Recapitulation as Described by Carlos Castaneda

The Recapitulation as described by Carlos Castaneda. 

The recapitulation, according to what don Juan taught his disciples, was a technique discovered by the sorcerers of ancient Mexico, and used by every shaman practitioner from then on, to view and relive all the experiences of their lives, in order to achieve two transcendental goals: one, the abstract goal of fulfilling a universal code that demands that awareness must he relinquished at the moment of death; and two, the extremely pragmatic goal of acquiring perceptual fluidity.

He said that the formulation of their first goal was the result of observations that those sorcerers made by means of their capacity to see energy directly as it flows in the universe. They had seen that there exists in the universe a gigantic force, an immense conglomerate of energy fields which they called the Eagle, or the dark sea of awareness. They observed that the dark sea of awareness is the force that lends awareness to all living beings, from viruses to men. They believed that it lends awareness to a newborn being, and that this being enhances that awareness by means of its life experiences until a moment in which the force demands its return.

In the understanding of those sorcerers, all living beings die because they are forced to return the awareness lent to them. Sorcerers through out the ages have understood that there is no way for what modern man calls our linear mode of thinking to explain such a phenomenon, because there is no room for a cause-and-effect line of reasoning as to why and how awareness is lent and then taken back. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico viewed it as an energetic fact of the universe, a fact that can't be explained in terms of cause and effect, or in terms of a purpose which can be determined a priori.

The sorcerers of don Juan's lineage believed that to recapitulate meant to give the dark sea of awareness what it was seeking: their life experiences. They believed that by means of the recapitulation, however, they could acquire a degree of control that could permit them to separate their life experiences from their life force. For them, the two were not inextricably intertwined; they were joined only circumstantially.

Those sorcerers affirmed that the dark sea of awareness doesn't want to take the lives of human beings; it wants only their life experiences. Lack of discipline in human beings prevents them from separating the two forces, and in the end, they lose their lives, when it is meant that they lose only the force of their life experiences. Those sorcerers viewed the recapitulation as the procedure by which they could give the dark sea of awareness a substitute for their lives. They gave up their life experiences by recounting them, but they retained their life force.

The perceptual claims of sorcerers, when examined in terms of the lin­ear concepts of our Western world, make no sense whatsoever. Western civilization has been in contact with the shamans of the New World for five hundred years, and there has never been a genuine attempt on the part of scholars to formulate a serious philosophical discourse based on statements made by those shamans. For instance, the recapitulation may seem to any member of the Western world to be congruous with psychoanalysis, something in the line of a psychological procedure, a sort of self-help technique. Nothing could be further from the truth.

According to don Juan Matus, man always loses by default. In the case of the premises of sorcery, he believed that Western man is missing a tremendous opportunity for the enhancement of his awareness, and that the way in which Western man relates himself to the universe, life, and awareness is only one of a multiplicity of options.

To recapitulate, for shaman practitioners, means to give to an incompre­hensible force-the dark sea of awareness-the very thing it seems to be looking for: their life experiences, that is to say, the awareness that they have enhanced through those very life experiences. Since don Juan could not possibly explain these phenomena to me in terms of standard logic, he said that all that sorcerers could aspire to do was to accomplish the feat of retaining their life force without knowing how it was done. He also said that there were thousands of sorcerers who had achieved this. They had retained their life force after they had given the dark sea of awareness the force of their life experiences. This meant to don Juan that those sorcerers didn't die in the usual sense in which we understand death, but that they transcended it by retaining their life force and vanishing from the face of the earth, embarked on a definitive journey of perception.

The belief of the shamans of don Juan's lineage was that when death takes place in this fashion, all of our being is turned into energy, a special kind of energy that retains the mark of our individuality. Don Juan tried to explain this in a metaphorical sense, saying that we are composed of a number of single nations: the nation of the lungs, the nation of the heart, the nation of the stomach, the nation of the kidneys, and so on. Each of these nations sometimes works independently of the others, but at the moment of death, all of them are unified into one single entity. The sorcerers of don Juan's lineage called this state total freedom. For those sorcerers, death is a unifier, and not an annihilator, as it is for the average man.

"Is this state immortality, don Juan?" I asked.

"This is in no way immortality," he replied. "It is merely the entrance into an evolutionary process, using the only medium for evolution that man has at his disposal: awareness. The sorcerers of my lineage were convinced that man could not evolve biologically any further; there­fore, they considered man's awareness to be the only medium for evolu­tion. At the moment of dying, sorcerers are not annihilated by death, but are transformed into inorganic beings: beings that have awareness, but not an organism. To be transformed into an inorganic being was evolution for them, and it meant that a new, indescribable type of awareness was lent to them, an awareness that would last for veritably millions of years, but which would also someday have to be returned to the giver: the dark sea of awareness."

One of the most important findings of the shamans of don Juan's lin­eage was that, like everything else in the universe, our world is a combi­nation of two opposing, and at the same time complementary, forces. One of those forces is the world we know, which those sorcerers called the world of organic beings. The other force is something they called the world of inorganic beings.

"The world of inorganic beings," don Juan said, "is populated by beings that possess awareness, but not an organism. They are conglom­erates of energy fields, just like we are. To the eye of a seer, instead of being luminous, as human beings are, they are rather opaque. They are not round, but long, candle like energetic configurations. They are, in essence, conglomerates of energy fields which have cohesion and boundaries just like we do. They are held together by the same agglutinating force that holds our energy fields together."

"Where is this inorganic world, don Juan?" I asked.

"It is our twin world," he replied. "It occupies the same time and space as our world, but the type of awareness of our world is so different from the type of awareness of the inorganic world that we never notice the presence of inorganic beings, although they do notice ours."

"Are those inorganic beings’ human beings that have evolved?" I asked.

"Not at all!" he exclaimed. "The inorganic beings of our twin world have been intrinsically inorganic from the start, the same way that we have always been intrinsically organic beings, also from the start. They are beings whose consciousness can evolve just like ours, and it doubtlessly does, but I have no firsthand knowledge of how this happens. What I do know, however, is that a human being whose awareness has evolved is a bright, luminescent, round inorganic being of a special kind."

Don Juan gave me a series of descriptions of this evolutionary process, which I always took to be poetic metaphors. I singled out the one that pleased me the most, which was total freedom. I fancied a human being that enters into total freedom to be the most courageous, the most imagi­native being possible. Don Juan said that I was not fancying anything at all-that to enter into total freedom, a human being must call on his or her sublime side, which, he said, human beings have, but which it never occurs to them to use.

Don Juan described the second, the pragmatic goal of the recapitulation as the acquisition of fluidity. The sorcerers' rationale behind this had to do with one of the most elusive subjects of sorcery: the assemblage point, a point of intense luminosity the size of a tennis ball, perceivable when sorcerers see a human being as a conglomerate of energy fields.

Sorcerers like don Juan see that trillions of energy fields in the form of filaments of light from the universe at large converge on the assemblage point and go through it. This confluence of filaments gives the assemblage point its brilliancy. The assemblage point makes it possible for a human being to per­ceive those trillions of energy filaments by turning them into sensorial data. The assemblage point then interprets this data as the world of everyday life, that is to say, in terms of human socialization and human potential.

To recapitulate is to relive every, or nearly every, experience that we have had, and in doing so to displace the assemblage point, ever so slightly or a great deal, propelling it by the force of memory to adopt the position that it had when the event being recapitulated took place. This act of going back and forth from previous positions to the current one gives the shaman practitioners the necessary fluidity to withstand extraordinary odds in their journeys into infinity. To the Tensegrity practi­tioners, the recapitulation gives the necessary fluidity to withstand odds which are not in any way part of their habitual cognition.

The recapitulation as a formal procedure was done in ancient times by recollecting every person the practitioners knew and every experience in which they had taken part. Don Juan suggested that in my case, which is the case of modern man, I make a written list of all the persons that I had met in my life, as a mnemonic device. Once I had written that list, he proceeded to tell me how to use it. I had to take the first person on the list, which went backwards in time from the present to the time of my very first life experience, and set up, in my memory, my last interaction with that first person on my list. This act is called arranging the event to be recapitulated.

A detailed recollection of minutiae is required as the proper means to hone one's capacity to remember. This recollection entails getting all the pertinent physical details, such as the surroundings where the event being recollected took place. Once the event is arranged, one should enter into the locale itself, as if actually going into it, paying special attention to any relevant physical configurations. If, for instance, the interaction took place in an office, what should be remembered is the floor, the doors, the walls, the pictures, the windows, the desks, and the objects on the desks, every­thing that could have been observed in a glance and then forgotten.

The recapitulation as a formal procedure must begin by the recounting of events that have just taken place. In this fashion, the primacy of the experience takes precedence. Something that has just happened is something that one can remember with great accuracy. Sorcerers always count on the fact that human beings are capable of storing detailed information that they are not aware of, and that that detail is what the dark sea of awareness is after.

The actual recapitulation of the event requires that one breathe deeply, fanning the head, so to speak, very slowly and gently from side to side, beginning on one side, left or right, whichever. This fanning of the head was done as many times as needed, while remembering all the details accessible. Don Juan said that sorcerers talked about this act as breathing in all of one's own feelings spent in the event being recol­lected, and expelling all the unwanted moods and extraneous feelings that were left with us.

