Beginners Castaneda

[dRider]

The books are real or not real, Don Juan may or may not have been real, but the knowledge is real. I feel it in my bones that it's real, it rings true to the oldest part of me that still lives when I dream. Besides that, there's a bunch of things in his books that aren't exactly widely known, aspects of deeper Buddhism or medicine man-like training. Some of his terms are different than Buddhists, medicine men, and pure magicians use, but they all speak of the same things.

Carlos is at least a literary genius, at possibly a sorcerer in training, long mad, but I think for sure that his knowledge is real. Heck, maybe even this is the nature of the true practitioners. If I could throw lightning bolts and wanted to teach everyone I could without coming right out and showing the world (attracting sincerely crazy worshippers and enemies, alike), I would take on a couple direct students, and otherwise hide the knowledge in roundabout training manuals. It makes sense.

Lastly, those who try to debunk his books and stories talk just like those who are always trying to debunk magick: from the standpoint that it's just too crazy too believe or that it's wacko talk. I.e., sheep trying to tell the wolves that eating meat is wrong.

[akimbomoss]

How do we answer the question of the thread then? Castaneda was the first occult books I ever read and it ended up getting burned in my brain. He seems to say everything runs on intent and in order for that to work better you need to stalk yourself. Other rituals seem to be impractical to northern altitudes and long winters. The only talk of the workplace is one time when Don Juan goes into town wearing a business suit to do something unknown.

I just found it really hard to apply this to modern living. But most especially I think it would be better if there was something for mentally ill people. There are lots of people with mental illness who want to come into magick to help them get better. I'm one. Castaneda did nothing for me in that respect... except distract me with fine story telling. So far the only thing that seems to be working is angelic healing. It looks like Castaneda wasn't too with it in the head at the end of his life.

I welcome any comments on this. I am looking for a debate.

[dRider]

For those who don't already know, Don Juan lite:

Light Body: the luminous sphere-ish thing that is what we, as humans, can perceive, where our assemblage point can take hold.

Assemblage Point: bright ball where luminous strands of light-consciousness are focused into a "field of perception;" there is much more to it, it is moved enough, like that one can become animals, walk the Plane of Light, etc.

Stalking: changing your demeanor so that you are not just acting a new character, you become one; you take on the new feelings, the new attitude, the whole new personna and worldview so that your assemblage point will have moved. Helps make it easier to make bigger shifts, later on.

Intent and Will, also important like stalking, had specific definitions don Juan laid out for Castaneda, which are a little different from textbook definitions, and I don't remember what they are.

Do as you seem you should with magick, though I will tell you that it works best combined with mundane means, also. I think you were right that stalking improves intent, but visa versa, too. I don't think the world runs on intent, I think it runs on perception, and we have to intend our assemblage point to perceive new things.

Now, what was the question from the beginning? I do believe it was don Juan who was patiently teaching Carlos, but in the end hoping for the results: that his teachings would be given to the world. It was as if he was trying to say, "Hey look, if a city bumpkin like Carlos can figure this stuff out, so can you." I think that much of what don Juan taught and the way he taught, things he said, were simply used to mold Carlos into a sorcerer, not necessarily the end all belief of don Juan as a seer.

...maybe he'll tell you his name is Jose, who knows...

[akimbomoss]

Intent and Will, also important like stalking, had specific definitions don Juan laid out for Castaneda, which are a little different from textbook definitions, and I don't remember what they are.

Intent means you change reality simply by intending it. It's so stupid simple when you have a lot of energy. Most people don't and use sigils to help intent along.

The will is a bit different. The will is an extension of the luminous egg that can push on objects like a hand to either move them or move the seer. Examples would be the jaguar that Don Juan tickled with his will when he was trapped, when Carlos was lying on the ground high on mushrooms and had to use his will, and during the waterfall test to try to get Carlos to see the luminous strand coming out of the bodies of the seers.

[dRider]

Alright, then what are the methods of saving up energy? There are the magical passes, which helps it be properly spread across the luminous body and in the proper organs and stuff, and the notion of not spending the energy on sex (which is pretty much a given when you never have a girlfriend lol), but what else is there?

[akimbomoss]

Alright, then what are the methods of saving up energy? There are the magical passes, which helps it be properly spread across the luminous body and in the proper organs and stuff, and the notion of not spending the energy on sex (which is pretty much a given when you never have a girlfriend lol), but what else is there?

You can stalk yourself in addition to the things you said to get energy.

For the magical passes there's Tensegrity, but isn't yoga just as good?

As for spending the energy on sex I think the nagual Julian was using 4 witches in a kind of tantra in order to pump his energy up to do energy healing. I think what he did was bring the 4 women to orgasm, probably not necessarily at the same time but possibly not have an orgasm himself like a monk? If he needed to do a really big heal that would have involved surgery he would not do physical surgery but just make sure everybody in the room believed he could heal the person and then use his energy to do the surgery.

Strange because Carlos had 4 women at the end to have sex with but I never heard any reports of him healing anybody. I just don't get it.

...and this is when it starts to get confusing. You can also practice compassion. The yaquis just call it healing. But if you try to help the wrong person you can screw yourself. Carlos helped a woman get her child to the hospital and thought he was being compassionate. But apparently he pitied her, poked a hole in his aura and emptied all his energy onto her?!?!?! I don't know if this is a trickster prank but I think Don Yuan patches the hole later on.

There's more to stalking than you said. You shouldn't give things away if you normally give things away. If you normally give things away then don't give anything away. I normally don't give things away, so therefore I should give things away ("the shirt off my back" it says in the book). Sometimes trying to determine which of these things we are is hard as it's very black and white. I do give away things sometimes...

