KPFA Radio Interview - 1968

Radio interview with Carlos Castaneda - 1968 "Don Juan: The Sorcerer"

Q:
For six years from 1960-66 Carlos Castaneda served as an apprentice to a Yaqui Indian brujo, or sorcerer named don Juan. During those years, Mr. Castaneda was a graduate student in Anthropology at UCLA. His experiences with don Juan lead him into a strange world of shamanistic lore and psychedelic experience and adventures in what Mr. Castaneda calls states of non ordinary reality, some of which were frightening in the extreme, and all of which are fascinating in the extreme. His experiences with don Juan are recounted in a book which has been published this year by the University of California Press called "The Teachings of don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge". Mr. Castaneda is with us here at KPFA today and has agreed to discuss the book and his experiences with don Juan. Let me begin by asking you how you managed to meet this remarkable personality, don Juan, and can you give us some idea what sort of a person he is?

CC:
I met don Juan in a rather fortuitous manner. I was doing, at the time in 1960, I was doing, I was collecting ethnographic data on the use of medicinal plants among the Arizona Indians. And a friend of mine who was my guide on that enterprise knew about don Juan. He knew that don Juan was a very learned man in the use of plants and he intended to introduce me to him, but he never got around to do that. One day when I was about to return to Los Angeles, we happened to see him at a bus station, and my friend went over to talk to him. Then he introduced me to the man and I began to tell him that my interests was plants, and that, especially about peyote, because somebody had told me that this old man was very learned in the use of peyote. And we talked for about 15 minutes while he was waiting for his bus, or rather I did all the talking and he didn't say anything at all. He kept on staring at me from time to time and that made me very uncomfortable because I didn't know anything about peyote, and he seemed to have seen through me. After about 15 minutes he got up and said that perhaps I could come to his house sometime where we could talk with more ease, and he just left. And I thought that the attempt to meet him was a failure because I didn't get anything out of him. And my friend thought that it was very common to get a reaction like that from the old man because he was very eccentric. But I returned again perhaps a month later and I began to search for him. I didn't know where he lived, but I found out later where his house was and I came to see him. He, at first, you know, I approached him as a friend. I liked, for some reason, I liked the way he looked at me at the bus depot. There was something very peculiar about the way he stares at people. And he doesn't stare, usually he doesn't look at anybody straight in the eye, but sometimes he does that and it's very remarkable. And it was more that stare which made me go to see him than my interest in anthropological work. So I came various times and we developed a sort of friendship. He has a great sense of humor and that eased the things up.

Q:
About how old a man was he when you met him?

CC:
Oh he was in his late 60's, 69, or something like that.

Q:
Now, you identify him in the book as a brujo. Can you give us some idea of what this means and to what extent don Juan is connected, if at all, with some sort of an ethnic background, a tribal background or is he pretty much of a lone wolf?

CC:
The word brujos, the Spanish conception, it could be translated in various ways, in English could render a sorcerer, witch, medicine man or herbalist or curer, and, of course, the technical word shaman. Don Juan does not relate, or does not define himself in any of those ways. He thinks of himself, perhaps he is a man of knowledge.

Q:
That's the term he uses, man of knowledge?

CC:
He uses man of knowledge or one who knows. He uses that interchangeably. In as far as his tribal allegiances, I think he, don Juan, is very much, I think his emotional ties are with the Yaquis of Sonora since his father was a Yaqui from one of the towns in Sonora, one of the Yaqui towns. But his mother was from Arizona. Thus he has sort of a divided origin which makes him very much a marginal man. At the present he has family in Sonora, but he doesn't live there. He lives there part of the time, perhaps I should say.

Q:
Does he have any formal livelihood? How does he earn his way in the world?

CC:
I wouldn't be able to, to, to discuss that, rather I don't think that I could at the moment.

Q:
One point I'd like to clear up - it's something that I wondered about as I read the book. The book consisted in large part of recordings of your own experiences in using the herbs and mushrooms and so on that don Juan introduced you to, and long conversations with don Juan. How were you able, just as a technical problem, how were you able to keep track of your experiences over such a long period of time. How were you able to record all of this?

CC:
It seems difficult, but since one of the items of the learning process of recapitulation of whatever you experience, in order to remember everything that happened, I had to make mental notes of all the steps, of all the things that I saw, all the events that occurred during the states of, let's say, expanded consciousness or whatever. And then it was easy to translate them into writing after, because I had them all meticulously filed, sort of, in my mind. That's as the experience itself goes, but then the questions and answers I simply wrote them down.

Q:
You were able to take notes while you were....

CC:
Not at the very beginning of our relationship I never took any notes. I took notes in the covert manner. I had a pad of paper inside my pockets, you know, big pockets on my jacket. I used to write inside my pockets. It's a technique ethnographers use sometimes that they convert notes and then, of course. you have to work very hard to decipher the way they're written. But it has to be done very quickly, very fast. As soon as you have time; you cannot postpone anything. You cannot let it go for the next day, cause you lose everything. Since I think I work compulsively, I was capable of writing down everything that took place very, very shortly after the events themselves.

Q:
I must say that many of the dialogues are extremely fascinating documents. Don Juan, as you record his remarks has a certain amount of eloquence and imagination.

CC:
Well one thing, he's very artful with usual words and he thinks of himself as a talker, although he doesn't like to talk. But he thinks that talking is his predilection, as other men of knowledge have all the predilections like movement, balance. His is talking. That is my good fortune to find a man that would have the same predilection that I have.

Q:
Now, one of the things that's most impressive about the book is the remarkable chances that you seem to have taken under don Juan's tutelage; that is, he introduced you to various chemicals, substances, some of which, clearly I suppose could have been fatal if they had not been used carefully. How did you manage to work up sufficient trust in this man to down all of the concoctions that he put before you?

CC:
The way the books present it seems to heighten some dramatic sequences, which is, I'm afraid, not true real life. There are enormous gaps in between in which ordinary things took place, that are not included. I didn't include in the book because they did not pertain to the system I wanted to portray, so I just simply took them away, you see. And that means that the gaps between those very height states, you know, whatever, says that I remove things that are continuous crescendos, in kind of sequence leading to a very dramatic solution. But in real life it was a very simple matter because it took years in between, months pass in between them, and in the meantime we did all kinds of things. We even went hunting. He told me how to trap things, set traps, very old, old ways of setting a trap, and how to catch rattlesnakes. He told me how to prepare rattlesnakes, in fact. And so that eases up, you see, the distrust or the fear.

Q:
I see. So there was a chance for you to build up a tremendous amount of confidence in this man.

CC:
Yes, we spent a lot of time together. He never told me what he was gonna do, anyways. By the time I realized, I was already too deep into to turn back.

Q:
Now, the heart of the book, at least as far as my reading was concerned, certainly the most fascinating part of the book, has to do with your experiences with what you term non-ordinary reality, and many of these experiences as you recount them have a great deal of cogency to them; that is, they are experiences that seem to come very close to demonstrating the validity of practices like divination, and then on the other hand you have experiences that, at the time, seemed to have been tremendously vivid experiences of flight and of being transformed into various animal forms, and often you suggest a sense of some ultimate revelation taking place. What sense do you make of these experiences now as you look back on them all? What seems to have been valid about them and how was don Juan, do you feel, seem able to control or predict what these experiences would be?

CC:
Well, in as far as making sense out of them, I think as an anthropologist, I think, the way I had done it, I could use them as grounds for, say, set up a problem in anthropology, but that doesn't mean that I understand them or use them in any way. I could just employ them to construct a system, perhaps. But if I will view them from the point of view of a non-European man, maybe shaman or perhaps a Yaqui, I think the experiences are, they are designed to produce the knowledge that reality of consensus is only a very small segment of the total range of what we could feel as real. If we could learn to code reality or stimuli the way a shaman does, perhaps we could elongate our range of what we call real.

Q:
What do you mean by that, how does a shaman like don Juan code stimuli?

CC:
For instance, in the idea that a man could actually turn into a cricket or a mountain lion or a bird, is to me, this is my personal conclusion, it's a way of intaking a stimuli and readapting it. I suppose the stimuli is there, anybody who would take a hallucinogenic plant or a chemical produced in a laboratory, I think will experience more or less the same distortion. We call it distortion of reality.

But the shamans, I think, have learned through usage in thousands of years, perhaps, of practice, they have learned to reclassify the stimuli encoded in a different way. The only way we have to code it is as hallucination, madness. That's our system of codification. We cannot conceive that one could turn into a crow, for instance. Q:
This was your experience under don Juan's tutelage?

CC:
Yes. As a European I refuse to believe that one could do it, you see. But...

Q:
But it was a tremendously vivid experience when you had it...

CC:
Well it was hard to say, it was real, that's my only way of describing it. But now you see the things over, if I would be allowed to analyze it, I think, you know, what he was trying to do was to teach me another way of coding reality, another way of putting it into a propitious frame that could turn into a different interpretation.

Q:
I thought the passage in the book where these very different orientations toward reality that you had, and don Juan had, the point at which it came through most clearly to me, was the point in which you question him about your own experience of apparent flight. And you finally came around to asking if you had been chained to a rock, would don Juan feel that you still had flown, and his answer was, in that case you would have flown with the chain and the rock.

CC:
He alludes, you know, that, I think what he means, what he meant to say is that one never really changes. As a European my mind is set, my cognitive units are set, in a sense. I would admit only a total change. For me to change would mean that a person mutates totally into a bird, and that's the only way I could understand it. But I think what he means is something else, something much more sophisticated than that. My system's very rudimentary, you see, it lacks the sophistication that don Juan has, but I cannot pinpoint actually what he means like, things like what he means that one never changes really, there's something else, another process is taking place.

Q:
Yes, it is difficult to focus on this. I think I remember don Juan's line was, you flew as a man flies. But he insisted that you flew.

CC:
Yes.

Q:
There's another remarkable statement he makes. It is in a discussion of the reality of the episode. He says, that is all there is in reality, what you felt.

CC:
Uh-huh. Yea, he, don Juan's a very sophisticated thinker, really, it's not easy to come to grips with him. You see, I had tried various times to wrestle with him intellectually and he always comes the victor, you know. He's very artful. He posed once the idea to me that the whole, the totality of the universe is just perception. It's how we perceive things. And there are no facts, only interpretations.

And those are nearly, I'm merely paraphrasing him as close as I can. And perhaps he's right, the facts are nothing else but interpretations that our brain makes of stimuli. So that such whatever I felt was, of course, the important thing.

Q:
Now, one of the aspects of what we normally call reality that seems most important to us is that of coherence or consistency from experience to experience, and I was impressed by the fact that the experiences you had under peyote seemed to have in your recordings a remarkable coherence from experience to experience. I'd like to question you about this. There is an image that appeared in the experiences which you called mescalito. And it seems as if this image appears again and again with great consistency, that the general sense of the experience, the sound of it, the feel of it, is very much the same from time to time. Am I accurate in saying that?

CC:
Yes, very, very much.

Q:
Well, how do you make sense of that fact?

CC:
Well, I'd, its the, I'd have two interpretations. Mine being it's the product of the indoctrination I went through, those long periods of discussions, where instruction was given.

Q:
Did don Juan every tell you how mescalito was to look?

CC:
No, no not that level. Once I constructed, I think, the composite in my mind, the idea that it was a homogenous and totally a protector and a very sturdy deity, may have held me to maintain that, that mental composite, or perhaps the deity exists outside of ourselves as he says. Completely outside of me, as a man, as a feeler, and all it does is manifest itself.

Q:
Now, I thought your description of this image, of mescalito, was very vivid and very impressive.

Do you think you could possibly, just to draw out one aspect of the book, describe what this figure seemed like to you?

CC:
It was truly an anthropomorphic composite as you say. It was not truly a man, but it looked like a cricket, and it was very large, perhaps larger than a man. It looked somehow like the surface of a cactus, the peyote cactus. And that was the top looked like a pointed head, but it had human features in the sense of eyes and a face. But it was not quite human either. It was something different about it and the movements, of course, were quite extraordinary because it hopped.

Q:
Now, when you described this experience to don Juan, how did he deal with it, was this the right image.

CC:
No, no. He didn't care at all about my description of the form. He's not interested at all. I never told him what the form, he discarded it all. I wrote it down because it was quite remarkable for me as the man who experienced it. It was just extraordinary. It was truly a shocking experience. And as I recalled everything that I experienced, but insofar as telling him, he didn't want to hear about it. He said that it was unimportant. All he want to hear was whether I had, how close he let me come in this anthropomorphic composite at the time I saw it, you know, let me come very close and nearly touch him. And that, in don Juan's system, I suppose, was a very good turn. And he was interested in knowing whether I was frightened or not. And I was very frightened. But insofar as the form, he never made any comment, or he didn't even show any interest in it.

Q:
I'd like to ask about one particular set of experiences. We don't have to go into them in detail here. I think we might simply tempt the listeners to look at the book, and read the actual details of the experiences. But, your final experience with don Juan is one of extreme fearfulness. Why do you think he lead you into this final situation, at least final in your relationship with him in which, I mean, he very literally just scared the hell out of you. What was the purpose of that. It seemed almost as you record it, it seemed at points almost deliberate cruelty. What do you think he was up to when he did that?

CC:
When he had previous to that last incident, or right before it, he taught me some position that it's proper of shamans to adopt at moments of great crises, the time of their death, perhaps. It's a form that they would adopt. And it's something that they would use, it's a sort of validation, a signature, or to prove that they have been men. Before they die they will face their death and do this dancing. And then they will yell at death and die. And I asked don Juan what could be important, you know, since we all have to die, what difference does it make whether we dance or we cry or scream or yell or run, and he felt that the question was very stupid because by having a form a man could validate his existence, he could really reaffirm that he was a man, because essentially that's all we have. The rest is unimportant. And at the very last moment, you see, the only thing that a man could do was to reassert that he was a man. So he taught me this form and in the course of the event, this very frightening set of circumstances, or actions, I was forced nearly to exercise this form and use it. It brought a great amount of vigor to me. And the event ended up there, "successfully". I was successful. And perhaps staying away from death, or something like. The next day, the next night he took me into the bushes, and what I was gonna do was, he was gonna teach me how to perfect this form, I thought was neat. And in the course of teaching me, I found myself alone. And that's when the horrendous fear attacked me really. I think what he had in mind was for me to use this form, this position, this posture that he had taught me. And he deliberately scared me, I suppose, in order for me to test that. And that was my failure, of course, cause I really succumbed to fear instead of standing and facing my death, as I was supposed to as a, let's say apprentice of this way of knowledge, I became a thorough European man and I succumbed to fear.

Q:
How did things actually end then between you and don Juan?

CC:
They ended that night I think, you know, I suffer a total ego collapse because the fear was just too great for my resources. And it took hours to pull me back. And it seems that we came to an impasse where I never talk ever again about his knowledge. That's almost 3 years ago, over 3 years ago.

Q:
You feel then he had finally lead you up to an experience that was beyond your capacity to grapple with?

CC:
I think so. I exhausted my resources and I couldn't go beyond that and its coherent with the American Indian idea that knowledge is power. See you cannot play around with it. Every new step, you see, is a trial and you have to prove that you're capable of going beyond that. So that was my end.

Q:
Yes, and over the 6 year period don Juan lead you through a great number of terribly trying and difficult experiences.

CC:
Yes, I should say, I would. But he does nothing that I haven't, that I finished, I don't know, by some strange reason he has never acted as though I'm through. He always thinks that this is a period of clarification.

Q:
Did he ever make it really clear to you what it was about you that lead him to select you for this vigorous process.

CC:
Well, he guides his acts by indications, by omens, if he sees something that is extraordinary, some event that he cannot incorporate into his, possibly his categorization scheme, if it doesn't fit in it, he calls it a portentous event or an extraordinary event and he considers that to be an omen.

When I first took that cactus, the peyote, I play with a dog. It was very remarkable experience in which this dog and I understood each other very well. And that was interpreted by don Juan as an omen, that the deity, mescalito, peyote, had played with me, which was an event that he had never witnessed in his life. Nobody has ever, in his knowledge, nobody has ever played with the deity, he told me. That was extraordinary, and something was pointing me out, and he interpreted it as I was the right person to transmit his knowledge, or part it or whatever.

Q:
Well, now after spending six years in apprenticeship to don Juan, what, may I ask, what difference this great adventure has made to you personally?

CC:
Well it has, certainly has given me a different outlook in life. It's enlarged my sense of how important today is, I suppose. I think, you know, I have, I'm the product of my socialization, I, like any other person of the western world, I live very much for tomorrow, all my life. I sort of save myself up for a great future, something of that order. And it's only, it was only, with the, of course, with the terrible impact of don Juan's teaching that I came to realize how important it is to be here, now. And it renders the idea of entering into states of what I call non ordinary reality instead of disrupting the states of ordinary reality, they render them very meaningful. I didn't suffer any disruption or any disillusion of what goes on today. I don't think its a farce. While I'll say I tended to think that it was a farce before. I thought that I was disillusioned as I was an artist to do some work in art, and I felt, you know, that something was missing with my time, something is wrong. But as I see it, you know, nothing is wrong. Today I can't conceive what's wrong anymore. Cause it was vague to begin with, I never thought exactly what was wrong. But I alluded that there was a great area that was better than today. And I think that has been dispelled completely.

Q:
I see. Do you have any plans of ever seeking out don Juan again?

CC:
No, I see him as a friend. I see him all the time.

Q:
Oh, you still do see him?

CC:
Yes I do. I'm with him, I have been with him lots of times since the last experience that I write in the book. But as far as seeking his teachings, I don't think I would. I sincerely think that I don't have the mechanics.

Q:
One final question: you make a heroic effort in the book to make sense of don Juan's world view. Do you have any idea of whether don Juan took any interest or takes any interest in your world, the one you're calling that of a European man?

CC:
Well, no I think he's versed, don Juan's very versed in what we, the Europeans, stand for. He's not handicapped, in that sense, he makes use, he's a warrior and he makes use of his, he sets his life as in a strategic game, he makes use of everything that he can, he's very versed in that. My effort to make sense of his world is, it's my own way of, let's say, paying back to him for this grand opportunity. I think if I don't make the effort to render his world as coherent phenomena, he'll go by the way he has for hundreds of years, as nonsensical activity, when it is not nonsensical, it's not fraudulent, it's a very serious endeavor.

Q:
Yes. Well the outcome of your experiences with don Juan is a really fascinating book and, after reading it myself, I can certainly recommend it to the Pacific audience. It is an adventure in a very different world than we ordinarily live in. I'd like to thank you, Mr. Castaneda, for making this time available to talk about the book and about your adventures. This is Theodore Rosack.

CC:
Thank you.



This interview was transcribed from a tape produced by Audio-Forum for their "Sound Seminars" series of interview tapes, Jeffrey Norton Publications, Inc. You may order this tape from Audio-Forum, Suite L9, 96 Broad Street, Guilford, CT, 06437. Phone: 1-800-243-1234. Copyright Audio-Forum.

Electro Print Graphics - 1968

Transcript of the tape:

Don Juan's Teachings: Further Conversations with Carlos Castaneda, 1968.

JH:

I'm Jane Hellisoe of the University of California Press, and I have here today, Carlos Castaneda, author of The Teachings of Don Juan. I'm assuming that most of you have read the book, you all look like you have. So I think just turn it over to Carlos and let it go from there. Carlos...

CC:

O.K. Maybe you like to ask me something that you want to know?

JH:

How did you meet don Juan?

CC:

The way I, uh, got to know him,was very uh, very fortuitous type of affair. I was not not interested in finding what he knew, because I didn't know what he knew. I was interested in collecting plants.

And I met him in Arizona. There was an old man who lived somewhere around them hills, that knew a great deal about plants. And that was my interest, to collect information on plants. And uh, I uh, we went one day this friend and myself we went to look for him. And we were misguided by the Yuma Indians and we up in the hills and never found the old man.

Um, it was later on when I was at the end of this first trip that I make to Arizona, at the end of the summer and I was ready to go back to Los Angeles, that I was waiting in the bus stop and the old man walked in. And that's how I met him.

Uh, I talked to him for about a year, I used to visit him, periodically I visit him, because I like him, he's very friendly and very consistent. It's very nice to be around him. He has great sense of humor . . . and I like him, very much. And that's was my first guiding thought, I used to go seek his council because he very humorous and very funny.

But I never suspected that he knew anything, beyond knowledgeable in the use of plants for medicinal purposes.

JH:

Did you have a sense that he knew how to live?

CC:

No, no, I didn't- I couldn't respond(?) There was something strange about him, but anybody could tell that you know, there's something very uh, very strange.

There are two people that I have taken down to the field, with me, and that they know him. They found that that... he has very haunting eyes when he looks at you, because most of the time he squints or he seems to be shifty.

You would say that he's a shifty looking man. He's not looking, except sometimes when he looks, he's very, whenever he looks he's very forceful. You could acknowledge that he's looking at you.

And I-... But I never knew that he knew anything beyond that. I had no idea. When I went to do my fieldwork, I always-... I departed from the point of view that I was the anthropologist, in quotes, doing the fieldwork with uh, Indian, you know. And they were uh, I was the one who knew most everything and uh they didn't. But of course, that it was a great culture shock to find out that I didn't know anything.

It's a great feeling that of arriving, a sense of uh, humbleness. Because we are the winners, the conquerors, you know, and whatever we do is great, is logical, it's, it's magnificent. We only the ones who are capable of anything noble, that's in the back of our mind. We cannot avoid that, we cannot avoid that. And whenever we tumble down from that stand, I feels it's great.

JH:

What country are you from?

CC:

I'm from Brazil, I was born in Brazil. My grandparents are Italian.

JH:

Uh, do you still think that he manipulated you into the last part of your book into a situation in which you supposedly in danger of losing your soul?

CC:

There, there are two explanations, you see, I prefer to think, that he was cueing me. It made me feel comfortable to think that this was an experience resulting from these manipulations or social cues. But maybe this witch was impersonating him. Everytime I am in U.C.L.A., of course, I pretend the position that he was, manipulating me.

That's very coherent, cogent of the pursual of academia. But whenever I am in field, I think they were impersonating him. And that's incoherent with what takes place there. That's a very difficult transition to make. If you are going to dwelling in a University, if I would be a teacher, if I know that I'm going to be a teacher all my life, I could say anything you know, and it's nice, but I may wind up again in the field, very soon. I uh, made up my mind. I am going to go back, later maybe at the end of this month, and uh, I'm very serious about that.

JH:

Could you describe the nature of your communication with don Juan, since you wrote the book?

CC:

We're very good friends. He uh, uh he uh, he's capable always to baffle me me, by kidding me. He never takes anything seriously.

I am very serious in the sense like, I feel that I have withdrawn from this apprenticeship. And I'm very serious about that, I believe that I have.

JH:

He doesn't believe you?

CC:

No....

JH:

Do you find that your approach to uh, uh reality, or whatever, is any different since meeting don Juan?

CC:

O yes, yes, very different. Very different as such. Well I don't take things too seriously anymore.

JH:

Why did you write the second part of your book?

CC:

Why? Essentially, I'm concerned with rescuing something that has been lost for five hundred years, because of superstition, we all know that. It's superstition, and it's been taken as such.

Therefore, in order to render it, serious, to go beyond the revelation, that there must be something that could be distilled from the revelation period. And to me, the only way to do it, is by presenting it seriously, in format of the socialist position.

Otherwise, it remains in the level of oddity. We have in the back of our minds, the idea that only we could be logical, only we could be sublime, noble.

Somehow, I think, maybe I'm speaking for myself alone, but that's the end of character of our actions. In social science you see that. Every social scientist goes to the field, loaded with the idea that he's going examine something and know. And uh, that's not fair, that he so um, in that sense, I cannot escape that.

JH:

Don Juan in the book, he mentioned that he asked you never to reveal the name that Mescalito gave to you, or to reveal the circumstances under which you met, yet you wrote this whole book of don Juan's to anyone who would read it.

CC:

I asked him about that. I wanted to know before I ever, ever, in writing something like that, I asked him if it was alright. I didn't reveal anything that was not permitted. I didn't.

I was interested in the logical system. It's a system of logical thought. It takes a long time, took a long time for me to discover, that this was a system of exhaustive, the best, presented in this, my world. This is what is appealing, is the order.