Sorcerers believe that the mystery of the recapitulation lies in the act of inhaling and exhaling. Since breathing is a life-sustaining function, sor­cerers are certain that by means of it, one can also deliver to the dark sea of awareness the facsimile of one's life experiences. When I pressed don Juan for a rational explanation of this idea, his position was that things like the recapitulation could only be experienced, not explained. He said that in the act of doing, one can find liberation, and that to explain it was to dissipate our energy in fruitless efforts. His invitation was congruous with every­thing related to his knowledge: the invitation to take action.

The list of names is used in the recapitulation as a mnemonic device that propels memory into an inconceivable journey. Sorcerers' position in this respect is that remembering events that have just taken place prepares the ground for remembering events more distant in time with the same clarity and immediacy. To recollect experiences in this way is to relive them, and to draw from this recollection an extraordinary impetus that is capable of stirring energy dispersed from our centers of vitality, and returning it to them. Sorcerers refer to this redeployment of energy that the recapitulation causes as gaining fluidity after giving the dark sea of awareness what it is looking for.

On a more mundane level, the recapitulation gives practitioners the capacity to examine the repetition in their lives. Recapitulating can con­vince them, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that all of us are at the mercy of forces which ultimately make no sense, although at first sight they seem perfectly reasonable; such as being at the mercy of courtship. It seems that for some people, courtship is the pursuit of a lifetime. I have personally heard from people of advanced age that the only ideal that they had was to find a perfect companion, and that their aspiration was to have perhaps one year of happiness in love.

Don Juan Matus used to say to me, over my vehement protests, that the problem was that nobody really wanted to love anybody, but that every one of us wanted to be loved. He said that this obsession with courtship, taken at face value, was the most natural thing in the world to us. To hear a seventy-five-year-old man or woman say that they are still in search of a perfect companion is an affirmation of something idealistic, romantic, beautiful. However, to examine this obsession in the context of the endless repetitions of a lifetime makes it appear as it really is: something grotesque.

Don Juan assured me that if any behavioral change is going to be accom­plished, it has to be done through the recapitulation, since it is the only vehi­cle that can enhance awareness by liberating one from the unvoiced demands of socialization, which are so automatic, so taken for granted, that they are not even noticed under normal conditions, much less examined.

The actual act of recapitulating is a lifetime endeavor. It takes years to exhaust the list of people, especially for those who have made the acquaintance of and have interacted with thousands of individuals. This list is augmented by the memory of impersonal events in which no people are involved, but which have to be examined because they are somehow related to the person being recapitulated.

Don Juan asserted that what the sorcerers of ancient Mexico sought avidly in recapitulating was the memory of interaction, because in inter action lie the deep effects of socialization, which they struggled to over­come by any means available. 

The Magical Passes for The Recapitulation 

The recapitulation affects something that don Juan called the energy body. He formally explained the energy body as a conglomerate of energy fields that are the mirror image of the energy fields that make up the human body when it is seen directly as energy. He said that in the case of sorcerers, the physical body and the energy body are one single unit. The magical passes for the recapitulation bring the energy body to the physical body, which are essential for navigating into the unknown.

To be continued...

TMMK

Motivation and The Trackless Path

In most forms of training, whether in The Warrior’s Way, sports, the military, the arts, medicine or spiritual practice, the first task of the teacher or benefactor is to clarify and intensify motivation. "Increase the urgency," they tell us. 

When I look back on my own training, Kalu Rinpoche returned again and again to the infamous Four Thoughts: The precious human existence, death and impermanence, the workings of karma and the shortcomings of samsara. All these motivational meditations centered on self-interest, and in that respect, except for the time-scale (lifetimes vs. this life) they are not that different from the endless encomiums to happiness, emotional and physical well-being, and family and career success that are often used to motivate people to practice today.

People start practice for different reasons. Milarepa sought a reconciliation with his murdering of thirty-seven people. Gampopa sought solace from devastating grief when his wife died. Many of us start practice because we are looking (or think we are looking) for some kind of benefit. And our teachers happily oblige. They wave a carrot or two in front of our noses. Or, they say, "You don't want that carrot. You want THIS carrot," and they tell you about a much bigger, brighter, juicier carrot.

For others, however, the motivation is in a different category. For Kongtrul the Great, it was an indefinable yearning. For Urgyen Tulku, it was something that he took to like a duck to water. For Dilgo Khyentse and others, it was just a sheer love for the Dharma. For them, it was more of a calling. That calling may take expression in traditional terms. My own teacher was deeply motivated by the bodhisattva ideal, when he was a young man and constantly seeking ways to form connections with people, animals and beings of all kinds.

At some point, and it may be one or two years down the road, or ten years, or maybe twenty, you realize that you aren't that interested in the carrot. You tried to love practice on those terms, but it just has not worked out that way. You can't make yourself love something that you don't, as a long-term (40+ years) practitioner wrote in commenting on a pre-publication copy of A Trackless Path.

Personally I'm deeply grateful for this book. It has pointed me back to the 'Trackless Path', to the yearning for 'this knowing' which originally started my quest in my teens. I left it decades ago for the fool's errand of a constant search for somebody or something to show me the path. Now I am looking again for myself.

Wherever you are in your life, whether you are at the beginning, middle or end, be clear, as clear as you can be, about why you are practicing. You may or may not be able to put your motivation into words. That does not matter. What matters is that you feel it – you feel it in your heart. That feeling may be warm, it may raw, it may be a relief to touch, it may be painful to touch. It doesn't matter. All that is important is that this is where your motivation, your calling, lies.

This is a different way of increasing the urgency, a way that is not based in possible benefits or achievements. Instead, it is based in what you experience right now.

Each day, when you sit to practice, take a few minutes and feel your motivation. That, essentially, is the purpose of the prayers that are used to begin meditation sessions in the Tibetan tradition-honoring the lineage of teachers, taking refuge and fostering awakening mind. These prayers express the traditional motivations, but if they don't speak to you, then write and use your own.

Then do your practice. Try this, and see if it makes a difference.

When your practice arises directly from your heart, you are setting out on a different path, a trackless path. As Wendell Berry wrote in Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms:

“A certain awesome futurity, then, is the inescapable condition of word-giving - as it is, in fact, of all speech - for we speak into no future that we know, much less into one that we desire, but into one that is unknown. But that it is unknown requires us to be generous toward it, and requires our generosity to be full and unconditional.”

There are many ways to give your word. Not all of them are spoken. And sometimes you only realize you have given your word long after it has, in fact, been given.

TMMK

Tonal Wants and Needs

The older I get, the more I cherish life. The tonal life and all its makings.  

As much time as many of us spend 'working on ourselves' with lucid dreaming, impeccable behavior, losing self importance, recapitulation, stalking, controlled folly, etc., etc., I thought I would share an article I found several years ago. It's a 'tonal article' which may be self important and egotistical, but that's fine by me. I enjoy it just the same. Here it is. 

The article below is from the prologue of the book, Reflections - Thoughts on Love and Living by Ginger Hutton. Sorry to get all sappy, but I love articles like this. 

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.

TMMK

Tips for Beginning the Recapitulation

Here is a list of five pointers for starting recapitulation and figured I’d post them here on our blog, as they will assist you during the process of recapitulation. If you think about it, you can use these pointers for just about anything and everything in your daily life if you put your mind to it! Give this a try and see how it works for you. 

Avoiding

Whatever you avoid, somebody or something else has to pick up. Emotions are energy in motion. If you don't experience them, then the energy either goes into your body and is stored there or it goes out into the world. Why would you make others experience what you, yourself, are avoiding? (Author’s note: Avoiding is one of the biggest opportunities with performing recapitulation.) Avoided and unresolved issues are stored in the subconscious (and the physical body, IMHO) and we have to tackle these issues directly if we want resolution. I can assist you through the recapitulation process if you would like me to. Just contact me on this page and I will get back to you as soon as I can. 

Stagnation

When energy is blocked or can't move, it stagnates. In your body, the restricted energy goes into adjacent muscles and organs and causes illness. In your personality, restricted energy flows into the patterns that you are least aware of and they run. In groups, restricted energy flows into the people whose attention is weakest and they are flooded. When energy stagnates, change and eliminate the configuration or pay the consequences. Once again, I can assist your mind and body with the process of energy stagnation and recapitulation. Using the recap, spiritual autolysis and EFT tapping, I will work together with you to clear out all your personal history. I may even need to exert some physical pressure on your body as well, but this depends on your own personal situation. (Don’t fret about me touching you. I was a professional medical massage therapist for 15 years and know what I’m doing and how to do it in a professional manner.) 

Momentum

Consistent recapitulation builds momentum. Momentum doesn't just go away. It has to go somewhere. When attention is not present, momentum flows into old patterns and powers them. The more you practice recapitulation, the longer you practice, the more important attention becomes. There are no vacations when working out unresolved issues. This is where a bit of motivation comes in on my part in assisting you. We must keep going…FURTHER! 

Rhythm

Respect the rhythms of recapitulation. When you are tense and on edge in your recapitulation work, just rest. When you are relaxed and open, push deep into the issue you wish to resolve. Glass doesn't bend; it breaks. Water doesn't move until you open a channel. Once again, recapping ‘opens the channel’ with your mind and physical body…not to mention your energy body! Keep in mind that the mind and body are already one, not two. The correct or true ‘other side of the coin,’ is the energy body. The mind/body and then the energy body are the keys to the totality of self. 

