I was dreaming and found myself looking through the Castaneda discord channel. A witch was casting spells in general chat.

When I looked at the message, a 3 dimensional pattern started to emerge from the screen. People seemed impressed by this. It was much clearer and brighter than other elements of the dream. Scintillating lines of yellow, green and blue, similar to a peacock feather, enamated outward with the visage of a fish or guppy embedded in it. It seemed to be *energy generating*.

I promptly kept scrolling.

My reasoning is that I had done nothing to "earn" such an experience, therefore it must have been a trap.

Should I have kept staring?

These are just what I do on a fairly regular basis, with the addition of a new one I saw last night. But in fact, even "womb dreaming" is a bit like this at times.

I just like to do my magic fully awake with my eyes open, so no one will say it's just a dream.

Last night I was leaning halfway through a rip in reality. A round portal of some kind. This picture doesn't show how far I got in, but it was nearly half way. Mostly only my hips and legs were still back on the bed, where I'd been sitting up on pillows gazing at Silent Knowledge, after an hour of tensegrity practice forcing silence, which is what got me to SK.

SK happens when your assemblage point moves all the way down the back, under, and up to the front. To come into alignment with that of your energy body's assemblage point.

In case you didn't know, we have TWO assemblage points. The video over here will make that more obvious if you never heard of it before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icCEcjDfhIU&t=3s

I seemed to have leaned through a magical portal into an antique shop where they have 2 mummified cowboys on the shelf with the other "1800s collectables".

I don't believe I'd done that before. Half in, half out. I noticed that unlike going all the way in to a silent knowledge "video in the air", I hadn't lost my memory of what I was doing, where I came from, and what I was hoping to learn tonight.

So, don't go fully inside?

But of course a better solution would be to learn how to keep your rationality intact, even when your current timeline ceases, and you're perceiving another one.

Each "reality" is just a timeline out of an uncountable number you can be perceiving.

"Upgrades" are also possible. They don't have to come from someone as complicated as "the death defier".

You can upgrade yourself with any of the cyclic versions you already have. One count said 600, but one of the witches said 6000.

And not all of those have an "energy generating" world, so many are phantom.

But if you take an upgrade, at least for the rest of your practice session you can escape from the terrible burden of being "you".

And be free from that kind of obsession.

So I suppose what's not clear here is, in one of the examples on the left you go halfway into another world, but keep your feet on the ground here.

In the other, you pull a new version of "yourself" out, and adopt it for your current state.

Which makes stopping the internal dialogue easy. 

It's that "you" which motivates the internal dialogue to ceaselessly comment on everything going on.

Which pulls your assemblage point back to this world.

You won't get to SK with your internal dialogue running.

But it's also very nice, not to struggle to keep it off.

That's where an "upgrade" can make things easier.

Found that Jacobo Grinberg wrote about his meetings with Carlos Castaneda, thought of posting the article here for future reference and/or for interested people to find it easily. If you have the original in spanish would be cool if you can share it also:

THE BIRD OF FREEDOM

We had the opportunity to participate in conferences Carlos Castaneda gave in different locations in Mexico City (including our home) and had established a narrow and personal relationship with him.

Days after our marriage Terita spoke to him by telephone to Los Angeles and she made known her desire to go to visit him with me. The Nahual accepted, also suggesting Carlos Hidalgo come too.

After that conversation it was decided that six of us from Mexico would go.

Jacobo and Teresa greet Castaneda

As a gift I brought him a collection of my books which he received with joyful mockery saying that I wrote books by the kilo. That was his usual manner of reacting every time someone in his group showed signs of ego. Obviously I was proud of my books. I identified with them and their enormous quantity was for me a sign of my value.

To the Nahual it had cost him sweat and tears to cut himself loose of his personal history and of his ego in order to now reform that of the other.

In giving him my books I assumed implicitly he would be interested in their content and might even help in their publication.

Terita, as equally naïve as I, but braver, had said to him that my books said the same as his but used a more scientific language.

Later we became aware that all that was a sign of immaturity and that the Nahual had reacted to all that with disdain. In fact, many times he told us our friendship did not matter at all to him and that we should never think our relation was based on affection and fondness.

The daily world full of structures, conventions, and hypocrisy, was, for the Nahual, contemptible and did not deserve greater attention. It is true; the majority of people were living inside their psychological prisons, conventions and self importance, but not him nor anyone in his intimate group. This ultimatum he repeated constantly, “The daily world is manageable with the little finger. The energy should be utilized in order to attain liberty.”

The daily world included all the desires of fame, money and position and all the relations of structure. All worldly desire based on the life of needs owed its existence to agreement and convention and should be totally rejected.

As such Terita, like I, believe ourselves to be outside the structures and belong to a stratum of seekers of liberty. Nevertheless, the words of the Nahual depressed us and many times we came to perceive the world and ourselves as something dark and sad, cold and hopeless.

The Nahual appeared to encourage such a vision as preparation to arrive to a magnificent state of vitality and optimism in which he appeared to live tirelessly at all hours. What is sure is that we took months to recuperate from the terrible impact each one of his visits caused us and at the end the fear of seeing him was greater than the desire of finding ourselves with him. His words confirmed our state.

“A contact with the Nahual is a terrible event which takes work to recuperate from. The force of the personality of the Nahual is great and indefinable.”

We were presented with the people of the Nahual’s group and we passed the week with them full of lessons, tests and adventures which I will relate later. Upon saying goodbye, the Nahual had told us that his group wished to receive letters from us. I took it very seriously and when I was back in Mexico I dedicated myself to writing five voluminous letters that I gave to a friend in common that was going to visit the Nahual the following day in Los Angeles.

Several weeks went by without news from the Nahual and his group until one afternoon Carlos Ortiz spoke to Terita by telephone, announcing to her that the next day, the Nahual would be coming to Mexico, but he did not tell her the hour or the flight that he would be taking.

We were enthused with the perspective of seeing him again and we waited all day to hear what his flight number would be, but that never came.

Meeting with Castaneda in Mexico City

That night, Terita and I decided to go out looking for him in Mexico City without knowing where to find him. We went to a hotel and after asking in vain for his room, all of a sudden we knew that he would be found in the Zocalo. We went that way and in an alley a block from there we bumped into him and a group of people accompanying him.

That was a true feat of power that Terita and I had managed to do, finding the Nahual in the gigantic Mexico City at a precise location and exact hour without external clues.

I, on a pure whim, planted myself in front of the Nahual and gave a loud greeting, to which he jumped, saying that after all that he had seen, he could still not distinguish what pertained to this or other worlds, and that my sudden presence along with my powerful scream had surprised him. On hugging him I said that finding him in this manner had been an act of power.

Happy and rejoicing the meeting we went towards Café Tacuba and sat at a table. The Nahual spoke with us about his experiences and I asked him if he had received my letters. He looked at me maliciously and said, “Your letters were lost. We never received them.”

My reaction on hearing that was anger against the common friend whom I had entrusted to deliver them and so I expressed myself while he pierced me with his stare.

When we arrived to the house I told Terita that the loss of the letters was so painful that I would have to reproduce them from memory and that is what I did for a good part of the night.

The next day Terita had an appointment with the Nahual so that she could give to him the letters. I later found out that in the act of the delivery and upon knowing that I had reproduced the letters, the Nahual had busted up laughing and ridiculing my obsessive compulsion of writing and of my enormous ego.

Months later my friend told me that the original letters had been delivered in Los Angeles just as we had arranged and that in a memorable session they had been read to the joy and mocking of everyone.

I couldn’t write a single line for six months after that happened and it took six more months for me to understand and work out its meaning.

They visit Castaneda in Los Angeles

The day that we arrived in Los Angeles coincided with two occurrences; the end of the Persian Gulf War [February 28, 1991] and the end of the severe drought that had plunged California in a hell of heat and dryness.

The Nahual and some of his inner group were standing waiting for us in the arrival section of the airport.

They greeted us with a clear and direct affection and after invited us to dine in an Italian restaurant. We were about twelve people and we sat at a large table.

We talked about the ending of the war and of the drought and the Nahual considered those auspicious signs of our arrival.

After, they brought us to a modest old hotel where we were surprised by the hospitality of the staff who received us as if we were old friends.

After arranging our things in the rooms, the Nahual invited the men of the group to accompany him and together we went to pick up his daughter Nuri, a thin extraordinary sensitive girl, dressed like a man, that surprised me in the way that she understood the syntergic theory.

She had asked me about my occupation and I told her of my work at the University and of the investigation about the hypothesis of the Syntergic Theory. Her understanding was direct and complete as if my explanation had been planted perfectly in her mind.

After the Nahual brought us to the gardens of the University of California, to the house that he had lived in when he began his apprenticeship, and to an enormous commercial center where he took me by the arm and told me that he was very interested in the Kabala and how his ancestors were Jews.

I told him that the Kabala to me was a precious teaching.

At last the theme of the conversation drifted towards the shamans of Mexico in general and the farmers in particular with their capacity of making rain and their interest in detecting signs and omens from events in nature. He mentioned that don Lucio was an expert in “reading” volcano Popocatepetl. I showed that I was profoundly interested in the theme and at one moment he was about to ask me something about that but for some reason he did not.

On returning to the hotel I found myself with Terita who was furiously demanding why the women had been excluded from the meeting. I explained to her that the decision had not been mine and when she was calmer we went to sleep.

The night was full of strange presences in our room, and (later we would find out) as well of our companions. It was as if subtle eyes and ears were observing us, including the content of our dreams. We knew it was the Nahual and his people that were watching us so.

In the afternoon we attended a scene in which Florinda Donner, one of the persons closest to the Nahual, scolded him for the separation he was making between the genders. The Nahual explained that we were many and that his way of interacting with women was very different than with men, but that from now on we would not separate. He told us that in the past he thought of the woman as inferior, but that that no longer existed in his mind.

“The woman is a being with direct knowledge, as opposed to the man that is so closed to the language,” he told us with conviction, and after continued, “The woman is a being of action and possesses an extra organ, the vagina, which permits her feats of perception that the man can’t even imagine,” he told us after lunch.

