Tag Archives: personal power

Just Keep Dancing!

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And thus you will dance to your death here, on this hilltop, at the end of the day. And in your last dance you will tell of your struggle, of the battles you have won and of those you have lost; you will tell of your joys and bewilderments upon encountering personal power. Your dance will tell about the secrets and about the marvels you have stored. And your death will sit here and watch you. The dying sun will glow on you without burning, as it has done today. The wind will be soft and mellow and your hilltop will tremble. As you reach the end of your dance you will look at the sun, for you will never see it again in waking or in dreaming, and then your death will point to the south. To the vastness. – Journey to Ixtlan

To me keep dancing means dancing along all the lines of awareness that come into my periphery. When we dance with this perception, if we do not resonate with a particular line or if it depletes our energy, we can discontinue that particular dance. Sometimes, the story that has culminated into a specific line of awareness may bring us great joy so we dance along that line for a long time, maybe a lifetime, or for just a while until we’ve attained the knowledge the line offers or until it becomes worn out or draining. On the other hand, if we do not resonate with a particular line of awareness we can reject it immediately or we may sometimes find ourselves dancing to the end of it anyway, in order to come into a deeper understanding of why that line of awareness even exists. And we may discover that some of those lines are very, very dark. When we dance upon all the lines of awareness we get to see the entire mold of man. The mold of man, as described by don Juan, is not a creator, but the pattern of every human attribute we can think of and some we cannot even conceive.

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The Importance of Recapitulation

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Excerpt from Becoming Awareness: Earth. Energy. Evolution.

Courtesy of Don Voss – RavenCircle Creations

We have tons of energy, we are pure energy. If we choose to recall and revisit past occurrences, we are simply feeding them which ultimately makes those past occurrences stronger and more prevalent. Who wants to hold on to old energy? To do so weakens and prevents us from being in the moment within the continual evolutionary act of creation or co-creation. You must recapitulate.
– Nayeli, Becoming Awareness

Early one morning in late June, Nayeli and I left her house to wander through the Sonoran Desert and harvest the luscious fruit of the saguaro cactus. The Sonoran Desert is the only place in the world where saguaros grow, and we are so fortunate and grateful to have access to this delicious fruit. We wore strong, sturdy hiking boots to maneuver through the desert brambles, prickly pear cactus, and the rocky arroyos. We each carried a citrus fruit picker, a pole that had a large wicker basket at the end. These pickers enabled us to reach up about twelve feet to retrieve the fruits of our labor. It also served as a staff to help us keep our balance through the arroyos, and as Nayeli said instilling a bit of fear, a tool with which to flick away any rattlesnakes we encountered.

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Leaver vs. Taker

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Every man is in touch with everything else, not through his hands, but through a bunch of long fibers that shoot out in all directions from the center of his abdomen. Those fibers join a man to his surroundings; they keep his balance; they give him stability. ~ A Separate Reality

More than stability, our connection with all else has the potential to provide us with stability while existing within multiple realities with fluidity. While we can attain balance when we are connected with the universal life flow of energy moving in, through and around us at all times, it is important to remain in a state of impeccable balance with our energy by ensuring that those around us are unaffected by our actions. This, as Daniel Quinn describes, is Leaver energy – the premise of the Leaver story is ‘man belongs to the world’ – in balance with all beings and situations as they unfold.

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Fusion With the Emanations at Large

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Seers maintain, naturally, that awareness always comes from outside ourselves, that the real mystery is not inside us. Since by nature the emanations at large are made to fixate what is inside the cocoon, the trick of awareness is to let the fixating emanations merge with what is inside us. Seers believe that if we let that happen we become what we really are – fluid, forever in motion, eternal. ~ Carlos Castaneda, The Fire from Within

The degree of awareness of every individual sentient being depends on the degree to which it is capable of letting the pressure of the emanations at large carry it.

As human beings accumulate experience, the band of emanations inside their cocoon begins to glow. In some instances, the glow of this band of emanations increases so dramatically that it fuses with the emanations from the outside. Seers, witnessing an enhancement of this kind, had to surmise that awareness is the raw material, and attention, the end product of maturation.

Attention is the harnessing and enhancing of awareness through the process of being alive. To examine what seers see in the first attention is essential for the warrior-traveler dedicated to freedom. It allows the first attention the only opportunity it will ever have to realize its own workings as well as the machinations of the mold of man.