And whatever, I reveal in it, has nothing to do with the things that were, let's say, taboo. I reveal only the order, only the system. So, as to make us realize that the Indians are very, very tenacious, they are persistent people and as intelligent as anybody.

Voice overdub on tape:

I think it's significant how Carlos is bending over backwards to present a system of non-ordinary reality, non-linear reality in a conceptual framework so that it can be accepted by his peers at the University of California by the American public. It's almost as if Carlos had wasn't taking any chances that the psychedelic generation was really going to be there and ready to read the book. The psychedelic generation could get the message- be a large enough part of the readership to to pass the word. He's talking about people, he talks about non-people there's some really some really remarkable instances there where I remember the one where don Juan walks or Carlos walks off into the chaparral and he comes back and there are these three beings there who turn out later according to don Juan not to be even beings. Apparently, they don't have these fibers coming or they don't look like eggs. Do you have any insights into what these are, that aren't really people, from having listened to that? I'm not too much into that, that was part of so-called phantoms that Carlos was describing, but it wasn't very clear to me where they fit into the whole picture, except these were people you know, phantoms were entities that you had to look for, and be careful about. It seems also like only a sorcerer and a man-of- knowledge can tell who they are, because to Carlos it looked very much like real people, and Genero and Juan can recognize them and unless we're into that other kind of knowledge, I can't claim to be able to recognize them. Carlos talks about his experience with the datura plant, or the jimson weed, the devil weed in the first book and the second book which is dealing very heavily the need for the psychotropic plants. He drank the root extract and rubbed himself with the paste, and what followed was an extraordinary experience. Afterwards Don Juan discusses with him the lessons he learned. Carlos says there was a question he wanted to ask don Juan. Carlos knew don Juan was going to evade it, so he waited for don Juan to mention the subject. Carlos waited all day. Finally, before he left that evening, he had to ask, "Did I really fly, don Juan?" "That is what you told me. Didn't you?" "I know, don Juan. I mean, did my body fly? Did I take off like a bird?" "You always ask me questions I cannot answer. You flew. That is what the second portion of the devil's weed is for. As you take more of it, you will learn how to fly perfectly. It is not a simple matter. A man flys with the help of the second portion of the devil's weed. That is all I can tell you. What you want to know makes no sense. Birds fly like birds and a man who has taken the devil's weed flies as such ." "As birds do?" "No, he flies as a man who has taken the weed." "Then I didn't really fly, don Juan. I flew in my imagination, in my mind alone. Where was my body?" "In the bushes," he replied cuttingly, but immediately broke into laughter again. "The trouble with you is that you understand things in only one way. You don't think a man flies; and yet a brujo can move a thousand miles in one second to see what is going on. He can deliver a blow to his enemies long distances away. So, does he or doesn't he fly?" "You see, don Juan, you and I are differently oriented. Suppose, for the sake of argument, one of my fellow students had been here with me when I took the devil's weed. Would he have been able to see me flying?" "There you go again with your questions about what would happen if... It is useless to talk that way. If your friend, or anybody else, takes the second portion of the weed all he can do is fly. Now, if he had simply watched you, he might have seen you flying, or he might not. That depends on the man." "But what I mean, don Juan, is that if you and I look at a bird and see it fly, we agree that it is flying. But if two of my friends had seen me flying as I did last night, would they have agreed that I was flying?" "Well, they might have. You agree that birds fly because you have seen them flying. Flying is a common thing with birds. But you will not agree on other things birds do, because you have never seen birds doing them. If your friends knew about men flying with the devil's weed, then they would agree." "Let's put it another way, don Juan. What I meant to say is that if I had tied myself to a rock with a heavy chain I would have flown just the same, because my body had nothing to do with my flying." "If you tie yourself to a rock," he said, "I'm afraid you will have to fly holding the rock with its heavy chain." [end of Voice overdub]

JH:

Why did you leave?

CC:

Why did I leave? I got too frightened. There is this assumption in all of us, that uh, we could give ourselves agreement that this is real. I'm sure that many humans have taken psychedelic substance like LSD, or something like that, the distortion that you suffer, under this psychedelic, is accountable, by saying I'm seeing such and such, and that and that, or this this and that because I have taken something, that's in the back of our mind - always.

So, anything could be, let's say, accounted for in a strange way. But, whenever you begin to lose that security, I think that's time to quit. That's my fear.

JH:

But you haven't really quit.

CC:

That's the problem.

JH:

That several visions that you said you were more-or-less clairvoyant visions, that told you about the past, things that you supposedly didn't know about, other than the visions or examples that reported in the books. Did you ever check to find out what you saw was true or not?

CC:

Well, that's sort of funny you know, there must be something. I've been involved in hunting treasures lately.

A Mexican came to me and told me that there was a house that uh, belonged to a man who apparently stored a lot of money and never used a bank, ever, in his life. He figure and calculated that there was at least $100,000 dollars and he asked if I could discover where the money was.

So I thought that's an interesting proposition. So, um I followed this ritual. It was a minor ritual that produces in quotes, a vision, not as clear as a divination procedure. But it's a vision that could be interpreted. A fire that has to be made to attract whatever it is that has to be attracted.

So this bunch of about four people and I, they did all the ritual they followed me they trusted me, I suppose and we waited for a vision but nothing came at all.

And then the fact was that everybody was looking for this treasure under the house, the house on the still, very high, underneath the house and they and dug up the whole house. And uh, the guy who was digging up, was bitten by a black spider, a black widows spiders. And it was disastrous, they never found anything.

So then I came into the picture, I have this vision, I have this dream. A dream in which the owner of the house was pointing to the ceiling. And I said, "Uh ha! It's not in the basement, it's in the ceiling." And we went, one day, tried to find it in the ceiling, but we didn't. We couldn't find anything.

It was disastrous though, because one of the Mexicans, very big, he weighs about 315 pounds. He's a big moose. There's a small hatch towards the ceiling and its' an old house constructed in the 20's probably and the ceilings paper thin.

So I was kinda walking on the beams and this guy got very suspicious he thought that we were going to cheat him out of his money, we never did it. And came into the scene, he came up. He walked up to where I was, I was in the center of the house, center of the room, because that's the place I thought he had pointed in my vision, stood by me, and he went through the ceiling. He got hooked you know, the legs were hanging in the upper part.

JH:

Did don Juan make any uh restrictions or any regulations that the circumstances in which you question yourself?...

CC:

Yes, good very good. I went to see don Juan, and I told him this failure. And how you know very, and he said was very natural, whatever is left of a man, guards whatever he's hiding.

I have my notes, you know that I took in the field that I treasure a great deal. I've become very possessive with my notes. And don Juan says, "will you leave your notes for any idiot to get?"

No, I won't. That's the point. And what's the difference? A guy loves his money. And he's not going to let an idiot like me come and get it. Therefore, he sets all kinds of traps and obstructions.

That's the turning point in my approach with don Juan. From then on, I never been able to think that I could trip him. He flipped me intellectually. I thought that that piece was very neat, very simple and coherent. From then on, I was not ever able to think of myself as the student of Anthropology the University student coming to look down on an Indian. He completely destroyed dislodged my affiliation to the intellectual man.

JH:

He made you think yourself as a man?

CC:

He made me think of myself as a man who doesn't know anything, in relation to what he knows. But I don't know what he means. All I've given you is what he gave me. I don't how fear could be vanquished. Because I haven't vanquished it myself. I have an idea, that perhaps applicable. I like to go into the field and test it. But that's another story that's very different.

JH:

Did he vanquish fear?

CC:

Well, he has. Yes . . .

JH:

Entirely?

CC:

Yes... it looks like it is very simple. Once you have the mechanics, I suppose, he is parting at all times from a different point of view. He set like uh , whatever is between the phenomena and that I am experiencing, and me, there's always an intermediate, it's a set of expectations, motivations, language, you name it. It's there, it's a whole set.

But that's my, my heritage of the European. To use the set which is common to all of us. That's why understand each other.

But don Juan has a different set, entirely different. That's the incapacity to understand him. Very difficult to understand what he's talking about. When he says that one could conquer fear. There's an interesting idea that occured to me now, that I would like to test in the field. I have attended recently a peyote meeting. It was a gathering, which I just took water to them. I didn't participate. I just went there to watch, to observe. Because I have this I have arrived to the conclusion that the consensus the agreement that he gave me, that I narrated in this book, a private agreement, special between the teacher and the student, but something else takes place. There's a collective agreement, a whole bunch of people agree upon things which cannot be seen, ordinarily.

But I was thought that this agreement consisted in cueing the others. Therefore, there must be a leader I thought that could cue, you know, by twisting the eye, you know, something like that, you know, twist of the fingers, and therefore, they all say that they have agreed. Because one gives the cue.

They believe that for instance in the matter of peyote, anybody who intakes peyote hears a buzzing in the ears. However the Indians believe that there a seventeen types of buzzing. And each one then will then respond to a precise nature of the visitation.

The deity Mescalito, comes in a specific way. And it announces it, by buzzing. There must be an agreement among them ten people as to what buzzing is it in the first place and then the nature of it.

How is the lesson going to be? Is it going to a ferocious lesson, very dramatic, very mild, amenable, depends on what is the, uh, I suppose the mood of the deity.

That, I thought this agreement was accomplished by means of a code. So I went I asked don Juan to I could drive them, I took my car and drove a whole bunch of people. I made myself available in that form. And then I could serve, I said, you know, bringing water to them.

So I watched. And I couldn't detect any code, at all. However in my effort to watch, I got involved, very deeply involved, and at that moment, I flipped. I walked into this experience, I had taken peyote, which I didn't.

This is my stand, O.K.? I think what they do, is they hold judgement. They drop this set. And their capable of gaining the phenomena in a different level. Their capable of viewing it, in a level from what I do ordinarily, the way I do it ordinarily.

So if I drop this set, whatever it is that is interfering, intermediate, the intermediate set between the phenomena and me, I arrive to this area of special agreement.

Therefore, it's very simple to them to arrive to that. I thought that experience in distorted a whole series of days, five or six days in which they intake peyote. I thought the last day was the only day in which they agree. But they agree every day. I don't know. I have to go and find out. I know that it's possible to hold judgement.

JH:

That girl asked you a question about fear, vanquishing fear entirely. At any, as I read it, or understand I, as I mean, as far as fear is no longer your enemy, doesn't mean you don't have it anymore. Because he said the man-of-knowledge goes to knowledge, and this could be anywhere along the line even after you vanquished fear. Would fear, respect, wide-awake and the four things, so fear is no longer your enemy, isn't that true?

CC:

No, maybe, maybe, though perhaps we are afraid only because are judging. That's another possibility. Once we drop the prejudgment, what's there to fear? At the moment, like uh he used to cure years ago, that's before I met him.

Today, he's not interested anymore in curing or bewitching. He says that he's beyond company or solitude. So, he just exists... he lives in central Mexico.

JH:

What does he do with his time?

CC:

Maybe he flies... I don't know. I really don't know. I feel, I always feel, I projected him, and I say, poor little old man, what does he do with his time? But that's me, you see, I, poor little old man, what do I do with my time? But that's a different set, you see, he has a different system, completely.

JH:

You smoked mushrooms in the state of Oaxaca. I'm wondering what the names of those mushrooms.

CC:

The mushrooms belong to the psilocybe family. I'm sure of that. And they grow in central Mexico. Then you make a journey to central Mexico. You collect them and then you take them to wherever you live. And wait for a year, before they are useable. They spend a year inside of a gourd. And they are utilized.

JH:

Were these the ones where they from Oaxaca.?

CC:

Their from central Mexico, that area, yeah, Oaxaca. They are fourteen species of psilocybe.

JH:

Could you tell us about the need and nature for secrecy and mystical teachings such as don Juans?

CC:

I don't know. He feels that in order to return from one of the trips, in quotes, you had to have a great degree of help and knowledge, without which you don't return. Maybe he's right, maybe he's right, maybe you need, the not so much the encouragement of the friendly man telling you everything's O.K. Joe, don't do it. More than that. Maybe you need another type of knowledge, that would render the experience utilizable, meaningful. And that cracks your mind, that really busts you.

JH:

Do you discourage someone from using these drugs?

CC:

I do, I do. I don't think they should. Because, perhaps they would get to know more about it. Otherwise, they become spearheads. And spearheads burn, period.

JH:

Do you know what the psychoactive substances in datura?

CC:

Atropine, And hyoscyamine. And there are two more substances, something like somebody called Scopolamine, but nobody knows what scopolamine was. It's very toxic, terribly toxic. Very, very harmful plant in that sense. Strychnine? Strychnine, peyote contains eight types of strychnine.

JH:

Were there other men of knowledge considered to be like don Juan?

CC:

Yes, Don Juan likes to think that his predilection is talking. He likes to talk. There are other men who has another type of predilection. There is a man who gives lessons in waterfalls. His predilection is balance and movement. And the other one I know dances, and he accomplishes the same thing.

JH:

What about mushrooms in your book?

CC:

There are no hallucinogenic mushrooms. Muscaria that's not in old world though.

JH:

Yeah, yeah.... Datura is growing all over Berkeley.

CC:

Well, it's a plant that grows anywhere, in the United States. The intake of Datura produces a terrible inflamation of the proxic glands. It's not desirable to use it. So uh, it's a very toxic plant.

JH:

It happened to you?

CC:

No, no after its prepared, it loses its toxicity. The American Indians I think learned a great deal in manipulating plants. And how they learned, perhaps like don Juan said you could arrive to a direct knowledge of complex procedures directly via tapping whatever you tap.

JH:

What do you see any meaning in terms of good and bad or good and evil or...?

CC:

No, I don't know. They interpreted in any way, again as a state of special ordinary reality. He again I think manipulated me and uh, or perhaps it is possible to see colours. I have a friend who reported though to me that to me he saw magenta, he says. That was the only thing he say, he tried to do this at night, and uh, he was capable of arriving to this distortion of colours, whatever.

JH:

One thing I noticed about reading the book, all these experiences take place at night.

CC:

No, I think the night is very friendly, very amenable. It's warmer, for some reason. And the darkness is a covering, it's like a blanket. Very nice. On the other hand, the daytime is very active, it's too busy. It's not conducive to feeling for anything like that.

I like the night, I don't know why, maybe I'm owl, something like that. I like very much, it's very amenable to me. I turn the lights in my house off all the time. I feel very funny, for some reason, it's very comfortable, it's dark, and very restless when there's much light.

JH:

Could you tell more about Mescalito? Like what, what, how?

CC:

First, of all the American Indians have a god not called Mescalito, it's called something else... They have different names, yes. Mescalito is a circumlocution, that he uses, like to say, little Joe, little Billy. Circumlocution is to mean William.

JH:

Is he one of, one god, or is like a thousand million gods?

CC:

That's power, it's a teacher. It's a teacher that lives outside of yourself. You never mention it by name. Because the name that he gives you is personal. Therefore, you use the name peyetero.

Because peyetero means something else. It's not applicable to that. It's a word that's been used by Spaniards. Peyetero is a state, very much like datura, in the Mexican, Spanish use in Mexico. Datura is called toloache. Toloache is a people say toloache is a state of knowledge, related to the datura. It's not the plant, it's a state of knowledge. Ololiuhqui, Saghun, the Spanish priest was very concerned with. And people have identified it as the seeds of the Morning Glory. But that belongs to the datura also. But again it's a state, state of knowledge.

JH:

Does don Juan or any of the other brujos have any difficulty with the Church, because of his...

CC:

Well, I suppose they do. They couldn't care less one way or the other. They are capable of short-circuiting the works of the dominant society. Which is very, very appealing to me, at least, to be able to short circuit them and render them meaningless, and useless, and harmless. You see, don Juan is not trying to fight anybody, therefore nobody with him. He's very capable, he's a hunter. He's a hunter, he's a capable man, he does everything himself.

JH:

He hunts animals for food?

CC:

Many ways, metaphorically, and um, in a literally way. He hunts in his own way. He's a warrior, meaning he's alert on his toes consistently. He never lets anything beyond, by him. There's a great argument that I have with his grandson. His grandson says my grandfather is feeble minded. I said you know perhaps you're wrong. Do you think you could sneak up on him? And the young guy, Fernando, no, my grandfather, you cannot sneak on the grandfather, he's a brujo. It's absurd, you know, how could you that he's feeble minded and then you said that you could not sneak up on him.

That's the idea, you see, he maintains everybody, under this this sort of control. He never lets me out of his sight. I'm always within his view. And its an automatic process, unconscious. He's not aware of it, but I'm always there, at all times. He's very alert. He's not isolated man. He's a hunter, a warrior. His life is a game of strategy. He's capable of rounding up his armies, and using them in a most efficient way. The most efficacious way. He's not a guy who cuts corners. But his great motto is efficacious. And that's totally opposed to my motto. My motto is waste, like all us, unfortunately.

You see, I get caught in tremendous upheavals of meaning. And things split me. I begin to whine.

You know, why, why, how did it happen to me? But if I could be able to live like don Juan, I could set up my life in way of strategy, set my armies strategically. Like he says, then if you lose, all you lose is a battle. That's all. You're very happy at that.

But not with me, because if I lose they took me, they raped me, I've been taken, in my furor. You know, no end to my fury. Because I was not prepared for it. But what would happen if I was prepared? Then I was just defeated, and defeat is not so bad.

But to be raped, that's terrible, that's horrendous, and that's what we all do. By one, we are raped by cigarettes. We can't stop smoking, ah, you know, people are raped by food, they can't stop eating.

I have my own quirks, I get raped by certain things, I cannot mention them. Weak and feeble, and helpless. Don Juan thinks that, and feels that, it's an indulgence, and he cannot afford to. And he's not indulgent at all. He does not indulge, and yet his life is very harmonious. Terribly funny, and great.

And I pondered, how in the devil can he do it? And I thinks it's by cutting his indulgence to nothing. And yet he lives very well. He doesn't deny himself anything, there's the trick. That's the funny trick. Its a normal semantic manipulation. Like he says, since he was six years old, he likes girls. He says that the reason why he likes girls, because when he was young he took one with datura, with the lizards, and the lizards bit him nearly to death. And he was sick for three months. He was in a coma for weeks and then his teacher told him not to worry about it, because from then on, he was going to be virile until the day he died. He says the lizards do that. You know, they bit you too hard, you become very virile.

So I asked him, "how could I get a couple of bites?" He said, "you would need more than a couple of bites." He's not frugal in sense of denial, but he doesn't indulge.

Maybe that doesn't make sense.

JH:

Could you tell me more about the Yaquis?

CC:

The Yaquis? The Yaquis are Christians, Catholics, nominal Catholics. They allowed the Catholic missionaries to come in 1773, voluntarily. And after 80 years of colonization, they killed all the missionaries. And no missionaries has ever come.

They involved themselves in this war against the Mexicans. After the independence of Mexico. The Yaquis have been in war with the Mexican army for 100 years, of solid war. Solid. They raided the Mexican towns, they killed them.

And finally, in 1908, at the beginning of the century, Mexico decided to put an end to this nonsense. They rounded them up, sending huge troops, armies, round up the Indians put them in trains in boats and ship them to the south, to Oaxaca, Veracruz and Yucatan, dispersed them completely and that was only the way to stop them.

And then in 1940, after the war, he says, masses of people in Mexico being the avant garde of democracy of Latin America, they couldn't stand the things that they did to the Yaquis. So they rounded the Yaquis again, brought them back, they are again in Sonora now.

They are seasoned warriors, they are very, very, very aggressive people. It is inconceivable that don Juan could enter into that society. It's a closed circuit. It's very aggressive. They wouldn't trust me, because I'm an Mexican. They see me as a Mexican. They would trust an American, much much better, much easier. They hate Mexicans, they call them the Yoris. Which means pigs, something like that. Because they have been so oppressed...

JH:

Do you know about don Juan as brujo or don Juan as diablero?

CC:

It's the same thing. A brujo is a diablero, those are two Spanish words, to denominate to design, they signify the same thing. Don Juan does not want to use that because it connotes a sense of evilness. So he uses the word man-of-knowledge, it's a Mazatec term. I concluded that whatever he learned from a Mazatec, because man-of-knowledge is one who knows. And one who knows is a Mazatec term. A brujo, a sorcerer, is one who knows.

I hope that I arrive to that. I doubt very much that my makeup is one that is required to make a man-of-knowledge. I don't think I have the backbone.

JH:

Well, Does don Juan agree with that?

CC:

No, he never told me that, you know. He thinks that I have a very bad probably frank. I do think because I get get bored, which is pretty bad, terrible, suicidal nearly.

Presented me the example of a man who was courageous. He found a woodcarver, who was very interested to in the idea of taking peyote.

Don Juan took me to Sonora as a show, so he could convince his grandson that is was very desirable to take peyote. That it would change his life.

His grandson is very handsome chap, terribly handsome. He wants to be a movie star. He wants me to bring him to Hollywood.

And he always asks me, his name is Fernando, he always asks me, do you think I'm handsome Carlos?

You're really handsome.

And then he says, do you think I could work in the movies as a chief in a cowboy movie or something?

He would, he would be a magnificent chief. He wants me to take him to Hollywood. He says just take me to the door, and leave me there. I never had the opportunity of bringing him to the door.

But uh, however don Juan has the intention to turn his grandson to the use of peyote. And he failed everytime.

And he took me one day as a show, and I told them my experiences, there were eight Indians and their listening. They said it, peyote, causes madness, causes insanity.

Don Juan says, "but that's not true, if that would be so, look at Carlos, he isn't mad."

They said, maybe he should be.

JH:

Do you think you could have found the level of understanding that you found now, by intaking the drugs without don Juan?

CC:

No, I am very emphatic about that. I would be lost.

I just talked to Timothy Leary. And he flipped.

I'm sorry, that's my personal feeling. He cannot concentrate, and that's absurd.

JH:

Is that the difference between he and Don Juan?

CC:

Don Juan can concentrate. That's it. He could pinpoint things. He could exhaustively laugh at things, and kick one subject until its death. I don't know why, its very amenable to do that.

He has a sense of humor. What he lacks is the tragedy of a western man. We're tragic figures. We're sublime beings ... grovelling in mud.

Don Juan is not. He's a sublime being. He told me himself.

I had a great discussion with him once about dignity. And I said I that I have dignity and if I'm going to live without dignity, I'll blow my head off.

I mean it. I don't how I mean it, but I do mean it.

He said, that's nonsense, I don't understand about dignity, I have no dignity, I am an Indian, I have only life. But that's his stand.

And I argue with him, I said listen, please I want so desperately, to understand, what I mean by dignity, what happened to the Indians when the Spaniards came? They actually forced them to live a life that had no dignity. They forced them to take the path that had no heart.

And then he said, that's not true. The Spaniards rounded up the Indians who had dignity. Only the Indians that had already dignity.

Maybe he's right. They never rounded him up.

I told don Juan when I met him, his guy who introduced me, said my name is so and so. In Spanish my name is spider, Charley Spider. If I told him my name is Charley Spider. He'd crack up. We kidded around.

After that, I found that was my golden opportunity to make my entry. And I said, "listen, I understand that you know a great deal about peyote. I do too, I know a great deal about peyote, maybe to our mutual benefit we could get together and talk about."

That was my presentation, I mean, my formal presentation, I used it over and over. And he looked at me, in a very funny way, I cannot portray.

But I knew at that moment, that he knew I didn't know anything. I was just throwing the bull, you know, completely bluffing him.

That's what bothered me very much, I never been looked at in that way, ever. That was enough for me to be very interested to go and see him. Nobody ever looked at me that way.

JH:

The guidance of a teacher. What about people that don't have a person like don Juan?

CC:

That's the real problem. I think, it's an untenable position.

I placed myself in that position, by myself, an untenable position. I wouldn't know.

It's like uh... when I went to see him, um for instance, when the book came out, I took it to him. I got a book, and pretended that it was the first book that ever came out of the presses, you know, and I wanted to take it to don Juan.

Maybe it was the first book, I don't know, perhaps it was. I wanted to believe that it was, anyway, and I took it to him, I gave it it was very difficult to reach him in the first place, because he was way up in the central part of Mexico I had to wait for a couple of days.

And then finally he came down to town and I gave him the book. I said, "don Juan look I finished a book," and he looked said, "very nice," he said, "a nice book", and in a state of passion I said , "I want you to have it want you to keep, I want you to have it."

He said, "what can I do with a book.? You know what we do with paper in Mexico."



