I'm almost reluctant to post this, after the comments about whether I might be pulling all of your legs, with the sleeping mask gift from intent. I assure you, this is as close as I can get to describing what happened last night, when I tried out the mask. I was as surprised as you would have been.
Anything that's not precise is the result of trying to condense 4 hours into a short narrative. So take it as you will, but it's the truth and you can do this also.
Just give up on the idea that this path is "spiritual". It is not, and never was intended to be. It's just an ancient technology. Go find spirituality elsewhere. I certainly hope the other students of Carlos haven't devolved to represent themselves as "spiritual people".
In classes, Carlos was often reluctant to give details on how to do any given technique. In the case of recapitulation for example, when someone asked him to show the precise head movement, he hesitated, looked over to Taisha, and she obliged. But she kept the description very short, and limited it to answering only the specific question asked. She also kept glancing at Carlos, to make sure it was ok to keep explaining.
Carlos gave out the same lack of information for other things. And that led to doubt in his students. For example, there was a rumor that Carlos had “stolen” Howard Lee’s Kungfu, and Howard wasn’t happy. Carlos could have put that rumor to bed by giving more detailed explanations of the energy balls you can form with tensegrity, and showing how you could have put those moves into any other martial art. Especially perhaps Tai Chi.
But he didn’t. He let the doubts stand. I also believe he was partly remembering the chaos of learning, and how each of the apprentices had come up with their own bizarre result of don Juan’s techniques. La Gorda’s third eye is a good example.
That’s merely a manifestation of the second attention being accessible to her through closed eyes. Many meditators see the room with closed eyes, and you could see “the wall” instead of an eye. But the impression la Gorda seemed to be giving was that anyone would end up seeing that eye.
Carlos may have simply been trying not to prejudice what might develop, with so many apprentices available in his Sunday class and at workshops.
Recently I’ve been reading specific places in his books to find specific techniques which we might all practice. I’ve come to believe that every single one will work if you actually try it. Even something as bizarre as one of don Juan’s apprentices having been said to have grown an extra arm.
I tried to find that just now in the searchable pdf, and was shocked to see that the word “arm” led to technique after technique. I didn’t have the patience to keep looking for the one referring to the extra arm. But we have a lot of cool techniques we can try out, from those books.
Last night I continued my quest to make La Gorda’s flying technique work. If you want to read up on it, here’s a little you could use for a search:
“She repeated the snapping movement of her fingers as she threw her hands over her head, and I saw a spray of long, luminous fibers flying away from her fingers. I had to tilt my head up to see them against the already dark sky. They appeared to be long, fine filaments of a reddish light. After a while they faded and disappeared.”
So far I had this going for me. I had seen the red filaments of light in the past, while rubbing puffs of purple color on my legs, to make them brighter. I’ll describe them in detail, but remember that Carlos probably would not have. The filaments look like a piece of cotton kite string in that they are thicker than thread, but not as thick as a rope. But instead of being perfectly straight, they’re jagged in some indiscernible energetic way. You get the feeling when you look at them that if you could stick your finger in there, it would pick up a lot of energy, maybe even hurt a bit. And the color stands out from anything else I’ve seen watching colors in the dark. They are very distinct. The closest analogy I can think of, is a heater filament which is glowing reddish orange on the way to fully heating up.
While practicing la Gorda’s flicking technique, I had caught a glimpse of a fiber or two in the last few days. If you can get a technique to do something, then maybe you can keep doing it to get more.
That’s not always true with sorcery, but most of the time it is for the small things like seeing colors or filaments.
I started by doing some tensegrity, because I had woken up around 2AM, felt bad from excessive wine drinking and binge TV watching, and wanted very badly to just go back to sleep. As soon as I did a little tensegrity, my assemblage point shifted. That usually takes at least an hour. You can tell it has shifted towards heightened awareness, because your breathing gets automatic and only the stomach moves, and you no longer feel tired.
I looked around the room, only to find that there were solid purple patches everywhere. Not just floating in a specific spot, in random locations. The room was a patch of purple flat surfaces, with details of lines in them. If someone had exploded some light purple fabric so that all the pieces were tossed into the air, but all facing the source of the explosion, that’s what it sort of looked like. You could see the weave of the purple fabric pieces.
My reaction was, “What the hell???!!”
I realized, I had to go get that sleeping mask out of the oven. This was the ideal condition to try it out.
Although the sleeping mask seemed to be a gift from intent, there was no way to know who delivered it. I pictured a homeless person stumbling by with their shopping cart, and a sleeping mask falling out onto the grass. I was afraid to put it on for fear of one of the communicable diseases ravaging the homeless population in the LA area, so I put it into the oven and let it sit for an hour at pasteurization temperatures.
It was in the kitchen. I brought it back to my bedroom, and laid it next to my bowl of water. Both were contained in the same square bowl. The bowls are unique. A Russian visitor had left them. The two of them sitting next to each other on the table looked like I was practicing some kind of Zen water ceremony.
I restored darkness by closing the door, worried the purple lights might not be so bright now. But they were every bit as bright. I walked over to the light switch, put on the sleeping mask, and turned on the lights.
The purple patches were still everywhere! The mask made no difference. In fact, I could even open my eyes with it on.
Thinking I had my answer, I turned off the lights, took off the mask, and went back to trying out la Gorda’s technique. I dipped my hands into the water, and flicked drops as hard as I could, up at a 45 degree angle.
I didn’t see the water drops traveling. But I did see an amazing display of super bright blue lights, the kind I usually associate with an inorganic being’s presence.
I realized, that wasn’t proof that the flicking technique was eventually going to work. The display of super bright lights seemed to be the result of flicking so hard that I jolted my back a little. I jolted my arms up and down so as to copy that feeling in my back, and it did indeed seem to be the cause of the brighter lights.
They were so amazing that I couldn't help but sit down on some pillows, and try to pull those super lights into my second attention’s assemblage point, using Zuleica’s harp movement.
I seemed to be pulling an enormous amount of light into that area. I’d never done that before. Usually it was just barely enough light to be satisfying. In the past it gave me the impression it might take forever to light up the energy body using that technique.
I had such a mass of light now close to my stomach, that my little low energy inorganic being became interested. She drifted into the lights, and formed pleasing faces for me.
