The Kogi tribe in Colombia:
From birth the Kogi attune their priests, called Mamos (which means sun in Kogi), who hold highly respected roles in Kogi society. Selected male children are taken from birth and put in a dark cave for the first nine years of their lives to begin this training.
Tibetan practices:
According to what I have heard from men who have spent long periods of seclusion in darkness, these hermits enjoy, at times, wonderful illuminations. Their cell becomes bright with light or, in the darkness, every object is drawn with luminous outlines; or again, a phantasmagoria of shining flowers, landscapes and personages arises before them.
Tibetans see the kaleidoscopic mirage as entirely subjective, caused by the uncontrolled agitation of the mind. When the latter is brought near stillness, the phantasmagoria vanishes. There remains only a spot (thigle) which may be either dark colored or like a diminutive globe of light. At first that spot moves and the aim of the practice is to fix it.
The stage in which the spot remains motionless, without undergoing any change in size, color, etc., is the moment when the mystic is able to concentrate his thoughts on any object he chooses without any other ideas breaking his "one-pointedness" of mind. The next stage is marked by the disappearance of the spot which sinks in utter darkness.
~Alexandra David-Neel
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Magic and Mystery in Tibet is a seminal work, priceless on multiple levels. The success of which was derived, in no small part, from the fact that she was a woman. The Tibetans of that time would not allow male foreigners to freely roam their lands, much less make anthropological studies. She was allowed to do both simply because she was an old woman. Nobody cared.
The Chinese oppression and decades long war against the culture and religion of the Tibetan people has pretty much destroyed the world that that book describes. If it all stopped tomorrow, I fear it would still take generations to recover...and likely would never be able to completely restore it's pristine magic.
I must confess one of the indulgences that I still long for is true physical solitude. TOTAL. Like dropped by aliens on a remote planet under a galactic no-trespassing enforcement solitude. Living on a world with 7.6 billion people will do that to you.
And I just Google'd, it's up to 7.7 billion now. Jesus it's getting crowded in here...
Sounds wonderfully like Zuleica's technique to me, except that I have some problems with the conclusion.
Certainly the cave could paint with scenes. Last night my entire bedroom seemed to have been made from dark grey shale, hand carved with statues doing things. They even started to go about their normal activities, but still carved out of stone.
But other times, my bedroom ends up surrounded by other worlds that look the same as this one, but unique to themselves. Like visiting a foreign country.
And seeing a single dot in the middle? I don't believe that at all. That's something for them to concentrate on producing, to help remove the last traces of the internal dialogue. It's not a universal truth leading to something.
Someone made it up or misunderstood something else (maybe the author), and it got passed down the same way book deals go. One person exagerates the previous.
I'm not putting that down, that's a wonderful practice. But don't take it as a roadmap; it's lacking at several levels.
As for the single object, I was shocked to see a big eye in front of me in the darkness last night. I'd read about it while trying to figure out how to do La Gorda's flying technique (which I got to work, sort of).
But seeing that eye, especially after having posted here that it's silly to think that's universal, I couldn't help but speak out loud.
I said, "Come on La Gorda, you expect me to believe everyone sees this lame eye thing?"
It went away.
Newbies: All this was after 12 hours of gazing at darkness in silence, so it's not like this sort of thing happens easily or frequently. If you know someone running around with constant tales of power like this, he's likely making it up.
But if you hear about having to sweat blood to get small things to happen, that's more truthful about how this path goes. It works, but it's far harder than anything you've ever tried to do.
Edited: once
Care to elaborate, or do you want to wait until you get better results?
It was part of combining the first attention and second attention into a single body, which can get messy and confusing.
But I can promise, if any of you takes Zuleica’s techniques to heart, you will indeed form the luminous body of the second attention. It just won’t be as flashy and satisfying as Carlos’ account of the process. It’ll mostly be tedious.
Fortunately, you have me to tell you, the tediousness pays off. Go ahead and watch the cute kitten videos if you like, and maybe you can get angry about politics a tiny bit per day, but remember that hard work to get silent pays off much better.
And certainly, you’ll be able to look down and see your second attention’s luminous body, tentacles and all. I even tried counting how many tentacles last night.
That’s really hard to do. And almost impossible to explain how you could absolutely be looking right at them, and not be able to count them.
Best explanation I can give is, there’s several longer ones, but only one is visible at a time. The attention has to focus on what it wants to see, and mine is limited to one.
The others are there, but I can’t focus my attention on all of them, so that I can count them.
Remember, seeing isn’t always directional. Usually it’s not. What that means, according to Carlos, is that you won’t see people’s luminous cocoons walking around and such. If you want to see one, that’s all you’ll be seeing for the duration.
You’re perceiving with the whole body, not the eyes. Maybe even the skin gets involved in gathering information.
It’s puzzlingly non-directional most of the time. And yet, you can in fact learn to see the luminous energy body of the second attention, which seems to me to be contained within the first attention’s luminous shell. Or maybe, Zuleica’s technique pulls it inside that, so that it’s more usable.
If someone manages to get to that point, I’ll video tape the tensegrity pass used to teach it to move around. It seemed to be Carlos’ favorite at times. But Zuleica gives the fundamentals in case that never happens.
And remember, there's some concern regarding Carlos accounts, as to whether people were in dreaming together when they did “impossible” things. We haven't really resolved whether it's possible to violate causality.
But in general, I was doing Zuleica's techniques in darkness, noticed a bunch of lines, remembered La Gorda’s flying technique, jumped up and hugged some, and hung in the air. I even reached over and put a big X on some dusty boxes about 14 feet up, so I could verify later if it really happened.
It was frigging wonderful! I mean, bliss, excitement, optimism. Being in the energy body can be wonderful.
And so while I made the technique work, and the experience was worth the 10 hours of effort, trouble is, I was at work, not at home. I started practicing at home, and did that technique at work.
I supposed I traveled there and did it in my dreaming body, which I guess doesn’t count for much.
Much better place to practice that technique however. The ceiling is very high. It wouldn’t have worked in my bedroom with the 7 or 8 foot ceiling level.
The main thing was, it felt absolutely normal. Wasn't like dreaming where everything is kind of weird, and you feel different and have to fight for lucidity.
I suspect it's the kind of dreaming, "only accessible from silence". When you recount it, it sounds like normal dreaming. But it’s not. You go into dreaming from awake, don’t have to fight to keep lucidity, and can end it anytime you want. Or sustain it as long as you like (within reason).
