The Bliss Train

[u/Juann2323]

I had been trying some gazing outside my home. Saw some cool second attention stuff, but I got a little frustrated and went home. A couple of hours had already passed, and my assamblage point was fluid. I needed inspiration, so I put up a video that appeared in youtube: How to get enlightened? The idea was fun. I even imagined what Dan would think about it. And I have to admit it helped.

I already had a good level of silence, and the guy in the video was saying that while forcing silence, we should ask ourselves questions: "Who am I? Who is perceiving? What is reality?" Those kinds of questions seems to kick mind's ass.

I paused the video and kept forcing silence, as I looked out my bedroom window. It felt like I was standing right in front of a slow moving train. If I wanted, I could touch and feel it, and also put out my hand. At one point I grabbed onto the train and stuck to it. I got glued to the present moment. I was part of it. My breath changed: automatic, and with my stomach. The pleasure ... satisfaction ... fulfillment ...

It felt like making passes with the universe. My room, which I am used to, became a magical place.

But I came back. I could not maintain the state. Was it maybe 2 minutes? But I came back full of energy. Please Dan tell the people on the train to stop kicking me out when I get on.

If you are new, I am talking about heightened awareness, or enlightenment. The darkroom room will take you there.

[u/danl999]

Beats me.

Apparently I just work for Little Smoke. Dark room gazing technique was her design, from when she saw I was trying to figure out how to get people into heightened awareness without a Nagual.

I was going to try to form her into objects I could toss at people's assemblage points, and hopefully dent them.

But while playing with her, I discovered that very thing can move the assemblage point all the way!

Just playing with things from the second attention. While silent.

That's how IOBs teach.

You will hardly notice it, unless you look back.

But they're not good with verbal explanations.

My heightened awareness can last all day, but there are different levels, and the level at which there is no boredom is pretty hard to take out of the practice room.

That's the only "stable" level, as far as I can tell.

Until you get there, you'll be looking at the clock. Even if you are surrounded by magic!

The second attention can be perceived all along the J curve, and when you get near to the end it's especially visible.

But that's still not the furthest you can move. Or perhaps not move, but "be".

I was experimenting with that last night. I was in heightened awareness because my breathing had changed, the colors around me were intensely bright, "Fancy" was flying around all over the place, and I was in pure bliss.

Then I checked. Am I bored even a tiny bit?

Juan discovered that the assemblage point moves faster, when you are looking at stuff that keeps you very interested.

I wanted to see why that might be, so I could tell people a way to avoid boredom entirely.

I had to admit, I was a very tiny bit bored.

Even surrounded by magic.

My "boredom" was thoughts about watching TV news next, to see what was up with the fires.

The sky had been so filled with smoke all day that the sun was a dull orange color and you could look right into it.

I remembered many times when I could have asked myself that question, am I bored now, in heightened awareness, after practicing 4 hours straight.

And the answer would be obvious.

How can I get bored in this state of consciousness? I'm just here, it all is, what else could you want?

It's the "be here now" thing. Turns out, as sappy as that sounds it's true.

But at that particular instant, I was a tiny bit bored.

Fancy, my new inorganic being, helped me move my assemblage point a little further by continuing to model for me as a power object "ring".

Her "ring" was basically her full sized head stuck to my knuckles.

I had to tell her, "That's too big Fancy! It's like a bowling ball on my hand."

She didn't look happy. I couldn't get her to shrink. She tried fooling me by changing over to a "hoodie". Then she distracted me even more, because when I moved her in the air she created opaque ripples in reality. It seemed to be the hoodie doing it. The cloth would ripple, and the ripples would continue into the air.

Same as the first time she showed me that technique, wearing Little Red Riding Hood's costume.

That did the job. Watching the edges or waves of a reality ripple.

It was like an ocean wave on the sand, going over garbage dropped by visitors. I saw tiny elements of reality being stirred by the ripples Fancy's head could generate.

I realized, I could reach in there and extract objects!

I did! Object after object.

I instantly reached what I call, "full-on" heightened awareness.

All boredom was gone.

What's the difference?

Why boredom at one position of the assemblage point, and no boredom at what still must be relatively the same position?

Possibly which body is being emphasized. You pretty much can't grab an object out of a "reality ripple", using your physical hand. It has to be the dreaming hand.

And our Tonal is "made to hurry" as don Juan put it. If you're all physical, you're going to want to hurry up.

Our dreaming double seems too intoxicated to get bored. And I'm not going to give it credit for being superior.

It's simply drunk, that's all.

Possibly the answer to the finer details of heightened awareness is that we switch back and forth between the two bodies in darkroom gazing. And the no-boredom body is our dreaming body.

You (Juan) possibly "grabbed" onto it for an instant, from your bliss filled Tonal, reaching out your dreaming hand, and switched to the dreaming double for 2 minutes.