Old ways (Habits)

Once you see through a pattern using the recapitulation, once you see what you've been doing, thinking, behaving, you can't go back. Ignorance may have been bliss, but you aren't there anymore. This means you can’t use your old excuses anymore, or use your old patterns and behaviors as a crutch anymore. Thus, you need to be prepared to live your (new) life without the old thoughts, actions and beliefs. This will take some practice, but if you complete at least one full round of recapitulation, this should come pretty easy to you. If not, I’m here to assist. 

Hopefully this short blog post will entice you to begin or to continue on with the recapitulation. It’s a marvelous mind-body healing technique, yet it’s not just theory. You actually have to DO it! If you don’t know where to begin, contact me. This information is provided below.

Kristopher Kelley

The Six Explanatory Propositions

The Six Explanatory Propositions were published in the Spanish version of the book, The Eagle’s Gift by Carlos Castaneda, but were never included in the English version.

The Six Explanatory Propositions

In spite of the amazing maneuvers that don Juan did with my awareness, over the years I stubbornly insisted on trying to intellectually evaluate what he did. Although I have written at length about these maneuvers, it has always been from a strictly experiential point of view and, besides, from a strictly rational perspective. Immersed as I was in my own rationality, I couldn’t recognize the goals of the teachings of don Juan. To understand the stretch of these goals with a certain degree of precision, it was necessary that I lost my human form and arrived at the totality of myself.

The teachings of don Juan were meant to guide me through the second stage of a warrior’s development: the verification and unrestricted acceptance that within us lies another type of awareness.

This stage was divided into two categories. The first one, for which don Juan required don Genaro’s help, dealt with two activities. It consisted of showing me certain procedures, actions and methods that were designed to exercise my awareness. The second one had to do with the six explanatory propositions.

Due to the difficulties that I had in adapting my rationality in order to accept the plausibility of what he was teaching me, don Juan presented these explanatory propositions in terms of my scholastic records. 

The first thing he did, as an introduction, was to create a division in myself by means of a specific blow on the right shoulder blade, a blow which made me enter an unusual state of awareness, which I couldn’t recall once I was back to normality.

Until the moment in which don Juan made me enter such a state of awareness, I had an undeniable sense of continuity, which I thought of as a product of my vital experience. The idea that I had about myself was that of being a full entity that could explain everything it had done.

Besides, I was convinced that the dwelling of all my awareness, if there was such, was in my head. However, don Juan showed me with his blow that there exists a center in the spinal cord, at the height of the shoulder blades, that is obviously a center of enhanced awareness.

When I questioned don Juan about the nature of this blow, he explained that the nagual is a director, a guide who bears the responsibility of opening the way, and that he must be impeccable to instill his warriors with a sense of confidence and clarity. Only under these conditions is a nagual in the position of giving this blow on the back in order to force a displacement of awareness, because the power of the nagual is what allows the transition. If the nagual is not an impeccable practitioner, the displacement doesn’t occur, as when I tried, unsuccessfully, to put the other apprentices in a state of heightened awareness by hitting them on the back before we ventured onto the bridge.

I asked don Juan what this displacement of awareness implied. He said that the nagual has to strike on a precise spot, which varies from person to person but which is always located in the general area of the shoulder blades. A nagual has to see to specify the spot, which is located in the periphery of one’s luminosity and not on the physical body itself; once the nagual identifies it, he pushes it in, more that striking it, and thus creates a concavity, a depression in the luminous shield. The state of heightened awareness resulting from this blow lasts for as long as this depression lasts. Some luminous shields go back to their original forms by themselves, some have to be struck at another point to be restored, and some others never go back to their oval shapes.

Don Juan said that seers see awareness as a peculiar glow.

Everyday awareness is a glow on the right side, which extends from the physical body’s exterior to the periphery of our luminosity. Heightened awareness is a more intense shine associated with great speed and concentration, a glow which saturates the periphery of the left side.

Don Juan said that seers explain what happens with the blow of the nagual as a temporary dislodging of a center located in the luminous cocoon of the body. The Eagle’s emanations are in reality evaluated and selected in that center. The blow alters their normal behavior.

Through their observations, seers have reached the conclusion that warriors must be put into that state of disorientation. The change in the way awareness works under these conditions makes this state an ideal territory to elucidate the commands of the Eagle. It allows warriors to function as if they were in everyday awareness, with the difference that they can concentrate on everything they do with unprecedented clarity and strength.

Don Juan said that my situation was analogous to the one he had experienced. His benefactor created a deep division in himself, making him move back and forth from the awareness of the right side to the awareness of the left side. The clarity and freedom of his left side awareness were in direct opposition to the rationalizations and endless defenses of his right side. He told me that all warriors are cast into the depths of the same situation that polarity molds, and that the nagual creates and reinforces the division to be able to lead his apprentices to the conviction that there is an awareness in human beings as yet unexplored.

The Six Explanatory Propositions explained. 

1 - What we perceive as the world are the Eagle’s emanations.

Don Juan explained to me that the world we perceive does not have a transcendental existence. Since we are familiarized with it, we believe that what we perceive is a world of objects which exist such as we perceive them, when in reality there is not a world of objects, but, rather, a universe of the Eagle’s emanations.

These emanations represent the only immutable reality. It is a reality that encompasses all that is, perceivable and unperceivable, knowable and unknowable.

Seers who see the Eagle’s emanations call them commands because of their urging force. All living creatures are urged to use the emanations, and they use them without getting to know what they are. Ordinary men interpret them as reality. And seers who see the emanations interpret them as the rule.

Despite the fact that seers see the emanations, they don’t have a way of knowing what it is they are seeing. Instead of entangling themselves with useless conjectures, seers occupy themselves in the functional speculation of how the Eagle’s commands can be interpreted. Don Juan maintained that to intuit a reality that transcends the world we perceive is to stay at the level of conjecture, which is not enough. It is conjecture for a warrior to say that the Eagle’s commands are perceived instantly by all living creatures on Earth, and that none of them perceives them in the same way. Warriors must try to behold the flow of emanations and “see” the way in which man and other living beings use it to build their perceptual world.

When I proposed to use the word “description” instead of Eagle’s emanations, don Juan said that he was not making a metaphor. He said that the word “description” connotes a human agreement, and that what we perceive stems from a command in which human agreements do not count.

2 - Attention is what makes us perceive the Eagle’s emanations as the action of skimming.

Don Juan used to say that perception is a physical faculty that living creatures groom; the final result of this grooming is known, among seers, as “attention”. Don Juan described attention as the action of hooking and channeling perception. He said that this action is our most singular feat, which covers all the spectrum of human alternatives and possibilities. Don Juan established a precise distinction between alternatives and possibilities. Human alternatives are those that we are enabled to choose as persons who function within the social environment. Our landscape of this dominion is quite limited. Human possibilities are those that we are capable of achieving as luminous beings.

Don Juan revealed to me a classificatory scheme of three types of attention, emphasizing that calling them “types” was erroneous. In fact, they are three levels of knowledge: first, second and third attention; each one of them an independent dominion, complete in itself.

For a warrior that is in the initial stages of his learning, the first attention is the most important of the three. Don Juan said that his explanatory propositions were attempts to bring into focus the way in which the first attention works, something that passes completely unnoticed by us. He considered it imperative for warriors to understand the nature of the first attention if they were going to venture into the other two.

He explained to me that the first attention has been taught how to move instantly through a whole spectrum of the Eagle’s emanations, without emphasizing at all that fact, in order to reach “perceptual units” which all of us have learned that are perceivable. Seers call this feat “skimming”, because it implies the capability of suppressing those emanations, which are superfluous and selecting which of them must be emphasized.

Don Juan explained this process taking as an example the mountain that we were seeing at that moment. He stressed that my first attention, at the moment of seeing the mountain, had skimmed an infinite number of emanations to obtain a miracle of perception; a skimming that all human beings know because each one of them has attained it by himself.

Seers contend that everything the first attention suppresses to obtain a skimming, cannot be recovered anymore by the first attention under any condition. Once we learn to perceive in terms of skimming’s, our senses stop registering the superfluous emanations. To elucidate this point, he gave me an example of skimming: the “human body”. He said that our first attention is totally unconscious of the emanations that compose the external luminous shield of the physical body. Our oval cocoon is not subjected to perception; those emanations have been rejected, which would make it perceivable in order to benefit those which allow the first attention to perceive the physical body such as we know it. Therefore, the perceptual goal that children must achieve as they grow up consists in learning to isolate the appropriate emanations to be able to channel their chaotic perception and transform it into the first attention; in doing so, they learn how to build skimming’s. All grown up human beings who surround children teach them how to skim. Sooner or later, children learn to control their first attention in order to perceive skimming’s in terms which are alike to those of their teachers.

Don Juan never ceased to be amazed at the capability of human beings to bring order into the chaos of perception. He contended that all of us, by his/her own merits, is a masterful magician and that our magic consists in rendering reality from the skimming’s that our first attention has learned how to build. 

The fact that we perceive in terms of skimming’s is the Eagle’s command, but to perceive the commands as objects is our power, our magical gift. Our fallacy, on the other hand, is that we always end up being one-sided when we forget that skimmings are only real in the terms that we perceive them as real, due to the power that we have to do it. Don Juan called this an error in judgment that destroys the richness of our mysterious origins.