I wiggled my fingers on the precise spot where Zuleica said the second attention has it’s assemblage point, hoping to lure my inorganic into that area to help with bringing in colors. But I noticed something very strange. I had 4 hands!
It wasn’t that I had 4 arms and each had a hand, it was more like the 2 arms I had, with their 2 hands, were ghosted by another set. I hadn’t anticipated anything like that. I thought that the “energy body” was just a blob of light, like a luminous cocoon. I never thought it could simply be another copy of your “real” body.
I rotated my wrists, moved my hands left and right, trying to figure out the rules. Are they independent? Or does the one only follow the other, like a lagging image?
The extra copy of my right hand had some junk stuck to it. It was like it had picked up stuff from the air. I wiggled it to see if the junk was attached or floating.
My little fairy rushed over at top speed, as if I’d finally gotten home very late, and put out a bowl of dog food. She was eager to get that energy.
I wondered if I could summon one of Carlos Allies using that energy, so I stretched my right arm towards the last place it had manifested. It had shown up as a frantically talking head, trying to tell me something, and made out of intense ultra-violet light.
A patch of ultra-violet started to form on the wall, and details began to emerge. I had no doubt, it was going to appear.
Continued due to word count limits
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continuation...
I looked down at my little Fairy, and she made a horrible face. She mutated into a corpse, a person who is crossing their eyes, and someone in the middle of a scream.
I put my arm down. Maybe not today. The allies are perfectly capable of chasing you, and I’m still not sure I’m immune to that.
Looking down at the bed sheets, I could see very strong details. Carlos called that, “the wall”, and it can appear anywhere. On the floor, on the wall, even on the ceiling. It’s just “in front” of you. Doesn’t matter which way your head is turned.
The details looked like stone which was previously dirt with worms living in it, which had been washed by water over millions of years, to reveal the tunnels dug by the worms. Very sharp little twists and turns, but not actual grooves, since it had been worn nearly flat.
I picked up the sleeping mask to see if the details would change, but then I realized, I can use my hands instead.
I cupped both hands over my eyes, blocking the view. The room was absolutely pitch black already. I’ve removed all sources of light leaks. So there’s no reason I should have seen anything at all on those bed sheets. That meant to me, blocking my eyes should make absolutely no difference.
But it did. The lines became a little blurrier. I removed my hands to confirm it. Indeed, the details became blurrier. Not by much. About as much as when the eye doctor switches lenses on you, and one is only barely sharper than the other.
I cupped my hands back over my eyes, saw the level of blur relative to not having them there, and then closed my eyelids so that my view was double blocked. Again, with eye lids closed, it was even blurrier. But not enough to be an issue. Each level of blur would be tolerable, if you were playing with colors in the darkness.
I’d been looking at the details on my bed sheets, so I lifted my head up and looked straight ahead. I wanted to see the blur levels on my wall, which by then was covered with hints of other worlds I could assemble, hints looking very much like the painting the blue scout had made.
With nothing blocking my eyes, details were very sharp. Too sharp for someone who’s as nearsighted as I am. Clearly all of that was from the second attention.
I cupped my hands over my eyes, and the details were slightly blurrier. But I also noticed, an inorganic being was materializing there in the middle of my sight. It was about the size of a silver dollar, and had very intense dots and squares, loosely connected by filaments. I closed my eye lids, and it got even brighter.
I confirmed it. With eyes not blocked, it was not there. With my hands cupped it was visible. With my eye lids also closed, it was intense.
In fact, it was burning its way into the room. It started to shrink, I reached out my hand, and it got stuck on the end of my phantom hand.
I’d forgotten about that extra hand. It was stuck there. I could wave my left hand around and see the extra copy of my arm lagging behind, like a trail you might see on a hallucinogen. But the intense burning spot of lights was stuck to the extra hand only. It did not seem to be stuck to the “real” one.
I’d hit the jackpot! I gave a big thumbs up so that I would remember it all, and noticed I could actually see the thumb. It was almost rude, like a big fake plastic thumb stuck on my real thumb. Except that the details were blurry. I couldn’t actually locate any edges. I could only see it, if I relaxed and didn’t stare. When I did that, it was almost dreamlike.
The thought occurred to me that the second attention’s energy body was sort of like an inorganic being. It didn’t actually look like anything real, but it could reflect your intent and become anything you might find in a dream. Even a copy of yourself.
I couldn’t resist trying out that extra hand. I was sitting on the bed near the bowls. I reached out towards the bowl of water, and it lit up like a swimming pool at night. I could see ripples of water, much smaller than you’d see in a pool with night lighting. And the ripples were vibrating a little violently.
But they did indeed look very much like what you see at night, with a beautifully lit swimming pool.
It was in fact, too much light. Something was wrong. I turned around, and noticed that the sun had come up. It was already 6 AM. Four hours had gone by, and light was leaking from under my bedroom door, traveling all the way from the bathroom.
I’d been wanting to try out la Gorda’s flicking technique with twilight conditions, in case it didn’t work well in the dark. So I dipped my fingers into the bowl, and flicked drops onto my dresser drawers which were only about 5 feet away, in a corner.
The drips were clearly visible as flickers, and I saw 2 red fibers form. They vibrated violently, but they were only fragments, and faded away in a second.
Then I got the scare of week. Sitting on the floor in the corner was my inorganic being. Except that she was full sized, had long straight blond hair with slight twists in it, and was dressed in a Japanese Sailor Girl Suit.
If you’ve read much Japanese Anime, you know exactly what they look like. This one was white with black bows and decorations. It’s the very kind many Japanese men go searching for at night, in one of the shops below the subway entrances.
The fright was nearly electric, but I trust her so it faded. While it was there, she was frightening. Beautiful, but frightening. There was something seriously wrong with how she was crumpled up in the corner, with her knees elevated a bit, and close to her chest. She looked both sad, and happy at the same time.
And very real. I looked around the room. There was more light than twilight now. It was only slightly dark. Yet there she was.
She tilted her head back, and looked like a coyote howling at the moon. The more I tried to figure out what she was doing, the weirder her movements became.
I glanced at the clock. I had to get up in one hour. So I lay on my side, and went to sleep. She drifted by my closed eyes as a little round fairy head, with a peaceful smile.
I ended up in a vast expanse of rooms, all carpeted and decorated like a Las Vegas endless hotel lobby. A bunch of people flocked up to me, and asked me to show them my extra arm.
