“We are nothing but a swarm of telepathic spirits,
Each screaming for our own attention,
Each reading the other’s intention“
Seranoga (1964)

This transcript is of a conversation between the CEO’s Balthazar Schlep and Lis who has been experimenting with various sorcery techniques. We do not recommend emulating Lis’ experiments at home.

Lis is italicised to differentiate the voices.

CC is Carlos Castaneda. DJ is Don Juan. AP is Assemblage point (the energetic intensity that determines what reality will be experienced). IOB is inorganic being

() wants to know how much of this can be done without entheogens?

I can do it without the drugs.

Just digesting what you said in bits. Your nodes theory seems possible but we’re in crazy land here. Who knows, I assumed the energy just dispersed. Why would it leave a node marker?

I think in an opposite manner. I think I come from asking “why would disperse it”? Coming from a post-relativity (in physics) mindset, I tend to just ask how something is gonna stop that other thing.

I suppose I think that because the animal is dead so the general awareness is gone.

You know, the inertia law in a vacuum, so if there isn’t a reason for something to dissipate, I assume it won’t.

Or if it’s gone, why is there a marker? I see, I am assuming a kind of entropy, it’s true. But still surely seems weird in such a flux like universe to have static blobs like this, which is why I thought they were probably like alien energetic poke throughs from some other level.

I see, it’s true, it is a completely open, the topic as to what they are. In that moment I was just channelling a feeling of what it seemed like. it felt like something familiar. () said of IOBs that “They also like to obsess people with irrelevant details, like the “nodes”.” So, without knowing or trying to understand what is being related, he just picks the word “nodes” and throws it to the side, implying via the quotation marks that it’s just a concept in the sense of a nominal notion, something too subjective to matter, a dream in the illusory sense. “It’s like pretending to be a demon, to scare people.” Here he is quoting DJ using other words, when DJ was showcasing his pessimism to CC about how there is no point to wanting power anymore, that power only serves to scare indians.

“They also pretend to have important details, to obsess you.” Again quoting the books with other words, just the advice from Genaro’s boys in general. There is even a part when, if I remember correctly, La Gorda or someone else said they only keep saying this to CC because they don’t get to obsess over anything, IOBs don’t offer them playthings.

“They get energy either way.” This paints the IOBs as just power-hungry things divested of anything but the intent to more power (which is, logically, no intent at all but just the recursive nature of power).

“Best way to think of them as they’re little kids with magic disguise boxes. Can be anything, or do anything, to get attention. Once you figure that out, they stop doing that and become more reliable.” I would say that doing this is very belittling and may be the reason Dan is bonkers, because if the IOBs are like what I experienced or how the books describe, they are not little fairy-like children that you can just scoff at. He thinks this shows impeccability (remaining still in the face of IOBs, understanding them as intellectually lesser), but it shows projection and resolution (classic neurotic loop). We can see how this goes well with what I said prior, that they think there is some purity to it all. They seem to gatekeep this because it’s like defending a virgin to them, or the waters of youth never touched by human if not to help the sacred tree drink from it.

“Or if you read the books, you have to “wrestle” them. But you aren’t always wrestling them physically.” He is an easy one to crack. Just look at how he uses quotation marks like the way I described. By saying “wrestle”, he is implying something devoid of meaning from a logical stand-point, something ineffable that cannot be analyzed (so it might as well be useless).

This is idealism of an extreme tinge to it, but not properly organized or made sense in a holistic manner. He is discombobulated in his speech and reveals every single one of his cards without much care, he just bursts into expressing himself because he thinks he is at the pinnacle of power in that subreddit (energetically speaking) and gave up “finding a nagual”.

“Fancy, my “evil” IOB, used to drop cages on me. Until I ignored each variety. And then she stopped doing that.” What the fuck

“IOBs look like and do what you expect. And while everything they do is significant, it’s only significant in your case. And you’ll never figure out what it was, unless you can summon them daily and make friends with them.” This goes against our understanding of sorcery as something that pushes magick to a bodily transformation-like function of war and battle. This defeated attitude of “it will only do something for you and only you” is solipsistic in the same way magic is being criticized for not possessing economically relevant applications since the ancients. Until it found its first great application that was the monastery and the order of what D&G call the “celibate machines” in the early church. Now, this is the application of organic magic, the mutation, and the growth of the virtual form of capital as the techno-theocratic state. In short, he thinks IOBs are tulpas.

But a tulpa, as we’ve talked about through Lynch, is a projection that replicates a reticular manifestation through an artificial telos (intention towards a task). This telos itself could be “become sentient” or “become free”, which is the principle of the alchemical golem, the homunculus. This we know, of course, but it doesn’t seem to me that () knows that what he is thinking are IOBs are his own projections of virtual forms of tulpas.