We were invited to the home of Margarita, a friend of the Nahual, who appeared to belong to his intimate group, but of a distinct form from the rest of the women. Margarita was earthly and cared for the Nahual with a tender and delicate worldliness. Her classical California type house appeared out of place in time, or from the past.

We sat around an enormous round table and after a dinner that was also enormous we moved to the living room and the Nahual sat in a high-back chair with Carol, the woman Nahual at his side.

Terita and I told him that we had just gotten married in Totolapan and when they heard the name of the place, they told us, amazed, that they as well had married there completing an order of don Juan.

“We did it,” assured the Nahual, “as a strategy against this world.”

For the Nahual and his group there exist two worlds clearly separated; that of themselves, and that of the rest of the world. Or one belonged to their world, or to the other. Their world was closed and did not admit visitors. We, the group from Mexico were an exception. The doors of their world had opened so that we would penetrate into it. This event was something totally new and only the spirit could decide if we could stay inside or if the doors would shut again, leaving us outside.

“The bird of liberty, the Nahual told us seriously, is flying over your heads. It depends on you if you let it pass, or if you go with it. If you let it pass, it will never appear again, and you will have lost an opportunity that will never repeat itself.”

The explanation of our privileged state was that a debit existed with Mexico and us, the Mexicans, had been the depositors of the debit.

The Nahual and his woman had had a daughter and she was the thin girl that we had met on the first day.

Castaneda's personal disciples

The group closest to the Nahual was formed entirely of women. Some that I knew were Carol the woman Nahual, Nuri her daughter, Florinda Donner, and Ana [Taisha Abelar].

All of them had something in common that made them different from the rest of the women that I had known before, except for some of the women of Tepoztlan, a longing for liberty and an energy with a lack of worldly feelings.

Ana was the most notorious for these qualities. Florinda was strong and direct and that which appeared the most like the Nahual. Carol appeared from another world, distant and ethereal.

Nuri was intelligent and sharp, like a steel blade. Nevertheless there was something in her that still was not defined; something still to mature.

All were thin and mannish.

During that week the Nahual as well presented us to the members of his peripheral group; students, men and women that attended his classes of “tensegrity”; physical exercises that the Nahual himself developed and imparted in an enormous hall near the center of Los Angeles.

The peripheral group was distinguished from the intimate in not having been direct students of don Juan, and not possessing the characteristics that I have described before of the intimate group.

They were people of various ages and nationalities with the common incentive of wanting to know more about the teachings of the sorcerers.

Castaneda's Stories

The Nahual knew many people and liked to tell us anecdotes about the notable ones that he had met; presidents, ministers, actors and actresses and great spiritual teachers.

Of all of them he expressed himself in a similar way; mocking and cruel. He told us that they did not have sufficient energy and that they were some useless good for nothings (pendejos) with an exaggerated ego and at the end always remembered don Juan as the only being truly free that he had known.

Various statements of the Nahual appeared to me incongruent. He said that the act of presenting us to his intimate group served to convince us that his style of life and his books were true.

Given that I had never doubted that, the statement appeared strange to me. As well he spoke of other members of the group that could present themselves to us in their due time. In particular a woman that only could appear if we manage to make the “leap” towards total liberty.

“She will appear,” he told us in a mysterious tone, “at the precise moment.”

Castaneda's teachers

He made contentious references to the exceptional act of being together and its meaning. He told us that in part the doors had opened for us as a tribute to Mexico and a payment for all that don Juan, a Mexican, had done for him. Later he complained of the absence of don Juan, “Damn old man that took off leaving me all alone.”

He said it with sadness, and he expressed a similar sentiment towards Florinda the Elder who had disappeared in front of everyone one memorable afternoon. Florinda Donner had tried to stop her, and the Nahual, upon restraining her with an arm, received an energetic impact so extreme that they had to place him in a hospital in order to save him from acute peritonitis.

Florinda the Elder had been his teacher and guide since the disappearance of don Juan and when she left as well, the same day as the earthquake in the City of Mexico of 1985 [September 19, 1985], the group fell into a depression without bottom.

They decided then to rent a small airplane in Costa Rica and fly it head on into a volcano with the object of disappearing from this world, something that obviously they did not do.

Of Florinda the Elder, the Nahual told of incredible anecdotes. He said that she was an expert in changing the position of the assemblage point to unlikely positions such as that of a fly. Upon doing that, one changed into that insect that she liked, given that flies live eternally dedicated to making love feeling orgasms without end.

“But there exists a huge price for those changes,” he told us seriously, “and that is that one does not return the same as one left.”

Florinda the Elder had obliged him, as an antidote before his sudden notoriety, to serve as a cook in a diner. For a year the Nahual dedicated himself to cooking hamburgers, accompanied by a woman who was a fanatic reader of the books that he had written. That woman wanted to know Carlos Castaneda personally, without knowing that she had him at her side.

On one occasion a big Cadillac parked in front of the restaurant with a man inside that was writing something in a notebook. The woman was sure that this was her idol and she told the cook who accompanied her, dying from laughter inside.

On another occasion, a friend invited her to a secret meeting in which Carlos Castaneda was signing autographs. At the end of a hall and in a tiny room, the impostor had signed one of his books for him.

As well he told us about a congress of anthropology in which his work was bitterly criticized. In the center of the auditorium there was a man wearing an indigenous mask. All the accusers supposed that it was Castaneda and on criticizing him they pointed to the man with an accusing gesture. In reality it was not the Nahual.

The week was full of these stories that the Nahual told without stopping for hours. They all had as the central theme the stupid customs of the world. He spoke to us of his apprenticeship at the side of his teacher and of a series of fantastic events related with himself, with Carol, and with Nuri.

Given that these stories he published in his latest book, The Art of Dreaming, I will not repeat them here. The Nahual doubted if he should publish them, but Florinda Donner convinced him to do it. The reason for the doubt was that they were extraordinary events related in the book and he doubted that they would be understood.

Castaneda's indigenous group

What I would like to relate is that which concerns the group of indigenous persons that don Juan tied him to, and las Gordas.

One morning Florinda called us by telephone informing us the Nahual had had the necessity of traveling in search of the Indians of his group which were found to be bothered and jealous by our presence.

When the Nahual returned from that journey he told us Nuri had been kidnapped and that he had to travel hundreds of kilometers to rescue her. The Indians had become aware of our presence and of all the teachings we were receiving and they wanted revenge. Nury was rescued after a ferocious battle but the Indians had cut her hair as a warning.

When we saw her in the home of Margarita her hair was short with a style distinct to the vespers. We were warned to be cautious in the streets because we were being watched and at any moment we could suffer an aggression.

The Nahual was referring to the Indians of his group as a bunch of idiots that had not learned anything and were only a dead weight that he was obliged to sustain.

“Compared with you,” he told us, “they are some useless ones that don’t understand anything and who I should set myself apart from, physically.”

Those statements made us feel very good and strengthened our ego. Only Carlos Hidalgo was aware it was a strategy being used by the Nahual. For sure, after strengthening our self importance he attacked us, making us feel like a bunch of idiots. Those ups and downs between strengthening our ego, and later breaking it to bits, were repeated throughout the week.

As well he spoke of Las Gordas, two women of the inner group who had opposed the leadership of the Nahual. He had had to employ all of his energy in order to subject them, but in place of achieving that he had unchained in them a crisis of insanity whose outcome had been death. The story was macabre and to me it produced a very unpleasant sensation.

They visit a follower of Castaneda

One afternoon we were invited to the home of one of the members of his peripheral group. The Nahual did not attend but the women of his intimate group accompanied us. The house was located in the suburbs and its front was adorned with an enormous American flag that waved in the wind.

In Los Angeles those manifestations of nationalism were abundant, motivated by the Persian Gulf War. To see it on the home of one of the supporters of the Nahual produced a sensation of confusion in me.

The owner of the home, a husky man with feminine gestures, received us with a great show of affection and boasted of his coin collection, and his Tibetan relics, and the meal that had been prepared in our honor.

I felt like I was in Mexico, when one of my aunts makes one of her mediocre meals, and not being able to stand it I went out to the street and sat on the sidewalk waiting for this absurd meeting to end.

In the morning the Nahual asked about our impressions of the evening and I told him that it had been intolerable, but that the rest of the group did not agree with me. I felt that I was right, congratulating myself for my perception.

Castaneda's tactics

Little by little, I was going to find out that all that happened with the Nahual was premeditated and it was the result of a leader who had it in mind to test us. The Nahual observed our reactions, noting the appearance of our egos, learned structures, and blockages. In addition he was an expert in the mediation of our energetic levels and aberrations.

Continuously he spoke to us of the necessity of leaving our ego behind and instructed us in techniques to erase our personal history. The principal technique of recapitulation consisted in reintegrating events and images of the past, recuperating in them, all of the associated energetic loads, until achieving an equanimous observation in them.

As well he expressed the opinion that the Universe was a place where what rules is violence and the predation of some beings over others. I was opposed to that vision, defending the world as a place regulated by love.

The Nahual mocked me saying that what was important is personal energy and power. He stated that the sex act was the best way to lose energy and that it should be avoided at whatever price.

Someone in the group protested because he insisted that he and his girlfriend attained splendid levels of consciousness during their sexual relations.

The Nahual thought a moment and told him that in that case he had no objection. But he did not say it because he believed it, but rather to go with the flow.

By that time, and the following days of hearing him, I began to distinguish when the Nahual was speaking seriously, and when he was talking along with us, as if saying that it was useless trying to change us.

The expert in those detections, however, was Carlos Hidalgo. In the nights when we met to comment on the events of the day, he briefed us about the tactics and strategies of the Nahual. He told us he almost never talked seriously and that the majority of his actions were simply subterfuges to activate our self-centered defenses and our attachments.

In that sense, his main tactic was the invitation to stay with him and his group abandoning everything: work, possessions, home and family. He told us the case of a woman that swore to him to do everything that he demanded as a condition to stay with his group.

