Both of my parents are avid readers and have a library of books. They passed along this trait to me. Each time I visit I always ask them if I can borrow a couple of books to take with me to read. The books I choose depend on what tickles my fancy at the time. This past weekend I chose many ‘old’ books, the oldest being published in 1863. Academic books are on hold for now; I just want to have some fun and get lost in a great book.
The quote below is from the prologue of the book, Reflections – Thoughts on Love and Living by Ginger Hutton, and quite impressed me ;)
Don’t bring me flowers, whatnots or jewelry.
Give me a fresh idea. One that I can roll around in my mind and on my tongue and savor for months to come. Human beings are vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge. I always feel half empty.
Give me a book. If it says something I don’t agree with – if it shakes me up – if it makes me spend hours thinking it through, so much better. I need the mental exercise.
Give me days to watch people, to listen to them, to understand them, so that their differences become familiar to me and no longer divide us.
Give me conversations with people who know more than I do, who teach me to think on a grander scale than I have before, who leave my mind racing and my dreams soaring.
Give me a job that seems a bit beyond me so that it makes me stretch to conquer my limitations and discover strengths I didn’t know I had.
Give me something new to taste, something new to see, something new to try, something new to feel.
Give me a workshop, a seminar, a lecture, a documentary, a movie, a class, a magazine, a newspaper. There are so many things to read, so many places to go, so many things to experience and not enough time to do it all.
Give me time. Give me freedom from all those things that take our energy and give back little. Heaven would be a place free of all the physical upkeep, like house-keeping and car repair, that is necessary to maintain this world.
Give me freedom from guilt when I take an hour or two from what I’m ‘supposed to do’ to read. So many of the supposed-to-dos will be undone or forgotten within moments or days. Learning stays with you forever.
Give me more moments talking and playing with children, mine and others. They teach me to feel and to express more openly and honestly.
Give me times of pain as well as gladness, for they develop inner strength and build faith in my ability to successfully deal with life’s mixed offerings.
Give me my mistakes, for they make me less judgmental of others.
Give me an answer.
Give me a question for which there appears to be no answer.
Thursday, June 29, 2017
Monday, June 26, 2017
Dreaming By Carlos Castaneda
Now it's time for you to become accessible to power, and you are going to begin by tackling dreaming. A warrior seeks power, and one of the avenues to power is dreaming.
What you call dreams are real for a warrior. You must understand that a warrior is not a fool. A warrior is an immaculate hunter who hunts power; he's not drunk, or crazed, and he has neither the time nor the disposition to bluff, or to lie to himself, or to make a wrong move. The stakes are too high for that. The stakes are his trimmed orderly life which he has taken so long to tighten and perfect. He is not going to throw that away by making some stupid miscalculation, by taking something for being something else.
Dreaming is real for a warrior because in it he can act deliberately, he can choose and reject, he can select from a variety of items those which lead to power, and then he can manipulate them and use them, while in an ordinary dream he cannot act deliberately.
In dreaming you have power; you can change things; you may find out countless concealed facts; you can control whatever you want. You’re going to learn how to make yourself accessible to power. Power is something a warrior deals with. At first it's an incredible, far-fetched affair; it is hard to even think about it. Then power becomes a serious matter; one may not have it, or one may not even fully realize that it exists, yet one knows that something is there, something which was not noticeable before. Next power is manifested as something uncontrollable that comes to oneself. It is not possible for me to say how it comes or what it really is. It is nothing and yet it makes marvels appear before your very eyes. And finally power is something in oneself, something that controls one's acts and yet obeys one's command. I am going to teach you right here the first step to power. I am going to teach you how to set up dreaming.
To set up dreaming means to have a concise and pragmatic control over the general situation of a dream, comparable to the control one has over any choice in the desert for instance, such as climbing up a hill or remaining in the shade of a water canyon. You must start by doing something very simple. Tonight in your dreams you must look at your hands.
Don't think it's a joke. Dreaming is as serious as seeing or dying or any other thing in this awesome, mysterious world. Think of it as something entertaining and don't get discouraged or stop trying if you don't succeed right away. Imagine all the inconceivable things you could accomplish. A man hunting for power has almost no limits in his dreaming.
The trick in learning to set up dreaming is obviously not just to look at things but to sustain the sight of them. Dreaming is real when one has succeeded in bringing everything into focus. Then there is no difference between what you do when you sleep and what you do when you are not sleeping.
A warrior has to be perfect in order to deal with the powers he hunts. Look at your hands. When they begin to change shape you must move your sight away from them and pick something else, and then look at your hands again. It takes a long time to perfect this technique. Ordinary dreams get very vivid as soon as you begin to set up dreaming. That vividness and clarity is a formidable barrier. Don't be distracted from the purpose of dreaming, which is control and power.
I'm going to remind you of all the techniques you must practice. First you must focus your gaze on your hands as the starting point. Then shift your gaze to other items and look at them in brief glances. Focus your gaze on as many things as you can. Remember that if you only glance briefly the images do not shift. Then go back to your hands. Every time you look at your hands you renew the power needed for dreaming, so in the beginning don't look at too many things. Four items will suffice every time. Later on you may enlarge the scope until you can cover all you want, but as soon as the images begin to shift and you feel you are losing control go back to your hands.
When you feel you can gaze at things indefinitely you will be ready for a new technique. I'm going to teach you this new technique now, but I expect you to put it to use only when you are ready.
The next step in setting up dreaming is to learn to travel. The same way you have learned to look at your hands you can will yourself to move, to go places. First you have to establish a place you want to go to. Pick a well-known spot--perhaps your school, or a park, a friend's house--then, will yourself to go there. This technique is very difficult. You must perform two tasks: you must will yourself to go to the specific locale; and then, when you have mastered that technique, you have to learn to control the exact time of your traveling. You are making yourself accessible to power; you're hunting it and I'm just guiding you.
You should try willing yourself to go to a specific place in dreaming while you take a nap during the daytime and find out if you can actually visualize the chosen place as it is at the time you are dreaming. Otherwise the visions you might have are not dreaming but ordinary dreams.
In order to help yourself you should pick a specific object that belongs to the place you want to go and focus your attention on it. It is easier to travel in dreaming when you can focus on a place of power. Perhaps the school where you go is a place of power for you. Use it. Focus your attention on any object there and then find it in dreaming. From the specific object you recall, you must go back to your hands and then to another object and so on.
Dreaming is the not-doing of dreams, and as you progress in your not-doing you will also progress in dreaming. The trick is not to stop looking for your hands, even if you don't believe that what you are doing has any meaning. In fact, as I have told you before, a warrior doesn't need do believe, because as long as he keeps on acting without believing he is not-doing.
Dreaming entails cultivating a peculiar control over one's dreams to the extent that the experiences undergone in them and those lived in one's waking hours acquire the same pragmatic valence. The sorcerers' allegation is that under the impact of dreaming the ordinary criteria to differentiate a dream from reality becomes inoperative.
The early stage of the preparatory facet, called setting up dreaming, consists of a deadly game that one's mind plays with itself. Some part of yourself is going to do everything it can to prevent the fulfillment of your task.
As soon as the sight of your hands begins to dissolve or change into something else, you have to shift your view from your hands to any other element in the surroundings of your dream.
Something in us is threatened by our activities in dreaming. Each warrior has his own way of dreaming. Each way is different. The only thing which we all have in common is that we play tricks in order to force ourselves to abandon the quest. The counter-measure is to persist in spite of all the barriers and disappointments.
The sorcerers' explanation of how to select a topic for dreaming, is that a warrior chooses the topic by deliberately holding an image in his mind while he shuts off his internal dialogue. If he is capable of not talking to himself for a moment and then holds the image or the thought of what he wants in dreaming , even if only for an instant, then the desired topic will come to him.
I'm going to begin telling you about the "double" or the "Other." The double is the sorcerer himself developed thru his dreaming . The double is an act of power to a sorcerer but only a tale of power to you. The double is the self; that explanation should suffice. For a sorcerer who sees , the double is brighter.
Don't take things so seriously. I've told you time and time again that the world is unfathomable, and so are we, and so is every being that exists in this world. It is impossible, therefore, to reason out the double.
A sorcerer can double up, that's all one can say. No sorcerer knows where his Other is. A sorcerer has no notion that he is in two places at once. To be aware of that would be the equivalent of facing his double, and the sorcerer that finds himself face to face with himself is a dead sorcerer. That is the rule. That is the way power has set things up. No one knows why.
By the time a warrior has conquered dreaming and seeing and has developed a double, he must have also succeeded in erasing personal history, self-importance, and routines. So doing is the means for removing the impracticality of having a double in the ordinary world, by making the self and the world fluid, and by placing them outside the bounds of prediction.
A fluid warrior can no longer make the world chronological, and for him, the world and himself are no longer objects. He's a luminous being existing in a luminous world. The double is a simple affair for a sorcerer because he knows what he's doing.
A sorcerer may certainly notice afterwards that he has been in two places at once. But this is only bookkeeping and has no bearing on the fact that while he's acting he has no notion of his duality.
