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VR - Oculus - And what it means for Sorcerers
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I just started experimenting with one today and the second I put it on, I almost started crying. And laughing.
It's like 'going to another realm'.
Here are we are putting in all this hard work, and the kids are just gonna put on VR headsets.
In all seriousness - I can't help wonder what this will do to sorcerers if anything, and our practices, the more we as a society adopt VR. We are talking about a completely new set of stimuli for the first attention, one that
matches the second attention
in many ways.
You are literally in another world, with 360 degree vision.
It's very thrilling. Old-schoolers, of which I guess I am, would say it's a distraction and is just going to stop people from putting in the hard work of gazing, recapitulating, stalking and dreaming.
New schoolers will say it's a perfect tool to teach a new generation of sorcery practitioners.
The wiki someday may have a link to an app - darkroom gazing - someone out there could write VR software that would start with a black screen, and then purple puffs, and then IOB faces, and then entering realms...
Just some thoughts.
TLDR: Wondering what kind of affect Oculus Quest 2 and other VRs will have on sorcery practice, once we all have adopted the tech. My family just got one and it's the closet thing any tech has come to matching my experiences in the second attention, dreaming and IOB realms.
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Two additional recent posts on this topic:
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/kdpok6/how_virtual_reality_can_unlock_an_elusive_dream/
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/l4v07g/exponential_growth_of_tech_is_outpacing_our/
It is both an opportunity and a problem. It all depends on intent.
I wrote this in chat a few weeks back:
Here's how it could go. We all work hard, without regard to any potential outcome. They develope and near-enough perfect that brain stimulation VR gaming setup, and people begin to perceive without their eyes for enough hours in a day that their natural second attention gets activated even when they aren't wearing it.
They go looking for answers, like hundreds of thousands or even millions of people, and find what we've all been doing for decades.
There's your, eventual, splash.
More people may be using such tech, than used drugs in the 60's. And culture had advanced since then anyway, thanks in large part to Carlos.
We're simply the vanguard (I was going to add lonely 😭)
And that future splash won't occur if we do a shitty job in the here and now.
Some future person just has to be on duty to keep the lights on, ie. preserve the record and the index to it.
I have the Oculus Quest 2. At first I was like, damn I just bought myself another addiction! Lol but then I saw that one of the “games” was a Tai Chi training game! It’s probably pretty basic, but it got me thinking, what are the possibilities for this technological interface? How good will it get in the future? Can we combine it with meditation? Lucid dreaming? Maybe it could be a catalyst for sorcery...
Wondering the same thing. 24 hours of playing with it, though, and I gotta be honest I was ready for some 'au natural' practice. For now, will just use the VR for fun like everyone else, and keep sorcery organic and natural... but there was one app something called walking with Titans or something like that, a CGI dreamscape with these huge characters in it. That had potential... I could feel my second attention getting hooked.
I do want to get one. Just because I wanna experience it. But with that said I would never expect that tech could ever replace or even become a short cut to storing energy or power. The point of the path is to rid oneself of self importance and silence the mind. This leads to seeing. There is no technology that can do that. It is not a game or something that one can put on like a pair of head phones or glasses that can cause one to see. It can only create the illusion of it. And the illusion has safe guards meaning it is not really dangerous. Death is not a real threat. But then again it could help in the beginning much like drugs in order to loosen the hold we have on our A.P. so it may shift. But actual movement requires the will. Dreaming requires intent. Freeing one self requires recapitulation. But I still want to get one. Lol.
Has anyone seen the movie "A Glitch in the Matrix". It explores this concept and much more involving technology at a very deep level. The idea of what is real. It is always so interesting how close these things come to the warriors path and mindset but with no real idea of what it is. I believe they buy the ticket but still miss the boat for the reasons being they get lost with self importance or they just don't know that it takes work that never has a conclusion. It's a mystery first that we will never ever grasp.
Let me shut up. I get lost too.
Just wanted to say I want one too. It looks so fun.
How about when we have godlike powers due to technology?
It's inevitable.
I think there's something else going on here.
Intent.
It's just a different intent.
We follow the intent of the sorcerers of ancient Mexico, because it's the only "cool" intent we know. The only one that brings happiness at this time. Magic.
We find a hook to that intent, and let intent itself "gift" us along that path.
But intent is an equal opportunity gifter.
You only have to listen to personal experiences of people practicing something else, like delusional religions.
They also get fantastic experiences once in a while.
And how about the entire failed workshop crowd, and all of the private class students.
They had the intent of attention seeking, and book dealing.
They drifted down that path, instead of the path of sorcery, and some even have interesting tales of power of their own.
Not useful ones, but they got gifted anyway.
It's what makes the best of them so hard to bring back to the intent Carlos wanted us to follow. The intent of the sorcerers of...
