CROW CALLS No. 6

Dreaming
(after the Yaqui Tribe teachings of Carlos Castenada)

When the everyday consciousness becomes aware of itself during the dream state, this is called dreaming. The dreaming body refers to the spirit body after it has been energized and awakened by storing power. Through dreaming we condense the dreaming body until it is capable of perceiving. Control of the consciousness in dreaming is attained through unbending intent, which leads to the internal silence that allows the consciousness to control the dream. Then control is gained by doggedly holding onto the vision of the dream. This produces inner strength that makes consciousness shift. We need a feeling that something is pressing the navel in order to hold the images in our dreaming.

You must lose your human form before you can change. A Medicine Man without a form begins to see an eye when he closes his eye. The formless Medicine Man uses that eye to start dreaming. If you don't have a form, you don't have to go to sleep to start dreaming. The eye in front of you pulls you every time you want to go. When the eye is very small, dreaming is precise. You must learn to open the eye by grabbing it and shaking it four times in its four directions like a bed sheet. Then open it as a door by holding it right in the middle and pulling it open horizontally. You can go into it and fly, but you must return.

You reach the second gate of dreaming by moving from one dream into another. Find an inorganic lifeform posing as an item in your dreamscape and stare at it, until your dream collapses and the being transports you into another level of dreaming. Medicine Men compel these beings to interact with them by sustaining the position where the consciousness has shifted in dreams. This act creates a distinctive energy charge, which attracts their attention. Ultimately, the inorganic beings especially delight in trapping 'male' consciousness, a rarity in the universe, in their realm; inorganic beings are 'female' in nature. Since these allies feed directly from our life-force in the middle of the stomach, they usually make us sick. However, when we become complete, we notice them only as formless forces. If you want to catch allies or entice them to stay with you, you must spin with them. Then, you need to vanquish fear from your life to safeguard your unity.

Dreaming requires extra energy to energize the dreaming body and transport it to other realms by changing the focus of consciousness. One must adopt a change of lifestyle to enhance this build up of energy. Discard everything in your life that is unnecessary; aim at living a simple life. Relax and abandon yourself; fear nothing. Only then will the powers that guide us open the road and aid us. When faced with odds that cannot be dealt with, retreat for a moment and let the mind meander. A solution will often then present itself. Never push yourself to the front; stay in the background so that you can relax and change the focus of your consciousness without having other forces focus on you. Moving the eyes in a circular motion helps to loosen the focus of consciousness and allow escape from other forces.

Changing the focus of consciousness can occur in different directions. When consciousness is shifted to the left, our spirituality is increased. When consciousness is shifted to the right, we become more physically active and violent. When consciousness is shifted downward, we can adopt animal forms, but this diminishes our energy. Moving consciousness to the left decreases the downward movement. When consciousness changes its focus, it can continue to perceive the ordinary world, use the energy released by the change of focus to launch itself into other realms, or directly perceive the flow of energy in the Universe. The enlargement and enhancement of our perception and the ability to move our consciousness into other realms is the main reason dreaming is pursued.

Dreaming is the art of displacing the assemblage point at will from its habitual position in order to enhance and enlarge the scope of what can be perceived. Dreaming is anchored on five conditions in the energy flow of human beings:
1. Only the energy filaments that pass directly through the assemblage point can be assembled into coherent perception
2. If the assemblage point is displaced to another position, no matter how minute the displacement, different and unaccustomed energy filaments begin to pass through it, engaging awareness and forcing the assembling of these unaccustomed energy fields into a steady, coherent perception.
3. In the course of ordinary dreams, the assemblage point becomes easily displaced by itself to another position in the spirit body.
4. The assemblage point can be made to move to positions outside the spirit body, into the energies of the Universe.
5. Through discipline it is possible to cultivate and perform, in sleep and ordinary dreams, a systematic displacement of the assemblage point.

There are seven rings of power in human beings. Our first ring of power is engaged very early in life, and we live under the impression that that is all there is to us. Our second ring of power, the attention of the Spirit, remains hidden for the vast majority of us, and only at the moment of our death is it revealed to us. There is a pathway to reach it, however, through dreaming.

