The following subject is one of the thorniest by far; yet, at the same time, it provides the answer to many questions that, sooner or later, everybody has.
Why are human beings in the present condition? Why are we able to express ingeniousness, imagination, intelligence, understanding, love, in short, everything that is beautiful in us; and at the same time we manifest cruelty, absolute stupidity, fatal rigidity, desperation, unlimited ferociousness, greed…all the worst that exists?
Moreover, why do we voluntarily lock ourselves into social cages without escape?
Why do we accept behaviors as socially normal, when, under closer examination, they seem to be dictated by a strange form of mental illness? Wars, homicide and institutionalized violence, devastation of the world we live in without any consideration for the future survival of our own species, racism in its different forms…the list is very long.
Not to mention emotional and mental instability, the lack of a clear vision of existence, and contradictory, individual behavior.
There is one explanation: it is at the same time the simplest and the most absurd. Our thoughts do not belong to us, what we believe to be our mind is actually the mind of an invader, an alien mind installed in us for a very precise purpose.
When I say, “alien,” I mean something “other than us,” there is no need to go bother the extraterrestrials: there is already a lot more in this world than we believe. Our parasite is nothing but another form of life that we normally do not perceive but that, I add, could actually be perceived. It is the bogeyman we see as children, but whose perception we cannot keep maintaining, or else our peers will discriminate against us; and so we, too, choose to stop perceiving them.
Also in this case, the Toltecs are not lacking in imagination and have enjoyed finding the most varied names to define these beings. Carlos Castaneda deals with them thoroughly in The Active Side of Infinity, describing the moment in which Don Juan Matus guides him to perceive them, to see them clearly, calling them voladores, (the flyers). And also Armando Torres talks about them in Encounters with the Nagual and in The Secret of the Plumed Serpent. So, I will not repeat here what they have already described; rather, I will try to supply you with further, useful information.
In my lineage, they are called “suggesters,” and this should give you a precise idea of what they do continuously.
Why can’t you turn off your thoughts at will? That is, if the inner dialogue is a part of me, I should be able to control it, at least to some degree. Why, then, does it seem to be an impossible task?
It is simple: because the thoughts that arrive to you are not yours.
These beings, the suggesters, affect all our thoughts, feelings, and actions. They have shaped our entire society; and they have done all of this with the purpose of using us as a source of food. They squeeze us like lemons, drawing out every drop of useful energy, leaving us only with the vital minimum.
Furthermore, they have supplied us with the illusion of being at the top of the food chain, of dominating the world and not being subject to any form of predation. This belief greatly helps the parasite’s task.
Indeed, the degree of control that the suggester has over us is essentially based on the concentration of the attention toward ourselves: what in Castaneda’s books is defined as the “feeling of self-importance.”
The founding act, the decision on which warriors base all of their future actions, is to get rid of the alien mind; thus, this war for freedom inevitably goes through the battle against the concentration on the self.
This fight is not at all banal or simple. Actually, it is the true battle that warriors fight to repossess the totality of their own being. Our self-image has been nourished and fattened up for many, many years. We love it so much, we have been pampering it for ever, it has been cosseted by us, and it has been coddled by our parents, friends, lovers, even by our enemies, by providing energy to our explosions of self-pity and egomania…. The only action that has ever counted in the course of our existence as normal and socially accepted persons (in that portion of society that interests us, that is, that satisfies our self-image) is the infinite reiteration of I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I….
We are holding on with our nails and teeth to our self-image and everything that nourishes it.
First of all, our personal history: we love it, what a nice weight to carry around. We always end up telling the same things. And they also seem to us as always interesting and worthy of sharing; instead, with time they become endless boredom.
Then, of course, come our beloved habits, that make us so recognizable…by whom?
The repetition of the same thought-feeling-action cycles.
Defending one’s personal beliefs up to extreme consequences…beliefs that have been accepted during the course of one’s life essentially in support to one’s self-image.
The feeling of personal importance, which is more exactly defined as continuous and obsessive “attention to the self,” has founded our entire civilization, religions, myths, science, and personal relations; everything is built to the sole purpose of adoring, admiring, evaluating, sizing up oneself in the image of man.
And then, beliefs, beliefs, beliefs….
Well, let us start dismantling this whole construction.
Remember, to begin with, that we are only incidentally human beings and that this fortuitousness keeps its hold only through the beliefs we have put together in the course of our lives. You are only the position of your assemblage point, nothing more.
However, coming to this awareness cannot be casual. What truly puts the suggester in flight is the development of a special discipline generated from the center for the vibratory aspect of energy.
But how can one obtain this?
Through all that warriors do. In particular, through recapitulation, permanent gazing, and all those aspects of stalking that fight habits and the feeling of personal importance.
A practical and immediate suggestion: use the impulses from the suggester to its own disadvantage. Your feelings channel energy through the modulated use of attention; it is no use opposing and starting an inner fight that would only be to its advantage. Instead, one should deflect the direction of the energy, once it has become available. This way, you can use the suggester’s impulses to modify the state of reality, to shift the assemblage point once it has been freed from its habitual position. This operation is called “discipline of sentiments” and is one of the founding nuclei of stalking.
In their fight for freedom, warriors get from the alien mind the maximum possible advantage. They use the challenge with the suggester to perfectly fine-tune the basics of stalking. Thanks to their discipline and application of an unbending intent, they eventually can create an energy depression that forces the suggester to make a final choice: to flee or to give up to the warrior most of its energetic availability…beside other useful things.