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Impeccable Balance

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The warrior’s final challenge is to balance all the attributes of his path. Once he does that, his purpose becomes inflexible. He is no longer moved by a desperate desire for gain. He is the owner of his will, and can put it to his personal service. When he arrives at that point, the warrior has learned how to be impeccable. And for him to continue being impeccable depends totally on the energy he has accumulated. ~ Carlos Castaneda, Encounters with the Nagual

When a warrior begins balancing all the attributes of her path, she comes to realize that she never has to desire anything again because she understands that she has absolutely everything she needs through sheer force of will and her connection and alignment with intent. Thinking that there is not enough of something, or no time left to complete a task, or trying to change something is replaced by simply knowing that when we are so fully in the flow of intent that we have everything we need and there is nothing left to ask for. We take responsibility for our lives by simply aligning with intent, getting out of our own way, and allowing the nature of things to unfold. Power is and power moves.

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Onslaughts of the Unknown

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I have spent thirty-five years of my life seeking the maturity of a warrior. I have gone to places that defy description, seeking that sensation of being seasoned by the onslaughts of the unknown. I went unobtrusively, unannounced, and I came back in the same fashion. The works of warriors are silent and solitary, and when warriors go, or come back, they do it so inconspicuously that nobody is the wiser. To seek a warrior’s maturity in any other fashion would be ostentatious, and therefore, inadmissible. ~ Carlos Castaneda, The Wheel of Time

As we dance our way more deeply into the unknown we come to understand that the things we see and experience can no longer be understood by most and it becomes a moot point to even attempt to describe it. All we can do is just keep dancing within the myriad of lines of awareness that bring us to a deeper understanding of the way of the warrior. Don Juan told Carlos, to enter into the marvels of this world, or into the marvels of another world, one needs to be a warrior: calm, collected, indifferent, seasoned by the onslaughts of the unknown. You are not seasoned that way yet. Therefore, it is your duty to seek that fulfillment before you could talk about venturing into the infinite.

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Not-Doing

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The residue of consciousness, called the second attention, is brought into action, or is harnessed, through exercises of not-doing . The essential aid to dreaming is a state of mental quietness, called “stopping the internal dialogue,” or the not-doing of talking to oneself. In a woman both the attention and the energy for dreaming originate from the womb. ~ Carlos Castaneda, The Eagle’s Gift

A fellow warrior recently asked a number of questions on the post Choosing Evolution. I cannot succinctly answer all of the questions asked since my perspectives and perceptions lie deeply rooted in the energies that emanate from the womb but I will attempt to provide the evolutionary course that works for me.

A Warrior’s descriptions are conceived from experience and action and not whimsical notions concocted to entertain. Once a warrior acts she is able to share her descriptions of the world in freedom, without imposing her will upon others to travel upon the same lines of awareness.

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Recapitulating Knowledge

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There are lots of things that you do now which would have seemed insane to you ten years ago. Those things themselves did not change, but your idea of yourself changed; what was impossible before is perfectly possible now and perhaps your total success in changing yourself is only a matter of time. In this affair the only possible course that a warrior has is to act consistently and without reservations. You know enough of the warrior’s way to act accordingly, but your old habits and routines stand in your way. Everything we do, everything we are, rests on our personal power. ~ Don Juan, Tales of Power

Personal power is what we gain through recapitulating. A couple of years ago I posted an article called Freedom through Recapitulation that had to do with recapitulating the personal. After we recapitulate those stories we begin to move into fluidity where we live in the moment and thus, we recapitulate in the moment. Holding on to nothing, we are free; mindful of the things that could potentially back us up and so, we let them go.

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Why Do I Always Say “Keep Dancing”?

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I fidgeted nervously, changing sitting positions, and he smiled.

“I will have to come with you over and over to this hilltop,” he said. “And then you will have to come by yourself until you’re saturated with it, until the hilltop is oozing you. You will know the time when you are filled with it. This hilltop, as it is now, will then be the place of your last dance.”

“What do you mean by my last dance, don Juan?”

“This is the site of your last stand,” he said. “You will die here no matter where you are. Every warrior has a place to die. A place of his predilection which is soaked with unforgettable memories, where powerful events left their mark, a place where he has witnessed marvels, where secrets have been revealed to him, a place where he has stored his personal power. “A warrior has the obligation to go back to that place of his predilection every time he taps power in order to store it there. He either goes there by means of walking or by means of dreaming.

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Personal Power = Evolution

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The tragedy of today’s man is not his social condition, but the lack of will to change himself. It is very easy to design collective revolutions, but to genuinely change, to put an end to self-pity, to erase the ego, to abandon our habits and whims… ah, that’s something else entirely! Sorcerers say that true rebellion, and humanity’s only way out as a species, is to stage a revolution against their own stupidity. As you can understand, this is solitary work. ~ Carlos Castaneda, Encounters with the Nagual

Evolution is possible when we have personal power. As La Gorda says in The Eagle’s Gift, …there are no steps to anything a warrior does. There is only personal power…

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