Struggling with the teachings of Don Juan - can someone help ?

I am not sure that I can help at all, but for the others here who can. I think you should/can be a bit more descriptive.

~~1. You mentioned book 10, assuming we're going in chronological order of release, are you referring to Magical Passes ?~~

COMMENT EDIT: Sorry I am a bit scatter brain this morning, when I read the part that mentions you re-reading the part 10x, I read it as I am reading book 10, so I assumed you meant you were on Magical Passes.

~~2. If you're on book 10, is it correct or incorrect to assume you've already read the previous 9 books?~~

Some of the materials & subject matter are sometimes regurgitated across different books. So the subject you're specifically referring to, may not be isolated to that specific book & chapter.

i think your time would be much better spent practicing gazing, recapitulation and silencing your mind throughout the day. once i did these things for a couple months, i got way more out of the books

i dont think the material is meant to be understood at a cerebral level or to be purely conceptualized, though i think you pick up pragmatic conceptions along the way if that makes sense

also its really worth it to go through the magical passes book and learn as many long forms as you can

A lot of the concepts in the early books are expanded on throughout the later books, and I found still greater benefit from reading the series multiple times. Though after the first round, I found it was only helpful for me to read from Tales of Power and skip the first few, once was enough for those.

In the later books, Carlos had recollected many more experiences and details which he was able to describe more fully.

Consensus can mean agreement between two or more beings on what they are perceiving. IE if you and another person were both dreaming together, you would not necessarily see the same things. Consensus then is what builds a common reality between multiple beings, the way the old sorcerers constructed entire towns that were perceived the same by all of them, and it’s how we’re all perceiving the same world here and now.

One definition of a term at a time isn’t going to be helpful, the whole series together will help you to start to conceptualize these things. However, you’ll hopefully get to the point eventually where you’ll realize you need to let go of all of that and just get to work though. Building your inventory of terms and definitions is not going to help you advance, only working and experiencing these things for yourself will.

I'm banned from reading the books by Carlos, so I'm not certain what you're talking about.

But I can tell you a true story! I'm good at those.

Your dreaming double is always out there. He never stops!

We were created as an egglike bubble around a clump of awareness on the vast sea of the emanations. On all possible realities.

You can learn to visibly see this, with darkroom. There's no theories in sorcery, it's all available to you if you try. And stay away from phonies like Lujan Matus, Miguel Ruiz, Ken Eagle Feather, Victor Sanchez, Armando Torres, Sergio Smergio, or anyone else with a book claiming to help you understand Castaneda sorcery.

All frauds. Except Taisha and Florinda, "the witches" associated with Carlos.

Now, your dreaming double becomes fully visible along the way. If you work hard using the instructions in here.

And will merge with you, so that you can "borrow" his eyes.

The "affection for the energy body" Tensegrity pass is a good example of my point.

Done in ABSOLUTE internal silence, the pieces of your energy body become VERY visible, and you can see them forming into a second copy of yourself.

It even has eyes. And if your hair doesn't stand up at least once while you master this pass, you're a lot braver than me.

At the end of the pass, if you do it right, you locate your double in some kind of alien world, stuck there behind some landscaping. In my case, stalky plants sticking straight up.

Turns out, it's landscaping for his favorite shopping mall!

No kidding here. In fact, the witches from our private classes once went "shopping" too long, and had Carlos very worried.

When I push back the stalks and reach in to pull him out and give him a hug, the goal of this magical pass, I gain his vision.

I can see his mall perfectly!

And if I turn very slowly in my darkroom to face south, I can keep the view of his world on my eastern wall. It helps out with holding the assemblage point at very distant positions.

But there's a witch who visits me, even in my darkroom on occasion.

We're still working on making it "real".

Right now, it's endless "coincidences".

We have no "consensus".

But we get "coincidences" so good, only an idiot would doubt them.

Like two days ago when she asked me, "Were you stuck in a star wars movie last night when I found you in dreaming?"

She's 6000 miles away using "womb dreaming", which is a female variety of lucid dreaming which they can get on demand directly from being awake (usually).

I was thinking, "No, I was in that shopping mall hoping you could see that too. Wasn't in any Star Wars movie." So I had to tell her, "I don't believe so."

We had no consensus. So we couldn't "tune in each others view of the world".

That "reskims" the infinite number of "emanations", and can make "micro-adjustments" in our view of reality. Tune in the view of two people, to be nearly a perfect match.

That's easy in the reality we share with billions of people! That is in fact, your real world!

It's just a "consensus" created realm. With the "power" of billions, making it very real.

But in a new one, shared by only 2, some "tuning" is required.

This is something the old seers did, to make "phantom rooms".

Shared realms of dreaming they could repeat, like the city the death defier made at Tula, which everyone in the lineage has visited in the last few hundred years.

They started with a single object, like a table, which both of them learned to perceive in darkness. When they both could see the same table, they'd add a vase.

Until they had an entire room.

Much of what you read in the books, did not in fact take place in the normal copy of reality.

But you don't find out until you read the very last one, written by Taisha.

But later I realized, maybe my witch comrade wasn't talking about being stuck in Star Wars while I was awake.

Doing waking dreaming.

Maybe she was talking about afterwards, when I used my waking dreaming to go into lucid dreaming.

It's a shame to waste it.

And in fact, although I was not stuck in "Star Wars", I was indeed stuck in "The Orville".

A Disney space show of sorts. On the same stream service as Star Wars!

I told the witch and she said, "I've never seen star wars. How could I know which one I was looking at? It was kind of blurry anyway."

I felt stupid.

That's how shared dreaming builds up. The double, your dreaming body, can tune in 10,000 worlds for each depth of the assemblage point your waking body can move to.

And has no way to "adjust" to the "right copy of reality".

In fact, that's the goal of 4 gates dreaming. At the end, you have to get your double to come into the "consensus" version of the blue line on the J curve.

So the topic is KEY to shared dreaming. And to teaching I suppose, when a sorcerer is trying to bring the apprentice into the second attention.

But as someone else warned you, understanding sorcery is of no use.

You have to do it.

And if you do it, there's nothing to learn.

It all just "becomes obvious" when the assemblage point moves along that J curve.

If you didn't see the map with little pictures, here it is. Carlos gave us the "stations" on there, but PC Paint gave us the colors with it's fabulous "16 color bmp palette".

And while Carlos described what happens at those stations, he didn't go into detail, or make any pictures.

I added those to make it easier to recognize where you were if you put in the time to move your assemblage point.

Have you finished reading all the books?

Just keep reading the books, then re read them once you’ve read them. They’ll click, don’t get hung up.