3 - The skimmings are made sense of by the first ring of power.

Don Juan used to say that the first ring of power is the force that stems from the Eagle’s emanations to affect exclusively our first attention. He explained that it has been represented as a “ring,” because of its dynamism, of its uninterrupted movement. It has been called ring “of power” due to, first, its compulsive character, and, second, because of its unique ability to stop its works, to change them or reverse their direction.

The compulsive character is better shown in the fact that it doesn’t only urge the first attention to build and perpetuate skimming’s, but it also demands a consensus from all the participants. A complete agreement is demanded from each one of us upon the faithful reproduction of skimming’s, since conformity to the first ring of power must be total.

It is precisely this conformity which gives us the certainty that skimmings are objects which exist as such, independent from our perception. Besides, the compulsiveness of the first ring of power does not cease after the initial agreement, but it demands that we continuously renew the agreement. Our whole life we must operate as if, for example, each one of our skimming’s was perceptually the first one for each human being, in spite of languages and cultures. Don Juan granted that even if all this is too serious to be taken jokingly, the urging character of the first ring of power is so intense it forces us to believe that, if the “mountain” could have an awareness of its own, it would consider itself as the skimming we have learned how to build.

The most valuable feature that the first ring of power bears to a warrior is the singular capability of interrupting its flux of energy, or to totally suspend it. Don Juan said that this is a latent capability that exists within us all as a backup unit. In our narrow world of skimming’s, there is no need to use it. Since we are so efficiently buttressed and shielded by the net of the first attention, we do not realize, not even vaguely, that we have hidden resources. However, if another alternative to follow would present itself to us, such as is the warrior’s option to use the second attention, the latent capability of the first ring of power could start to function and could be used with spectacular results.

Don Juan emphasized that the biggest feat of sorcerers is the process of activating this latent capability; he called it blocking the intent of the first ring of power. He explained to me that the Eagle’s emanations, which have already been isolated by the first attention in order to build the everyday world, exert an unbending pressure upon the first attention. For this pressure to stop its activity, the intent must be displaced. Seers call this an obstruction or an interruption of the first ring of power. 

4 - Intent is the force that moves the first ring of power.

Don Juan explained to me that intent doesn’t refer to having an intention, or to wanting one thing or the other, but rather has to do with an imponderable force that makes us behave in ways which could be described as intentions, wishing, volition, etc. Don Juan didn’t bring it forth as a condition of being stemming from oneself, such as a habit produced by socialization, or a biological reaction. But rather he brought it forth as a private, intimate force we possess and use individually as a key that makes the first ring of power move in acceptable ways. Intent is what directs our first attention in order for it to focus on the Eagle’s emanations within a certain frame. And intent is also what commands the first ring of power to obstruct or interrupt its flux of energy.

Don Juan suggested to me to conceive intent as an invisible force which exists in the universe, without receiving itself, but still affecting everything: a force that creates and sustains skimmings. He asserted that skimming’s must be incessantly re-created to be imbued with continuity. In order to re-create them each time with the freshness that they need to build a living world, we must intend them each time we build them. For instance, we must intend the “mountain” along with all its complexities for the skimming to be fully materialized. Don Juan said that, for a spectator, who behaves exclusively based upon the first attention without the intervention of intent, the “mountain” would appear as an entirely different skimming. It could appear as the skimming “geometric form” or “amorphous spot of color”. For the skimming mountain to be completed, the spectator must intend it, whether it is unconsciously through the urging force of the first ring of power, or premeditatedly, through the warrior’s training.

Don Juan pointed to me the three ways in which intent comes to us. The most predominant one is known by seers as “the intent of the first ring of power”. This is a blind intent which comes to us by chance. It is as if we were in its way, or as if intent was in ours. Inevitably we find ourselves trapped in its net without having the least control of what is happening to us.

The second way is when intent comes to us by its own. This requires a considerable amount of purpose, a sense of determination on our part. Only in our capability as warriors can we put ourselves voluntarily in the way of intent; we summon it, so to speak. Don Juan explained to me that his insistence in being an impeccable warrior was nothing more than an effort to let intent know that he is putting himself in its way.

Don Juan used to say that warriors call this phenomenon “power”. Thus, when they speak of having personal power, they are referring to the intent that comes to them voluntarily. The outcome, he used to say to me, can be described as the facility to find new solutions, or the facility to affect people or events. It is as if other possibilities, previously unknown by the warrior, suddenly become apparent. In this way, an impeccable warrior never plans anything ahead, but his actions are so decisive that it seems as if the warrior had calculated beforehand each facet of his activity.

The third way in which we find intent is the rarest and complex of the three; it occurs when intent allows us to harmonize with it. Don Juan described this state as the real moment of power: the culmination of a lifetime effort in search of impeccability. Only supreme warriors obtain it, and as long as they are in such a state, intent lets itself be handled by them at will. It is as if intent had fused in those warriors, and in doing so it transforms them into a pure force, without preconceptions. Seers call this state the “intent of the second ring of power”, or “will”. [Ed. Note: One may say that Silvio Manuel was in this state of ‘intent of the second ring of power.’]

5 - The first ring of power can be stopped by a functional blocking of the capability of building skimmings.

Don Juan said that the function of the not-doings is to create an obstruction in the usual focus of our first attention. The not-doings are, in this sense, maneuvers designed to prepare the first attention for the functional blocking of the first ring of power, or, in other words, for the interruption of intent.

Don Juan explained to me that this functional blocking, which is the only method to systematically use the latent capability of the first ring of power, represents a temporary interruption that the benefactor creates in the disciple’s capability for building skimmings. It is a premeditated and powerful artificial intrusion into the first attention, in order to push it beyond the appearances which the known skimming’s present to us; this intrusion is accomplished by interrupting the intent of the first ring of power.

Don Juan said that in order to achieve this interruption, the benefactor treats intent as what it really is, a flux, a current of energy that can eventually be stopped or reoriented. An interruption of this nature, however, implies a commotion of such magnitude that it can force the first ring of power to stop fully; a situation which is impossible to conceive under our normal life conditions. It is unthinkable to us that we can un-walk the steps we took when we consolidated our perception. But it is feasible that, under the impact of this interruption, we could place ourselves in a perceptual position very similar to the one of our beginnings when the Eagle’s commands were emanations that we had not yet imbued with significance.

Don Juan explained that any procedure the benefactor could use to create this interruption must be intimately linked with his personal power. Therefore, a benefactor doesn’t use any process to handle intent, but rather moves it and makes it available to the apprentice through his personal power. 

In my case, Don Juan achieved the functional blocking of the first ring of power through a complex process, which combined three methods: the ingestion of hallucinogenic plants, manipulation of the body and maneuvering with intent itself.

In the beginning don Juan relied strongly upon the ingestion of hallucinogenic plants, apparently due to the persistence of my rational side. The effect was tremendous, and yet retarded the sought for interruption. The fact that the plants were hallucinogenic offered my reason the perfect justification to congregate all of its available resources to continue exerting control. I was convinced that I could logically explain anything that I was experiencing, along with the inconceivable feats that don Juan and don Genaro used to do to create the interruptions, as perceptual distortions caused by the ingestion of hallucinogens.

He said that the most remarkable effect of hallucinogenic plants was something that every time I ingested them, I interpreted as the peculiar feeling that everything around me oozed a surprising richness. There were colors, forms, details that I had never beheld before. Don Juan used this increment in my ability to perceive, and, through a series of commands and comments used to force me to enter a state of nervous restlessness.

Afterwards he manipulated my body and made me shift from one side of awareness to the other, until I had created phantasmagorical visions or absolutely real scenes with three-dimensional creatures that could not possibly exist in this world.

Don Juan explained to me that once the direct relation between intent and the skimming’s we are constructing is broken, it cannot ever be repaired. From that moment on we acquire the ability to catch a current of what he described as “phantom intent, “or the intent of the skimming’s that are not present at the moment or place of the interruption, which is to say, an intent put at our disposal through some aspect of memory.

Don Juan asserted that with the interruption of the intent of the first ring of power we become receptive and moldable; a nagual can then introduce the intent of the second ring of power. Don Juan was convinced that children of a certain age find themselves in a similar situation of receptivity; being deprived of intent, they are ready to be imprinted with any intent that is available to the teachers who surround them.

After my period of continuous ingestion of hallucinogenic plants, don Juan totally discontinued its use. However, he obtained new and more dramatic interruptions in myself by manipulating my body and making me shift states of awareness, combining all this with maneuvers with intent itself. Through a combination of mesmerizing instructions and adequate comments, Don Juan created a current of “phantom intent” and I was led to experience common skimming’s as something unimaginable. He conceptualized all this as “glancing into the immensity of the Eagle”.

Don Juan masterfully led me through countless interruptions of intent until he was convinced, as a seer, that my body showed the effects of the functional blocking of the first ring of power. He said that he could see an unusual activity around the area of the shoulder blades. He described it as a little hole that had formed exactly as if the luminosity was a muscular layer contracted by a nerve.

To me, the effect of the functional blocking of the first ring of power was that it managed to erase the certainty I had all my life that what my senses reported was “real”. Quietly I entered a state of inner silence.