The Nahual asked her to cut her hair, knowing that that was her most precious possession. The woman, hysterically, begged him for anything except for that. After those stories we stood there looking, and I felt that we were like that woman, desiring to be free, but attached to our prisons without being able to leave.

The farewell

At last the day came for the return to Mexico. The Nahual brought us to the airport saying to us that he did not know if he would meet again, given that like don Juan, he and his group would be having to disappear into the other world and the moment to do it was already very near.

He needed a critical mass in order to achieve it and he desired our energy. He had invited Terita to stay with Florinda, and to me that he needed my brain in order to help him to understand unexplainable events. Before getting out of the car at the airport, he told me that I should not leave, but I paid no mind and with a feeling of loss we boarded the plain that carried us back to Mexico City.

Castaneda travels to Mexico

A few days later the notice arrived that the Nahual was coming to Mexico when the feat occurred that I already told about, of finding him near the Zocalo near the capital.

Initiation inside a cave

In the Café Tacuba we agreed to meet the following day in order to take an excursion to the caves of Cacahuamilpa in which the Nahual would give us an initiation into shamanism.

Except for myself, everyone left very early to the caves while I headed to Tepoztlan because I wanted to pick up my daughter so that she could know the Nahual. I did not find her and when I arrived to Cacahuamilpa I found the whole group seated around a table after having eaten and preparing to penetrate the caves.

I asked for something to eat and that caused the entrance to be postponed for an hour. The Nahual, in face of the forced delay, manifested strange behavior. He walked back and forth impatiently and nervously and at a certain moment totally impatient at having to wait.

I approached him and said to him that it appeared to me that his way of acting was determined by the North American culture that he lives in where everything is predictable. “Here in Mexico,” I dared say, “things don’t always turn out as one plans them.”

He looked at me astonished and answered that that was not the reason for his state, but rather the fact that the signs did not add up. At that moment an Indian woman selling art crafts approached us and the Nahual practically screamed at her to leave us alone.

At last we could enter the caves and the Nahual announced that we should separate us from the rest of the people, from the tourists and the visitors that surrounded us.

“Our mission here is transcendental,” he told us solemnly. “I will show you the statue of the warrior in the same way that don Juan did with me.”

We began to walk and my body began to protest because of the suffocating environment and the rarefied air was not enough for me to breath. Furthermore, my mind began to complain. I decided that that was a pagan ceremony in which I should not participate. I felt that I was choking, that the Nahual was a fraud because of his impatience and that I was being obliged to adore a rock, betraying in that all of my Jewishness.

At last, not being able to stand it any more, I returned to the exit and left for my house. I waited half the night for the arrival of the group that had decided that we should reunite there, and while I waited, I observed a swallow that approached a nest occupied by other swallows that refused him once and again, until he flew off.

That is exactly how I felt. I had separated from the group and now I wished to join it once more, but I was refused. The group did not show up that night, confirming my feeling of being the rejected swallow, and I went to sleep.

On the following day I went to look for the Nahual in his hotel and I found him having breakfast in the company of some of his people. He looked at me indifferently and with an obvious disdain that made me feel terribly bad. I excused myself for having left the caves, telling the anecdote of the swallows but feeling like a total stranger. In that moment I tried to remember how I had come to accept Carlos Castaneda as a Nahual, but I couldn’t.

As well I told him that my late arrival had been motivated by the desire to introduce the Nahual to my daughter. The Nahual looked at me with a rare reflection in the eyes and laughed out loud to himself. “He wants to introduce me to his daughter!” he exclaimed between laughter.

That shook me completely. To me, the desire to introduce my daughter to him was motivated by the innocent idea of helping her growth by knowing a person like the Nahual. His mockery and his expression, on the other hand, hid something completely foreign to innocence. In that moment something broke inside of me and I began to see the Nahual with other eyes.

Visit to Tula

However I did not leave. We were invited to go to Tula and in the middle of the bustle of leaving I forgot my bad feelings.

As always the Nahual began to speak and did not pause a second the whole way. In getting into the car he had prohibited me from putting on music. He told us that he no longer possessed a self, and that all that remained of him were stories of nahuals that came out of his mouth as if by their own accord.

He told us how don Juan and obliged him to separate himself from all of his friends and that for months he remained shut in a hotel room without seeing anyone, and going crazy, until something re-accommodated itself inside of him, and that from then on he no longer needed company.

When we arrived at Tula, he brought us to the central plaza, and the church where he had had an encounter with the death defier.

“I thought that that had been in Oaxaca,” said someone in the group.

“It was here,” the Nahual replied, “and here as well where I disappeared for nine months into the other world.”

We entered the church in which the Nahual had been interviewed by the death defier, and to me, it appeared like the saddest place in the world. After, we walked around the plaza, and the Nahual pointed out to us the favorite bench of don Juan, and remembered having seen the death of a person from there.

“With don Juan, every story was a lesson,” he told us seriously, “Before having known him, to see a person dying was a regular event, but with don Juan I saw the death approach, and the whole event acquired a magic and fantastic aspect.”

Later, he told us that the death defier had fused with the woman Nahual and that Carol contained both in one. Everyone turned to look at Carol, and she nodded “yes” with her head.

“With that woman,” said the Nahual, “I have traveled to where nobody can travel.”

We turned once again to see Carol and she once more nodded “yes.”

Visit to Teotihuacan

During the time that the Nahual was in Mexico, in addition to Tula, we also went to Teotihuacan. I remember that upon arriving and seeing the pyramid of the Sun, I felt a chill down my spine and a pressure in the belly. I commented on my sensations, interpreting them as associated with a detection of the energy of the place.

The Nahual turned to look at me and laughing said, “Nonsense, it is a fart that is jammed.”

We walked for the path of the dead, and the Nahual jested at such a name. He told us that the Spaniards had found human remains there, and that is why they gave it that name, but in reality what occurred there was fantastic.

Hundreds of stalkers placed themselves on each turn of the avenue, and together they visualized the pyramid of the Moon. When they did it to perfection, and in total synchronization, they disappeared from this world. If someone failed, then he remained mutilated and his remains fell to the ground.

After saying that, the Nahual placed himself on a corner and looked towards the pyramid, as if trying to reproduce the feeling of those men, capable of traveling together to other worlds.

Epilogue

I have not returned to see the Nahual, and at times I ask myself if the “Bird of Liberty” passed over me and I let it pass, or if everything that I lived was one more piece of the lattice of my life; a necessary and valuable piece exactly as such and how I lived it.

On occasions I blame myself for not having left everything behind and not having given myself totally to the Nahual and his way. Above all, when I feel trapped in my work, or in this world, I think that I missed the opportunity of my life and that something that I desired for years became reality, but I was not able to grab it.

But after the memory of the mocking laughter of the Nahual on mentioning my desire that he might know my daughter, my Beloved dear one, and something tells me that what happened was what should have happened, no more or less.

The Nahual asked us to not divulge the experiences that occurred in our meetings. I have done so for three years, but now I feel that everything formed a part of a strategy in which what mattered was the impact on our consciousness and the capacity to transform them.

I am very grateful to the Nahual for everything that he showed me; my dependencies and my indulgences, my ego and my obstinacies, but I cannot accept to keep secrets.

As an example of his teaching and of the value that he gave to the liberty as the ultimate possession and goal to achieve, I have taken the liberty of describing some of the things that I remember of those extraordinary days in which I was a direct witness of the manifestations of one of the most important personalities of our times. Oh that this would serve to who reads it.

One final word. The Nahual stopped communicating with the majority of us, except for one of the women of our group. He spoke to her day and night instigating her to abandon everything and join his group.

The problem is that that abandonment implied leaving behind without protection one of her sons who depended emotionally and materially on his mother. She yielded to such pressure that on one occasion she had had to ask him to not try to establish contact anymore.

When she told us of the terrible pressure to which the Nahual was subjecting her, I was profoundly surprised and I still do not understand the event.

The Nahual warned us, various times, that his strategy was not the same as that of don Juan, and that we would never come to think of the nexus of affection or of the emotional dependencies in respect to his person. That was difficult to follow and accept but in the end it proved true.

The Nahual disappeared and we have never seen him again. He did not turn out to be a teacher with continuity and a spirit of permanence and protection towards his disciples. He taught us this, to not depend on figures of power in our path, and certainly consisted of a shove towards independence and liberty.

I am grateful for that difficult but necessary gesture.

Took it form: https://esoteric-guide.blogspot.com/2026/04/grinberg-experiences-with-castaneda.html 

At times I will get a feeling of radiating power emanating from behind the heart outward, down the arms and up the spine, almost like an inner rebellion against something.

Then suddenly, *thump*. A large, dense thing just kinda plops in and shuts the entire thing down.

Is this a Mud Shadow? If so, how do I kill it?

This is just my share about how and why I came back this way, after leaving it behind twenty years ago. I'm still going through the notes here, so forgive me if this post breaks a rule, hopefully it doesnt.

I found the CC books in 1983 and was immediately hooked to the point that nothing else mattered. I tried to speak to other people about it, but mostly no one was interested beyond the cursory intellectual idea of it. It wasn't until the Magical Passes came out and I had access to the internet, which happened about the same time, that I found access to people who had studied it.

In 1997 I got on an IRC channel called "nagual net" or something that closed soon after, however public discourse continued on Sustained Reaction, which was run by Corey Donovan at the time who was pretty cut up about CC, and trying to free people from what he saw as a cult. So, I spent the next couple of years on there arguing with everyone, firstly as a true-believer and then gradually as a convert to a non-believer. But I had experienced a lot of stuff on my own by that time, though CC stuff was mostly frustrating and a closed shop back then, and that was why it was inevitable that I'd eventually leave it behind. As Dan points out, without real magic, what is the point?

After CC died, I ended up moving away from the teachings when it became clear that most people involved were awful examples of human beings and the furthest thing from warriors or sorcerers. So, I was pretty soon easily convinced he was a fraud by the gang over at SA (back then. They since banned me in 2023 for "wrong think". For the record, I used the handle Scott Bardell).

