The Dreaming Eye | Carlos Castaneda
If you would like to understand sorcery at a deep level then I have also created a complementary guide Autobiography of a Sorcerer: A Study of Toltec Shamanism, Castaneda's Sorcery, Yoga & Zen Philosophy, click the above button for details.
OPENING THE CRACK AND STEPPING INTO ANOTHER WORLD | CARLOS CASTANEDA
I dreamed I had something in my eye, when I looked there was a white lizard in the corner of my eye. I then tried to pull it out but instead its tail came off and it went further into the eye.
When I pulled the skin underneath to try and get to it and I saw something black, I could feel it pulling down and I was gagging in the dream.
When I got it out, it was about 3 inches long and was black and slimy and looked like a slug. I put it down, when I looked again it had gone so I was panicking about finding it and also still trying to get the lizard out of my eye. It was an awful dream and I woke up with fright but could not get the images out of my head because I had seen my reality.
Hello and welcome to the Ancient wisdom modern mind podcast and before I read this extract from The Second Ring of Power by Carlos Castaneda, I would like to take a moment to remind you to subscribe to this channel, so go ahead and click on the subscribe button.
In this podcast I have compiled the relevant sections from The Second Ring of Power that relates to what La Gorda called the Dreaming Eye, and how this eye relates to Dreaming and losing the Human Form.
Extract is from.
Part 1: A Witness to Acts of Power.
Chapter 3. La Gorda.
“The Nagual told me that a warrior without form begins to see an eye. I saw an eye in front of me every time I closed my eyes. It got so bad that I couldn’t rest anymore; the eye followed me wherever I went. I nearly went mad. Finally, I suppose, I became used to it. Now I don’t even notice it because it has become part of me.
“The formless warrior uses that eye to start dreaming. If you don’t have a form, you don’t have to go to sleep to do dreaming. The eye in front of you pulls you every time you want to go.”
“Where exactly is that eye, Gorda?”
She closed her eyes and moved her hand from side to side, right in front of her eyes, covering the span of her face.
“Sometimes the eye is very small and other times it is enormous,” she went on. “When it’s small your dreaming is precise. If it’s big your dreaming is like flying over the mountains and not really seeing much. I haven’t done enough dreaming yet, but the Nagual told me that that eye is my trump card. One day when I become truly formless I won’t see the eye anymore; the eye will become just like me, nothing, and yet it’ll be there like the allies. The Nagual said that everything has to be sifted through our human form. When we have no form, then nothing has form and yet everything is present. I couldn’t understand what he meant by that, but now I see that he was absolutely right. The allies are only a presence and so will be the eye. But at this time that eye is everything to me. In fact, in having that eye I should need nothing else in order to call up my dreaming, even when I’m awake. I haven’t been able to do that yet. Perhaps I’m like you, a bit stubborn and lazy.”
“How did you do the flying you showed me tonight?”
“The Nagual taught me how to use my body to make lights, because we are light anyway, so I make sparks and lights and they in turn lure the lines of the world. Once I see one, it’s easy to hook myself to it.”
“How do you hook yourself?”
“I grab it.”
She made a gesture with her hands. She clawed them and then placed them together joined at the wrists, forming a sort of bowl, with the clawed fingers upright.
“You have to grab the line like a jaguar,” she went on, “and never separate the wrists. If you do, you’ll fall down and break your neck.”
She paused and that forced me to look at her, waiting for more of her revelations.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” she asked.
Without giving me time to answer, she squatted and began again to produce her display of sparks. I was calm and collected and could place my undivided attention on her actions. When she snapped her fingers open, every fiber of her muscles seemed to tense at once. That tension seemed to be focused on the very tips of her fingers and was projected out like rays of light. The moisture in her fingertips was actually a vehicle to carry some sort of energy emanating from her body.
“How did you do that, Gorda?” I asked, truly marveling at her.