Gazing Dreamers have to be gazers before they can trap their second attention. The position of the body is of great importance while one is gazing. Sit on the ground on a soft mat. Prop the back against a tree or pole or rock. The body must be thoroughly relaxed. The eyes are never fixed on the object, to avoid tiring them. The gaze consists in scanning very slowly the object gazed at, going counterclockwise but without moving the head. If you gaze with your eyes open, you get dizzy and the eyes get tired; but if you half close them and blink a lot and move them around you can look for hours. Keep the eyelids half closed. Gazing is really for stopping the world, that is, the internal dialogue, and disengaging the attention of the everyday world. One must sweep the everyday world clear before the world of the spirit can be reached. Sweeping the everyday world clear allows you to live an impeccable life, which is the only way to lose the human form. Losing the human form is the essential requirement for unifying the two attentions.

Gazing at leaves fortifies the second attention. If you gaze at a pile of leaves for hours, your thoughts get quiet. Without thoughts, the attention of the everyday world wanes and suddenly your second attention hooks onto the leaves and the leaves become something else. The moment when the second attention hooks onto something is called stopping the world. You never know about the quirks of the second attention, so you should have someone else around when you do it until you have become familiar with the technique.

The difficulty in gazing is to learn to quiet down the thoughts. Once you can stop the world you are a gazer. Combine gazing at dry leaves with looking for your hands in dreaming. It may take years for success with these two; once you have trapped your second attention with dry leaves, you do gazing and dreaming to enlarge it. And that's all there is to gazing. All you need to do to trap your second attention is to try and try.

First gaze at small plants. Small plants are very dangerous. Their power is concentrated; they have a very intense light and they feel when dreamers are gazing at them; they immediately move their light and shoot it at the gazer. Dreamers have to choose one kind of plant to gaze at. Next gaze at trees.

Next gaze at moving, living creatures. Small insects are by far the best subjects. Their mobility makes them innocuous to the gazer, the opposite of plants, which draw their light directly from the earth.

Next gaze at the earth. Rocks are very old and powerful, and have a specific light which is rather greenish in contrast to the white light of plants and the yellowish light of mobile, living beings. Rocks do not open up easily to gazers, but it is worthwhile for gazers to persist because rocks hold special secrets concealed in their core, secrets that can aid you in your dreaming (e.g. - each rock core has a special scent, and you can guide yourself in your dreaming by the scents).

In the early morning trees and rocks are stiff and their light is faint; around noon they are at their best, and gazing at that time is done to borrow their light and power. In the late afternoon and early evening trees and rocks are quiet and sad, and trees will return your gaze.

A second series in the cycle of gazing is to gaze at cyclic phenomena: rain, and fog. You can focus your second attention on the rain itself and move with it, or focus it on the background and use the rain as a magnifying glass to reveal hidden features (e.g. - places of power are yellowish, while places to be avoided are intensely green). Fog is the most mysterious thing on earth for a gazer. It can be used just like rain, but it does not easily yield to women, even after they lose their human form. Fog is used to uncover the ghosts of things that are no longer there, and the true feat of fog-gazers is to let their second attention go into whatever their gazing reveals. The door between the worlds is to be found in the fog; when the second attention is called upon.

The last series is fire, smoke and shadow gazing. For a gazer, fire is not bright but black, and so is smoke. Shadows, on the other hand, are brilliant and have color and movement in them. Shadows in the early morning don't tell much; they rest then. Around six in the morning they wake up, and they are best around five in the evening when they are fully awake.

Two more things are kept separate: star and water gazing. Stargazing is done by Medicine Men who have lost their human form, and water gazing is used by formless Medicine Men to gather their second attention and transport it to any place they need to go. Running water can carry you away beyond your control.

We hold the images of the world with our attention. A Medicine Man is very difficult to train because his attention is always closed, focused on something. A Medicine Woman, on the other hand, is always open because most of the time she is not focused on anything, especially during her menstrual period. Men have to be hooked into the Medicine way, but women go freely into anything; that's their power and their drawback. Men have to be led and women have to be contained.

The Parallel Being The parallel being is a counterbalance that all living creatures have by the fact that they are luminous beings filled with inexplicable energy. A parallel being of any person is another person of the same sex who is intimately and inextricably joined to the first one. They coexist in the world at the same time. The two parallel beings are like the two ends of the same pole. It is nearly impossible for Medicine Men to find their parallel being, because there are too many distracting factors in the life of Medicine, other priorities. But whoever is capable of accomplishing this feat will find in his parallel being an endless source of youth and energy.

You must be impeccable in your effort to change, in order to scare away the human form and shake it away. After years of impeccability, a moment will come when the form cannot stand it any longer and it leaves. In doing so, it injures the body and one may even die, but an impeccable Medicine Man always survives.