It’s an interesting technique, at the very least.
There’s a bunch of techniques like that flying one, in Carlos’ books. Especially regarding the apprentices.
Hopefully some day we’ll extract them as a list of steps, so they aren’t lost in the narrative.
Oh you have got to get a ladder and check for that X! Tell the maintenance guy you need something in that box, and act disappointed that it's the wrong box.
It's pretty high up! I just took a look back there (I'm at work now), and coincidentally found a ladder right near where I wanted to look.
I went up there and verified the top of the boxes had the same dusty look. That might seen obvious, but in fact I didn't expect to see dust on top of them. The Chinese boss moved a bunch of them around recently, which is what made it possible for me to try that technique.
Otherwise, that part of the warehouse would be been too cluttered to do it.
It seems he'd cleared a perfect space where I could do the technique, and even left a ladder for me to use. I'm clueless about what kind of ladders we have around. And it was in fact an unusual occurrence. Anyone working here would tell you, he's never cleared it out like that before.
But no X on the few boxes I examined, and it's a bit dangerous going up there at my age. Maybe I'll keep an eye out for next time they bring down some of those boxes, and look for the X.
Until one of us violates causality in a believable fashion, I'm just going to assume that you can't, but that it seems like you did at the time, and it's wonderful to be able to do things like that, so Carlos took some liberties in reporting all the details.
Could be something as simple as, causality is escapable, but not alterable.
I have more details on this experience of traveling to work in my dreaming body. It could come in handy for those of you visiting a foreign country. I wish I knew about it the last time I was at the forbidden city.
First, it’s no where near an ordinary dream, but you’ll have to find that out for yourself.
I believe what happened was, I spent a good 12 hours forcing silence at home on the weekend, then went to work to feed the tropical fish. The building was empty, so it was very dark. I noticed the big warehouse had been cleaned out, leaving a nice big space. I went in to see if I could summon blobs of color, and maybe even hypnogogic images. It’s hard to resist dark spaces once you learn waking dreaming.
I did get some colors to form, and a vague hypnogogic head.
Then I went home, and later that evening resumed silence in darkness.
I suspect that by copying that technique a little bit at work, I focused my second attention. And then later, when I was forcing out the last bits of internal dialogue and fantasy images, I went blank. But instead of ending up assembling another world, I ended up at work. At precisely the same spot I was when I decided to check out the dark back storeroom.
I was a little confused, but figured I had fallen asleep at work. Then I started to feel a super creepy feeling, the one absolutely associated with Carlos’ allies hanging out in the area.
That should have made me realize what was going on, but it didn’t. In such a state you have most of your reason, but not all of it. In particular, silence causes you to give up the concerns that can’t be resolved, and also you stop questioning “where you are”. Meaning, you are where you are, instead of constantly keeping track.
So the technique is this: Learn to get silent in darkness, stare at colors, scoop them in closer, form the second attention’s energy body, and then you can focus your second attention elsewhere, and return there in your energy body.
I’m not saying you could learn to do this on demand. I suspect that’s our obstacle. Thinking you can learn to do something on demand, easily.
You probably can’t. But in the course of the frustration of not being able to duplicate what you believe is important to duplicate, you discover all the fine details which turn out to be more useful in the long run. You will learn to do things on demand, just not the ones you thought were important.
Can you do it too? You can if you actually work at it. That’s all that stops people. Not working on it.
In Carlos’ case, he was with Zuleica all night long. It wasn’t an hour here or there. Don Juan dropped him off in heightened awareness, and he practiced all night. Carlos cleverly hinted at this when he wrote that one of the people in don Juan's party had said that dreamers never lack for sleep, even though they practice all night.
Did you miss the hint? You have all the time you need; give up half your sleep time for a while and see how you feel.
Sometimes, Carlos just went into a pleasant state and remained there, to learn that it wasn’t all that useful, wallowing in bliss. Naturally that would count as sleep, even though he was aware of it.
I don’t know how long it took Carlos to form his second attention energy body, but I suspect he returned to Zuleica for weeks, not days. But I’ve “half” formed it, if that’s possible. And I’ve only been trying out Zuleica’s technique for a couple of months at the most.
Carlos probably didn’t make it clear how much work was needed because he knew there would be rewards along the way if any effort at all was made, and he didn’t want to discourage people.
Just to clarify and keep this knowledge sinking in through repetition, does the scooping energy in closer along with the "harp string" finger movements 1.5 feet out and 4 inches right of the navel form the energy body? That harp string movement is to draw the second attentions assemblage point in closer to the body...hopefully permanently, does that also help form it?
I had to self-correct when I realized I wasn't reaching out far enough. It's basically at full arm extension distance, and my arm gets tired quickly so I switch off with the right hand claw feeling for "cobwebs" technique.
Also I notice what I assume is the subconscious (flyers mind) 3 hour barrier problem. I lose all sense of time in the dark and think I must have been at it for 4 hours by now and should call it a night, only to find it's only been between 2 and 2 1/2 hours. Haven't got to or past 3 hours yet.
You’ll get past 3 hours when your assemblage point moves enough to make it very pleasant. I mean, very, very pleasant. Like Yogananda’s account of his master having angels fly over him in his bed. It’s just like that! Except, the angels are really creepy.
As for the harp string effect, I suspect that’s a tiny bit of a trick.
Carlos showed us a movement in class where you just scoop your hands on your sides, towards the middle, while you rock your hips gently. That has the same effect as Zuleica’s technique, but also combines trying to feel the floor with the tentacles of the second attention energy body.
But I use both, just to make sure. Zuleica’s technique has the advantage of forming “dark waves” you can visually see, from the fingers wiggling. And also, I can’t prove this, but it seems to please inorganic beings. Perhaps tickling that area releases energy they crave.
(Let me mention that pulling and pushing them as Carlos wrote, is better than my scooping technique, though both have their effects.)
Remember, there are multiple ways to pull those colors closer to the body. You can swish into it, the way crazy Josephina did, you can let the orangish red spot envelop you, and you can get more active and try to scoop the colors.
Reaching out very far helps stir up unused emanations, always a good thing. When you learn to be perfectly silent, you’ll be shocked to see your arm painting streaks of colors in the air. It’s amazing.
But Zuleica’s point is just in front of your stomach, and slightly to the right. It’ll be a lot easier when you can see it.
3 hours by the way is great, but it has to be with very good silence or you’ll just be fretting. Eventually the silence is automatic. No effort required, because your perception is focused entirely on the second attention (thus why it’s good to have absolute darkness).