Edited: twice
Side note:
That took 4 hours, and I just remembered something I didn't report.
The lights were so vivid that night, and I just couldn't resist trying out my dreaming hand.
I cupped my hand like the doorknob technique for pushing out a bad feeling. The account of it was given in an earlier posting.
As soon as I started moving it, I could see that the dreaming hand had taken the lead. And it was literally pushing and pulling a thick rod, floating in the air. The rod looked like a newspaper, rolled up to threaten a dog. But the hand was holding it in the middle, and it was moving around exactly as if being held.
I don't want to give the impression it looked like a newspaper. It was made out of vague lights, and was the size of a rolled up paper.
It stirred up so many lights in that area where it was moving, that I had the thought, of course this technique works! How could it not?
You're reaching out to grab something. That activates the intent of snatching something. But you're also pushing, so you could easily intend to push that out.
Because I was in heightened awareness, it all seemed too obvious to be worth mentioning. I felt silly for wondering how that technique works.
That's one feature of heightened awareness. Everything seems obvious and self-explanatory, the same way Carlos had written it would be.
Edited: twice
Looking it up, and not analyzing it too much:
"howl at the moon. LITERARY. If you bay at the moon or howl at the moon, you waste your time and energy trying to do something which is impossible or trying to get something which you cannot have."
And:
"Wolves do not howl at the moon! They howl to communicate with each other. Howling is the most direct way of communicating across long distances, and is especially important in areas where wolf territories are vast. A howl can communicate things like a wolf's location, warnings about predators, and the position of prey."
Maybe that ultraviolet head is a kind of inorganic that your Sailor Moon is a bit afraid of. It made some unambiguously frightening faces/forms when you tried to connect with it. Maybe it's the equivalent to a predator or a head honcho in their world, at least to them...not necessarily to us.
We have no idea if they have a pecking order amongst themselves, maybe it just isn't ready to give up the limelight with you..fearing you'll gravitate away (the more the merrier they always say). Limelight=A rare chance at interacting with a human actually capable of consciously perceiving them.
Or it's a tad possessive/insecure? Maybe they're like a colony of bees in that "dirt wall" and your fairy brings back energy for the others like bees bring back pollen for the hive.
Now I'm really analyzing!
I have no idea. But my personal prejudice is that they appear as you expect or subconsciously think they'll appear.
La Gorda for example said that she perceives them as big threatening Indian men.
I have to wonder if she doesn't have a thing for big Indian looking men, the same way I'm kind of fond of Sailor Suits.
In Asia, they often have daughters of local restaurant owners dress up in Sailor Moon costumes and such, to try to convince you to buy more beer of a specific brand.
I tried buying all the beer of that brand they had in the restaurant, thinking that would please the young woman in a blue sailor suit, but was told it was insulting by someone who was dining with me.
I guess they take it as you want to put them out of a job. People don't tip in Asia. They get paid hourly. No more beer, no more pay.
I doubt my Fairy in a Sailor Suit is worried about being put out of a job by Carlos' Allies.
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I guess I feel sometimes like I missed my calling. When I was a kid I thought I would be a scientist when I grew up, then I found out they had to be good at math! I fancy exploring the worlds of the inorganics as maybe an ethnobiologist would. Observe, Theorize, Test The Theory, and Re-evaluate based on the results. I just have to keep from getting so involved I think I belong there and forget about this reality.
Edit: I suspect this might wind up being a flawed strategy, but most anything probably would be... I just prefer it to flowery symbolic religiosity.
I love the idea! Depending on how many people put in the work to learn to assemble other worlds, a discipline dedicated to finding the 7 types of inorganic beings, and the source of each, would be wonderful.
It might even alter the intent of our population.
You could be the first trans-dimensional botanist.
I don’t know how to order these on reddit, but this should be the 4th comment on Zuleica’s technique, which is my second attempt after the start of this post.
Last night I again got silent in darkness, specifically wanting to see if my progress in forming the energy body was still there.
The thing about Zuleica’s technique, as given to Carlos, is that it’s a progression. Step by step you’re supposed to see the next thing happen.
I was tickled pink when I darkened the room, sat on some pillows, forced silence, and saw a giant blob of purple and fuzzy white stuff around my stomach.
Right on top of the purple light was a pretty hypnogogic head. It looked like my low energy inorganic wanted to try to repeat what happened before. Or maybe she was floating in bliss.
The purple blob took on the most intense form, a form Carlos described in class as a sworl, and which people who write to me have also seen.
It’s a blob of purple light that’s rotating, so it looks a tiny bit like a yin-yang shape. The half that isn’t purple is jet black. I suspect that’s what Carlos was describing in the mirror technique, where you find a water spirit.
Along with the purple and black were flat and wide edges of yellowish grey. Carlos had reported seeing yellowish green in some other accounts.
Watching my little fairy head swim around, I wondered if I still had my dreaming hands. I wiggled my fingers, and they were still there.
Except, the reach of them had extended. They were no longer ghosting my “real” hand, but seemed to spread out too far, and in the wrong directions.
They were definitely evolving. I suspect if they evolve too far, I won’t be able to give you accounts like this one, because I’ll have forgotten them.
Hopefully by writing how techniques progress, we can get some in-between steps and make the path seem manageable.
I don’t believe we should expect techniques we pick up from Carlos’ books to work exactly the same way as written. There are too many accounts in there of contrary information, such as La Gorda’s take on things.
Rather, the technique is a starting point, and then you have to go with what happens. But I truly believe, each and every single technique in Carlos books will work for someone, if we get enough people who realize this is a big job, not a fanciful lifestyle.
Wiggling my hands, I started to see the tentacles very clearly. I still couldn’t count them because of non-directionality, but there were at least 2. When they moved around, which they seemed to be doing by themselves, they cast out dark ripples.
I felt a very strange sensation watching them. They seemed to have passed through something sticky. It echoed in me as a feeling coming with a concern. It wasn’t a negative feeling. But the fact that it was pervasive and strong made it seem like a worry.
The feeling can’t be described, but it was something like, the feeling you get when walking into an underground structure with wind blowing through it. It was the essence of what the right side of your body would feel when first walking in. I associate it with other such physical feelings, like the feeling you get when walking too close to stucco walls, and subconsciously know to keep your distance, or your skin will scrape off.