Think of this, the world doesn't yield to us directly, the description of the world stands in between. So, properly speaking, we are always one step removed and our experience of the world is always a recollection of the experience. We are perennially recollecting the instant that has just happened, just passed. We recollect, recollect, recollect.
If our entire experience of the world is recollection, then it's not so outlandish to conclude that a sorcerer can be in two places at once. This is not the case from the point of view of his own perception, because in order to experience the world, a sorcerer, like every other man, has to recollect the act he has just performed, the event he has just witnessed, the experience he has just lived. In his awareness there is only a single recollection. The sorcerer, however, recollects two separate single instants, because the glue of the description of time is no longer binding him. We're always one jump behind.
Does the double have corporealness? Certainly. Solidity, corporealness are memories. Therefore, like everything else we feel about the world, they are memories we accumulate, memories of the description.
No one develops a double. That's only a way of talking about it. All of us luminous beings have a double. All of us! A warrior learns to be aware of it, that's all. There are seemingly insurmountable barriers protecting that awareness. But that's expected; those barriers are what makes arriving at that awareness such a unique challenge. You are afraid of it because you're thinking that the double is what the word says. A double, or another you. I chose those words in order to describe it. The double is oneself and cannot be faced in any other way.
The double is not a matter of personal choice. Neither is it a matter of personal choice who is selected to learn the sorcerers' knowledge that leads to that awareness. Have you ever asked yourself, why you in particular? I don't mean that you should ask it as a question that begs an answer, but in the sense of a warrior's pondering on his great fortune, the fortune of having found a challenge.
To make it into an ordinary question is the device of a conceited ordinary man who wants to be either admired or pitied for it. I have no interest in that kind of question, because there is no way of answering it. The decision of picking you was a design of power; no one can discern the designs of power. Now that you've been selected, there is nothing that you can do to stop the fulfillment of that design.
A warrior is in the hands of power and his only freedom is to choose an impeccable life.
You're in a terrible spot. It's too late for you to retreat but too soon to act. All you can do is witness. For you there is only witnessing acts of power and listening to tales, tales of power. The double is one of those tales. You know that, and that's why your reason is so taken by it. You are beating your head against a wall if you pretend to understand. All that I can say about it, by way of explanation, is that the double, although it is arrived at through dreaming , is as real as it can be. It is the self. It is the awareness of our state as luminous beings. It can do anything, and yet it chooses to be unobtrusive and gentle.
I'm going to tell you about the dreamer and the dreamed. The double begins in dreaming . The double is a dream. I am referring to the first emergence of the awareness that we are luminous beings. Each one of us is different, and thus the details of our struggles are different.
The steps that we follow to arrive at the double are the same, though. Especially the beginning steps, which are muddled and uncertain. A dream in which one is watching oneself asleep is the time of the double. Rather than wasting power in wondering and asking questions, one should use the opportunity to act. When you have the chance you should be prepared.
A warrior never lets his guard down. What matters is what can you use as a shield? A warrior must use everything available to him to close his mortal gap once it opens. So, it's of no importance that you really don't like to be suspicious or ask questions. That's your only shield now.
There is no flaw it the warrior's way. Question without fear, without suspicion and without draining yourself. Assemble what you learn, without presumptuousness and without piousness.
The self dreams the double. Once it has learned to dream the double, the self arrives at this weird crossroad and a moment comes when one realizes that it is the double who dreams the self. Your double is dreaming you. No one knows how it happens. We only know that it does happen. That's the mystery of us as luminous beings. You can awaken in either one.
Stopping the internal dialogue is, however, the key to the sorcerers' world. The rest of the activities are only props; all they do is accelerate the effect of stopping the internal dialogue. There are two major activities or techniques used to accelerate the stopping of the internal dialogue: erasing personal history and dreaming.
The secret of all this is one's attention. All of this exists only because of our attention. This very rock where we're sitting is a rock because we have been forced to give our attention to it as a rock.
Erasing personal history and dreaming should only be a help. What any apprentice needs to buffer him is temperance and strength. That's why a teacher introduces the warrior's way, or living like a warrior. This is the glue that joins together everything in a sorcerer's world. Bit by bit a teacher must forge and develop it. Without the sturdiness and levelheadedness of the warrior's way there is no possibility of withstanding the path of knowledge.
I've taught you the three techniques that help dreaming : disrupting the routines of life, the gait of power, and not-doing . Disrupting routines, the gait of power, and not-doing are avenues for learning new ways of perceiving the world, and they give a warrior an inkling of incredible possibilities of action. The knowledge of a separate and pragmatic world of dreaming is made possible through the use of those three techniques.
Dreaming is a practical aid devised by sorcerers. They were not fools; they knew what they were doing and sought the usefulness of the nagual by training their tonal to let go for a moment, so to speak, and then grab again. This statement may not make sense to you. But that's what you're doing: training yourself to let go without losing your marbles.
Dreaming , of course, is the crown of the sorcerers' efforts, the ultimate use of the nagual.
We're at the end of our review. All in all, then, you have been being led into the nagual . But here we have a strange question. What is being led into the nagual ? Not reason . Reason is meaningless there. Reason craps out in an instant when it is out of its safe narrow bounds. Your tonal ? No, the tonal and the nagual are the two inherent parts of ourselves. They cannot be led into each other. Your perception!
Everything has a particular mold. Plants have molds, animals have molds, worms have molds. Sorcerers have the avenue of their dreaming to lead them to the mold. The mold of men is definitely an entity, an entity which can be seen by some of us at certain times when we are imbued with power, and by all of us for sure at the moment of our death. The mold is the source, the origin of man, since, without the mold to group together the force of life, there is no way for that force to assemble itself into the shape of man.
The only thing that makes you think you are yourself is the form. Once it leaves, you are nothing. A warrior without form begins to see an eye. The formless warrior uses that eye to start dreaming . If you don't have a form, you don't have to go to sleep to do dreaming . The eye in front of you pulls you every time you want to go.
Everything has to be sifted through our human form. When we have no form, then nothing has form and yet everything is present.
The art of the dreamer is to hold the image of his dream. Our art as ordinary people is that we know how to hold the image of what we are looking at. We just do it; that is, our bodies do it. In dreaming we have to do the same thing, except that in dreaming we have to learn how to do it. We have to struggle not to look but merely to glance and yet hold the image.
With our attention we can hold the images of a dream in the same way we hold the images of the world. The art of the dreamer is the art of attention.
Our first ring of power is engaged very early in our lives and we live under the impression that that is all there is to us. Our second ring of power , the attention of the nagual, remains hidden for the immense majority of us, and only at the moment of our death is it revealed to us. There is a pathway to reach it, however, which is available to every one of us, but which only sorcerers take, and that pathway is through dreaming . Dreaming is in essence the transformation of ordinary dreams into affairs involving volition. Dreamers, by engaging their attention of the nagual and focusing it on the items and events of their ordinary dreams, change those dreams into dreaming.
There are no procedures to arrive at the attention of the nagual , only pointers. Finding your hands in your dreams is the first pointer; then the exercise of paying attention is elongated to finding objects, looking for specific features, such as buildings, streets and so on. From there the jump is to dream about specific places at specific times of the day. The final stage is drawing the attention of the nagual to focus on the total self.
The attention under the table is the key to everything sorcerers do. In order to reach that attention I have taught you dreaming.
Another way to learn how to do dreaming is by learning gazing. If you gaze at a pile of leaves for hours your thoughts get quiet. Without thoughts the attention of the tonal wanes and suddenly your second attention hooks onto the leaves and the leaves become something else. The moment when the second attention hooks onto something is called stopping the world.
The difficulty in gazing is to learn to quiet down the thoughts. Once you can stop the world you are a gazer. And the only way of stopping the world is by trying. Combine gazing at dry leaves and looking for our hands in dreaming . Once you have trapped your second attention with dry leaves, you do gazing and dreaming to enlarge it. And that's all there is to gazing. All we need to do in order to trap our second attention is to try and try. Once dreamers know how to stop the world by gazing at leaves, they can gaze at other things; and finally when the dreamers lose their form altogether, they can gaze at anything.
First after leaves, gaze at small plants. Small plants are very dangerous. Their power is concentrated; they have a very intense light and they feel when dreamers are gazing at them; they immediately move their light and shoot it at the gazer. Dreamers have to choose one kind of plant to gaze at.
Next gaze at trees. Dreamers also have a particular kind of tree to gaze at. Next gaze at moving, living creatures. Small insects are by far the best subject. Their mobility makes them innocuous to the gazer, the opposite of plants which draw their light directly from the earth.
The next step is to gaze at rocks. Rocks are very old and powerful and have a specific light which is rather greenish in contrast with the white light of plants and the yellowish light of mobile, living beings. Rocks do not open up easily to gazers, but it is worthwhile for gazers to persist because rocks have special secrets concealed in their core, secrets that can aid sorcerers in their dreaming.
Dreamers can gaze in order to do dreaming and then they can look for their dreams in their gazing. For example you can gaze at the shadows of rocks and then, in your dreaming , you might find out that those shadows have light. You can then, while gazing, look for the light in the shadows until you find it. Gazing and dreaming go together.