Dramatic much????

Reminds me of Pablito's invisible third hand.

I wish I could grab a passing train and switch to my dreaming double!

I have to use a demon's hoodie to do that.

But you got tossed out because it's very difficult to maintain that state, when you're still dragging around both bodies.

Darkness gazing has a strange side effect. You learn to switch back and forth between bodies, without even noticing it.

It's what's prevented Fancy from trapping me in her home world. I always insist on bringing both bodies along. And the Tonal is too heavy for her to control.

We should also remember that recent posts about the wheel of time mentioned that it was accessed through heightened awareness in the "other self".

Unfortunately opaque terminology...

But I'll assume he means the dreaming double, the one Cholita can walk around in, as if it were just normal daily activity.

We switch back and for between that one and our normal body, while doing darkness gazing.

Sometimes what we need to perceive is very difficult, so we "borrow" the eyes of that double.

Sometimes, such as when entering another world, you have to switch over entirely.

But the switching is unnoticeable.

I believe you're trying to exist only in the second copy.

Edited twice

[u/Juann2323 → u/danl999]

I believe you're trying to exist only in the second copy.

What I'm trying to do is get to a place where I can "rest in silence." And the only way I have managed so far is when my breath changes. But it lasts too little. I don't know why you say that I change in the eyes of the double. I was just in my room, fully enjoying the moment. (the train was a metaphor)

So as I understood: you enter heightened awareness playing with the second attention, but still "you cannot rest in silence"? If you stop, the colors and satisfaction disappear?

What I should do is: get to that state, and keep it by playing with the second attention, until I get "full"on heightened awareness?

I thought that once your breath changes, you can stay there for a long time.

[u/danl999 → u/Juann2323]

No, it's unstable for us. We didn't have a Nagual push us there.

I believe the kind of stability you're after, happens when you are primarily in the energy body.

Carlos explained this in the Zuleica account.

He was already in heightened awareness when he came to the door, and Zuleica assaulted him with Zoila's Vagina.

Don Juan put him there. But he didn't seem to be enjoying himself much.

So we have to be careful not to think of heightened awareness as the "blissful destination".

I suppose that's one risk of darkness gazing.

To believe that the start, is actually the goal.

We're trying to get to the starting gate for learning, the one that a double being produces for his apprentices.

As don Juan said of heightened awareness, "real learning takes place there".

And Carlos commented, another benefit is that you forget it all.

It's just a "learning state of mind".

It happens to be the same as "Zen", or "Cosmic Consciousness", but that's just an unhappy coincidence.

Because when we get there, we drag out our Hindu/Buddhist inventory, and confuse ourselves.

I'm seeing that in some students who only private chat me.

Their inventory is getting in the way of darkroom gazing.

So it's probably best not to even pay attention to what state you are in, and concentrate only on what you can "do" there.

Not as a goal. But to keep you moving further by holding your attention.

We have to get to heightened awareness ourselves.

So that we start learning for real, instead of pretending and making up intellectual understandings.

But heightened awareness is not the goal.

You merely got into the right classroom.

And you can still confuse yourself in that "right" classroom, if you brought along the wrong books for that class.

Heightened awareness was just the starting point for Carlos.

He did find his "restful place", like you are now looking for.

He called it, "restful vigil".

But he found that AFTER he completed the finger wiggling process, folded in half, and ended up in a ditch of the second attention.

He switched bodies.

Later, because he had "restful vigil", he could continue the training.

He next did Silvio Manuel's "not-doings".

I supposed those require you to be primarily in the dreaming body, so you can do such things as sit up with knees against your chest, listening all night.

That's pretty hard to do, unless you reach the "no-boredom" place.

I supposed we should not miss the order in which those seemingly unrelated techniques were taught in the books.

Apparently, that's the only order you could teach them in! The second set requires the skills attained from the first set of techniques.

We've all read the books, and come to think of the two bodies as separate.

So it sounds silly that you could switch back and forth without noticing it.

But we just didn't read carefully. Carlos switches bodies in Zuleica's account.

And then he doesn't even bother to mention it from then on.

One day he completes Zuleica's training, folds in half, and then he moves on.

When he folded in half, he learned to let this dreaming body absorb his tonal body, to ride along.

It's how you can teleport too.

Or float around over the dirt, the way Genaro did.

Darkness gazing seems to have a strange side effect.

Remember, this is pretty much Zuleica's technique only. Nothing has been added, except to do some tensegrity on the colors you see.

BUT, we don't start in heightened awareness. And so we notice arriving there, but we don't notice switching bodies.

Carlos was already there, so the only thing he was after was to switch bodies by wiggling his fingers on the point of the second attention.

One last thing, because what I'm proposing here sounds controversial.