I inhaled while sweeping my head to the left, to see if I could recapitulate that sensation. It felt very much like a “bundle” of emanations, although a super small one that only produced one feeling. I could see all kinds of fibers in the air. The sheer volume of them caused me to believe, is indeed possible (inevitable) to learn to see the emanations being inhaled and exhaled during recapitulation. After a couple of sweeps, the feeling was gone.
My conclusion was, discovering recapitulation is automatic, and even if no one told you, you'd discover it on your own.
I firmly believe that every single crazy thing in Carlos’ sorcery follows automatically and inevitably, from learning to get silent. That doesn’t mean anyone who got silent would progress this far. We have the video of Shinzen Young mentioning a little drummer man who materialized on his hand, as solid and real as anything. But then he dismisses it as an amusing problem for philosophers to figure out. He seems to have no knowledge of the energy body and how to assemble another world. The intent of sorcery isn't there.
Maybe he stopped there, because he didn’t have an “endorsed” path to follow to get further. But there's a horrible speculation possible from this. Maybe we no longer have "endorsed" paths to follow, to make Carlos techniques work. There was a visitor who commented all this was delusional. Since that visitor was perusing a Castaneda forum, and didn't recognize Carlos' own techniques and experiences, the implication is that someone out there is unendorsing Carlos' techniques, in order to promote something else.
A very bad thing.
I kept wiggling my fingers, to see what I could stir up. And then, I stopped and just sat in silence, to see if I could feel my energy body as a whole.
I slumped over on the bed, dangerously close to falling off and onto a low table. I keep my bowl of water there. I slowly let myself back up, blanked out for a bit, and was startled when I slumped again.
That was dangerous, so I decided I needed to find a position where I couldn’t slump in that direction. After a good half hour, I still hadn’t found one.
I spread my legs outward and leaned in so low that I couldn’t slump left or right. I remembered that when Carlos did the technique, he automatically ended up in that position. Folded up like a switch blade, with the feeling he was laying in a ditch.
I’d been hoping pulling on the colors would produce that result for me, but again, I suspect things go their own way and you have to go with what happens.
Somehow I’d discovered on my own, that many people trying to do that technique would eventually find out the best position is indeed to be folded up like that. It’s just a little hard for most people to attain. I’ve still got some left-over flexibility from martial arts.
I couldn’t get all the way down, but I was so far that I couldn't slump left or right. From that position I saw the mass of colors as a swirling pool of dreaming worlds. I saw my little inorganic first as a head, she morphed into a woman dressed in white medieval clothes standing up, she walked into a doorway, and other beings started to interact with her.
I was looking through a dreaming window of sorts. I suspect its from bringing the energy of the calves closer to the stomach, as Carlos mentioned a few times in his accounts.
Any movement of my hand in that position caused a flood of physical sensations of cobwebs touching everything. And the sensations were more solid then normal. It was unmistakably something coming from my newly (but weakly) formed second attention energy body.
So far that energy body has become solid enough to touch the wooden floor under my bed, with my right hand. It’s been solid enough to create a foot that reached 2 inches down to the ground. And now feelings everywhere scattered around me, reaching out for things.
But the key is the floor. I realized, I was folded up in half like Carlos, and my energy body was trying to touch the floor, presumably with a tentacle that appeared when viewed through dreaming images, to be an actual body part.
So far Zuleica’s technique works exactly as written, but you have to expect some twists and turns along the way.
Edited once
Anyone can choose to order the comments in a post either by date (newest to oldest or vice versa) or by upvotes etc.. There is no control on the posters end. So what you did, saying it's the 3rd or 4th continuation etc. is best practice.
In the Eagle's Gift, the tickling of that point creates a dent in the energy body, which brings the right and left-side awarenesses together so the second attention can predominate:
The next step is sweeping the ground with the midsection to move at will, and then dreaming becomes a cinch.
Zuleica ain't lying! It surely works.
But don't expect it to go precisely like that. It didn't for Josephina or la Gorda.
Not only does dreaming come easier, but you can do it while awake. The witches used to emphasize that, though I can't recall which was more adamant. Dreaming awake they called it.
It just means, you can shift your assemblage point enough to end up somewhere else, without having to go to sleep in between.
And Carlos mentioned being asleep while conscious there, which is precisely the description of heightened awareness. It's always sleeping according to don Juan. He says so elsewhere.
But, there are levels to heightened awareness. At a very deep level, you're literally sleep walking, and will even snore if you lay in the wrong position.
In the weakest form, you only see vast empty space when you close your eyes, but there are no dreaming images (second attention) visible.
Here's the moral of the story: All this stuff is EASY! And it works exactly as described.
But you have to do a lot of work to get to the place where you realize, it was easy all along.
A lot of work does not equal not easy. Not easy means, you don't need to have special talent. For instance, you don't have to be like crazy Josephina to make it work.
You don't need talent. That's all. I call that "easy".
But, you are practicing being an idiot 14 hours a day, if you're a normal person. You have to counter act that, which is why it likely takes a good 3 hours a day, to make rapid progress.
It's not that you have to put in the work to make progress. It's more like you have to undo the rest of the day, filled with feeling sorry for yourself, and with that maddening voice in your head.
Or with crazy arguments about transcending everything to find the "universal soul". Or with religious worries. Everything done daily on the island of the Tonal, needs some balance with trying to summon the nagual.
It's more like undoing damage you insist on causing all the time. Like if you had a bad habit of scratching your leg to the point that you have scabs.
Taking care of the scabs isn't hard work. It's just necessary because you have a bad habit.
Yes, it sounds as though the second attention takes over while one is awake!
Shortly after this passage, Silvio Manuel shows Carlos how to turn into a luminous egg:
This is the crux for us beginners. We have to realise that whatever we're currently experiencing is due to our intent. To do anything new, sometimes we have to undo that intent, but we're very invested in it, we even define ourselves (erroneously) by it. Hence recapitulation and notdoing, they both disentangle things.
And later on in the same passage:
The beckoning of intent bit is gold!
It sure is!
I didn't know about that. I guess it goes along with sorcerers remembering assemblage point positions using the "shine" of their eyes.
If you think about it, any way we manipulate something is just arbitrary. If you're in the shape of a cat, you do it the cat way. If you're in an abstract dream and seem to be a log floating in a yellow river, you roll.