Copyright 1992 ElectroPrint Graphics, Inc.

Castaneda Interview:
Source: Seeing Castaneda (1976). Reprinted from Psychology Today, 1972.

Sam Keen:
As I followed don Juan through your three books, I suspected, at times, that he was the creation of Carlos Castaneda. He is almost to good to be true--a wise old Indian whose knowledge of human nature is superior to almost everybody's.

Carlos Castaneda:
The idea that I concocted a person like don Juan is inconceivable. He is hardly the kind of figure my European intellectual tradition would have led me to invent. The truth is much stranger. I wasn't even prepared to make the changes in my life that my association with don Juan involved.

Keen:
How and where did you meet don Juan and become his apprentice?

Castaneda:
I was finishing my undergraduate study at UCLA and was planning to go to graduate school in anthropology. I was interested in becoming a professor and thought I might begin in the proper way by publishing a short paper on medicinal plants. I couldn't have cared less about finding a weirdo like don Juan. I was in a bus depot in Arizona with a high-school friend of mine. He pointed out an old Indian man to me and said he knew about peyote and medicinal plants. I put on my best airs and introduced myself to don Juan and said: "I understand you know a great deal about peyote. I am one of the experts on peyote (I had read Weston La Barre's The Peyote Cult) and it might be worth your while to have lunch and talk with me." Well, he just looked at me and my bravado melted.

I was absolutely tongue-tied and numb. I was usually very aggressive and verbal so it was a momentous affair to be silenced by a look. After that I began to visit him and about a year later he told me he had decided to pass on to me the knowledge of sorcery he had learned from his teacher.

Keen:
Then don Juan is not an isolated phenomenon. Is there a community of sorcerers that shares a secret knowledge?

Castaneda:
Certainly. I know three sorcerers and seven apprentices and there are many more. If you read the history of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, you will find that the Catholic inquisitors tried to stamp out sorcery because they considered it the work of the devil. It has been around for many hundreds of years. Most of the techniques don Juan taught me are very old.

Keen:
Some of the techniques that sorcerers use are in wide use in other occult groups. Persons often use dreams to find lost articles, and they go on out-of-the-body journeys in their sleep. But when you told how don Juan and his friend don Genero made your car disappear in broad daylight I could only scratch my head. I know that a hypnotist can create an illusion of the presence or absence of an object. Do you think you were hypnotized?

Castaneda:
Perhaps, something like that. But we have to begin by realizing, as don Juan says, that there is much more to the world than we usually acknowledge. Our normal expectations about reality are created by a social consensus. We are taught how to see and understand the world. The trick of socialization is to convince us that the descriptions we agree upon define the limits of the real world. What we call reality is only one way of seeing the world, a way that is supported by a social consensus.

Keen:
Then a sorcerer, like a hypnotist, creates an alternative world by building up different expectations and manipulating cues to produce a social consensus.

Castaneda:
Exactly. I have come to understand sorcery in terms of Talcott Parsons' idea of glosses. A gloss is a total system of perception and language. For instance, this room is a gloss. We have lumped together a series of isolated perceptions--floor, ceiling, window, lights, rugs, etc.--to make a totality. But we had to be taught to put the world together in this way. A child reconnoiters the world with few preconceptions until he is taught to see things in a way that corresponds to the descriptions everybody agrees on. The world is an agreement. The system of glossing seems to be somewhat like walking. We have to learn to walk, but once we learn we are subject to the syntax of language and the mode of perception it contains.

Keen:
So sorcery, like art, teaches a new system of glossing. When, for instance, van Gogh broke with the artistic tradition and painted "The Starry Night" he was in effect saying: here is a new way of looking at things. Stars are alive and they whirl around in their energy field.

Castaneda:
Partly. But there is a difference. An artist usually just rearranges the old glosses that are proper to his membership. Membership consists of being an expert in the innuendoes of meaning that are contained within a culture. For instance, my primary membership like most educated Western men was in the European intellectual world. You can't break out of one membership without being introduced into another. You can only rearrange the glosses.

Keen:
Was don Juan resocializing you or desocializing you? Was he teaching you a new system of meanings or only a method of stripping off the old system so that you might see the world as a wondering child?

Castaneda:
Don Juan and I disagree about this. I say he was reglossing me and he says he was deglossing me. By teaching me sorcery he gave me a new set of glosses, a new language and a new way of seeing the world. Once I read a bit of the linguistic philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to don Juan and he laughed and said: "Your friend Wittgenstein tied the noose too tight around his neck so he can't go anywhere."

Keen:
Wittgenstein is one of the few philosophers who would have understood don Juan. His notion that there are many different language games--science, politics, poetry, religion, metaphysics, each with its own syntax and rules--would have allowed him to understand sorcery as an alternative system of perception and meaning.

Castaneda:
But don Juan thinks that what he calls seeing is apprehending the world without any interpretation; it is pure wondering perception. Sorcery is a means to this end. To break the certainty that the world is the way you have always been taught you must learn a new description of the world--sorcery--and then hold the old and the new together. Then you will see that neither description is final. At that moment you slip between the descriptions; you stop the world and see. You are left with wonder; the true wonder of seeing the world without interpretation.

Keen:
Do you think it is possible to get beyond interpretation by using psychedelic drugs?

Castaneda:
I don't think so. That is my quarrel with people like Timothy Leary. I think he was improvising from within the European membership and merely rearranging old glosses. I have never taken LSD, but what I gather from don Juan's teachings is that psychotropics are used to stop the flow of ordinary interpretations, to enhance the contradictions within the glosses, and to shatter certainty. But the drugs alone do not allow you to stop the world. To do that you need an alternative description of the world. That is why don Juan had to teach me sorcery.

Keen:
There is an ordinary reality that we Western people are certain is 'the' only world, and then there is is the separate reality of the sorcerer. What are the essential differences between them?

Castaneda:
In European membership the world is built largely from what the eyes report to the mind. In sorcery the total body is used as a perceptor. As Europeans we see a world out there and talk to ourselves about it. We are here and the world is there. Our eyes feed our reason and we have no direct knowledge of things. According to sorcery this burden on the eyes in unnecessary.

We know with the total body.

Keen:
Western man begins with the assumption that subject and object are separated. We're isolated from the world and have to cross some gap to get to it. For don Juan and the tradition of sorcery, the body is already in the world. We are united with the world, not alienated from it.

Castaneda:
That's right. Sorcery has a different theory of embodiment. The problem in sorcery is to tune and trim your body to make it a good receptor. Europeans deal with their bodies as if they were objects. We fill them with alcohol, Bad food, and anxiety. When something goes wrong we think germs have invaded the body from outside and so we import some medicine to cure it. The disease is not a part of us. Don Juan doesn't believe that. For him disease is a disharmony between a man and his world. The body is an awareness and it must be treated impeccably.

Keen:
This sounds similar to Norman O. Brown's idea that children, schizophrenics, and those with the divine madness of the Dionysian consciousness are aware of things and of other persons as extensions of their bodies. Don Juan suggests something of the kind when he says the man of knowledge has fibers of light that connect his solar plexus to the world.

Castaneda:
My conversation with the coyote is a good illustration of the different theories of embodiment. When he came up to me I said: "Hi, little coyote. How are you doing?" And he answered back: "I am doing fine. How about you?" Now, I didn't hear the words in the normal way.

But my body knew the coyote was saying something and I translated it into dialogue. As an intellectual my relationship to dialogue is so profound that my body automatically translated into words the feeling that the animal was communicating with me. We always see the unknown in terms of the known.

Keen:
When you are in that magical mode of consciousness in which coyotes speak and everything is fitting and luminous it seems as if the whole world is alive and that human beings are in a communion that includes animals and plants. If we drop our arrogant assumptions that we are the only comprehending and communicating form of life we might find all kinds of things talking to us. John Lilly talked to dolphins. Perhaps we would feel less alienated if we could believe we were not the only intelligent life.

Castaneda:
We might be able to talk to any animal. For don Juan and the other sorcerers there wasn't anything unusual about my conversation with the coyote. As a matter of fact they said I should have gotten a more reliable animal for a friend. Coyotes are tricksters and are not to be trusted.

Keen:
What animals make better friends?

Castaneda:
Snakes make stupendous friends?

Keen:
I once had a conversation with a snake. One night I dreamt there was a snake in the attic of a house where I lived when I was a child. I took a stick and tried to kill it. In the morning I told the dream to a friend and she reminded me that it was not good to kill snakes, even if they were in the attic in a dream. She suggested that the next time a snake appeared in a dream I should feed it or do something to befriend it. About an hour later I was driving my motor scooter on a little-used road and there it was waiting for me--a four foot snake, stretched out sunning itself. I drove alongside it and it didn't move. After we had looked at each other for a while I decided I should make some gesture to let him know I repented for killing his brother in my dream. I reached over and touched his tail. He coiled up and indicated that I had rushed our intimacy. So I backed off and just looked. After about five minutes he went off into the bushes.

Castaneda:
You didn't pick it up?

Keen:
No.

Castaneda:
It was a very good friend. A man can learn to call snakes. But you have to be in very good shape, calm, collected--in a friendly mood, with no doubts or pending affairs.

Keen:
My snake taught me that I had always had paranoid feelings about nature. I considered animals and snakes dangerous. After my meeting I could never kill another snake and it began to be more plausible to me that we might be in some kind of living nexus. Our ecosystem might well include communication between different forms of life.

Castaneda:
Don Juan has a very interesting theory about this. Plants, like animals, always affect you. He says that if you don't apologize to plants for picking them you are likely to get sick or have an accident.

Keen:
The American Indians had similar beliefs about animals they killed. If you don't thank the animal for giving up his life so you may live, his spirit may cause you trouble.

Castaneda:
We have a commonality with all life. Something is altered every time we deliberately injure plant life or animal life. We take life in order to live but we must be willing to give up our lives without resentment when it is our time. We are so important and take ourselves so seriously that we forget that the world is a great mystery that will teach us if we listen.

Keen:
Perhaps psychotropic drugs momentarily wipe out the isolated ego and allow a mystical fusion with nature. Most cultures that have retained a sense of communion between man and nature also have made ceremonial use of psychedelic drugs. Were you using peyote when you talked with the coyote?

Castaneda:
No. Nothing at all.

Keen:
Was this experience more intense than similar experiences you had when don Juan gave you psychotropic plants?

Castaneda:
Much more intense. Every time I took psychotropic plants I knew I had taken something and I could always question the validity of my experience. But when the coyote talked to me I had no defenses. I couldn't explain it away. I had really stopped the world and, for a short time, got completely outside my European system of glossing.

Keen:
Do you think don Juan lives in this state of awareness most of the time?

Castaneda:
Yes. He lives in magical time and occasionally comes into ordinary time. I live in ordinary time and occasionally dip into magical time.

Keen:
Anyone who travels so far from the beaten paths of consensus must be very lonely.

Castaneda:
I think so. Don Juan lives in an awesome world and he has left routine people far behind. Once when I was with don Juan and his friend don Genaro I saw the loneliness they shared and their sadness at leaving behind the trappings and points of reference of ordinary society. I think don Juan turns his loneliness into art. He contains and controls his power, the wonder and the loneliness, and turns them into art. His art is the metaphorical way in which he lives. This is why his teachings have such a dramatic flavor and unity. He deliberately constructs his life and his manner of teaching.

Keen:
For instance, when don Juan took you out into the hills to hunt animals was he consciously staging an allegory?

Castaneda:
Yes. He had no interest in hunting for sport or to get meat. In the 10 years I have known him don Juan has killed only four animals to my knowledge, and these only at times when he saw that their death was a gift to him in the same way his death would one day be a gift to something. Once we caught a rabbit in a trap we had set and don Juan thought I should kill it because its time was up. I was desperate because I had the sensation that I was the rabbit. I tried to free him but couldn't open the trap. So I stomped on the trap and accidentally broke the rabbit's neck. Don Juan had been trying to teach me that I must assume responsibility for being in this marvelous world. He leaned over and whispered in my ear: "I told you this rabbit had no more time to roam in this beautiful desert." He consciously set up the metaphor to teach me about the ways of a warrior. The warrior is a man who hunts and accumulates personal power. To do this he must develop patience and will and move deliberately through the world. Don Juan used the dramatic situation of actual hunting to teach me because he was addressing himself to my body.

Keen:
In your most recent book, __Journey to Ixtlan__, you reverse the impression given in your first books that the use of psychotropic plants was the main method don Juan intended to use in teaching you about sorcery. How do you now understand the place of psychotropics in his teachings?

Castaneda:
Don Juan used psychotropic plants only in the middle period of my apprenticeship because I was so stupid, sophisticated and cocky. I held on to my description of the world as if it were the only truth. Psychotropics created a gap in my system of glosses. They destroyed my dogmatic certainty. But I paid a tremendous price. When the glue that held my world together was dissolved, my body was weakened and it took months to recuperate. I was anxious and functioned at a very low level.

Keen:
Does don Juan regularly use psychotropic drugs to stop the world?

Castaneda:
No. He can now stop it at will. He told me that for me to try to see without the aid of psychotropic plants would be useless. But if I behaved like a warrior and assumed responsibility I would not need them; they would only weaken my body.

Keen:
This must come as quite a shock to many of your admirers. You are something of a patron saint to the psychedelic revolution.

Castaneda:
I do have a following and they have some strange ideas about me. I was walking to a lecture I was giving at California State, Long Beach the other day and a guy who knew me pointed me out to a girl and said: "Hey, that is Castaneda." She didn't believe him because she had the idea that I must be very mystical. A friend has collected some of the stories that circulate about me. The consensus is that I have mystical feat.

Keen:
Mystical feat?

Castaneda:
Yes, that I walk barefooted like Jesus and have no callouses. I am supposed to be stoned most of the time. I have also committed suicide and died in several different places. A college class of mine almost freaked out when I began to talk about phenomenology and membership and to explore perception and socialization. They wanted to be told too relax, turn on and blow their minds. But to me understanding is important.

Keen:
Rumors flourish in an information vacuum. We know something about don Juan but too little about Castaneda.

Castaneda:
That is a deliberate part of the life of a warrior, To weasel in and out of different worlds you have to remain inconspicuous. The more you are known and identified, the more your freedom is curtailed. When people have definite ideas about who you are and how you will act, then you can't move. One of the earliest things don Juan taught me was that I must erase my personal history. If little by little you create a fog around yourself then you will not be taken for granted and you will have more room for change. That is the reason I avoid tape recordings when I lecture, and photographs.

Keen:
Maybe we can be personal without being historical. You now minimize the importance of the psychedelic experience connected with your apprenticeship. And you don't seem to go around doing the kind of tricks you describe as the sorcerer's stock-in-trade. What are the elements of don Juan's teachings that are important for you? Have you been changed by them?

Castaneda:
For me the ideas of being a warrior and a man of knowledge, with the eventual hope of being able to stop the world and see, have been the most applicable. They have given me peace and confidence in my ability to control my life. At the time I met don Juan I had very little personal power. My life had been very erratic. I had come a long way from my birthplace in Brazil. Outwardly I was aggressive and cocky, but within I was indecisive and unsure of myself. I was always making excuses for myself. Don Juan once accused me of being a professional child because I was so full of self-pity. I felt like a leaf in the wind. Like most intellectuals, my back was against the wall. I had no place to go. I couldn't see any way of life that really excited me. I thought all I could do was make a mature adjustment to a life of boredom or find ever more complex forms of entertainment such as the use of psychedelics and pot and sexual adventures. All of this was exaggerated by my habit of introspection. I was always looking within and talking to myself. The inner dialogue seldom stopped.

Don Juan turned my eyes outward and taught me to accumulate personal power.

I don't think there is any other way to live if one wants to be exuberant.

Keen:
He seems to have hooked you with the old philosopher's trick of holding death before your eyes. I was struck with how classical don Juan's approach was. I heard echoes of Plato's idea that a philosopher must study death before he can gain any access to the real world and of Martin Heidegger's definition of man as being-toward-death.

Castaneda:
Yes, but don Juan's approach has a strange twist because it comes from the tradition in sorcery that death is physical presence that can be felt and seen. One of the glosses in sorcery is: death stands to your left. Death is an impartial judge who will speak truth to you and give you accurate advice. After all, death is in no hurry. He will get you tomorrow or the next week or in 50 years. It makes no difference to him. The moment you remember you must eventually die you are cut down to the right size.

I think I haven't made this idea vivid enough. The gloss--"death to your left"--isn't an intellectual matter in sorcery; it is perception. When your body is properly tuned to the world and you turn your eyes to your left, you can witness an extraordinary event, the shadowlike presence of death.

Keen:
In the existential tradition, discussions of responsibility usually follow discussion of death.

Castaneda:
Then don Juan is a good existentialist. When there is no way of knowing whether I have one more minute of life. I must live as if this is my last moment. Each act is the warrior's last battle. So everything must be done impeccably. Nothing can be left pending. This idea has been very freeing for me. I am here talking to you and I may never return to Los Angeles. But that wouldn't matter because I took care of everything before I came.

Keen:
This world of death and decisiveness is a long way from psychedelic utopias in which the vision of endless time destroys the tragic quality of choice.

Castaneda:
When death stands to your left you must create your world by a series of decisions.

There are no large or small decisions, only decisions that must be made now. And there is no time for doubts or remorse. If I spend my time regretting what I did yesterday I avoid the decisions I need to make today.

Keen:
How did don Juan teach you to be decisive?

Castaneda:
He spoke to my body with his acts. My old way was to leave everything pending and never to decide anything. To me decisions were ugly. It seemed unfair for a sensitive man to have to decide. One day don Juan asked me: "Do you think you and I are equals?" I was a university student and an intellectual and he was an old Indian but I condescended and said: "Of course we are equals." He said: "I don't think we are. I am a hunter and a warrior and you are a pimp. I am ready to sum up my life at any moment. Your feeble world of indecision and sadness is not equal to mine." Well, I was very insulted and would have left but we were in the middle of the wilderness. So I sat down and got trapped in my own ego involvement. I was going to wait until he decided to go home. After many hours I saw that don Juan would stay there forever if he had to. Why not? For a man with no pending business that is his power. I finally realized that this man was not like my father who would make 20 New Year's resolutions and cancel them all out. Don Juan's decisions were irrevocable as far as he was concerned. They could be canceled out only by other decisions. So I went over and touched him and he got up and we went home. The impact of that act was tremendous. It convinced me that the way of the warrior is an exuberant and powerful way to live.

Keen:
It isn't the content of decision that is important so much as the act of being decisive.

Castaneda:
That is what don Juan means by having a gesture. A gesture is a deliberate act which is undertaken for the power that comes from making a decision. For instance, if a warrior found a snake that was numb and cold, he might struggle to invent a way to take the snake to a warm place without being bitten. The warrior would make the gesture just for the hell of it. But he would perform it perfectly.

Keen:
There seem to be many parallels between existential philosophy and don Juan's teachings.

What you have said about decision and gesture suggests that don Juan, like Nietzsche or Sartre, believes that will rather than reason is the most fundamental faculty of man.

Castaneda:
I think that is right. Let me speak for myself. What I want to do, and maybe I can accomplish it, is to take the control away from my reason. My mind has been in control all of my life and it would kill me rather than relinquish control. At one point in my apprenticeship I became profoundly depressed. I was overwhelmed with terror and gloom and thoughts about suicide. Then don Juan warned me this was one of reason's tricks to retain control. He said my reason was making my body feel that there was no meaning in life. Once my mind waged this last battle and lost, reason began to assume its proper place as a tool of the body.

Keen:
"The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of" and so does the rest of the body.

Castaneda:
That is the point. The body has a will of its own. Or rather, the will is the voice of the body. That is why don Juan consistently put his teachings in dramatic form. My intellect could easily dismiss his world of sorcery as nonsense. But my body was attracted to his world and his way of life.

And once the body took over, a new and healthier reign was established.

Keen:
Don Juan's techniques for dealing with dreams engaged me because they suggest the possibility of voluntary control of dream images. It is as though he proposes to establish a permanent, stable observatory within inner space. Tell me about don Juan's dream training.

Castaneda:
The trick in dreaming is to sustain dream images long enough to look at them carefully. To gain this kind of control you need to pick one thing in advance and learn to find it in your dreams. Don Juan suggested that I use my hands as a steady point and go back and forth between them and the images. After some months I learned to find my hands and to stop the dream. I became so fascinated with the technique that I could hardly wait to go to sleep.

Keen:
Is stopping the images in dreams anything like stopping the world?

Castaneda:
It is similar. But there are differences. Once you are capable of finding your hands at will, you realize that it is only a technique. What you are after is control. A man of knowledge must accumulate personal power. But that is not enough to stop the world. Some abandon also is necessary. You must silence the chatter that is going on inside your mind and surrender yourself to the outside world.

Keen:
Of the many techniques that don Juan taught you for stopping the world, which do you still practice?

Castaneda:
My major discipline now is to disrupt my routines. I was always a very routinary person. I ate and slept on schedule. In 1965 I began to change my habits. I wrote in the quiet hours of the night and slept and ate when I felt the neeed. Now I have dismantled so many of my habitual ways of acting that before long I may become unpredictable and surprising even to myself.

Keen:
Your discipline reminds me of the Zen story of two disciples bragging about miraculous powers. One disciple claimed the founder of the sect to which he belonged could stand on one side of a river and write the name of Buddha on a piece of paper held by his assistant on the opposite shore. The second disciple replied that such a miracle was unimpressive. "My miracle," he said, "is that when I feel hungry I eat, and when I feel thirsty I drink"

Castaneda:
It has been this element of engagement in the world that has kept me following the path which don Juan showed me. There is no need to transcend the world. Everything we need to know is right in front of us, if we pay attention. If you enter a state of nonordinary reality, as you do when you use psychotropic plants, it is only to draw back from it what you need in order to see the miraculous character of ordinary reality. For me the way to live--the path with heart--is not introspection or mystical transcendence but presence in the world. This world is the warrior's hunting ground.

Keen:
The world you and don Juan have pictured is full of magical coyotes, enchanted crows and a beautiful sorceress. It's easy to see how it could engage you. But what about the world of the modern urban person? Where is the magic there? If we could all live in the mountains we might keep wonder alive. But how is it possible when we are half a zoom from the freeway?

Castaneda:
I once asked don Juan the same question. We were sitting in a cafe in Yuma and I suggested that I might be able to stop the world and to see, if I could come and live in the wilderness with him. He looked out the window at the passing cars and said: "That, out there, is your world." I live in Los Angeles now and I find I can use that world to accommodate my needs. It is a challenge to live with no set routines in a routinary world. But it can be done.

Keen:
The noise level and the constant pressure of the masses of people seem to destroy the silence and solitude that would be essential for stopping the world.

Castaneda:
Not at all. In fact, the noise can be used. You can use the buzzing of the freeway to teach yourself to listen to the outside world. When we stop the world the world we stop is the one we usually maintain by our continual inner dialogue. Once you can stop the internal babble you stop maintaining your old world. The descriptions collapse. That is when personality change begins.

When you concentrate on sounds you realize it is difficult for the brain to categories all the sounds, and in a short while you stop trying. This is unlike visual perception which keeps us forming categories and thinking. It is so restful when you can turn off the talking, categorizing, and judging.

Keen:
The internal world changes but what about the external one? We can revolutionize individual consciousness but still not touch the social structures that create our alienation. Is there any place for social or political reform in your thinking?

Castaneda:
I came from Latin America where intellectuals were always talking about political and social revolution and where a lot of bombs were thrown. But revolution hasn't changed much. It takes little daring to bomb a building, but in order to give up cigarettes or to stop being anxious or to stop internal chattering, you have to remake yourself. This is where real reform begins. Don Juan and I were in Tucson not long ago when they were having Earth Week. Some man was lecturing on ecology and the evils of war in Vietnam. All the while he was smoking. Don Juan said, "I cannot imagine that he is concerned with other people's bodies when he doesn't like his own." Our first concern should be with ourselves. I can like my fellow men only when I am at my peak of vigor and am not depressed. To be in this condition I must keep my body trimmed. Any revolution must begin here in this body. I can alter my culture but only from within a body that is impeccably tuned-in to this weird world. For me, the real accomplishment is the art of being a warrior, which, as don Juan says, is the only way to balance the terror of being a man with the wonder of being a man.



