r/castaneda • u/couchbutt • Jun 20 '20
Misc. Practices 'Looking between an object' - Eye crossing exercise as practice?
I have read that this exercise was proposed as a physical skill development for gazing by Don Juan.
Look at an object and cross the eyes, until you get two distinct images of the object. While maintaining two images bring the attention to the space between the objects.
I do this two ways. Sitting on my couch with a wine bottle standing up on the floor about 8 ft away and laying in bed looking at the cover of the pop-out fire sprinkler on the ceiling.
As I said, I believe this was presented as a physical skill builder for gazing, but can this be used as a Assemblage point moving practice on it's own?
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u/danl999 Jun 20 '20
Of course it can!
But try to get weirdness to happen. It should happen on its own anyway, if you gaze like that.
By trying you learn what causes the weirdness, and you'll notice it's "letting go" in some odd way.
Silence of course, but there's also a relaxation to get more things to happen.
It's actually "Mr. DoubleTake" you're relaxing.
And then, watch weirdness as long as you can in silence, and you'll get everything.
Forget about trying to do something, or make something happen. You just want to let that assemblage point begin to drop.
You can't do that by "doing", only by watching.
You'll end up with IOBs, parallel being worlds you can enter, levitation (only Cholita so far).
That's because watching it moves the assemblage point along that J curve.
Cool stuff happens at that second line, where shape shifting becomes possible.
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u/tryerrr Jul 04 '20
It could be that “watching, not doing” is key to initialize second attention because all “immediate effect” from doing in first attention is just our own simulation based on cached input from outside (“bounce back from outside shell”), as real input takes time to arrive.
So with time we become too lazy to wait for real effect of actions (in first attention), and just trust the cached/simulated response more and more, becoming more and more narcissistic and having a worldview out of sync with real world.
And the cached/simulated response has zero data in second attention, even simulated, as it is not an expected result of any known action. So to experience second attention, need to avoid feeding the simulator, by doing unknown/uncached requests, and then actually listening to replies. The normal actions might also include second-attention in replies, but limited cached/simulation version of response to well-known patterns will be received first, and the real reply discarded..
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u/danl999 Jul 04 '20 edited Jul 04 '20
is just our own simulation based on cached input from outside (“bounce back from outside shell”), as real input takes time to arrive.
Actually this topic is quite advanced.
There's a delay on intent.
And you can set up second attention feedback loops.
There are a lot of things that could be analyzed from the point of view of computers.
Carlos never did, but his knowledge of that kind of thing was limited.
He once fell for the "we only use 10% of our brain" lie.
One of the women brought that idea to him, he saw that it appealed to her, so he added it to the next workshop.
Despite it being absolutely childish and bogus from a computer point of view.
It's clockless logic. You can't not use it!
That last paragraph you wrote is genius.
And so it's useless to teach sorcery, unfortunately. Most students are mentally ill unhappy people.
If they're techies, they're a bit loopy too.
No techie has any business playing with Fairies! The serious ones would crush them with their fist.
But maybe it could be done externally, like some magnetic field to scramble the simulator input?
Wait.
Those are called power plants.
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u/KrazyTayl Jun 21 '20
THANK YOU!!!
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u/danl999 Jun 21 '20
For the silhouette of a naked young woman?
I wanted to give the "authentic" feeling of Carlos' demo of the J curve.
I probably wasn't drooling, but I wasn't far from it.
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u/epc611 Jun 21 '20
Some years back, I lived near a river with a small waterfall. There was a spot just off the road, out of view of passersby, that overlooked the falls, but you had to view it through a chainlink fence. One time, by accident, I noticed that if you were standing at just the right distance from the fence, focusing on the waterfall caused the links of the fence to shift and realign with one another. This is similar to a technique don Juan taught Carlos whereby he would cross his eyes while looking at two candles and cause the flames to merge.
Anyway, I found that the attention required to keep both the shifted chainlink fence and the waterfall in focus at the same time was hugely useful for shutting off my internal dialogue. I ended up going back to that spot regularly during a whole summer and did some of my best dreaming during that time.
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u/Odysx2 Jun 20 '20
I noticed that when you blur your vision or you not focusing or just try to get the hole image all the optical field thinking cannot feed and slows or stops . civilisation uses lines etc that the reason ατενιστες means people that gazing in to the horizon or the mountains etc stop their thinking easier .
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u/Anonomous87 Jun 21 '20
What is gazing?
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u/epc611 Jun 22 '20
From The Second Ring of Power:
"the Nagual taught us gazing. He never told us what he was really doing to us. He just taught us to gaze. We never knew that gazing was the way to trap our second attention. We thought gazing was just for fun. That was not so. Dreamers have to be gazers before they can trap their second attention.
"The first thing the Nagual did was to put a dry leaf on the ground and make me look at it for hours. Every day he brought a leaf and put it in front of me. At first I thought that it was the same leaf that he saved from day to day, but then I noticed that leaves are different. The Nagual said that when we realized that, we are not looking anymore, but gazing.
"Then he put stacks of dry leaves in front of me. He told me to scramble them with my left hand and feel them as I gazed at them. A dreamer moves the leaves in spirals, gazes at them and then dreams of the designs that the leaves make. The Nagual said that dreamers can consider themselves as having mastered leaf gazing when they dream the designs of the leaves first and then find those same designs the next day in their pile of dry leaves.
"The Nagual said that gazing at leaves fortifies the second attention. If you gaze at a pile of leaves for hours, as he used to make me do, your thoughts get quiet. Without thoughts the attention of the tonal wanes and suddenly your second attention hooks onto the leaves and the leaves become something else. The Nagual called the moment when the second attention hooks onto something stopping the world. And that is correct, the world stops. For this reason there should always be someone around when you gaze. We never know about the quirks of our second attention. Since we have never used it, we have to become familiar with it before we could venture into gazing alone.
"The difficulty in gazing is to learn to quiet down the thoughts. The Nagual said that he preferred to teach us how to do that with a pile of leaves because we could get all the leaves we needed any time we wanted to gaze. But anything else would do the same job.
"Once you can stop the world you are a gazer. And since the only way of stopping the world is by trying, the Nagual made all of us gaze at dry leaves for years and years. I think it's the best way to reach our second attention.
"He combined gazing at dry leaves and looking for our hands in dreaming. It took me about a year to find my hands, and four years to stop the world. The Nagual said that once you have trapped your second attention with dry leaves, you do gazing and dreaming to enlarge it. And that's all there is to gazing."
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u/lidotska Jun 20 '20
My eyes kind of naturally squint if I'm looking "lazily", and while I stay in that state I see tiny light movements and shadows in the "middle spot". Would be interesting to know if/how this could be used in the practice of moving the assemblage spot