Silence Within

silence of emptiness

There is one thing, one very important skill, which is of crucial importance on the Path to Freedom, in my opinion.

Without it, things just get foggy, unclear and progress in dreaming and in real life as well is limited.

"We talk to ourselves incessantly about our world. In fact we maintain our world with our internal talk. And whenever we finish talking to ourselves about ourselves and our world, the world is always as it should be. We renew it, we rekindle it with life, we uphold it with our internal talk. 

Not only that, but we also choose our paths as we talk to ourselves.

Thus we repeat the same choices over and over until the day we die, because we keep on repeating the same internal talk over and over until the day we die.

A warrior is aware of this and strives to stop his internal talk."

- Don Juan

It is not just about stopping the flow of thoughts. That's the first step, yes, maybe. But that's not enough. 

What really does the trick and yields a profound change in the state of consciousness is de-identification from those abstract and innermost notions that are so integrated into our awareness that we don't even notice.

It is not enough to just stop the inner flow of subtle perception based on the dichotomy between awareness and content of awareness either, as this can be done on many levels.

And here we are way beyond the reach of any kind of energy (low astral energy, dark energy from djinn/demons, elemental energy or any other energy). One can have tons of energy and can learn to manipulate the perception in every which way, and still be a prisoner of these innermost identifications.
That's what happened to some of the old sorcerers from the Don Juan Lineage, didn't it. They were masters of energy manipulation and yet unable to progress beyond mere low astral level realms. Obviously, something went seriously wrong in their practice.

Enormous amounts of life energy and awareness energy are being spent just to uphold the self-designated meaning to the content of our own awareness. 

We can call that self-importance, self-pity, victim-mentality, indulgence, a quest for power and immortality, complacency, ignorance, attachments or aversion.

The thing is that whatever we do with the content of our awareness and however we manipulate energy, all of this and everything any human or any other being can ever think of or experience, is, has been and forever will be, empty.

No need to raise stormy waves in perfectly calm weather on a completely placid lake of our awareness.

And the Silence Within does just that: liberates perception into simple, natural and unlimited space-like awareness which is far beyond all types of energy and all thoughts.

Astral Glamour - a serious problem

In many years on the path of Nagualism, I have observed something interesting: a tendency to indulge in the sweet-sugar-new-age bull shit attraction of self-created illusory phenomena.

What am I talking about?

I am talking about the lack of clear and sincere insight into Reality; about attachments to the false and flashy ideas about things as some individuals would love them to appear instead of seeing them as they really are.

I am talking about indulgence in the glamour of lower astral (emotional and energy) realm (where lower elemental spirits, souls of dead people, "friendly" inorganic beings, dark death defiers, demons, etc... reside) and illusions created within the minds of those who lack the ability to face the Reality as it Really is.

In practice, these tendencies manifest as self-delusion about the importance of certain inorganic beings or assumptions about contacts with god-forms or other powerful spirits and deities in dreaming or meditation.

Craving for power, immortality and instant magical movements of the focus of perception is what might obstruct a lot of dreamers, I observe.

Emotional perception or focusing primarily on sensations and/or mental understanding is seriously limited and flawed - it yields no spiritual attainment.

One can not feel or astrally/emotionally sense truly spiritual Beings (the Kukulkan, for example) and the same goes for mental masturbation (tons of info, understanding, asking and receiving answers, analyzing, remembering, etc.). Not even in million years can a mental level bring spiritual attainments.

The astral sense is limited and inherently flawed. And a dreamer has to work really hard to overcome that astral trap or s/he might end up as a permanent resident of some low astral realm (like Castaneda did).

Glamour, in its turn, veils and hides the truth behind the fogs and mists of feeling and emotional reaction; it is of unique and terrible potency, owing to the strength of human nature to
identify itself with the astral nature and to the vital nature of conscious and sentient response itself. As you know and have been taught, glamour can only be dissipated by the inflow of
clear, directed light; this is true of the life of the individual or of humanity as a whole.
-  Glamour - A World Problem, p. 185

That is rather well said, in my opinion. And the "clear, direct light" mentioned above cannot, it never has and it never will come from the astral beings, whether the friendly ones or the dark ones.


"Mental illusion when intensified by desire, occurring on the astral plane. (Emotional attachment to forms - distracts attention away from reality.) Glamour has been likened to a mist or fog in which the aspirant wanders and which distorts all that he sees and contacts, preventing him from ever seeing life truly or clearly or the conditions surrounding him as they essentially are... 
He is deceived by the appearance and forgets that which the appearance veils. The emanatory astral reactions which each human being initiates ever surround him and through this fog and mist he looks out upon a distorted world."

One more notion from Alice A. Bailey:

Illusion: Mental fixation upon an idea - exclusive of the whole thus not seen in its reality - leads to misinterpretation of the phenomenal world. 
An illusion is the power of some mental thought-forms, of some ideal, and some concept - sensed, grasped and interpreted in mental form - to dominate the mental processes of the individual or of the race and consequently to produce the limitation of the individual or group expression.


A good book that deals with the astral glamour problem has been written years ago and is still quite relevant (quotes above are from that book):

Glamour - A World Problem, a book by Alice A. Bailey and her Master, can be purchased here >>