Don Juan said "The double is created through dreaming." Not meaning only while we're asleep, but with the Intent of dreaming as well. Dreaming awake. Dreaming the world into being. Dreaming as an act of Creation.
My own take on it is: "The double is created through Intent." But, again, not necessarily the direct intent to create a double. Many times, shamanism and sorcery are back-door visitors - meaning that they must be viewed in little glances, from the corner of the third eye. Try to look at it head-on and it will vanish. Try to comprehend it before experiencing it, it may elude you.
For that reason, when I say creating the double is a matter of Intent, I'm not saying that we set out to create the double like baking a cake, go through a process, and when we're done, the double is standing before us. Instead, the intent which creates the double is not the intent TO create the double. My own processes have worked something like this, though in no particular order. I'm only numbering them to point out that they are separate actions/intentions, but all interconnected.
1. "The hurt is what will make you hunt a cure." The double is created through longing, ache, hurt, want, need, the desire to conjoin with the infinite, with the unknown, with some eternal "other" which has been spoken of in shamanism since the dawn of time. At the stage of longing, the double may be experienced only as the longing itself, what some have called the call of the unknown, the call of the wild.
2. The double CAN be strengthened through imagination. Having been a professional fiction writer for many years, I "created" many characters who have attributes of my double. This act of imagination is part of a creative process which some may be inclined to pursue, others not at all. For myself, I think my writing helped me to form the paradigm of the double, and may indeed be one reason Orlando manifested in the flesh - though not until many, many, many years later. The act of imagination could be described also as the thoughtform from which reality flows if that is the intent of the sorcerer. And, indeed, at the time I was writing, I had no idea about any of this. It was simply a natural step for me, and part of how I earned my Indian name: Thinks-on-Paper.
3. The double may be experienced and expressed through gnosis, though for myself that was a process which came into being LONG after all of the above. Perhaps it could be said that I only learned how to hear it and express it without my own agendas and self-importance getting in the way after many years of working with the warrior's path.
4. The double is a self-resolving paradox, which is directly connected to #3 above. What most warriors fail to grasp, and where quantum shamanism provides a much clearer opportunity for direct comprehension as an enhancement to intuitive awareness, is this: when you begin to follow the path and do the work required to gather your cohesion (the great work, the work of evolution, the path), you are actually going through the process which re-defines you as an eternal being. That eternal being is the double -- and once it takes its symbolic first breath, it is alive ubiquitously throughout the space-time continuum, simultaneously in every molecule or speck of dark matter scattered throughout all of creation and beyond. Of course, what that means is that at THAT point, the double is also within YOU -- FROM THE MOMENT YOU WERE CONCEIVED, and even before that. BUT... it is only by going through the Doings that you learn how to see that, how to communicate with it, how to listen so that you might actually learn HOW to create it so that it can exist in the first place. At that point, it is said, "The double is now dreaming you." But again I think some terminology can get in the way, so let's use the terms, "The double is teaching you what you need to know to become an eternal being."
Quantum Shaman, 2003
From a post to The Shaman's Rattle
http://www.quantumshaman.com/html/double1.htm