For manipulating energy in darkness, you can simply push it with your hand, or "pull" it with your gaze.
The intent part is the doing of it, or rather, what comes from wanting to do it a certain way. Some sort of outside and sticky force helps out, giving the doing some integrity.
So apparently the gaze invokes it. Kind of makes sense. Carlos would sometimes get a spacey look while talking to us in class. He'd look slightly up to his left, his eyes weren't focused, and his chin was probably sticking out a little more than normal. He was "facing" something.
I fancy he could see into the future, sort of. Like, the effect his words would have, 20 years later.
In the same chapter Carlos describes it thus, after managing to move around using the three tentacles:
[…]
Who knows, Russell Targ on that video talks about one of his remote viewers during a test who instead of actually carrying out the remote viewing instead fast-forwarded to the bit when she was shown the answer instead to cut a corner. If our ultimate nature is closer to light than matter, perhaps it is possible, it'd just be a case of maintaining awareness as you switch into light mode, perhaps as Silvio Manuel was doing.
Man, Carlos had 3? I've only seen 2 so far.
Sometimes I also wonder about...
Well, he did have a dozen girlfriends.
Apparently so!
And while in the that "light mode" awareness time is non-linear, that's how she could see the answers before they were given.
You can also split your awareness half and half and look with the "eye" of the tonal at the present moment and look around the corner (past the present moment) with the "eye" of the nagual/dreaming body. I practice this quite a bit, or rather find myself doing it, with tangible results.
Stormtroopers too. Let's not get snobby here.
I guess I've been doing this glance by accident. When I look down to see my luminous shell, after sweeping colors into there long enough that it seems to have lit up, there it is. And once I can see it, I can lift my head up, and it's visible as the lower half of my body. But I have to have deliberately tried to look at it, before I can see that sight. After that, I can even walk around, and see a lumbering luminous blob following me as the lower half.
Haha. Was Carlos a warrior or a stormtrooper? His image, at least the public image created by his work and actions, which of course he may have manipulated quite carefully, is not of a warrior of the mold of don Juan's generation (which of course is also something he may have manipulated quite carefully).
According to some people I admire, he was a scoundrel.
And no surprise. He wrote himself in his books that he was more like the nagual Julian.
I'll give a funny example. Carlos told a joke about meeting a "virgin". He didn't say virgin however, he said,
"v.. v.. VIRGIN???"
And he said it with a glint in his eyes. His hands seemed to be ready to grab something.
Myself, if I ran into a virgin that was available to me, I'd run for my life!
Any of the old guys in here will tell you, my response is the wisest one.
I suspect that the whole "warrior" thing is a lure for childish intellects.
I don't mean to imply that the warrior's way is wrong. Of course you have to do all that! But you'll do it automatically, when you realize why you have to do it.
You don't need to put on a fancy cap and get a gentleman's cane while you're still learning about it.
The concept of warriors way becomes a placebo for the mind, and then you don't get as worried that maybe you actually ought to practice some of the techniques, especially silence.
With your mind pacified, because you're a super cool impeccable warrior, you're missing the drive to actually become one.
And that's the world we live in right now! All the information out there on Carlos, is posturing warrior way nonsense. There's no actual meat.
I'll date myself: Where's the beef???
I have to say, one of the younger members pointed out to me that the warriors way is good for young people to read, because they'll do better in life if they work hard and plan things well. Yes, that's all true.
But what the heck happened to the Sunday class warriors? All gone?
It's so bad that, if some of them read my postings, they wouldn't believe it. They'd even get a little hostile about it.
It should be that at this point, they can glance at a single page, and know I'm telling the truth.
(If not a little misguided in my emphasis, since I have no one else to bounce those things off of.)
I missed commenting on that.
Carlos combined the two movements (pulling in the colors, and touching the floor with a tentacle) in the first Tensegrity movement he taught me in a private class. And it was probably the one he used the most, when he just wanted to chill and talk to us.
Just put your hands on your sides, about 6 inches out, and sweep your hands and palm inward, like there was some fog at waist level, and you're trying to scoop the vapors inward, towards your crotch.
Isn't there a better term for that? What we have stomach, and crotch? And that's all?
The point is, it's not towards the second attention point Zuleica described. That's up about 6 inches, and 4 inches to the right.
You're just trying to scoop them towards the front, at the same level as the hands, dangling on the sides.
You do the right hand, then the left. If you do it over and over, you notice that slightly rocking the hips makes it easier. That causes the rolling movement of the stomach, which lets the luminous shell try to feel the ground with a tentacle.
Carlos never endorsed any particular rocking movement. He just seemed to be amused to see all the tall (and very serious) Europeans, having to do that ridiculous movement. Usually they preferred to be trying to make points, by quoting obscure but "great" intellectuals, speaking on consciousness (without having a clue about the Nagual).
It's a combined movement, using 2 parts of Zuleica's instructions, which ought to illustrate that the directions in the book are flexible, and no one should take them as sacred steps (the way some me-too Naguals do, to sell more books).
You WILL feel the floor eventually. But by the time you do, it won't seem like a big deal. It'll be more like, "Oh, I guess that works too."
Please notice that most tensegrity movements are manipulating some energy with the hands. It's pathetic if you can't actually see it, especially after 20 years since Carlos taught it.
Got to learn to visually see it, or as some of you do, sense it with your whole body.
There's a video from Renata Murez on her Tensional Integrity YouTube channel, it has a unseen (never on video) magical pass in it called Infinity Breath.
Lesson 1 - Full Sensorial Sensing
https://youtu.be/C_uR8IWSvag
Fascinating!
I can't say for sure because I learned thousands of movements, but I believe I remember that pass.
Looks like Renata didn't give up after all.
She takes a gentler approach than I do. I like to bop people on the head like Zuleica threatened, while she tries to give them very simple things to do, and explains them in detailed steps.
Her target audience seems to be women, which sort of agrees with what some me-too naguals found out. It's easier to get female students to keep coming to workshops.
Unfortunately, that video illustrates a problem with the students of Carlos.
They're all getting old.
The "tensional integrity" thing was explained by Carlos, along with a mention of Buckminster Fuller.
So she didn't create a new book deal for herself.
Here's Bruce. He didn't give up either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGGDnPKrR-w
I believe what we're seeing there is stalking "sweetness", but I'm not sweet enough to be sure.
