The best essay on recapitulation and how to I have ever read

[Red Heart]

This is from Zamurito. If you want results, this will get it for you. Its not easy, and its not fun, but it will clear the decks for the next big adventure; I promise.


Carlos Castaneda’s Recapitulation

Extracts from the Eagles Gift

A recapitulation is the forte of stalkers as the dreaming body is the forte of dreamers. It consists of recollecting one's life down to the most insignificant detail.

The first stage is a brief recounting of all the incidents in our lives that in an obvious manner stand out for examination.

The second stage is a more detailed recollection, which starts systematically at a point that could be the moment prior to the stalker sitting, and theoretically could extend to the moment of birth.

A perfect recapitulation can change a warrior as much, if not more, than the total control of the dreaming body. In this respect, dreaming and stalking lead to the same end, the entering into the third attention. It is important for a warrior, however, to know and practice both.

The key element in recapitulating is breathing. Recollecting is easy if one can reduce the area of stimulation around the body. Theoretically, stalkers have to remember every feeling that they have had in their lives, and this process begins with a breath.

Write down a list of the events to be relived. The procedure starts with an initial breath. Stalkers begin with their chin on the right shoulder and slowly inhale as they move their head over a hundred and eighty degree arc. The breath terminates on the left shoulder. Once the inhalation ends, the head goes back to a relaxed position. They exhale looking straight ahead.

The stalker then takes the event at the top of the list and remains with it until all the feelings expended in it have been recounted. As stalkers remember the feelings they invested in whatever it is that they are remembering, they inhale slowly, moving their heads from the right shoulder to the left. The function of this breathing is to restore energy. The luminous body is constantly creating cobweb like filaments, which are projected out of the luminous mass, propelled by emotions of any sort. Therefore, every situation of interaction, or every situation where feelings are involved, is potentially draining to the luminous body. By breathing from right to left while remembering a feeling, stalkers, through the magic of breathing, pick up the filaments they left behind. The next immediate breath is from left to right and it is an exhalation. With it stalkers eject filaments left in them by other luminous bodies involved in the event being recollected.

These are the mandatory preliminaries of stalking. Unless stalkers have gone through the preliminaries in order to retrieve the filaments they have left in the world, and particularly in order to reject those that others have left in them, there is no possibility of handling controlled folly, because those foreign filaments are the basis of one's limitless capacity for self-importance.

In order to practice controlled folly, since it is not a way to fool or chastise people or feel superior to them, one has to be capable of laughing at oneself. One of the results of a detailed recapitulation is genuine laughter upon coming face to face with the boring repetition of one's self-esteem, which is at the core of all human interactions.

The rule defines stalking and dreaming as arts; therefore they are something that one performs. The life-giving nature of breath is what also gives it its cleansing capacity. It is this capacity that makes a recapitulation into a practical matter.

A profound recapitulation is the most expedient means to lose the human form. Thus it is easier for stalkers, after recapitulating their lives, to make use of all the not-doings of the self, such as erasing personal history, losing self-importance, breaking routines and so forth.

Extracts from the Power of silence

A recapitulation of their lives, which sorcerers do, is the key to moving their assemblage points. Sorcerers start their recapitulation by thinking, by remembering the most important acts of their lives. From merely thinking about them they then move on to actually being at the site of the event. When they can do that--be at the site of the event--they have successfully shifted their assemblage point to the precise spot it was when the event took place. Bringing back the total event by means of shifting the assemblage point is known as sorcerers' recollection.

Recollecting is not the same as remembering. Remembering is dictated by the day-to-day type of thinking, while recollecting is dictated by the movement of the assemblage point.

Extracts from the Art of dreaming

To be ready for a true merging of your dreaming reality and your daily reality you must recapitulate your life further.

The recapitulation of our lives never ends, no matter how well we've done it once. The reason average people lack volition in their dreams is that they have never recapitulated and their lives are filled to capacity with heavily loaded emotions like memories, hopes, fears, et cetera, et cetera.

Sorcerers, in contrast, are relatively free from heavy, binding emotions, because of their recapitulation. And if something stops them, the assumption is that there still is something in them that is not quite clear.

Recapitulating and dreaming go hand in hand. As we regurgitate our lives, we get more and more airborne.

The recapitulation consists of reliving the totality of one's life experiences by remembering every possible minute detail of them. It's the essential factor in a dreamer’s redefinition and redeployment of energy. The recapitulation sets free energy imprisoned within us, and without this liberated energy dreaming is not possible.

Make a list of all the people you have met in your life, starting at the present. Arrange your list in an orderly fashion, breaking it down into areas of activity, such as jobs you have had, schools you have attended. Then go, without deviation, from the first person on your list to the last one, reliving every one of your interactions with them.

