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Promise I'll be as clear and concise as possible. The simple, straightforward questions (two in total) are bolded and appear midway through the post, if it's easier to just skim everything and skip to them.
Alright. Much more familiar with kundalini and NEW. Happened to be recently researching into the "Toltec" stuff, the "dreamer/warrior" lifestyle, mindset and abilities. It's properly referred to as "Tensegrity" now by the surviving successors of Don Juan, and I wanted to know if you have anything on the subject to share with us.
From what I understand, a lot of it involves something called "magic passes," which seem to be analogous to calisthenics or the sequences found in formal martial arts training, used to accomplish various spell effects. I originally just assumed that they were yet another way to train the individual to open themselves up to their true infinite creative nature, like the process I believe takes place any kind of ritual magic, sidestepping the conscious mind that says it's impossible in little steps.
However, the teachings get VERY specific about a point of awareness, usually remaining fixed between the shoulder blades but a few inches or so outside the body, being the center where all sorts of "filaments" of reality converge and penetrate into the human energy coccoon and the individual's mind, where the energetic information is processed as sensory information. Movement of this point around the individual's energy coccoon apparently allows different groups of those energetic filaments to penetrate into the consciousness, and this is how the individual is able to directly perceive our own world on an energetic, magickal level. It also allows the individual to directly perceive, from what I've read, other worlds, dimensions or realities, which sounds to me a lot like mental and astral projection.
Either way, various methods of manipulating one's reality are available to the student as they learn these techniques and magical passes, yet aside from the end result -- mastery over and transcendance above everyday physical reality -- I haven't found ANY descriptions matching what I know about kundalini. In fact, it seems like an entirely alternative process to achieving some results of a kundalini awakening/rising, with absolutely no mention of the physical sensations of the serpents emerging from the base of the spine and twirling up the body.
So,
1.) Are you aware of these traditions of awakening, and if so, how do they relate to the awakening of the kundalini energy?
Also,
The description of the individual who has mastered this tradition seems to possess abilities that are similar, but with very specific differences from the individual with awakened, risen and active kundalini.
2.) Do you have any idea why this might be? Are they completely different kinds of energies or energetic systems or something? Or is it merely a matter of belief in what one's capable of doing, and what one believes they need to do to get there based on what their ancestor's arcane traditions teach them?
For instance, from what I know of kundalini lore, the fully-awakened individual has almost Christ-like abilities, including a kind mastery over death which involves "ascending," like raising one's vibration to take one's physical body with their consciousness into higher dimensions (much like the "ascension" attributed to Christ, to Virgin Mary, and to the raptured Christians described in Revelation).
But the Toltec traditions specifically talk only about a transcendance of total death that can strictly occur at the very moment that the physical body dies, where, according to this tradition, the individual is fated to eventually be destroyed and absorbed back into the "Eagle," the universal consciousness.
The Toltec master's conscious mind is instead said to be able to avoid this fate and live on indefinitely without a physical body. It sounds a lot like what I know of vampirism, where the human stores up enough energy in the etheric body to remain on that level longer than usual, feeding on the living in order to fight the etheric body's decay. The only difference seems to be that either the Toltec master is not bound by this feeding process, or if he is, there is no mention of it.
(Side note -- speaking of belief dictating result, I saw the new X-Men movie recently, and it occurred to me how much more interesting this planet would be if, once the entire human population had been fully awakened and evolved, our extraordinary abilities didn't automatically default to the water-walking, levitation, fish-and-loaves abilities traditionally assigned to enlightened ones -- e.g. Sai Baba -- and instead became another medium through which one could express themselves personally, manifesting any kind of abilities one wanted as if we were all artists, the abilities our paint and the four-dimensions of our physical world as our canvas.)
I appreciate any illumination you can shed.
Best,
--V
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EDIT: I just started reading The Art of Dreaming, which contains a sort of recap in the beginning, so here's an edit for those who are interested. Some of these are included to clarify or correct some of what I stated above, while others are things that I found which further illustrate the similarities and differences between the two topics.