The First Gate of Dreaming The first step to power is setting up dreaming. To set up dreaming means to have a precise and practical command over the general situation of a dream. The first gate is a threshold we must cross by becoming aware of a particular sensation before deep sleep, a sensation which is like a pleasant heaviness that doesn't let us open our eyes. We reach that gate the instant we fall asleep, suspended in darkness and heaviness. There are no steps to follow; one simply intends to become aware of falling asleep.

The trick is to reach the spirit body; for that you need energy. The goal of dreaming is to intend the spirit body. Becoming aware that one is falling asleep, one does not command oneself to be aware, but rather by sustaining the sight of whatever one is looking at in a dream. Dreamers take quick deliberate glances at everything present in a dream; they only focus their dreaming attention on something specific when they wish to use it as a point of departure from the dream. The dreaming attention is the key to every movement in the Medicine Man's world. Dreams are a hatch into other worlds; our awareness goes through that hatch into other realms, and those other worlds send scouts into our dreams. These scouts are energy charges that get mixed with the items in our normal dreams. They are bursts of foreign energy that come into our dreams, and we interpret them as familiar or unfamiliar items. Medicine Men strive to isolate the currents of foreign energy from the normal items in their dreams. At one moment, our dreaming attention discovers them among the items in a dream and focuses on them, then the total dream collapses, leaving only the foreign energy. It is not, however, advisable to get caught up in spending time searching for scouts.

In order to pass the first gate of dreaming, first you must focus your gaze on anything of your choice as the starting point. Then shift your gaze to other items and look at them in brief glances. Focus your gaze on as many things as you can. Remember that if you glance only briefly, the images don't shift. Then go back to the item you first looked at. In order to offset the evanescent quality of dreams, Medicine Men have devised the use of the starting point item. Every time you isolate it and look at it, you get a surge of energy, so at the beginning don't look at too many things in your dreams. Four items will suffice. Later on, you may enlarge the scope until you can cover all you want, but as soon as the images begin to shift and you feel like you are losing control, go back to your starting point item and start over again.

Through dreaming we condense the spirit body until it's a unit capable of perceiving. There are three ways the spirit body deals with energy in dreaming: it can perceive energy as it flows, or it can use energy to boost itself like a rocket into unexpected areas, or it can perceive as we ordinarily perceive the world. But to maintain that gain is predicated on energy alone. Medicine Men get that energy by redeploying the energy they have and use for perceiving the daily world.

The Second Gate of Dreaming The active element of this training is persistence; the mind and all its rational defenses cannot cope with persistence. Sooner or later, the mind's barriers fall, under its impact, and the dreaming attention blooms. The energy needed to release our dreaming attention from its socialization prison comes from redeploying our existing energy. The most effective redeployment of energy is losing self-importance. Self-importance is not only the Medicine Man's supreme enemy, it is the nemesis of all mankind; most of our energy goes into upholding our importance. When we free our energy from trying to maintain the illusory idea of our grandeur, we provide ourselves with enough energy to enter into the second attention to catch a glimpse of the actual grandeur of the universe.

You reach the second gate of dreaming when you wake up from a dream into another dream. You can have as many dreams as you want or as many as you are capable of, but you must exercise adequate control and not wake up in the world we know. Although it is possible never to wake up in this world again, this should be avoided; wake up naturally when you are through with dreaming, but while you are dreaming, dream that you wake up in another dream. A dreamer on crossing the first gate has already reached the spirit body. So what is really going through the second gate, hopping from dream to dream, is the spirit body. On crossing the second gate you must intend a greater and more sober control over your dreaming attention: this is the only safety valve for dreamers. The true goal of dreaming is to perfect the spirit body.

A perfect spirit body has such control over the dreaming attention that it makes it stop when needed. This is the safety valve dreamers have. No matter how indulging they may be, at a given time, their dreaming attention must make them surface. Waking up in one dream after another does not mean going to sleep in your dreams, but only moving from one dream to another in an orderly and precise manner. You can cross the second gate of dreaming by either waking up from one dream into another one, or by moving from one dream into another one by using the items of the dream to trigger another one, such as going through a window or door or by staring at one item until it metamorphs into a vortex and pulls you elsewhere.

Life and consciousness, being exclusively a matter of energy, are not solely the property of organisms. There are two types of conscious beings roaming the earth, the organic and the inorganic; both are luminous masses crossed from every imaginable angle by millions of the universe's energy filaments. They are different from each other in their shape and in their degree of brightness. Inorganic beings are long and candle-like but opaque, whereas organic beings are round and by far the brighter. Another difference is that the consciousness of organic beings is short-lived, because they are made to hurry, whereas the life of inorganic beings is infinitely longer and their consciousness infinitely more calm and deeper. There is no problem interacting with them, because they possess the crucial ingredient for interaction, consciousness.