Recapitulating an event starts with one's mind arranging everything pertinent to what is being recapitulated. Arranging means reconstructing the event, piece by piece, starting by recollecting the physical details of the surroundings, then going to the person with whom one shared the interaction, and then going to oneself, to the examination of one's feelings.

The recapitulation is coupled with a natural, rhythmical breathing. Long exhalations are performed as the head moves gently and slowly from right to left; and long inhalations are taken as the head moves back from left to right. This act of moving the head from side to side is called "fanning the event." The mind examines the event from beginning to end while the body fans, on and on, everything the mind focuses on.

The sorcerers of antiquity, the inventors of the recapitulation, viewed breathing as a magical, life-giving act and used it, accordingly, as a magical vehicle; the exhalation, to eject the foreign energy left in them during the interaction being recapitulated and the inhalation to pull back the energy that they themselves left behind during the interaction.

It is more involved than an intellectual psychoanalysis. The recapitulation is a sorcerer's ploy to induce a minute but steady displacement of the assemblage point. The assemblage point, under the impact of reviewing past actions and feelings, goes back and forth between its present site and the site it occupied when the event being recapitulated took place.

The old sorcerers' rationale behind the recapitulation was their conviction that there is an inconceivable dissolving force in the universe, which makes organisms live by lending them awareness. That force also makes organisms die, in order to extract the same lent awareness, which organisms have enhanced through their life experiences. The old sorcerers believed that since it is our life experience this force is after, it is of supreme importance that it can be satisfied with a facsimile of our life experience: the recapitulation. Having had what it seeks, the dissolving force then lets sorcerers go, free to expand their capacity to perceive and reach with it the confines of time and space.

Dreaming requires every bit of our available energy. If there is a deep preoccupation in our life, there is no possibility of dreaming. If you think you are deeply preoccupied and your practices are not interrupted, it would be that you are only egomaniacally disturbed. To be preoccupied, for sorcerers, means that all your energy sources are taken on.

There is a second round of the recapitulation. It consists of a new recapitulation pattern. Construct a jigsaw puzzle by recapitulating, without any apparent order, different events of your life.

It'll be a mess if you let your pettiness choose the events you are going to recapitulate. Instead, let the spirit decide. Be silent, and then get to the event the spirit points out.

There are two basic rounds to the recapitulation; the first is called formality and rigidity, and the second fluidity.

Extracts from the Active side of Infinity

The way sorcerers perform the recapitulation is very formal. It consists of writing a list of all the people they have met, from the present to the very beginning of their lives. Once they have that list, they take the first person on it and recollect everything they can about that person. And I mean everything, every detail. It's better to recapitulate from the present to the past, because the memories of the present are fresh, and in this manner, the recollection ability is honed. What practitioners do is to recollect and breathe. They inhale slowly and deliberately, fanning the head from right to left, in a barely noticeable swing, and exhale in the same fashion.

The inhalations and exhalations should be natural; if they are too rapid, one enters into something called tiring breaths: breaths that require slower breathing afterward in order to calm down the muscles.

Begin making your list today. Divide it by years, by occupations, arrange it in any order you want to, but make it sequential, with the most recent person first, and end with Mommy and Daddy. And then, remember everything about them. No more ado than that. As you practice, you will realize what you're doing.

I am sure that you have bouts with intent. You intended something and anything that was opposed to it you had to let go. The touch of warrior-travelers is very light, although it is cultivated. The hand of a warrior-traveler begins as a heavy, gripping, iron hand but becomes like the hand of a ghost, a hand made of gossamer. Warrior-travelers leave no marks, no tracks. That's the challenge for warrior-travelers.

The power of the recapitulation is that it stirs up all the garbage of our lives and brings it to the surface.

I'm going to delineate the intricacies of awareness and perception, which are the basis of the recapitulation. I am going to present an arrangement of concepts that you should not take as sorcerers' theories under any conditions, because it is an arrangement formulated by the shamans of ancient Mexico as a result of seeing energy directly as it flows in the universe. I will present the units of this arrangement to you without any attempt at classifying them or ranking them by any predetermined standard.

I'm not interested in classifications. You have been classifying everything all your life. Now you are going to be forced to stay away from classifications. Classifications have a world of their own. After you begin to classify anything, the classification becomes alive, and it rules you. But since classifications never started as energy-giving affairs, they always remain like dead logs. They are not trees; they are merely logs.

The sorcerers of ancient Mexico saw that the universe at large is composed of energy fields in the form of luminous filaments. They saw zillions of them, wherever they turned to see. They also saw that those energy fields arranged themselves into currents of luminous fibers, streams that are constant, perennial forces in the universe. The current or stream of filaments that is related to the recapitulation was named by those sorcerers the dark sea of awareness, and also the Eagle.