One of the most important goals of sorcery is to reach the luminous cocoon; a goal which is fulfilled through the sophisticated use of dreaming and through a rigorous, systematic exertion called not-doing. I've defined not-doing as an unfamiliar act which engages our total being by forcing it to become conscious of its luminous segment.
The compulsion to possess and hold on to things is not unique. Everyone who wants to follow the warrior's path has to rid himself of this fixation in order not to focus our dreaming body on the weak face of the second attention.
The dreaming body, sometimes called the "double" or the "Other," because it is a perfect replica of the dreamer 's body, is inherently the energy of a luminous being, a whitish, phantomlike emanation, which is projected by the fixation of the second attention into a three-dimensional image of the body.
The dreaming body is as real as anything we deal with in the world. The second attention is unavoidably drawn to focus on our total being as a field of energy, and transforms that energy into anything suitable. The easiest thing is of course the image of the physical body, with which we are already thoroughly familiar from our daily lives and the use of our first attention. What channels the energy of our total being to produce anything that might be within the boundaries of possibility is known as will.
If you have the same vision in dreaming three times, pay extraordinary attention to it. When a dreamer dreams that he sees himself asleep he must avoid sudden jolts or surprises, and take everything with a grain of salt. The dreamer has to get involved in dispassionate experimentations. Rather than examining his sleeping body, the dreamer walks out of the room.
In dreaming what matters is volition, the corporeality of the body has no significance. It is simply a memory that slows down the dreamer . If you do not stare at things but only glance at them, just as you do in the daily world, you can arrange your perception. That is, by taking your dreaming for granted, you then can use the perceptual biases of your everyday life.
In the final analysis every dreamer is different. There are, however, general states.
Restful vigil is the preliminary state, a state in which the senses become dormant and yet one is aware.
The second state is dynamic vigil. In this state one is left looking at a scene, a tableau of sorts, which is static. One sees a three-dimensional picture, a frozen bit of something--a landscape, a street, a house, a person, a face, anything.
The third state is passive witnessing. In it the dreamer is no longer viewing a frozen bit of the world but is observing, eye-witnessing, an event as it occurs. It is as if the primacy of the visual and auditory senses makes this state of dreaming mainly an affair of the eyes and ears.
The fourth state is the one in which you are drawn to act. In it one is compelled to enterprise, to take steps, to make the most of one's time. This state is called dynamic initiative.
Dreaming begins as a unique state of awareness arrived at by focusing the residue of consciousness, which one still has when asleep, on the elements, or the features, of one's dreams.
The residue of consciousness, called the second attention, is brought into action, or is harnessed, through exercises of not-doing . The essential aid to dreaming is a state of mental quietness, called "stopping the internal dialogue," or the "not-doing of talking to oneself." To teach you how to master it, I've made you walk for miles with your eyes held fixed and out of focus at a level just above the horizon so as to emphasize the peripheral view. This method is effective on two counts. It allows you to stop your internal dialogue, and it trains your attention. By forcing you to concentrate on the peripheral view, I reinforced your capacity to concentrate for long periods of time on one single activity.
The best way to enter into dreaming is to concentrate on the area just at the tip of the sternum, at the top of the belly. The attention needed for dreaming stems from that area. The energy needed in order to move and to seek in dreaming stems from the area an inch or two below the belly button. That energy is the will , or the power to select, to assemble. In a woman both the attention and the energy for dreaming originate from the womb.
Anything may suffice as a not-doing to help dreaming , providing that it forces the attention to remain fixed. The attention one needs in the beginning of dreaming has to be forcibly made to stay on any given item in a dream. Only through immobilizing our attention can one turn an ordinary dream into dreaming.
In dreaming one has to use the same mechanisms of attention as in everyday life. Our first attention has been taught to focus on the items of the world with great force in order to turn the amorphous and chaotic realm of perception into the orderly world of awareness.
The second attention serves the function of a beckoner, a caller of chances. The more it is exercised, the greater the possibility of getting the desired result. But that is also the function of attention in general, a function so taken for granted in our daily life that it has become unnoticeable; if we encounter a fortuitous occurrence we talk about it in terms of accident or coincidence, rather than in terms of our attention having beckoned the event.
The only thing that really counts in making the shift into the dreaming body is anchoring the second attention. Attention is what makes the world. What is important is to store attention in dreaming.
The first attention, the attention that makes the world, can never be completely overcome; it can only be turned off for a moment and replaced with the second attention, providing that the body had stored enough of it. Dreaming is naturally a way of storing the second attention. In order to shift into your dreaming body when awake you have to practice dreaming until it comes out your ears.
I have given you three tasks to train your second attention. First, to find your hands in dreaming . Next, to choose a locale, focus your attention on it, and then do daytime dreaming and find out if you can really go there. I've suggested that you place someone you know at the site in order to do two things: first to check subtle changes that might indicate that you were there in dreaming , and second, to isolate unobtrusive detail, which would be precisely what your second attention would zero in on.
The most serious problem the dreamer has in this respect is the unbending fixation of the second attention on detail that would be thoroughly undetected by the attention of everyday life, creating in this manner a nearly insurmountable obstacle to validation.
What one seeks in dreaming is not what one would pay attention to in everyday life. One strives to immobilize the second attention only in the learning period. After that, one has to fight the almost invincible pull of the second attention and give only cursory glances at everything. In dreaming one has to be satisfied with the briefest possible views of everything. As soon as one focuses on anything, one loses control.
The last generalized task I gave you to train your second attention was to get out of your body. This task begins with a dream in which you find yourself looking at yourself asleep.
To elucidate the control of the second attention, I've presented the idea of will . Will can be described as the maximum control of the luminosity of the body as a field of energy; or it can be described as a level of proficiency, as a state of being that comes abruptly into the daily life of a warrior at any given time. It is experienced as a force that radiates out of the middle part of the body following a moment of the most absolute silence, or a moment of sheer terror, or profound sadness. Those things afford the warrior the concentration needed to use the luminosity of the body and turn it into silence.
For a human being sadness is as powerful as terror. Both can bring the moment of silence. Or the silence comes of itself, because the warrior tries for it throughout his life. It is a moment of blackness, a moment still more silent than the moment of shutting off the internal dialogue. That blackness, that silence, gives rise to the intent to direct the second attention, to command it, to make it do things. This is why it's called will . The intent and the effect are will ; they are tied together.
We don't feel our will because we think that it should be something we know for sure that we are doing or feeling, like getting angry, for instance. Will is very quiet, unnoticeable. Will belongs to the other self. We are in our other selves when we do dreaming.
Will is such a complete control of the second attention that it is called the other self.
Stalkers deal with people, with the world of ordinary affairs. Stalkers are the practitioners of controlled folly as the dreamers are the practitioners of dreaming . Controlled folly is the basis for stalking , as dreams are the basis for dreaming . Generally speaking, a warrior's greatest accomplishment in the second attention is dreaming , and in the first attention his greatest accomplishment is stalking.
In the absence of self-importance, a warrior's only way of dealing with the social milieu is in terms of controlled folly.
The second attention belongs to the luminous body, as the first attention belongs to the physical body.
Dreaming is in fact a rational state. In dreaming , the right side, the rational awareness, is wrapped up inside the left side awareness in order to give the dreamer a sense of sobriety and rationality; but the influence of rationality has to be minimal and used only as an inhibiting mechanism to protect the dreamer from excesses and bizarre undertakings.
Our first attention is hooked to the emanations of the earth, while our second attention is hooked to the emanations of the universe. A dreamer by definition is outside the boundaries of the concerns of everyday life.
The dreamers ' power to focus on their second attention makes them into living slingshots. The stronger and the more impeccable the dreamers are, the farther they can project their second attention into the unknown and the longer their dreaming projection will last.
Dreaming is no illusion. It's a step toward the control of the second attention; in other words, you are learning the perceptual bias of that other realm.
A recapitulation is the forte of stalkers as the dreaming body is the forte of dreamers . It consists of recollecting one's life down to the most insignificant detail.
The first stage is a brief recounting of all the incidents in our lives that in an obvious manner stand out for examination.
The second stage is a more detailed recollection, which starts systematically at a point that could be the moment prior to the stalker sitting, and theoretically could extend to the moment of birth.
A perfect recapitulation can change a warrior as much, if not more, than the total control of the dreaming body . In this respect, dreaming and stalking lead to the same end, the entering into the third attention. It is important for a warrior, however, to know and practice both.
What the new seers saw in the glow of awareness resulted in the sequence in which they arranged the old seers' truths about awareness. This is known as the mastery of awareness. From that, they developed the three sets of techniques. The first is the mastery of stalking , the second is the mastery of intent , and the third is the mastery of dreaming . I taught you these three sets from the very first day we met.
The new seers deemed it imperative to see the Indescribable Force 's emanations in order to find a more suitable way to move the assemblage point. As they tried to see the emanations they were faced with a very serious problem. They found out that there is no way to see them without running a mortal risk, and yet they had to see them. That was the time when they used the old seers' technique of dreaming as a shield to protect themselves from the deadly blow of the Indescribable Force 's emanations. And in doing so, they realized that dreaming was in itself the most effective way to move the assemblage point.