Permanently? I’m afraid, possibly nothing is permanent with sorcery. However, if you keep that up, pretty soon you’ll have a well formed second attention energy body, and that might indeed be permanent. But if you go back to the old suffering life, you likely won't notice it anymore, except in dreams.
So maybe a lot of it is permanent, but the problem is, it's all about where your attention is focused. That's a choice.
Edited: once
yup. that's the idea.
I knew I missed something in this. The cobwebs!
You have got to learn to feel those. You'll be shocked how real they get.
Three nights ago, I felt my hand scrape across a smooth surface, like a wooden table. It was absolutely real. But I was sitting on pillows on the bed, with no tables even remotely close.
I moved my hand up very, very slowly, to make sure it couldn’t possibly be a real surface, like maybe the bed or sheets. Even though it clearly felt hard and solid and flat, I thought there must be some explanation.
There wasn’t. I moved it up 2 inches from where it was, and even down one inch. I hit nothing. But I could still feel it at the location I had first detected it.
Hard and smooth as anything, and absolutely solid.
All I can figure is, it was some detail of the luminous shell of the second attention.
Then last night, I found a cobweb that produced a feeling in my ankle when I detected it with my hand. Usually, they go away after you feel them and you have to search for another.
This one was there to stay. I tried for at least 10 minutes to find an explanation, all the while reminding myself, it’s good to focus your awareness on anything coming from the second attention, even sense of touch, because it moves the assemblage point. However, the feeling was so concrete and stable, that eventually I had to move on.
My suspicion: forming the second attention’s energy body using Zuleica’s technique eventually makes it real and solid, whatever that could possibly mean.
So keep feeling for those cobwebs! And while you’re at it, listen well to see if you can find sounds that can’t possibly be there.
That’s Silvio Manuel’s technique, which should be practiced next, once you master Zuleica’s technique.
And remember the ants, if you get stuck and can’t feel anything. The smallest ones are from Argentina after all, one of Carlos’ favorite places to get apprentices.
I wave my hand the way Carlos described for finding an ally in the wilderness. But you can rotate the wrist any way you like. And also, eventually you'll feel cobwebs while doing Zuleica's harp playing, though I have to say that's rare for me so far.
"As thick as water", she said. It's absolutely true, though it's not wet, and isn't everywhere. She was describing the resistance you feel, and that it's certainly strong and real, but doesn't prevent your fingers from wiggling.
"Teasing the web" is what Kylie called that movement, and I believe it was associated with "forming the frame of the energy body".
Odd coincidence? No. Carlos actually took all the good stuff from his books, wrapped it up in Howard Lee's Kungfu as a tribute to HYL, and gave it to us so it wouldn't be overlooked.
Then something went wrong...
Edited: twice
>> Odd coincidence? No. Carlos actually took all the good stuff from his books, wrapped it up in Howard Lee's Kungfu as a tribute to HYL, and gave it to us so it wouldn't be overlooked.
I have been thinking about why tensegrity is like a martial art with embedded magical passes, as you have said on other occasions.
And what Carlos did is very logical. For example, when you write a story, you prepare the reader with the story, you activate areas of his brain with the rhythm of the paragraphs, the words, active memories emotions and when he reaches a certain state (let's say his assamblage point is ready to move) ... bang !! ... you release the most important part of the story and follow the narrative. I guess Carlos knew all that in an intuitive way because he was already a writer. If they tell you that the magic pass is to move the arm and grab something without being in a proper context: presence of nagual, place of power, ... it would be like going to the gym and doing squats.
Carlos found in the forms of taichi the narrative he needed to tell his energetic story.
Is just a logic theory.
Makes sense to me. Also, he wanted Howard to join his group, and help take over when he died. Maybe if Howard had, the witches and Kylie would have stuck around.
Carlos was hanging around martial arts institutions all over Southern California. I can place him at 3 locations, 20 years apart.
I don't know if it was the association with the witches, or his own interest. But I can say, martial arts from the 60s to the 80s were post WW2 people from Hong Kong, Taipei, Tokyo, and Seoul. They were scattered to those places by the communist Chinese.
And they brought the weirdest stuff along with them in some cases, in order to boost their customer base.
Stuff hard to resist investigating. Shape shifting, teleportation, and exotic chi gung were common. I studied at more than 15 of them for decades, searching for something like Castaneda.
One Hopkido studio had some of it. Old Korean sorcery. And certainly Ueshiba was a Japanese sorcerer, of sorts.
Not tai chi, but Choy Lai Fut.
Not that it matters. From what I saw, Choy Lai Fut is just a vanilla Chinese kungfu style not dissimilar to Japanese Kenpo. Which is also a 1960s sort of style.
Old school that is.
Last night I had another example of how the second attention’s energy body might actually become solid through Zuleica’s technique.
I was playing with water and la Gorda’s flying technique. I didn’t get the red lines to form, but it does produce results, even after just a few attempts.
It created an amazing buzz of lights all over. That’s normal, but not so quickly. Those usually come after a long time of silence.
I went and sat on the edge of the bed, hoping my low energy inorganic would show me her world again.
I felt my foot slide on the floor. That was weird, because when I sit on the bed, my feet are a few inches above the floor. But I clearly felt it.
I lowered my foot a bit by leaning, and it was indeed 2 inches above the floor.
But I felt the floor anyway, and it was indistinguishable from feeling it the normal way.
I had just commented on something from the books that's directly related here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/c4r42t/buddhism_meets_sorcery/ew73o6f?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
It's a pickpockets or street magicians dream to have an actual third arm to do sneaky stuff with. I can only imagine what else it could be used for 🤫
Maybe I had a third foot last night, when I could feel the floor, but my real feet were 2 inches above it.
Zuleica's technique leads to that.
It also leads to easy silence. Easy. Automatic. Hard to believe when you're starting out but eventually you find a "sweet spot" that feels so good, you only have to invoke that feeling.
It feels like the creepness of darkness, as children feel it. If you take a 5 year old to Disneyland, they're still a little too young to enjoy any of the rides where it gets dark right away.
They can feel something, and they realize there are things living in the darkness. It produces intense fright, but it's more like electricity.
That's half the feeling of internal silence. The other half is bliss.
Creepy bliss, that's what silence is.
I guess the meditation folks only seek out the bliss, so they miss out on all the weirder stuff.
Maybe that how, or at least one of the how's, some of the runners of pre-columbian times were able to travel 3-4 feet off the ground. They were running with "energy body stilts" extending from their physical legs.
