Tag Archives: perception

Choosing Evolution

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We are perceivers. The world that we perceive, though, is an illusion. It was created by a description that was told to us since the moment we were born. ~ Don Juan, Tales of Power

The world is composed of a massive diversity of people, and of these, there are two classifications that define them; sustainers and creators. We are perceivers, however, the majority of people are sustaining illusions that was imparted upon them from the moment they were born. And since most people operate from a field of reason, they continue to assimilate the ideas and thoughts of others which ultimately puts them in a position of sustaining those ideas and thoughts. Those are the ideas and thoughts from which mythology, ritual and ideologies were born and are maintained. They are patterns that are replayed and slightly adjusted to justify ones current reality. They rarely consist of original thoughts, they are not born of creative expression, and they are obstacles to the evolution of humanity.

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Awareness, Intent, Evolution

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The grand task of seers is to bring forth the idea that, in order to evolve, man must first free his awareness from its bindings to the social order. Once awareness is free, intent will redirect it onto a new evolutionary path. ~ Don Juan, The Art of Dreaming

Once awareness is free, intent will redirect it onto a new evolutionary path. What does this mean for the warrior? To free awareness one must recapitulate, erase personal history and allow for the assemblage point (AP) to shift significantly. When the AP shifts the warrior is able to perceive in a different way, free from the impositions of a long line of stories that had been conveyed as the right or only way to live for a very long time. Think about it. If you ever watch any history shows you will recognize the patterns that have been maintained and perpetuated from generation to generation.

Once awareness is free… no longer bound to the social order, you are free to perceive energy directly. Perceiving energy directly becomes different when you no longer attempt to define, label and compare every single experience as it unfolds. This act of perceiving is alignment with intent, to be in the ultimate flow of knowing that things are the way they are for a reason that lies beyond our ability to attempt to control or change it. This is not to say that warriors should not take responsibility for their actions; what it means is that we can only be observers, witnesses to an indescribable force (intent) that is much greater than ourselves while living with integrity and being impeccable.

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Humility, Impeccability and Freedom

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A warrior acknowledges his pain but he doesn’t indulge in it. Thus the mood of a warrior who enters into the unknown is not one of sadness; on the contrary, he’s joyful because he feels humbled by his great fortune, confident that his spirit is impeccable, and above all, fully aware of his efficiency. A warrior’s joyfulness comes from having accepted his fate, and from having truthfully assessed what lies ahead of him. ~ Don Juan, Tales of Power

We learn to free ourselves from old patterns when we recapitulate them with finality. Yeah, that’s what happened last week when I allowed my impeccability to slip and descend into the nightmare of the predator, feeling the pain of that particular reality and then indulging in it. A long-ingrained pattern of reacting to the atrocities that occur with regularity in a dream that doesn’t belong to me. I didn’t create it, I don’t participate in it, I don’t maintain it and I certainly cannot, under any circumstances, feed it by reacting to it. I must treat it as though it doesn’t exist.  As warriors we have no choice but to be impeccable with our energy.

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The Bird of Freedom

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The nagual Mariano Aureliano had once told me that sorcerers, when they talk among themselves, speak of sorcery as a bird: They call it the bird of freedom. They say that the bird of freedom only flies in a straight line and never comes around twice. They also say that it is the nagual who lures the bird of freedom. It is he who entices the bird to shed its shadow on the warrior’s path. Without that shadow, there is no direction. ~ Florinda Donner, Being-in-Dreaming

But it was night and there was no shadow. The three of us were standing on the cool Saltillo tile looking up towards the northeast at the Andromeda Galaxy through a high-powered telescope. It was a mild evening and since we were in the phase of the new moon last weekend it was very dark and the millions of stars in the Milky Way were brilliant. There wasn’t any sound at all except the gentle lapping of the waves from the Sea of Cortez. We were in the Sonoran Desert, donde el desierto y el mar se encuentran; where the desert meets the sea.

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Vanquishing the Self

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In order to be a dreamer I had to vanquish the self. Nothing, but nothing, is as hard as that. The sorcerers understand freedom as the capacity to do the impossible, the unexpected – to dream a dream that has no basis, no reality in everyday life. The knowledge of sorcerers is what is exciting and new. Imagination is what a woman needs to change the self and become a dreamer. ~ Florinda Donner, Being-in-Dreaming

At some point on the path of the committed warrior it becomes necessary to deepen by shifting the assemblage point as thoroughly as possible to align with the unfathomable sea of awareness. This is more than a decision to change a routine, recapitulate a thing or break a pattern. It is a commitment to align with intent as much as possible and jump into the abyss, feet first, without looking back. In order to jump it is necessary to prepare by pooling all accessible energy and engage in the act of not-doing as much as possible.

