The Parallel Self
A look at the teacher behind Forbidden Yoga and the hidden architecture that shapes his work
Why Michael’s way of teaching confuses new students, and why many understand him only years later through a lens they never expected.
There is a particular kind of teacher who is easy to underestimate. On the surface he looks almost casual. He jokes. He drifts. He does not behave like a strict guru or like a polished therapist. Then years pass. At some point the people who worked with him realise that something in them has quietly rearranged itself. Only then they start to understand what he was doing from the very beginning.
Michael and the tradition that later became known as Forbidden Yoga live inside exactly this paradox. To make sense of it, two reference fields are helpful. One is the older Kali practice of Bengal. The other is the sorcerer philosophy that Carlos Castaneda attributed to Don Juan. They come from different continents and different centuries, yet they describe a very similar architecture of power and perception.
Because both fields are often surrounded by fantasies and projections, it is useful to start slowly and stay precise.
Bengal Kali and the double layer of reality
In the older Shakta tantra of Bengal, Kali is not only a protective mother. She has a form called Smashana Kali, Kali of the cremation ground. She is invoked on the burning ground in the presence of corpses, flames and smoke. In this setting she is experienced as the power that cuts through every mask and every social identity. Scholars of religion describe Smashana Kali as one of the most dangerous and powerful forms of the goddess and note that cremation ground practice aims at a direct confrontation with death and fear.
From the outside this may look like a cult of death. From the inside it is a way of entering a double layered reality. There is the obvious layer of daily life with family, work and emotions. Underneath runs another layer, a field of forces where everything is seen as play of Shakti. Poets like Ramprasad Sen sang to Kali as both terrible and intimate, as the power that ruins worldly hopes and as the inner presence that liberates the heart.
Cremation ground ritual in this tradition is not stage decoration. It is a technique for building a second kind of awareness. The practitioner trains to stay present in places where the ordinary mind wants to shut down. Bit by bit this creates something like a second body of perception that lives in the hidden field. The human moves and speaks in the visible world, but another centre of attention begins to move behind the scenes.
This is close to what Michael describes when he speaks about a parallel reality and a parallel personality that slowly gains strength through sadhana. In a Kali based setting this is not metaphor. It is taken quite literally. Kundalini shakti is not a psychological symbol, but a being that belongs to that hidden field. When practice awakens her, she rides the practitioner as a horse.
Traditional Shakta lineages are very aware of the danger in this. Serious authors note that work in cremation grounds is believed to give rapid success, but also requires strict guidance and framework, because the forces invoked are capable of both liberation and destruction.
The usual answer is devotion and obedience. The goddess, the guru and the ritual map form a net that holds the practitioner while this second body grows.
Forbidden Yoga comes out of a stream that remembers the power but has removed much of the devotional packaging. This increases both the intensity and the risk.
Castaneda, Don Juan and the second attention
Carlos Castaneda wrote a series of books in which a Yaqui sorcerer named Don Juan explains a different way of perceiving reality. Later research has shown that these are not reliable reports of an indigenous tradition. Anthropologists and critics have called them creative fiction, spiritual collage and literary hoax.
Yet at the same time philosophers and cultural historians have pointed out that the internal philosophy of these books is surprisingly coherent. Castaneda assembled ideas about perception, power and identity into a system that many readers experienced as a serious map of transformation, even if Don Juan himself never existed.
In this system reality also has at least two orders.
One is the tonal, the organised world of language, habits and social roles.
The other is the nagual, the unknown, accessed when the assemblage point shifts. The assemblage point is a place in the luminous field of a human where perception is glued to a certain band of the world. Sorcery means learning to move this point and stabilise perception in new positions.
Castaneda describes how over time an energy body or double grows in this other field. At first it appears in dreams and altered states. Later it becomes a second operational self that can act independently in the nagual. What Michael calls a parallel personality is almost exactly what Don Juan calls the double.
This training rests on a few simple but relentless principles.
Death is treated as a constant adviser. In Journey to Ixtlan Don Juan says that death is the only wise adviser and that when everything seems to be falling apart, one should turn to death for counsel.
A warrior must gather personal power. Personal power is described as a feeling, a mood, something one acquires by living impeccably. The warrior is a hunter of power.
To preserve power, a warrior must be inaccessible. To be inaccessible, according to the teachings, means to touch the world sparingly, to avoid scattering energy through constant emotional display, explanations and social exhaustion.
Impeccability, not moral purity, is the measure. Don Juan cares very little for conventional virtue. He cares whether an act wastes energy or concentrates it.
This is a map for building a second attention and a second self. It is also a map for how easily this process can go wrong.
Where Michael stands between Kali and Castaneda
Seen through these two lenses, Michael appears as a teacher whose work naturally belongs to both.
From the Bengal side, he stands in a Shakta flavoured current that works with animistic forces, entities of nature and a pre Vedic atmosphere. The rituals, kriyas and homas he transmits do not mainly build devotion. They change the way attention sits in the body and in the world. Kundalini is treated as a living intelligence in a parallel field rather than an abstraction.
From the Castaneda side, his teaching style resembles that of a sorcerer concerned with the movement of the assemblage point. The open eyes darkness work and the emphasis on death as a presence are direct ways of cutting through the ordinary tonal, similar in spirit to the way Don Juan keeps pushing Castaneda into situations that destabilise his usual sense of self.