Edit: maybe if you worked at it you wouldn't need a ladder to see the X in the dust on that box!
Maybe that's the only way it's possible, who knows?
Speaking of which, reading la Gorda's flying technique more closely, there's a disruption to the continuation of the Tonal. A break. Carlos finds himself to have fallen over, after la Gorda lands on the ground.
I'm afraid the implication there is, they were both in dreaming when she demonstrated flying. She didn't violate causality.
We've all been hoping for someone to violate causality, because that's the only way to convince people like auxiliary7 of the value of the experience. If there's no profit in it, it's delusion.
I'm not sure that flying technique is going to solve it.
Sounds full of fucking shit to me.
Robot or person? I'll take a chance you're real.
Full of shit is the best kind!!!! There's nothing more exciting than learning to do things that others won't believe. I mean, what's the ultimate compliment, assuming you aren't making stuff up? Someone who gets angry and jealous and calls you a liar, because they've been unable to make any real progress.
Carlos went through a period of seeking out other “gurus” and such. When I heard his accounts of it, it gave me a little doubt about him. I’d heard criticisms of his works, as being taken from bits and pieces of all kinds of philosophies and techniques.
But now I realize, it’s inevitable that people go looking for answers. When he lost don Juan, he was still only slightly past beginner. And he undoubtedly discovered things he didn’t understand, and for which he could not recall any answers from don Juan.
But the good part of going looking for answers is, once you get to the point that you need them, you have the ability to judge if someone you’re visiting is the real thing or not.
This post illustrates that. Here’s a technique so similar to Zuleica’s, you can tell right off the top that it’s not bullshit. That is in fact how it works.
Well, not the part about locking up children for 9 years. Unfortunately, that’s an Asian tendency. Maybe Columbian also, since they're notorious for child trafficking.
But in Asia, children are often given to the temple, because the parents are too poor to take care of them.
And, the temple's use of them isn’t always for good purposes.
I'll add that one of the ways you can tell someone is for real, is to ask them a question.
In particular, I'm planning to visit an old martial arts master soon, to ask him about his light walking technique.
If he reacts badly to being asked specific questions, you know for sure he's a fake. All of these techniques seem to lead to the same truth, probably because we're all using the same body and brain. If a question seems alien to him, and full of fucking shit as you say, he's only a posturer, probably so he can sell techniques that don't work.
Edited: twice
Sounds like a post full of fucking shit to me.
So do I know you? Former Carlos student?
I'm always hopeful to get some back.
No one's pulling your leg here, thus no reason to kick.
No, I just don't like the the spiritual being associated with delusion when it's supposed to lead to the opposite.
You want to debate it? Better to go read the comparative posts here.
You'll learn that all spiritual techniques simply alter the internal dialogue.
Sorcery shuts if off, to see what's behind it. Socrates recommended it, and a bunch of other meditation types. It's universal.
Even judeo/christian spiritualists know about it. Contemplative meditation also merely alters the internal dialogue, which is why it produces the amazing results it can.
However, until you realize that, you're at the mercy of spiritual types, who are in it for the money.
We have 2 sides. Society has suppressed the stuff you call delusion. They tossed it out, because it was too much trouble.
The problem with that is, we badly need it. And so as people age, they end up on Prozac or anti-depressants. Or alcohol or drugs. Or sex.
They're trying to find that other half of themselves, the one you call delusion.
Trouble is, that one can travel to other worlds, and even affect outcomes in this realm.
And so, most religions sell their beliefs with tales of supernatural occurances. I don't know of any which don't.
But they can't actually do what they say.
You've gotten used to that, and seem to get miffed when someone claims they can.
Why not simply try it and see? Go look up the simple silence technique, and try that a week.
You'll be ahead of the spiritual game if you do that.
And no one needs to give any donations to a guru, preacher, or other parasite, in order to learn sorcery.
That's the spiritual part. It's free.
The version of me in your head and the reality are out of sync, stop being deluded.
Then it's curious that you found your way here, to this remote sub-reddit.
It's about as obscure as you can get.
That's not related to our discussion, I'm simply telling you you're forcing words and ideas on me I've never expressed.
How about this from your postings:
I just had another profound realization, we've been doing the same thing with reality as well. The animal spirits, the ghosts, all the unknown is just our brain making the illogical into logical. This is what Zen points to, that even our reality is just our brain's version of it, a logical version of it. And when you think about that it becomes a crazy thought. What if there are billions of pieces of reality, like a jigsaw, and you're taking them in at all times. And then your brain takes these pieces of reality and constructs logical concepts of it. For all we know we could actually be those jigsaw pieces observing the brain's brilliancy at organizing us.
My conclusion: I pissed off someone and you came to look. Just a guess. I sure hope it wasn't a cleargreen groupy. Those guys are the same as me, there's no actual competition. I just have my own style.
There's plenty of people to piss off out there, but I'm only interested in preserving Castaneda's techniques by getting people to stop pretending and get to work.
And I don't give up easily, on former followers of Carlos.
It's the standard scientific reductionist view of a chaotic and meaningless universe, versus the everything is part of a grand design and nothing is meaningless view. They are so polar opposite that clinging to one automatically prohibits identifying with the other.
As in most things, actual reality is in the grey area between these two views. Or maybe, as most will realize in this path, in a completely different field that we can barely comprehend.
It gives me a headache to even read it.
Better to get silent, play with inorganic beings, and assemble other worlds.
So put down the cute kitten videos, the speculative interactions with other people, and silence your mind for real.
It's really worth it!
Here's an example: Two nights ago I was assembling another world, the world of what someone here proposed is a low energy inorganic being. I have no idea, but it shows up once I get silent.
I was pushing and pulling on her friends, when I saw some red-orange fibers streaking across the room. Those are what la Gorda described for her flying technique. I’ve been trying to make that work for a few days, and each day I get closer.
I had the idea, if I had a sleeping mask, like the one Carlos put on the cover of Art of Dreaming, I could slip it on right now, turn the lights on in the room, and find out if there's a way people who can't practice in darkness can substitute a sleeping mask. The transition would be free of light, so the wonderful things going on in the room ought to either change, or not change at all. It would be good if I could tell others if that works.
I had that thought in perfect silence. It wasn’t internal dialogue, it was just a wish.
But I wasn’t likely to do anything about it. I’ve got too much else to do.
The next day I was walking around my business. The loop takes about 6 minutes. I like to do it in silence, and watch all the weird things going on in the world, that people ignore.