Don Juan used to say that what gives warriors that extreme uncertainty that his benefactor had experienced at the end of his life, that resignation to failure that he himself was living, is the fact that one glance into the immensity of the Eagle leaves one without hope. Hope is the result of our familiarity with skimming’s and the idea that we control them. In such moments only the warrior’s life can help us to persevere in our efforts to discover that which the Eagle has concealed from us, but without hope that we can get to understand what we discover.

6 - The second attention.

Don Juan explained to me that the examination of the second attention must begin with the realization that the force of the first ring of power, which boxes us in, is a physical, concrete edge. Seers have described it as a wall of fog, a barrier that can be systematically brought to our awareness by means of the blocking of the first ring of power; and then can be perforated by means of the warrior’s training.

After perforating this wall of fog, one enters a broad intermediate state. The task of warriors then consists in going through it until they reach the next division line, which must be perforated in order to enter what is properly the other self or the second attention.

He said that the two division lines are perfectly recognizable. When warriors perforate the wall of fog, they feel that their bodies are squeezed, or they feel an intense shaking in the cavity of their bodies, generally to the right of the stomach or through the middle part, from right to left. When warriors perforate the second line, they feel an acute crack on the upper part of the body, something like the sound of a dry bough that is broken in two.

The two lines that box in both attentions, and individually seal them, are known to seers as the parallel lines. These seals both attentions by means of the fact that they extend into infinity, without ever allowing the crossing unless they are perforated.

Between both lines there exists an area of specific awareness that seers call limbo, or the world between the parallel lines. It is a real space between two huge orders of the Eagle’s emanations; emanations which are within the human possibilities of awareness. 

One is the level that creates the self of everyday life, and the other is the level that creates the other self. Since the limbo is a transitional zone, there both fields of emanations extend one upon the other. The fraction of the level which is known to us, that extends into that area, hooks a portion of the first ring of power, and the capability of the first ring of power to build skimming’s makes us perceive a series of skimming’s in the limbo which are almost the same as those of everyday life, except that they appear grotesque, uncanny and contorted. In this manner the limbo has specific features that do not change arbitrarily each time that one goes into it. There exists in its physical features which resemble the skimmings of everyday life.

Don Juan maintained that the feeling of heaviness experienced in the limbo is due to the growing burden that has been placed on the first attention.

In the area located right behind the wall of fog we can still behave as we do normally; it is as if we were in a grotesque but recognizable world. As we penetrate further into it, beyond the wall of fog, it becomes progressively difficult to recognize the features or to behave in terms of the known self. He explained to me that it was possible to make anything else appear instead of the wall of fog, but that seers have opted for accentuating that which consumes less energy: to visualize the wall of fog does not demand any effort.

What exists beyond the second division line is known by seers as the second attention, or the other self, or the parallel world; and the action of going through both edges is known as “crossing the parallel lines”. Don Juan thought that I could assimilate this concept more firmly if he described each dominion of awareness as a specific perceptual pre-disposition.

He told me that in the territory of everyday awareness we are inescapably entangled into the specific perceptual pre-disposition of the first attention. From the moment in which the first ring of power begins to build skimming’s, the way of building them becomes our normal perceptual pre-disposition. 

Breaking the unifying force of the first attention implies to break the first division line. The normal perceptual pre-disposition passes then into the intermediate area, which is between the parallel lines. One keeps building almost normal skimmings for some time. But as one approaches what seers call the second division line, the perceptual pre-disposition of the first attention begins to recede, it loses strength. Don Juan used to say that this transition is marked by a sudden incapability of remembering or understanding what one is doing.

When one gets closer to the second division line, the second attention begins to act on the warriors who undertake the voyage. If they are inexperienced, their awareness gets emptied; it goes blank. Don Juan held that this occurs because they are approaching a spectrum of the Eagle’s emanations, which does not yet have a systematized perceptual pre-disposition.

My experiences with la Gorda and the nagual woman beyond the wall of fog were an example of this incapability. I traveled as far as the other self, but I couldn’t account for what we had done for the simple reason that my second attention was still unformulated and it did not give me the opportunity of formulating all I had perceived.

Don Juan explained to me that one begins to activate the second ring of power by forcing the second attention to wake from its slumber. The functional blocking of the first ring of power achieves this. Then the task of the teacher consists of recreating the condition that started the first ring of power, the condition of being saturated with intent. The first ring of power is put in motion by the force of the intent given by those who teach how to skim. As my teacher he was giving me, then, a new intent which would create a new perceptual environment.

Don Juan said that it takes a lifetime of unceasing discipline, which seers call unbending intent, to prepare the second ring of power to be able to build skimming’s which belong to another level of the Eagle’s emanations. To dominate the perceptual pre-disposition of the parallel self is a feat of peerless value which few warriors achieve. Silvio Manuel was one of those few.

Don Juan warned me that one must not attempt to deliberately dominate it.

If this happens, it must be through a natural process that unfolds itself without much effort from our part. He explained to me that, since the goal warriors actively pursue is to break both perceptual pre-dispositions in order to enter the final freedom of the third attention, the reason for this indifference lies in the practical consideration that when it is dominated it simply becomes very difficult to break, since the goal that warriors actively pursue is to break both perceptual predispositions, to enter the final freedom of the third attention.

TMMK

Why You Get Sick

This post is a little different from the rest, but feel it's needed here. This post ties in with impeccability and many other teachings of don Juan, as written by Carlos Castaneda. This post references clients, but it is for all people in general. 

I often hear clients comment that they've 'caught a cold.' Really? As Tohei Sensei is famous for saying, "Why catch a cold? I throw them away!" BTW, I've not 'been sick' in over seven years and have never had the flu. I don't have a super-immune system, I have just focused on abundance of health, not dis-ease.

When, through insecurity (fear) and a feeling that there 'isn't enough,' we try to hold onto or cling to what we have, we begin to cut off this wonderful flow of energy. In hanging onto what we have, we fail to keep the energy moving and we don't make space for new energy to come to us.

People get sick because they 'believe' on an inner level that illness is an appropriate or inevitable response to some situation or circumstance, because it in some way seems to solve a problem for them or get them something that they need, or as a desperate solution to some unresolved and unbearable inner conflict.

If we are suffering physically in some way, it is a message that there is something to be looked at within our consciousness, something to be recognized, acknowledged, and changed.

This, above, is what I spend time on with clients using EFT Tapping, inner silence, recapitulation and many other techniques. Seems to work like a charm!

TMMK 

Unbending Intent

When we have unbending intent to create something - that is we deeply desire it, we completely believe that we can do it, and we are totally willing to have it - it simply cannot fail to manifest, and usually within a very short time.

The clearer and stronger our intent, the more quickly and easily our creative visualization will work. In any give situation we only need ask ourselves about the condition of our intent. If it is weak or uncertain, it can often be strengthened by affirming: I now have unbending intent to create this here and now!

We can think of life as containing three levels, and we can call those levels beingness, doingness, and havingness.

Beingness is the basic experience of being alive and conscious. It is the experience we have in deep meditation, the experience of being totally complete and at rest within oneself.

Doingness is movement and activity, it stems from the natural creative energy that flows through every living thing and is the source of our vitality.

Havingness is the state of being in relationship with other people and things in the universe. It is the ability to allow and accept things and people into our lives; to comfortably occupy the same space with them.

Beingness, doingness and havingness are like a triangle where each side supports the others. They are not in conflict with each other. They all exist simultaneously.

Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: They try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want, so that they will be happier.

The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.

Thus, the purpose is to connect us with our beingness to help us focus and facilitate our doingness and to increase and expand our havingness.

TMMK

Affirmations for Loved Ones

If you are feeling frustrated with a loved one, become gratitude, and then recite these words:

I want to be present with you exactly as you are. I am not asking you to change in any way. While I may have preferences about how I might want you to be, I am committed to letting go of those preferences in favor of letting you be exactly the way you are. You may change from one moment to the next, and I am committed to being fully present with you on a moment-to-moment basis and to feel and accept you however much you change. No matter what happens in this moment, I am determined to let you be as you are with an open and sincere heart.

TMMK

Attachment

I gathered the information for this post from my Aikido sensei and wrote it when I was still living in Las Vegas performing massage therapy and EFT Tapping. One can just as well use the lessons in this post for most any physical activity. 

Concerning Tensegrity, massage or EFT Tapping, just like most anything else, there is body action of some kind. Of course, that has to be. I must raise my arms and place my hands and fingers on the client’s face and body to tap on the meridian points or perform massage while I teach the client how to do it themselves. But what is my body action an expression of? That's the question.

Is it an expression of my own small mind, trying to do something? Or is it an expression of the deeper sense of unity? Is it creating goodness out of badness, when a client is stressed out, or in a weakened condition, or injured? Do I think that there is something wrong, and I need to fix it?

This is seeing only the relative world. This is seeing only chaos, where in fact there is perfect order. If I don't see the order, then the order does not influence the client using EFT Tapping, massage, or anything else.

The client cannot see the order, balance, harmonious universe, because of their temporary condition of stress, anxiety, physical pain, etc. If I don't see perfection, then the client also doesn't see that.

When someone feels pain, there is attachment to that area of the mind/body. So, one might think that, if you are attached, in some sense your mind is strong there. But it is just very stuck there.

Attachment is weakness. If my mind is strong, it is free and not stuck. Mind is weak there in that sore place or injured place, so if I touch the client using EFT Tapping there in that sore or injured place with a free mind, then I can release the attachment.