Copyright 1972 Psychology Today

Time Magazine Cover Story from March 1993

Don Juan and the Sorcerer's Apprentice

Glendower: "I can call spirits from the vasty deep" Hotspur: "Why so can I, or so can any man;" "But will they come when you do not call for them?" -- Henry IV, Part I

THE Mexican border is a great divide. Below it, the accumulated structures of Western "rationality" waver and plunge. The familiar shapes of society - landlord and peasant, priest and politician - are laid over a stranger ground, the occult Mexico, with its brujos and carismaticos, its sorcerers and diviners. Some of their practices go back 2,000 and 3,000 years to the peyote and mushroom and morning glory cults of the ancient Aztecs and Toltecs. Four centuries of Catholic repression in the name of faith and reason have reduced the old ways to a subculture, ridiculed and persecuted. Yet in a country of 53 million, where many village marketplaces have their sellers of curative herbs, peyote buttons or dried hummingbirds, the sorcerer's world is still tenacious. Its cults have long been a matter of interest to anthropologists. But five years ago, it could hardly have been guessed that a master's thesis on this recondite subject, published under the conservative imprint of the University of California Press, would become one of the bestselling books of the early '70s.


OLD YAQUI.

The book was The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1968). With its sequels, A Separate Reality (1971) and the current Journey to Ixtlan (1972), it has made U.S. cult figures of its author and subject: an anthropologist named Carlos Castaneda and a mysterious old Yaqui Indian from Sonora called Juan Matus. In essence, Castaneda's books are the story of how a European rationalist was initiated into the practice of Indian sorcery. They cover a span of ten years, during which, under the weird, taxing and sometimes comic tutelage of Don Juan, a young academic labored to penetrate and grasp what he calls the "separate reality" of the sorcerer's world.

The learning of enlightenment is a common theme in the favorite reading of young Americans today (example: Herman Hesse's novel Siddhartha). The difference is that Castaneda does not present his Don Juan cycle as fiction but as unembellished documentary fact.

The wily, leather-bodied old brujo and his academic straight man first found an audience in the young of the counterculture, many of whom were intrigued by Castaneda's recorded experiences with hallucinogenic (or psychotropic) plants: Jimson weed, magic mushrooms, peyote. The Teachings has sold more than 300,000 copies in paperback and is currently selling at a rate of 16,000 copies a week. But Castaneda's books are not drug propaganda, and now the middleclass middlebrows have taken him up. Ixtlan is a hardback bestseller, and its paperback sales, according to Castaneda's agent Ned Brown, will make its author a millionaire.

To tens of thousands of readers, young and old, the first meeting of Castaneda with Juan Matus which took place in. 1960 in a dusty Arizona bus depot near the Mexican border is a better known literary event than the encounter of Dante and Beatrice beside the Arno. For Don Juan's teachings have reached print at precisely the moment when more Americans than ever before are disposed to consider "non-rational" approaches to reality. This new openness of mind displays itself on many levels, from ESP experiments funded indirectly by the U.S. Government, to the weeping throngs of California 13 year olds getting blissed out by the latest child guru off a chartered jet from Bombay.

The acupuncturist now shares the limelight with Marcus Welby, M.D., and his needles are seen to work - nobody knows why. However, with Castaneda's increasing fame have come increasing doubts. Don Juan has no other verifiable witness, and Juan Matus is nearly as common a name among the Yaqui Indians as John Smith farther north. Is Castaneda real? If so, did he invent Don Juan? Is Castaneda just putting on the straight world?

Among these possibilities, one thing is sure. There is no doubt that Castaneda, or a man by that name, exists: he is alive and well in Los Angeles, a loquacious, nut-brown anthropologist, surrounded by such concrete proofs of existence as a Volkswagen minibus, a Master Charge card, an apartment in Westwood and a beach house. His celebrity is concrete too. It now makes it difficult for him to teach and lecture, especially after an incident at the University of California's Irvine campus last year when a professor named John Wallace procured a Xerox copy of the manuscript of Ixtlan, pasted it together with some lecture notes from a seminar on shamanism Castaneda was giving, and peddled the result to Penthouse magazine. This so infuriated Castaneda that he is reluctant to accept any major lecture engagements in the future. At present he lives "as inaccessibly as possible" in Los Angeles, refreshing his batteries from time to time at what he and Don Juan refer to as a "power spot" atop a mountain north of nearby Malibu: a ring of boulders overlooking the Pacific. So far he has fended off the barrage of film offers. "I don't want to see Anthony Quinn as Don Juan," he says with asperity. Anyone who tries to probe into Castaneda's life finds himself in a maze of contradictions. But to Castaneda's admirers, that scarcely matters.

"Look at it this way," says one. "Either Carlos is telling the documentary truth about himself and Don Juan, in which case he is a great anthropologist. Or else it is an imaginative truth, and he is a great novelist. Heads or tails, Carlos wins."

Indeed, though the man is an enigma wrapped in mystery wrapped in a tortilla, the work is beautifully lucid. Castaneda's story unfolds with a narrative power unmatched in other anthropological studies. Its terrain studded with organpipe cacti, from the glittering lava massifs of the Mexican desert to the ramshackle interior of Don Juan's shack becomes perfectly real. In detail, it is as thoroughly articulated a world as, say, Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. In all the books, but especially in Journey to Ixtlan, Castaneda makes the reader experience the pressure or mysterious winds and the shivver of leaves at twilight, the hunter's peculiar alertness to sound and smell, the rock bottom scrubbiness of Indian life, the raw fragrance of tequila and the vile, fibrous taste of peyote, the dust in the car and the loft of a crow's flight. It is a superbly concrete setting, dense with animistic meaning. This is just as well, in view of the utter weirdness of the events that happen in it.

The education of a sorcerer, as Castaneda describes it, is arduous. It entailed the destruction, by Don Juan, of the young anthropologist's interpretation of the world; of what can, and cannot be called "real." The Teachings describes the first steps in this process. They involved natural drugs.

One was Lophophora williamsii, the peyote cactus, which, Don Juan promised, revealed an entity named Mescalito, a powerful teacher who "shows you the proper way of life." Another was Jimson weed, which Don Juan spoke of as an implacable female presence. The third was humito, "the little smoke" a preparation of dust from Psilocybe mushrooms that had been dried and aged for a year, and then mixed with five other plants, including sage. This was smoked in a ritual pipe, and used for divination.

Such drugs, Don Juan insisted, gave access to the "powers" or impersonal forces at large in the world that a "man of knowledge" - his term for sorcerer - must learn to use. Prepared and administered by Don Juan, the drugs drew Castaneda into one frightful or ecstatic confrontation after another. After chewing peyote buttons Castaneda met Mescalito successively as a black dog, a column of singing light, and a cricket like being with a green warty head. He heard awesome and uninterpretable rumbles from the dead lava hills. After smoking humito and talking to a bilingual coyote, he saw the "guardian of the other world" rise before him as a hundred-foot high gnat with spiky tufted hair and drooling jaws. After rubbing his body with an unguent made from datura, the terrified anthropologist experienced all the sensations of flying.

Through it all, Castaneda often had little idea of what was happening. He could not be sure what it meant or whether any of it had "really" happened at all. That interpretation had to be supplied by Don Juan.

Why, then, in an age full of descriptions of good and bad trips, should Castaneda's sensations be of any more interest than anyone else's? First, because they were apparently conducted within a system - albeit one he did not understand at the time - imposed with priestly and rigorous discipline by his Indian guide. Secondly, because Castaneda kept voluminous and extraordinarily vivid notes.

A sample description of the effects of peyote: "In a matter of instants a tunnel formed around me, very low and narrow, hard and strangely cold. It felt to the touch like a wall of solid tinfoil...

I remember having to crawl towards a sort of round point where the tunnel ended; when I finally arrived, if I did, I had forgotten all about the dog, Don Juan, and myself." Perhaps most important, Castaneda remained throughout a rationalist Everyman. His one resource was questions: a persistent, often fumbling effort to keep a Socratic dialogue going with Don Juan: "'Did I take off like a bird?' "'You always ask me questions I cannot answer...What you want to know makes no sense. Birds fly like birds and a man who has taken the devil's weed flies as such.'"

"'Then I didn't really fly, Don Juan. I flew in my imagination. Where was my body?' " And so on.

By his account, the first phase of Castaneda's apprenticeship lasted from 1961 to 1965, when, terrified that he was losing his sense of reality - and by now possessing thousands of pages of notes - he broke away from Don Juan. In 1968, when The Teachings appeared, he went down to Mexico again to give the old man a copy. A second cycle of instruction then began. Gradually Castaneda realized that Don Juan's use of psychotropic plants was not an end in itself, and that the sorcerer's way could be traversed without drugs.

But this entailed a perfect honing of the will. A man of knowledge, Don Juan insisted, could only develop by first becoming a "warrior" not literally a professional soldier, but a man wholly at one with his environment, agile, unencumbered by sentiment or "personal history". The warrior knows that each act may be his last. He is alone. Death is the root of his life, and in its constant presence he always performs "impeccably." This existential stoicism is a key idea in the books. The warrior's aim in becoming a "man of knowledge" and thus gaining membership as a sorcerer, is to "see."

"Seeing," in Don Juan's system, means experiencing the world directly, grasping its essence, without interpreting it. Castaneda's second book, A Separate Reality, describes Don Juan's efforts to induce him to "see" with the aid of mushroom smoke. Journey to Ixtlan, though many of the desert experiences it recounts predate Castaneda's introduction to peyote, datura and mushrooms, deals with the second stage: "seeing" without drugs.

"The difficulty." says Castaneda, "is to learn to perceive with your whole body, not just with your eyes and reason. The world becomes a stream of tremendously rapid, unique events. So you must trim your body to make it a good receptor; the body is an awareness, and it must be treated impeccably." Easier said than done. Part of the training involved minutely, even piously attuning the senses to the desert, its animals and birds, its sounds and shadows, the shifts in its wind, and the places in which a shaman might confront its spirit entities: spots of power, holes of refuge. When Castaneda describes his education as a hunter and plant gatherer learning about the virtues of herbs, the trapping of rabbits, the narrative is absorbing. Don Juan and the desert enable him, sporadically and without drugs, to "see" or, as the Yaqui puts it "to stop the world." But such a state of interpretation free experience eludes description even for those who believe in Castaneda wholeheartedly.


SAGES.

Not everybody can, does or will. But in some quarters Castaneda's works are extravagantly admired as a revival of a mode of cognition that has been largely neglected in the West, buried by materialism and Pascal's despair, since the Renaissance. Says Mike Murphy, a founder of the Esalen Institute: "The essential lessons Don Juan has to teach are the timeless ones that have been taught by the great sages of India and the spiritual masters of modern times." Author Alan Watts argues that Castaneda's books offer an alternative to both the guilt-ridden Judaeo-Christian and the blindly mechanistic views of man: "Don Juan's way regards man as something central and important. By not separating ourselves from nature we return to a position of dignity."

But such endorsements and parallels do not in any way validate the more worldly claim to importance of Castaneda's books: to wit, that they are anthropology, a specific and truthful account of an aspect of Mexican Indian culture as shown by the speech and actions of one person, a shaman named Juan Matus. That proof hinges on the credibility of Don Juan as a being and Carlos Castaneda as a witness. Yet there is no corroboration beyond Castaneda's writings that Don Juan did what he is said to have done, and very little that he exists at all.

Ever since The Teachings appeared, would be disciples and counterculture tourists have been combing Mexico for the old man. One awaits the first Don Juan Prospectors' Convention in the Brujo Bar BQ of the Mescalito Motel. Young Mexicans are excited to the point where the authorities may not even allow Castaneda's books to be released there in Spanish translation. Said one Mexican student who is himself pursuing Don Juan: "If the books do appear, the search for him could easily turn into a gold-rush stampede."

His teacher, Castaneda asserts, was born in 1891, and suffered in the diaspora of the Yaquis all over Mexico from the 1890s until the 1910 revolution. His parents were murdered by soldiers. He became a nomad. This helps explain why the elements of Don Juan's sorcery are a combination of shamanistic beliefs from several cultures. Some of them are not at all "representative" of the Yaquis.

Many Indian tribes, such as the Huichols, use peyote ritually, both north and south of the border - some in a syncretic blend of Christianity and shamanism. But the Yaquis are not peyote users.

Don Juan, then, might be hard to find because he wisely shuns his pestering admirers. Or maybe he is a composite Indian, a collage of others. Or he could be a purely fictional shaman concocted by Castaneda.

Opinions differ widely and hotly, even among deep admirers of Castaneda's writing. "Is it possible that these books are nonfiction?" Novelist Joyce Carol Oates asks mildly. "They seem to me remarkable works of art on the Hesse-like theme of a young man's initiation into 'another way' of reality. They are beautifully constructed. The character of Don Juan is unforgettable. There is a novelistic momentum, rising, suspenseful action, a gradual revelation of character."


GULLIVER.

True, Castaneda's books do read like a highly orchestrated Bildungsroman. But anthropologists worry less about literary excellence than about the shaman's elusiveness, as well as his apparent disconnection from the Yaquis. "I believe that basically the work has a very high percentage of imagination," says Jesus Ochoa, head of the department of ethnography at Mexico's National Museum of Anthropology. Snaps Dr. Francis Hsu of Northwestern University: "Castaneda is a new fad. I enjoyed the books in the same way that I enjoy Gulliver's Travels." But Castaneda's senior colleagues at U.C.L.A., who gave their former student a Ph.D. for Ixtlan, emphatically disagree: Castaneda, as one professor put it, is "a native genius," for whom the usual red tape and bureaucratic rigmarole were waived; his truth as a witness is not in question.

At the very least, though, it is clear that "Juan Matus" is a pseudonym used to protect his teacher's privacy. The need to be inaccessible and elusive is a central theme in the books. Time and again, Don Juan urges Castaneda to emulate him and free himself not only of daily routines, which dull perception, but of the imprisoning past itself. "Nobody knows my personal history," the old man explains in Ixtlan. "Nobody knows who I am or what I do. Not even I...we either take everything for sure and real, or we don't. If we follow the first path, we get bored to death with ourselves and the world. If we follow the second and erase personal history, we create a fog around us, a very exciting and mysterious state."

Unhappily for anyone hot for certainties about Carlos Castaneda's life, Don Juan's apprentice has taken the lesson very much to heart. After The Teachings became an underground bestseller, it was widely supposed that its author was El Freako the Acid Academic, all buckskin fringe and pinball eye, his brain a charred labyrinth lit by mysterious alkaloids, tripping through the desert with a crow on his hat. But Castaneda means chestnut grove, and the man looks a bit like a chestnut: a stocky, affable Latin American, 5 ft. 5 in., 150 lbs. and apparently bursting with vitamins. The dark curly hair is clipped short, and the eyes glisten with moist alertness. In dress, Castaneda is conservative to the point of anonymity, decking himself either in dark business suits or in Lee Trevino-type sports shirts. His plumage is words, which pour from him in a ceaseless, self-mocking and mesmeric flow. "Oh, I am a bullshitter!" he cackles, spreading his stubby, calloused hands. "Oh, how I love to throw the bull around!"


FOG.

Castaneda says he does not smoke or drink hard liquor; he does not use marijuana; even coffee jangles him. He says he does not use peyote any more, and his only drug experiences took place with Don Juan. His own encounters with the acid culture have been unproductive. Invited to a 1964 East Village party that was attended by such luminaries as Timothy Leary, he merely found the talk absurd: "They were children, indulging in incoherent revelations. A sorcerer takes hallucinogens for a different reason than heads do, and after he has gotten where he wants to go, he stops taking them."

Castaneda's presentation of himself as Mr. Straight, it should be noted, could not be better designed to foil those who seek to know his own personal history. What, in fact, is his background? The "historical" Carlos Castaneda, anthropologist and apprentice shaman, begins when he met Don Juan in 1960; the books and his well-documented career at U.C.L.A. account for his life since.

Before that, a fog.

In spending many hours with Castaneda over a matter of weeks, TIME Correspondent Sandra Burton found him attractive, helpful and convincing - up to a point - but very firm about warning that in talking about his pre-don Juan life he would change names and places and dates without, however, altering the emotional truth of his life. "I have not lied or contrived," he told her. "To contrive would be to pull back and not say anything or give the assurances that everybody seeks."

As the talks continued, Castaneda offered several versions of his life, which kept changing as Burton presented him with the fact that much of his information did not check out, emotionally or otherwise.

By his own account, Castaneda was not his original name. He was born, he said, to a "well-known" but anonymous family in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on Christmas Day, 1935. His father, who later became a professor of literature, was then 17, and his mother 15. Because his parents were so immature, little Carlos was packed off to be raised by his maternal grandparents on a chicken farm in the back country of Brazil.

When Carlos was six, his story runs, his parents took their only child back and lavished guilty affection on him. "It was a hellish year," he says flatly, "because I was living with two children." But a year later his mother died. The doctors' diagnosis was pneumonia, but Castaneda's is accidie, a condition of numbed inertia, which he believes is the cultural disease of the West. He offered a touching memory: "She was morose, very beautiful and dissatisfied, an ornament. My despair was that I wanted to make her something else, but how could she listen to me? I was only six."

Now Carlos was left with his father, a shadowy figure whom he mentions in the books with a mixture of fondness and pity shaded with contempt. His father's weakness of will is the obverse to the "impeccability" of his adopted father, Don Juan. Castaneda describes his father's efforts to become a writer as a farce of indecision. But, he adds, "I am my father. Before I met Don Juan I would spend years sharpening my pencils, and then getting a headache every time I sat down to write. Don Juan taught me that's stupid. If you want to do something, do it impeccably, that's all that matters."

Carlos was put in a "very proper" Buenos Aires boarding school, Nicolas Avellaneda. He says he stayed there till he was 15, acquiring the Spanish (he already spoke Italian and Portuguese) in which he would later interview Don Juan. But he became so unmanageable that an uncle, the family patriarch, had him placed with a foster family in Los Angeles. In 1951 he moved to the U.S. and enrolled at Hollywood High. Graduating about two years later, he tried a course in sculpture at Milan's Academy of Fine Arts, but "I did not have the sensitivity or the openness to be a great artist."

Depressed, in crisis, he headed back to Los Angeles and started a course in social psychology at U.C.L.A, shifting later to an anthropology course. Says he: "I really threw my life out the window. I said to myself: If it's going to work, it must be new." In 1959 he formally changed his name to Castaneda.


BIOGRAPHY.

Thus Castaneda's own biography. It creates an elegant consistency - the spirited young man moving from his academic background in an exhausted, provincial European culture toward revitalization by the shaman; the gesture of abandoning the past to disentangle himself from crippling memories. Unfortunately, it is largely untrue.

For between 1955 and 1959, Carlos Castaneda was enrolled, under that name, as a pre-psychology major at Los Angeles City College. His liberal arts studies included, in his first two years, two courses in creative writing and one in journalism. Vernon King, his creative writing professor at L.A.C.C., still has a copy of The Teachings inscribed "To a great teacher, Vernon King, from one of his students, Carlos Castaneda."

Moreover, immigration records show that a Carlos Cesar Arana Castaneda did indeed enter the U.S., at San Francisco, when the author says he did: in 1951. This Castaneda too was 5 ft. 5 in., weighed 140 lbs. and came from Latin America. But he was Peruvian, born on Christmas Day, 1925, in the ancient Inca town of Cajamarca, which makes him 48, not 38, this year. His father was not an academic, but a goldsmith and watchmaker named Cesar Arana Burungaray. His mother, Susana Castaneda Navoa, died not when Carlos was six, but when he was 24. Her son spent three years in the local high school in Cajamarca and then moved with his family to Lima in 1948, where he graduated from the Colegio Nacional de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe and then studied painting and sculpture, not in Milan, but at the National Fine Arts School of Peru. One of his fellow students there Jose Bracamonte, remembers his pal Carlos as a resourceful blade who lived mainly off gambling (cards, horses, dice), and harbored "like an obsession" the wish to move to the U.S. "We all liked Carlos," recalls Bracamonte. "He was witty, imaginative, cheerful - a big liar and a real friend."


SISTER.

Castaneda apparently wrote home sporadically, at least until 1969, the year after Don Juan came out. His Cousin Lucy Chavez, who was raised with him "like a sister," still keeps his letters. They indicate that he served in the U.S. Army, and left it after suffering a slight wound or "nervous shock" Lucy is not sure which. (The Defense Department, however, has no record of Carlos Arana Castaneda's service.)

When TIME confronted Castaneda with such details as the time and transposition of his mother's death, Castaneda was opaque. "One's feelings about one's mother," he declared, "are not dependent on biology or on time. Kinship as a system has nothing to do with feelings." Cousin Lucy recalls that when Carlos' mother did die, he was overwhelmed. He refused to attend the funeral, locked himself in his room for three days without eating. And when he came out announced he was leaving home. Yet Carlos' basic explanation of his lying generally is both perfect and totally unresponsive. "To ask me to verify my life by giving you my statistics," he says, "is like using science to validate sorcery. It robs the world of its magic and makes milestones out of us all."

In short, Castaneda lays claim to an absolute control over his identity.

Well and good. But where does a writer's license, the "artistic self-representation" Castaneda lays claim to, end? How far does it permeate his story of Don Juan? As the books' sales mount, the resistance multiplies. Three parodies of Castaneda have appeared in New York magazines and papers lately indicating that the critics seem to be preparing to skewer Don Juan as a kind of anthropological Ossian, the legendary third century Gaelic poet whose works James Macpherson foisted upon 18th century British readers.

Castaneda fans should not panic, however. A strong case can be made that the Don Juan books are of a different order of truthfulness from Castaneda's pre-don Juan past.

Where, for example, was the motive for an elaborate scholarly put on? The Teachings was submitted to a university press, an unlikely prospect for bestsellerdom. Besides, getting an anthropology degree from U.C.L.A. is not so difficult that a candidate would employ so vast a confabulation just to avoid research. A little fudging, perhaps, but not a whole system in the manner of The Teachings, written by an unknown student with, at the outset, no hope of commercial success.

For that was certainly Castaneda's situation in the summer of 1960: a young Peruvian student with limited ambitions. There is no reason to doubt his account of how the work began. "I wanted to enter graduate school and do a good job of being an academic, and I knew that if I could publish a little paper beforehand, I'd have it made." One of his teachers at U.C.L.A., Professor Clement Meighan, had interested him in shamanism. Castaneda decided the easiest field would be ethnobotany, the classification of psychotropic plants used by sorcerers. Then came Don Juan.

The visits to the Southwest and the Mexican desert gradually became the spine of Castaneda's life. Impressed by his work, the U.C.L.A. staff offered him encouragement. Recalls Professor Meighan: "Carlos was the type of student a teacher waits for." Sociology professor Harold Garfinkel, one of the fathers of ethnomethodology, gave Castaneda constant stimulus and harsh criticism. After his first peyote experience (August 1961), Castaneda presented Garfinkel with a long "analysis" of his visions. "Garfinkel said, "Don't explain to me. You are a nobody. Just give it to me straight and in detail, the way it happened. The richness of detail is the whole story of membership." The abashed student spent several years revising his thesis, living off odd jobs as taxi driver and delivery boy, and sent it in again. Garfinkel was still unimpressed. "He didn't like my efforts to explain Don Juan's behavior psychologically. 'Do you want to be the darling of Esalen?' he asked." Castaneda rewrote the thesis a third time.

Like the various versions of Castaneda's life, the books are an invitation to consider contradictory kinds of truth. At the core of his books and Don Juan's method is, of course, the assumption that reality is not an absolute. It comes to each of us culturally determined, packaged in advance. "The world has been rendered coherent by our description of it," Castaneda argues, echoing Don Juan.

"From the moment of birth, this world has been described for us. What we see is just a description."


MULTIVERSE.

In short, what men take as reality, as well as their notions of the world's rational possibilities, is determined by consensus, in effect by a social contract that varies from culture to culture. Through history, the road has been hard for any person who questions its fine print - especially if, like Castaneda, he tries to persuade others to accept his vision.

Anthropology by its nature deals with different descriptions, and hence literally with separate realities, within different cultures. As Castaneda's colleague Edmund Carpenter of Adelphi College notes, "Native people have many separate realities. They believe in a multiverse, or a biverse, but not a universe as we do." Yet even this much scholarly relativism is ndigestible for many people who like to reassure themselves that there is only one world and that the "validity" of a culture's interpretations can and should be measured only against this norm. Any myth, they would say, can conveniently be seen as an embryonic form of what the West accepts as linear history; a Hopi rain dance is merely an "inefficient" way of doing what cloud-seeding does well.