When I got back to my doorway, and just 15 feet from it, right in my path, was a perfect sleeping mask. It was in pristine condition, sitting right there on the grass, as if someone had placed it there for me.
That’s intent. If you treat others well, and are interested in esoteric matters, it’ll take a fancy to you, and help you out.
If you fuss around in your mind all day, rubbing other people the wrong way, it probably won’t.
Note: The mask is for you guys, courtesy of intent. I’ll give it a try next time things are ideal.
Last Thursday I ordered a very special pair of goggles/mask from a company in Slovakia. They should be here in a few weeks. They cost around 33 euros.
I intend to post a detailed review of their efficacy. They're designed for a sport for the blind called Goalball, which uses adhesive patches over each eye along with a modified pair of ski goggles to ensure all players are equally sightless.
After emailing the manufacturer in Denmark (I think!) she assured me that they engineered them to render someone sightless without the need for the patches, and that they had plenty of room for open eyes, by design.
Wow, those are great!
The problem with the sleeping mask is, it presses against the eyeballs. So you have to close them.
If you close your eyes, you're headed off for sleep, by habit.
But, if you walk around while doing it, you're headed for sleep walking. That’s exactly what we want! Or call it “heightened awareness” if you prefer.
So I'd say, if you walk around you can use anything, and go ahead and just close your eyes. But you’ll still need a mask; it’s not dark enough just to close your eyes.
We want the eyes to crank up the amplification, and try to color balance the scene. That produces the colors.
But if you have to sit on the bed because you have a spouse and can’t walk around, you'll fall asleep for sure until you learn what movement of the assemblage point feels like. A sudden movement of the assemblage point, in the beginning, usually produces unconsciousness.
Those goggles would solve both problems.
So what's the deal with falling asleep? I'd like to comment on that a bit. It’s a little advance. Most of you should just be looking for colors.
But once you get them, what to do next?
You want to stop the world. Once you do that, you’ve arrived. You’re officially a “sorcerer”. You can finally get that Boy Scouts sorcerer badge on your shirt. Mine never arrived, so if you get one I’d like to know what color it is.
My technique for stopping the world is, to sit up on the bed with my eyes open, in total darkness. I only do that once I’ve been walking around playing with colors, and can feel that my assemblage point has shifted to heightened awareness. It’s unmistakable! Your breath will tell you, not to mention all self-pity goes away and you feel darned good and happy.
Then sitting there, maybe on some pillows, and it’s ok to lean your back against the bed, you force out any trace images. Internal dialogue is already gone, but you can’t have even a single image of a cute kitten video, a hamburger, or an electric bill in your mind. Not even for an instant.
About 15 minutes of that and you’ll fall over. Or your head will bump forward. You may even feel like someone slapped your left shoulder. That’s the assemblage point shifting suddenly.
Don’t move. Don’t fret. Start over. If your head slumped, move it back up. If you feel a tingling or goosebumps, relish them. But still, don't do anything.
If you feel that you will fall asleep again because it’s happened several times in a row, give your cheek a little slap.
Yes, I said slap yourself in the face. But not hard. Just a little is enough to fight off sleep.
Carlos advised putting the hands on either side of the rib cage, just below the armpits, and squeezing hard until it hurts. He used opposite sides, so that the arms were wrapped around your chest, but I think that's too hard. Just pinch hard below your armpit.
The first time it’ll hurt like the dickens! But after that it doesn't hurt much, so I don’t use that technique often. Nor do I use the one where you press the thumbs into the top of your hipbone.
I got into trouble on that technique, by bringing a full sized medical skeleton to class.
Typically, I just slap myself to keep awake.
Continue removing the last traces of images, and suddenly you’ll be somewhere else. Hopefully it’ll be a blank space.
If you get there, you stopped the world. Don't worry. It'll be so freaky, you won't have any doubts. Awake one second, with eyes open, and in a yellow world of sand, the next instant. You can actually walk around. Except, you probably won't have a body.
If you hit the absolute jackpot, you’ll be staring at an infinite expanse of glowing fibers of amber light, stretching into infinity, with other worlds visible in bundles or knots of fibers. Sometimes it can look like a flame coming towards you. If you see that, stare into a flame and you can stay in that world for hours.
The other thing that can happen is, you don’t stop the world. Instead you travel to another place. Either another world, in a body you seemingly borrowed from there, or in a real place in this world, but in your energy body.
In those cases, you didn’t stop the world. But it’s still very entertaining.
Edited: Twice, to clarify it's only sudden movements of the assemblage point which tend to produce unconsciousness. And to correct some mistakes.
That is the most spine-tingling goosebump-raising occurance of "ask and you shall receive" one can hope to witness! It's so astounding, that I can see why others have such a hard time believing in "a separate reality" as it was once put. It flies in the face of common sense, which is a pathetic shield when confronted with the power of infinity.
Even now I myself with all I've experienced and awakened to, which amounts to a hill of beans, my rational (flier) mind says "what's he trying to pull...he's got to be lying...that kind of shit just doesn't happen...what are the odds, they're astronomical etc. etc." Anything and everything, including constructing elaboratley detailed scenarios in which it could theoretically occur, to keep us anchored to this view and no other.
Most are simply not prepared to accept such a view of a participatory universe where intent and consciousness are directly involved in the assembling of reality. They're both terrified that accepting such a view will send them off the rails, and queazy at the thought of admitting we have such a level of responsibility over our current state of affairs.
Hey, TechnoMagical_Intent, just a quick heads-up:
occurance is actually spelled occurrence. You can remember it by two cs, two rs, -ence not -ance.
Have a nice day!
^^^^The ^^^^parent ^^^^commenter ^^^^can ^^^^reply ^^^^with ^^^^'delete' ^^^^to ^^^^delete ^^^^this ^^^^comment.
Hey /u/CommonMisspellingBot, just a quick heads up:
Your spelling hints are really shitty because they're all essentially "remember the fucking spelling of the fucking word".
And your fucking delete function doesn't work. You're useless.
Have a nice day!
^Save ^your ^breath, ^I'm ^a ^bot.
Well there is the story of the flooded basement. That's even weirder.
As it turned out, the mask was a power object. I never had one of those before. Maybe just being in the path of intent is what turned it into that.
I tried it out last night and the results were really spooky. I'll write about it in a post.
But let me take the time to repeat what I first wrote here, to make things clear to intent.