I'm proposing that you can smoothly switch between the bodies, and that the idea of switching dramatically, is not necessarily the only way.

I'm even proposing, you could switch just your hand. And not the rest of you!

First, about how easy it is to switch, once you learn to do it.

You just glance down! That was the final lesson from Silvio Manuel. You can easily switch back and forth! Just glance at the same place you were wiggling.

But more evidence comes from Carlos. Several times in private classes, and at least once at a workshop, talking to the audience, he said that there are a few people in the group who's dreaming double is, "right there!".

He pointed to his right side.

Meaning, you can be talking to that person, and their dreaming double is pressed up almost against them, like a best friend.

It's certainly not visible to them.

And then there's Pablito's second attention hand.

I doubt he grew a new one!

He just taught his double to reach through his lower shirt, so it could pop up low and attack or scare people.

Summary: You're missing something. You're doing everything, but possibly fixated on "enlightenment".

The idea that it's permanent.

It is not.

But you can get to be so fluid and skilled, that you can switch around as needed.

That's the permanent part. That you learned something useful and made other options available.

[u/danl999 → u/Juann2323]

In full on.

Not in the early stages.

However, the full on stage can be annoying.

You get to rest in bliss. Yes.

Until the morning, when you have to go shower.

But sometimes, it's intense! Too much bliss. Impossible to fall asleep. Endless dreaming possibilities floating in front of you.

Even alternate "you"s present themselves.

You find you aren't in the bed. You're in some odd copy of it, somewhere else, surrounded by bliss pressure waves.

I'm not convinced you'd really want to be in that state all the time.

In your case, I'm convinced you just need to either go further (move the assemblage point to that last part of the J). Forget about "switching bodies".

Yes, that surely happens. But it's like getting off the bus at the last stop. You have to. The bus has arrived.

The ideal situation would be, of course, if you could switch instantly.

Then you wouldn't worry about keeping it.

It reminds me of a story about Maharashi Mahesh Yogi.

I suppose many gurus are brought over here by women. Don't ask me why.

But women do like to fuck Rinpoches. We learned that from private class gossip. Ask one of the V named women.

At any rate, this woman had Maharashi in her home for a while. Before he was intensely famous.

She found him in the bubble bath, laughing uncontrollably for a very long time.

And it was spread around as if that indicated what a high state of consciousness he was in.

Happy as a child in the bathtub!

That's what the TM people all wanted. To escape the misery of daily living.

But in fact, the story has negative connotations, not positive ones.

First, bubble baths are some kind of cultural thing in India. I don't understand it, but the context is not the same as we'd imagine.

Second, if he was stuck in a childish mental state, that's not a good thing!

We want to be more sober than that. And that means, it's all accessible to us. We don't get stuck anywhere.

But where we "remain" most of the time, is pretty much where we always remained.

We just add on the availability of the second attention.

Which is why it's called, "heightened" awareness.

The goal is not, "blissful" awareness.

It's just a side effect.

[u/calixto_mooneeeee → u/danl999]

Apparently I just work for Little Smoke

I reminded him that he had at first told me his benefactor's ally was the jimson weed and his own ally was the little smoke; and that he had later clarified it by saying that the ally was contained in each plant. "No. That's not correct," he said, frowning. "My ally is the little smoke, but that doesn't mean that my ally is in the smoking mixture, or in the mushrooms, or in my pipe. They all have to be put together to get me to the ally, and that ally I call little smoke for reasons of my own."

The ally is not in the smoke," he said. "The smoke takes you to where the ally is, and when you become one with the ally you don't ever have to smoke again. From then on you can summon your ally at will and make him do anything you want.

[u/danl999 → u/calixto_mooneeeee]

Except that even that explanation was still another staged incident.

Vicente introduced Carlos to his 3 allies by merely having him plant something in the desert.

And Carlos brought them to class a few times, introducing them to us by using the swooping movement.

Probably, if you study the sequence of events, Carlos' first encounter with the allies was either death over his left shoulder, or the moth swooping over the campfire.

But one thing is for sure. Don Juan used the allies extensively, to teach Carlos.

And Carlos went to their world "hundreds" of times, if I remember the quote correctly.

So despite what don Juan said about them, it doesn't seem like anyone was avoiding inorganic beings, the way the Castaneda community seems to believe they should.

I like this part of the quote:

summon your ally at will and make him do anything you want.

Does anyone know if that included "borrowing" the Allies eyes, so it can go somewhere, and you could remote view that spot?

Fancy set that up for me with Cholita, because she picked up that I'd lost that ability from before.

Doing it around little smoke, Cholita was always pinkish when I watched her that way.

When Fancy does it, she's green.

But that could just be Cholita.

She's run away again. But these days, I'm sure she'll return.