One of the strictest commands of the new seers was that warriors have to learn dreaming while they are in their normal state of awareness. Following that command, I began teaching you dreaming almost from the first day we met.
Dreaming has to be taught in normal awareness because dreaming is so dangerous and dreamers so vulnerable. It is dangerous became it has inconceivable power; it makes dreamers vulnerable because it leaves them at the mercy of the incomprehensible force of alignment.
The new seers realized that in our normal state of awareness, we have countless defenses that can safeguard us against the force of unused emanations that suddenly become aligned in dreaming.
Dreaming , like stalking, began with a simple observation. The old seers became aware that in dreams the assemblage point shifts slightly to the left side in a most natural manner. That point indeed relaxes when man sleeps and all kinds of unused emanations begin to glow.
The old seers became immediately intrigued with that observation and began to work with that natural shift until they were able to control it. They called that control dreaming, or the art of handling the dreaming body.
There is hardly a way of describing the immensity of their knowledge about dreaming. Very little of it, however, was of any use to the new seers. So when the time of reconstruction came, the new seers took for themselves only the bare essentials of dreaming to aid them in seeing the Indescribable Force 's emanations and to help them move their assemblage points.
Seers, old and new, understand dreaming as being the control of the natural shift that the assemblage point undergoes in sleep. To control that shift does not mean in any way to direct it, but to keep the assemblage point fixed at the position where it naturally moves in sleep, a most difficult maneuver that took the old seers' enormous effort and concentration to accomplish.
Dreamers have to strike a very subtle balance, for dreams cannot be interfered with, nor can they be commanded by the conscious effort of the dreamer , and yet the shift of the assemblage point must obey the dreamer 's command--a contradiction that cannot be rationalized but must be resolved in practice.
After observing dreamers while they slept, the old seers hit upon the solution of letting dreams follow their natural course. They have seen that in some dreams, the assemblage point of the dreamer would drift considerably deeper into the left side than in other dreams. This observation posed to them the question of whether the content of the dream makes the assemblage point move, or the movement of the assemblage point by itself produces the content of the dream by activating unused emanations.
They soon realized that the shifting of the assemblage point into the left side is what produces dreams. The farther the movement, the more vivid and bizarre the dream.
Inevitably, they attempted to command their dreams, aiming to make their assemblage points move deeply into the left side. Upon trying it, they discovered that when dreams are consciously or semiconsciously manipulated, the assemblage point immediately returns to its usual place. Since what they wanted was for that point to move, they reached the unavoidable conclusion that interfering with dreams was interfering with the natural shift of the assemblage point.
From there the old seers went on to develop their astounding knowledge on the subject--a knowledge which had a tremendous bearing on what the new seers aspired to do with dreaming, but was of little use to them in its original form.
Thus far you have understood dreaming as being the control of dreams, and every one of the exercised I have given you to perform, such as finding your hands in your dreams, was not, although it might seem to be, aimed at teaching you to command your dreams. Those exercises were designed to keep your assemblage point fixed at the place where it had moved in your sleep. It is here that the dreamers have to strike a subtle balance. All they can direct is the fixation of their assemblage points. Seers are like fishermen equipped with a line that casts itself wherever it may; the only thing they can do is keep the line anchored at the place where it sinks.
Wherever the assemblage point moves in dreams is called the dreaming position. The old seers became so expert at keeping their dreaming position that they were even able to wake up while their assemblage points were anchored there.
The old seers called that state the dreaming body , because they controlled it to the extreme of creating a temporary new body every time they woke up at a new dreaming position. I have to make it clear to you that dreaming has a terrible drawback. It belongs to the old seers. It's tainted with their mood. I've been very careful in guiding you through it, but still there is no way to make sure.
I'm warning you about the pitfalls of dreaming, which are truly stupendous. In dreaming, there is really no way of directing the movement of the assemblage point; the only thing that dictates that shift is the inner strength or weakness of dreamers. Right there we have the first pitfall.
At first the new seers were hesitant to use dreaming. It was their belief that dreaming , instead of fortifying, made warriors weak, compulsive, capricious. The old seers were all like that. In order to offset the nefarious effect of dreaming, since they had no other option but to use it, the new seers developed a complex and rich system of behavior called the warrior's way, or the warrior's path.
The name dreaming body means a feeling, a surge of energy that is transported by the movement of the assemblage point to any place in this world, or to any place in the seven worlds available to man.
The procedure for getting to the dreaming body starts with an initial act which by the fact of being sustained breeds unbending intent . Unbending intent leads to internal silence, and internal silence to the inner strength needed to make the assemblage point shift in dreams to suitable positions.
This sequence is the groundwork. The development of control comes after the groundwork has been completed; it consists of systematically maintaining the dreaming position by doggedly holding on to the vision of the dream. Steady practice results in a great facility to hold new dreaming positions with new dreams, not so much because one gains deliberate control with practice, but because every time this control is exercised the inner strength gets fortified. Fortified inner strength in turn makes the assemblage point shift into dreaming positions which are more and more suitable to fostering sobriety; in other words, dreams by themselves become more and more manageable, even orderly.
The development of dreamers is indirect. That's why the new seers believed we can do dreaming by ourselves, alone. Since dreaming uses a natural, built-in shift of the assemblage point, we should need no one to help us.
What we badly need is sobriety, and no one can give it to us or help us get it except ourselves. Without it, the shift of the assemblage point is chaotic, as our ordinary dreams are chaotic. So, all in all, the procedure to get to the dreaming body is impeccability in our daily life.
Once sobriety is acquired and the dreaming positions become increasingly stronger, the next step is to wake up at any dreaming position . That maneuver, although made to sound simple, is really a very complex affair--so complex that it requires not only sobriety but all the attributes of warriorship as well, especially intent.
Intent, being the most sophisticated control of the force of alignment, is what maintains, through the dreamer's sobriety, the alignment of whatever emanations have been lit up by the movement of the assemblage point.
There is one more formidable pitfall of dreaming: the very strength of the dreaming body. For example, it is very easy for the dreaming body to gaze at the Indescribable Force's emanations uninterruptedly for long periods of time, but it is also very easy in the end for the dreaming body to be totally consumed by them. Seers who gazed at the Indescribable Force's emanations without their dreaming bodies died, and those who gazed at them with their dreaming bodies burned with the fire from within. The new seers solved the problem by seeing in teams. While one seer gazed at the emanations, others stood by ready to end the seeing.
It's perfectly possible for a group of seers to activate the same unused emanations. And in this case also, there are no known steps, it just happens; there is no technique to follow.
In dreaming together, something in us takes the lead and suddenly we find ourselves sharing the same view with other dreamers. What happens is that our human condition makes us focus the glow of awareness automatically on the same emanations that other human beings are using; we adjust the position of our assemblage points to fit the others around us. We do that on the right side, in our ordinary perception, and we also do it on the left side, while dreaming together.
Alignment is a unique force because it either helps the assemblage point shift, or it keeps it glued to its customary position. The aspect of alignment that keeps the point stationary is will; and the aspect that makes it shift is intent. One of the most haunting mysteries is how will, the impersonal force of alignment, changes into intent, the personalized force, which is at the service of each individual.
The strangest part of this mystery is that the change is so easy to accomplish. But what is not so easy is to convince ourselves that it is possible. There, right there, is our safety catch. We have to be convinced. And none of us wants to be.
It is possible for you to intend your assemblage point to shift deeper into your left side, to a dreaming position. Warriors should never attempt seeing unless they are aided by dreaming.
To move the assemblage point away from its natural setting and to keep it fixed at a new location is to be asleep; with practice, seers learn to be asleep and yet behave as if nothing is happening to them.
Technically, as soon as the assemblage point shifts, we are asleep. You are absolutely asleep without having to be stretched out.
During normal sleep, the shift of the assemblage point runs along either edge of man's band. Such shifts are always coupled with slumber. Shifts that are induced by practice occur along the midsection of man's band and are not coupled with slumber, yet a dreamer is asleep.
The new seers maintain their assemblage points along the midsection of man's band. If the shift is a shallow one, like the shift into heightened awareness, the dreamer is almost like anyone else in the street, except for a slight vulnerability to emotions, such as fear and doubt. But at a certain degree of depth, the dreamer who is shifting along the midsection becomes a blob of light. A blob of light is the dreaming body of the new seers. Such an impersonal dreaming body is conducive to understanding and examination, which are the basis of all that the new seers do.
The position where one sees the mold of man is very close to that where the dreaming body and the barrier of perception appear. That is the reason the new seers recommend that the mold of man be seen and understood.
The dreaming body and the barrier of perception are positions of the assemblage point, and that knowledge is as vital to seers as knowing how to read and write is to modern man. Both are accomplishments attained after years of practice.
The dreaming body is known by different names. The name I like the best is, the Other. We can be in two places at once, we can experience a sort of perceptual dualism. There is no end to the mystery of man and to the mystery of the world.
The only thing that soothes those who journey into the unknown, is oblivion. What a relief to be in the ordinary world!
For warriors, there are two positions of the assemblage point where there are no more doubts. In one you have no more doubts because you know everything. In the other, which is normal awareness, you have no doubts because you don't know anything.