My name is Daniel Lawton. I'm a former student of Carlos' Sunday classes. My intent is to preserve the techniques given to us in class by Carlos, so that they aren't lost to future generations.
From Eagle's Gift:
Seems like what a lot of "magical thinking" is based on, put a Budai statue in your business, a rabbit foot on your keychain, etc., and it may beckon intent without really understanding what's going on. Better to be fully aware of what's going on and beckon intent with the eyes, of course.
I find it only happens to me when I am silent, and not even premium level silence. It's more of an impulse than a coherent thought. It should have the small print "Ask and You Shall Receive (no thinking allowed)."
I can personally attest to the fact that in one's daily life the beckoner/caller of chances function of the second attention, and the interpreter function of the dreaming body, actualizes more and more as they are synergistically exercised.
It can get downright spooky when it happens multiple times in a single day. And it's the best kind of proof, because you can't easily dismiss it when it keeps happening.
That's unrelated to the discussion.
Sorry to bother you again, and you have my absolute assurance that although this isn't my subreddit, you're welcome here as long as you like, if you have an interest in Castaneda.
But I can't resist and you might have an answer I'm seeking.
Who taught you that Carlos Castaneda techniques were spiritual?
I can assure you, he would have spent an entire lecture in Sunday classes making fun of that idea. He'd emphasize the "p" in "spiritual", as if a little bit of saliva flew from his mouth onto your face, when he said it.
(I attended more than 115 private classes with Carlos).
Who's spreading the impression this is spiritual, or did you just pick the first word you could think of to categorize something that's really hard to categorize?
What do you mean who taught me that Castaneda? spiritual? You mean why I think he's spiritual? Because of his words of course. And I don't see why it's hard to categorize.
Note while I'm subscribed to this site, I personally don't like Carlos and neither do I believe in everything he said. IMO he made up a lot of shit and his books have subtle spiritual lessons that are more important to me than the main points of them which seem to be very full of imagination.
But then again has anyone ever succeeded in wording the wordless...
Someone else said the same thing to me as this, that Carlos' "warriors way" had benefited a large number of people.
I have to agree. But I still think it's a mistake to focus on that, and not actually learn to get silent.
If you get silent, you'll stop the world.
Why are you under the impression that stopping conscious awareness to reveal the subtle one will somehow change anything. The higher consciousness doesn't have an ego, how can it change anything without wanting to... You can't even talk about it in a way of having or being.
Do you favor the hindu view, daoist, or buddhist?
Somewhere around Daoist, Buddhist and Zen. Keeping things simple. Not trying to explain the illogical and thus unexplainable.
You're ahead of the game then. One thing that'll block someone, is only studying one thing. Like Zen.
The profiteers and religious types do a number on your head. I'm sure there's a few people in here who can remember being arrogant about how what they were doing was the one true path.
I don't study anything anymore and don't plan to. I don't have concrete plans, maybe some psychedelic drugs. I've had great luck with just not being.
In that case, Carlos would have approved. I know because, one time I started to promote his early workshops in dieting forums. I'd lost 30 pounds doing tensegrity with him, so it seemed logical.
He was laughing when he brought up the topic. I guess it was the second or third time I was in hot water. But after he made fun of it, he shook his head up and down like a "yes", and just smiled.
You mentioned tensegrity a few times what do you mean with that? What does that resemble?
Tensegrity is something you'll automatically discover, if you can get silent.
In general, it's the manipulation of subtle energy, using anything you can to manipulate it. In that sense, it's not restricted to the body, and I've seen tensegrity done with a "jo", a short staff.
But the easiest way to learn what tensegrity is, is to learn to see colors in darkness, by using intense silence.
Then play with them. Use your hands and feet.
The colors become an absolute measure of your ability to get silent. You can't fake getting silent, and you can't fake seeing the colors. You either do, or you don't.
Once you can push the colors around with your hands, (which pretty much all of the official tensegrity moves do), you can learn about inorganic beings (spirits).
All of these things are common to most esoterica, but not in such a pure form.
For instance, "internal" martial artists are fully aware of the power of silence, but they call it emptiness, and give it an attribute it doesn't have. It's not empty, it's full to overflowing.
Still, the best among them manage to do the same things Carlos wrote about. They just get made fun of for doing it, so it's rather a censored area.
There was an old time martial artist, Richard Kim, who had wonderful stories about this, as long as there weren't any "serious" martial artists in the audience, to criticize him and question his stories. He once taught me an energy technique at a workshop, and my very serious Shotokan teacher (Ray Dalke) made fun of it.
At least 2 of the witches knew of Ray Dalke. They probably knew Richard Kim also, even if they didn't realize it.
I tried Richard's energy technique once I could get silent, and it works exactly as he. I saw energy traveling between my fingers. Intense purple lines and sparks.
As to what it resembles, in the long run I have a plan to use Nina Stanley (daughter of Owsley Stanley) to draw up what some of this resembles. The old hippies would eat that up.
I don't think Owsley liked me. I was a bad influence on his daughter.
The concept makes no sense to me, how can you manipulate subtle energy when you are just an ego of the body, the mind, a product of the brain.
You just push it with your hands, that's all.
How can we walk, when we're just an ego of the body? How can we eat hamburgers, or buy beer from Sailor Moon?
By the way I wanted to comment, just about EVERYONE in here likely believes Carlos was making up stuff. If they don't, they haven't been paying attention.
He flaunted that in class, making up stuff so absurd and obviously false, that he got weird looks from his inner circle. But then later, on, everyone pretended it was true.
It was not-doing.
The real question I have is, do any of his techniques violate causality?
All bets are off if it can.
If not, it's still a lot of fun to have spirits to play with and to do amazing things in a dreaming body in the real world.
What do you mean how we can walk? The ego does the walking, the ego does the talking, the ego does the thinking. Your body is like a circuit, there's energy making astounding amounts of rotations per second around the body. Just like a circuit. That's the origin of doing. The only things that aren't originated from the circuit are dreams and the feeling of oneness(love for everything). The only thing that can perceive the doing is not-doing. The only thing that can perceive form is the formless. Only the timeless can perceive time.
If you mean by energy being pushed with hands something like Prana I don't see how that's beneficial to one's spiritual life. Buddha told not to get attached to unwordly powers or Qi, as it's just another delusion.
Felix Wolf seems to have gone this path, after admitting he never had much success getting silent.
However, if you read any of the disciplines which talk like you do, they all admit that being silent reaches the goal.
So just get silent, and you'll have both points of view covered. Cut out the middleman.