It is very difficult to tell what is what with them. The difficulty with inorganic beings is that their awareness is very slow in comparison with ours. It will take years for a Medicine Man to be acknowledged by inorganic beings. It is advisable to have patience and wait. Sooner or later they show up. Medicine Men compel these beings to interact with them by the act of dreaming. Dreaming is sustaining the position where the assemblage point has shifted in dreams. This act creates a distinctive energy charge, which attracts their attention. It's like bait to fish; they'll go for it. Medicine Men, by reaching and crossing the first two gates of dreaming, set bait for these beings and compel them to appear. At first, they often cause interference in your dreaming before they actually appear some time later. You should add to your dreaming practices the intent of reaching those inorganic beings. Send a feeling of power and confidence to them, a feeling of strength, of detachment. Avoid at any cost sending a feeling of fear or morbidity. They are plenty morbid by themselves. Ultimately, the inorganic beings especially delight in trapping 'male' consciousness, a rarity in the universe, in their realm; the inorganic beings, like the universal consciousness and most consciousness in the universe, are 'female' in nature.

They do, at times, materialize themselves in the daily world, right in front of us. Most of the time, though, their invisible presence is marked by a bodily jolt, a shiver of sorts that comes from the marrow of the bones. In dreaming we have the opposite; at times we feel them as a jolt of fear, but most of the time they materialize in front of you. Since you are unfamiliar with their energy, this may generate fear, which is very dangerous for you. Through the channel of fear, they can follow us to the daily world, with disastrous results for us. Inorganic beings can drive us mad by amplifying our fears. Medicine Men mingle with them, and turn them into allies. They form associations and create friendships.

To capture allies, you must first find a gourd the size of the thumb of the left hand, dry it and hollow it out. Then invite the ally to live there. As long as one clings to the human form, one can only reflect that form, and since the allies feed directly onto our life-force in the middle of the stomach, they usually make us sick, and then we see them as heavy, ugly creatures. When we become complete, we notice them only as formless forces. If you want to catch allies or entice them to stay with you, you must spin with them. Sometimes they come of their own accord and spin a Medicine Man. Contact with allies can produce an injurious perspiration, which must be washed off immediately. Your clothes must be sunned before you wear them again.

Inorganic beings, with their superb consciousness, exert a powerful pull over dreamers, and can easily transport them into worlds beyond description. The Medicine Men of antiquity used them, and they are the ones who coined the name 'allies'. Their allies taught them to move the assemblage point out of the egg's boundaries into the non-human universe. So when they transport a Medicine man, they transport him to worlds beyond the human domain. If the Medicine Man is lucky, the inorganic beings may come on their own to seek an association. Such a friendship consists of a mutual exchange of energy. The inorganic beings supply their high awareness, and Medicine Men supply their heightened awareness and high energy. The positive result is an even exchange. The negative one is dependency on both parties. Usually, the first encounters the Medicine Man has with inorganic beings will determine which kind of relationships will come later.

Watery inorganic beings are more given to excesses. The old Medicine Men believed they were more loving, more capable of imitating, or perhaps even having feelings. As opposed to the fiery ones, who were thought to be more serious, more contained than the others, but also more pompous. At this point, you need to vanquish fear from your dreams and from your life, in order to safeguard your unity.

Upon crossing the first or second gate of dreaming, dreamers reach a threshold of energy and begin to see things or to hear voices. Not really plural voices, but a single voice. Medicine Men call it the voice of the dreaming emissary. The dreaming emissary is a force that comes from the realm of the inorganic beings. The inorganic beings have a deeper consciousness that we do, and they feel compelled to take us under their wing and teach us about their realm. This, however, curtails our search for freedom and consumes all of our available energy. The old Medicine Men ruled for four thousand years, from seven thousand years ago to about three thousand years ago. At that time, they disappeared en mass. The old Medicine Men who disappeared were lured into the realm of the inorganic beings and never returned. By means of their dreaming contacts with inorganic beings, the old Medicine Men became immensely well-versed in the manipulation of the assemblage point. Be very careful with inorganic beings: they love slavery while we love freedom; they love to buy -- but we shouldn't sell! The old Medicine Men put all of their eggs in one basket: the assemblage point and the thousands of positions it can adopt.

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