An odd thing happened to me a few years back and I'll post it here just in case someone else has a similar experience, so they hopefully don't freak out.
I was sitting in a room with someone and I felt myself sort of move inward or more closer to my core, sort of like what dreaming awake must feel like. From that inward viewpoint at the core of my awareness, I heard myself have a whole conversation with the other person in the room.
Nothing revelatory just regular ho-hum run-of-the-mill chitchat. It was very interesting to say the least hearing yourself have a conversation with someone having no idea what words are going to come out of your mouth!
It was like watching someone else talking but from the an inner and not outward perspective. Kind of like inverse astral projection.
Some discussion on it might help to prepare others for such an odd experience. It's very Nagualist, in the sense that it's likely to be common as one gets more seasoned with practice.
Edit: I should also add that my eyes were open the entire time.
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Sounds like talent to me!
Have you done meditation techniques? I once had a similar experience that was likely induced by simple mantric meditation. I was meditating 6 hours a day for a spell. The rest of the day, I could sit quietly and be somewhere else for an instant. Sort of.
My best guess on what it is comes from a lecture Carlos gave. He was talking about the dreaming double. Up until that time I was thinking about Genaro’s antics with his dreaming double. That was sort of on or off. Either he was in his double, or he wasn’t. And when it was his double, it was a special occasion.
But Carlos talked about the dreaming double like it was always around. It was just that most people can’t see them. He talked about one woman who’s double who “was right there!” He pointed to a spot on the floor on his right side. It was as if the double was standing right next to her from time to time.
He also said something about how most people’s doubles are lost. Out there, and there’s no way to find them.
When it was nearby, you could teach that person more easily. I don’t know if that was because you could teach both of them, or perhaps because someone who’s double was nearby had more energy.
I’ve been around a double woman who’s dreaming body lingered around her quite a bit.
Most of the time I could only pick it up as an orange glow. But occasionally it was actually visible, and looked just like her. I’d only get a glance of it, for a few seconds. Then I’d go to see what she was up to, and she wasn’t around.
On one occasion, I remembered a conversation I had with her about a new notebook her mother had given her. She liked notebooks.
The next day I asked her about the notebook, and she wondered how I knew about it. She’d only gotten it the day before and hadn’t shown or talked about it to anyone.
I tried to remember when that conversation had happened, and although I could recall how we were standing, I couldn’t fit it into any timeline I was aware of.
I just wish it extended to dreaming. I used to dream like a son-of-a-bitch, pushing and pulling a dream version of this antique mason jar around with my will and other massively clear and detailed lucid dreams.
But for the last couple of years I go to sleep, and wake up 8 hours later and there's literally nothing in between. No dream recall, no getting up to pee, just out like a light-switch. It's been very novel for a long-time insomniac, but very depressing. I miss my dreams! Or rather the memory of them.
It's why I'm so interested and motivated by your modified version of Zuleica's technique.
You'll certainly get dreaming that way!
One bad side effect. Losing the human form. It sucks a little.
I read up on La Gorda's account. She had a massive heart attack and was in bed for a week or two.
Hopefully because we have to do all this on our own, it'll be a little smoother than that.
The odd thing is I don't even know how I fall asleep each night. I used to fret and worry, hence the insomnia. Now it seems like I'm out in less than a minute most nights.
Where was this? I came across an interview with Castaneda from 1980 I think where he talked about the others from the Eagle's Gift were with Florinda in Chiapas, he called her the Señora Tolteca, they had a musical group or something. Then Castaneda and La had gone stalking as Joe Córdoba and his wife and worked at a truck stop for a year or so, where he learned to cook eggs. Was La Gorda around in the 90s at all in LA? I wonder when the division took place, or perhaps he was always playing a few hands. The Amy Wallace book has him rushing out of their hotel after their first tryst to meet a mysterious group. This is all a bit gossipy, I have to admit, all for the tonal.
In the 90s? There were rumors of her hiking in the Santa Monica mountains, near the sorcerer’s cave. But I always thought it was earlier.
Since you mentioned it, I guess it could have been in the 90s. But it’s been a long time since anyone talked to me about that.
I believe the person who might know would be Pat. I’ve tried to provoke her a bit, but she didn’t seem interested. I suspect she got a husband and moved on.
Come on Pat, we need your lovely gossip!
La Gorda’s musings on the human form are a few dozen pages past a chapter entitled, “La Gorda”, in “The Second Ring of Power”.
I see her as a source of misinformation and chaos, possibly on purpose.
La Gorda talks about seeing a giant eye when she closes her own eyes, and that the eye can pull her into dreaming. From how she talks, it seems like something everyone would see.
But I’ve never seen it. And I can go into dreaming directly from awake, something she says she couldn’t do.
I really don’t expect to be seeing the “third eye” like that anytime soon. Nor do I expect to hear the voice of the dreaming emissary.