Castaneda's books insist otherwise. He is eloquent and convincing on how useless it is to explain or judge another culture entirely in terms of one's own particular categories. "Suppose there was a Navajo anthropologist," he says. "It would be very interesting to ask him to study us. He would ask extraordinary questions, like 'How many in your kinship group have been bewitched?' That's a terribly important question in Navajo terms. And of course, you'd say 'I don't know,' and think 'What an idiotic question.' Meanwhile the Navajo is thinking, 'My God, what a creep! What a primitive creep!'"

Turn the situation around, Castaneda argues, and there is your typical Western anthropologist in the field. Yet a "very simple" alternative exists: the crux of anthropology is acquisition of real membership. "It's a hell of a lot of work," he says, explaining the years he spent with Don Juan. "What Don Juan did with me was simply this: he was making his sorcery membership available, handing down the necessary steps." Professor Michael Harner of The New School for Social Research, a friend of Castaneda's and an authority on shamanism, explains: "Most anthropologists only give the result. Instead of synthesizing the interviews, Castaneda takes us through the process."

It is not those years of study but the nature of the revelation he offers that has run Castaneda afoul of rationalists. To join another man's consensus of reality, one's own must go, and since nobody can easily abandon his own accustomed description it must be forcibly broken up. The historical precedents, even in the West, are abundant. Ever since the ecstatic mystery religions of Greece, our culture has been continually challenged by the wish to escape its own dominant properties: the linear, the categorical, the fixed.

Whether Carlos Castaneda is, as some leading scholars think, a major figure in an evolution of anthropology or only a brilliant novelist with unique knowledge of the desert and Indian lore, his work is to be reckoned with. And it goes on. At present, he is finishing the fourth and last volume of the Don Juan series, Tales of Power, scheduled for publication next year.


"POWER SPOT."

It may confront, more clearly than the first three books, the final purpose of Don Juan's painful teachings: a special case of the ancient desire to know, propitiate and, if possible, use the mysterious forces of the universe. In that pursuit, the splitting of the atom, the sin of Prometheus and Castaneda's search for a "power spot" near Los Angeles can all be remotely linked. A good deal of the magic Don Juan works on Castaneda in the books (making Carlos believe his car has disappeared, for instance) sounds like the kind of fakir rope trickery that gurus think frivolous. Yet all in all, the books communicate a primal sense of power running through the world, arranging our perceptions of reality like so many iron filings in a huge magnetic field.

A sorcerer's power, Castaneda insists, is "unimaginable," but the extent to which a sorcerer's apprentice can hope to use it is determined by, among other things, the degree of his commitment.

The full use of power can only be acquired with the help of an "ally", a spirit entity which attaches itself to the student as a guide - of a dangerous sort. The ally challenges the apprentice when he learns to "see," as Castaneda did in the earlier books. The apprentice may duck this battle. For if he wrestles with the ally - like Jacob with the Angel - and loses, he will, in Don Juan's slightly enigmatic terms, "be snuffed out." But if he wins, his reward is "true power the final acquisition of sorcery membership, when all interpretation ceases."

Up to now, Castaneda claims, he has chosen to duck the final battle with an ally. He admits to an inner struggle on the matter. Sometimes, he says, he feels strongly tugged away from the commitment to sorcery and back into the mundane world. He has a very real urge to be a respected writer and anthropologist, and to use his new-found power of fame in tandem with the printed word to go on communicating glimpses of other realities to hungry readers.


APEX.

Moreover, like most men who have explored mystical separate realities and returned, he seems to have reentry problems. According to the books, Don Juan taught him to abandon regular hours - for work or play - and even in his apartment in Los Angeles he apparently eats and sleeps as whim occurs, or slips off to the desert. But he often works at his writing as many as 18 hours a day. He has great skill at avoiding the public. No one can be sure where he will be at any given time of day, or year. "Carlos will call you from a phone booth," says Michael Korda, his editor at Simon & Schuster, "and say he is in Los Angeles. Then the operator will cut in for more change, and it turns out to be Yuma." His few good friends do not give his whereabouts away to would-be acolytes, in part because his own experience is mysterious and he can't explain it. He has a girl friend but not even his friends know her last name. He avoids photographers like omens of disaster. "I live in this inflow of very strange people that are waiting for a word from me. They expect something that I can't give at all. I had a class in Irvine that was very large, and it looked like they were just waiting for me to crack up."

At other moments he seems decided to be a true sorcerer or bust. "Power takes care of you," he says, "and you don't know how. Now I'm at the edge, and I have to change my whole format. Writing to get my Ph.D. was my accomplishment, my sorcery, and now I am at the apex of a cycle that includes the notoriety. But this is the last thing I will ever write about Don Juan. Now I am going to be a sorcerer for sure. Only my death could stop that." It is a romantic role, this anthropological gesture across a pit of entities which, in a different age, would have been called demons. Will Castaneda become the Dr. Faustus of Malibu Beach, attended by Mephistopheles in a sombrero?

Stay tuned in for the next episode. In the meantime, his books have made it hard for readers ever to use the word primitive patronizingly again.



Copyright March 5th, 1973 Time Magazine

[This article appeared in Magical Blend magazine in 1985. The interview was conducted entirely in Spanish probably around 1980-81 and published in an Argentinian magazine. The translator that created this English version apparently introduced numerous mispellings and strange phraseology which is preserved here.]

By Graciela Corvalan, translated by Larry Towler

Magical Blend Magazine Issue #14

Carlos Castaneda is world reknowned as an author of seven best selling books on the Toltec system of sorcery. Some give him credit as being the crucial catalyst of mainstream awareness of metaphysics that has grown so in recent decades. Graciela Corvalan Ph.D. is a professor of Spanish at Webster College, in St Louis, Missouri. Graciela is currently working on a book consisting of a series of interviews with mystical thinkers in the Americas. A while back she wrote a letter to Carlos Castaneda asking for an interview. One night she received a phone call from Carlos accepting her request and explaining that he had a friend who collected his mail for him while he was away traveling. Upon his return he always reached into the mail sacks and pulled out two letters which he then acted upon. Hers had been one of the most recent two. He explained he was excited to be interviewed by her for she was not a member of the established press. He arranged to meet Graciela in California on the UCLA campus. He asked that the interview first be published in Spanish which Graciela has done, in the Argentinian magazine, Mutantian. Now we are honored to release an English translation. Graciela has obviously succeeded in capturing a flash of lightning over a desert night and showing us amazing insights into Carlos Castanada the Toltec Seer!


[Beginning of Corvalan Interview - Part 1]

At around 1:00 pm, my friend and I set course for the campus of UCLA. We had somewhat more than two hours of travel.

Following Castaneda's directions, we arrived without difficulty at the guard shack at the entrance to the parking lot of UCLA.

It was about quarter to four.

We stationed ourselves in a more or less shady place.

At exactly four o'clock, I looked up and saw him coming toward the car:

Castaneda was wearing blue jeans and a pale cream colored open-collared jacket without pockets. I got out of the car and hastened to meet him.

After the greetings and conventional courtesies, I asked him if he would permit me to use a tape recorder. We had one in the car in case he permitted us. No, it's better not to, he answered with a shrug of his shoulders. We showed him the way to the car to get the notes, notebooks and books.

Loaded with books and papers, we let Castaneda drive. He knew the route well.

Over there, he said, pointing with his hand, there are some beautiful river banks.

From the beginning, Castaneda established the tone of the conversation and the themes which we were to deal with.

I also realized that it wasn't necessary to have all those questions that I had so laboriously worked out.

As I had anticipated from his telephone call, he wanted to speak to us about the project he was involved in, and the importance and seriousness of his investigations.

The conversation was conducted in Spanish, a language that he manages with fluidity and a great sense of humor. Castaneda is a master in the art of conversation.

We spoke for seven hours. The time passed without his enthusiasm or our attention weakening. As he gradually became more comfortable, he made more use of typically Argentinian expressions so as to make use of his coastal ways such as a friendly gesture to us that we are all Argentinian.

It must be mentioned that although his Spanish is correct, it's evident that his language is English.

He made abundant use of expressions and words in English for those which we give the equivalent of in Spanish.

That his prime language would be English is manifested also in the syntactic structure of his phrases and sentences.

All that afternoon Castaneda strove to maintain the conversation on a level that wasn't intellectual.

Even though he has obviously read a lot and knows the different currents of thought, at no time did he establish comparisons with other traditions of the past or the present. He transmitted to us the Toltec teachings by means of material images that, precisely for that reason, hindered their being interpreted speculatively. In this way Castaneda wasn't only obedient to his teachers but totally faithful in the route he has chosen- he didn't want to contaminate his teaching with anything extraneous to it.

Shortly after meeting us, he wanted to know the reasons for our interest in knowing him.

He already knew about my possible outline and the projected book of interviews I was planning. Beyond all professionalism, we insisted on the importance of his books that had influenced us and many others so much.

We had a profound interest in knowing the font of his teaching. Meanwhile, we arrived at the banks and, in the shade of the trees, sat down. Don Juan gave me everything, he began to say, when I met him I had no other interest than anthropology, but upon encountering him I changed. And what has happened to me I wouldn't change for anything!

Don Juan was present with us. Every time Castaneda mentioned or remembered him we felt his emotion. He told us that, from Don Juan, he had learned that there was one totality of exquisite intensity capable of giving himself everything in every present moment. Give your all in each moment is his principal, his rule, he said. That which Don Juan is like can't be explained and is rarely comprehended, it simply is.

In The Second Ring of Power Castaneda records one special characteristic of Don Juan and Don Genaro, that which all others lack. There he writes: None of us is disposed to lend to another undivided attention in the way that Don Juan and Don Genaro did.

The Second Ring of Power had left me full of questions; the book interested me a lot, especially after the second reading, but I had heard unfavorable commentaries. I had certain doubts myself. I told him that I believed that I had enjoyed Journey to Ixtlan best without really knowing why. Castaneda listened to me and answered my words with a gesture which seemed to say, And me, what do I have to do with the taste of all? I continued speaking, looking for reasons and explanations.

Maybe my preference for Journey to Ixtlan is because of the love I perceived, I asserted. Castaneda made a face. He didn't like the word love. It's possible that the term might have connotations of romantic love, sentimentality, or weakness for him. Trying to explain myself, I insisted that the final scene of Journey to Ixtlan is bulging with intensity. There, said Castaneda. Yes, he would agree with that last statement. Intensity, yes, he said, that's the word.

Emphasizing the same book, I demonstrated to him that some scenes seemed to me definitely grotesque. I couldn't find justification for them. Castaneda was in agreement with me. Yes, the behavior of those women is monstrous and grotesque, but that vision was necessary to be able to enter into action, he said.

Castaneda needed that shock.

Without an adversary we are nothing, he continued. The adversary belongs to human form. Life is war, is struggle. Peace is an anomaly. Referring to pacifism he qualified it as monstrosity because, according to him, men, are beings of success and struggles.

Without being able to restrain myself I told him that I couldn't accept pacifism as a monstrosity. What about Ghandi? I asked. How do you see Ghandi, for example?

Ghandi? he responded to me, Ghandi is not a pacifist. Ghandi is one of the most tremendous fighters that have existed. And what a fighter!

It was then that I understood the very special value that Castaneda gives to words. The pacifism that he had made reference to couldn't have been a pacifism of weakness; that of those who don't have enough guts to be, and consequently do something else, that of those who do nothing because they don't have objectives or energy in life; that pacifism reflects a completely self-indulgent and hedonistic attitude.

With a grand gesture which would include all of society without values, will, or energy, he replied, All drugged out... yes, hedonists!

Castaneda didn't clarify those concepts, and we didn't ask him to. I had understood that part of the aesthetic of the warrior was to free himself from the human nature, but the unusual comments of Castaneda had filled me with confusion. Little by little, however, I was getting to know that being, beings of success and struggles is the first level of the relationship. That is the raw material where they part. Don Juan, in the books, always referred to the good tone of a person. There begins the learning and one passes to another level.

You can't pass to the other side without losing the human form, said Castaneda.

Insisting about other aspects of his book that hadn't made themselves clear to me, I asked him about the hollows that had remained with people by the simple act of having reproduced.

Yes, said Castaneda, there are differences between people who have had children and those who haven't. To pass on tiptoes in front of the eagle, you need to be whole. A person with 'hollows' can't pass.

He will explain to us the metaphor of the eagle a little later. For the moment I will pass by this almost without mentioning it because the focus of our attention was on another theme.

How do you explain the attitude of Dona Soledad with Pablito and that of la Gorda with her daughters? I wanted to know insistently. Taking from the children that edge which at birth they take from us was, in large measure, something inconceivable for me.

Castaneda agreed that he still doesn't have it all systematized. He insisted, still in the differences that exist between people who have reproduced and those who haven't.

Don Genero is crazy! Crazy! Don Juan, in a different way, is a serious crazy man. Don Juan goes slowly but arrives far away. In the end, the two of them arrive...

I, like Don Juan, he continued, have hollows; that is to say, I have to follow the route. The Genaros, on the other hand, have another model.

The Genaros, for example, have a special edge that we don't have. They are more nervous and of rapid motion...they are very fickle, nothing detains them.

Those who like la Gorda and I have had children have other characteristics that compensate for that loss. One is more settled and, although the road might be long and arduous, one arrives also. In general those who have had children know how to take care of others. It doesn't mean that people without children don't know how, but it's different...

In general one doesn't know what one is doing; one is unconscious of actions and later pays for it. I didn't know what I was doing, he exclaimed, referring, without a doubt, to his own personal life.

At birth, I took everything from my father and mother, he said. They were all bruised! To them I had to return that edge that I had taken from them.

Now I have to recoup the edge that I lost.

It would seem that these hollows that have to be closed, have to do with biological adornment.

We wanted to know if to have hollows is something irreparable.

No, he responded, one can be cured.

Nothing is irrevocable in life.

It's always possible to return what doesn't belong to us and recoup what is ours.

This idea of recovery is coherent with a path of learning walk in which it doesn't suffice to know or practice one or more techniques but that requires an individual and profound transformation of being. It relates to everything- a coherent system of life with concrete and precise objectives.

After a short silence I asked him if The Second Ring of Power had been translated in Spanish.

According to Castaneda, a Spanish publishing house had the right, but he wasn't sure if the book had come out or not.

The translation into Spanish was done by Juan Tovar, who is a good friend of mine.

Juan Tovar used the notes in Spanish that Castaneda himself had furnished him, notes that some critics have put in doubt.

The translation into Portuguese seems to be very beautiful Yes, said Castaneda.

This translation is based on the translation into French.

Really, it's very well done.

In Argentina, his first two books have been banned.

It seems that the reason given was the drug affair.

Castaneda didn't know.

Why he asked us without waiting for our answer.

I imagine it's the work of the 'Mother Church'.

At the beginning of our conversation, Castaneda mentioned something about the Toltec teaching.

Also in The Second Ring of Power it insists in the Toltecs and in being a Toltec.

What does it mean to be a Toltec I asked him.

According to Castaneda, the word Toltec constitutes a wide meaning.

It is said that someone is a Toltec in the same way that it can be said that one is a Democrat or a philosopher.

In the way he uses it, this word doesn't have anything to do with its anthropological meaning.

From the anthropological point of view the word makes reference to an Indian culture of the center and south of Mexico that was already extinct at the time of the conquest and colonization of America by Spain.

Toltec is one who knows the mysteries of watching and dreaming.

All of them are Toltecs.

It deals with a small group that has known how to maintain alive a tradition from more than 3,000 years B.C.

As I was working on mystic thought and had particular interest in establishing the fountain and the place of origin of the distinct traditions, I insisted, Do you believe that the Toltec tradition offers teaching that would be peculiar to America?

The Toltec nation maintains alive a tradition, that is, without a doubt, peculiar to America.

Castaneda asserted that it is possible that the early Americans could have brought something upon crossing the Bering Straits, but all this was so many thousands of years ago that for the moment there are nothing more than theories.

In Stories of Power, Don Juan talks to Castaneda about the wizards about those men of knowledge that the conquest and colonization of the white man couldn't destroy because they didn't know about their existence nor notice all the incomprehensible ideas of their world.

Who forms the Toltec nation? Do they work together? Where do they do it? I asked.

Castaneda answered all of my questions.

He is now in charge of a group of young people that lives in the area of Chaiapas, in the south of Mexico.

They all moved to that area due to the fact that the woman who now teaches them was located there.

Then... you returned?

I felt impelled to ask him to remember the last conversation between Castaneda and the little sisters at the end of The Second Ring of Power.

Did you return right away like the Gorda asked you to?

No, I didn't return right away, but I did return, he answered me laughing.

I returned to continue a task which I can't renounce.

The group consists of about 14 members.

Even though the basic nucleus is 8 or 9 people, all are indispensable in the task that each does.

If each one is sufficiently impeccable, a large number of people can be helped.

Eight is a magical number, he said at one moment.

Also he insisted that the Toltec isn't saved alone but that he goes with the basic nucleus.

Those who remain are indispensable in continuing and maintaining alive the tradition.

It is not necessary that the group be big, but each one of those who are involved in the task is definitely necessary for the total.

La Gorda and I are responsible for the arrivals.

Well... really I am the responsible one but she helps me intimately in this task, explained Castaneda.

He spoke to us later about the members of the group that we knew from his books.

He told us that Don Juan was a Yaqui Indian, from the state of Sonora.

Pablito, on the other hand, was a Mixteco Indian, Nestor was Mazatecan (from Mazatlan, in the province of Sinalea), and Benigno was Tzotzil. He stressed several times that Josefina was not Indian but was Mexican and that one of her grandparents was of French origin. La Gorda, as were Nestor and Don Genaro, was Maytec.

When I met La Gorda she was an immense heavy woman brutalized by life, he said. None of those who knew her can today imagine that she now is the same person as before.

We wanted to know in what language he communicated with all the people of the group, and what was the language that they generally used among themselves. I reminded him that in his books there are references to some Indian languages.

We communicate in Spanish because it's the language we all speak, he responded. Besides, neither Josefina nor the Toltec woman are Indians.

I only speak a little in the Indian language. Single phrases like greetings and some other expressions. I don't know enough to maintain a conversation. Taking advantage of his pause I asked him if the task which they are doing is accessible to all men or if it deals with something for only a few. As our questions began to point at discovering the relevancy of the Toltec teaching and the value of the experience of the group for the rest of humanity, Castaneda explained to us that each one of the members of the group has specific tasks to perform whether in the Yucatan zone, in other areas of Mexico, or in other places.

Performing tasks one discovers a large number of things that are directly applicable to concrete situations of daily life. doing tasks one learns a lot.

The Genaros, for example, have a musical band with which they go through all the places of the frontier. You will imagine that they see and are in contact with many people. You always have the possibility to transmit knowledge.

It always helps. It helps with one word, with one little insinuation... each one, faithfully performing his task, does it. All humans can learn. All have the possibility to live as warriors.

Any person can undertake the task of warrior. The only requirement is to want to do it with an unshakeable desire; that is to say, one has to be unshakeable in the desire to be free. The way isn't easy. We constantly seek excuses and try to escape. It's possible that the mind obtains it but the body feels everything... the body learns rapidly and easily.

The Toltec can't waste energy in foolishness, he continued.

I was one of those persons who can't be without friends... I can't even go to the movies alone. Don Juan in a resolute moment told him that he had to abandon all and, particularly, separate himself from all those friends with whom he had nothing in common.

For a long time he resisted the idea until finally he got involved.

One time, returning to Los Angeles, I got out of the car a block before arriving home and telephoned. Naturally on that day, as always, my house was full of people. I asked one of my friends to prepare a satchel with some things and bring it to where I was. Also I told her that the rest of the things- books, records, etc.- could be distributed among them. It's clear that my friends didn't believe me and took everything as borrowed, clarified Castaneda.

The act of getting rid of the library and records is like cutting off everything in the past, a whole world of ideas and emotions.

My friends believed that I was crazy and kept hoping that I would return from my craziness. I didn't see them in about twelve years, he concluded. After twelve years passed, Castaneda would meet again with them. He first looked for one of his friends who put him in contact with the rest of them. They then planned to meet, and get together to eat dinner. That day they had a good time; they ate a lot and their friends got drunk.

To find myself with them after all those years was my way of showing my gratitude for the friendship that they had offered me before, said Castaneda Now all are grown. They all have their families, spouses, children... It was necessary, nevertheless, that I thank them. Only in that way could I definitely terminate with them and end a stage of my life.

It is possible that Castaneda's friends don't understand anything he is doing, but the fact that he wanted to thank them was something very beautiful.

Castaneda didn't pretend anything with them. He sincerely thanked them for their friendship, and in doing so, freed himself internally from all that past. We then spoke of love, of that often mentioned love. He related to us several anecdotes about his Italian grandfather, always so lovesick, and about his father, so Bohemian, he. Oh, love! Love! he repeated several times. All his commentaries tended to destroy the ideas that one commonly has about love.

It cost me a lot to learn, he continued. I was also very lovesick. Don Juan had to work hard to make me understand that I had to cut off certain relationships.

The way in which I finally cut off with one was the following. I invited her to dinner and we met in a restaurant. During the dinner the same thing happened as always. There was a big fight and she yelled at me and insulted me. At last I asked her if she had any money. She answered that she had.

I took advantage of that to tell her that I had to go to the car to look for my wallet or something like that. I got up and didn't go back. Before leaving her, I wanted to be sure that she had enough money to take a taxi home. Since then I haven't seen her.

You aren't going to believe me, but the Toltecs are very ascetic, [ascetic- Someone who practices self denial as a spiritual discipline] he insisted. Without doubting his word I commented that that idea couldn't be deduced from The Second Ring of Power. On the contrary, I stressed. I believe that in your book many scenes and attitudes present confusion.

How do you think I was going to say that clearly? he answered me. I couldn't say that the relations between them were pure because not only would nobody have believed me but nobody would have understood me.

For Castaneda, we live in a very bustful society. Of all that we had been speaking that afternoon, the majority hadn't been understood. It's that the same Castaneda is seen obligated to adapt to certain exigencies of the publishers who, at the time, would strive to satisfy the tastes of the reading public.

The people are into another thing, continued Castaneda. The other day, for example, I entered a bookstore here in Los Angeles and I began to leaf through the magazines on the counter.

I found that there was a large amount of publications with photos of nude women... many also with men. I don't know what to tell you. In one of the photos there was a man fixing an electric cable while high on a ladder. He had on his protective helmet and a large belt full of tools.

That was all. The rest was naked. Ridiculous! Something like that can't be possible! A woman is graceful... but, a man! As means of explanation he added that women have a lot of experience due to their long history in that type of thing. A role like that has no room for improvisation.

This is the first time I have heard of the idea that the behavior of women isn't improvised; it is something totally new for me, I responded. After listening to Castaneda, we were convinced that, for the Toltec, sex represents an immense draining away of energies that is needed for other tasks. His insistence is therefore understood about the totally ascetic relations that members of the group maintain.

In the point of view of the world, the life that the group carries and the relationships they maintain are something totally unacceptable and unheard of.

That which I tell them isn't believable. It took me a long time to comprehend it, but I have finally been able to verify it.

Castaneda had told us earlier that when a person reproduces he loses a special edge. It appears that that edge is a force that children take from their parents by the mere act of birth. This hollow that remains with a person is that which must be filled or recovered. You have to recover the force which you have lost.

He also made us understand that a prolonged sexual relationship of a couple ends with a decline. In a relationship differences surge up which make certain characteristics of one or the other progressively rejected. In consequence, for reproduction, it is selected from the other part that which one likes, but there is no guarantee that that which is chosen is necessarily the best. In the point of view of reproduction, he commented, the best is at random.

Castaneda strove to explain to us these concepts better, but had to confess again that they are themes which he himself doesn't have clear yet.

Castaneda came to us describing a group whose requirements, for the average person, were extreme. We were very interested in knowing where all that vigor came from What is the sole objective of the Toltec? We wanted to know the sense of what Castaneda was telling us. What is the objective that you pursue?

We insisted on bringing the question to a personal level.

