you from this or any path. Nobody cares, or even has the time to care. There's simply too much endless novelty right in front of us, or just around the corner to consume; and too much shit that has to be addressed.
As long as your not spouting dangerous/violent rhetoric, or enjoy being extremely politically incorrect, you're golden in the 21st century.
Isn't this exactly what Castaneda was trying to avoid? As a multi-million dollar author, didn't he seek solace in a being a common man? Don't the black magicians, in this case our friends and family, take you for granted. Isn't it, as you say, too much information?
Changing your name and moving to another state may indeed be beneficial if you come from a truly controlling family environment. Only you can personally decide if such drastic measures such as you posted are necessary.
But you also need to be wary of feeding the ego, thinking of yourself as important or needing a pure and trouble-free environment in which to practice. Sorcerer's have historically thrived and grown in such harsh environments, against petty tyrants.
Don't deny yourself the challenge offhand. It may wind up being what most propels you, driving your inner resources to emerge.
I've had enough pretty petty tyrants in my life, believe you, me. I'm done with that.
Male or Female?
I only ask because, women are taught (or learn) differently than men. And this is the first chance I've seen to mention some aspects of teaching, regardless of your particular sex (or orientation for the sake of the young folks).
As far as I can tell, women are constantly looking outwards at the big picture, while men look inwards at their private goals, often missing the big picture from a social point of view. This is a drastic difference in how their attention is focused! It's not universal however. I've seen women who respond to male teaching methods. But most don't.
Carlos’ teaching method for women seemed to be, get them to commit to physical intimacy in some form, then he’d give them personal projects just for themselves. Based on the results he’d release some of it to his private classes, which encouraged the specific woman by giving her a little more status in the social hierarchy. A kind of feminine approach to motivation, perhaps. A "Do me this favor, and I'll tell everyone about it", sort of thing.
He also downgraded women, although I could never figure out the cause. The Chacmools were supreme for a while, then he brought in some younger women, stuck sunglasses on them, rubbed his fingers up and down one of their bodies in class, and effectively demoted the “Chacmools” to ordinary inner circle people.
Both odd ways of handling the teaching of female students helped to create a huge scandal when he died, effectively breaking up the various groups he’d formed in his classes, the same way Carlos and the other apprentices were broken up when don Juan left. I have no way back to Cleargreen, Carlos saw to that. On the other hand, I’m still active and so are my own cohorts (most of whom are lurkers).
I’ll propose something horrible: You can’t teach women by telling them to shut up and be silent, because they don’t like to learn that way. You have to show them. And then they have an amazing ability to copy, without having put in the time and effort to achieve what they end up doing.
Just a theory…
Edited: once
I want to say, be serious about this. Don't just brush it off as whim. You seem discerning. Help me navigate.
If you are serious, I would start off by simply moving. And if you're concerned about internet stalking, dial back your internet presence. These most likely will be enough, unless the petty tyrant(s) your seeking to escape have incredible resources.
I'd hold off on that name change though. There are people who specialize in helping individuals start over, such as wives fleeing abusive ex-husbands etc. They know all the tricks and loopholes. Consulting one, or doing some research, may give you some effective options you may not have considered.
I am not running in fear, however, and I think the intent matters. True, they may offer tricks, but I am looking with a hand toward releasing my personal history, notably, my identity or my identity with "who I am" and "what defines me".
Changing your name won't do that. Recapitulating will. I'm not the expert on that though, see if u/danl999 comments tomorrow (don't overwork him though, he seems stretched a bit thin at times...there aren't many at his level)
I have, indeed, released a lot of my emotional holdings through recapitulation (though I find there is more that I can do). I now feel a distance between my and my family and close friends that wasn't there before. I think this is really positive. I feel I am kinda defined as a "self" now rather than, I dunno, maybe a "nother" (emphasis added).
http://www.thebear.org/essays2.html#anchor515747
Thank you. I am going about my name change with little or no guidance. I'm working with what works for me and what I feel is meaningful while at the same time scared to commit to it. Maybe I am scared to claim my power?
This gives me a lot to think about in a new, positive direction.
I guess if your given birth name is truly terrible, then changing it would be a good idea:
https://www.boredpanda.com/funny-unfortunate-names/
All my life, I have been erasing personal history, without erasing my personal history. How? I didn't know it was a concept, I didn't know about Carlos nor his books until 2016. It just turned out that I have moved countries and cities, just due to my international life since early childhood. When I was in my late teen years, I could feel how "friends" and people hung out with, were holding me back from moving ahead and achieving the things that I wanted. When I had enough, I just changed my number and moved to another town, or just changed my number. There is nothing wrong in that imho. Today I selectively contact some of my old friends, just to be in touch, they can't drag me back anymore, and it is good to speak again with people from the far past, they can remind one about important things, which one has forgotten. For example situations which are healthy to recapitulate etc. Changing a name is like giving one self a new piece of software. In my experience, once a baby is given a name - a certain destiny is chosen. I genuinely think that if you have chosen to change the name, there must have been something in your life that has been bothering you, and now, your fear has kicked in, you are about loose your identity and values. But a new name means a new set of values and identity. Sounds exciting but it is scary :) fear is the first enemy of man, and very hard to beat :)
I took don Juan to heart, and ditched everyone I knew for 17 years. Eventually Carlos told me to go back to my family.