I have however, seen the mold of man. I didn’t realize it at the time. But I was poking around Carlos’ books recently, and realized the mold of man wasn’t the same thing as the human form.
And yes, you can ask the mold of man for something if you see it. It might even invite you to ask. When I saw it around 20 years ago, it said something like, “What did you want to ask me?”
That scared the shit out of me, and I ran to the bathtub for some cold water. If I hadn’t stopped reading Carlos books (because he told us not to), I might have realized what it was. On the other hand, I wouldn’t have independently confirmed what he wrote about it. That’s always nice.
Verifiable stuff aside, it could be that don Juan just went with whatever his apprentices discovered, the same way he went along with the power plant stuff regarding entities like Mescalito or the little smoke “Ally”.
Maybe it was pretty much just to challenge Carlos’ view of things, and make him think there was an alternative.
Or maybe that stuff in the earlier books was concocted by Carlos to hook readers, in cahoots with whoever don Juan really represented.
It sure worked. It’s hard to talk people out of those earlier books. Must be about like trying to yank eagle feathers from a live bird.
Now that you've had 20 years to ruminate, if you saw it again what would you ask?
Probably nothing.
The odd thing about it is, Carlos never says there's no God and no heaven.
The mold of man is supposed to be God, and that's what I knew when I saw it. I just knew that.
I would ask why did this (flyer's mind/disconnection) have to happen to us as a species, though I think I already intuit the answer. And more helpfully, is there a foolproof way for a totally ignorant and average person to be awakened and set on the path, or to interrupt that imposed mind. Something universal and effective, without fail, that would work despite any resistance they might try and throw up.
In some ways, the fliers mind is a tool for dealing with stuff, using abstractions.
I'm afraid to say, it's only going to get worse with technology. Eventually people might not even poke their heads out and look at "reality" for months at a time.
So finding something to help people is likely irrelevant.
Just like producing mass transportation systems is misguided. I'm always hearing talk about putting a train in the middle of the freeways here.
It's a really bad idea. Self-driving little cars that can even stack themselves while traveling on those freeways are coming soon. No one will want to wait for a train.
I don't get this. Please, when you have time, explain.
Carlos used to talk about how people “gloss”.
Part of what he meant is that once you can think about something using language, you stop paying attention to most of its details. And the language comes with prejudices built into it. He called that “syntactic commands”.
This becomes very obvious if you learn to get silent. Your senses become amazing. Super hearing, super sight, super smell. And you stop making syntactic associations (somewhat).
But from a computer point of view, imagine trying to write a program to identify trees, in random pictures. I suspect even google hasn’t fully succeeded in that.
But our brain can. Not the internal dialogue part, the rest of it.
By the time any information gets to our internal dialogue, there’s almost none left. Just a word or two representing a vast amount of information.
If we scare the flyer and it takes his mind, do we lose the ability to use abstractions?
How can we communicate with our peers without these abstractions?
Science says we need these abstractions to save energy.
Maybe the mind of the flyer was what set us apart from the monkey hundreds of thousands of years ago? What made us human?
Dig into my post on U.G. Krishnamurti, he had the exact same problems you're speculating when he himself lost the human form:
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/bfeku8/ug_krishnamurti_on_losing_the_human_form/
Hey! I didn't know there were two Krishnamurti.
I imagine that one has the patent on the name, Jidhu. :-)
I have a book of his called "Krishnamurti's Diary." It took me a while to know which of the two I was talking about. In the end I have known from the photo.
In the end I found the excerpt you posted from "Active Side of The Infinity." The part where it says that when the flyer leaves, we are left alone at 0.
As I commented to Dan, I have been able to control my internal dialogue quite a bit although he has doubts that this is to achieve the "silent", to see if he clarifies it to me. But if I have realized that there are times that I am silent for a while, without thoughts trying to get my attention and a vacuum is made. I start looking for thoughts myself and I even believe that I do the internal dialogue myself, invoke it or provoke it because I want to have a busy mind.
I don't always do it, only when I'm not doing anything physical.
What is your opinion?
It's basically the most challenging thing a person can try and accomplish, and the fact that you're, or anyone, is even attempting it is a victory in and of itself. Just believe that it is possible and that it is absolutely worth doing, and don't stop. It doesn't matter how slow you go, as long as you don't stop.
Why on purpose? I haven't read it in awhile, maybe her personality would answer that.
On purpose to teach us that there's always chaos when you have multiple people learning sorcery.
Carlos' private classes were a little bit stuffy on the surface, but there were chaotic things going on in the background.
I suspect a common tendency among people interested in such things is to try to give a leader like Carlos, attributes from other religions. Even when he didn't claim them.
Like, can't die, can't get sick, can't get angry.
One interesting thing about La Gorda is her flying technique. One of these days I'm going to go back and read up on it, and give it a try.
(Minus peeing on your own hands).