Those sorcerers also found out that every creature in the universe is attached to the dark sea of awareness at a round point of luminosity that was apparent when those creatures were perceived as energy. On that point of luminosity, which the sorcerers of ancient Mexico called the assemblage point of human beings, zillions of energy fields from the universe at large, in the form of luminous filaments, converge and go through it. These energy fields are converted into sensory data, and the sensory data is then interpreted and perceived as the world we know. What turns the luminous fibers into sensory data is the dark sea of awareness. Sorcerers see this transformation and call it the glow of awareness, a sheen that extends like a halo around the assemblage point. I'm going to make a statement which, in the understanding of sorcerers, is central to comprehending the scope of the recapitulation.

What we call the senses in organisms is nothing but degrees of awareness. If we accept that the senses are the dark sea of awareness, we have to admit that the interpretation that the senses make of sensory data is also the dark sea of awareness. To face the world around us in the terms that we do is the result of the interpretation system of mankind with which every human being is equipped. Every organism in existence has to have an interpretation system that permits it to function in its surrounding.

The old sorcerers saw that at the moment of death, the dark sea of awareness sucked in, so to speak, through the assemblage point, the awareness of living creatures. They also saw that the dark sea of awareness had a moment's, let's say, hesitation when it was faced with sorcerers who had done a recounting of their lives. Unbeknownst to them, some had done it so thoroughly that the dark sea of awareness took their awareness in the form of their life experiences, but didn't touch their life force. Sorcerers had found out a gigantic truth about the forces of the universe: the dark sea of awareness wants only our life experiences, not our life force.

Sorcerers believe that as we recapitulate our lives, all the debris, as I told you, comes to the surface. We realize our inconsistencies, our repetitions, but something is us puts up a tremendous resistance to recapitulating. Sorcerers say that the road is free only after a gigantic upheaval, after the appearance on our screen of the memory of an event that shakes our foundations with its terrifying clarity of detail. It's the event that drags us to the actual moment that we lived it. Sorcerers call that event the usher, because from then on every event we touch on is relived, not merely remembered.

Walking is always something that precipitates memories. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico believed that everything we live we store as a sensation on the backs of the legs. They considered the backs of the legs to be the warehouse of man's personal history.

Walking will have you ready to begin this sorcerers' maneuver of finding an usher: an event in your life that you will remember with such clarity that it will serve as a spotlight to illuminate everything else in your recapitulation with the same, or comparable, clarity. Do what sorcerers call recapitulating pieces of a puzzle. Something will lead you to remember the event that will serve as your usher. Give it your best shot; do your best.

To recount events is magical for sorcerers. It isn't just telling stories. It is seeing the underlying fabric of events. This is the reason recounting is so important and vast.

Warrior-travelers roll with the punches. They go wherever the impulse may take them. The power of warrior-travelers is to be alert, to get maximum effect from minimal impulse. And above all, their power lies in not interfering. Events have a force, a gravity of their own, and travelers are just travelers. Everything around them is for their eyes alone. In this fashion, travelers construct the meaning of every situation, without ever asking how it happened this way or that way.

Today, you may remember an event that sums up your total life. We are always faced with a situation that is the same as one that we never resolved. Infinity always puts us in this terrible position of having to choose. We want infinity, but at the same time, we want to run away from it. You want to tell me to go and jump in a lake, but at the same time you are compelled to stay. It would be infinitely easier for you to just be compelled to stay.

Something in you will begin to collapse for sure. It has been collapsing all along, but it repairs itself very quickly every time its supports fail. I've told you already, we have two minds, and only one of them is truly ours. There is a secret option to the recapitulation. Just like I told you that there is a secret option to dying, an option that only sorcerers take. In the case of dying, the secret option is that human beings could retain their life force and relinquish only their awareness, the product of their lives. In the case of the recapitulation, the secret option that only sorcerers take is to choose to enhance their true minds.

Any haunting memory of your recollections can come only from your true mind. The other mind that we all have and share is, I would say, a cheap model: economy strength, one size fits all. But this is a subject that we will discuss later. What is at stake now is the advent of a disintegrating force. But not a force that is disintegrating; I don't mean it that way. It is disintegrating what the sorcerers call the foreign installation, which exists in you and in every other human being. The effect of the force that is descending on you, which is disintegrating the foreign installation, is that it pulls sorcerers out of their syntax.

I know how difficult it is for you to deal with this facet of your life. Every sorcerer that I know has gone through it. The males going through it suffer infinitely more damage than the females. I suppose it's the condition of women to be more durable. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico acting as a group, tried their best to buttress the impact of this disintegrating force. In our day, we have no means of acting as a group so we must brace ourselves to face in solitude a force that will sweep us away from language, for there is no way to describe adequately what is going on.