Here's what Taisha sounds like:
Here's what worries me about Russians. Nice form, but why copy the chacmools?
And here's something even odder:
I'd suggest a dark room first, then the waterfall later?
How about this? Seems like something from Tensegrity is leaking into popular culture, where it quickly leads to noisy internal dialogue usage, unfortunately. Trying to project "love" to the white house is really silly.
Carlos gave an entire lecture on "white house", and how it's sort of an imaginary construct. He was trying to show how trapped our minds are by noisy internal dialogues which consist largely of syntactic commands.
Syntactic command means, just saying it, like "white house", creates endless mental images bound to hold your assemblage point hostage.
Or, "my butt is too big". Or, one of his least favorites, "I can't wear those shoes!"
(A girl got tossed out for saying that, when presented with a gift of shoes from one of the inner circle).
How in the heck did you stumble upon that video? Impressive!
YouTube decided I was a weirdo after I watched Renata's video, and suddenly there were a bunch more like it on the side.
Just be very careful you don't click on any kitten videos. God knows what kitten loving weirdos watch.
To the point of the will?
Wow, another cool thing!
Yes, depending on the length of your arms. But in my case, it's pretty much 2 inches below the navel.
Does that also somehow equate the tentacles with the will?
I'll have to try to see how far up or down they are, relative to the belly button.
Sure would be nice if you guys could also see that. We could compare notes and best 2 out of 3 wins (as far as figuring out missing details).
The trouble with trying to see the tentacles is, they're almost non-directional. Not quite, but almost.
It's sort of like if you had a chair right in front of you. The ordinary view of it is directional, meaning, if your rotate your body with your eyes straight, it rotates out of sight.
But when you look at the tentacles, it's almost like you zipped up real close to the chair, and were looking right at it with your nose only a foot away.
At least, that's what it's like in perfect darkness.
I'm not sure! There seem to be two distinct points, one for the will, which gradually opens as we near death, below the navel, and the other is how we pay attention during dreaming:
On the number of tentacles:
On their use by Genaro, and approximate location:
Watching Doctor Octopus in that Spiderman movie would give a good visual analogue of this I think.
Great! Something else I get to construct! But it says "find in my dreams," hmmm....
So if I'm reading correctly, the brace is the pebble? And I think she saw it in her dreams first, then she had to look for it all over til she found it in the regular world. Golly.
That's much harder than I was anticipating! I remember that passage now, or my brain's crib-notes version of it.
That's good to read. Possibly part of why Carlos told us to stop reading his books. There's something really nice about seeing it first, then reading about it.
When I look there, there are so many "fibers" that it's kind of hard to label some as "tentacles".
So when looking for colors in the darkness, don't forget to look for fibers. I didn't realize they may emanate from there, and as a result, I looked everywhere. So don't just look there, even look on the floor.
We don't know enough to focus our attention on just what's in the books. Not to mention, "finding his spot" was Carlos' first practice at looking for colors.
Don Juan put him to work on this right away. Too bad it's been almost 25 years, and the Sunday class people haven't gotten around to it yet.
I've found another good spot to sit, but it's right close up against a wall, getting quite a few colors but nothing really coming together brightly enough to see anything in them yet, but interesting that the wall, which is less than two feet away, gets to seem quite far off, there's a depth that isn't really there. (Still not got a totally dark place…)
That's progress for sure.
Yesterday I was feeling a little guilty for fowling up the "tensegrity near a waterfall" video on YouTube. I left a comment suggesting you could assemble another world on your room's walls, using that pass.
Master Yulia Chi might interpret it as aggression, instead of just taking it as relevant advice for her viewers.
I guess I should keep in mind what Carlos said about La Gorda. She tried to take over the group, and dropped dead on the spot.
No, no no. I don't want any group. I've had too much of that group! It's all the obnoxious people you try to avoid at parties, united as one to give themselves emotional support.
And what a thankless job, teaching sorcery to people with low self-esteem.
Still, I felt guilty, so I tried out my own advice. I'd learned at least some of that pass in private classes.
I used it. Within seconds, the wall of my completely dark room had a cliff drawn on it, with little heads peeking out. I bent my hand the way she does in that pass, and used it to push and pull on the little creatures.
Each one stretched out when I pulled, and revealed some outlandish outfit they were wearing, under their head.
So it works. Just FYI.
I experience this too, even though my darkened room is small it feels larger when you mind stops reminding you of the memory of how big it is, and you're instead paying attention only to what you're perceiving in that moment.
That's possibly the same part of the second attention that people report in lower levels of heightened awareness.
I used to encounter it decades ago, in meditation. No one had told me it was important, so I didn't pay much attention.
But I knew, I'd get bliss, when the dark flatness seen with closed eyes, suddenly appeared to have depth.
It's the second attention. It just hasn't figure out which images to bring up. Or maybe, it can't overcome the remaining internal dialogue enough to produce more than depth. Or perhaps, the mind is still fantasizing in latent images, so why add more?
(Gotta get rid of those latent images, if you want to stop the world).
I wish someone would go out, and throw a monkey wrench into other meditation systems. Their followers experience everything they need, to find the link to Sorcery. They just haven't been told what to look for.
When refocusing eyes on a closer plane in darkness (crossing eyes), the flat nearby blackness goes farther into distance as if in 3d. Is this effect related to the 3d feeling? Where are the eyes focused physically when seeing those scenes you describe?
Ah...
Very hard question to answer.
It's not a matter of focusing the eyes or not, although if someone had an IR camera, I wouldn't be surprised to find they were NOT focused.
And, we have many excellent accounts of Carlos seeing in class. I wish some lurkers would share theirs. But what I saw was, he looked off into the distance, like he was daydreaming for an instant. If his eyes were focused, it wasn't on anything in the room.
In my case, it's almost like you have to be "dumb". I can't explain how it feels, except to say, we all know the feeling. We've just been punished so that we don't do it. As a baby I mean.
So picture a combination of not necessarily unfocusing the eyes, but rather not caring. Combine that with that feeling of being dumb, or innocent perhaps.
And seeing usually isn't directional, so it almost doesn't matter where you look, as long as you are facing the general direction.
Once you know that feeling of being absolutely innocent a few times, you can invoke it.
But it still doesn't work until you get silent.