No rational assumptions should interfere with the actions of a seer. Rationality is a condition of alignment, merely the result of the position of the assemblage point. You have to understand this when you are in a state of great vulnerability. To understand it when your assemblage point has reached the position where there are no doubts is useless, because realizations of that nature are commonplace in that position. It is equally useless to understand it in a state of normal awareness; in that state, such realizations are emotional outbursts that are valid only for as long as the emotion lasts.
You can travel by waking up at a distant dreaming position. By moving your assemblage point from normal awareness all the way to the position where the dreaming body appears, your dreaming body can actually fly over incredible distances in the blink of an eyelid. The mystery is in the dreaming position. If it is strong enough to pull you, you can go to the ends of this world or beyond it, just as the old seers did. They disappeared from this world because they woke up at a dreaming position beyond the limits of the known.
There is no way of knowing how it is done. Strong emotion or unbending intent, or great interest serves as a guide; then the assemblage point gets powerfully fixed at the dreaming position, long enough to drag there all the emanations that are inside the cocoon.
The fact that such a maneuver is possible is something of the most singular importance to seers. It means escaping the Indescribable Force by moving their assemblage points to a particular dreaming position called total freedom.
What you call dreams are real for a warrior. You must understand that a warrior is not a fool. A warrior is an immaculate hunter who hunts power; he's not drunk, or crazed, and he has neither the time nor the disposition to bluff, or to lie to himself, or to make a wrong move. The stakes are too high for that. The stakes are his trimmed orderly life which he has taken so long to tighten and perfect. He is not going to throw that away by making some stupid miscalculation, by taking something for being something else.
Dreaming is real for a warrior because in it he can act deliberately, he can choose and reject, he can select from a variety of items those which lead to power, and then he can manipulate them and use them, while in an ordinary dream he cannot act deliberately.
In dreaming you have power; you can change things; you may find out countless concealed facts; you can control whatever you want. You’re going to learn how to make yourself accessible to power. Power is something a warrior deals with. At first it's an incredible, far-fetched affair; it is hard to even think about it. Then power becomes a serious matter; one may not have it, or one may not even fully realize that it exists, yet one knows that something is there, something which was not noticeable before. Next power is manifested as something uncontrollable that comes to oneself. It is not possible for me to say how it comes or what it really is. It is nothing and yet it makes marvels appear before your very eyes. And finally power is something in oneself, something that controls one's acts and yet obeys one's command. I am going to teach you right here the first step to power. I am going to teach you how to set up dreaming.
To set up dreaming means to have a concise and pragmatic control over the general situation of a dream, comparable to the control one has over any choice in the desert for instance, such as climbing up a hill or remaining in the shade of a water canyon. You must start by doing something very simple. Tonight in your dreams you must look at your hands.
Don't think it's a joke. Dreaming is as serious as seeing or dying or any other thing in this awesome, mysterious world. Think of it as something entertaining and don't get discouraged or stop trying if you don't succeed right away. Imagine all the inconceivable things you could accomplish. A man hunting for power has almost no limits in his dreaming.
The trick in learning to set up dreaming is obviously not just to look at things but to sustain the sight of them. Dreaming is real when one has succeeded in bringing everything into focus. Then there is no difference between what you do when you sleep and what you do when you are not sleeping.
A warrior has to be perfect in order to deal with the powers he hunts. Look at your hands. When they begin to change shape you must move your sight away from them and pick something else, and then look at your hands again. It takes a long time to perfect this technique. Ordinary dreams get very vivid as soon as you begin to set up dreaming. That vividness and clarity is a formidable barrier. Don't be distracted from the purpose of dreaming, which is control and power.
I'm going to remind you of all the techniques you must practice. First you must focus your gaze on your hands as the starting point. Then shift your gaze to other items and look at them in brief glances. Focus your gaze on as many things as you can. Remember that if you only glance briefly the images do not shift. Then go back to your hands. Every time you look at your hands you renew the power needed for dreaming, so in the beginning don't look at too many things. Four items will suffice every time. Later on you may enlarge the scope until you can cover all you want, but as soon as the images begin to shift and you feel you are losing control go back to your hands.
When you feel you can gaze at things indefinitely you will be ready for a new technique. I'm going to teach you this new technique now, but I expect you to put it to use only when you are ready.
The next step in setting up dreaming is to learn to travel. The same way you have learned to look at your hands you can will yourself to move, to go places. First you have to establish a place you want to go to. Pick a well-known spot--perhaps your school, or a park, a friend's house--then, will yourself to go there. This technique is very difficult. You must perform two tasks: you must will yourself to go to the specific locale; and then, when you have mastered that technique, you have to learn to control the exact time of your traveling. You are making yourself accessible to power; you're hunting it and I'm just guiding you.
You should try willing yourself to go to a specific place in dreaming while you take a nap during the daytime and find out if you can actually visualize the chosen place as it is at the time you are dreaming. Otherwise the visions you might have are not dreaming but ordinary dreams.
In order to help yourself you should pick a specific object that belongs to the place you want to go and focus your attention on it. It is easier to travel in dreaming when you can focus on a place of power. Perhaps the school where you go is a place of power for you. Use it. Focus your attention on any object there and then find it in dreaming. From the specific object you recall, you must go back to your hands and then to another object and so on.
Dreaming is the not-doing of dreams, and as you progress in your not-doing you will also progress in dreaming. The trick is not to stop looking for your hands, even if you don't believe that what you are doing has any meaning. In fact, as I have told you before, a warrior doesn't need do believe, because as long as he keeps on acting without believing he is not-doing.
Dreaming entails cultivating a peculiar control over one's dreams to the extent that the experiences undergone in them and those lived in one's waking hours acquire the same pragmatic valence. The sorcerers' allegation is that under the impact of dreaming the ordinary criteria to differentiate a dream from reality becomes inoperative.
The early stage of the preparatory facet, called setting up dreaming, consists of a deadly game that one's mind plays with itself. Some part of yourself is going to do everything it can to prevent the fulfillment of your task.
As soon as the sight of your hands begins to dissolve or change into something else, you have to shift your view from your hands to any other element in the surroundings of your dream.
Something in us is threatened by our activities in dreaming. Each warrior has his own way of dreaming. Each way is different. The only thing which we all have in common is that we play tricks in order to force ourselves to abandon the quest. The counter-measure is to persist in spite of all the barriers and disappointments.
The sorcerers' explanation of how to select a topic for dreaming, is that a warrior chooses the topic by deliberately holding an image in his mind while he shuts off his internal dialogue. If he is capable of not talking to himself for a moment and then holds the image or the thought of what he wants in dreaming , even if only for an instant, then the desired topic will come to him.
I'm going to begin telling you about the "double" or the "Other." The double is the sorcerer himself developed thru his dreaming . The double is an act of power to a sorcerer but only a tale of power to you. The double is the self; that explanation should suffice. For a sorcerer who sees , the double is brighter.
Don't take things so seriously. I've told you time and time again that the world is unfathomable, and so are we, and so is every being that exists in this world. It is impossible, therefore, to reason out the double.
A sorcerer can double up, that's all one can say. No sorcerer knows where his Other is. A sorcerer has no notion that he is in two places at once. To be aware of that would be the equivalent of facing his double, and the sorcerer that finds himself face to face with himself is a dead sorcerer. That is the rule. That is the way power has set things up. No one knows why.
By the time a warrior has conquered dreaming and seeing and has developed a double, he must have also succeeded in erasing personal history, self-importance, and routines. So doing is the means for removing the impracticality of having a double in the ordinary world, by making the self and the world fluid, and by placing them outside the bounds of prediction.
A fluid warrior can no longer make the world chronological, and for him, the world and himself are no longer objects. He's a luminous being existing in a luminous world. The double is a simple affair for a sorcerer because he knows what he's doing.
A sorcerer may certainly notice afterwards that he has been in two places at once. But this is only bookkeeping and has no bearing on the fact that while he's acting he has no notion of his duality.
Think of this, the world doesn't yield to us directly, the description of the world stands in between. So, properly speaking, we are always one step removed and our experience of the world is always a recollection of the experience. We are perennially recollecting the instant that has just happened, just passed. We recollect, recollect, recollect.
If our entire experience of the world is recollection, then it's not so outlandish to conclude that a sorcerer can be in two places at once. This is not the case from the point of view of his own perception, because in order to experience the world, a sorcerer, like every other man, has to recollect the act he has just performed, the event he has just witnessed, the experience he has just lived. In his awareness there is only a single recollection. The sorcerer, however, recollects two separate single instants, because the glue of the description of time is no longer binding him. We're always one jump behind.
Does the double have corporealness? Certainly. Solidity, corporealness are memories. Therefore, like everything else we feel about the world, they are memories we accumulate, memories of the description.
No one develops a double. That's only a way of talking about it. All of us luminous beings have a double. All of us! A warrior learns to be aware of it, that's all. There are seemingly insurmountable barriers protecting that awareness. But that's expected; those barriers are what makes arriving at that awareness such a unique challenge. You are afraid of it because you're thinking that the double is what the word says. A double, or another you. I chose those words in order to describe it. The double is oneself and cannot be faced in any other way.
