Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan’s Teachings

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To be ready for a true merging of your dreaming reality and your daily reality you must recapitulate your life further.

The recapitulation of our lives never ends, no matter how well we’ve done it once. The reason average people lack volition in their dreams is that they have never recapitulated and their lives are filled to capacity with heavily loaded emotions like memories, hopes, fears, et cetera, et cetera.

Sorcerers, in contrast, are relatively free from heavy, binding emotions, because of their recapitulation. And if something stops them, the assumption is that there still is something in them that is not quite clear.

Recapitulating and dreaming go hand in hand. As we regurgitate our lives, we get more and more airborne.

The recapitulation consists of reliving the totality of one’s life experiences by remembering every possible minute detail of them. It’s the essential factor in a dreamer ‘s redefinition and redeployment of energy. The recapitulation sets free energy imprisoned within us, and without this liberated energy dreaming is not possible.

Make a list of all the people you have met in your life, starting at the present. Arrange your list in an orderly fashion, breaking it down into areas of activity, such as jobs you have had, schools you have attended. Then go, without deviation, from the first person on your list to the last one, reliving every one of your interactions with them.

Recapitulating an event starts with one’s mind arranging everything pertinent to what is being recapitulated. Arranging means reconstructing the event, piece by piece, starting by recollecting the physical details of the surroundings, then going to the person with whom one shared the interaction, and then going to oneself, to the examination of one’s feelings.

The recapitulation is coupled with a natural, rhythmical breathing. Long exhalations are performed as the head moves gently and slowly from right to left; and long inhalations are taken as the head moves back from left to right. This act of moving the head from side to side is called “fanning the event.” The mind examines the event from beginning to end while the body fans, on and on, everything the mind focuses on.

The sorcerers of antiquity, the inventors of the recapitulation, viewed breathing as a magical, life-giving act and used it, accordingly, as a magical vehicle; the exhalation, to eject the foreign energy left in them during the interaction being recapitulated and the inhalation to pull back the energy that they themselves left behind during the interaction.

It is more involved than an intellectual psychoanalysis. The recapitulation is a sorcerer’s ploy to induce a minute but steady displacement of the assemblage point. The assemblage point, under the impact of reviewing past actions and feelings, goes back and forth between its present site and the site it occupied when the event being recapitulated took place.

The old sorcerers’ rationale behind the recapitulation was their conviction that there is an inconceivable dissolving force in the universe, which makes organisms live by lending them awareness. That force also makes organisms die, in order to extract the same lent awareness, which organisms have enhanced through their life experiences. The old sorcerers believed that since it is our life experience this force is after, it is of supreme importance that it can be satisfied with a facsimile of our life experience: the recapitulation. Having had what it seeks, the dissolving force then lets sorcerers go, free to expand their capacity to perceive and reach with it the confines of time and space.

Dreaming requires every bit of our available energy. If there is a deep preoccupation in our life, there is no possibility of dreaming . If you think you are deeply preoccupied and your practices are not interrupted, it would be that you are only egomaniacally disturbed. To be preoccupied, for sorcerers, means that all your energy sources are taken on.

There is a second round of the recapitulation. It consists of a new recapitulation pattern. Construct a jigsaw puzzle by recapitulating, without any apparent order, different events of your life.

It’ll be a mess if you let your pettiness choose the events you are going to recapitulate. Instead, let the spirit decide. Be silent, and then get to the event the spirit points out.

There are two basic rounds to the recapitulation, the first is called formality and rigidity, and the second fluidity.

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When dreaming you are seeing your body you have to establish some valid guide to find out whether you are actually seeing your body asleep in your bed. Remember, you must be in your actual room, seeing your actual body. Otherwise, what you are having is merely a dream. If that’s the case, control that dream, either by observing its detail or by changing it. Figure out a way to validate the fact that you are looking at yourself. Use your own judgment.

Dreamers have to be imaginative to move their energy bodies. Sorcerers say that at the third gate the entire energy body can move like energy moves: fast and directly. Their energy bodies know exactly how to move. They can move as they move in the inorganic beings’ world. When your energy body learns to move by itself, you’ll be thoroughly out of the inorganic beings’ reach.

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Be impeccable. I have told you this dozens of times. To be impeccable means to put your life on the line in order to back up your decisions, and then to do quite a lot more than your best to realize those decisions. When you are not deciding anything, you are merely playing roulette with your life in a helter-skelter way.

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Instead of struggling to walk in dreaming , one wills oneself to move. It takes sorcerers forever to learn to move the energy body with their own volition. Once you’ve learned how to move your energy body by yourself, you should continue moving. Moving your energy body opens up a new area of extraordinary exploration.

Again, one must come up with an idea to validate the faithfulness of one’s dreams.

To be transported by a scout is the real dreaming task of the second gate. It is a very serious matter, but not as serious as forging and moving the energy body. Therefore, when the time comes, you have to make sure, by some means of your own, whether you are actually seeing yourself asleep or whether you are merely dreaming that you’re seeing yourself asleep. One’s new extraordinary exploration hinges on really seeing oneself asleep.

Dreamers take a very long time to perfect their energy bodies. And this is exactly what’s at stake here: perfecting your energy body. The reason the energy body is compelled to examine detail and get inextricably stuck in it is its inexperience, its incompleteness. Sorcerers spend a lifetime consolidating the energy body by letting it sponge up everything possible.

Until the energy body is complete and mature, it is self-absorbed. It can’t get free from the compulsion to be absorbed by everything. But if one takes this into consideration, instead of fighting the energy body, one can lend it a hand by directing its behavior, that is to say, by stalking it.

Since everything related to the energy body depends on the appropriate position of the assemblage point, and since dreaming is nothing else but the means to displace it, stalking is, consequently, the way to make the assemblage point stay put on the perfect position, in this case, the position where the energy body can become consolidated and from which it can finally emerge.

The moment the energy body can move on its own, sorcerers assume that the optimum position of the assemblage point has been reached. The next step is to stalk it, that is, to fixate it on that position in order to complete the energy body. The procedure is simplicity itself. One intends to stalk it.

Let your energy body intend to reach the optimum dreaming position . Then, let your energy body intend to stay at that position and you will be stalking .

Intending is the secret. Sorcerers displace their assemblage points through intending and fixate them, equally, through intending . And there is no technique for intending . One intends through usage.

The ideal spot and the fixation of the assemblage point are metaphors. They have nothing to do with the words used to describe them.

What comes next is a sorcerer’s gem, the real task; seeing energy in your dreaming with your energy body.

Dreamers have a rule of thumb. If their energy body is complete, they see energy every time they gaze at an item in the daily world. In dreams, if they see the energy of an item, they know they are dealing with a real world, no matter how distorted that world may appear to their dreaming attention. If they can’t see the energy of an item, they are in an ordinary dream and not in a real world.