So the nature of what transpires between us, the client and me, the quality or flavor of what transpires between us, carries the quality, flavor, or taste of the source of that. If it comes from my small mind, then it carries that flavor; that characteristic. It is not that it is nothing, in this case, but it's limited. It's not limitless. It is not infinite. It's finite.

So what is the point of all that?

It is very important for me, and clients, to begin to truly understand how it is that energy pervades everything. It is everything there is. So, if I think, "I am going to move energy from me to you", or attempt to channel or move energy from The Great Spirit, or Heaven or God or whatever to you, this is limited thinking and a bit of a mistake.

Because how can that happen? It's already there.

TMMK

Being Present and Coming Back

Morihei Ueshiba, known as the father of the modern martial art of Aikido, was reputedly asked by one of his students how he remained so present and apparently unperturbed in the midst of a fight. Whether apocryphal or not, he is reputed to have said that he did not consider himself particularly good at being continuously present in a fight but what he was really good at was ‘coming back’ from being distracted.

When people first begin Mind-Body Relaxation training, almost universally they report that their major difficulty is staying focused. Their distress about being distracted is usually allayed when they understand that the practice of Mind-Body Relaxation involves, like the skill of the Aikido master, getting good at ‘coming back’ from distraction. One learns to be tireless, remorseless, and unperturbed by the tendency of one’s mind to wander away from the object of focus.

“Getting good at coming back from distraction is as important as being good at staying focused.”

Beginners often feel various degrees of frustration, irritation and remorse when they find that their attention has wandered off into what they’re having for lunch or some distressing thought about their symptoms, whatever they may be. As one progresses in this relaxation practice, one learns to return attention to the chosen sensation they are focusing on without any emotion or internal comment about being distracted. Coming right back from distraction without emotion or internal comment is what it takes to get good at ‘coming back.’ There is no quick way to achieve this – practice, practice and more practice is the often-unwelcome secret.

TMMK

Mind Training for Difficult Situations

In complex situations many patterns are triggered simultaneously. Conflicting thoughts and ideas race around in your mind. Conflicting feelings tear your heart apart. Your body moves first in one direction, then another. Patterns and identities struggle to maintain themselves. You experience their struggles as turmoil, uncertainty and indecision. Or you move to absolute certainty and inflexibility to avoid the turmoil and chaos.

In difficult situations, you cannot possibly think through what to do because all your thinking is in the service of one pattern or another.

Instead, sit in the mess. Keep coming back to attention until you find a quality of open clarity - in the mess, not apart from it.

Clarity means that you experience what arises clearly. Thoughts and feelings arise like reflections in a mirror. When you look at a mirror, you do not see a mirror - you see reflections. When you know the reflections are reflections and not actual objects, you know you are looking at a mirror. Thoughts and feelings are similar. When you know that thoughts and feelings are thoughts and feelings, you know you are looking at your mind.

That is clarity.

Open means you see without prejudice and without confusion. You do not suppress or ignore anything that arises, internally or externally. Regard all that you experience as a dream. At the same time, see what is what. Do not confuse one thing for another - experience every element in the dream vividly and distinctly.

The intensity of your thoughts and feelings lessens because you are in and aware of the space in which they arise. Like silence and sound or stillness and movement, thoughts and feelings are not separate from the open space of awareness. You still feel everything, but you are no longer struggling against it.

It is tricky, because if you succumb to even a little distraction, you lose attention and you are once again lost in the mess.

Keep coming back to that open clarity and resting in the mess until you become aware of a timeless awareness that is you and not you. It is you, because you are aware. It is not you, because "you" as a separate entity is not there.

In that timeless awareness, a knowing arises. This knowing is non-conceptual. It is not driven by reaction or pattern. It arises from meeting, opening, understanding and accepting exactly and precisely what is arising in your life. You know where the imbalances are, not through thinking, but more through sensing directly. And you know what needs to be done to address those imbalances. That knowing takes expression through your body, through action.

Imagine that you are an avid poker player. You hang out with a circle of people who enjoy playing poker, a circle that extends not only through your home town but to other towns within easy driving distance.

One night you are playing with a group of friends and the dealer drops the cards. Everyone helps pick them up and the dealer deals the next hand. You end up with really good cards. The betting begins, and it's quite exciting. The stakes rise. It's by far the biggest pot of the night, but you are confident in your cards. When the dust settles, you are the winner. Big winnings! And then someone at the table says, "You cheated. When the cards were dropped, you picked up a couple of good cards and that's why you had such a good hand."

The silence around the table is deafening. You start to protest, but before you can do so, another person says, "Let's check the deck." The deck is found to be two cards short, and then two cards are found on floor near your chair.

Nobody says anything. They just look at you and quietly leave. You know you didn't cheat, but what can you do?

The next day, your Twitter account and Facebook page are filled with postings about the card game and what happened. Your friends won't speak with you and your colleagues keep their distance. Your relationship with your circle of friends has changed dramatically. Yet moving away isn't an option for you.

What does mind training have to say about this situation?

Your response to the above post may reflect a perspective that pervades how people generally think about practice these days, namely, that the point of practice is to help you in your life or, in this case, help you to find a way through a difficult situation.

While many practices can help you in difficult situations, the help usually takes the form of ‘seeing’ and not being trapped by the reactive mechanisms operating, both yours and others.

However, when you take the aim of practice to be able to meet difficult situations, you are close to adopting a transactional relationship with practice. In transactional relationships, you are primarily interested in what you get out of the relationship. If you find something that is more helpful, you take up that. The focus on what you get out of the practice inevitably reinforces the sense of self that keeps you from experiencing life without that sense of separation.

Perhaps there is a progression here. You may begin to practice with the idea that it will help you in your life, but as time goes on, you realize that you have become more interested in what you can accomplish through the practice (awakening, presence, whatever you want to call it). But as still more time goes by, you come to appreciate that any kind of goal, any kind of objective, prevents you from being present in your experience and, increasingly, the only thing to do is experience whatever is arising as completely as possible.

That kind of effort is often extremely challenging. In the case of being falsely accused of cheating, your effort requires you to experience the emotional pain of social humiliation and approbation, the pain of the loss of friends and human connection and/or the pain that comes with the recognition that, despite your best efforts, you may never be respected or appreciated the way you would like to be. On the other hand, there are great joys, too, the joy of freedom from conventional notions of success and failure, the joy of the peace that comes when you know you can experience whatever life throws at you because you know, experientially, that there is no "you" as such, and the joy that arises naturally when there is no separation between you and what you experience.

Yes, mind training and other practices may help you in difficult situations, but the aim of the mind-training instructions is not simple utilitarianism. They give you a way of being in your experience, whatever it is. What that leads to is not something you can know or control. As T.S. Eliot says in Four Quartets (Section V in East Coker), "For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business." Not everyone wants to live this way, but if you are taking up mind-training, taking and sending, or any of many other practices, that is where you are headed.

TMMK

Emotional Reactions

Let's face it. Emotional reactions really make a mess of our lives. There are the three basic ones, virtually hard-wired into us: Attraction, aversion and indifference.

Attraction becomes desire and greed. Aversion becomes anger (as well as hatred) and envy. Indifference becomes instinct (as in stupidity) and pride. They are all intimately related. Shock a highly competitive person (envy) and he or she becomes an animal (instinct). Pride breeds stupidity. Unchecked desire becomes greed. The completely impractical challenge we face as practitioners is to change our relationship with these emotional reactions so that they don't completely run our lives.

The common feature is that they are all organized around a felt sense of "I" and their function is to maintain that sense of "I" against all odds. This is important to remember. To step out of an emotional reaction is to step out of an "I". Not so easy.

One of the aspects of the Tibetan tradition of Buddhism that I find quite wonderful is that it gives us several lines of defense or ways of meeting emotional reactions. Defense may be the wrong metaphor because it implies an enemy. Perhaps it's better to talk about doors, doors to freedom. Traditionally, the three doors to freedom are no characteristics, no aspiration, and emptiness, but I'm going to talk about them from a different perspective: Faith, compassion and impermanence.

The first door is faith and it corresponds to the door of emptiness. You can call it confidence or trust, if you wish, but please don't call it belief. I make a distinction between faith and belief. Faith is the willingness to open to what arises in experience. Belief is the disposition to make what arises in experience conform to certain ideas or positions. The one opens. The other closes. For a bit more on this, visit this post: Belief vs. Faith.

When an emotional reaction arises, then, we open to that experience--completely. The caveat is that opening to it means that one experiences it, in all its intensity, without suppressing or expressing it and knows it for what it is. Again, not so easy. For instance, when someone insults me, a whole bunch of reactive mechanisms are triggered. My body immediately tenses up. Anger, pride, astonishment jump up. My mind is only a microsecond behind coming up with defenses, retorts, dismissals, etc. Quite the fireworks show! All of that stuff, all of it, is, however, nothing more than movement in my field of experience. I don't have to do anything with any of it and when I know and experience it as movement, it takes care of itself. If I'm willing to open to the fireworks show, however intense, it releases itself, and that release is made possible by my willingness to just experience what arises.