That one.
My theory is that intent just likes to help us explore, and be the best whatever we want, that we can be.
And there are probably even better intent trails than we know of.
Like, not-being.
What the heck is that???
Well said.
I think in gazing and dreaming, when my intent is 'freedom', even though DJ himself recognized that freedom can't truly be defined, but when I do have the feeling of freedom as my intent, things do open up in ways that feel right.
I suppose the intent of VR right now in the people using it is 'escapism', or 'entertainment' or of course 'sexual desires'....
You make a good differential.
Kissing up huh?
Doesn't work with me. I'm autistic.
It's just creepy.
When someone kisse up like that, I flinch and look for the other hand to smack me on the head.
Which it usually does.
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I think people sometimes don't want to do any work, and try to talk their way into whatever they believe is power, at the expense of others.
It's the most common behavior in the castaneda world.
You put in that, "I'm only interested in the quest for freedom" statement, or something similar.
Aside from being abysmally misguided (we all have to copy the old seers in every way until the end), usually that means, "I have an excuse for why I have no actual magic! I'm not an evil old sorcerer, pursuing dangerous magic. I'm a purist. I only want freedom. So I don't have to do any hard work to get magic to happen."
Everyone can see that in your writings. You don't fool anyone skulking around in here.
You're seething with anger, trying to force people to recognize you as something you are not.
We're just waiting for you to wake up and do some actual work.
So far I suppose we have 3 in here who managed to do that.
But usually angry people who are pretending have their head explode for the final time, and they take their basketball and go home.
Although I must admit, I have trouble keeping track of user IDs. I'm assuming you're the Facebook mod woman.
That woman was sucking up energy from the community for a long time, and giving nothing in return.
I need to find some software that makes notes next to the user IDs. It's hard to keep track.
https://www.howtogeek.com/336237/how-to-add-custom-user-tags-to-reddit/
It requires Reddit Enhancement Suite extension/add-on (I think), which means it would only work on old.reddit.com format.
Chat doesn't work in old.reddit, and Flairs behave oddly sometimes etc.
Maybe have two browsers running in parallel, with new reddit on the other? Couldn't do it with separate tabs in the same browser, would reset when the page refreshes.
At least it's possible.
Thanks.
Not sure I'll do that. I hate computer software.
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You don't know how many bad players pass through here. My desk would be covered in hand written notes.
Always the same behavior.
More interested in self-promotion than the learning materials in here!
As if what's in here is perfectly normal. They can't even see intent at work!
Always feel entitled to get angry. Never apologize for the big mistakes they make.
They spout bad information that harms others, such as making up a new meaning for things, which allows anyone to pretend to be doing that.
No concern for the possibility that the teachings will be completely lost, because no one did anything unusual. They almost were, until this subreddit came along.
They're satisfied to do the same pretend stuff the astral plane people are doing. Or the lucid dreaming people.
Because, they don't actually have an interest in sorcery.
It's attention they seek.
Not magic.
That does suck, but the ones claiming to be Naguals are crazy.
That doesn't harm the community. Every weird teaching has stand out crazies.
What hurts it is when the entire community is too lazy to learn to do the amazing things in the books, and goes straight for inflating their accounts of dreams, and in between waking states even normal people experience.
That hurts the most because potential new people are not stupid. They read the books, see miracles being done in them, and then look at the Castaneda community and see the same old pretending nonsense that's everywhere else, without exception.
Then they read on google that Carlos was a fraud. So the "experts" say he was a fraud, his former private class students cursed him on death, and there's no one anywhere you learned to do what's in the books.
What's he going to conclude?
The crazy ones will say, "Great! I don't actually have to do anything, I can just pretend like everyone else."
So future generations are just as lazy and attention seeking as the one Carlos gathere.
Anyone serious will look at that information, and remember the last time they were fooled by a guru.
We won't get the good quality practitioners.
That's what's almost killed the teachings! Not the Quantum Shamaness.
By the way, she did have some weird association with private class students. No one ever explained it to me.
Perhaps you think the women claiming to be naguals are a bigger problem than the average "chat room sorcerer" because of the same reason my little niece refused to wear makeup at 10?
She was desperate for attention at 10 years old. She had a 12 year old sister. And no other siblings.
There's always fierce competition there.
Her sister put on some makeup for a school play. They were doing a transgendered version of Shakespeare where at the end, she got to kiss a woman, and the male lead kissed a man.
(It's LA private school).
Her little sister was obviously jealous of the attention she was getting with her makeup. The 14 year old boys were circling around her like scavengers.
I suggested I'd take her to mall and buy all the makeup she wanted.
She looked at me and said, "I refuse to do that. That's cheating!"