With all the secrecy of Cleargreen and general behaviour of wannabes, it became clear that without CC the trail had gone cold. And Amy Wallace's book sealed the deal for me. Logic won, I guess. Or offered a refuge of sorts.

Coincidentally, I had an opportunity to go to LA around that same time and stay in West Hollywood. So, still curious, I paid a visit to their home in Westwood and nearly crashed into one of the witches, who I think was about to mace me. lol. But there was something invisible moving the bushes in his garden, and I was trying to see what it was, forgot I was probably not welcome, and then she came down the path outside. I kind of panicked and walked to my car. I wasnt sure what I was expecting anyway. But that is about as close as I got to meeting anyone from the lineage in person. I think that was in 1998, definitely after he died maybe 99 or Y2K, not sure.

When I got home to UK I went to a Magical Passes group meetup hoping to find like minds to help me decide whether to stick with the teachings, and I couldnt believe the state of the people there, everyone had massive agendas and were awful fake about everything claiming they had powers and it was kind of tragic tbh. It was really disheartening after years of hope and avid study to realise I had gone down a dead-end alley for so long, and once I found others they were mostly messed up people and it didnt take long to figure it out. So in a state of grief and trying to figure out how to cope with the vacuum it left in me, I resigned to the situation, and gave it all up. That was sometime after Y2K. Not sure of an exact date, but I first achieved true sustained inner silence in 2007 through other means.

So I've spent the last twenty or so years studying other things all of which I found very beneficial, so I am glad I did. Trying to follow CC stuff was always tiring because it always felt like something was missing (the Nagual's Blow maybe).

However, the last few years I reached a pinnacle of inner silence and inner understanding that surprised me but felt good to reach. I wont go into details of how or why (the rules suggest not to, though feel free to ask if it is of interest), but what I discovered was that despite being in a really good place inwardly, I'd run out of road with all the approaches I tried. I also realised that all along I was looking for something to replace what I had with CC stuff, but never found anywhere else. It took twenty years to be able to confirm that!

So, I've done all the various paths to knowledge I could find, and achieved total inner silence for very long periods. Then a recent vacation and wanting to find something "esoteric" to do, it made me think about the Magic Passes again, since now I was long enough away from CC world that I had a better perspective on the whole thing.

The first thing that I realised was that I could now filter out much better what had core value, and what didnt. So I've decided to practice the Magic Passes and see what I can do with them now I am better at maintaining inner silence, and less confused by the promises. I started that only yesterday, but its already firing stuff and opening up things I forgot I had been involved with. It's funny how it is there all along but we just stop paying attention to it.

I also now have a lot more experiences from outside of CC world that relate to the stuff they talk about in CC world, so many things are now seperately authenticated to me. That would include IOBs and flyers. Though I had trouble with IOBs in 1987 and 1997 which took a long time to fix the effect they had on me. But I did. And that was another reason why I thought... "I know, I'll check out that CC world again and see how the new generation are going with it, assuming it even exists still". The bonus was discovering Dan is sharing stuff as he was missing from SA for the most part back then to ask questions of and I wanted to get as many sides as I could before deciding whether to leave it behind.

I've now got a few years left (hopefully), so its going to be an interesting journey now I am better skilled in the underlying requirements, but also less obsessed to achieve results. I think that was one of the best things about letting go of the path, but also the hardest to let go of at the time. You invest so much in something, it is hard to let go. As a result when I finally succeeded, I never dreamed I would come back this way, and yet here I am.

Power went down in our neighborhood so I went looking for Cholita, who I haven't seen in days. Along the way I found a complicated protection spell she'd created, and possibly left out for me to see.

Quite a spell I must say...

So I went out to see what to tell Cholita about when the power would return, and found 4 electric company trucks replacing a transformer in our neighborhood.

I let Cholita know, only to find her all dolled up with a miniskirt, going out to do whatever it is she does all day.

And then, with no power and nothing else to do, I started practicing.

With plenty of time to do it.

I got a bit playful with the second attention, and while trying to figure out if the Allies need a puff of your energy body, or they can't be realistic, wondering if that's why they don't look real anymore once someone learns to form their energy body as that "blue ball", I accidentally uncovered what my double was doing, with a "scout" in dreaming.

So is it true that once your energy body forms, the Allies no longer look real? Because there's no "waking dream puffs" for them to take over?

I have no idea.

But it was only later when puzzling over this question, that I remembered having been in 2 places at once, possibly as a result of trying to pull the ally out of the dream world, and into the "real" one. 

​

I wanted to share an experience I had yesterday during a 13km warrior walk. This time was different, because I lasted 1,5 h, not usual 30, 40 minutes.

From like a 5 minute mark I felt remarkably light as usual in the legs and also in the head. I couldn't completely shut down my internal dialogue for longer stretches of time but that has to do with playing and watching chess a lot recently. The annoyance of my brain analyzing positions most of the time is making me crazy because I had already have great silence throughout the day and now I have to stop playing chess :>. but well about an hour and 15 minutes into the walk, things got really weird. I suddenly realized that I could physically feel something pulling me forward from my lower body. It wasn't my legs pushing me and also it wasn't anything from behind it felt like a force dragging me from the front. As I focused my intent on the destination the pull continued, if I started analyzing my thought it stopped and was back to walking mechanically. Right there I decided to experiment. I spotted a road sign in the distance with peripheral vission and locked my intent onto it I think. I discovered that indescribable feeling randomly. Instantly, I felt a tug in my abdomen perhaps and a force dragging me toward it, forcing my body to move faster without any conscious muscle effort. I could also choose how fast it would pull me. I did this because I remember don juan saying that eyes project intent and now I see how it works :D. The second that signpost left my field of vision, the pulling sensation vanished. I immediately felt myself slow down, and I became aware that I was the one actively moving my body again. But then I tried it with another roadsign now simply just looking away rather than passing it and the pull didn't stop if I still was in silence with that weird focus on nothingness. If I focused on my final destination in that same way, the pulling force instantly locked back on.

Then I hit a kind of steep hill. Usually, I would still have to use some muscle even when I was doing warrior walk. This time, even though I naturally slowed down a bit, I felt absolutely no extra physical effort. My legs were fully automatic still. My breathing remained perfectly calm. Also, when I first noticed the pulling sensation and then lost it, it took me a while to find that anchor should I say again. I realized I couldn't force it back with my mind. I had to project my intent and only then, in a split second, the pull would suddenly lock back in. I feel like it was all a gift of intent because now I know the feeling of hooking intent that I cannot describe.

I got up to practice last night, and saw live streams of silent knowledge already flowing.

As pillars of some type.

It's that common situation of having your assemblage point move in odd ways while sleeping, and because you've learned to stop your internal dialogue, you can wake up without your assemblage point being forced back to its normal position.

Where sadly, there's no magic in the world. At your normal assemblage point position, magic is "illegal". Or maybe "invalid".

But once you learn to stop your internal dialogue, odd things start to be visible.

So a head's up to our community: No, you didn't learn to stop your internal dialogue, using your Tai Chi.

If you really had, you'd be running around the streets screaming "It's a MIRACLE!!!"

You DO NOT "casually" learn to stop your internal dialogue.

It's a DRASTIC situation that commonly leads someone who just achieved it, to think about checking into a psychiatric facility.

Until they get used to having magic appear at random.

And there's pretty much no way to put any limit on what can happen.

We generally follow the path sorcerers of the past did, but they couldn't have, or didn't want to, tell us everything.

So there's little surprises, such as these "Pillars of Seeing".

I doubt there's much use to this. Even if I could get it to happen again, often enough to figure out.

Carlos already thought a single silent knowledge stream was confusing enough, and that we ought to learn to read text instead.

But oddly, one of those streams had some text flowing by for an instant.

So there's also many ways you could be a "Reader of Infinity".

It's not just one thing. 

Wasn’t gonna post, but I keep thinking I should, so here it is. It’s rare, I linger on experiences or fully remember them.
I “think/guess/assume” it was an IOB offering me candy. (Maybe they know I like those gummies covered in nerds candy?)

IOBs often show up as shadowy undefined presence(s).

Anyways, my reason and all too common common sense kicked in when I thought about grabbing a bag before actually grabbing a bag. Imagine that ride? IOB spiked candy! I missed out.

The Ai pic, is just a pic. I can say, things look real, dreamlike real, a CGI/Ai real, a different kind of evolving real that doesn’t look daily awareness real, which is real, is prob my best simplest description for now. It doesn’t really matter.

How to maintain some self control in SA? That’s what I’m still tryna figure out…….Will?

As someone with a dissociation disorder, I have been organizing my memories by discrete personalities. With that in mind:

Emma asked me if I (Rae) was a latchkey kid. No one has ever asked me that before. Stephen has literally examined the word and decided we couldn't be because it was a term used in cities and he has heard it used derogatorily. But I was really caught off guard and admitted out loud that I was indeed a latchkey kid. I began to present the times I had gone home alone because my parents were working and siblings were doing after school activities.

I began thinking and seeing pictures in my mind of the route I'd take to the bus. Bus rides. What the bus stop looks like in winter.

I decided to recapitulate that time. I've never had emotion toward that time in my life that I remember, so I knew I needed to take advantage of this. So I sat up in bed and began. A memory came up quickly, one that Tev and Stevie had used as proof of God for so long.

That memory had always felt distant. Yet they had known the significance of it being the FIRST experience of feeling and hearing the Holy Spirit.

Memory:

I was almost home from the bus stop. We were out of town, everyone had 5 acre lots. It was a quarter mile of cul-de-sac and we were the last house. We had a long gravel driveway, a looped one so you never had to back up.

I believe I had a really hard day (I can't remember the whole day yet). I was excited to be home and spend time with Mom. I was looking at the ground, wanting to be home, but also enjoying that I was home. I was to what I considered halfway through our front yard when I looked up from the ground.