I think the point of this is to cause a lot of stress and a big upset in the person's life so that there can be peace afterwards. You end up doing in months what normal people do in years in regards to happiness. It's not easy to grasp when money dominates everything now.

Tell you what I'll give you a secret. Start praying to archangel Uriel everyday. He/she is the angel of peace. Don Yuan mentions Jacob and the angel in one of the books referring to Jacob fighting a man across the river all night (it's from the old testament). This "man" is thought to be Phanuel who is similar to Uriel. I consider them to be the same because there is war before peace. I've been praying to Uriel every day for months and it seemed more like war than peace. But as time goes on I've noticed I'm starting to feel more and more at peace. Kind of like shock therapy.

I should add that most of my energy losses in life seem to be due to me not being at peace. Allies to the rescue... or at least angels for me. I have a theory that angels are safer to use than other spirits.

[dRider]

That's all very interesting, and I agree with you on the angel note, that they are safer. I think that's because they're spirits just the same, but are for whatever reason bound to help and love humans (choice, command, or whatever you can think of). Maybe they're not even spirits the same, but are specific energies that aren't capable of harm. Extremely advanced, once living ascended masters? Many possibilities.

As to sex and Tantra, I think it can be used to raise energy, or collect it. Remember the Celestine Prophecies, where it says that energy taken from each other diminishes, but energy shared and given becomes more than it was? I think it's possible in Tantra, so long as it's done right. Maybe Carlos heals, maybe not, maybe don Juan had his four "friends" for the accumulation of and/or learning to properly use his energy. I also think that healing in such a manner doesn't necessarily spend energy so much as it moves it, and in so doing corrects the affected person's energy.

Question to all who reads this: do you think that energy is accumulated and spent, or an equal amount over the entirety of our lives? Basically, do you think we start out with a huge amount and spend it as we go along, choosing to save it as we get older and learn how? Or do you think we simply have to learn how to proportion it in the right amounts of the right places in our energy fields, but we die with the same energy that we were born with?

[dRider]

Last night I found my hands in a dream for at least the first time, if not second (memory is sketchy, like I'm always half-in/half-out of second attention). I was in a house, looking out a window with someone near me. I was angrily thinking, "Well if it's a dream then I can look at anything," or something to that affect, then I remembered consciously the practice of looking at hands. The anger went away and I switched from a tree outside to my friend, to my hands, to a glass on the windowsill, back to my hands, etc.

My hand was starting to look weird, such as the thumb being shorter than normal and grit over the hands. I tried to focus better to see my hand the way it should be, and I woke up. Progress...PROGRESS!!

[akimbomoss]

Nice start. I never really wanted to continue after my first try as a scout came and bit my hand scaring the crap out of me. I was reading the art of dreaming at the time and hadn't gotten to the part about scouts yet. An ally was after me and with the encouragement of people on this forum I went for it. Since it was 10 years later I don't know if it was the ally. You can see the results in the thread "are these servitors".

Long story short after meeting The Fox (we think it's a fire elemental), some trickster spirit I bet, I started descending into madness while everybody watched. They tried to drop vague hints at me but it didn't work because I was in too deep. It took a angelic healing witch from Greece to snap me out of it.

I felt like Carlos. I couldn't wait to go back to The Fox to see what pictures he was going to show me in his books. I saw an abandoned city full of giant flywheels. I saw a giant slugpig crawling down a building. I saw a tornado going through a city with nobody in the buildings. Apparently he was showing me atlantis or some ancient city from millions of years ago.

Now I don't talk to anything but angels now.

[dRider]

Cool beans. I'm going to follow this and see where it leads, personally. I've already had freakin weird experiences in and out of dreams, so I want to see what's possible. My ambien, sleep medication, puts me in a definite trance/second attention state if I don't lay down right after I take it.

That could have been atlantis, also could have been your mind, metaphoricized by dreamstate.

[akimbomoss]

Cool beans. I'm going to follow this and see where it leads, personally. I've already had freakin weird experiences in and out of dreams, so I want to see what's possible. My ambien, sleep medication, puts me in a definite trance/second attention state if I don't lay down right after I take it.

That could have been atlantis, also could have been your mind, metaphoricized by dreamstate.

Ambien? See what i mean? Now we have new drugs that help... or are they? That's experimental territory.

Any addictive substance or vices needed to be left behind before outsiders could do a peyote run with the Toltecs. I read that in a book about Toltec spirituality. I got off a sleeping pill a few months ago and life has been very hard on me since then. I went to a naturopath and got on natural products, and due to genetic defects have to go sugar, gluten and dairy free.

The Yaquis and Toltecs have peyote festivals every now and then. I've read that incidence of mental illness is lower with these people who eat peyote in this way.

[dRider]

I agree that sleep meds aren't necessary and may hurt in the long run. And the US Native American Church ($300 membership, unfortunately) also has peyote among its membrs. I don't actually know any Toltecs or Yaqui indians. I would happily leave all my psych meds behind if a man I trusted as my master in the subject said it was necessary. It's my goal anyway, to learn to control what the meds do for me.

[ddionysius]

"The Truth" about CC has been out there for a while, and you're right that there's not much to be obtained practically from the books. However, they definitely served as a good motivator for me (and many others) to start looking at how I went through life, and also as a reminder that there's other realities existing besides the everyday humdrum we tend to believe is all. Don Juan may have been a figment of CC's imagination, though as a work (like portions of the Bible or Alice in Wonderland), it can have certain "waking" effects on people which can be useful.
His references to "stalking", and also the contrast between ordinary men and a "man of knowledge" certainly left an impression on me.

[dRider]

To what truth do you speak? I see nothing wrong with the information, directly or indirectly.