The double is not a matter of personal choice. Neither is it a matter of personal choice who is selected to learn the sorcerers' knowledge that leads to that awareness. Have you ever asked yourself, why you in particular? I don't mean that you should ask it as a question that begs an answer, but in the sense of a warrior's pondering on his great fortune, the fortune of having found a challenge.
To make it into an ordinary question is the device of a conceited ordinary man who wants to be either admired or pitied for it. I have no interest in that kind of question, because there is no way of answering it. The decision of picking you was a design of power; no one can discern the designs of power. Now that you've been selected, there is nothing that you can do to stop the fulfillment of that design.
A warrior is in the hands of power and his only freedom is to choose an impeccable life.
You're in a terrible spot. It's too late for you to retreat but too soon to act. All you can do is witness. For you there is only witnessing acts of power and listening to tales, tales of power. The double is one of those tales. You know that, and that's why your reason is so taken by it. You are beating your head against a wall if you pretend to understand. All that I can say about it, by way of explanation, is that the double, although it is arrived at through dreaming , is as real as it can be. It is the self. It is the awareness of our state as luminous beings. It can do anything, and yet it chooses to be unobtrusive and gentle.
I'm going to tell you about the dreamer and the dreamed. The double begins in dreaming . The double is a dream. I am referring to the first emergence of the awareness that we are luminous beings. Each one of us is different, and thus the details of our struggles are different.
The steps that we follow to arrive at the double are the same, though. Especially the beginning steps, which are muddled and uncertain. A dream in which one is watching oneself asleep is the time of the double. Rather than wasting power in wondering and asking questions, one should use the opportunity to act. When you have the chance you should be prepared.
A warrior never lets his guard down. What matters is what can you use as a shield? A warrior must use everything available to him to close his mortal gap once it opens. So, it's of no importance that you really don't like to be suspicious or ask questions. That's your only shield now.
There is no flaw it the warrior's way. Question without fear, without suspicion and without draining yourself. Assemble what you learn, without presumptuousness and without piousness.
The self dreams the double. Once it has learned to dream the double, the self arrives at this weird crossroad and a moment comes when one realizes that it is the double who dreams the self. Your double is dreaming you. No one knows how it happens. We only know that it does happen. That's the mystery of us as luminous beings. You can awaken in either one.
Stopping the internal dialogue is, however, the key to the sorcerers' world. The rest of the activities are only props; all they do is accelerate the effect of stopping the internal dialogue. There are two major activities or techniques used to accelerate the stopping of the internal dialogue: erasing personal history and dreaming.
The secret of all this is one's attention. All of this exists only because of our attention. This very rock where we're sitting is a rock because we have been forced to give our attention to it as a rock.
Erasing personal history and dreaming should only be a help. What any apprentice needs to buffer him is temperance and strength. That's why a teacher introduces the warrior's way, or living like a warrior. This is the glue that joins together everything in a sorcerer's world. Bit by bit a teacher must forge and develop it. Without the sturdiness and levelheadedness of the warrior's way there is no possibility of withstanding the path of knowledge.
I've taught you the three techniques that help dreaming : disrupting the routines of life, the gait of power, and not-doing . Disrupting routines, the gait of power, and not-doing are avenues for learning new ways of perceiving the world, and they give a warrior an inkling of incredible possibilities of action. The knowledge of a separate and pragmatic world of dreaming is made possible through the use of those three techniques.
Dreaming is a practical aid devised by sorcerers. They were not fools; they knew what they were doing and sought the usefulness of the nagual by training their tonal to let go for a moment, so to speak, and then grab again. This statement may not make sense to you. But that's what you're doing: training yourself to let go without losing your marbles.
Dreaming , of course, is the crown of the sorcerers' efforts, the ultimate use of the nagual.
We're at the end of our review. All in all, then, you have been being led into the nagual . But here we have a strange question. What is being led into the nagual ? Not reason . Reason is meaningless there. Reason craps out in an instant when it is out of its safe narrow bounds. Your tonal ? No, the tonal and the nagual are the two inherent parts of ourselves. They cannot be led into each other. Your perception!
Everything has a particular mold. Plants have molds, animals have molds, worms have molds. Sorcerers have the avenue of their dreaming to lead them to the mold. The mold of men is definitely an entity, an entity which can be seen by some of us at certain times when we are imbued with power, and by all of us for sure at the moment of our death. The mold is the source, the origin of man, since, without the mold to group together the force of life, there is no way for that force to assemble itself into the shape of man.
The only thing that makes you think you are yourself is the form. Once it leaves, you are nothing. A warrior without form begins to see an eye. The formless warrior uses that eye to start dreaming . If you don't have a form, you don't have to go to sleep to do dreaming . The eye in front of you pulls you every time you want to go.
Everything has to be sifted through our human form. When we have no form, then nothing has form and yet everything is present.
The art of the dreamer is to hold the image of his dream. Our art as ordinary people is that we know how to hold the image of what we are looking at. We just do it; that is, our bodies do it. In dreaming we have to do the same thing, except that in dreaming we have to learn how to do it. We have to struggle not to look but merely to glance and yet hold the image.
With our attention we can hold the images of a dream in the same way we hold the images of the world. The art of the dreamer is the art of attention.
Our first ring of power is engaged very early in our lives and we live under the impression that that is all there is to us. Our second ring of power , the attention of the nagual, remains hidden for the immense majority of us, and only at the moment of our death is it revealed to us. There is a pathway to reach it, however, which is available to every one of us, but which only sorcerers take, and that pathway is through dreaming . Dreaming is in essence the transformation of ordinary dreams into affairs involving volition. Dreamers, by engaging their attention of the nagual and focusing it on the items and events of their ordinary dreams, change those dreams into dreaming.
There are no procedures to arrive at the attention of the nagual , only pointers. Finding your hands in your dreams is the first pointer; then the exercise of paying attention is elongated to finding objects, looking for specific features, such as buildings, streets and so on. From there the jump is to dream about specific places at specific times of the day. The final stage is drawing the attention of the nagual to focus on the total self.
The attention under the table is the key to everything sorcerers do. In order to reach that attention I have taught you dreaming.
Another way to learn how to do dreaming is by learning gazing. If you gaze at a pile of leaves for hours your thoughts get quiet. Without thoughts the attention of the tonal wanes and suddenly your second attention hooks onto the leaves and the leaves become something else. The moment when the second attention hooks onto something is called stopping the world.
The difficulty in gazing is to learn to quiet down the thoughts. Once you can stop the world you are a gazer. And the only way of stopping the world is by trying. Combine gazing at dry leaves and looking for our hands in dreaming . Once you have trapped your second attention with dry leaves, you do gazing and dreaming to enlarge it. And that's all there is to gazing. All we need to do in order to trap our second attention is to try and try. Once dreamers know how to stop the world by gazing at leaves, they can gaze at other things; and finally when the dreamers lose their form altogether, they can gaze at anything.
First after leaves, gaze at small plants. Small plants are very dangerous. Their power is concentrated; they have a very intense light and they feel when dreamers are gazing at them; they immediately move their light and shoot it at the gazer. Dreamers have to choose one kind of plant to gaze at.
Next gaze at trees. Dreamers also have a particular kind of tree to gaze at. Next gaze at moving, living creatures. Small insects are by far the best subject. Their mobility makes them innocuous to the gazer, the opposite of plants which draw their light directly from the earth.
The next step is to gaze at rocks. Rocks are very old and powerful and have a specific light which is rather greenish in contrast with the white light of plants and the yellowish light of mobile, living beings. Rocks do not open up easily to gazers, but it is worthwhile for gazers to persist because rocks have special secrets concealed in their core, secrets that can aid sorcerers in their dreaming.
Dreamers can gaze in order to do dreaming and then they can look for their dreams in their gazing. For example you can gaze at the shadows of rocks and then, in your dreaming , you might find out that those shadows have light. You can then, while gazing, look for the light in the shadows until you find it. Gazing and dreaming go together.
One of the most important goals of sorcery is to reach the luminous cocoon; a goal which is fulfilled through the sophisticated use of dreaming and through a rigorous, systematic exertion called not-doing. I've defined not-doing as an unfamiliar act which engages our total being by forcing it to become conscious of its luminous segment.
The compulsion to possess and hold on to things is not unique. Everyone who wants to follow the warrior's path has to rid himself of this fixation in order not to focus our dreaming body on the weak face of the second attention.
The dreaming body, sometimes called the "double" or the "Other," because it is a perfect replica of the dreamer 's body, is inherently the energy of a luminous being, a whitish, phantomlike emanation, which is projected by the fixation of the second attention into a three-dimensional image of the body.
The dreaming body is as real as anything we deal with in the world. The second attention is unavoidably drawn to focus on our total being as a field of energy, and transforms that energy into anything suitable. The easiest thing is of course the image of the physical body, with which we are already thoroughly familiar from our daily lives and the use of our first attention. What channels the energy of our total being to produce anything that might be within the boundaries of possibility is known as will.
If you have the same vision in dreaming three times, pay extraordinary attention to it. When a dreamer dreams that he sees himself asleep he must avoid sudden jolts or surprises, and take everything with a grain of salt. The dreamer has to get involved in dispassionate experimentations. Rather than examining his sleeping body, the dreamer walks out of the room.