Sorcerers face the unknown in the most common incidents one can imagine. When they are confronted with it, and cannot interpret what they are perceiving, they have to rely on an outside source for direction. I've called that source infinity, or the voice of the spirit. If sorcerers don't try to be rational about what can't be rationalized, the spirit unerringly tells them what's what.

Infinity is a force that has a voice and is conscious of itself. Consequently, I have prepared you to be ready to listen to that voice and act efficiently always, but without antecedents, using as little as possible the railings of the a priori



A recapitulation is the forte of stalkers as the dreaming body is the forte of dreamers . It consists of recollecting one's life down to the most insignificant detail.

The first stage is a brief recounting of all the incidents in our lives that in an obvious manner stand out for examination.

The second stage is a more detailed recollection, which starts systematically at a point that could be the moment prior to the stalker sitting, and theoretically could extend to the moment of birth.

A perfect recapitulation can change a warrior as much, if not more, than the total control of the dreaming body . In this respect, dreaming and stalking lead to the same end, the entering into the third attention. It is important for a warrior, however, to know and practice both.

The key element in recapitulating is breathing. Recollecting is easy if one can reduce the area of stimulation around the body. Theoretically, stalkers have to remember every feeling that they have had in their lives, and this process begins with a breath.

Write down a list of the events to be relived. The procedure starts with an initial breath. Stalkers begin with their chin on the right shoulder and slowly inhale as they move their head over a hundred and eighty degree arc. The breath terminates on the left shoulder. Once the inhalation ends, the head goes back to a relaxed position. They exhale looking straight ahead.

The stalker then takes the event at the top of the list and remains with it until all the feelings expended in it have been recounted. As stalkers remember the feelings they invested in whatever it is that they are remembering, they inhale slowly, moving their heads from the right shoulder to the left. The function of this breathing is to restore energy. The luminous body is constantly creating cobweb like filaments, which are projected out of the luminous mass, propelled by emotions of any sort. Therefore, every situation of interaction, or every situation where feelings are involved, is potentially draining to the luminous body. By breathing from right to left while remembering a feeling, stalkers , through the magic of breathing, pick up the filaments they left behind. The next immediate breath is from left to right and it is an exhalation. With it stalkers eject filaments left in them by other luminous bodies involved in the event being recollected.

These are the mandatory preliminaries of stalking . Unless stalkers have gone through the preliminaries in order to retrieve the filaments they have left in the world, and particularly in order to reject those that others have left in them, there is no possibility of handling controlled folly, because those foreign filaments are the basis of one's limitless capacity for self-importance.

In order to practice controlled folly, since it is not a way to fool or chastise people or feel superior to them, one has to be capable of laughing at oneself. One of the results of a detailed recapitulation is genuine laughter upon coming face to face with the boring repetition of one's self-esteem, which is at the core of all human interactions.

The rule defines stalking and dreaming as arts; therefore they are something that one performs. The life-giving nature of breath is what also gives it its cleansing capacity. It is this capacity that makes a recapitulation into a practical matter.

A profound recapitulation is the most expedient means to lose the human form. Thus it is easier for stalkers , after recapitulating their lives, to make use of all the not-doings of the self, such as erasing personal history, losing self-importance, breaking routines and so forth.

[Gonzo]

Here's a variation on the technique provided by Michael King called "The Body Scan".

A. Place yourself, preferably in the early night, in a resting
environment. Be naked in order that the pressures of fabrics not
distract from your perceptions. Attempt to be comfortable in
a very dimly lit room, lying upon your back, face up.

B. Close your eyes, and attempt to place yourself into a form
of quiet mind.

C. Mentally, upon your focus of intent, imagine that there is an
extraordinarily intense beam of light. The beam of light is
flooding the soles of your feet. Feel that intensity. Perceive
how the feet feel. Ask if they are experiencing emotions. Hold
the perception of the light as the feet become warm. Hold the
light in that position.

D. When the feet warm, move the light with mental focus, to
the tips of the toes. Ask the same questions ("the questions"):
How they feel, are there emotions, are there perceptions?.

E. When these body surfaces are thoroughly explored and understood
to the limit of their efficiency at this "first" exercise, move
the light intensity, progressively, through the body, the next
position being the ankles. Ask "the questions".

F. Continue this slow and delicate process carefully, through
the lower and upper legs, pelvis, genitalia, being examining
with "the questions" at each step. Move through the torso.

G. The features of the face can be as provocative as the other
segments of the study.

What results could very well be quite altering for you. To get to
"the source code" that is the subject of the seeker, this
process will be required to be repeated about every other night
until much is learned. On the second scan, the responses will
be very different - very - as another layer of self will
then be investigated upon that occasion.