It would make sense with his graph (that I just saw yesterday) tracing the whole circuitry of what the subreddit is about. He has pet projections (like the purple puffs or the tulpas) which he took from CC-adjacent stuff and his own things as someone who was involved later on, and he uses these pet projections as simulated accretions that can them be energized by the very act of practicing them. In other words, the subreddit has become a way to channel subjective intent into his projections (once he knows he cannot do some things due to the limitation of the nagual being lost).

He thinks he is doing this as a way to preserve the knowledge of these things.

You really think his IOBs are just chaos magick accretion/egregores?

Definitely, he does indeed pass that energy. He is someone in a bad loop. I don’t think he is interacting with true IOBs at all. They seem like devious projections. We gotta remember, Carlitos only did the IOB thing properly split. This guy is proclaiming that just about everyone can “summon them” and call them pet names and silence them, but they’re like interdimensional gods. Both ideas co-exist in his mind.

As you say correctly there is like a total focus on the later books, which I can see rules out a lot of old seers type magic like practices but I think throws away too much. Yes he is making light of interactions with things and encouraging the weird pet name thing, telling people they’ll get crazy powers, it’s not good.

Indeed, it is very weird and that’s why I just felt weird from the start when that guy showed up almost a year ago now.

Do you think like they are like gods? Aren’t they interdimensional beings? Just animals from totally different environments.

No, I mean like for ()  they’re at the same time powerful things like Gods and fairy-like minute things that you can pet-call and ignore. He thinks both of these things which makes no sense.

I see.

Indeed, I think it is. I agree that phenomenologically what is happening is bonkers and all over conceptual spaces of all kinds. But the way he phrases it is so dismissive of the entire thing. It’s like he wants to make anyone give up on sorcery. He closed himself off in a half-formed world, and the window to that, that connects what he’s made of his world with ours is simply that subreddit

It does indeed seem like he wants to make it impossible, 3 hours a day dark room , three hours a day recapitulation. I think he thinks he’s what’s left of the lineage. Carlos couldn’t really do it and produced people like this, maybe he’s even one of the better ones who knows.

I think it’s no joke when the naguals say CC fucked up bad and imagine his daily routine in the 90s. Mansions full of people like (), fighting for attention of someone who essentially became a guru.

He did fail, they knew he was going to fail, and he knew it too.

Yes, and this has some correlation with the entire mythos of Mexican indigenous culture as well. With the motif being that of loss.

As Genaro says at one point: ‘you’re the sorriest looking nagual I’ve ever seen’.

Just as some priests and conquistadores reported weird scenes where entire cities would just go silently away into the forest and leave all the gold and good for the “blonde people”, without a fight or fear just a really weird cosmology that hinges on the notion of loss.

That phrase got me hard when I first read it. It’s so melancholic. It reads like he doesn’t expect to ever find another full nagual. It’s like an ennui. Which in a way marks the failure of DJ already, of adapting fully.

We can see a lot of distaste towards DJ in the subreddit. The focus on later works and ways of life is so huge that it’s common that people there try to shift the blame of CC’s failure to DJ. And this thing I realized about the darkroom being something you “make” by altering the physiology of your pupils and ears is telling that my “youness” needs to, indeed, be tamed a bit. Or else we’re suggesting the “new darkroom” The numbing of the experimentee’s excitement is essential. Dan is acting in a way his warped circuitry makes him think is impeccable. If he stops, he breaks for good. Which is by itself a form of impeccability But weakened, expended.

It’s all such a mess and it reminds me for a lot of people and indeed the general positivity you do hear about CC is of course exactly the impeccability thing. Not the madness, which as discussed is in many ways no use to anyone. The systems’s usage to general people is just to pull themselves up a bit and try their best in what they do and don’t get hung up thinking shit over and over again. It is also clear someone could live as a warrior and never have anything to do with the madness. Indeed I myself with my general lack of ability in the liminal ways do end up considering exactly these notions, because once you face this kind of ‘there is nothing better to do whilst alive than temper your spirit’, this is quite hard to find fault with. What’s harder is trying to trim and improve and not sit there sneakily hoping ‘have i done enough trimming for something weird to happen, which is ridiculous.

I realised something, for me that is, one of the best ways to dislocate myself from the weirdness is exactly to get excited about all this writing stuff, it is as CC would describe a ‘shield.’ These kinds of exciting flows make me really engaged with the CEO generally and simultaneously nearly kill my actual ability to be silent, or certain feelings I get when I know I am closer to the weirdness, we could call them subtle AP shifts.