Thread: Castaneda's "Hands" technique Properly explained.

20 years to find your hands? wow. took me a couple months. at first they were all big and hairy. But I used mirror gazing in waking life to stabilize my dream body. Now every time I see my hands they are mine. Unless i've shape shifted recently.

A few comments about dream control, lucidity, and reality checks - I view these as being just different forms of manipulating awareness. Our awareness has to focus somewhere and our ability to focus that awareness is key regardless of where it may end up in dreams, or for that matter, everyday life.

Using Castaneda's deeper energetic model, dreaming is in fact a movement of a particular part of the energy body he calls the assemblage point (AP). It is his contention that it is the point at which an individual energy being assembles reality. He also has stated that it is our individual attachment point to the universal energy which he calls the sea of awareness or infinity. In normal awareness of this world the AP sits between the shoulder blades about an arm's reach away - right on the surface of the sphere of the energy body. In dreaming or in other non ordinary states, the AP moves away from this customary position and the world perceived literally changes.

Getting back to dreaming, the movement of the AP is natural while we sleep and so we perceive new realities, but our focus is poor simply because we haven't learned to control it well in that state. Using the "hands technique" we learn to anchor our focus at a particular new position and this position is often very arbitrary at the beginning. The point is to attain pure focus (lucidity) at this point by keeping the AP in place. Usually in a dream the AP is all over the place, hence the need to get it focused. This kind of focus can in time lead to a very specialized use of awareness which Castaneda calls "attention". With time we learn to have clear attention in the dream state regardless of where the AP ends up. He calls this attention "dreaming attention" or "the second attention".

It is interesting to note that Don Juan maintained that the everyday world is in fact just a position of the AP - a position that is not really a natural fact of being human, but rather a trained position. We learned from all the people around us to anchor our attention here in this exact world uniformly. That process in none other than the act of growing up, of becoming socialized. That is why he refers to this world as "the first attention." In truth there is no stable world except from the point of view of attention, the fine focusing of awareness via the position of the AP. If you can move the AP at will and with full awareness, then you are a sorcerer who has endless worlds at his command.

So says Castaneda. So what is a reality check? In his terms, an attempt to anchor the AP to any given new dreaming position. Or to be more abstract, to attempt to find a new position to anchor one's awareness to the infinite, to the sea of awareness. We always have that connection, but are unaware of it in everyday life or in everyday dreams.

Nice explanation been there. This is Exactly how I understand this technique.