In dreaming what matters is volition, the corporeality of the body has no significance. It is simply a memory that slows down the dreamer . If you do not stare at things but only glance at them, just as you do in the daily world, you can arrange your perception. That is, by taking your dreaming for granted, you then can use the perceptual biases of your everyday life.
In the final analysis every dreamer is different. There are, however, general states.
Restful vigil is the preliminary state, a state in which the senses become dormant and yet one is aware.
The second state is dynamic vigil. In this state one is left looking at a scene, a tableau of sorts, which is static. One sees a three-dimensional picture, a frozen bit of something--a landscape, a street, a house, a person, a face, anything.
The third state is passive witnessing. In it the dreamer is no longer viewing a frozen bit of the world but is observing, eye-witnessing, an event as it occurs. It is as if the primacy of the visual and auditory senses makes this state of dreaming mainly an affair of the eyes and ears.
The fourth state is the one in which you are drawn to act. In it one is compelled to enterprise, to take steps, to make the most of one's time. This state is called dynamic initiative.
Dreaming begins as a unique state of awareness arrived at by focusing the residue of consciousness, which one still has when asleep, on the elements, or the features, of one's dreams.
The residue of consciousness, called the second attention, is brought into action, or is harnessed, through exercises of not-doing . The essential aid to dreaming is a state of mental quietness, called "stopping the internal dialogue," or the "not-doing of talking to oneself." To teach you how to master it, I've made you walk for miles with your eyes held fixed and out of focus at a level just above the horizon so as to emphasize the peripheral view. This method is effective on two counts. It allows you to stop your internal dialogue, and it trains your attention. By forcing you to concentrate on the peripheral view, I reinforced your capacity to concentrate for long periods of time on one single activity.
The best way to enter into dreaming is to concentrate on the area just at the tip of the sternum, at the top of the belly. The attention needed for dreaming stems from that area. The energy needed in order to move and to seek in dreaming stems from the area an inch or two below the belly button. That energy is the will , or the power to select, to assemble. In a woman both the attention and the energy for dreaming originate from the womb.
Anything may suffice as a not-doing to help dreaming , providing that it forces the attention to remain fixed. The attention one needs in the beginning of dreaming has to be forcibly made to stay on any given item in a dream. Only through immobilizing our attention can one turn an ordinary dream into dreaming.
In dreaming one has to use the same mechanisms of attention as in everyday life. Our first attention has been taught to focus on the items of the world with great force in order to turn the amorphous and chaotic realm of perception into the orderly world of awareness.
The second attention serves the function of a beckoner, a caller of chances. The more it is exercised, the greater the possibility of getting the desired result. But that is also the function of attention in general, a function so taken for granted in our daily life that it has become unnoticeable; if we encounter a fortuitous occurrence we talk about it in terms of accident or coincidence, rather than in terms of our attention having beckoned the event.
The only thing that really counts in making the shift into the dreaming body is anchoring the second attention. Attention is what makes the world. What is important is to store attention in dreaming.
The first attention, the attention that makes the world, can never be completely overcome; it can only be turned off for a moment and replaced with the second attention, providing that the body had stored enough of it. Dreaming is naturally a way of storing the second attention. In order to shift into your dreaming body when awake you have to practice dreaming until it comes out your ears.
I have given you three tasks to train your second attention. First, to find your hands in dreaming . Next, to choose a locale, focus your attention on it, and then do daytime dreaming and find out if you can really go there. I've suggested that you place someone you know at the site in order to do two things: first to check subtle changes that might indicate that you were there in dreaming , and second, to isolate unobtrusive detail, which would be precisely what your second attention would zero in on.
The most serious problem the dreamer has in this respect is the unbending fixation of the second attention on detail that would be thoroughly undetected by the attention of everyday life, creating in this manner a nearly insurmountable obstacle to validation.
What one seeks in dreaming is not what one would pay attention to in everyday life. One strives to immobilize the second attention only in the learning period. After that, one has to fight the almost invincible pull of the second attention and give only cursory glances at everything. In dreaming one has to be satisfied with the briefest possible views of everything. As soon as one focuses on anything, one loses control.
The last generalized task I gave you to train your second attention was to get out of your body. This task begins with a dream in which you find yourself looking at yourself asleep.
To elucidate the control of the second attention, I've presented the idea of will . Will can be described as the maximum control of the luminosity of the body as a field of energy; or it can be described as a level of proficiency, as a state of being that comes abruptly into the daily life of a warrior at any given time. It is experienced as a force that radiates out of the middle part of the body following a moment of the most absolute silence, or a moment of sheer terror, or profound sadness. Those things afford the warrior the concentration needed to use the luminosity of the body and turn it into silence.
For a human being sadness is as powerful as terror. Both can bring the moment of silence. Or the silence comes of itself, because the warrior tries for it throughout his life. It is a moment of blackness, a moment still more silent than the moment of shutting off the internal dialogue. That blackness, that silence, gives rise to the intent to direct the second attention, to command it, to make it do things. This is why it's called will . The intent and the effect are will ; they are tied together.
We don't feel our will because we think that it should be something we know for sure that we are doing or feeling, like getting angry, for instance. Will is very quiet, unnoticeable. Will belongs to the other self. We are in our other selves when we do dreaming.
Will is such a complete control of the second attention that it is called the other self.
Stalkers deal with people, with the world of ordinary affairs. Stalkers are the practitioners of controlled folly as the dreamers are the practitioners of dreaming . Controlled folly is the basis for stalking , as dreams are the basis for dreaming . Generally speaking, a warrior's greatest accomplishment in the second attention is dreaming , and in the first attention his greatest accomplishment is stalking.
In the absence of self-importance, a warrior's only way of dealing with the social milieu is in terms of controlled folly.
The second attention belongs to the luminous body, as the first attention belongs to the physical body.
Dreaming is in fact a rational state. In dreaming , the right side, the rational awareness, is wrapped up inside the left side awareness in order to give the dreamer a sense of sobriety and rationality; but the influence of rationality has to be minimal and used only as an inhibiting mechanism to protect the dreamer from excesses and bizarre undertakings.
Our first attention is hooked to the emanations of the earth, while our second attention is hooked to the emanations of the universe. A dreamer by definition is outside the boundaries of the concerns of everyday life.
The dreamers ' power to focus on their second attention makes them into living slingshots. The stronger and the more impeccable the dreamers are, the farther they can project their second attention into the unknown and the longer their dreaming projection will last.
Dreaming is no illusion. It's a step toward the control of the second attention; in other words, you are learning the perceptual bias of that other realm.
A recapitulation is the forte of stalkers as the dreaming body is the forte of dreamers . It consists of recollecting one's life down to the most insignificant detail.
The first stage is a brief recounting of all the incidents in our lives that in an obvious manner stand out for examination.
The second stage is a more detailed recollection, which starts systematically at a point that could be the moment prior to the stalker sitting, and theoretically could extend to the moment of birth.
A perfect recapitulation can change a warrior as much, if not more, than the total control of the dreaming body . In this respect, dreaming and stalking lead to the same end, the entering into the third attention. It is important for a warrior, however, to know and practice both.
What the new seers saw in the glow of awareness resulted in the sequence in which they arranged the old seers' truths about awareness. This is known as the mastery of awareness. From that, they developed the three sets of techniques. The first is the mastery of stalking , the second is the mastery of intent , and the third is the mastery of dreaming . I taught you these three sets from the very first day we met.
The new seers deemed it imperative to see the Indescribable Force 's emanations in order to find a more suitable way to move the assemblage point. As they tried to see the emanations they were faced with a very serious problem. They found out that there is no way to see them without running a mortal risk, and yet they had to see them. That was the time when they used the old seers' technique of dreaming as a shield to protect themselves from the deadly blow of the Indescribable Force 's emanations. And in doing so, they realized that dreaming was in itself the most effective way to move the assemblage point.
One of the strictest commands of the new seers was that warriors have to learn dreaming while they are in their normal state of awareness. Following that command, I began teaching you dreaming almost from the first day we met.
Dreaming has to be taught in normal awareness because dreaming is so dangerous and dreamers so vulnerable. It is dangerous became it has inconceivable power; it makes dreamers vulnerable because it leaves them at the mercy of the incomprehensible force of alignment.
The new seers realized that in our normal state of awareness, we have countless defenses that can safeguard us against the force of unused emanations that suddenly become aligned in dreaming.
Dreaming , like stalking, began with a simple observation. The old seers became aware that in dreams the assemblage point shifts slightly to the left side in a most natural manner. That point indeed relaxes when man sleeps and all kinds of unused emanations begin to glow.
The old seers became immediately intrigued with that observation and began to work with that natural shift until they were able to control it. They called that control dreaming, or the art of handling the dreaming body.
There is hardly a way of describing the immensity of their knowledge about dreaming. Very little of it, however, was of any use to the new seers. So when the time of reconstruction came, the new seers took for themselves only the bare essentials of dreaming to aid them in seeing the Indescribable Force 's emanations and to help them move their assemblage points.