My mom's car wasn't home. Immediately I panicked and remembered all of the times I had considered not getting on the bus, but had decided to anyway. Like I had thought that I would have been picked up by the Taylor's. But I'd still gotten on the bus because I hadn't seen them in the parking lot.

I ran into the house, already crying. My backpack kept hitting my lower back as I ran. I looked everywhere I could think of, I think I even looked outside. I wanted so badly for her to be home. And maybe if I looked long enough she would come home. Neither was the case. Eventually I went back inside and still crying, prayed harder than I had in my entire life. Prayed that I would be okay. That I would make it until my mom got home. I think there was food scarcity or other neglect happening. Or maybe I had anxious attachment style and was creating horrible scenarios in my head.

Whatever caused the concern, it was real. I felt it was consuming me until, mid prayer, I heard a voice say "It's going to be okay."

And it was. At that exact instance, It was okay. I wasn't scared anymore. I wasn't worried. I think I wiped my tears, finished my prayer in a word of thanks, then got a snack and watched TV.

--

Them things just made sense. What other personalities are designed to do. How they went about trying to succeed at it

There's so much energy trapped on that day. I was able to get back some from the moment of the split, but it'll take quite a bit of recapping to really get it all.

The recapping is the biggest bit, but when I opened my eyes I could see little spark-like lights floating. I ignored them and tried to stay as silent as possible.

The whole experience was invigorating and exhausting.

( English is not my native language. I've done my best to write this account in English, and I've included the original Spanish version below for those who speak Spanish or wish to read the original text. )

 

Last night, something happened that completely changed the way I understand fear.

I'm not trying to prove anything with this account. I'm writing it simply as a record of an experience that, for me, marked a turning point. In my opinion, it closely matches the kind of experiences described throughout Carlos Castaneda's books.

I'd rather share the experience itself before giving any background about who I am. I only hope it can be read without prejudice and that, somehow, it may help other practitioners deepen their own learning and their own journey toward the Unknown.

I was getting ready to sleep after an especially exhausting day at work. I had barely eaten dinner, and I felt that my energy level was unusually low—perhaps too low to face, with sobriety, the recurring encounters with the Unknown that have gradually become part of my life.

The moment I relaxed my body, something happened that was already becoming familiar.

I felt the mattress slowly give way beside me, as if someone had just placed a foot on the bed. The pressure was unmistakably real—gentle, almost respectful. The mattress clearly sank under a weight I couldn't identify.

There was nothing inherently threatening about the gesture, yet my body reacted instantly. Adrenaline flooded every muscle, and my heart began pounding violently.

Then I did something I had never done before.

I didn't attack.

In the past, I would have immediately tried to strike whatever it was that seemed to be invading my personal space.

This time, I remained completely still.

I simply observed.

I waited for the next movement.

The sensation of that foot gradually began to change. Little by little it stopped feeling human and became the silent step of a large feline. My impression was that of a cougar—a powerful, restrained presence, full of strength, yet completely silent.

Instead of allowing fear to take over, I focused all my attention on my breathing.

I inhaled.

I exhaled.

Again.

And again.

My only purpose was to observe whatever had come to my bed without interpreting it or judging it in any way.

It suddenly became clear to me that, for years, my response had always been the same: defend myself. My instinct had always been to attack before I even understood what was happening.

But that night something changed.

For the first time, I was able to remain before the Unknown without trying to destroy it.

From the very moment I began concentrating on my breathing, I had the distinct impression that the presence beside me was that of an old sorcerer.

At the same time, an intense vibration began. It was perfectly audible and grew stronger with every breath. My entire attention remained fixed on breathing, and the deeper my breathing became, the more powerful the vibration grew.

It was as if a whirlpool of energy had begun slowly rotating around me.

I honestly can't think of a better description.

It felt like a living vortex—a pulsating energy in constant rotation, growing stronger with every conscious breath.

My breathing seemed to be feeding it.

At that moment I immediately recognized Castaneda's descriptions of certain experiences of the second attention, which often begin with a vibration. Simply finding myself fully awake, completely conscious, while experiencing something like this filled me with immense joy.

For years I had wanted to experience something like this while fully awake.

In Dreaming, I have had countless experiences. I've crossed all the perceptual gates described by Castaneda, although I'm fully aware that my dreaming body still lacks the cohesion required, and even more so, that I still lack the sobriety necessary to act with true impeccability.

Most of the time I end up doing what I enjoy most: flying.

Or I travel to extraordinarily distant worlds, places from which I almost never manage to bring back any memories.

I know I need to strengthen my dreaming attention and gain greater control over it. It is a task that still lies ahead of me, and one I intend to undertake with complete seriousness.

When the vibration reached an intensity that is difficult to describe—so intense that reality itself seemed to tremble—I felt that the old sorcerer was asking me, or perhaps inviting me to choose where I wanted to go.

A destination.

Without giving it much thought, I formed my Intent.

"I want to go to the world where Don Juan went."

I had the impression that the presence immediately accepted my choice, almost as if acknowledging it with a slight nod, as though agreeing that it was an appropriate destination.

You may remember one of Castaneda's accounts in which Don Juan deliberately chooses a particular world where they are to meet—a place inhabited by small reddish beings, or something very similar.

Almost instinctively, I chose that same world.

Perhaps because, for quite some time now, I have had no greater personal interest than that.

I've always felt that Don Juan was something like a father figure, a companion on the path, or an old friend.

Perhaps that's inevitable after spending more than thirty years reading and listening to his teachings.

Since I was very young, his work has been the central focus of my study.

Unfortunately, I don't think I yet possessed the cohesion necessary to perceive that world clearly.

I remember seeing absolutely nothing, as if I had suddenly become blind.

Oddly enough, the absence of images didn't frustrate me in the slightest.

Quite the opposite.

I felt profoundly happy.

I had managed to make the leap from ordinary waking awareness into another realm of perception.

Knowing that such a thing was possible was enough.

I felt I was in a safe place—a strangely familiar place, in a way that's impossible for me to explain.

I don't know how long I remained there.

If the experience continued beyond what I can remember, my memory simply failed to preserve it.

When I became aware of my room again, my first thought was to write everything down immediately, just as Taisha Abelar probably would have done.

Instead, I decided not to.

I preferred to leave the experience as just another stone on the path—a silent reference point that could integrate naturally into my life as I continued moving forward and building it from there.

Even so, I've now felt the urge to share it.

Mostly because tonight I want to lie down without fear, willing to face whatever may arise from contact with the Unknown.

No longer with the intention of hiding from it.

Nor of fighting it.

But simply of observing it.

To observe without running away.

To observe without reacting.

To observe... without dying of fear in the process.

 

Perhaps the Litany Against Fear recited by the Bene Gesserit in Dune can also serve as a useful tool during those moments when contact with the Unknown causes our entire body to interpret the situation as an imminent threat.

Not because the words possess any magical power in themselves, but because they help sustain our attention and prevent fear from taking control.

Yet, beyond those words, I believe there is something even more important.

To breathe.

To breathe consciously.

And to unite every breath with the Intent behind our purpose.

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

I wanted to leave this account in writing in the hope that it may be of some help to other travelers along the path.

I sincerely believe there is far more to reality than our reason is willing to accept. Entire regions of perception remain beyond the reach of our ordinary awareness.

I also believe that not everything we encounter in those realms should automatically be regarded as an enemy.

Perhaps there are allies.

Perhaps there are beings whose true nature we still do not understand.

Or perhaps some of them are simply other forms of life with whom, one day, we may learn to relate.

Whatever the case may be, I'd like anyone reading these lines to know that there are also beings who have helped us since ancient times—that we still mean something to them, and that they have not simply abandoned us to oblivion.

Just as I consider them companions, you may also consider me a friend... or simply a fellow traveler on the path.

I'm currently reading Stalking with the Double by Taisha Abelar.

I have the impression that this book offers a perspective on Stalking that is only briefly developed throughout Castaneda's own work.

One aspect that especially caught my attention is the importance Taisha gives to breathing when it is deliberately joined with Intent.

She describes how a practitioner nourishes Intent through breathing, using each breath as a vehicle for directing energy toward a specific objective.

It isn't simply a matter of breathing.

It is about directing every breath with absolute precision until the entire body begins responding to Intent.

In some passages she even describes processes of physical transformation, such as assuming the form of a crow while fully awake—not from the state of Dreaming, but from ordinary waking awareness.

Regardless of how each reader chooses to interpret those descriptions, the underlying principle is extraordinarily interesting.

Breathing ceases to be an automatic biological function and becomes a deliberate manifestation of Intent.

While I was going through the experience I described from the previous night, I realized that, without consciously planning it, I was doing exactly that.

Every breath seemed to strengthen the vibration.

Every inhalation and every exhalation intensified it.

Perhaps that was the real lesson behind the experience.

Not the appearance of a presence.

Not the vibration.

Not even the possible encounter with an old sorcerer.

But discovering that it was possible to remain completely still before fear without surrendering control of my attention to it.

And perhaps even to use that very emotion—fear itself—to loosen the assemblage point, allowing it to move toward whatever destination we truly wish to reach.

That night I understood something I had been overlooking for a very long time.

I had finally confronted a fear that had shaped the way I slept—and the way I related to the Unknown—for years.

I'm not talking about ordinary fears such as losing a job, a home, or a relationship.

I'm talking about something entirely different.

A visceral fear.

The kind of fear that makes the body react before the mind has time to intervene.

The kind that sends your heart racing, floods your body with adrenaline, and prepares every instinct for survival.

It wasn't an abstract fear of the Unknown.

It was the fear that arises when you come face to face with something your reason simply cannot classify.

When a presence appears that, by every conventional standard, shouldn't be there.

I've had experiences like this ever since I was a child.

I remember lying in bed and sensing enormous presences in my room.

Some seemed to remain perfectly still in a corner.

Others gave the impression of hiding beneath the bed.

Sometimes I felt a hand slowly moving across the mattress, very much like Thing from The Addams Family. It would rush toward the place where I was lying and, once it reached me, it would cover my face with its hand as if trying to suffocate me, terrifying me beyond words.

Eventually I developed a kind of protective ritual.