Now when my fairy actually stood up on the bed, and I got goosebumps up my spine and had a "Spielberg Moment", I was indeed staring right at her. That was what gave me the goosebumps. I could stare.
Does yawning have any effect? It can sometimes trigger goosebump-like effect
Yes, yes, yes. Good idea! I'll try it out.
But, it's that little rush of pleasure at the end a yawn, that will tell you when the assemblage point shifts far enough into heightened awareness.
Every breath becomes automatic, and comes with the happy ending of a yawn.
But not that kind of happy ending, like they have in Tokyo.
Check out how silent you are. If you think you're silent, check out if you're fantasizing in images.
If you aren't blanking out once in a while, you aren't silent. That's the problem.
The blank outs often come with a tingle, and then the colors will amplify.
(When you unblank out, and if you don't move too much).
It's great that you don't have a totally dark place. We get to see what happens, so future people don't have to worry about it.
My guess: you'll see slightly different things, due to the extra lights.
That'll cause it to incorporate into your waking world better than my darkness practices integrate with my waking world. It's like the 2 are separated by a barrier.
Except that the inorganic can break through that barrier.
Not silent enough! Or not prolonged enough. As soon as anything happens it whirrs up again. The novelty should wear off though. I catch stuff when out and about too, often have a wee gaze and everything gets a bit weird. Early this morning there was lots of shadowy movement in bottom left of vision too, no idea what, again dialogue sparks up and then tonal eyes take over.
If you learn to be silent most of the day, and go for a walk, and come across some palm tree frond shadows...
Wow! You'll totally get why people gaze at plant shadows.
Silence produces weird daytime side effects. I've got a child running around my office today, playing hide and seek.
Except, she's not really there.
And there's a huge black fly buzzing around silently, but it's also not really there.
You said the first time you saw while in class with Castaneda was when a fly introduced itself to you and said it's name was Paul.
That type of seeing, and of a phantom child/fly, seems very different to an outsider than pure abstract forms. Do you understand the difference enough to postulate? Or is there no difference, just what our (tonals) expectations are?
Nope. I’m just a lowly stormtrooper. We don’t actually know what makes our plasma rifles work.
But I can give some examples, based on what people write to me, what Carlos commented on, and what I experienced.
Lowest level of seeing: You’re sitting on the toilet thinking about wanting to be an impeccable warrior, you take the time to stare real hard so you can put in a few seconds of practice time, and the details on the floor sort of “wiggle”.
Just don’t bother me with it. But yes, that’s in the same realm as seeing. And don’t forget to flush.
You’re a little kid, in the bathtub (somehow the bathroom keeps coming up in what people write to me). You have a little toy airplane, and you’re flying it all around while you splash in the water. And because you’re just a little kid and the fliers mind hasn’t fully taken hold, you can see the clouds in your daydream. It gives you some kind of endorphin rush, which is possibly why kids get goofy grins for no apparent reason, and stare off into space on occasion.
Another: You gave up on finding Carlos, and switched to mantric meditation. Once in a while, you have a vision while meditating, but not having been told, “Jesus!!! Keep doing that!”, you just sort of write it off. Nothing to see here. But it’s still pretty nice, you must admit.
You’re at a tensegrity workshop. You’ve learned to force silence, though it’s not perfect and doesn’t actually last more than 10 seconds. But it’s enough, combined with the tensegrity being done by a mass of people, to move your assemblage point. You stop to rest between sets, someone is blathering on the stage repeating quotes from Carlos' books, and you start to see some lines in front of you. They stretch into infinity. You focus on one, and you start to move with that great band of emanations.
That triggers the book deal mind, you start to think and congratulate yourself, the fliers mind takes over, and you end up convinced you made it all up. It is after all, a Separate Reality. And it’ll remain that way until you integrate the second attention with your first attention, possibly with Zuleica’s technique.
You’re worried about something, but you’re pretty much silent so it’s just latent images, regarding the possible pieces of the answer. You force yourself even more silent in the darkness, and you see “the wall”. It looks like the colors and lines you see in darkness have decided to sit flat on a surface about 15 feet in front of you. Perhaps it’s actually the inside of your luminous cocoon.
While watching it, something starts to burn into the scene, with light as bright as the sun. A weird Mexican Indian head forms, his nose looks down, the pieces of worries in your mind form dreaming scenes, and they start to rotate. Some bump into each other and combine, while the weird Indian man watches. Eventually there’s only one left. A voice says, as clear as if that Indian head could speak, “Here’s your answer.”
Then there’s also the most puzzling stuff of all. You’re confronted with a complex situation, and you can see things about it that you shouldn’t know. But you don’t realize that; they just seem like insights based on the actual facts available to you. You mention one to someone and they ask, “How the hell can you know that?”
It just seems obvious, that’s all. Later it turns out to be right.
In the dreaming realm: Some troublesome characters are hassling you at the endless shopping mall you just found. No matter which way you try to go to avoid them, they manage to block your path.
You remember what Carlos said, and stare right at one of the men. While staring you notice there are 5 of them. As you stare, he starts to wiggle, shrink, and all that’s left after a few seconds is a pile of clothes on the floor (not the actual ones he was wearing). You stare at the next man, he goes away. And now there’s only one left. Don’t ask me what happened to the other 2. You stare at him, he goes through some contortions, and then he turns into a vertical bar of glowing, golden fibers.
You found an inorganic being in dreaming.
Then there's things like out of nowhere thinking about how you haven't gotten a phone call in several days and that you should go get your phone just in case, and sure enough 5 seconds later it rings with your hand a foot from picking it up.
Also quieting your mind and closing your eyes in the daytime and immediately seeing an image of a painting of a young girl with a white fluffy dog to her left that you've never seen before. You can zoom in on the details of the canvas and the paint textures and of the old wood frame. I don't care for these types of paintings, and certainly don't actively imagine/construct mental images of such. It's just there without any mental involvement or thought whatsoever.
It's "daydreaming". Most people grow out of it early, and just about all of them before they turn 25. I mean, they completely lose the ability.
Some don’t. But that’s often damage, possibly from drug usage in their teens.
If you do a shitload of recapitulation, you get your daydreaming ability back. But by shitload, I mean 6 hours a day for a year.
I have a theory about daydreaming. And it includes "playing".
I have a fondness for very young women, same as Carlos.
I just don't mess with them or take advantage.
