In the World and Not of It

Mine’s a tale that can’t be told, My freedom I hold dear, How years ago in days of old, When magic filled the air.  – Led Zeppelin

The magic that Robert Plant sings about in Ramble On still exists and we don’t have to look too hard for it. We don’t need magic wands, crystal balls, or wizardry to enter into and exist within a magical reality. As creator beings we can choose to be immersed in it since magic is the energy that effervesces around us all the time.

We are all at a strange time in our lifetime; a time that is challenging those of us to do whatever it takes to ensure that we stay our path; whatever that path may be. While those who believe they have the power over everyone to attempt to put us all into a melting pot of sameness and compliance, it is our expansive, multi-faceted diversity that will allow us to simultaneously protect the freedoms that we each strive to attain, maintain, and sustain.

There is no truth, there is only perception! When we recognize that the drama and stories of the world are an illusion, we are able to make a choice, the choice being to participate in the illusion or to walk away from it. Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds – Bob Marley. Choosing to free your mind of the chaos of repetitive, historical patterns appeals to the warrior seer who is committed to being impeccable with his energy.

A Circle is a Reflection of Eternity

Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. – Chief Black Elk, Black Elk Speaks

This video is best viewed on a computer.

I created this video to feature the beauty and strength of circles in our natural and created world. Circles are the strongest structural shape, and in nature, the sphere is the strongest three dimensional shape. This is because the energy and pressure is distributed equally along the arc instead of concentrating at any one point. Buckminster Fuller created the geodesic dome and the domes are durable and sturdy because of a structural principle called tensegrity. Tensegrity comes from the words tension and integrity and refers to the relationship between tension and compression.

Shifting Timelines: Co-creating a New World

When the assemblage point assembles a world, that world is total. This is the marvel that the old seers stumbled upon and never realized what it was: the awareness of the earth can give us a boost to align other great bands of emanations, and the force of that new alignment makes the world vanish. Every time the old seers made a new alignment they believed they had descended to the depths or ascended to the heavens above. They never knew that the world disappears like a puff of air when a new total alignment makes us perceive another total world. – Don Juan, The Fire from Within

Rather than writing, I’m expressing through this video I created.

Gratitude. Energy. Alignment. Intent!

Just Keep Dancing!

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.

Synchronicity Within the Illusion

We live in illusion, the appearance of things, but there is a reality and we are that reality. When you understand this, you see that you are nothing, and being nothing, you are everything. That’s all there is. – Kalu Rinpoche

The past week has been so powerful in so many ways. With a full moon last Monday leading up to the fall equinox the energy that percolated was invigorating as well as mentally stimulating. As the harvest comes to fruition and the leaves change color and fall from the tree, the fall equinox represents the beginning of new cycle.

This fall equinox provides us with the opportunity to honor all of life’s experiences from the past year. To release them with humility and gratitude and to become empty, once again, so that balance and harmony may enter in to hold the fertile space for the seeds of greater vision to grow. While we sit in the darkness of shorter days and longer nights, we are preparing for the birth of light within, illumination, which occurs on the winter solstice as the light returns to lengthen the day and shorten the night. We are in sync with the cycles of the earth.

The Flaw with Words

Those of us attempting to access the essence of nagualism must accept an outrageous premise; even though the teachings of don Juan are now available in print, the silent knowledge that underlies those teachings remains completely beyond the power of the written word. The Toltecs insist that anything truly “of the spirit” must be actualized as a personal experience rather than simply written or talked about as an intellectual concept. – Tomas, Creative Victory

For years I have included in my blog posts, “Don’t believe a word I say, have your own experience!” Having spent the past couple of weeks contemplating my decade’s long journey in awareness on the Toltec path got me to thinking about – once again – recapitulating these teachings; it seems as though most of them have become superfluous for me. While there was a time when much of these practices were necessary, it is now time to actualize the fact that power is and power moves.

Precursor to Third Attention

He explained that what he called the key to everything was the firsthand knowledge that the earth is a sentient being and as such can give warriors a tremendous boost; it is an impulse that comes from the awareness of the earth itself at the instant in which the emanations inside warriors’ cocoons are aligned with the appropriate emanations inside the earth’s cocoon. Since both the earth and man are sentient beings, their emanations coincide, or rather, the earth has all the emanations present in man and all the emanations that are present in all sentient beings, organic and inorganic for that matter. When a moment of alignment takes place, sentient beings use that alignment in a limited way and perceive their world. Warriors can use that alignment either to perceive, like everyone else, or as a boost that allows them to enter unimaginable worlds. – Carlos Castanda, The Fire from Within

The Unfathomable Sea of Awareness

Flower of Life

Human beings are unable to enter and remain for any extended length of time inside the realm of cosmic awareness – the state which Don Juan called ‘the third attention’. Either we leave it and forget, or we stay and melt into that unfathomable sea. But the power that governs us has found the way to get around this limitation, by creating organisms in which individual entities work as members. – Carlos Castaneda, Encounters with the Nagual

It is, in my experience, extremely difficult to put the abstract into words because in seeking words to describe an abstract experience we potentially dilute it as well as create the fixation of the assemblage point. The Eagle’s emanations, as written by Carlos Castaneda, are Fluid, forever in motion, and yet unchanged, eternal.

It is said that the Eagle bestows awareness and also devours awareness by making sentient beings relinquish it at the moment of death. In The Fire from Within Don Juan describes the eagle’s emanations as, A presence, almost a mass of sorts, a pressure that creates a dazzling sensation. One can catch only a glimpse of them, as one can catch only a glimpse of the Eagle itself and, there is nothing visual about the Eagle. The entire body of a seer senses the Eagle.

Old Age and the Warrior Traveler

At the end of his journey of learning, and almost without warning he will come upon the last of his enemies: old age! This enemy is the cruelest of all, the one he won’t be able to defeat completely, but only fight away. This is the time when a man has no more fears, no more impatient clarity of mind – a time when all his power is in check, but also the time when he has an unyielding desire to rest. If he gives in totally to his desire to lie down and forget, if he soothes himself in tiredness, he will have lost his last round, and his enemy will cut him down into a feeble old creature. His desire to retreat will overrule all his clarity, his power, and his knowledge. – Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan

In 2015 I wrote a blog entitled warriors and the four natural enemies. Today I want to talk about the natural enemy of old age because this is the era that many who have aligned themselves with the Toltec path of knowledge and awareness are entering into. I bring this up at this time because I am witness to a group of warriors – who I have done work with for decades – succumb to old age, and some of them are still in their 40s. As a result, I felt myself slipping into a state of perma-rest until recently when faced with the choice of acquiescing to the predator or continuing the battle against it.  Wake up call! The battle for knowledge and freedom continues.

My Cat Taught Me Everything I Know

Curiosity

The first attention, the attention that makes the world, can never be completely overcome; it can only be turned off for a moment and replaced with the second attention, providing that the body has stored enough of it. Dreaming is naturally a way of storing the second attention. – Carlos Castaneda, The Eagle’s Gift

Zeus is my hero. He was born 9/18/18. Look at those numbers… 9-9-9. I almost named him Nueve, Spanish for nine. He is a stalker, a dreamer, pure love, a survivor, an innocent, a Panther,  an explorer, and an overall chill cat. Since the Covid Pandemic was announced last March my assemblage point became fixated in first attention; the Tonal. And then, an avalanche of repercussions were launched from the pandemic which all served to further fixate the position of my assemblage point. Rooted. Unmoving. Inflexible. Flight or Fight? I chose to rail against the machine. To battle the predator. Until, of course, the day on the river.