But I'm not always able to do that. Sometimes the insult is too personal. It hits something in me that I am not yet willing or able to experience. It may hit a part of me that I was not even aware of. That's where the second door comes in. The second door is taking and sending – compassion - and corresponds to no aspiration, that is, I don't want anything. If my training and practice is solid, it clicks in and as soon as I notice the anger or pride, I breathe in that emotional reaction from everyone in the world. Everyone. Not just the person who insulted me. To focus only on that person runs the risk that compassion will degenerate into a pity that is, itself, based in pride. No, I take in the anger of everyone in the world, the seething rage, the icy hatred, the blind fury, all of it from everyone everywhere so that they are free of it. And then I breathe out joy, well-being, peace and good fortune to everyone. That is what I do. The result, that is, what happens, that this exchange changes my relationship with the anger. It loses its compelling force. The compassion behind taking and sending leads me to experience it for just what it is, a movement in mind. Then a different form of compassion arises, less personal but more powerful, a compassion that knows no separation, that knows the suffering and struggle we all experience when we are in the grip of emotional reactions.

The third door is impermanence and it corresponds to no characteristics--everything is defined in relation to other things and has no essential characteristic. Essentially, when faced with enraging, seductive or sleep-inducing emotional reactions, one remembers "This, too, shall pass." And it does. In letting reactions pass without falling into them, even it means gritting one's teeth a bit, we are not polluting the world with our own emotional reactions and we are reminded that those reactions are our responsibility, not anyone else's. "You made me do that" doesn't operate here.

TMMK

Reaffirmations From The World Around Us

Let us begin with a couple of quotes which will be explained below.

"He [Don Juan] said that for a sorcerer, the world of everyday life is not as real, or out there, as we believe it is. For a sorcerer, reality, or the world we all know, is only a description.

"...A description that had been pounded into me from the moment I was born.

"He pointed out that everyone who comes into contact with a child is a teacher who incessantly describes the world to that child, until the moment when the child is capable of perceiving the world as it is described.

"According to don Juan, we have no memory of that portentous [portentous- of momentous or ominous significance] moment, simply because none of us could possibly have had any point of reference to compare it to anything else.

"From that moment on, however, the child is a member. He or she knows the description of the world. Their membership becomes full-fledged, I suppose, when they are capable of making all the proper perceptual interpretations which, by conforming to that description, validate it.

"For don Juan, then, the reality of our day-to-day life consists of an endless flow of perceptual interpretations which we, the individuals who share a specific membership, have learned to make in common.

"The idea that the perceptual interpretations that make up our world have a flow is congruous with the fact that they run uninterruptedly; and they are rarely, if ever, open to question.

"In fact, the reality of the world we know is so taken for granted that the basic premise of sorcery - that our reality is merely one of many descriptions - could hardly be taken as a serious proposition."

Ah, but some of us DO take this as a serious proposition! The above, at least for me, is self-explanatory. If it's not, please re-read the above and use some critical thinking on the topic. If there is a need (for myself or others) to expand on this I'll do so at a later date.

Now that you (hopefully!) understand that above, at least on a basic level, let's perform a simple exercise.

Stop whatever you are doing right now, unless you are driving or something that requires your attention for your own safety, and perform the following:

Whether sitting or standing, take a few deep breaths in and out. Try and relax the physical body just a bit. Then, become aware of everything around you as quickly as possible and remain alert to everything around you for just thirty seconds without moving. Begin with what’s directly in front of your eyes and focus on that. Then, slowly expand your awareness to everything around you. Focus on what you see and that’s it. Be alert and aware as you possibly can for just thirty seconds.

If this is difficult for you, keep practicing. If this is easy for you, while performing the above, engage your other senses. Listen to what's around you. Touch something within reach. What does your mouth taste like?

What are we attempting to accomplish here? We are breaking the continuous flow of thought. Don't 'think' about anything while performing the exercise above. Don't judge, good or bad or otherwise, what you see, hear, touch or smell while performing the above exercise. Just recognize 'it,' and leave it be. Just reside in awareness. Don't 'think' that what you are looking at is pretty, or ugly or anything of the sort. So, as don Juan stated above, we are attempting to break the "endless flow of perceptual interpretations." Or, we can say we are allowing the endless flow and just not interpreting it, thinking about it, within duality. Good or bad. Soft or hard. Pretty or ugly. JUST OBSERVE and that's it.

Now, with that said, thinking is good. It has its purpose. Yet, with the exercise above, we're just giving it a rest. I'm a huge fan of critical thinking, yet what we need to rid ourselves from is the mindless chatting that's usually always going on in our heads. That doesn't serve us well. Most of us worry about the past and fret over the future. With the exercise above, give the mind a rest and just observe what's 'out there.'

The exercise above is also what I label a premeditation. Most cannot meditate because they don't have any attentive capacity. The ability to focus. The beauty of the exercise above is to learn how to meditate or pay attention for a short period of time. It's also great when we are performing a task and get all stressed out. Take a minute, relax, and perform the above. Voila! Now you are centered and focused. Meditation is great, but I don't that when you're stressed out at work you can tell the boss that you need to run along and go meditate. The exercise above is best used in THE MIDST of stressful situations.

Here's another behavior pattern that all of us get stuck in: Not only do we ramble on with the internal dialogue, we rambling on in regards to OURSELVES. Performing the exercise above gets us 'out of our minds' or continually thinking about ourselves by gazing at external stimuli. So, yes, as don Juan mentioned that 'the world out there is a description,' at least we can sneak out of our own heads and thoughts for just a bit. And guess what? Where IS that description don Juan mentions? In our mind, of course. Let's loosen up that stead-fast belief we have about what we know, how that world is, etc.

Okay, I think that's enough for now. I was going to continue on and tie the above in with the topic, Reaffirmations From The World Around Us, but I'll write a separate post for that. For now, work on the above premeditation. Do it as often as you can throughout the day. I do! Start building up your attentive capacity. Gaze at the world around you. Close your eyes and listen, without judging, to everything around you. Breathe through your nose and see what odors you can differentiate. Touch something and truly feel it without judging it.

Until next time....

TMMK

Personal History

Everyone wants to know about our ‘personal history,’ so here is mine. No use in hiding it; this ties in with being available and unavailable (also a don Juan technique.) I will write about being available and unavailable when I have time. So, here is a brief recap of how I began with Carlos Castaneda and some of my personal history. 

The year was 1987 and I was a junior in college. I had found a professor I really enjoyed (he was even in the field I was majoring in, Business,) and began attending all his classes. He seemed a bit odd to me, and that’s one reason I really enjoyed him. He wasn’t the typical ‘stuffy’ professor. He was this old ‘hippie,’ and would drive up from Sedona to Flagstaff to teach each week. He would quote Carlos Castaneda in his lectures, as well as provide us quotes on paper.

My favorite time with this professor was when he took the entire class outside, to conduct class out on the grassy lawn area. He spoke of many Carlos Castaneda topics, and this caught my interest. It didn’t attract me enough to actually read, Journey To Ixtlan, which was required reading for this professor’s course, but I certainly found interest in it!

Fast forward another year and a half, after graduation in the summer of 1988. I was bored one Sunday afternoon; so bored I decided to dig out my old college books and try and find something exciting. I found a book that I’d never opened, entitled Journey To Ixtlan by Carlos Castaneda. (As mentioned above.) Figured I’d take a look. Fascinating!

That was the weirdest book I’d ever read, and come to find out, it was required reading from my favorite professor mentioned above. Thus, I started thinking about that professor and how he had behaved. I saw how he emulated what was taught in the book.

So, I tried the concepts myself, yet I was only dabbling. It was just a bit to ‘off the wall,’ but I tried. I felt like Carlos Castaneda in comparison to don Juan. It was entertaining intellectually, but when it came to put it to practice, I didn’t do so well.

Fast forward another five years to 1993. At the ripe old age of 27, I died. Drown. I was legally dead, brain dead for over two minutes. I won’t go into all the NDE details, as I have many, just suffice it to say that it really woke me up. (Or so I thought.) I applied all of the teachings CC had written about in his series of books. (CC is short for Carlos Castaneda the author.) But, as the years went by, and life carried on, I slowly slipped back into non-awareness.

Ah, but life wasn’t finished with me yet. Four years after the first NDE I was electrocuted and died once again in 1997. (I guess one life lesson wasn’t enough, eh?) This NDE really kicked me in the pants. I decided to really ‘buckle down’ and get with the teachings once again.

One part of the teachings that seemed to come from the last NDE was the ability to have lucid dreams at will. I will write about these Dreams and the lessons taught within the Dream. The rest of the waking lessons were difficult even though I was receiving guidance in Dreaming. That's what this blog is all about; the path of the mastery of awareness, and decided to label it, Exploring Awareness.

It’s now been over twenty years since that last NDE. Much has happened. I’ve kept the teachings of CC active and do my best to practice them. I also dabble in Zen and other teaching’s; different fingers pointing at the moon.

This blog will discuss my own personal experiences in regards to the teachings of don Juan and Carlos Castaneda, along with other teachings I find helpful. Am I a master of awareness? Not even close. Or, perhaps I-Am. Perhaps we ALL are. Who knows? What I do know is that life certainly is entertaining!

Tip - I highly recommend you read Carlos Castaneda's books if you are to follow along with this blog. If you are following this blog you have probably already read them. If not, please comment and ask for clarification.

TMMK 

Looking vs. Seeing

 There is a difference between the freedom of a still mind and the freedom of no mind.

The freedom of a still mind is like kayaking in still water. It is peaceful. You can direct attention wherever you choose, and it rests there because you are so still. And it is almost useless in regular life.