What I like is, they know how to "play". By their mid 20s, they don't.
Play is like this: you're driving along in a beat up old truck with an amazingly beautiful young woman sipping on a big gulp, and she's content and talking away. She sees a red convertible go by and says, "I want to be a model in a convertible!"
That’s playing. And it has a real purpose.
It’s very odd that people don’t know that. If her mother was in the car, she’d probably say something negative about that fantasy.
If a child drags you into a game with her buddies (little boys just smash things, so a girl is a better example), the first thing you want to do is listen to hear the rules of the game.
You’ll hear, “I get to be the princess. You can be the kitten.” The rules go on and on for a while. We’re in a castle. I have a leash on you. We’re going out into the garden.
After a while, all the rules are decided. Except the younger girl says, No kitten. I don’t want to be the kitten again. I’ll be a puppy!
They start to walk, to show you that they’re now playing the game, and then they get tired of it. They run off to do something else.
They don’t actually play the games they cook up. They just plan them. If they do play a game all the way, following the rules, there’s an adult intervention in there. Someone played it with them and they got used to that activity.
Kids are constantly filling in their neural net. They get a piece of information, with their limited ability to understand what’s going on around them, and they have to find how to connect it to the rest of the database in their brain.
They play to fill in the missing details. But even more interesting is, they're practicing intent.
They say stuff like, I’ll be a policeman. You be a scientist. It’s virtually all they do. Watch them in the supermarket, talking to the box of cookies strategically placed on the lower shelf, so they can find stuff to buy.
It’s their job to play. To make a good neural net, for when they have to take care of themselves.
While playing, their biology rewards them with endorphin rushes. Happy chemicals. Those let them concentrate more, ignoring other stuff going on, and they follow any thread they can, regarding whatever they’re trying to resolve.
It’s seeing. But before that’s an odd thing to do. It’s just built into their biology.
Edited: once to include the speculation that children can handle intent.
I didn't do drugs as a teen and haven't done that level of racapitulating yet. I thought everyone could do this as an adult! Never realized...
It's kind of like looking into the brain's background defragmenting process, which never stops making sense of your memories and perceptions...even while awake.
I haven't figured out who can and who can't, but at some point you can't even ask a person. They don't remember actually seeing the daydream, and confuse that with talking to themselves about it.
It could be a matter of the strength of the oppressive internal dialogue, and the drugs just prevent it from completely taking hold in some small way.
I believe they're one and the same. Or maybe when the will begins to be expressly used again, intentionally, they come out to play after a long slumber.
There's some place where don Juan goes over a bunch of things, seemingly to describe some esoteric point to Carlos. I seem to remember he even wrote on the ground with a stick.
And it included "Seeing, Dreaming, and Will" in it.
We should grab that and make a new post. Do you have time?
I believe, it's not really an explanation, but a list. Sort of like don Juan telling us that we need to dig out something for each of those topics, and practice it.
But I haven't read that in 25 years.
I checked this out yesterday. Looks like that's right. It's the correct level.
Great! I could do this in public even, people will think I'm just doing a terrible version of the fortnite floss.
Yea, that's almost it.
I've been meaning to repeat this again for emphasis. Nothing to do with CruzWayne. Just a good chance to make a point.
If you can't make enough time to practice, at least try to incorporate something into your day. As many things as possible.
That's not just my advice, Carlos talks about how once you are saturated with tensegrity, you'll instantly know the right move to do in a given situation. Even while walking as I recall (it's in his final tensegrity book).
Of course, you know my preference for what you ought to incorporate. Silence. All day long.
Or at least, while driving your car. You'll know you are going somewhere, when you stop having opinions about everything you drive by.
My internal dialogue on driving used to be like this:
Oh that guy must think he's something in his shiny Cadillac!
Look at the dust on that car. Is that guy a drug addict? Better steer clear.
Slow car, must be a hatter (old people who wear hats).
It went on and on. Even the doughnut shops weren't safe from my angry internal dialogue.
Every second of silence you save up, leads to the goal.
Here it is on page 660 of that all-in-one PDF, from The Second Ring of Power:
"He suddenly reached across the table and nearly snatched my writing pad away from me. He grabbed it with the thumb and index finger of his left hand. I had to hold onto it with both hands, using all my strength. There was such an extraordinary force in his pull that if he had really wanted to take it he could have easily jerked it away from my grip. He let go, and as he retrieved his hand I saw a fleeting image of an extension to it. It happened so fast that I could have explained it as a visual distortion on my part, a product of the jolt of having to stand up halfway, drawn by the force of his pull. But I had learned by then that I could neither behave with those people in my accustomed manner, nor could I explain anything in my accustomed manner, so I did not even try.
"What's that in your hand, Pablito?" I asked.
He recoiled in surprise and hid his hand behind his back. He had a blank expression and mumbled that he wanted us to leave that house because he was becoming dizzy.
La Gorda began to laugh loudly and said that Pablito was as good a deceiver as Josefina, maybe even better, and that if I pressed him to tell me what was in his hand he would faint and Nestor would have to tend to him for months."
Wow, I guess I have Pablito's hand now. Sounds like the same thing to me.
I kind of wish the "deceiver" part would be downplayed by Carlos' followers. They seem to endlessly pacify themselves pretending they are copying that kind of behavior. I worry now that Cleargreen has devolved into a spiritual organization, and are luring people in with promises of wisdom and fake personal growth.
On the other hand, they could simply have moved so far that they don't care about everyone else these days.
(I'm trying to snag a nervous bird here)
I hope everyone knows that I was simply playing the devil's advocate to make a point about the stodgy decrepitude of the flier's mind and the disempowered position it forces us all into.
Well.....
It's not that simple. I have a guy who's been writing to me for a couple of years now, and I only just convinced him you have to actually do some work.
And he did start doing work, and progressed rapidly. Before that he complained, he didn't even know what the second attention or assemblage point was.
Now he's got very fine categories to describe how to move it, and how to hold the second attention.
You'd think that was enough to convince him, but he seems to be disturbed by my fairy in a Sailor Suit. He still worries he's being taken advantage of.
There's no loss of points for playing devil's advocate. Did you know that the Chinese have a point system? Westerners are oblivious to it, but every act you do with a full on Chinese person, alters the points you have racked up.
I'm autistic. You actually have to strike me, to lose points.