‘Intent is not intention’ Don Genaro, Journey to Ixtlan.
By Ina Woolcott
Castaneda’s works offer us views into a revolutionary and deeply spiritual outlook on the world. One of his most profound insights is that we have a latent awareness that continues once we are dead. The main aim of a warrior is to maintain this awareness when one dies physically. This is also known as darting past the Eagle and being free. The eagle embodies the force which devours the awareness of ALL beings when they die. All of the discipline that encompasses a warriors way of life needs to be mustered up to defy death in this way.
As Don Juan said in Journey to Ixtlan, chapter 11 (The Mood of a Warrior) “to seek the perfection of the warrior’s spirit is the only task worthy of our manhood.” Shamanic practises are designed to maximise a warriors personal power, or experience. Within the books are easy to follow transformational exercises. Practitioners and book readers the world over are incorporating Castaneda’s ideas individually or through consultation with Castaneda affiliates. An example of one of Castaneda’s exercises is the art of recapitulation, where one reviews ones life in order to successfully master detachment and heighten awareness and energy.
When you have enough personal power, which is achieved by gathering energy though the techniques outlined by Castaneda, you are led to the mastery of Intent, primarily the controlled manipulation of what is termed the assemblage points, the centre of a bundle of energy emanations/filaments that come out of the body. Castaneda, like those trained before him, found that we all have luminous cocoons surrounding us like a big ball of light.
When babies our assemblage points are fluid and free moving throughout our luminous cocoons. As we develop into adults our cocoons become rigid because we become set in our ways and have our rigid perceptions of the environment around us. The cocoons are crisscrossed with the emanations that create our perception, as we get older and our views of the world are set and filtered through these emanations, we use only a small amount of them. This limits our awareness. The waking ordinary reality we perceive, what we feel and the way we perform in our day to day lives is predisposed by the rigid fixture of our assemblage points. When we are able to move our assemblage points then we can tune into the realities that surround us (non-ordinary reality), that are just as valid and real as ‘ordinary’ reality. The only time when ‘ordinary people’ are able to manipulate their energy points is when they are dreaming (which is the easiest and most used way by a warrior), after an accident, by use of hallucinogens or plant allies, meditation, love, or through Intent. Castaneda thoroughly describes the methods to master awareness through dreaming, and outlines the exercises used by him for this in his book “The Art of Dreaming”. (an excellent book, I highly recommend it!)
Minute manipulations of the energy points results in minute changes in perception, large manipulations result in large changes. When we live with intent, we send out psychic energy of a magical and glowing disposition. Our energy bodies are non physical and composed of Intent. Through using the techniques Castaneda learned from Don Juan Matus such as developing the warriors mood, dreaming and ascension, and stopping the world to name but a few, the warriors goal is to recapture the luminosity that has been lost through the ‘ordinary awareness’ of day to day life, and in the end have direct influence over Intent. The warrior aims to achieve totality of self by illuminating all of the emanations intersecting the cocoon surrounding them at once and thereby aligning them with all of existence and experience.
“Think about this,” he urged us. “Perhaps this is exactly what is happening to all of us in the world of daily life. We are here, and the fixation of our assemblage point is so overpowering that it has made us forget where we came from, and what our purpose was for coming here” Don Juan Matus, The Art of Dreaming