The objective is to leave the living world; to leave with all that one is but with nothing more than what one is. The question is not to take anything nor leave anything. Don Juan left completely- from the world. Don Juan doesn't die because the Toltecs don't die. In The Second Ring of Power, La Gorda instructs Castaneda with respect to the dichotomy wizard-tonal.

The domain of the second attention is only achieved after the warriors sweep totally the surface of the table... this second attention makes the two attentions form a unity and this unity is the totality of oneself.

In the same book, La Gorda says to Castaneda, when the wizards learn to 'dream,' they tie together their two attentions and, therefore, there is no need for the center to push out... sorcerers don't die...

I don't want to say that we don't die. We are nothing, we are nincompoops, stupid; we aren't either here nor there. They, on the other hand, have their attentions so united that maybe they never die.

According to Castaneda, the idea that we are free is an illusion and an absurdity. He pushed to make us understand that common sense deceives us because ordinary perception only tells us a part of the truth.

Ordinary perception doesn't tell us all the truth. There has to be more than a mere passing through the earth, of only eating and reproducing, he said vehemently.

With a gesture I interpreted as alluding to the unfeelingness of all and the immense tediousness of life in its everyday boredom, he asked us,...

What is all this that surrounds us? Common sense would be that accord to which we have arrived behind a long educative process that imposes on us ordinary perception as the only truth. Precisely. The art of the wizard, he said, consists of bringing learning to discover and destroy that perceptive prejudice.

According to Castaneda, Edmundo Husserl is the first one from the West who conceives of the possibility of suspending judgment.

In Ideas for a pure phenomenology and a phenomenological philosophy (1913) Husserl dealt thoroughly with the era or phenomenological reduction. The phenomenological method doesn't deny but simply puts into parentheses those elements that sustain our ordinary perception.

Castaneda considers that phenomenology offers him the theoretical methodological framework to comprehend the teaching of Don Juan. For phenomenology, the act of knowing depends on intention and not on perception.

Perception always varies according to history, that is to say, according to the subject with knowledge acquired and immersed in a determined tradition. The most important rule of the phenomenological method is that of toward the same things.

The task with which Don Juan fulfilled me, he insisted, was that of breaking, little by little, the perceptive prejudices until arriving at a total rupture.

Phenomenology suspends judgment and is limited to the description of pure intentional acts. So, for example, I construct the object 'house.' The phenomenological reference is minimal. The 'intention' is what transforms reference into something concrete and singular.

Phenomenology, without a doubt, has, for Castaneda, a simple methodological value. Husserl never transcended the theoretical and, as a consequence, he didn't touch the human being in his life in all his days.

For Castaneda, the most the western man-the European man-has arrived to is the political man. This political man would be the epitome of our civilization. Don Juan, he said, with his teaching is opening the door for another much more interesting man: a man who still lives in a magical world or universe.

Meditating about this idea of the political man a book by Eduardo Spranger named Forms of Life came to my memory, in which it says that the life of the political man is interwoven of relationships of power and rivalry. The political man is the man of dominion whose power controls as much of the concrete reality of the world as the beings that inhabit it.

The world of Don Juan, on the other hand, is a magical world populated with entities and forces.

The admirability of Don Juan, said Castaneda, is that even though in the world of days he appears to be crazy, nobody is capable of perceiving him. To the world, Don Juan offers a face that is necessarily temporal... one hour, one month, sixty years. Nobody would be able to catch him off guard!

In this world Don Juan is impeccable because he always knew that what is here is only momentary and that which comes after... well... a beauty! Don Juan and Don Genaro intensely loved beauty.

The perception and conception which Don Juan has of reality and time are undoubtably very distinct from ours. If on the level of daily life Don Juan is always impeccable, this doesn't prevent you from knowing that from this side all is definitely fleeting.

Castaneda continued describing a universe polarized between two extremes: the right side and the left side. The right side would correspond to the tonal and the left side to the wizard.

In Stories of Power, Don Juan explains extensively to Castaneda about those two halves of the bubble of perception. He says that the last duty of the teacher consists of tediously cleaning a part of the bubble, and then reorganizing all that there is on the other side.

The teacher is occupied in this hammering away at learning without pity until all his vision of the world stays in one half of the bubble. The other half, that which has remained clean, can therefore be reclaimed by something which the wizards call will.

To explain all this is very difficult because at this level words are totally inadequate. Precisely, the left part of the universe implies the absence of words, and without words we cannot think. There are only actions. In that other world, said Castaneda, the body acts.

The body doesn't need words to understand.

In the magical universe- as it's called- of Don Juan, certain entities exist that are called allies or fleeting shadows. These can be captured a number of times. For this kind of capture a large number of explanations have been sought, but, according to Castaneda, there is no doubt that these phenomena depend principally on the human anatomy. The important thing is to arrive at an understanding that there is a whole gamut of explanations that can give reasons for these fleeting shadows.

I asked him, then, about that knowing with the body that he speaks of in his books. Is it that, for you, the whole body is an organ of knowledge? I inquired.

Sure! The body knows, he responded to me. As an example, Castaneda told us of the many possibilities of that part of the leg that goes from the knee to the ankle where a memory center could be seated. It would appear that you can learn to use the body to capture those fleeting shadows.

The teaching of Don Juan transforms the body into an electronic scanner, he said, looking for an adequate word in Spanish to compare the body to an electronic telescope. The body would have the possibility to perceive reality at distinct levels which, in their time, would reveal configurations of material also distinct.

It was evident that for Castaneda the body had possibilities of movement and perception to which the majority of us are not accustomed. Standing up and pointing to the foot and the ankle, he spoke to us of the possibilities of that part of the body and of the little that we know about all of this.

In the Toltec tradition, he affirmed, the apprentice is trained in the development of those possibilities. At this level Don Juan begins to construct.

Meditating on these words of Castaneda, I thought about the parallel with Tantric Yoga and the distinct centers or chakras through which the ritualist comes to awakening by means of certain ritual practices.

In the book The Hermetic (impenetrable) Circle by Miguel Serrano one reads that the chakras are centers of conscience. In the same book, Karl Jung refers to a conversation that Serrano had with a Pueblo Indian chief named Ochwian Biano or Lake of the Mountain.

He explained to me his impression of the whites-always so agitated, always looking for something, aspiring to something... According to Ochwian Biano, the whites were crazy; only crazy people affirm thinking with the head.

This affirmation of the Indian chief produced great surprise in me and I asked him what he thought with. He answered me that he thought with the heart. (Miguel Serrano, The Impenetrable Circle, Buenos Aires: Ed. Kier, 1978) The path of knowledge of the warrior is long, and requires total dedication. The warrior has a concrete objective and a very pure incentive.

What is the objective? I insist. It seems that the objective consists in passing consciously to the other side through the left flank of the universe. You have to try to come as near as possible to the eagle and strive to escape it without it devouring us. the objective, he said, is to leave on tiptoe by the left hand side of the eagle.

I don't know if you know, he continued, seeking the way to clarify for us the image, that there is an entity that the Toltecs call the eagle. The visionary sees it as an immense blackness that extends to infinity; it is an immense blackness that lightning crossed. For that reason it is called the eagle: it has black wings and back, and its chest is luminous.

The eye of the entity isn't a human eye. The eagle doesn't have pity. Everything that is alive is represented in the eagle.

That entity encloses all- the beauty that man is capable of creating as well as all the bestiality that isn't the human being properly said. That which is appropriately human in the eagle is immensely small in comparison with all the rest. The eagle is excessively mass, bulk, blackness... in front of that little which is proper in a human being.

The eagle attracts all life force that is ready to disappear because it is nourished from that energy. The eagle is like an immense magnet that picks up all those beams of light that are the vital energy of that which is dying.

While Castaneda told us all this, his hand and fingers imitated, like hammers, the head of an eagle pecking space with an insatiable appetite. I only tell you that which Don Juan and the others say. They are all wizards and witches! he exclaimed. They are all involved in a metaphor that is incomprehensible for me.

What is 'the master' of man? What is it that claims us? he asked. I listened attentively and stopped talking because he had entered a terrain in which questions were possible.

The master of us can't be a man, he said. It seems that the Toltecs call master the mold of a man. Everything-- plants, animals and human beings --have a mold. The mold of man is the same for all human beings. My mold and yours, he continued explaining, is the same, but in each one it is manifested and acted on in a distinct form according to the development of the person.

Dividing the words of Castaneda, we interpreted that the human mold is that which doesn't reunite, that which unifies the force of life. The human form, on the other hand, could be that which impedes us from seeing the mold. It seems that while the human form isn't lost, we are, and this impedes us from changing.

In The Second Ring of Power, La Gorda instructs Castaneda about the human mold and the human form. In that book, the form is described as a luminous entity and Castaneda remembers that Don Juan described it as, the fount and origin of man. La Gorda, thinking about Don Juan, remembers that he told her that, if we arrive at having sufficient personal power we will be able to glimpse the pattern although we are not wizards; and that when this occurs we will say that we have seen God. She told me that if we call it God, it would be fit because the mold is God.

(The translation and the italicization are ours.)

Many times that afternoon we returned to the theme of the human form and the mold of man. Surrounding the theme from distinct angles, each time it was becoming more evident that the human form is that hard shell of the person.

That human form, he said, is like a towel that covers one from the armpits to the feet. Behind that towel there is a bright candle that is being consumed until it goes out. When the candle goes out, it is because one has died. Then, the eagle comes and devours it.

Seers, continued Castaneda are those beings capable of seeing the human being as a luminous egg. Inside of that sphere of light is a lit candle. If the seer sees that the candle is small even though the person appears strong, it means that it is already ended.

Castaneda had told us before that the Toltecs never die because to be Toltec implies having lost the human form. Only at that moment we comprehended: if the Toltec has lost the human form, there is nothing that the eagle could devour.

He hadn't kept us in doubt either that the concepts master of man and mold of man as well as the image of the eagle referred to the same entity or were intimately related.

Several hours later, seated before hamburgers in a cafeteria on the corner of Westwood Boulevard and another street whose name I don remember, Castaneda reported to us his experience of losing the human form.

According to what he said, his experience wasn't as strong as that of La Gorda (in The Second Ring of Power, La Gorda relates to Castaneda that when she lost the human form she began to see an eye always in front of her. That eye accompanied her all the time and almost ended in driving her crazy. Little by little she got used to it until, one day, the eye happened to form a part of her. Some day,... when I arrive at being a real being without form, I won't see that eye any more; the eye will be one with me...) who had symptoms similar to those of a heart attack In my case, said Castaneda, a simple phenomena of hyperventilation was produced. In that precise moment I felt a big pressure: a current energy entered through my head, passed through my chest and stomach and followed through my legs until it disappeared through my left leg.

That was all.

To assure myself, he continued, I went to a doctor, but he didn't find anything. He only suggested that I breathe in a paper bag to diminish the amount of oxygen and to resist the phenomenon of hyperventilation.

According to the Toltecs, in some way you have to return or pay the eagle what belongs to it. Castaneda had already told us that the master of a man is the eagle, and that the eagle is all the nobility and beauty as well all the horror and ferocity which is found in all that is. Why is the eagle the master of man?

The eagle is the master of man because it feeds from the call of life, of the vital energy that is loosened from all that is. And, making once more the gesture with his hands resembling the pecking head of the eagle, cleared the space of pecks with his arm, which he said, Like that! Like that! It devours everything!

The only way to escape the voracity of death is irrefutable and inescapable, the action begins. What does it consist of, how do you do this personal recapitulation? I wanted to know.

In the first place a list has to be made of all the people you have known in the length of your life, he responded, a list of all those who in one way or another have forced us to put the ego (that center of personal growth that later would be shown as a monster of 3,000 heads) on the table.

We have to bring back all those who have collaborated so that we might enter into that game of they like me or they don't like me. A game that isn't anything else than upset living about we ourselves...Licking our own wounds!

The 'recapitulation' has to be total, he continued; it goes from Z to A, going backwards. It begins in the present moment and goes toward early infancy, until two or three years of age and even earlier if it were possible. Since we were born, everything is being engraved on our bodies. The 'recapitulation' requires a great training of the mind.

How do you do this 'recapitulation'? One goes carefully bringing up images and fixing them in front of yourself, then, with a movement of the head from right to left, every one of the images is blown out as if we were sweeping them from our vision... The breath is magic, he added.

With the end of the 'recapitulation,' ended also are all the tricks, games and the self feeling. It seems that in the end we know all our tricks and there isn't any way to put the ego on the table without our realizing immediately what we are pretending with it. With personal recapitulation you can divest yourself of everything. Then, only the task remains; the task in all its simplicity, purity and rawness.

The 'recapitulation' is possible for everyone, but requires an inflexible will. If you fluctuate or hesitate; you are lost because the eagle will eat you. In that terrain there's no room for doubt.

In the first The Teachings of Don Juan, it says this: The thing that you have to learn is how to arrive at the crack between the worlds and how to enter into the other world... there is a place where the two worlds come together one over the other. The crack is there. It opens and closes like a door with the wind.

To arrive there, a man must exert his will, must, I would say, develop an indomitable desire, a total dedication. But he must do it without the help of any power and of any man...

I don't know how to explain all of this well, but in the fulfillment and dedication to the task, you have to be compulsive without truly being so because the Toltec is a free being. The task asks all of one; however, it is freeing.

Do you comprehend? If this is difficult to understand it is because, at its base, it deals with a paradox.

But to this recapitulation, added Castaneda, changing tone and posture, you have to put 'spice' on it. The characteristic of Don Juan and his 'pals' is that they are fickle. Don Juan cured me of being tiresome. He is not solemn, nothing formal. Within the seriousness of the task that they all perform there is always room for humour.

To illustrate in a concrete way the way that Don Juan taught him, Castaneda related to us a very interesting episode. It seems that he smoked a lot and that Don Juan resolved to cure him.

I smoked three packs a day. One after the other! I didn't let them go out. You see that now I don't have pockets, he said, showing his jacket that, lacked them. I eliminated pockets in them so as to remove from my body the possibility of feeling something on my left side, something that might remind me of the habit. In eliminating the pocket, I eliminated also the physical habit of carrying my hand in my pockets.

One time Don Juan told me that we were going to spend several days in the Chihuahua hills. I remember that he expressly told me not to forget to bring my cigarettes. He recommended to me, also, to bring provisions for two packs a day and no more. So I bought the packs of cigarettes, but instead of 20 I packed 40. I made up some divine packs that I covered with aluminum foil to protect my cargo from animals and the rain.

Well equipped and burdened with a knapsack, I followed Don Juan through the hills. There I walked, lighting cigarette after cigarette, and trying to catch my breath.

Don Juan had tremendous vigor. With great patience he waited for me while observing me smoke and try to keep up with him through the hills. I wouldn't have had the patience that he had with me! he exclaimed.

We arrived, at last, at a pretty high plateau, surrounded by cliffs and steep hillsides. There Don Juan invited me to try to descend. For a long time I probed from one side to the other until finally I had to desist from the purpose. I wasn't going to be able to do it.

We continued like that, for several days, until one morning I woke up, and the first thing I did was to look for my cigarettes. Where were my divine packages? I looked and looked, and I didn't find them.

When Don Juan woke up, I wanted to know what was happening to me. He explained what was going on and told me, Don't worry. Surely a coyote came and carried them away, but they can't be very far. Here! Look! There are the tracks of the coyote!

We spent all that day trailing the tracks of the coyote in search of the packs. There we were, when Don Juan sat on the ground and, pretending to be a little old man, very old, began to complain, This time I'm sure lost... I'm old... I can't any more... While he was saying this, he grabbed his head in his hands and made a great fuss.

Castaneda told us this whole story imitating Don Juan in his gestures and tone of voice. It was a spectacle seeing him. A little later, the same Castaneda would tell us that Don Juan used to make reference to his histrionic [histrionic- Characteristic of acting or a stage performance; often affected] abilities. With all that walking around, continued Castaneda, I believe that 10 or 12 days had passed. I already didn't care about smoking!

That is how I lost the desire to smoke. We had gone along like demons running through the hills! When the time came to return, you can imagine that Don Juan knew the way perfectly. We went down directly to the town.

The difference was that, then, I already didn't have a need to buy cigarettes. From that episode, he said nostalgically, fifteen years have passed.

The line of not-doing, he commented, is precisely the opposite of the routine or the routines to which we are accustomed. Habits, like smoking for example, are those which have us tied up, in chains... in the sense of not-doing, on the other hand, all avenues are possible.

We were silent for a while. I finally broke it to ask about Dona Soledad.

I said that she had impressed me as a grotesque figure; really, like a witch. Dona Soledad is Indian, he answered me. The history of her transformation is something incredible. She put such willpower into her transformation that in the end she achieved it.

In that force her will developed to such an extreme that as a consequence she also developed too much personal pride. Precisely for this reason I don't believe that she can pass on tiptoes by the left side of the eagle. In whatever way, it's fantastic what she was capable of doing by herself!

I don't know if you remember who she was... she was Pablito's 'mamacita.' She was always washing clothes, ironing, washing dishes... offering little meals to someone or another.

In relating this to us, Castaneda imitated in gestures and movements a little old lady. You have to see her now, he continued. Dona Soledad is a young strong woman. Now she is to be feared!

The 'recapitulation' took Dona Soledad seven years of her life. She hid herself in a cave and didn't leave there. She stayed there until she finished with everything. In seven years that's all she did. Even though she can't pass together with the eagle, Castaneda said, full of admiration, she'll never go back to being the poor old thing she was before.

After a pause, Castaneda reminded us that Don Juan and Don Genaro still weren't with them.

Now already everything is different, expressed Castaneda nostalgically. Don Juan and Don Genaro aren't there.

The Toltec woman is with us. She asks tasks of us. La Gorda and I do tasks together. The others also have tasks to perform; distinct tasks, also in different places.

According to Don Juan, women have more talent than men. Women are more susceptible. In life, moreover, they wear out less and tire less than men.

For this reason Don Juan has left me now in the hands of a woman. He has left me in the hands of the other side of the man woman unit. Furthermore, he has left me in the hands of women; of the little sisters and La Gorda.

The woman who is teaching us now has no name. (Several months later La Gorda (Maria Tena) called me to send a message from Castaneda. In that conversation, she told me that Mrs. Toltec is named Dona Florinda, and that she is a very elegant, vivacious and anxious woman. Mrs. Toltec must be 50 years old.) She is simply the Toltec woman.

Mrs. Toltec is the one who teaches me now. She is responsible for everything.

All the others, La Gorda and I, are nothing. We wanted to know if she knew that he was going to meet with us as well as his other plans.

Mrs. Toltec knows everything. She sent me to Los Angeles to converse with you, he responded, turning his attention to me. She knows about my projects and that I'm going to New York.

We also wanted to know what she was like. Is she young? Is she old? we asked him.

Mrs. Toltec is a very strong woman. Her muscles move in a very peculiar way. She is old, but one of those who shines with the strength of her makeup.

It was difficult to explain how she was. In his trying, Castaneda sought for a point of reference and reminded us of the movie Giant.

Do you remember, he asked us, that movie that James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor appeared in? There Taylor plays a mature woman although in reality she was very young. The Toltec woman causes the same impression in me: a face with the makeup of an old woman with a body still young. Also I could say that she acts old.

Do you know about the National Enquirer he casually continued, A friend of mine is in charge of saving them for me here in Los Angeles, and every time I come I read them. It's the only thing that I read here... Precisely in that newspaper recently I saw some photos of Elizabeth Taylor. Now she surely is large!

What did Castaneda want to transmit to us in making the comment about the National Enquirer is the only thing he reads? It's difficult to imagine that a sensationalist newspaper would be his fount of information.

That comment in some way synthesized his judgment with respect to the immense production of news that characterizes our era. That comment also encloses a judgment in respect to the values of the whole Western culture. Everything is on the level of the National Enquirer.

Nothing Castaneda said that afternoon was casual. The different fragments which he provided pointed at creating a determined impression on us. In this intention wasn't in any way wrong; on the contrary, his interest was to transmit the essential truth of the teaching they are involved in.



-- The second half of this interview will be printed in issue #15 of Magical Blend.


Another partial translation has previously been printed in Seeds of Unfolding.


Copyright 1985 Magical Blend Magazine

[Transcriber's note: the published version of this article contains various strange phrases, numerous misspelled words and lots of peculiar punctuation, all of which is preserved here.]

A CONVERSATION WITH CARLOS CASTANEDA

Magical Blend Magazine Issue #15

[This is part 2 of the interview]

[Introduction to interview by Magical Blend Magazine]

During the planning stages for a book she is writing on mystical thinkers, Graciela Corvalan wrote a letter to Carlos Castaneda requesting an interview.

She later received a phone call from Castaneda in which he accepted her request, explaining that he was excited to be interviewed by her since she was not a member of the established press. Castaneda asked her to meet him at a specified time and date on the UCLA campus. When Graciela and a few colleagues arrived for the interview, she was asked not to use the tape recorder she had brought along. So, for seven hours, loaded with books and papers, Graciela kept notes as the man, who some have credited as being the crucial catalyst of mainstream awareness of metaphysics, explained his tutelage under the Yaqui Sorcerer, Don Juan, his present tasks assigned to him by the fierce Toltec Woman, and the nature of the Toltec teachings.

In the first part of this interview, published in Magical Blend issue #14, Graciela explained that the interview was conducted in Spanish, noting that although Castaneda is fluent in Spanish, his native language is obviously English.

Graciela found that Castaneda, though well read, was not intellectual in a bookish sense. At no time, says Graciela, did he establish comparisons with other traditions of the past or present. It was obvious that he did not wish to contaminate his teaching with anything extraneous to it.

Graciela found Castaneda a master in the art of conversation as he talked at length about his past and present.

At the time he met Don Juan, Castaneda's primary interest was anthropology, but, upon encountering him I changed.

Graciela remembers that, Don Juan was present with us. Every time Castaneda mentioned or remembered him, we felt his emotion.

From Don Juan, Castaneda learned the sorcerer's principle rule: Give your all in each moment. And through Don Juan, Castaneda became involved in the long process of freeing himself from his past, a process which included divesting himself of both possessions and friends. According to Castaneda, the life of the Toltec warrior requires an unshakeable desire to be free. In the course of the interview, Castaneda revealed himself to be every bit the warrior showing a distaste for pacifism and cheap sentiment. Without an adversary, he maintains, we are nothing.

In questioning Castaneda about the Toltec tradition, Graciela found that, from an anthropological perspective, the word Toltec makes reference to an Indian culture of the center and south of Mexico that was already extinct at the time of the conquest and colonization of America by Spain. But, according to Castaneda, Toltec is descriptive not so much of hereditary characteristics but rather of a way of life and a way of looking at life. Toltec, says Castaneda is one who knows the mysteries of watching and dreaming. It is a tradition that has been maintained for more than 3,000 years. Though Toltec colonies or civilizations may have been destroyed by the white man, the Toltec nation could not be destroyed, for it represented something incomprehensible to the white man to whom the dream world remained cut off, mysterious and unapproachable.

According to Castaneda, the objective of the Toltec is to leave the living world; to leave with all that one is, but with nothing more than what one is. Don Juan succeeded in this activity, but it was not, emphasizes Castaneda, death, because Toltecs don't die. In The Second Ring of Power, la Gorda says, when the wizards learn to 'dream' they tie together their two attentions and, therefore, there is no need for the center to push out...sorcerers...don't die.

Freedom, says Castaneda, is an illusion perpetrated by the snare of the senses.

The art of the wizard consists of bringing learning to discover and destroy that perceptive prejudice. In transcending, or breaking, the tyranny of the senses, a door to a magical universe is opened. Castaneda describes the universe as being polarized between two extremes: the right side and the left side-The two halves of the bubble of perception. On the left side is action. Here there are no words. Here the mind does not conceptualize but rather the entire body realizes, without thoughts and without words.

The duty of a teacher such as Don Juan is to move all vision of the world into the right side, so that the left side can remain clear for the magical practice of will.

Presiding over the universe is the Eagle, an immense blackness representative of all the beauty and all the bestiality in everything that's alive. According to Castaneda, that which can be called human is very small in comparison to the rest. As excessive mass, bulk, and blackness, the Eagle attracts and feeds on all life force that is ready to disappear. It is, he says, like an immense magnet that picks up all those beams of light that are the vital energy of that which is dying.