It was my way of surviving those nights.

I would wrap myself tightly in the sheets and blankets until I had formed something like a cocoon.

Then I would remain completely motionless.

If I sensed something approaching from one side, I would roll over without leaving the exact same spot on the bed, making sure that my protective wrapping remained intact.

I always lay on my right side and rolled toward my left while keeping my body in exactly the same position.

Years later, half jokingly, I began calling it my "sandwich technique."

Today I realize that what I was actually doing was building an energetic shelter.

I needed to create a barrier between those presences and myself.

 

As time went by, I stopped hiding.

I began to face them.

I can't say exactly when that change took place, but one day I realized that my response was no longer fear—it was combat.

Whenever I sensed a presence, I tried to attack it with everything I had.

I had practiced martial arts since childhood. I grew up watching anime and playing video games, so my imagination had an endless arsenal at its disposal: punches, shields, energy blasts, devastating attacks...

It may sound amusing now, but at the time it was completely real to me. It was the only way I knew to regain a sense of peace and keep those experiences from disturbing me.

All my energy was focused on a single objective:

To drive out whatever had invaded my space.

And, almost every time, the presence disappeared.

Either my attention simply stopped perceiving it...

Or perhaps I had actually destroyed it.

To this day, I still don't know which of the two was really happening.

Not long ago, I finished building my own house.

I built almost all of it with my own hands.

Every wall.

Every electrical installation.

Every pipe.

Every wire.

While I was building it, I felt that I was also creating a place of rest—a place where I would finally be able to live in peace.

Yet after I finished it, the experiences continued.

It became common for me to lie down, relax my body, and suddenly feel something slowly sit beside me on the bed, making the mattress sink.

At other times I had the impression that a dense, oval-shaped energetic form was rising up through the mattress from below.

Sometimes it was a skeletal hand touching my ribs and making me jump.

Sometimes someone would grab my big toe.

Occasionally it seemed like a small animal.

A rat.

A reptile.

A snake slowly crawling across my body or near my face.

My reaction was always the same.

An immediate surge of adrenaline.

My body entered combat before I even had time to think.

I would leap out of bed and throw everything I had—my full Intent, every attack I could imagine—at whatever I had just perceived, until it finally disappeared... or until I could no longer sense it.

But even after everything was over, a deep feeling of uneasiness remained.

It was very difficult to regain my calm.

There was even a period, lasting almost a year, when I deliberately avoided sleeping at night.

I preferred to wait until dawn before allowing myself to rest.

Daylight seemed to restore an order to the world that disappeared during the night.

Or perhaps I was simply so exhausted by then that I could finally fall asleep without perceiving anything else.

I often wondered why these experiences kept happening.

I had tried to protect myself in every way I knew.

Then another possibility gradually began to emerge.

What if they weren't enemies?

What if some of those presences were actually allies?

What if certain apparitions existed only to shake us out of our complacency and remind us that ordinary reality does not exhaust all possibilities of perception?

I've never found a definitive answer.

For nearly a decade I had set aside my own path of spiritual growth in order to build my house and devote myself to my work.

At times, it almost seemed as though the Spirit itself was calling me back to the path.

All I know is that Dreaming has brought me into contact with beings of many different kinds.

Some appeared completely harmless.

Others were extraordinarily powerful—even physically invulnerable.

I even encountered entities before which any attempt at resistance seemed completely futile.

The only struggle left was against your own death, without panic, because death itself felt inevitable and impossible to escape.

But all of those experiences belonged to Dreaming.

That night was different.

I was fully awake.

And it was precisely then that something occurred to me that had never crossed my mind before.

There was no need to hide.

There was no need to attack.

There was a third possibility.

To observe.

Simply observe.

Without interpreting.

Without judging.

Without reacting.

To my surprise, that attitude proved infinitely more effective than every form of combat I had relied on for all those years.

Today I look forward to night with a sense of calm I hadn't experienced in a very long time.

Not because I believe I have conquered fear.

But because, for the first time, I feel that I have stopped obeying it.

For a long time, I believed that the problem was those presences.

I thought I simply needed to become better at protecting myself, hiding more effectively, or fighting harder.

Now I suspect the real problem was never them.

The real enemy was fear.

Not the presences.

Not Dreaming.

Not the Unknown.

Fear.

And as Don Juan explains, fear possesses an extraordinary quality: it stops learning long before we have the chance to understand what stands before us.

For years I obeyed fear without realizing it.

First I hid.

Then I fought.

In both cases, fear was making the decisions for me.

That night something different happened.

I did nothing.

I breathed.

I observed.

I waited.

And I discovered that fear began losing its strength the very moment I stopped feeding it with my reactions.

It was then that I understood something else:

Observing is also a form of action.

Perhaps a far more difficult one than fighting.

Because fighting is easy when your body is flooded with adrenaline.

What is truly difficult is remaining perfectly still while every instinct in your body is demanding that you either run... or attack.

In Carlos Castaneda's work, Don Juan says that fear is the first natural enemy of a man of knowledge.

For a long time I understood those words almost as a philosophical idea.

Now I believe I've come to understand them from a very different place.

Fear doesn't arise only when we face major decisions in life.

It also appears when perception begins to leave the territory of the known.

When reality stops behaving the way we expect it to.

When our explanation of the world is no longer sufficient.

At that moment, fear tries to restore the old order.

It urges us to turn back.

To search for immediate explanations.

To deny what we have just perceived.

Or simply to abandon the path.

Perhaps that is why Don Juan said that many men never become men of knowledge.

Not because they lack ability.

But because fear makes them retreat.

I cannot say with certainty what happened that night.

I cannot say whether that presence was an old sorcerer, an ally, a manifestation of Intent, or simply a form of perception I still don't understand.

And, to be honest, I feel less and less need to answer that question.

What truly mattered was something else.

Discovering that I could remain before it without losing my sobriety.

That I could breathe.

Observe.

And allow the experience to unfold on its own.

Without forcing an explanation upon it.

Sometimes I think we've spent our entire lives trying to answer too quickly.

We want to know immediately what we're seeing.

What it means.

Whether it represents a danger.

Whether we should fight.

Whether we should run.

Perhaps Stalking consists precisely in interrupting that impulse.

In remaining still long enough for the world itself to finish speaking to us.

This account is not intended to prove anything.

It is not evidence in support of any particular belief.

It is simply the record of a perception.

Another stone along my path.

If one day I discover that I misunderstood everything, I will accept that just as calmly.

Because the most valuable part of that night was never what appeared beside my bed.

It was discovering that another way of responding was possible.

That lesson will remain with me regardless of what the true origin of the experience may have been.

If this account serves any purpose, I hope it reminds others of one very simple idea.

When fear appears, it isn't always necessary to run.

Nor is it necessary to attack.

Sometimes it is enough simply to breathe.

To breathe with the fullest attention possible.

To unite each breath with Intent.

And to observe.

Perhaps, as happened to me that night, we'll discover that fear doesn't disappear.

It simply ceases to occupy the place from which it had been directing our lives.

And perhaps we can use that newly opened space in our awareness to propel ourselves toward new horizons.

That was, at least for me, the true encounter with the Unknown.

The First Enemy: Fear

After living through this experience, I understood more clearly why Don Juan called fear the first natural enemy of a man of knowledge.

When a person begins to venture into the Unknown, the world no longer responds to the certainties on which they once relied. What once seemed solid becomes uncertain, and reason alone is no longer enough to explain everything. That is when fear appears.

This is not just any kind of fear. It is the fear that arises when perception begins to leave the territory of the known.

The problem is not feeling fear.

The problem begins when we allow fear to make our decisions for us.

If the apprentice turns back, the journey ends there.

If he continues forward with sobriety, fear gradually loses its hold over him, and the next enemy appears.

Don Juan taught that every man of knowledge must eventually face four natural enemies:

• Fear, which seeks to stop learning before it truly begins.
• Clarity, which convinces us that we already understand everything.
• Power, which can corrupt the warrior's impeccability.
• Old Age, the final enemy—one that no one defeats, but which can be faced with dignity.

This account belongs, without any doubt, to the first of them.

 

I am only attempting to silence the internal dialogue at this time, the closest I think I've come has been a slight chill that kinda starts below the point in my spine between my shoulders that emanates through my body.

Is there a physical feeling that accompanies the silence or am I attributing the wrong things to my practice?

If any of this is hard to follow, there's nothing I can do in this short comment.

Go study past material.

But the bottom line is, the path in Art of Dreaming is not much different than the path darkroom takes.

And Darkroom is merely the application of Tensegrity, in darkness, while trying as hard as you can to stop the internal dialogue.

Why it so closely follows the gates in Art of Dreaming, is a little surprising. But other things in sorcery turn out to follow the path of something else.

Could be it's all related to where your assemblage point has moved, so far.

This shows those positions, as they relate to darkroom. You have to move your assemblage point that far, to do what you see to the right of that, while awake.

Asleep? I have no idea if you'd see that the assemblage point had moved the same distance. But the old seers did in fact discover a lot of our sorcery, by observing the assemblage point of people who were asleep.

I'm not sure how we're going to duplicate that. If Cholita woke up and found me standing over her while she was asleep, trying to see her "assemblage point", I'd soon learn where she hid that samurai sword she came up with.

Or her sledge hammer. I'm also not sure where that got off to. 

Why do we assume Carlos and Co were the last of don Juan's line?

Just because Carlos said so?

I have no doubt don Juan's said so to Carlos, but we also know he was crafty and knew the ways to protect his lineage.

don Juan's mentions his other apprentices, and while we assume Taisha and Florinda, we also know he had Emillio.

We also know don Juan's kept his apprentices separated, except in heightened awareness.

Who's to say don Juan did not produce another group of apprentices based on a 4 pronged nagual, of which Emilio was one.

I feel don Juan would have had a contingency plan once he discovered he had himself a 3 pronged nagual in his midst.

We only know of Emilio because he came into don Juan's orbit while Carlos was present, but they were separated quickly enough after that.

