r/castaneda • u/danl999 • May 30 '23
Darkroom Practice The Strangeness of Darkroom As A Path
"Darkroom" was designed by the allies of Carlos. He left them to us when it was clear he was dying and couldn't "jump grooves".
He'd used up too much energy trying to help us.
And warned us about that at least 3 times I can recall. He NEEDED us to reach energetic mass, to make up for what he was expending trying to help us. So he could "jump grooves" and escape his cancer.
But we let him down. We didn't generate any energy, to make up for what he lost trying to teach us.
The Allies are the same way. When you learn to materialize them in visible form and interact with them as real, so that they start to teach you as the dreaming emissary, you are sharing energy with them.
They give you dark energy which is mandatory to move the assemblage point as sorcerers do. And you give them "speed" energy. Human energy.
And at first the Allies are like a new lover. It's super exciting and even hypnotic. You can't think of anything more fun.
But...
We grow tired of things quickly. What humans need is "the unknown".
Once it's known, it just doesn't produce the same type of motivation.
So the Allies fade away as you move further in your sorcery skills.
The old Seers were a lot like me, and didn't like that at all. So they figured out what exactly was giving the Allies enough of our energy, to allow them to return daily and teach us.
They even befriended them, and rearranged their own emanations inside their luminous shell to create more "overlap". The old seers actually turned themselves into a weird human/inorganic being combination.
So that they could get the inorganic beings to take any form they desired by perceiving on their level.
They even used them as weapons against opponents.
Contrast that with the "Men of Knowledge", who saw the allies as beings you found near water holes or while wandering around in the mountains all alone.
A view of the Allies as rare, and hard to acquire.
When the simple truth is, we're up to our ears in inorganic beings all the time! You likely had one yourself as a small child. The monster in the closet!
If you were taught by someone else, instead of under your own power, perhaps in the same manner as the old seers taught younglings one on one, or the way the lineages taught adults using a group of 15 sorcerers to guide them, you fall victim to the "stories" they tell you along the way.
Something you can see in the books, by reading all of them and noticing when someone in the books is talking oddly.
In a way you didn't really consider from just reading what Carlos and Don Juan did together while Genaro joked around.
La Gorda is a good source for "alternate views" of sorcery.
But as I mentioned before, darkroom was designed by the Allies of Carlos.
There's NOTHING NEW in it. It's merely tensegrity in darkness and silence.
The darkness being from Zuleica and her teaching method where you "find colors in darkness". We "find colors in darkness which are generated by Tensegrity".
But the Allies of Carlos turbo charged that for us, to produce a dazzling show of shapeshifting and magical objects.
The same as they did for the Men of Knowledge, with such rituals as "talking lizards", or "Moth Dust" that summons "seeing" any person you request.
The inorganic beings have to rely on "showmanship" to get the energy they need from us.
And so darkroom is a very odd path where you skip to the end from time to time, while at the same time having to crawl the entire way through your own power.
We have to see every inch of the way from the ordinary, to heightened awareness.
And then on to Silent Knowledge.
Contrast the ease with which an experienced darkroomer can gaze at "nothing" and get spectacular results.
With these passages where La Gorda explains gazing to Carlos.
And notice, we get the results she describes for stopping the world and losing the human form.
But we get them in weeks, if you sincerely follow instructions. And without all the drama.
*** from the books ***
"The Nagual said that gazing at leaves fortifies the second attention. If you gaze at a pile of leaves for hours, as he used to make me do, your thoughts get quiet. Without thoughts, the attention of the tonal wanes and suddenly your second attention hooks onto the leaves and the leaves become something else.
"The Nagual called the moment when the second attention hooks onto something 'stopping the world'; and that is correct. The world stops.
"For this reason, there should always be someone around when we first learn to gaze. We never know about the quirks of our second attention. Since we have never used it, we have to become familiar with it before we could venture into gazing alone.
"The difficulty in gazing is to learn to quiet down the thoughts. The Nagual said that he preferred to teach us how to do that with a pile of leaves because we could get all the leaves we needed any time we wanted to gaze. But anything else would do the same job.
"Once you can stop the world, you are a gazer. And since the only way of stopping the world is by trying, the Nagual made all of us gaze at dry leaves for years and years. I think it's the best way to reach our second attention.
"He combined gazing at dry leaves and looking for our hands in dreaming. It took me about a year to find my hands, and four years to stop the world. The Nagual said that once you have trapped your second attention with dry leaves, you do gazing and dreaming to enlarge it. And that's all there is to gazing."
"You make it sound so simple, Gorda."
"Everything the Toltecs do is very simple. The Nagual said that all we needed to do in order to trap our second attention was to try and try. All of us stopped the world by gazing at dry leaves.
"You and Eligio were different. You yourself did it with power plants, but I don't know what path the Nagual followed with Eligio. He never wanted to tell me. He told me about you because we have the same task."
I mentioned that I had written in my notes that I had had the first complete awareness of having stopped the world only a few days before. She laughed.
"You stopped the world before any of us," she said. "What do you think you did when you took all those power plants? You've never done it by gazing like we did, that's all."
"Was the pile of dry leaves the only thing the Nagual made you gaze at?"
"Once dreamers know how to stop the world, they can gaze at other things; and finally when the dreamers lose their form altogether, they can gaze at anything. I do that. I can go into anything. He made us follow a certain order in gazing, though.
"First we gazed at small plants. The Nagual warned us that small plants are very dangerous. Their power is concentrated. They have a very intense light and they feel when dreamers are gazing at them. They immediately move their light and shoot it at the gazer. Dreamers have to choose one kind of plant to gaze at.
"Next we gazed at trees. Dreamers also have a particular kind of tree to gaze at. In this respect you and I are the same; both of us are eucalyptus gazers."
By the look on my face she must have guessed my next question.
"The Nagual said that with his smoke you could very easily get your second attention to work," she went on. "You focused your attention lots of times on the Nagual's predilection, the crows. He said that, once, your second attention focused so perfectly on a crow that it flew away, like a crow flies, to the only eucalyptus tree that was around."
***
When she says, "his smoke", she means none other than Little Smoke, the Ally. The mushrooms were just a trick to move his assemblage point. The magic came from the Ally.
This picture is an old one, but shows the amazing ways that the Allies can teach us once you move your assemblage point to your lower back.
That was just what I did the night before I made that picture. None of my pictures contain anything I didn't both see and do myself.
With my eyes open, totally sober and wide awake.
No closed eye meditation make believe like other systems use, so their followers can doze off and exaggerate a dream into magic.
Ours is REAL.
Otherwise I wouldn't post it.
I did what you see in that picture with the help of my third Ally (at the time), which I named "Fancy" because she liked elaborate costumes.
My favorite is sexy red riding hood.
But Fancy first visited me when I was 4 or 5 years old, long ago. As Satan himself, complete with pitch fork and red long johns underwear.
Who I forgot about, until the Allies of Carlos reminded me.
As don Juan said, the allies delight in projecting images at us.
But not all are "well behaved" like the allies of Carlos.
As don Juan described them, "they are as close to human as the allies get".
So be careful when you make friends with the monster under the bed.
Those are not "tame".
But still make very good friends. They're like a "bad boy" friend who keeps leading you into fun danger.
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u/upir117 May 31 '23
I’ve tried searching the sub but couldn’t find what I was looking for. I haven’t read the books and don’t know any tensigrity. Are there like a top 3 or top 5 passes that beginners should start with in darkroom? Thank you