Dreaming instruction is divided into two parts. Part one is about dreaming procedures that fix the dreaming attention and Part two is about the purely abstract explanations of these procedures. This is an interplay between enticing one's intellectual curiosity with the abstract principles of dreaming and guiding one to seek an outlet in its practices.

In this podcast I read a short extracts from Tales of Power and Journey to Ixtlan that that relate to Selecting a Topic for Dreaming: First Extract is from Part 1, Tales of Power: Witness to Acts of Power, Chapter 1. An Appointment With Knowledge. Second Extract is from Part 1, Journey to Ixtlan: Stopping the World, Chapter 12. A Battle of Power.

“You’re again confusing issues. Solace, haven, fear, love, all of them are moods that you have learned without ever questioning their value. As one can see, the black magicians have already engaged all your allegiance.”

Most of the time when we’re dreaming, we’re not aware of it and just take what’s before us in the dream as real. But the Not-doing of dreaming is when you are aware that you’re dreaming and can take steps to control the dream.

“One of the first concerns of warriors is to free that energy in order to face the unknown with it,” Don Juan went on. “The action of rechanneling that energy is impeccability.”

Don Juan explained to Carlos in “Journey to Ixtlan”, that stopping the world was a technique practiced by those who were hunting for power, a technique by virtue of which the world as we know it was made to collapse.

Clarity is all that we hold to be good and just, all the values that society holds as true are built upon clarities manipulation, and are so ingrained, so interwoven into our moral ideals, that clarity is invisible to the sorcerer.

The concept of the “man of knowledge” is a person who lives an examined life and progresses through stages of awareness, connection, and ego dissolution. A man of knowledge is one who has followed truthfully the hardships of learning, a man who has, without rushing or without faltering, gone as far as he can in unraveling the secrets of power and knowledge. To become a man of knowledge one must challenge and defeat his four natural enemies.