If anyone has more specific questions, you can PM me and I'll see what I can dig up. There's been talk about taking this post, once it's answered, and putting it into whatever forum is most relevant for further discussion. Based on conversations I have with other members via PMs, I can compile further points of interest and add them to this thread as needed (though my intuition tells me I should avoid making this thread even more complicated than it already is ), or if it's feasible, we can copy this post to another forum now and begin discussion immediately.
Let me know what you guys want to do.
1.) The "assemblage point" is not necessarily between the shoulderblades, but instead traditionally lay (on most people) about two feet directly behind the uppermost part of one's right shoulderblade.
2.) The sorcerer seems to "see" without seeing. I'm not sure yet if it's an image in one's mind's eye, or if it's a very specific tactile sensation, or some kind of imperceptable knowing. There's a ton of very visual imagery used, but it may just be a metaphor used to explain otherwise unknowable concepts.
3.) A person's energy self is described as a globe, an egg shape, or a tombstone shape, which, for whatever reason, seems to have slowly changed from the former to the latter over the course of thousands of generations. What the sorcerer "sees" is this shape surrounding the human body, with the tennis ball-sized assemblage point flush on the surface in the aforementioned position, collecting a certain number of the infinite "filaments" of energy of which the universe is made and assembling them into a coherent set of data for the individual's mind to interpret.
4.) However, the sorcerer does not "see" auras. I'm not sure how, or even if, this works in real time, but it's made clear that when they view huge crowds of people, they are not seeing a bunch of egg shapes passing through each other. Instead, according to the description, they "see" only one globe of energy collecting filaments at the assemblage point, hanging alone in the universe, for each individual.
5.) The first step on this journey down the path of the sorcerer (referred to as the Art of Dreaming), according to Don Juan's instructions to Castaneda, is to look at one's hands during a dream. Here lay some startling similarities to things I've read in Astral Dynamics. Castaneda even goes into detailed explanation about how, when he finally began becoming aware of the fact that he was dreaming and could regularly remember to look at his hands, they often did not appear to be his. In fact, he mentions that sometimes they would look "nightmarish."
6.) Much of these early stages of the sorcerer's process deal with developing lucidity in dreaming, and Don Juan even says that the instructions for Castaneda to look for his hands was not because his hands were important, but because the activity of looking would stimulate his awareness that he was dreaming.
7.) Don Juan goes on to instruct Castaneda to find an object in his dreams and fixate on it as soon as he became lucid, and then using that object as an anchor to provide a boost to his awareness when he noticed it was slipping and he was falling back into normal dream consciousness. Don Juan tells him to take his field of vision on small but increasing forays away from the focal object, taking quick glances around at everything surrounding him in the dream environment, and then returning his gaze to it to stabilize.
8.) Further interesting is that Don Juan mentions alien energies that pervade one's dreams like scouts from other dimensions of existence, manifesting as objects or people that the aware dreamer can identify by a sense of familiary or unfamiliarity, and that the dreamer can follow these energies to other dimensions of experience.
9.) There is a point where Castaneda explains to Don Juan that as he became aware of his dreams, and began following Don Juan's instructions, he found his obsessive nature greatly magnified, going so far as to describe the incessant inner monologue that was constantly reminding him of the tasks he needed to complete, the objects he needed to look at, etc. Don Juan asked Castaneda if it felt like it was coming from inside himself and he replied that it did not. Don Juan then instructs him to wait until it happens again, and then to get very angry and yell, "Stop it!" Castaneda reports that he does this, and the inner voice immediately stopped, never to return.
10.) Don Juan talks about everyone being born with a finite quantity of energy, and that in order to have enough energy available to begin walking the sorcerer's path, one must abandon unneccessary things. His discussion about how many people waste energy worrying about their appearance to others and about possible futures where things might go wrong, the problems they might have, etc., and how these things need to be cleared from the sorcerer's life in order to proceed down the path, sounds a lot to me like the death of ego.