Then if you want to be spiritual, or buy beer from Sailor Moon instead, that’s your business.
If you want to understand Castaneda, you have to get silent.
I don't want to understand Castaneda though, I'm not obsessed with his works. I'm just here to do what I was going to do either way.
Thank you, I didn't realize that a potentially large group of people here just wanted the inspirational quotes.
They are pretty cool.
I joined this sub-reddit about reading the book, I've never had actual interest in it.
Apparently they didn't take Robert Frost to heart when he penned:
"And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."
The choice to merely be an average man is far, far less interesting and doesn't move us ahead as a species, or rather toward regaining some part of what we used to be.
The most precious thing a man can be gifted is a worthwhile challenge, one that can potentially benefit not just himself but others as well. So many live lives utterly devoid of meaning, that they must invent fictional challenges just to cope. Here is a real challenge. Don't dismiss it out of fear, it's a lousy reason and you'll regret it.
Dismissing it because it simply doesn't appeal to you is fine, but not out of fear.
Let me tell you what it's like at my stage.
When I get home, I have a choice between summoning the low energy inorganic, playing with her a lot, and seeing if she'll take me to her world, where I can push and pull on her friends, to try to learn to levitate objects. The more I play with her, the more she shows up during the day as a black dot darting past, or even a ghostly figure running across the hall in my home (which has only me in it). If I 'm lucky, I'll get her to manifest in full lighting, and I look forward to seeing what form she takes.
Or I could play with Zuleica's technique and see if I still have my extra "hands". If I do, I can try to grab some junk out of the air, to get it stuck on my hand, at which point I can easily summon one of Carlos' allies. They seem lately, to help me open portals to other worlds.
Or I can flick liquids out in my backyard, trying to see the lines of the world, so I can learn to leap around houses, the way don Juan did for Carol Tiggs.
Or I can just do a variety of things, trying to get my new energy body to actually touch objects in the real world, until I get so silent that I can try to assemble the corridor between worlds, or even better, to see the emanations themselves.
Or I can watch too many Magnum PI reruns and drink wine.
My neighbor has several choices also. He can wash and polish his shiny car, sit around with the family drinking beer, shouting, and watching sports, or he can angrily complain that my sprinklers come dangerously close to touching his vehicle. Or he can watch his wife come out and flirt with me when the macho husband isn't looking.
I guess old Sunday class people also have all kinds of choices these days. They can pretend they've transcended everything and that Carlos wasn't worth the time, getting themselves more attention as esoteric giants, they can gather on social media and call each other "teacher", while they post cute animal videos, or they can fuss and fume with the family they picked up once Carlos died, teaching them to copy their own new life, based on false promises it'll all work out in the end.
Maybe people think that learning to do what you describe means they can't also have block parties or complain about politics. Bullshit! You simply have more choices as to what you're capable of doing, and how does having more choices not make you better off.
You just won't be interested in arguing politics or collecting stamps when you can do what Dan describes. You'll likely figure out how to enhance the things you already love to do with your newfound skills. Again, more options and possibilities.
You could actually have more fun with angry politics and stamp collecting, if you adopted stalking techniques.
I'm a little too lazy for those, but the results could be astounding.
When don Juan wrote that unexpected acts, or acts outside your routine, light up all kinds of unused emanations, he wasn't giving us advice in the same way you get advice from other esoteric doctrines. Most of the time when they tell you something you "should" do, there's really no way of noticing if it made any difference.
You just have to stick the turban on your head, assume it preserves divine energy from leaking out the top of your skull, and go on with your daily routine.
(Hopefully eating excellent Sikh food and practicing sword fighting).
But don Juan's advice means, you'll find out that it's 10 times easier to get weird stuff to happen when you get silent. Just by skipping a bit when you walk, turning around in circles and walking backwards, or pretending you're super passionate about Libertarian policies, you can assemble whole other worlds to play in.
There was some part about smoke and “smoking” defensive or closed people to find out sata about them and “clarify” them? Something about smoke being similar to fog in some way, perhaps by being a sort of “grey noise”. DJ making Carlos sit near open fire for hours until coughing and teary-eyed et cetera.
Have you tried these techniques in or near smoke or open fire?
No, but thanks! There are so many techniques in the books that it's hard to remember even a fraction of them.
Let's take don Juan leaping over a house for Carol Tiggs. That's a technique! It doesn't tell how to do it there, but if you look around, you realize it has to be la Gorda's flying technique.
Which sadly, I'm starting to believe actually requires you to pee in your hands.
I'm walking around with a bottle of Perrier, hoping I can use that. But so far, I only get a few sparks. Leave it to Carlos to get everyone to pee themselves.
I'll send you a box of latex gloves!
Hmmm... good idea.
But I'm still not going to pee myself. I'll just learn to get more silent and see them all the time. Maybe by rubbing energy on my legs.
You can try the gloves for me, but please don't send them afterwards.
Maybe a garden hose as a more prodigious source of fluid? Or that lawn sprinkler you mentioned.
My biggest problem is that there's too much fun stuff to try.
No person could explore even a fraction of what Carlos left us in his books.
In the long run, we need some specialists, the way don Juan's group had them.
I hope this makes people wonder, why on earth people pursue book deals? It's not a good sign.
Check out these if you're vasilating (not for Dan obviously):
https://addicted2success.com/life/how-playing-it-safe-can-ruin-your-life/
Why Comfort Will Ruin Your Life, Bill Eckstrom, TEDx Talks
This is a materialist view, that the mind is produced by the body. It may be so, I have no evidence otherwise, but it is contrary to Buddhist thought, which I saw you mentioned elsewhere. I don't think it really matters though. Other comments also suggest you're doing pretty OK, letting the mind find its own way home.
Only if you define yourself by thoughts and emotions.
This is probably correct. We have such a pathetically low level of understanding of anything that isn't an accepted part of the natural or man-made world in Western culture that the buzzword "spiritual" is invoked to describe anything that we don't entirely believe is real.
There are plenty of militant atheists out there, especially amongst millennials, that seem to enjoy poking their head in amongst various esoteric like-minded groups and lobbing the "you're all idiots!" grenade for shits and giggles.
I don't care enough to ponder on their ultimate goals or motives. They're just shitty people who try to make others feel as shitty as them.
Edit: I invoke my "withhold attention from those that crave it" motto, and intentionally refuse to engage. Engaging with them is what they want, and you're only giving fuel to their dumpster fire outlook.