The key to escaping the Eagle is recapitulation which involves going backward from adult to infancy, clearing out the images of a lifetime, divesting oneself of everything until only the task remains and one arrives at the crack between the worlds. To arrive there, says Castaneda requires an indomitable desire, a total dedication. But one must do it without the help of any power and of any man.

According to Toltec tradition, all living things have a mold. The mold of man is the same for all human beings. In each individual it is developed and manifested according to the development of the person. The human form, on the other hand, impedes us from seeing the mold. In The Second Ring of Power, the form is described as a luminous entity. According to Don Juan, it is the fount and origin of man. The reason that Toltecs do not die is because, having lost the human form, they have nothing that the Eagle can devour.

In The Second Ring of Power, la Gorda relates that when she succeeded in losing the human form, she began to see an eye always in front of her which almost ended up driving her crazy. But someday she says, when I arrive at being a real being without form, I won't see that eye anymore; the eye will be one with me.

So, without further digression, we proudly present the second part of Graciela Corvalan's interview with Carlos Castaneda.


[Beginning of Corvalan Interview - Part 2]



EVASIVE MYSTERIES

By Graciela Corvalan, Ph.D.

We continued talking about the Toltec Woman and Castaneda told us that she's leaving soon. She's told us that in her place are going to come two women. The Toltec Woman is very strict, her demands are terrible! Now, if the Toltec Woman is fierce, it appears that the two who are coming are much worse. Let's hope that she's not leaving yet! One can't stop wanting nor can prevent the body from complaining and fearing the severity of the undertaking... Nevertheless, there's no way of altering destiny. So, there it grabbed me!

I don't have more liberty, he continued, than the impeccable one because only if I'm impeccable, I change my destiny; that is to say, I go on tiptoes by the left side of the eagle. If I'm not impeccable, I don't change my destiny and the eagle devours me.

The Nagual Juan Matos is a free man. He is free in fulfilling his destiny. Do you understand me? I don't know if you understand what I want to say, he asked worriedly.

Sure we understand! we retorted vehemently. We find a great similarity with what we feel and live daily in so much in this last section as in many other things that you have referred to us up to now.

Don Juan is a free man, he continued. He looks for liberty. His spirit looks for it... Don Juan is free from that basic prejudice; the perceptive prejudice that prevent us from seeing reality.

The importance of all that which we came speaking about resides in the possibility of destroying the circle of routines: Don Juan made him practice numerous exercises so he would become conscious of his routines: exercises such as 'walking in the darkness' and the 'power walk.'

How to break that circle of routines ? How to break that perceptive arc that ties us to that ordinary vision of reality? That ordinary vision that our routines contribute to establishing is, precisely, that which Castaneda denominates the attention of the tonal or 'the first ring of attention.'

To break that perceptive arc isn't an easy task; it could take years. The difficulty with me, he affirmed laughing, is that I am very pigheaded. Quite unwillingly I went on learning: For this reason, in my case, Don Juan had to use drugs... and so I ended up...with my liver in the stream!

In the line of not-doing is achieved the destroying of routines and becoming conscious, explained Castaneda. While saying this he stood up and started to walk backwards while he remembered a technique that Don Juan had taught him: Walking backwards with the help of a mirror. Castaneda continued reporting to us that to facilitate the task he devised an artifact of metal (like a ring that in the style of a crown he bore on his head) in which the mirror was fastened. In that way, he could practice the exercise and have his hands free.

Other examples of techniques of not-doing would be to put on your belt backwards and to wear your shoes on the opposite feet. All these techniques have as an objective to make one conscious of what one is doing at each moment. Destroying routines, he said, is the way we have of giving the body new sensations. The body knows...

Immediately Castaneda related to us some of the games that the Toltec youth practice for hours. They are games of not-doing, he explained. Games in which there are no fixed rules but rather they are generated as they play.

It seems that by not having fixed rules, the behavior of the players isn't foreseen and, consequently, everyone must be very attentive. One-of these games, he continued, consists in giving the adversary false signs. It's a game of pulling.

As he said, in that game of pulling, three persons participate and two posts and a rope are needed. With the rope you tie up one of the players and hang him from the posts. The other two players must pull on the ends of the rope and try to fool him giving him false signs. All have to be very attentive so that when one pulls, the other also does it and the person who is tied doesn't get twisted.

The techniques and games of not-doing develop attention: You can say that they are concentration exercises since they obligate those who practice them to be fully conscious of what they are doing. Castaneda commented that old age would consist in having remained shut in the perfect circle of routines.

The way of teaching of the Toltec Woman is to put us into situations. I believe that it's the best way because in putting us in situations we discover that we are nothing: The other way is that of self love, that of personal pride. The former way transforms us into detectives, always attentive to all that could happen or offend us. Detectives? Yes ! We spent time seeking evidence of love: if they love me or they love me not. Thus, centered in our ego we don't do anything but strengthen it. According to the Toltec Woman, the best is to begin considering that nobody loves us.

Castaneda told us that for Don Juan, personal pride resembles a monster of 3,000 heads. One destroys and knocks down heads but others always rise up... It's that one possesses all the tricks! he exclaimed. With the tricks it appears that we fool ourselves believing we are somebody.

I then reminded him of the image of catching weaknesses, as rabbits are caught in a trap, that appears in one of his books. Yes, he answered me, you constantly have to be on the lookout.

Changing position, Castaneda began to give us the history of the past three years. One of the many tasks was that of cook in those roadside cafes. La Gorda accompanied me that year as a waitress. For more than a year we lived there as Jose Cordoba and his wife! My complete name was Jose Luis Cordoba, at your service, he, said with a profound reverence. Without a doubt, everyone knew me as Joe Cordoba.

Castaneda didn't tell us the name or the location of the city in which they lived. It's possible that they had been in different places. It appears that at the beginning, he arrived with la Gorda and the Toltec Woman, who accompanied them for a while. The first thing was to find housing and work for Joe Cordoba, his wife, and his mother-in-law. That was how we presented ourselves, commented Castaneda, otherwise, the people wouldn't have understood.

For a long time they looked for work, until finally they found it in a roadside cafe. In that type of establishment you begin very early in the morning. At five a.m. you have to be already working.

Castaneda told us, laughing, that in those places the first thing they ask you is: Do you know how to make eggs? What could there be to making eggs? It appears that he delayed enough time in figuring out what they were trying to say until he finally discovered that they were talking about the diverse ways of preparing eggs for breakfast. In restaurants or cafes for truck drivers. 'Egg making' is very important.

They spent one year working there. Now I know how to 'make eggs', he affirmed laughing. All that you would want! La Gorda also worked a lot. She was such a good waitress that she ended up by taking care of all the girls there. At the end of a year, when the Toltec Woman told them, That's enough, you're finished with this task, the owner of the cafe didn't want us to leave. The truth is that we worked very hard there. A lot! From morning till night.

During that year, they had a significant encounter. It relates to the story of a girl named Terry who arrived at the cafe where they were asking for work waitressing. By then, Joe Cordoba had gained the confidence of the owner of the establishment and was the one in charge of contracting and watching over all the staff. As Terry told them, she was looking for Carlos Castaneda. How could she know that they were there? Castaneda didn't know.

This girl Terry, continued Castaneda with sadness and giving us to understand that she looked dirty and messy, is one of those 'hippies' who take drugs... a terrifying life. Poor thing! Later, Castaneda would tell us, that, even though he could never tell Terry who he was, Joe Cordoba and his wife helped her a lot during the months she spent with them. He told us that one day she came in very excited from the street saying that she had just seen Castaneda in a Cadillac parked in front of the cafe. He's there, she screamed to us; he's in the car, writing. Are you sure it's Castaneda? How can you be so convinced? I told her. But she continued, Yes, it's him, I'm sure... I then suggested to her that she go out to the car and ask him. She needed to get rid of that immense doubt.

Hurry! Hurry! I insisted. She was afraid to speak to him because she said that she was very fat and very ugly. I encouraged her. But you look divine, hurry!

Finally, she went, but came right back crying a river of tears. It seems that the man in the Cadillac hadn't looked at her, and had thrown her out telling her not to bother him. You can imagine that I tried to console her, said Castaneda. It gave me so much pain that I almost told her who I was. La Gorda didn't let me; she protected me. Really, he couldn't tell her anything because he was performing a task in which he was Joe Cordoba and not Carlos Castaneda. He couldn't disobey.

As Castaneda told it, when Terry arrived she wasn't a good waitress. With passing months, without a doubt, they brought her to be good, clean and careful. La Gorda gave much advice to Terry. We cared for her a lot. She never imagined who she was with all that time.

In these last years they had passed moments of tremendous deprivation during which people maltreated and offended them. More than once he was at the point of revealing who he was, but... Who would have believed me! he said.

Besides, the Toltec Woman is the one who decides.

That year, he continued, there were moments in which we were reduced to the minimum: we slept on the ground and we ate only one thing.

Hearing this, we wanted him to explain to us the ways of eating they had.

Castaneda told us that Toltecs only eat one type of food at a time, but that they do it continually. Toltecs eat all day, he commented in a casual tone. (In this affirmation of Castaneda one can see his desire to break the image that people have of the sorcerer or wizard - beings with special powers who don't have the same needs as the rest of mortals. In saying that they eat all day, Castaneda united them with the rest of mankind.)

According to Castaneda, the mixing of foods, for example, eating meat with potatoes and vegetables, is very bad for your health. This mixture is very recent in the life of humanity, he affirmed. To eat one kind of food helps digestion and is better for the organism.

One time Don Juan accused me of always feeling sick. You can imagine that I defended myself! However, later I realized that he was right and I learned. Now I feel well, strong and healthy.

Also the way of sleeping that they have is different from that of the majority of us. The important thing is to realize that you can sleep in many ways. According to Castaneda, we have learned to go to sleep and to get up at a determined hour because that is what society wants from us. So, for example, said Castaneda, parents put the children to bed to get rid of them. We all laughed because there was some truth in his statement.

I sleep all day and all night, he continued, but if I add up the hours and minutes I sleep, I don't believe they come to more than five hours a day. To sleep in that way requires on the part of the person the ability to go directly into deep sleep.

Returning to Joe Cordoba and his wife, Castaneda told us that one day the Toltec Woman came and told them that they were not working enough. She ordered us, he said, to organize a pretty big business in landscaping, something like designing and arranging gardens. This new task of the Toltec Woman wasn't anything small. We had to contract a group of people to help us to do the work during the week while we were in the cafe. During the weekends we dedicated ourselves exclusively to the gardens. We had a lot of success.

La Gorda is a very enterprising person. That year we worked really hard. During the week we were in the Cafe and on the weekends always driving the truck and pruning trees. The demands of the Toltec Woman are very large.

I remember, continued Castaneda, that at a certain opportunity we were in the house of a friend when reporters arrived looking for Carlos Castaneda. They were reporters from The New York Times. So as to pass unnoticed, la Gorda and I put ourselves to planting trees in my friend's garden. In the distance we saw them enter and leave the house. That was when my friend yelled at us and mistreated us a lot in front of the reporters. It seemed that Joe Cordoba and his woman could be yelled at without consequence. None of those who were present there came to our defense. Who were we? There, only the poor people and dogs work in the sun!

So that was how between my friend and us we fooled the reporters. My body, however, I couldn't fool it. For three years we were involved in the task of giving experiences to the body to make it realize that, in truth, we are nothing. The truth is that the body isn't the only thing that suffers. The mind also is accustomed to constant stimuli. The warrior, however, doesn't have stimuli from the media; he doesn't need them. The best place, therefore, is that where we were! There nobody thinks!

Continuing with the story of his adventures, Castaneda commented that more than once he and la Gorda were kicked out in the street. Other times, going by truck down the highway, we were pushed to the edge of the road. What alternative did we have? It's best to let them pass!

Through all that Castaneda came telling us, it appears that the task of those years had to do with, learning to survive in adverse circumstances, and with surviving the experience of discrimination. This last, something very difficult to endure but very informative, he concluded with great calm.

The objective of the task consists in learning to remove oneself from the emotional impact which discrimination provokes. The important thing is not to react, not to get angry. If one reacts, he/she is lost. One doesn't get offended by a tiger when it attacks, he explained, you move to the side and let it pass.

In another opportunity, la Gorda and I found work in a house, she as a maid and I as butler. You can't imagine how that ended! They kicked us out into the street without pay. Even more! To protect themselves from us in case we were to protest, they had called the local police. Can you imagine? We were jailed for nothing.

That year, la Gorda and I spent working very hard and suffering great privations.

Many times we didn't have anything to eat. The worst thing was that we couldn't complain nor did we have the support of the group. In that task we were alone and we couldn't escape. In whatever way, even though we might have been able to say who we were, nobody would have believed us. The task is always total.

Truthfully, I am Joe Cordoba, continued Castaneda accompanying his words with his whole body; and this is very beautiful because you can't fall lower. I have already arrived at the bottom you can be. That is all that I am. And with these last words he touched the ground with his hands.

As I told you before, every one of us has different tasks to perform. The Genaros are quite bright; Benigno is now in Chiapas and he's doing very well. He has a musical group. Benigno possesses a marvelous gift of imitation; he imitates Tom Jones and many more. Pablito is the same as always; he's very lazy. Benigno is he who makes the noise and Pablito celebrates it. Benigno is the one who works and Pablito gathers the applause.

Now, he said in way of conclusion, we have all finished the tasks which we have been doing and we are preparing ourselves for new tasks. The Toltec Woman is the one who sends us.

The story of Joe Cordoba and his woman had impressed us a lot. It dealt with an experience very different from those of his books. We were interested in knowing whether he had written or was writing anything about Joe Cordoba. I know that Joe Cordoba existed, said one of us; he had to exist. Why don't you write about him? From all that you have come telling us, Joe Cordoba and his woman is what has impacted me most.

I just brought a new manuscript to my agent, Castaneda answered us. In that manuscript, the Toltec Woman is she who teaches. It couldn't be any other way... The title might possibly be, The Stalking and the Art of Being in The World. [This book was published in 1981 as The Eagle's Gift.] There is all her teaching. She is the one responsible for that manuscript. A woman had to be the one who taught about the art of stalking. Women know it well because they have always lived with the enemy; that is to say, they have always walked 'on tiptoe' in the masculine world. Precisely for that reason, because women have long experience in that art, the Toltec Woman is she who has to give the principles of stalking.

In that last manuscript, however, there is nothing concrete about the life of Joe Cordoba and his woman. I can't write in detail about that experience because nobody would understand nor believe it. I can speak of these things with very few... Yes, the essence of the experience of the last three years is in the book.

Returning to the Toltec Woman and her nature, Castaneda told us that she was very different from Don Juan. She doesn't love me, he insisted, la Gorda, on the other hand, yes, she loves her! You can't ask the Toltec Woman anything. Before you speak to her she already knows what she has to say. Besides, you have to fear her; when she gets angry, she hits, he concluded making many gestures which indicated his fear.

We stayed in silence for a while. The sun had gone down and its rays reached us through the branches of the trees. I felt a little cold. It seemed to me that it was around 7 p.m.

Castaneda appeared also to become aware of the time. It's already late, he told us. What do you think about getting something to eat? I invite you. We got up and began to walk. As one of those ironies, Castaneda took charge of my notes and books for part of the way. The best thing was to leave everything in the car. That's what we did. Free of our bundles, we walked for some blocks in animated conversation.

All that they had achieved requires years of preparation and practice. One example is the exercise of dreaming. That which seems so foolish, affirmed Castaneda emphatically, is very difficult to achieve.

The exercise consists in learning to dream at will and in a systematic way. You begin by dreaming about a hand that enters the visual field of the dreamer. Then, you see the whole arm. You continue in a progressive way until you can see yourself in the dream. The other step consists in learning to use dreams. That is to say, once you have achieved control over them, you have to learn to act on them. So, for example, Castaneda said, you dream about yourself that you leave the body and that you open the door and go out into the street. The street is something outrageous! Something in you leaves you; something that you achieve at will.

According to Castaneda, dreaming doesn't take much time. That is to say, dreams don't occur in the time of our watches. The time of the dream is something very compact.

Castaneda gave us to understand that in dreams an immense physical draining is produced. In dreams, you can live a lot, he said, but the body resents it. My body really feels it... Afterwards you feel like a truck has run over you. Several times, touching upon that theme of dreaming, Castaneda would say that that which they do in dreams has a pragmatic value. In Tales of Power, you read that the experiences of dreams and those lived in one's waking hours acquire the same pragmatic valence, and that for sorcerers the criteria to differentiate a dream from reality becomes inoperative. (p. 18).

That of leaving or traveling outside of the physical body keenly caught our interest, and we wanted to know more about those experiences. He answered us explaining that every one of them had achieved different experiences. La Gorda and I, for example, go together. She takes me by the forearm and... we go.

He explained to us also that the group has common journeys. They are all in constant training whose objective would be 'to become witnesses.' To arrive at being witnesses means, affirmed Castaneda, that you can't judge any more. That is to say, it relates to an internal sight which equals not having prejudices any more.

Josefina seems to have great abilities to journey in the body of dreaming. She wants to take you there and probes recounting marvels. La Gorda is the one who always rescues her.

Josefina has a great facility to break that arch of being able to reflect upon things. She's crazy, crazy! he exclaimed. Josefina flies very far, but she doesn't want to go alone and always returns. She returns and looks for me... She gives me reports that are marvelous.

According to Castaneda, Josefina is a being who cannot function in this world. Here, he said, she would have ended up in some institution.

Josefina is a being who cannot be held to the concrete; she is ethereal. In whatever moment she can definitively leave. La Gorda and he are, on the other hand, much more cautious in their flights. La Gorda, particularly, represents the stability and equilibrium that in some measure he lacks.

After a pause, I reminded him of that vision of an immense dome which in The Second Ring of Power is presented as the place of meeting and where Don Juan and Don Genaro would be waiting for them.

La Gorda also has that vision, he commented pensively. That which we see isn't an earthly horizon. It's something very smooth and arid in whose horizon we see rising an immense arch which covers all and which extends until it arrives at the zenith. In that point in the zenith, you can see a large brightness. You could say that it is something like a dome that emits an amber light.

We strove to press upon him questions so that he would give us more information about that dome. What is it? Where is it? we inquired.

Castaneda answered that by the size of what they see, it could be a planet. In the zenith, he added, there is like a great wind.

By the brevity of his answer, we realized that Castaneda didn't want to talk much about that topic. It is possible, also, that he couldn't find adequate words to express what they saw. No matter what, it is evident that those visions, those flights in the body dreaming, are a constant training for the definitive journey- that leaving through the left side of the eagle, that final leap which is called death, that giving an end to the recapitulation; that being able to say we are ready, in which we carry all that we are but nothing more than that what we are.

According to the Toltec Woman, Castaneda conferred to us, those visions are my aberrations: She thinks that that is my unconscious way of paralyzing my actions; that is to say, the way I have of saying that I don't want to leave the world. The Toltec Woman also says that with my attitude, I am detaining la Gorda from the possibilities of a more fertile or more productive flight.

Don Juan and Don Genaro were great dreamers. They had an absolute control of the art. I am surprised, immediately exclaimed Castaneda, raising his hand to his forehead, at the fact that nobody notices that don Juan is an outrageous dreamer. The same can be said of Don Genaro. Don Genaro, for example, is capable of bringing his body of dream to the every day life.

The great control of Don Juan and Don Genaro is evidenced in that of not being noted or passing by unnoticed. (In all his books, Castaneda has referred to that of not being noted and to go by unnoticed. In The Second Ring of Power, Castaneda records the times that Don Juan had ordered him to concentrate on not being obvious. Nestor, also, says that Don Juan and Don Genaro learned to not be noticed in the midst of all this. The two are masters of the art of stalking.

Of Don Genaro, la Gorda says that he was in the body of dreaming most of the time, (p. 270). All that they do, he continued with enthusiasm, is worthy of praise. Of Don Juan, I admire immensely his great control, composure and serenity.

Of Don Juan, it can never be said that he is a senile old man. He isn't like other people. There is here on campus, for example, an old professor who when I was a young man was already famous. At that time, he was at the peak of his physical strength and intellectual creativity. Now, he's chewing his tongue of cork! Now I can see him as he is, as a senile old man. Of Don Juan, on the other hand, you will never be able to say something like that. His advantage in respect to me is always abysmal.

In the interview with Sam Keen, Castaneda says that one time Don Juan asked him if he thought the two were equals. Even though he really didn't think that they were, in a condescending tone he said yes. Don Juan listened to him, but he didn't accept his verdict. I don't think that we are, he said, because I am a hunter and a warrior and you are more like a pimp. I am ready at any moment to offer the recapitulation of my life. Your small world full of sadness and indecision can never be equal to mine. (Sam Keen, Voices and Visions (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), p. 122.)

In all that Castaneda had told us can be found parallels with other currents and traditions of mystical thinking. In his own books are cited authors and works of antiquity and of the present. I reminded him that, among others, there are references to The Egyptian Book of the Dead, to Tractatus by Wittgenstein, to Spanish poets like San Juan de la Cruz and Juan Ramon Jimenez, and to Latin American writers like the Peruvian Cesar Vallejo.

Yes, he responded, in my car there are always books, many books. Things that someone or another send me. He was accustomed to read sections of those books to Don Juan. He likes poetry. It's clear that he only likes the four first lines! According to him, that which follows is idiocy. He says that after the first verse it loses force, that it's pure repetition.

One of us asked him if he had read of or if he knew the yoga techniques and the descriptions of the different planes of reality which the sacred books of India offer.

All that is marvelous, he said. I have had, moreover, pretty intimate relationships with people who work in Hatha Yoga.

In 1976, a doctor friend named Claudio Naranjo (Do you know him? he asked us.) connected me with a yoga teacher. That's how we went to visit him in his 'ashram' here in California. We communicated by means of a professor who acted as interpreter. I was trying to discover in that interview parallels with my own experiences of traveling outside of the body. There, however, he didn't speak of anything important. There was, yes, much show and ceremony, but he didn't say anything. Towards the end of the interview, this character took in his hands a metal watering can and began to wet me with a liquid whose color I didn't like at all. No sooner had he withdrawn, when I asked him what he had just thrown at me. Someone came near and explained to me that I should be very happy because he had given me his blessing. I insisted on knowing the contents of the container.

Finally I was told that all the secretions of the teacher are saved: Everything that comes from him is sacred. You can imagine, he concluded in a tone between jocular and joking, that here concluded the conversation with the yoga master.

A year later, Castaneda had a similar experience with one of the disciples of Gurdjieff. He met with him in Los Angeles upon the insistence of one of his friends. It seems that the gentleman had imitated Gurdjieff in everything. He had shaven his head and had a huge moustache, he commented, indicating with his hands their size. We had just entered, when he energetically grabbed me by the throat and gave me some tremendous blows. Immediately after he told me to leave my master because I was wasting my time: According to him, in eight or nine classes, he was going to teach me everything I needed to know. Can you imagine? In a few classes he can teach someone everything.

Castaneda also told us that the disciple of Gurdjieff had mentioned the use of drugs to accelerate the learning process.

The interview didn't last long. It seems that Castaneda's friend realized right away the ridiculousness of the situation and the magnitude of his error. That friend had insisted that he see the disciple of Gurdjieff because he was convinced that Castaneda needed a teacher more serious than Don Juan.

When the interview ended, Castaneda told us that his friend felt full of shame. We continued walking some six or seven blocks. For a while we talked about circumstantial things. I remember that I commented to him that I had read in La Gaceta an article by Juan Tovar in which he mentions the possibility of filming the books. (See Juan Tovar. Encounter of Power, La Gaceta, F.C.E. (Mexico, December 1974).

Yes, he said. At one time that possibility was spoken of. He later told us the story of his encounter with the producer Joseph Levine, who would have intimidated him from behind an immense desk. The size of the desk and the producer's words hardly comprehensible because of the huge cigar he kept between his lips, were the things that had made the biggest impression on Castaneda. He was behind a desk like it was a dais, he explained, and I, there below, very small. Powerful! With his hands full of rings with very large stones.

Castaneda had already said to Juan Tovar that the last thing he wanted to see was an Anthony Quinn in the role of Don Juan. It seems that someone had proposed Mia Farrow for one of the roles... To conceive of such a movie was very difficult, he commented. It's neither ethnography nor fiction. The project in the end fell apart. The sorcerer Juan Matus told me that it wouldn't be possible to do it.