I'm glad he did, because now I know enough to explain to others what your friends and family can do. And how to deal with it.
They drag you back to the oldest positions of your assemblage point they can find, in an effort to manipulate you for their own gain. If they see you changing and it isn't better for them, they try to convince you it's a bad change, and you need to cut it out. If things get out of hand from their point of view, they spread rumors to get other family members and friends to help push you back to where they want you to be.
On the other hand, dealing with that is good stalking practice. Carlos was probably advised to dump his friends and family mostly because don Juan was zapping him in the background, taking him to the space between worlds, and giving him to Zuleica to learn dreaming. None of which he was aware of in his daily world. So the urgency of leaving everyone might have been related to don Juan worrying Carlos was going to skip town in the long run.
Conclusion? I have none, but I think you can make it work either way. You'll need to recapitulate to reduce the ties. And then pay attention to their behavior, rather than judge it.
Just like the recapitulation, you don't remember past events and curse or thank people based on the event. You just try to understand the events, and what sort of pattern there might be, especially involving your own behavior. And a wonderful bonus of recapitulation when done while learning silence is, you can actually learn to see the emanations leaving as you exhale, and being sucked back as you inhale. You have to get to heightened awareness, but that's not so difficult.
For formulalife’s sake I have to point out, when I see an opportunity to put out more info, sometimes whoever triggered it ends up looking like the straw man. It’s not intended.
If you missed my mention of it, in private classes Carlos told us to stop reading his books.
I didn't understand at the time, but now it's perfectly obvious. People get wrapped up in his books, and don't actually learn sorcery. They just reshape their behavior to appear to be practicing. Or you could say, they practice what they understand and which is very easy to do, and ignore the hard stuff like learning to get silent.
Some then go out in public and parade around, so that others will marvel at their sorcery powers. Some give themselves cool “Indian” sounding names. Some manage to get a little fame, at which point they start to make up new material, so that people will have a reason to keep returning to admire them, and give them money.
I hope some of those actually practice sorcery, but it’s easy to see on social media that the usual course is for them to become obsessed with getting more social media likes. They retweet cute kitten videos and angry politics because that gives the strongest results in terms of people responding to their wonderfulness.
And so instead of learning to be silent, they’ve learned to be so noisy that they infect the population of people actually interested in learning sorcery. They mellow out the angry politics with the kitten videos, which only re-enforce the human form. Rather than being a benefit to teaching Carlos’ techniques, despite being frauds, they become a detriment to it by making it seem like a noisy mess of stuff that doesn’t really work.
That’s what can go wrong with Carlos’ books. There’s the real secret behind sorcery, then there’s all the fluff don Juan added on.
Some of the fluff can’t possibly be serious! It’s all good advice, but you have to wonder if don Juan wasn’t sitting around with Genaro joking about what sort of back story they could make up, to get Carlos be behave better. And to keep him from being sucked back to his old life by his friends and family. They had a lot invested in him, and couldn’t afford to lose him.
Best way to avoid all this is to watch out for being all hat, and no cowboy, as they say in Texas.
On the other hand, stalking is a very powerful technique. I’m too lazy to do it often, but while stalking you pretend to be someone else, and if you’re really good at it, you become someone else.
That’s every bit as powerful as any form of meditation I’ve seen, considering that all I’ve seen simply alter the internal dialogue in some manner. Becoming someone else is the ultimate modification of internal dialogue, and when it’s modified (or better yet silenced), your assemblage point will eventually drift.
All sorcery cool stuff happens because the assemblage point has shifted. It doesn’t much matter how it got shifted. Drugs will shift it, fright, a sorcerer pushing it, an Ally, or my favorite, looking at things from the second attention while holding silence.
I can’t advise you on the name change, but there probably won’t be much benefit from that, unless you change who you are to go along with it.
Any new behavior lights up emanations you haven’t used before. I’m not quoting from the books here, I can see it. That releases energy, or maybe more precisely, it gives you a little shock, and then more movement of the assemblage point is possible.
As a technique, stalking is supreme (but not nearly as cool as dreaming).
By forcing silence and gazing at colors and inorganic beings in the darkness, I can hold heightened awareness for a full day (sometimes). And while it only lasts a day at most, I can repeat that as long as I'm willing to practice for a few hours in the middle of the night.
On the other hand, the last time I went stalking, I held heightened awareness for 2 weeks as a direct result of it. I only lost it because it’s damned hot and humid in South East Asia. They don’t they spend much money on air conditioning. I got shocked by being overheated, and that pushed it back to normal (more or less).
So stalking is harder to set up so that you get the best results, but lasts longer. Myself, I prefer the one day method. I'm lazy. (For the sake of intent, I'll add, lazy like a programmer, where it's considered more positive than negative.)
Edited: once
Do you have a new name picked out? If so you could try, as an exercise in Stalking, moving to a new and totally unfamiliar area for a few weeks and stay in the new Stalking persona. A trial run as it were.
You could pattern it off those past, and maybe present, scumbag dudes that have two separate families in two different states. Then having two names would be better than one, and legally changing it would be an unnecessary (to you) hindrance.
Don Juan and Castaneda had different names for their different realms of activity and/or Stalking personas. I don't think either ever legally changed their actual birthnames.