Good for jellyfish stingers, but I wouldn't want to shake their hand! 😝
I now recommend keeping a bowl of water in the room when you practice gazing in darkness. There does seem to be something about it, and you can see things traveling when you flick it off your fingers.
Do you dip your fingers in the water and do a flicking motion? Or just use it to attract inorganics?
You can bet I dipped it. I want to repeat that flying technique of La Gorda's, but from where I started. It's somehow unsatisfying to have done it elsewhere when I didn't actually travel there.
I could see the water drops moving in the air, and they did stir up lines. But I'd hardly call them the, "lines of the world" as la Gorda did. It's just a jumble of lines everywhere, and most of them bent and broken. But that was only a first attempt.
I didn't think of offering water to the inorganics. And now I can say that in the plural, because my little low energy one brings me back to her world nightly. Not as long as I want though. She seems to want to show me something, and when I don't get it, it goes away. But while I'm there, I always see two or more.
Last time I was pushing and pulling on the multiple inorganic beings there, and discovered it's much better than scooping them around. I guess I got convinced you could lock inorganic beings in a gourd, the way don Juan seems to have done. When I failed to lock one in an Indian basket from Morongo, I still must have believed they can be moved around like that.
But pushing and pulling is different. I haven’t found the optimum method, but they stretch and move towards you, expanding, and move away from you, mutating into a myriad of possible beings. They even seem to get “pulled” from some kind of thick stuff, revealing their lower body.
I pulled and pushed on my little fairy until she became human sized, then I asked her if she wanted to just stand on the floor there. I’m still trying to get her to walk across the room, in full body shape. She looked down at the floor, and her mouth moved! I couldn’t believe it. She animated for me. Usually they just change images, and if they’re talking, it’s at about 1 frame per second (sorry, I design cameras for a living).
She didn’t stand, but I had what I wanted: goosebumps.
Goosebumps = controlled shift of the assemblage point, and fairly far.
In private classes Carlos brought a couple of new women up to the front, and explained how they’d succeeded at moving their assemblage points quite far. On one, he traced the path and it was several feet all around her.
At the time I thought, he’s replacing the Chacmools with younger women???
It didn’t occur to me that he was literally telling the truth, and they had in fact done that. I had the impression you would transform into an insect along the way, and buzz off.
It doesn’t seem to work that way.
And you're using that doorknob/handshake configuration when you're pushing and pulling with only one hand, or with both?
The thought occurred to me, but I didn't use it.
At this point I have to say, I’m not sure me describing what happened to me is such a good idea for others.
But we’ve all been so poverty stricken for so long, I can’t think of anything else to do but provide my own experiences, hoping to lure you into your own.
So remember, the colors can be different, the shapes, how you control them, and which other lights you see. We have accounts from multiple apprentices in Carlos’ books, perhaps so that we know, there isn’t one way things go. And we have examples of don Juan or Zuleica just going with what happens, rather than a set plan.
When they go with what happened, they act as if that were the way they expected it to go, because it always does. But probably, it never goes the same way for different people.
I’ll explain it another way, which came to me while pushing and pulling on inorganic beings.
You have to DO something. If you just sit silently in darkness, you’ll fall asleep.
But there’s no light, so you can’t really do anything.
That gives you no other option but to do a “not doing”.
The particular not doing doesn’t matter, as long as it’s convincing to you.
My technique for pushing and pulling on the inorganics first started with putting my hands on their left and right sides, mostly when they were forming faces, and gently cupping them as if I had embraced their head, and gently pulling them towards me.
I pushed them away the same way, except that I felt guilty for putting my palms right on their noses, so I kept them on the sides, but cupped them a bit deeper so that I could push. I got a weird look from one when I pushed on his face, which is what made me switch methods there. I didn’t want to see that face again.
It worked well, but after a couple of days I noticed, I could push and pull them simply by waving my hand the right way. No contact was required.
And no, I’ve never felt them to be solid. You just put your hands where you would if they were “real”, and simulate the real motion.
The day it feels solid, I’m sure I’ll have goosebumps even on my butt.
I’ll venture a guess on why this teaches you to move objects merely by looking at them. When the inorganics stretch while pulled and pushed, it really isn’t them that stretches. It’s your own perception of space.
A micro wormhole so to speak.
Edited: once
That's what Castaneda did, and it seems to have worked out better than could be expected, which was likely not at all.
I'll offer this account of Buddha and Angulimala,
"Angulimala was a North Indian folk figure known for murder and robbery. At one point, the Buddha confronts him. Angulimala attempts to rush at the Buddha, but can’t reach him no matter how fast he runs. When the killer gets frustrated and asks why the Buddha won’t stand still, the Buddha says he is still – unlike Angulimala who can never be mentally at ease because of rage. It’s the moment of the killer’s “pivotal awakening” that leads to his enlightenment."