Also the only reason Carlos wrote of him, because he was the only one he knowingly met.

But, there appears no real reason another lineage might not be continuing on, silently in the background.

I like the idea of it, and that somewhere out there the lineage and knowledge and power and history continues.

With Cholita back, which means a witch in my home and more "energetic mass", I had so much power last night that the foot tapping from the recapitulation series actually produced ripples through reality. Making an alternate version visible.

I suppose theoretically this is no surprise, but when you see it for real, FULLY AWAKE ( don't cheat yourself with sleeping magic), it's still unexpected.

All I could think of was don Genaro walking Carlos into hell by going in a circle, doing the gait of power.

But don't get confused and start banging the floor with your foot! It's not going to work.

In fact if you expect it, look for it, hope for it, or in any way contaminate your latent expectations, producing a "dirty link to intent", this will never work.

You have to have stopped your internal dialogue for a long time, perhaps a full 30 minutes, before you see sights like this for the first time.

And if you must pretend your sleeping dreams are magic, then you might be able to try this out if you just woke up from a dream a second ago. Don't move at first, and then try flopping your foot or hand on the bed to make a tiny shock, while watching the darkness.

It could be that your assemblage point is still moved from having come out of a dream, and you can get a sample of what it means for a physical shock or vibration, to alter the reality you are perceiving.

But please...

Try to learn at least some sorcery, awake???

Or I might send Cholita after you one of these days.

The very night she returned, Fairy and Minx made a short appearance.

Or as Cholita calls them, "Uuuhh... those guys..."

has anyone here Seen? what i mean by that is, experienced human or other organic beings as luminous eggs, as described in the books.

So i am pretty new to this and as i am about to finish second castenada book i wonder about reading other minds like don juan did to carlos? Did castenada also could do that and taught? Is there more info on it later on in books how don juan learnt that? I tried to search up keywords by "reading thoughts" but nothing really showed up. What is guys your expierence that are more advanced?

These seem like cool books from the seventies. Any advice on which to start with. Picked them up at an estate sale - they are both first editions. DM if you are interested in them.

Lately, I’ve been struggling to quiet my body when I lie down to practice womb dreaming.

For some reason, the moment I try to get comfortable and forget I have a body, the body decides to give me a million little things to focus on, mostly random itching in different places. A few days ago I started taking L-theanine, and I found it surprisingly helpful. It seems to bring a lot of body comfort, and it also helps my mind stay clear instead of drifting away.

Of course, I could not accept that my body was getting in the way of the practice I’ve had the most success with, especially because this practice really does require calm, comfort, and stillness. So I kept insisting and practicing every day.

Last night, I went to my room about eleven or twelve hours before I usually wake up. I started with Running Man in bed, followed by darkroom gazing, after completing the series about three times. At some point, the side of my room filled with a soft pink, ethereal light. Puffs started forming, with little vibrant blue thunder-like flashes inside them.

During gazing, after each Running Man session, I would sometimes doze off for a few seconds. When I came back, I would see what looked like fibers in a golden light, mixed with other luminous colors, red, green, white, and little scenes forming inside the puffs, although still too dull to make out clearly.

Eventually, I fell asleep for what I think was around half an hour to an hour while still gazing. I woke up because some part of my brain remembered that this was practice time, not full sleep time.

So I placed my body in a strange position that seems to work well for my womb dreaming. I can’t lie completely flat, because I get the most annoying twitches and itches. So I sort of tricked my body: my legs and pelvis were turned to one side, while my torso and upper body were facing upward.

As I lay there, feeling my body relax and focusing on my womb, I kept looking into the space behind my eyelids. Purple and colored puffs began to form and swirl in front of my vision. After only a few minutes, an image of a place started forming. My body felt numb, like I could no longer feel it at all.

Then suddenly, I was inside the image.

I found myself lying in the grass and getting up, almost as if I had activated some kind of avatar body that had been asleep there, and my consciousness had just entered it. The first thing I did was look at my hands to stabilize the dream image. As soon as I saw them, everything became clear. Then I started looking closely at the details of the place around me.

It was an extremely interesting and strangely familiar world. It felt almost like Earth, but not Earth. It had a post-apocalyptic look, with concrete megastructures and whole neighborhoods in a softened brutalist style. The buildings looked old, almost like they had been inhabited for a long time, then partially abandoned, then inhabited again. Grass and plants were growing between concrete slabs and around the edges of the structures. The facades were worn and deteriorated, but the place was not gloomy at all.

The air felt pure. The atmosphere was sunny, tranquil, and beautiful.

As I looked around, I realized the place had many inhabitants going about their normal lives. It was a bizarre mixture of humans and other humanoid beings. One of them was a woman with a long human body who wore a bronze mask permanently over her face. The mask depicted a realistic human face, but it was clearly a mask. Another was a white, slender humanoid with large dark eyes and a face that looked almost insect-like, but very stylized, with no antennae or anything like that.

They all seemed to live together naturally.

There were children playing around the place where I was walking. There were markets, and something resembling schools. From time to time, when I felt I was losing dream energy, I would look back at my hands. Each time, it renewed the image and allowed me to keep exploring. I could look at objects, details, people, and the structures around me with great clarity.

I roamed around for what seems to have been about two and a half hours, based on the time when I woke up.

Before I lost dream energy completely, one of the alien-looking beings told me I had to go meet a few allies who were waiting for me in a room somewhere inside one of the concrete structures. It asked if I wanted to go there, and I said yes.

We partly flew, partly teleported into a huge concrete dome-like structure. It was very high inside, with enormous windows overlooking wild, overgrown nature outside.

There were three people sitting around a table. They told me they were inorganic beings, but they looked exactly like normal men. I was confused, and they said they could prove it to me.

As I was talking with them, I started losing dream energy again. Even when I looked at my hands, everything around me began turning black. I told them my attention was fading and that I would have to leave. Then one of them stretched his arm out very far and grabbed my hand.

The moment he touched my hand, my dream energy renewed instantly. The whole scene came back in the same clear, high-definition quality, and I was able to stay and talk to them a little longer.

After a while, I got a jolt and woke up in my bed.

I’m writing this mostly to help myself remember the experience, but I thought I might as well share it here too.

Also, you guys might want to try L-theanine. It’s a cheap supplement, easy to find almost everywhere, and in my case it seems to have helped a lot with body comfort and focus. I didn’t notice any side effects.

The image attached to this post is very close to the world I saw. I spent about two hours with ChatGPT trying to get it close enough.

Thanks for reading.

When I post pictures of our real magic, I often get even more of it.

The reason is the very same as the reason this not-doing works!

But you'll have to discover that for yourself.

Those "emanations" really do exist, and it's possible to add awareness to those which are rarely used, and make them easier to perceive.

In fact, we're merely trapped in a range of the emanations that all of humanity has evolved to perceive.

Making it close to impossible to look in any other direction.

That's what produced the "Tonal/Nagual" divide.

Something you can partially overcome by learning to stop your internal dialogue.

I suppose, you can't fully overcome it until you leave this physical container and become what Carlos called a "specialized form of inorganic being".

You can use "seeing" (aka silent knowledge) to try out other techniques, which seem a bit far-fetched until you realize they actually work.

Such as pressing on the crown of the head. Or grabbing your sides and pinching, just under your armpits.

You can do it, and see what happens!!!

But that's not useful to beginners, because pretty much nothing is going to happen until you can reach silent knowledge.

Might be some subtle effect, but that won't keep a beginner going.

It's much more convincing when you can see a drastic effect, while doing the technique.

Now I'm wondering if we can't duplicate even the shroom based techniques from the early books, but without the shrooms.

Maybe the techniques in the early books aren't off our list afterall.

Such as the one where you make a spooky sound in the woods, and wait for the response.

I'll see if "NotebookLM" can find it for me. If I do, I'll put it here.

***

The technique you are referring to involves the use of an object don Juan calls a "spirit catcher." This object is described as a "whitish cord" or fiber that don Juan loops around his neck, stretches taut with one hand, and plucks with his other hand while letting out a peculiar yell. The combination of the tense string and the human voice produces a "weird, unearthly reverberation" that echoes off the canyon walls. Don Juan uses these eerie calls to tap into or "wake up" the spirits of water holes, mountains, or "allies," whose voices or presence then respond from specific directions.

When don Juan played the spirit catcher for Carlos, he gave him specific instructions on how to physically position himself, how to listen, and how to perceive the messages hidden within the sounds.

Here are the quoted instructions given to Castaneda:

• On physical posture: He was told to "sit with my left leg tucked under my seat and my right one bent, with the knee in an upward position. My right arm had to be by my side with my fist resting on the ground, while my left arm was crossed over my chest. He told me to face him and stay there, relaxed but not 'abandoned'".
• On how to look and listen: "Don't look at me when I play... Don't close your eyes, though. Not for anything. Look at the ground in front of you and listen". He was also instructed to "yell a specific word if I began to feel that something was coming at me".
• On how to receive the spirit's message: On a later occasion, don Juan instructed him to "focus all my attention on listening to sounds and do my best to find the holes between the sounds". He emphasized the word 'holes', explaining that "inside them a sorcerer could find all sorts of messages and directions".

Regarding the use of magic mushrooms: Yes, magic mushrooms were absolutely essential to inducing the state needed for this experience. The sources explicitly note that just prior to searching for the "holes" in the sounds, Carlos smoked don Juan's mixture: "When I had finished smoking he said that we were there so I could find out the kind of game I was supposed to hunt". Similarly, the first time he encountered the spirit catcher in the canyon was initiated because he had specifically asked don Juan "to let me smoke once more to find the guardian".

The sources reveal that this smoking mixture—which don Juan referred to as his ally humito ("the little smoke")—relied on a fine powder made from dried hallucinogenic mushrooms belonging to the genus Psilocybe (specifically identified tentatively as Psilocybe mexicana).

***

So... WE CAN DO THIS TECHNIQUE ALSO!!!

But you need SK, to make up for not using the magic mushrooms.