The warrior strives to become capable of what don Juan refers to as stupendous maneuvers of perception, and in preparing for this it is necessary to vanquish the self and gain deeper access to dreaming. In order to begin to explore from a new point of perception everything has to change. The hardest decision for me was letting go of the blog and recapitulating all of it because the lines within the internet began to overwhelm me and it felt as though the lines of information I was putting forth were gathering up other lines and coming right back through the screen, through my fingertips and into me. This subtle and nearly imperceptible occurrence was beginning to fixate my assemblage point and it was time to unplug and focus on fluidity.

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Artificial Intelligence

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There is no doubt that the description we have received (of living in the world)  is a valuable possession, similar to the rigid stake that is tied to a tender sapling to strengthen and guide it. It allows us to grow up as normal people, within a society that is molded to that rigidity. To achieve it, we had to learn how to ‘skim’ – that is, how to make selective readings from the enormous volume of data that arrives to our senses. But once those readings are converted into ‘reality’, the rigidity of our attention works as an anchor, because it prevents us from becoming aware of our incredible possibilities. ~ Carlos Castaneda, Encounters with the Nagual

I’ve been thinking lately about artificial intelligence and how our species is rapidly evolving into the arena of exactly that. Most people are “skimmers”, merely touching the surface of a subject in order to accumulate meaning and knowledge. Yes, as you know this is nothing more than self-importance, nothing more than accumulating knowledge to claim to know things without really knowing anything.

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Energetic Lines of Awareness

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Look, see those birds? At some point a program was written to govern them. A program was written to watch over the trees, and the wind, the sunrise, and sunset. There are programs running all over the place. The ones doing their job, doing what they were meant to do, are invisible. You’d never even know they were here. But the other ones, well, we hear about them all the time. Every time you’ve heard someone say they saw a ghost, or an angel. Every story you’ve ever heard about vampires, werewolves, or aliens, is the system assimilating some program that’s doing something they’re not supposed to be doing. ~ The Oracle, The Matrix

The movie The Matrix was a blockbuster hit and a sensation that still has people talking about it. My own experience with this movie very much resembled the state of pure energy and incomprehensible entities that don Juan often made reference to. My earlier post regarding The Predator was posted on another public forum to which it received quite a large number of comments and responses. The forum was not specific to the teachings of Castaneda, but rather, a site where people are attempting to move into an evolutionary realm of conscious awareness.

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Shifting the Assemblage Point

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Any movement of the assemblage point means a movement away from excessive concern with the individual self. Shamans believe it is the position of the assemblage point which makes modern man a homicidal egotist; a being totally involved with his self-image. Having lost hope of ever returning to the source of everything, the average man seeks solace in his selfishness. ~ Don Juan, The Power of Silence

It is the assemblage point where reality is constructed. The assemblage point is not as complex as Castaneda had made it out to be. You don’t need to find a nagual, or take loads of entheogens, or have a near death experience in order to move the assemblage point from its fixated position. Although these are methods that can assist, all you really have to do is have enough energy to move it on your own through the use of a strong will and unbending intention.

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Perception

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The core of our being is the act of perceiving, and the magic of our being is the act of awareness. Perception and awareness can be a single, functional, inextricable unit with two domains. The first one is the attention of the tonal; that is to say, the capacity of average people to perceive and place their awareness on the ordinary world of everyday life: our first ring of power; our awesome but taken-for-granted ability to impart order to our perception of our daily world. ~ don Juan, The Second Ring of Power

I once read a quote that said “there is no truth, there is only perception” yet so many people hunger for the truth. They sit around and wait for a truth to be declared and when it is they either buy into it or reject it. Stopping the internal dialogue is the key to the sorcerers’ world, the mystery. The mystery, or the secret of the sorcerers’ explanation is that it deals with unfolding the wings of perception. The nagual by itself is of no use, it has to be tempered by the tonal. The sorcerers’ secret in using the nagual is in our perception.

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Toltec Warriors

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To be a warrior is not a simple matter of wishing to be one. It is rather an endless struggle that will go on to the very last moment of our lives. Nobody is born a warrior, in exactly the same way that nobody is born an average man. We make ourselves into one or the other. ~ Carlos Castaneda, The Wheel of Time

Toltec is a Nahuatl word meaning ‘master craftsman’ and this craftsmanship extends to all phases of a warriors existence whether it is through gardening, building, artwork, honing awareness, connecting to silent knowledge, writing books or creating the bridge that facilitates awareness between that which we know and that which we have limited access to.

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