Seers, old and new, understand dreaming as being the control of the natural shift that the assemblage point undergoes in sleep. To control that shift does not mean in any way to direct it, but to keep the assemblage point fixed at the position where it naturally moves in sleep, a most difficult maneuver that took the old seers' enormous effort and concentration to accomplish.
Dreamers have to strike a very subtle balance, for dreams cannot be interfered with, nor can they be commanded by the conscious effort of the dreamer , and yet the shift of the assemblage point must obey the dreamer 's command--a contradiction that cannot be rationalized but must be resolved in practice.
After observing dreamers while they slept, the old seers hit upon the solution of letting dreams follow their natural course. They have seen that in some dreams, the assemblage point of the dreamer would drift considerably deeper into the left side than in other dreams. This observation posed to them the question of whether the content of the dream makes the assemblage point move, or the movement of the assemblage point by itself produces the content of the dream by activating unused emanations.
They soon realized that the shifting of the assemblage point into the left side is what produces dreams. The farther the movement, the more vivid and bizarre the dream.
Inevitably, they attempted to command their dreams, aiming to make their assemblage points move deeply into the left side. Upon trying it, they discovered that when dreams are consciously or semiconsciously manipulated, the assemblage point immediately returns to its usual place. Since what they wanted was for that point to move, they reached the unavoidable conclusion that interfering with dreams was interfering with the natural shift of the assemblage point.
From there the old seers went on to develop their astounding knowledge on the subject--a knowledge which had a tremendous bearing on what the new seers aspired to do with dreaming, but was of little use to them in its original form.
Thus far you have understood dreaming as being the control of dreams, and every one of the exercised I have given you to perform, such as finding your hands in your dreams, was not, although it might seem to be, aimed at teaching you to command your dreams. Those exercises were designed to keep your assemblage point fixed at the place where it had moved in your sleep. It is here that the dreamers have to strike a subtle balance. All they can direct is the fixation of their assemblage points. Seers are like fishermen equipped with a line that casts itself wherever it may; the only thing they can do is keep the line anchored at the place where it sinks.
Wherever the assemblage point moves in dreams is called the dreaming position. The old seers became so expert at keeping their dreaming position that they were even able to wake up while their assemblage points were anchored there.
The old seers called that state the dreaming body , because they controlled it to the extreme of creating a temporary new body every time they woke up at a new dreaming position. I have to make it clear to you that dreaming has a terrible drawback. It belongs to the old seers. It's tainted with their mood. I've been very careful in guiding you through it, but still there is no way to make sure.
I'm warning you about the pitfalls of dreaming, which are truly stupendous. In dreaming, there is really no way of directing the movement of the assemblage point; the only thing that dictates that shift is the inner strength or weakness of dreamers. Right there we have the first pitfall.
At first the new seers were hesitant to use dreaming. It was their belief that dreaming , instead of fortifying, made warriors weak, compulsive, capricious. The old seers were all like that. In order to offset the nefarious effect of dreaming, since they had no other option but to use it, the new seers developed a complex and rich system of behavior called the warrior's way, or the warrior's path.
The name dreaming body means a feeling, a surge of energy that is transported by the movement of the assemblage point to any place in this world, or to any place in the seven worlds available to man.
The procedure for getting to the dreaming body starts with an initial act which by the fact of being sustained breeds unbending intent . Unbending intent leads to internal silence, and internal silence to the inner strength needed to make the assemblage point shift in dreams to suitable positions.
This sequence is the groundwork. The development of control comes after the groundwork has been completed; it consists of systematically maintaining the dreaming position by doggedly holding on to the vision of the dream. Steady practice results in a great facility to hold new dreaming positions with new dreams, not so much because one gains deliberate control with practice, but because every time this control is exercised the inner strength gets fortified. Fortified inner strength in turn makes the assemblage point shift into dreaming positions which are more and more suitable to fostering sobriety; in other words, dreams by themselves become more and more manageable, even orderly.
The development of dreamers is indirect. That's why the new seers believed we can do dreaming by ourselves, alone. Since dreaming uses a natural, built-in shift of the assemblage point, we should need no one to help us.
What we badly need is sobriety, and no one can give it to us or help us get it except ourselves. Without it, the shift of the assemblage point is chaotic, as our ordinary dreams are chaotic. So, all in all, the procedure to get to the dreaming body is impeccability in our daily life.
Once sobriety is acquired and the dreaming positions become increasingly stronger, the next step is to wake up at any dreaming position . That maneuver, although made to sound simple, is really a very complex affair--so complex that it requires not only sobriety but all the attributes of warriorship as well, especially intent.
Intent, being the most sophisticated control of the force of alignment, is what maintains, through the dreamer's sobriety, the alignment of whatever emanations have been lit up by the movement of the assemblage point.
There is one more formidable pitfall of dreaming: the very strength of the dreaming body. For example, it is very easy for the dreaming body to gaze at the Indescribable Force's emanations uninterruptedly for long periods of time, but it is also very easy in the end for the dreaming body to be totally consumed by them. Seers who gazed at the Indescribable Force's emanations without their dreaming bodies died, and those who gazed at them with their dreaming bodies burned with the fire from within. The new seers solved the problem by seeing in teams. While one seer gazed at the emanations, others stood by ready to end the seeing.
It's perfectly possible for a group of seers to activate the same unused emanations. And in this case also, there are no known steps, it just happens; there is no technique to follow.
In dreaming together, something in us takes the lead and suddenly we find ourselves sharing the same view with other dreamers. What happens is that our human condition makes us focus the glow of awareness automatically on the same emanations that other human beings are using; we adjust the position of our assemblage points to fit the others around us. We do that on the right side, in our ordinary perception, and we also do it on the left side, while dreaming together.
Alignment is a unique force because it either helps the assemblage point shift, or it keeps it glued to its customary position. The aspect of alignment that keeps the point stationary is will; and the aspect that makes it shift is intent. One of the most haunting mysteries is how will, the impersonal force of alignment, changes into intent, the personalized force, which is at the service of each individual.
The strangest part of this mystery is that the change is so easy to accomplish. But what is not so easy is to convince ourselves that it is possible. There, right there, is our safety catch. We have to be convinced. And none of us wants to be.
It is possible for you to intend your assemblage point to shift deeper into your left side, to a dreaming position. Warriors should never attempt seeing unless they are aided by dreaming.
To move the assemblage point away from its natural setting and to keep it fixed at a new location is to be asleep; with practice, seers learn to be asleep and yet behave as if nothing is happening to them.
Technically, as soon as the assemblage point shifts, we are asleep. You are absolutely asleep without having to be stretched out.
During normal sleep, the shift of the assemblage point runs along either edge of man's band. Such shifts are always coupled with slumber. Shifts that are induced by practice occur along the midsection of man's band and are not coupled with slumber, yet a dreamer is asleep.
The new seers maintain their assemblage points along the midsection of man's band. If the shift is a shallow one, like the shift into heightened awareness, the dreamer is almost like anyone else in the street, except for a slight vulnerability to emotions, such as fear and doubt. But at a certain degree of depth, the dreamer who is shifting along the midsection becomes a blob of light. A blob of light is the dreaming body of the new seers. Such an impersonal dreaming body is conducive to understanding and examination, which are the basis of all that the new seers do.
The position where one sees the mold of man is very close to that where the dreaming body and the barrier of perception appear. That is the reason the new seers recommend that the mold of man be seen and understood.
The dreaming body and the barrier of perception are positions of the assemblage point, and that knowledge is as vital to seers as knowing how to read and write is to modern man. Both are accomplishments attained after years of practice.
The dreaming body is known by different names. The name I like the best is, the Other. We can be in two places at once, we can experience a sort of perceptual dualism. There is no end to the mystery of man and to the mystery of the world.
The only thing that soothes those who journey into the unknown, is oblivion. What a relief to be in the ordinary world!
For warriors, there are two positions of the assemblage point where there are no more doubts. In one you have no more doubts because you know everything. In the other, which is normal awareness, you have no doubts because you don't know anything.
No rational assumptions should interfere with the actions of a seer. Rationality is a condition of alignment, merely the result of the position of the assemblage point. You have to understand this when you are in a state of great vulnerability. To understand it when your assemblage point has reached the position where there are no doubts is useless, because realizations of that nature are commonplace in that position. It is equally useless to understand it in a state of normal awareness; in that state, such realizations are emotional outbursts that are valid only for as long as the emotion lasts.
You can travel by waking up at a distant dreaming position. By moving your assemblage point from normal awareness all the way to the position where the dreaming body appears, your dreaming body can actually fly over incredible distances in the blink of an eyelid. The mystery is in the dreaming position. If it is strong enough to pull you, you can go to the ends of this world or beyond it, just as the old seers did. They disappeared from this world because they woke up at a dreaming position beyond the limits of the known.
There is no way of knowing how it is done. Strong emotion or unbending intent, or great interest serves as a guide; then the assemblage point gets powerfully fixed at the dreaming position, long enough to drag there all the emanations that are inside the cocoon.
The fact that such a maneuver is possible is something of the most singular importance to seers. It means escaping the Indescribable Force by moving their assemblage points to a particular dreaming position called total freedom.
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