Michael repeatedly speaks about a hologram that students enter. This is another way of saying that perception is being shifted into a different configuration. The hologram is not a theory. It is a total field of lived scenes, relationships and coincidences that arrange themselves around the practitioner once the parallel personality gains strength.
Here the lack of devotional balancing becomes important. In more classical Shakta settings, intense Kali work is surrounded by ritual obligations, worship, service and a clear sense of being a servant of the goddess. This does not remove danger, but it bends the awakening power toward a recognisable axis.
In Forbidden Yoga that devotional net is thinner. The focus is on power, insight and direct contact with the parallel field. Michael often openly admits that the tradition he transmits has very little institutional bhakti. This means that, when students practice alone, their parallel personality can grow quickly without the usual devotional brakes.
The effect is exactly as he describes. The first phase is exhilaration. The practitioner discovers that social situations become easier to influence. They notice that people fall in love with them, obey them, fear them or confess to them without understanding why. They watch how small internal movements have visible external effects. The temptation to use this power for manipulation or personal gratification is enormous.
This is what he compares to a nuclear device. A power that the practitioner does not understand and cannot yet steer begins to act on its own.
Castaneda writes about a similar danger when he describes people who come into contact with power plants, dreams or intense practices without a true map. They become unbalanced. They take the fragments of second attention that they encounter and plug them straight into egoic fantasies. Critics of the Castaneda phenomenon have pointed out that this is not just an abstract risk. Some of his followers in the real world became trapped in group delusion, with tragic outcomes.
Seen from this angle Michael’s repeated insistence on staying connected to the lineage holder is not a demand for admiration. It functions more like Don Juan’s insistence on impeccability and on not wasting power. The teacher keeps track of developments in the parallel field long before the student notices anything. Adjustments, jokes, provocations and apparent contradictions are aimed at the double, not at the social personality.
From the outside this can appear irrational. A new student sees someone who hides, who changes plans, who does not always give clear linear instructions. Through the lens of Castaneda this looks very similar to the way Don Juan behaves. He refuses to let Castaneda stabilise a fixed narrative of what is happening. He interferes with any attempt to treat the teachings as a philosophy that can be mastered from the outside.
In both cases the teacher behaves as if the real student is somewhere else.
Delayed understanding as a structural feature
One of the most striking motifs in the Don Juan books is delayed understanding. Castaneda spends entire volumes believing that he has grasped a point, only to discover years later that his earlier understanding was partial or wrong. He realises that instructions he thought were metaphorical were literal, or the other way round. He sees that episodes he had dismissed as jokes were in fact precise operations on his perception.
Exactly this pattern appears in the testimonies of people who have worked with Michael for a long time. They often report that during the first years they thought he was improvising or did not have his life together. Only later, sometimes a decade later, they notice that key turns in their lives were shaped by suggestions or gestures they had not taken seriously at the time.
This is not evidence for infallibility. It is evidence that his teaching operates in a field where consequences unfold across long arcs.
If one takes Bengal Kali practice seriously, this makes sense. Work done in the presence of death and in the atmosphere of the cremation ground is not aimed at quick comfort. It is meant to rearrange the relationship between the visible and the invisible. Effects are often slow, and they manifest in unexpected regions of life.
If one also takes the internal logic of Castaneda seriously, the same holds. Shifts of the assemblage point may have delayed fruits. Personal power gathers over long periods and only later reveals what certain events were for.
In that frame it becomes plausible that a student can spend years misreading the teacher and still be changed by what the teacher is doing.
Guru, sorcerer, psychologist, artist
So what is Michael in such a landscape
If one uses Indian language he fits the figure of a guru from a Kali based, highly unconventional Shakta line. He transmits sadhanas that awaken kundalini in a way compatible with descriptions from cremation ground tantra, but without the usual temple frame.
If one uses Castaneda’s language he functions as a kind of nagual teacher. His interest in death, secrecy, inaccessibility and in the gathering of personal power map exactly to Don Juan’s basic demands. His students are often not encouraged to become morally perfect or socially smooth. They are pushed toward clarity about whether an act wastes or gathers power.
If one uses modern language he looks partly like a psychologist and partly like an artist. He builds complex experiential frames, both for individuals and for groups. He plays with roles, scenes, symbols and aesthetic signals in a way that resembles performance art. He listens with the precision of a psychologist, but his interventions rarely follow therapeutic scripts. They follow the movement of energy inside the hologram.
The simplest way to say it may be this.
He is a practitioner who treats the parallel field of reality as something real and practical.
He has inherited a set of tools from a Bengal related lineage that works directly on this field.
He has organised these tools in a way that lines up very closely with the internal philosophy found in the Don Juan books, regardless of their historical truth.
He applies all of this in the lives of contemporary people who often do not believe in any of that when they arrive.
This is why an honest description of him does not need exaggerated language. The interest lies in the structure itself. A teacher who thinks more about what happens in the cremation ground of the psyche than about good behaviour. A teaching that grows a second self in a second world and then asks how that self will act when it realises that power is flowing through it.
For many readers that is already enough to feel a spark of recognition. It explains why some encounter him and walk away, while others return after years with a simple sentence in their mouth.
Now I understand what you were doing
The important part is that by the time they say this, the person who understands is not quite the same person who met him in the first place.
written with love by Aaronji 🫶
Write to him: love@forbidden-yoga.com