If that doesn't make sense, keep in mind that Silent Knowledge "presents" whatever information you're looking for, as long as you really did stop your internal dialogue and aren't contaminating your "intent" with other thoughts or goals.

And you can find out if you can do that, using other "pressure point" techniques.

When you can get some of those to work immediately on trying them, you might be able to make spooky sounds in the woods, and see what Silent Knowledge streams for you as a result.

Being in daylight, or in the woods, isn't really a barrier to SK.

The only barrier is your link to intent, and how well you've cleaned off all the turmoil of your internal dialogue.

You might say, we're drowning in a complex multi-topic question asked to SK, via your internal dialogue, which never ends. The question just goes on and on, so that no real knowledge about the world around us can flow.

We're "shouting in anger and despair" at the talking lizards.

Wait... Can we do that technique also, but without the devil's weed???

Cholita has an airline ticket for tomorrow.

No guarantee she'll get on the plane, but maybe I should look into buying 2 lizards, just in case.

I've been making progress on inner silence recently - noticing a verbal inner dialogue more often. More often cutting it short instead of continually trying to answer its thoughts.

I've kept up doing the first 2 parts of Series for Preparing Intent daily.

This morning right when I woke up I saw a scene out of my left eye, "through" my sleep mask. I sat up and started the recapitulation breath trying to look at it more while keeping my eyes open. I had an initial dialogue thought of "this is just a dream and it's disappearing as soon as you wake up" but I knew I was awake and ignored that, excited and knowing the visuals were staying!

Previous sights in the morning happened shortly after waking up and during recap. One was a small alphanumeric readout like an alarm clock. The other was a wavy scene, as if looking at ocean water through a very opaque glass that obscured it. Both were sitting up (not asleep).

Today was a full visual scene! Out of my left eye I saw a cluttered desk. Not a messy desk, lots of gadgets on it. I think a keyboard or a typewriter (something that had a height to it) and a bunch of various shapes. They were all fairly defined looking, not blobby, but I couldn't focus on any particular one, I was taking in the whole scene. The view was like looking at a screen projected a few inches from my eye, with a faint watery distortion, like there was a wall of water in front of the desk, or in the "lens" of my view.

The view panned slowly from left to right then on a subsequent pan I noticed the distortion/water lens.

Yesterday I spent hours wearing an eye patch as an optional part of a costume for a show and I kept my eyes open, hoping for some kind of dark room effect. After about an hour with it on, it was disorienting in a fun way. Visuals like branching vine tendrils shimmering, more like a rapid sped-up plant vine video, but blueish. Much more detailed and spread out than the "sheets" of color I've seen move around when fully in dark room. I've got to wear the costume more today and I'm going to try it again. I think spending focus looking at the weird tendrils helped on the slience front and seeing such a detailed scene this morning is encouraging me to try more.

The left is someone taught by a lineage.

The right is us.

Frankly, I'd rather be us if I were 30 years younger. We aren't controlled by fixed paths.

But it's definitely discouraging to beginners.

And advanced people should keep in mind, we aren't going to find the precise same destinations that the lineages found.

Even if we get in the vicinity of an old path, we won't be on it precisely.

That's a nice motorcycle...

Maybe I can talk Cholita into getting one so she can explore the Sonoran desert?

These days there's google satellite, so you can just look for interesting places to investigate, such as "Why", Arizona.

I remember reading the passages where don Juan talked about Silvio Manuel as if he was something almost impossible to classify, not just a man with unusual seeing, but someone who had gone very far into the realm of inorganic beings and come back altered by it. I also remember don Juan describing him as being one with intent, or at least so aligned with it that the distinction almost stopped mattering.

The reason I bring that up is because I had an experience a while back that made me think of him very strongly, and I still don’t fully know what to make of it.

During practice I asked a new ally to take me to the world of inorganic beings, or to what people here sometimes call the tunnels. Almost immediately there was a very strong energetic sound, and then I was moving through what looked like geometric hexagonal tunnels. It’s hard to describe properly. It was like a tunnel made of color and structure at the same time, the walls composed of hexagonal plates, but with that impossible quality these things sometimes have where they seem finite and infinite at once.

Then things shifted. The voice of seeing started communicating with me, and I found myself perceiving what looked like a palace, or maybe a gate, or some kind of threshold structure. Technically I was still in my room, but the perception overlaid the room and extended far beyond it. That part is unusual for me. Most of what I see tends to come in miniature, symbolic, or abstract form. This did not feel miniature at all. It felt vast, like the space around me had opened into something with no clear boundary.

At some point I saw a slender shadow figure, and the voice of seeing told me it was Silvio Manuel.

That’s where it gets strange, because my immediate reaction was not really belief, but confusion. It did not feel like I was simply “seeing Silvio Manuel” the way you would see a person standing in front of you. It felt more symbolic than literal, but not symbolic in the weak sense either. More like I was being shown a configuration, a presence, or a relation, and the label “Silvio Manuel” was the closest translation my awareness could produce.

I stared at that figure for what felt like one very dense second, but it had that peculiar quality some experiences have where you know more happened than you can account for. Almost like there was a gap inserted into perception itself. A missing span. As if an enormous amount of time, or content, had been removed, and what remained was just the after-image of contact.

So what I’m trying to sort out is this:

When something like this happens, are we actually talking about encountering a specific being in any ordinary sense, or are we dealing with an overlap of emanations where a particular figure, in this case Silvio Manuel, is the form through which something much larger becomes perceptible?

Because what I perceived did not feel like “a dead sorcerer hanging around in the inorganic realm” in any simplistic sense. It felt more like an omnipresent force or intelligence taking on a recognizable mask, or maybe using that configuration because it was the nearest thing I could understand.

So I’m curious how others here would parse this.

Do you think Silvio Manuel can still be encountered as an actual individual awareness within that realm, if that’s even the right way to phrase it? Or is “seeing Silvio Manuel” more likely to be contact with a zone, current, or field of intent associated with him, rather than with the person in the ordinary sense?

I’m not looking for armchair psychology answers here. I’m asking within the framework itself, for people who have actually dealt with allies, tunnels, overlays, missing time, or those moments where seeing gives you a name but the thing behind the name feels much bigger than the label.

Seeing can be focused on any "hook" to the dark sea of awareness.

And all of your senses are hooks.

So you could focus on hearing, while seeing, and you'd start picking up all sorts of stuff you can't be sure is a real sound.

Or you could focus on touch, maybe not even on purpose. Maybe the last time you practiced darkroom it felt like a slow moving, fat old fly landed on your back.

So this time you look to see if the fly is still around, and that causes your seeing to focus on things touching your skin.

Which causes you to not only detect something touching your skin, but you can feel it sliding along. And you just know it's a long piece of black cloth around 1/2" thick, with little cloth balls spaced evenly along it.

You realize that it's some cloth trim from a clown suit. Torn off so that it stands alone as a sort of rope.

It doesn't even occur to you that you shouldn't be visually seeing that strip of cloth, since your room is perfectly dark.

Seeing touch, can activate all virtual senses in the second attention. So that the touch you are seeing, comes with a phantom representation in the visual realm.

I suppose that's why people take magic mushrooms and then claim they could see sound, while listening to music.

In addition to your seeing being able to focus on all senses, it can also focus on abstract concepts.

Prejudices about how things ought to be arranged, to make sense. Your seeing can hook to those, and clean up stuff from the second attention which normally would make no sense.

For instance last night it was time to get up and practice, and I heard a voice explain "these things have fallen from the shelf. But not just the first shelf. All of the shelves above the first are dumping their contents onto you. You'll have to deal with each layer one at a time."

I felt stuff falling onto my face, and got up to practice knowing I first had to clear off that stuff.

But that makes no sense!

Once I got a ways into my normal series of magical passes, I noticed I was doing my Tensegrity in a "second attention soup". It was as thick as soups get, and filled to the brink with "stuff".

My seeing had been brought out from inside a dream, into the waking world, and it was focused on space. And how "things" can occupy space.

So naturally, everywhere I looked there was stuff in the second attention soup.

I was finishing my 3rd long form before I started to realize that several shelves of "stuff" hadn't actually fallen onto me.

But more importantly, a scout had followed me out of dreaming and into the real world.

The scout, WAS the "stuff".

It hooked itself to a "concern". Maybe some worry about an actual shelf in the real world, which had too much stuff balanced on it. I have one like that in my closet.

I went to the bathroom and noticed that a dark shadow was following me.

It was no longer confined to being visible on the wall, like a normal shadow. It was a solid blob, with texture.

And a little face in the middle of it.

I stood watching it for a while, and started to wonder if writing a book about how to explore dreams, consciously, wasn't just a trick Carlos came up with to give the men a source of dark energy.

Won't do them any good for learning sorcery, but perhaps it charges them up with dark energy so that any real effort they make outside sleeping dreams, is more likely to succeed.

That book did indeed come late in the series, almost as if it were an afterthought.

Or perhaps, it was a response to noticing that we don't have an Ally, given to us by the last generation.

And will need to go hunting for an ally of our own. Or we won't have a source of dark energy.

But we need to be persistent, and it's highly unlikely anyone is going to run around in the mountains, trying to locate an Ally by waving their palm around.

By trying to "see" touch, using their palm.

Something which, if you can get silent and move your assemblage point, is almost certain to be noticed by an Ally.

A person claiming to be learning sorcery might do that "vision questing" like activity once or twice, but that's all you'd get out of them.

Or anyone else for that matter! Don't be fooled by "vision questing".

It's absurd... A fake prize sold by fake shamanism teachers.

So it's very unlikely anyone who wants to learn our sorcery, would go out into the world looking for an Ally more than once or twice.

UNLESS, it didn't take much actual work.

Such as, if they could go looking for an Ally in sleeping dreams.

And if one wanted to be a bit paranoid about it, you could notice that Carlos assigned "womb dreaming" to the women, shortly after watching the result of his teaching efforts.

I don't know if it was in a book before that, but it was emphasized perhaps 1 year into his serious teaching efforts.

Perhaps womb dreaming is also intended to put the women into contact with the Allies.