“I really don’t know,” she said. “I simply do it. I’ve done it lots and lots of times and yet I don’t know how I do it. When I grab one of those rays I feel that I’m being pulled by something. I really don’t do anything else except let the lines I’ve grabbed pull me. When I want to get back through, I feel that the line doesn’t want to let me free and I get frantic. The Nagual said that that was my worst feature. I get so frightened that one of these days I’m going to injure my body. But I figure that one of these days I’ll be even more formless and then I won’t get frightened, so as long as I hold on until that day. I’m all right.”
“Tell me then, Gorda, how do you let the lines pull you?”
“We’re back again in the same spot. I don’t know. The Nagual warned me about you. You want to know things that cannot be known.”
I struggled to make clear to her that what I was after were the procedures. I had really given up looking for an explanation from all of them because their explanations explained nothing to me. To describe to me the steps that were followed was something altogether different.
“How did you learn to let your body hold onto the lines of the world?” I asked.
“I learned that in dreaming,” she said, “but I really don’t know how. Everything for a woman warrior starts in dreaming. The Nagual told me, just as he told you, first to look for my hands in my dreams. I couldn’t find them at all. In my dreams I had no hands. I tried and tried for years to find them. Every night I used to give myself the command to find my hands but it was to no avail.
I never found anything in my dreams. The Nagual was merciless with me. He said that I had to find them or perish. So I lied to him that I had found my hands in my dreams. The Nagual didn’t say a word but Genaro threw his hat on the floor and danced on it. He patted my head and said that I was really a great warrior. The more he praised me the worse I felt. I was about to tell the Nagual the truth when crazy Genaro aimed his behind at me and let out the loudest and longest fart I had ever heard. He actually pushed me backward with it. It was like a hot, foul wind, disgusting and smelly, just like me. The Nagual was choking with laughter.
“I ran to the house and hid there. I was very fat then. I used to eat a great deal and I had a lot of gas. So I decided not to eat for a while. Lidia and Josefina helped me. I didn’t eat anything for twenty-three days, and then one night I found my hands in my dreams. They were old and ugly and green, but they were mine. So that was the beginning. The rest was easy.”
“And what was the rest, Gorda?”
“The next thing the Nagual wanted me to do was to try to find houses or buildings in my dreams and look at them, trying not to dissolve the images. He said that the art of the dreamer is to hold the image of his dream. Because that’s what we do anyway during all our lives.”
“What did he mean by that?”
“Our art as ordinary people is that we know how to hold the image of what we are looking at.
The Nagual said that we do that but we don’t know how. We just do it; that is, our bodies do it. In dreaming we have to do the same thing, except that in dreaming we have to learn how to do it. We have to struggle not to look but merely to glance and yet hold the image.
“The Nagual told me to find in my dreams a brace for my belly button. It took a long time because I didn’t understand what he meant. He said that in dreaming we pay attention with the belly button; therefore it has to be protected. We need a little warmth or a feeling that something is pressing the belly button in order to hold the images in our dreams.
“I found a pebble in my dreams that fit my belly button, and the Nagual made me look for it day after day in water holes and canyons, until I found it. I made a belt for it and I still wear it day and night. Wearing it made it easier for me to hold images in my dreams.
“Then the Nagual gave me the task of going to specific places in my dreaming. I was doing really well with my task but at that time I lost my form and I began to see the eye in front of me.
The Nagual said that the eye had changed everything, and he gave me orders to begin using the eye to pull myself away. He said that I didn’t have time to get to my double in dreaming, but that the eye was even better. I felt cheated. Now I don’t care. I’ve used that eye the best way I could. I let it pull me in my dreaming. I close my eyes and fall asleep like nothing, even in the daytime or anywhere. The eye pulls me and I enter into another world. Most of the time I just wander around in it. The Nagual told me and the little sisters that during our menstrual periods dreaming becomes power. I get a little crazy for one thing. I become more daring. And like the Nagual showed us, a crack opens in front of us during those days. You’re not a woman so it can’t make any sense to you, but two days before her period a woman can open that crack and step through it into another world.”
With her left hand she followed the contour of an invisible line that seemed to run vertically in front of her at arm’s length.