This was resolved shortly after printing presses were invented, back in the 1600s.
Go look up "Biblioteca Esoterica".
The category is esoterica, not spirituality. Spirituality is in the eye of the beholder, esoterica is not.
I don't have the same problem with grumpy people as you do. Everyone starts out as shit. If you can't get silent, you're still circling around the bowl.
I'll work on it.
Silence. That's the key.
Though even if you can get silent, your family will be able to undo it until you can extract the entangled emanations. I'm afraid to say, we nearly 100% exist in those entangled emanations.
Last week I walked into my local Barnes and Noble and went to try and find the New Age section where Castaneda's books used to be shelved, only to find they no longer had a New Age section.
Most of people's mental focus seems to be tied up with social media and the like, people don't read like they used to. So maybe they simply aren't aware of Castaneda at all, since he was lumped into the whole "New Age" category which seems to have fallen out of favor.
It's all about YouTube these days. The amount of excellent esoterica available has exploded, since you can make a profit from people viewing your YouTube stream. Our little live fish tank turns out a surprising amount of money every few months. It certainly pays for tank maintenance.
Searching I found this Docu made in Spainish National Television (RTVE) about the journey of Alexandra David-Neel to Lhasa, a sort of biopic. Is in youtube now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnYQ8i1zQwQ you can activated English auto-translate subs. Worth seeing.
At some point in the middle of the mountains they are cold and they begin to practice a learned technique that allows them to activate their "internal fire" and thus survive the cold.I found it interesting to comment. I have not read any of his books myself but I understand that he witnessed many interesting things.I'll start with this one to see how it goes: Magic and Mystery in Tibet
That's tummo, the first of the six yogas of Naropa in the Kagyu lineage. It's pretty much what Wim "the Iceman" Hof practises. The Nangchen Nuns are renowned for it. It's pretty well accepted scientifically. Vase breathing is one technique to start to be aware of and control prana (chi in East Asian traditions), similar to what the crazy lung-gom-pa runners mentioned elsewhere do, and the lonemanpai guy who someone else on this sub brought up.
I translated it from Spanish Docu voice, "fuego interno" The word trap :-)
Reading the links of tummo that you have put it is clear to me that it is a technique to shift the assamblage point to a learned position where the cold is not felt.
I think that physically raising the body temperature from 36 to 39 degrees surrounded by ice at -25 C is not enough. The rise in temperature seems more a result than an end.
What would be the equivalent of chi or prana in the Don Juan's tradition?
Man, you guys are good to have around!
Next maybe we'll even be able to analyze Cajun food recipes in terms of sorcery experiences.
Just kidding, but you know what I mean. If we want to blow up Castaneda's teachings and spread them everywhere (don Juan's true goal according to Carlos), we need the feeling of, "Come on in, the water's fine, and your particular religion, sexual orientation, or whatever else doesn't matter."
For that, you have to know a wide range of things that appeal to particular people.
That we are a sealed unit that doesn't permit (easy) entry or egress of energy. You can't suck Chi from a tree or something and accumulate it like a battery or a vampiric Sith Lord (Star Wars reference). It's all about redeployment and working on increasing it's mobility and flow. Only a double being like don Juan or Castaneda had the right configuration for the death defier to access some of it, and he used rarified methods that should probably stay lost.
This doesn't mean that it can't be "externalized." Our luminous spheres are alot bigger than most realize, so it's affects can be inside of the perimeter of our sphere of energy and still appear to be outside of the physical body.
This is a great question. It seems the content of the second attention adapts to the description of it in a way, it's quite subjective, so it may be that if enough people (or beings) perceive it in the same way, it can appear that way to others too. Kind of similar I think to how the tonal comes about, how we totally believe we're perceiving the same thing, while in fact it may just be a subset of the nagual that collectively we've brought into focus or concretion, but still it's fundamentally subjective. Ask Dan about it, he has posited some very interesting theories about it. I struggle to quite grasp it!
You could say that what I've done with Zuleica's technique is like what you mention. Zuleica only intended that to activate the second attention's energy body.
But by playing around with it (because it's pathetically slow to rebuild the energy body), I learned to assemble other worlds, mixed in with my actual bedroom.
It's not hard to imagine that the concept of chi is an attempt to make practical use of the second attention.
In other words, they "conceived" of it, the way sorcerers have conceived of the assemblage point.
Carlos by the way liked to use the word "chi".
From Second ring of Power, about practice in a dark room (in process of changing directions):
...The room was very dark. It did not seem to have any windows. La Gorda grabbed me by the arm and placed me in what I thought was the center of the room. All of them surrounded me. I could not see them at all; I could only feel them flanking me on four sides.
After a while my eyes became accustomed to the darkness. I could see that the room had two windows which had been blocked off by panels. A bit of light came through them and I could distinguish everybody. Then all of them held me the way they had done a few minutes before, and in perfect unison they placed their heads against mine. I could feel their hot breaths all around me. I closed my eyes in order to sum up the image of my gazing. I could not do it. I felt very tired and sleepy. My eyes itched terribly; I wanted to rub them, but Lidia and Josefina held my arms tightly.
We stayed in that position for a very long time. My fatigue was unbearable and finally I slumped. I thought that my knees had given in. I had the feeling that I was going to collapse on the floor and fall asleep right there. But there was no floor. In fact, there was nothing underneath me. My fright upon realizing that was so intense that I was fully awake in an instant; a force greater than my fright, however, pushed me back into that sleepy state again. I abandoned myself. I was floating with them like a balloon. It was as if I had fallen asleep and was dreaming and in that dream I saw a series of disconnected images. We were no longer in the darkness of their room. There was so much light that it blinded me...
Yea, that can happen.
I promise you guys that you can experience things like that.
Carlos once looked me in the eye and said, "I promise you", after talking about what you can experience with sorcery.
I do believe that promise kept me going a time or two.
But I don't have other people around to see if it can happen to a group like that. And even if I wanted to try it in a group, there's no one I know of to do it with.
So for the record, I've never seen a violation of causality, and even wonder if those don't actually happen in dreaming. Once you've dived into a dream while fully awake, and in your own bedroom, you start to wonder what's going on with your "real" body. But it doesn't much matter. The experience is still really cool.
I'd call shared dreaming a violation of causality, if information is exchanged during it.
I've never seen that either, at least which can't be explained as a coincidence.
Mantak Chia's (Taoist) Darkness Retreats:
https://www.mantakchia.com/darkness-retreats/
Great find, vids
here