The freedom of no mind is like kayaking with no fixed point inside you. You are not separate from what you experience. You are not watching it.

How do you lose your mind? You look again and again at what cannot be seen, your own mind. Stillness helps with that looking. It helps a lot. Yet stillness by itself, even the extraordinary stillness of infinite space, infinite consciousness and so on, is not enough.

You have to see. And to see, you have to look.

Look again and again at what cannot be seen. At some point you see nothing - you really see nothing. You know, through your own experience, that there is no you in you, no fixed point - nothing. That experience makes all the difference. As thoughts, feelings and sensations arise in your life, you experience them without any fixed reference point. They are not "other."

You move with them and through them, just like you move with and through the waves in a kayak in the ocean.

What do you do about thoughts, feelings and sensations? Nothing. They are free, free, to come and go on their own, just like the waves in the ocean.

…and so are you, because you have lost your mind.

TMMK  

Double Being Defined

 "I have to know about the double," I said.

"There's no way of knowing whether he's flesh and blood," don Juan said. "Because he is not as real as you. Genaro's double is as real as Genaro. Do you see what I mean?"

"But you have to admit, don Juan, that there must be a way to know."

"The double is the self; that explanation should suffice. If you would see, however, you'd know that there is a great difference between Genaro and his double. For a sorcerer who sees, the double is brighter."

After their laughter subsided, I asked don Genaro what a double did, or what a sorcerer did with the double.

Don Juan answered. He said that the double had power, and that it was used to accomplish feats that would be unimaginable under ordinary terms.

"I've told you time and time again that the world is unfathomable," he said to me. "And so are we, and so is every being that exists in this world. It is impossible, therefore, to reason out the double. You've been allowed to witness it, though, and that should be more than enough."

"But there must be a way to talk about it," I said. "You yourself have told me that you

explained your conversation with the deer in order to talk about it. Can't you do the same with the double?"

He was quiet for a moment. I pleaded with him. The anxiety I was experiencing was beyond anything I had ever gone through.

"Well, a sorcerer can double up," don Juan said. "That's all one can say."

"But is he aware that he is doubled?"

"Of course he's aware of it."

"Does he know that he is in two places at once?"

Both of them looked at me and then they exchanged a glance.

"Where is the other don Genaro?" I asked.

Don Genaro leaned towards me and stared into my eyes.

"I don't know," he said softly. "No sorcerer knows where his other is."

"Genaro is right," don Juan said. "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."

Don Juan explained that by the time a warrior had conquered dreaming and seeing and had developed a double, he must have also succeeded in erasing personal history, self-importance, and routines. He said that all the techniques which he had taught me and which I had considered to be empty talk were, in essence, 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," don Juan explained. "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. To take notes is a simple affair for you, but you still scare Genaro with your pencil."

"Can an outsider, looking at a sorcerer, see that he is in two places at once?" I asked don Juan.

"Certainly. That would be the only way to know it."

"But can't one logically assume that the sorcerer would also notice that he has been in two places?"

"Aha!" don Juan exclaimed. "For once you've got it right. 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."

My mind boggled. I felt that if I did not keep on writing I would explode.

"Think of this," he went on. "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."

He turned his hand over and over to give me the feeling of what he meant.

"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. But for an outsider looking at the sorcerer it may appear as if the sorcerer is acting two different episodes at once. The sorcerer, however, recollects two separate single instants, because the glue of the description of time is no longer binding him."

"Is the double solid?" I asked don Juan after a long silence.

They looked at me.

"Does the double have corporealness?" I asked.

"Certainly," don Juan said. "Solidity, corporealness are memories. Therefore, like everything else we feel about the world, they are memories we accumulate. Memories of the description.

You have the memory of my solidity, the same way you have the memory of communicating through words. Thus, you talked with a coyote and you feel me as being solid."

TMMK

The Lens Is The Self

When we trace all problems back to their single source, we find that the world appears dark and murky and unknowable not because it is, but because the lens through which it is projected and perceived is filthy.

The lens is self and the filth is personal history, self-importance and ego. Clean the lens with recapitulation and the world resolves into crystal clarity, and darkness and murkiness are forgotten as if they never were. (Eliminate the lens altogether and you’ve reached the totality of self, but then, ‘who’ is left to be the totality of self?)

That’s why any true and complete teaching can be fully expressed in a few words; wipe the lens, think for yourself, open your eyes, know thyself, ask Who Am I?

These are the first questions...

What are you doing? Why are you doing it? Where is this going? 

If you know, you’ll succeed. If you don’t, you won’t. 

That’s not just pretty talk, that’s the law.

All the world’s systems are dedicated to making the most of the least, but why make the most of darkness when we can just turn on the lights?

TMMK

Reaffirmations from the World Around Us

Let's begin today with a couple questions in regards to the mastery of awareness. 

Are your days ruled by old thoughts, old beliefs, and old stories formed in the past, or do you meet each day with fresh eyes and wonder at the miracle that your life is?

Do you see how holding on to old thoughts keep you trapped in the past?

Do you have any idea how to break your old descriptions of the world?

Can you take an honest inventory of all your beliefs?

Hold those thoughts while we move on to a couple of quotes...

"Plants are very peculiar things," he said without looking at me." They are alive and they feel." At the very moment he made that statement a strong gust of wind shook the desert chaparral around us. The bushes made a rattling noise. "Do you hear that?" he asked me, putting his right hand to his ear as if he were aiding his hearing. "The leaves and the wind are agreeing with me."

"People hardly ever realize that we can cut anything from our lives, any time, just like that." He snapped his fingers. "Do you think that one can stop smoking or drinking that easily?" I asked. "Sure!" he said with great conviction. "Smoking and drinking are nothing. Nothing at all if we want to drop them." At that very moment the water that was boiling in the coffee percolator made a loud perking sound. "Hear that!" don Juan exclaimed with a shine in his eyes. "The boiling water agrees with me."

Then he added after a pause, "A man can get agreements from everything around him."

Thus, our topic for this post. Yet, let me ask you a question before we begin. Without reading back up this page, do you remember the questions asked in the very first lines of this post? If not, then you are not paying attention, your mastery of awareness isn't activated, and you need to go and continue to read and practice some premeditation as described here in this Exploring Awareness blog. 

When we are ruled by our thoughts and beliefs, we cannot truly appreciate the reaffirmations from the world around us. Thus the need for the premeditation as mentioned above. When we reside in awareness only, not caught up in thoughts, especially about ourselves, then we can begin to notice what occurs 'outside' our own thoughts. Understand these reaffirmations are happening to all of us all of the time, yet, are we 'aware' of them? This post is one of the first lessons in regards to the mastery of awareness. 

As to the little test of remembering the first questions at the top of this post, after reading the quotes...Whether you remembered the questions or not, I highly recommend you visit the link above and continue practicing the premeditation daily. And not just daily, but as often throughout the day as you can. Also, begin to pay attention to what is happening around you. Pay attention to your surroundings. Begin the moment you wake up. (You will need to pay attention to your dreams while asleep as well, but that's another blog post for another time.) 

Just gaze, listen, smell, touch, and taste without judgement, criticism, etc. Do it right now while looking around your computer screen. What else do you see? What noise do you hear? What can you touch? You can do this at work as well. Many people work in the city and complain that Carlos and don Juan are out in the desert, thus it's easy for them as they aren't working, residing in the beauty of nature. Bullshit. Stop thinking and comparing everything and just see the beauty of whatever's around you. See the beauty in that old piece of concrete curbing. Listen to the noise of the car driving down the street without analyzing it. 

I can hear you now asking, "But Kris, where are these agreements you speak of? I'm paying attention but I don't see, hear or feel any agreements."

Well, that's because I've not covered the agreements yet. (Grins.) 

So, let's talk about receiving agreements. First, perform the premeditation as described in the link above. This will 'loosen you up' so to speak. Second, you need to voice your intent. You can focus your mind and ask psychically, but I prefer to voice my intent out loud. Thus, the question is, what do you want? What agreement are you looking for? What thought comes to mind after clearing your mind with the premeditation? If your intent is pure, you will receive an agreement. If not, then you are not asking the right question. (Understand there are no answers; only the right questions.) If you do this, and have the awareness to receive the agreement, then you will receive it.

Once again, pay attention. Perform the premeditation, then voice your intent, then clear your mind again, reside in pure awareness and pay attention. Keep an open mind. The agreement may not come as a typical sight, sound or smell. 

On a side note as I re-read the above, the premeditation is not the same as 'spacing out.' You are activating your senses without thought. But hell, what do I know? Try spacing out and see if it works for you. 

So, what's the point in all of this? Several points. First, learn to pay attention without thought, and second, 'life' or 'the world' or whatever, always has messages or affirmations for us. I could tie this in with the law of attention and how that works, but I'll refrain at this time. For now, just practice. Well, I will add one comment. After performing the premeditation I'll usually shout out, "I'm grateful to be alive!" "I'm grateful to be alive!" "I'm grateful to be alive!" This is a 'seal' that holds my awareness, if that makes any sense. 

Lack of practice is the biggest sticking point I see. People complain and say this doesn't work, yet they seldom practice what's mentioned above. This isn't all theoretical. It takes work. The more you can focus your intent, pay attention, the more you will 'see'. 

Until next time...