“During that time a woman, if she wants to, can let go of the images of the world,” la Gorda went on. “That’s the crack between the worlds, and as the Nagual said, it is right in front of all of us women.
“The reason the Nagual believes women are better sorcerers than men is because they always have the crack in front of them, while a man has to make it.
“Well, it was during my periods that I learned in dreaming to fly with the lines of the world. I learned to make sparks with my body to entice the lines and then I learned to grab them. And that’s all I have learned in dreaming so far.”
Commentary
The idea of finding your hand or la Gorda’s task of finding houses or buildings is a Not-Doing to distract the ego self from its endless chatter, and is really a form of Mantra used to distract the internal dialog of the ego self. Don Juan’s idea of examining ones elements within the dream is a subterfuge with the intent of developing awareness of falling asleep.
And once you become aware of falling asleep you will have crossed the second gate of dreaming. So whether you want to call it an Affirmation, a Mantra or your Dreaming Intent, this idea is fundamentally a Not-Doing designed to saturate the First Attention with your Intent.
And while we are on the subject of building our dreaming intent I would like to make a distinction between Intent and the idea of manifesting your reality or desires, as this new age idea is no better than wishing, and wishing is not Intent. As an example of this manifesting mentality which also includes ideas such as positive thinking, and the doctrine of divine love, these ideas imply that we can intend or manifest our personal desires by focusing our thoughts upon a desired outcome.
This idea is based on the “Law of Attraction” which claims that “Positive Thinking”, or even directing requests to "The Universe" will manifest your reality or desire, but this is not what is meant by Intent, or Mantra. Although Affirmations could in some cases be branded with the same brush.
Another important mistake that most people make is in the assumption that Dreaming was about dreams. Dreaming is a Not-Doing exercise designed to split the consciousness" or "create a double consciousness ", so don’t get hung up on the meaning of dreams as they only relate to self’s personal reality within the first Attention
As for la Gorda’s Dreaming Eye, I personally think this is an embellishment by Carlos, and in my own experience there is no Dreaming Eye as such, but more what I would call a spot or blotch in the center of your vision similar to the visual effect that still exists after doing too much sun gazing, but more subtle and it is possible that one me not even become aware of this spot, although I will say that eye is definitively a more exciting description.
I also don’t think that seeing this spot is directly related to losing the human form and either Carlos or la Gorda, or maybe both are incline to exaggerations to bolster their own egos, yet in saying this there is little doubt that the spot or eye if you want to call it that, is related to the Second Attention and is a sign that the barrier between the First and Second Attentions is weakening.
The sorcerer through dreaming slowly dissolves the barrier between the First and Second Attentions, so that awareness achieves a fluidity of movement between the First and Second Attentions, and awareness is thus freed from the dualistic dictums of the ego self in much the same way a kōan can free the mind of the novice monk. With this understanding we can also see that the label dreaming is deceptive and should not be taken literally or confused with lucid dreaming. Of course it is also little understood that the practice of dreaming is also a steady dissolving of the ego self, and this is because the sorcerer through dreaming will eventually become one awareness. They become the Nagual, Atman or Higher Self, and the ego self which is rooted in the self-importance of the First Attention fades into obscurity, which finally climaxes with what Carlos called the journey into the abyss.
And if you want delve deeper into the books of Carlos Castaneda then I also have a number of podcasts in the play list SORCERY & CASTANEDA that delves into this area, simply follow the Link in the description.
All right. So this podcast was about Gorda’s Dreaming Eye, and I hope that this reading from The Second Ring of Power supports you in your dreaming practice, and if you have any questions.
Feel free to drop your comment in the comment section and I will try to answer them, I would really appreciate it if you share your thoughts, and thank you for listening to the Ancient Wisdom Modern Mind podcast.
I’m Jason your host signing off. Take care.
And if you would like to understand sorcery at a deep level then I have also created a complementary guide Autobiography of a Sorcerer: A Study of Toltec Shamanism, Castaneda's Sorcery, Yoga & Zen Philosophy, follow the link for details.
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