During that same time he was invited to participate in shows like Johnny Carson and Dick Cavett. In the end I couldn't accept things like that. What would I say to Johnny Carson, for example, if he asked me if I spoke to the coyote or not? What would I say? I'd say, yes... and then? Indubitably, the situation could have become very ridiculous.

Don Juan was the one who put me in charge of giving testimony of a tradition, said Castaneda. He himself insisted that I accept interviews and give conference to promote the books. Later he made me cut everything because that type of task burns a lot of energy. If you're into those things you have to give them force.

Castaneda explained clearly that with the production of his books, he is in charge of taking care of the expenses of the whole group. Castaneda allows everyone to eat.

Don Juan, he insisted, gave me the task of putting in writing all that the wizards and sorcerers said. My task doesn't consist in anything but in writing until one day they tell me, Enough, here you stop. The impact or not of my books, really is unknown to me because I'm not dealing with what's happening here. To Don Juan before and to the Toltec Woman now belong all the material in the books.

They are responsible for all that is said there.

The tone of his voice and his gestures impressed us in a lively way. It was evident that in that terrain the task of Castaneda consists of obeying. His objective isn't anything but to be impeccable as receptor and transmitter of a tradition and of a teaching.

Personally, he continued after a pause, I am working on a kind of journal; it's something like a manual. For this work, yes, I am responsible. I would like a serious publisher to publish it and to be in charge of distributing it to interested persons and to centers of study.

He told us that he had worked out some 18 units in which he believes he has summarized all the teaching of the Toltec nation. To organize the work, he has made use of the phenomenology of E. Husserl as a theoretical framework to make comprehensible what they taught him.

Last week, he said, I was in New York. I brought the project to the editors of Simon and Schuster but I failed. It seems they got scared. It's that something like that can't have success.

Of those 18 units I am the only one responsible, he continued in a meditative tone, and, as you can see, I wasn't successful. Those 18 units are something like the 18 falls in which I was bumped hard on the head. I agree with the editors that it's a work of heavy reading, but there I am... Don Juan, Don Genaro, all the others are different. They are fickle! (According to what Castaneda communicated to us by telephone, Simon and Schuster finally decided to accept the project of the journal that had seemed to worry him so much.)

Why do I call them units? he asked, moving ahead of us. I call them that because each one of them claims to show one of the ways to break the unit of the familiar. That unique perceptive vision can be broken in different ways.

Castaneda, trying once again to clarify this, gave us the example of the map. Each time we want to arrive at some place we need a map with clear points of reference to not get lost. We can't find anything without a map, exclaimed Castaneda. What later occurs is that the only thing we see is the map. Instead of seeing what there is to see, we finish seeing the map we carry inside.

Therefore, to break that arc of reflexibility, to constantly cut the bonds that lead us to the known points of reference, is the ultimate teaching of Don Juan.

Many times during that afternoon, Castaneda had to insist that he was just a contact to the world. All the knowledge of the books belongs to the Toltec nation. In the presence of his insistence, I couldn't but react and tell him that the labor of arranging the material from notes into coherent and well organized book must have been immense and difficult.

No, responded Castaneda. I don't have any work. My task consists, simply, in copying the page which is given me in dreams.

According to Castaneda, you can't create something from nothing. To pretend to create like that is an absurdity. To explain this to us, he brought up an episode in the life of his father. My father, he said, decided that he was going to be a great writer. With that idea, he resolved to fix his office. He needed to have an office that was perfect. He had to keep in mind the smallest detail, from the decorations of the wall to the type of light on his work table. Once the room was ready, he spent much time looking for a suitable desk for his task. The desk had to be of a determined measurement, wood, color, etc. Another such incident occurred with the selection of the chair on which he would sit. Later he had to select the suitable cover so as to not ruin the desk's wood. The cover could be plastic, glass, leather, cardboard. On this cover my father was going to rest the paper on which he would write his masterpiece. Then, seated at his chair, in front of the blank paper he didn't know what to write. That is my dad. He wants to begin writing the perfect phrase. Surely you can't write that way! One is always an instrument, an intermediary. I see each page in dreams, and the success of each one of those pages depends on the degree of fidelity with which I am capable of copying that model from the dream. Precisely, the page which impresses or impacts most is that in which I have achieved reproducing the original with most exactitude.

These commentaries of Castaneda reveal a particular theory of knowledge and of intellectual and artistic creation. (I thought immediately of Plato and of St. Augustine with his image of inner teacher. To know is to discover and to create is to copy. Neither knowledge or creation can ever be an undertaking of a personal nature.

While we ate dinner I mentioned to him some of the interviews which I had read. I told him that I had enjoyed greatly that which Sam Keen had done and which had been published first in Psychology Today. Castaneda was also satisfied with that interview. He has much appreciation for Sam Keen. During those years, he said, I knew many people with whom I would have liked to have continued being friends... one example is the theologian Sam Keen. Don Juan, however, said, Enough.

With respect to the interview in Time, Castaneda related to us that first a male reporter came to meet with him in Los Angeles. It seems it didn't go well, (he used some Argentine slang) and so he left. They then sent one of those girls that you can't turn down, he said making us all smile. It all came out well, and they understood each other magnificently. Castaneda had the impression that she understood what he had told her. In the end, however, she didn't do the article. The notes which she had taken were given to a reporter that I think is now in Australia, he added. It seems that this reporter did what he wanted with the notes they gave him.

Every time that for one reason or another, the Time interview was mentioned, his annoyance was evident. He had observed to Don Juan that Time was too powerful and important a magazine. Don Juan, on the other hand, had insisted that the interview be done. the interview was done, 'just in case' concluded Castaneda informally using once again a typically port area (Argentinian) expression.

We also spoke of the critics and of that which had been written about him and his books. I mentioned to him Richard deMille and others who had put in doubt the veracity of his works and the anthropological value of them.

The work that I have to do, affirmed Castaneda is free from all that the critics can say. My task consists of presenting that knowledge in the best way possible. Nothing they can say matters to me because I no longer am Carlos Castaneda, the writer. I am neither a writer, nor a thinker, nor a philosopher... in consequence, their attacks don't reach me. Now, I know that I am nothing; nobody can take anything from me because Joe Cordoba is nothing. There isn't in all this, any personal pride.

We live, he continued, on a level lower than the Mexican peasants, which is already saying a lot. We have touched ground and we can't fall lower. The difference between us and the peasant is that he has hopes, wants things, and works to one day have more than he has today. We, on the other hand, don't have anything and each time we will have less. Can you imagine this?

Criticisms can't hit the target.

Never am I more full than when I am Joe Cordoba, he exclaimed vehemently standing up and opening his arms in a gesture of plentitude. Joe Cordoba, frying hamburgers all day with my eyes full of smoke...Do you understand me?

Not all the critics have been negative. Octavio Paz, for example, wrote a very good preface for the Spanish edition of The Teachings of Don Juan. To me his preface was most beautiful. Yes, Castaneda said feelingly, That preface is excellent. Octavio Paz is a complete gentleman. Maybe he is one of the last who remain.

The phrase, a complete gentleman doesn't refer to the undeniable qualities of Octavio Paz as thinker and writer. No! The phrase points to the intrinsic qualities of being, the value of a person as a human being. That Castaneda might point out that he is one of the last ones who remain accented the fact that he is relating to a species in danger of extinction.

Well, continued Castaneda trying to soften the impact, maybe there remain two gentlemen. The other is an old Mexican historian friend of his whose name wasn't familiar to us. He told us some anecdotes about him that reflected his physical vitality and intellectual vivacity.

At this juncture in the conversation Castaneda explained to us how he selects the letters that arrive to him. Do you want me to explain how I did it with yours? he asked directing himself to me.

He told us that a young friend receives them, puts them in a bag and keeps them until he arrives in Los Angeles. Once in Los Angeles, Castaneda always follows the same routine: First he dumps all the correspondence into a large box, like a toy box, and then he only takes out one letter. The letter he takes out is that which he reads and answers. Clearly nothing is done in writing.

Castaneda doesn't leave tracks.

The letter I took out, he explained, was the first one that you wrote. Later I looked for the other one. You can't imagine how many problems I had to get your phone number! When I already believed that I wasn't going to have any luck, I obtained it by the intervention of the university. I had really already thought that I wasn't going to be able to speak with you.

I was very surprised to know all the inconveniences that he had had to get to me. It appears that once he had my letter m his hands, he had to try to exhaust all means. In the magical universe much importance is given to signs.

Here in Los Angeles, continued Castaneda casually, I have a friend who writes me a lot. Each time I come I read all his letters, one after the other as if it were a diary. One certain time, between the letters I bumped into another one that without realizing I had opened. Even though I immediately realized that it wasn't from my friend, I read it. The fact that it was in the pile was for me a sign.

That letter put him in contact with two people who reported a very interesting experience to him. It was night and they had to enter the San Bernardino Freeway. They knew that to meet it they had to continue ahead until the end of the street. Then they had to take a left and continue until they reached the freeway. So they did it, but after some 20 minutes they realized that they were in a strange place. It wasn't the San Bernardino Freeway. They resolved to get off and ask, but nobody helped them. At one of the houses where they knocked they were met with screaming.

Castaneda continued telling us that the two friends went back down the road until they reached a service station where they asked for directions. There they were told what they already knew. So they again repeated the same steps, and without any inconveniences arrived at the highway.

Castaneda met with them. Of the two of them, it seems that only one is truly interested in understanding the mystery.

On the earth, he said as means of explanation, there are sites, special places or openings, through which you can enter and pass through to something else.

Here he stopped and offered to bring us. It's near here... in Los Angeles... If you want, I can take you, he said. The earth is something alive. Those places are the entrances from where the earth periodically receives force or energy from the cosmos. That energy is that which the warrior must store up. Maybe, if I am rigorously impeccable, I might get close to the eagle. May it be so!

Every 18 days a wave of energy falls upon the earth. Count, he suggested to us, starting on the third of next August. You will be able to perceive it. This wave of energy could be strong or not; it depends. When the earth receives very large waves of energy, it doesn't matter where you might be, it always reaches us. Before the magnitude of that force, the earth is small and the energy reaches all parts.

We were still animatedly conversing when the waitress approached and in a cutting tone asked if we were going to order anything else. As nobody wanted dessert or coffee, we had no other remedy than to get up. No sooner had the waitress moved away when Castaneda commented, It seems we are being thrown out...

Yes, we were being thrown out and, maybe, with reason. It was late. In surprise we checked the passing of time. We got up and left for the avenue.

It was night, the street and the people had the appearance of a fair. A mime dressed in tails and top hat was clowning around behind our backs. Everything we saw made us smile while our eyes searched for the plate that is always passed during those representations. To our right, under the eaves of an old theater, someone was trying another representation on a miniature stage. I believe I saw a cat ready for its function. Really there you could see everything.

In other times; a man disguised as a bear tried to compete with a human orchestra. The question is to look for alternatives each time more extravagant, someone commented. While we walked, returning to the campus, Castaneda spoke about a prospective trip to Argentina.

There a cycle is closed, he told us. To return to Argentina is very important for me. I'm still not sure when I can do it, but I will go. For now I have things to do here. Just in August three years of tasks will be accomplished, and it's possible that then I might go.

That afternoon, Castaneda spoke to us a lot about Buenos Aires, about its streets, neighborhoods and sports clubs. He remembered nostalgically Florida Street with its elegant stores and the itinerant multitude. He was even reminded with precision of the famous street of cinemas. Lavalle Street, he said making memory.

Castaneda lived in Buenos Aires during his childhood. It seems he was enrolled in a downtown school. Of that era he remembers with sadness that it had been said that he was wider than he was tall words that when one is a child hurt a lot. I always looked with envy, he commented, on those Argentinians so tall and handsome.

You know that in Buenos Aires you always have to belong to some club, continued Castaneda. I was from Chacarita. To be from River Plate isn't surprising, right? Chacarita, on the other hand, is always one of the last.

In those times, Chacarita always came out last. It was touching to see him identified with those who lose, with the 'underdog.'

Surely La Gorda will come with me. She wants to travel. Clearly she wants to go to 'Parice', he declared. La Gorda buys now in Gucci, is elegant and wants to go to Paris. I always say to her, Gorda, why do you want to go to Paris? There there is nothing. She has a certain idea about Paris, 'the city of light' you know.

Many times that afternoon, La Gorda was named. With her, Castaneda brought us to an extraordinary person due to the fact that he, without a doubt, feels great respect and admiration for her. What would be the sense then, of all that circumstantial information that he gave us about her? I believe that with those commentaries, as well as those in which he referred to the way of eating and sleeping of the Toltecs, Castaneda tried to prevent us from forming a rigid image of what they are. The work that they are doing is very serious and their lives are austere, but they aren't rigid nor can they be squeezed into the traditional norms of society. The important thing is to liberate oneself from schemes, not to replace them with others.

Castaneda gave us to understand that he hasn't traveled much in Latin America, if you exclude Mexico. Lately I've only been in Venezuela, he said. As I've already told you, I have to go to Argentina soon. There a cycle is closed. After that I will be able to leave. Well... the truth is that I don't know if I want to leave yet. His last words were said smilingly, Who doesn't have things that hold him down.

He has traveled through Europe several times for business related to his books. In 1973, however, Don Juan sent me to Italy, he affirmed. My task consisted of going to Rome to obtain an audience with the Pope. I didn't claim to obtain a private audience but one of those audiences which are conferred on groups of persons. All I had to do in the interview was to kiss the hand of the Supreme Pontiff.

Castaneda did everything that Don Juan had asked him. He went to Italy, arrived in Rome and asked for the audience. It was one of those Wednesday audiences, after which the Pope officiates at a public mass in the plaza of San Pedro. They did confer on me an audience but... I couldn't go, he said. I didn't even arrive at the door.

That afternoon, Castaneda referred several times to his family and to his typically liberal and frankly anticlerical background education. In The Second Ring of Power, Castaneda also makes reference to the anticlerical heritage that he received. Don Juan, who doesn't seem to justify all his prejudices and battles against the Catholic Church, says: To conquer our own foolishness requires all our time and energy. This is the only thing that matters. The others lack consistency. Nothing that your grandfather and your father have said about the Church has made them happy. To be an impeccable warrior, on the other hand, will give you force, youth and power. Thus, the appropriate thing for you is to know how to choose. (p. 236) Castaneda didn't theorize about these themes.

With respect to the disjunctive 'clericalism-anticlericalism' he only wanted us to receive a teaching with the example of his experience. That is to say, he makes us understand that it is very difficult to break the schemes which have been formed in youth.



Copyright 1985 Magical Blend Magazine

Dimensions, February 1992

BEING-IN-DREAMING

FLORINDA DONNER IN CONVERSATION WITH
ALEXANDER BLAIR-EWART

Florinda Donner is a longtime colleague and fellow dream-traveler of Carlos Castaneda and the acclaimed author of "The Witch's Dream" and "Shabono". Her latest book "Being-In-Dreaming: An Initiation into the Sorcerer's World", an autobiographical account of her halting, sometimes unwilling, often bewildering initiation into the inner works of being-in-dreaming, has recently been released and will be available in Canada in the Spring. Anthropologist and sorceress, Florinda Donner lives in Los Angeles, California and Sonora, Mexico.

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ALEXANDER BLAIR-EWART: [ABE:] Now, at the beginning of the book, you talk about how you become drawn into a living myth. Can you talk about that mythology?


FLORINDA DONNER: It's a living myth. Well the myth of the Nagual is a myth, but a myth that is being relived over and over again.

You see, the myth that exists is the myth that there is the Nagual and that he has his troop of people, apprentices, sorcerers. Actually I'm not an apprentice of Don Juan. I was an apprentice of Castaneda who was an apprentice of Don Juan. And I am one of the 'sisters' who were actually of the women of Florinda, and she gave me her name. So, in that sense, it is a myth which exists.

They didn't care that I called them witches. It has no evil connotations for them. From the western point of view, the idea of a brujo, or a witch, has always a negative connotation.

They couldn't care less, because for these people, the abstract quality of sorcery voids automatically any positive or negative connotation of the term. We are apes on one level, but we have this other magical side. In that sense we relive a myth.


ABE: So the myth of the Nagual is that there is an unbroken lineage from the ancient Toltecs right down to modern times. I'm wondering if I can get you to talk about what the pattern of the myth actually is.


FLORINDA D: Well, there is no pattern of the myth. That's why the whole thing is so baffling and so difficult.

When I first got involved with these people my main quest, my main aberration, which I came to call it later, was that I wanted to have some rules and regulations about what the hell it is I had to do.

There were none. There is no blueprint because each new group has to find their own way to deal with this idea of trying to break the barriers of perception.

The only way we can break the barriers of perception, according to Don Juan, is that we need energy.

All our energy is already deployed in the world to present the idea of self: what we are; who we want to be perceived as; how other people perceive us.

So Don Juan says 90% of our energy is deployed in doing that, and nothing new can come to us.

There's nothing open to us, because no matter how "egoless" we are, or we pretend to be, or we want to believe we are, we are not; even, let's say, "enlightened" people, or gurus that I have met.

At one time Carlos Castaneda was going around trying to meet gurus- and the ego of those people was so gigantic; in how they wanted to be perceived in the world.

And that is, according to Don Juan, exactly what kills us. Nothing is open to us anymore.


ABE: A real Nagual; a real seer wouldn't care how the world perceives them, particularly, would they?


FLORINDA D: No, they don't. But they still have to fight it. Castaneda has been at this for thirty years. I've been at this for over twenty years, and it's ongoing; it doesn't stop.


ABE: What's the nature of the battle? Because you use the language of the warrior. What's the nature of the battle? What are you fighting?


FLORINDA D: The self.


ABE: The self.


FLORINDA D: It's not even the self: it's an idea of the self, because if we would really get the self below the surface, we don't really know what it is.

And it is possible to curtail this idea; this bombastic idea we have of the self, because whether it's a negative idea or a positive idea doesn't really matter. The energy employed to sustain our idea of ourself is the same.


ABE: So there's tremendous emphasis in this tradition on overcoming what is called self-importance.


FLORINDA D: Self-importance, exactly. That's the main battle; to shut off our internal dialogue.

Because even if we are isolated someplace, we are still constantly talking to ourselves. That internal dialogue never stops.

And what does the internal dialogue do? It always justifies itself, no matter what. We replay things, events, what we could have said or could have done, what we feel or don't feel.

The emphasis is always on me. We're constantly spouting this mantra- me...me...me, silently or verbally.


ABE: So, an opening emerges when...


FLORINDA D: ...when that dialogue shuts off: Automatically. We don't have to do anything.

And the reason people reject Castaneda as not true is because it's too simple. But its sheer simplicity makes it the hardest thing there is to do for us.

There are about six people in our world engaged in the same pursuit; and the difficulty we all have is totally shutting off that internal dialogue.

It's fine if we're not threatened; but when certain buttons are pushed, our reactions are so ingrained in us that it's so easy to go back on automatic pilot.

You see, there's one great exercise that Don Juan prescribes- the idea of recapitulation.

The idea is that you recapitulate your life, basically; and it's not a psychological recapitulation.

You want to bring back that energy you left in all the interactions you've had with people throughout your life, and you start of course from the present moment and you go backwards in lime.

But if you really do a good recapitulation, you discover, by the time you are three or four years old, you have learned all your reactions already. Then we become more sophisticated, we can hide them better, but basically the pattern has already been established- how we're going to interact with the world and with our fellow human beings.


ABE: So here is the image, then, or the awareness of a kind human being who is travelling a parallel path to the world of the Tonal, or the world of the person; the social person. This other world, his other opening, is something that has apparently always been there.


FLORINDA D: Yes, it's always there. It's available to all of us.

Nobody wants to tap into it, or people think they want to tap into it, but as Don Juan pointed out, the seeker is involved in something else, because a person who seeks already knows what he's seeking.


ABE: Yes, that's clear.


FLORINDA D: The disappointment that so many people who are "seekers" have with Castaneda is because, when he talks to them, well, they have already made up their mind how things should be; and they are not open.

Even if they're listening, they're not open to anything anymore, because they already know how it should be; what it is they're seeking.


ABE: My version of that is that I am not interested in self-improvement.

I'm interested in self-realization, but not im- provement, and I'm not concerned with whether or not what I turn out to be in the process of recapitulation is something nice and spiritual and acceptable, because it's going to contain elements of madness as well as everything else.


FLORINDA D: Exactly.


ABE: But this is a very deeply disturbing idea for most people.


FLORINDA D: It is, yes, definitely. You see, we believe in this idea that we are basically energetic beings.

Don Juan said everything hinges on how much energy we have.

Our energy to fight, even to fight the idea of the self, requires an enormous amount of energy.

And we go always to the easiest path. We go back to what we know, even us who have been involved in this for so long.

It would be a lot easier just to say, oh, to hell with it, you know, I' m just going to indulge a little bit. But the thing is, that little bit of indulging would plunge you right back to point zero again.


ABE: Except for one thing that we both know, Florinda, which is this: that once you pass a certain point within yourself, if you have reached that silence, I believe, even for one moment, if its real...


FLORINDA D: ...you can't stop it. Exactly.

But to reach this moment of silence you need the energy. You can stop it- what Juan calls this momentary pause, this cubic centimetre of chance- and you can stop it immediately.


ABE: And once it's happened, you'll never be the same again.


FLORINDA D: Absolutely.


ABE: And you might want to go back to your old ways and indulge, but you can't get any satisfaction out of it.


FLORINDA D: Exactly. No, you can't. There's no satisfaction. That's totally correct.

I think, if we would really arrive... let's say a critical mass would arrive at that feeling or at that knowledge, we could change things in the world.

The reason nothing can change is because we're not willing to change ourselves, whether it's political dogma, economic or social issues, it doesn't really matter.

What the hell is the whole thing with the rainforest and the environment at the moment?

How can we expect someone to change if we're not willing to change ourselves? The change is phony; the change is restructuring or replaying the pieces, but there's no change.

Basically we are predatory beings, you see. That hasn't changed in us. We could use that predatory energy to change our course, but we're not willing to change ourselves.


ABE: Now, in the myth, the individual seer and/or Nagual is selected by providence, the unknown, the ineffable.


FLORINDA D: ...actually selected. Carlos has been "tapped" energetically.

Let's look at our energetic configuration... some people are basically energetically different. They call Carlos a three-pronged Nagual; Don Juan was a four-pronged Nagual. So what does that really entail?

Basically, Naguals have more energy than the rest of the group, and that's something very curious. Why the hell him, or why, for instance, are always the men Naguals?

We have women Naguals in the lineage, but the men have more energy- the men that have been selected so far: They're not better.

There were people in Don Juan's world who were infinitely more spiritual, better prepared, bigger men of knowledge in the sense that they knew more, and it didn't make any difference.

It is not that the Nagual is more or less than somebody else. It's just that he has that energy to lead.


ABE: And he can give some of that energy to somebody, too, and give them a boost.


FLORINDA D: We draw from that energy, yes. It is not that you get that energy, but he has that energy, if nothing else, not-to become whatever the world presents.

For instance, in that sense, being with Castaneda for so long, the worldly goodies that have been presented to him are unbelievable, yet he has never wavered from his path.

And I, personally, could say now, that if I had been put in that position for that many years, I could not honestly say that I would have been so impeccable.

And you see, I have to acknowledge that, because the worst thing, of course, we can do is to try to hide certain things. And for me to have witnessed Castaneda's journey, I mean, there were incredible worldly things presented to him which he never took. And you see, for that you need energy.

That's where energy comes in; that's when you need whoever is then the leader of the group to point out that way. Because if somebody else would have been the Nagual that doesn't have the energy, he would have succumbed.


ABE: Can a Nagual succumb and then recover?


FLORINDA D: No. There is no chance.


ABE: How come?


FLORINDA D: Go back to the myth. The eagle flies in a straight line. It doesn't turn around. You might be able to say okay, you have to run harder after it. But what does that mean? It's a metaphor.


ABE: So, the Nagual works in different ways to fulfill the unfolding of the myth.


FLORINDA D: Don Juan had more people behind him. Energetically he had a larger mass, so he could practically pluck you in and put you some place.

Carlos will not do that. For him, whatever the people he is working with- and there are six of us- it's a matter of decision. That's all. Our decision is all that counts, nothing else.

He will not cajole us; he will not beg; he will not tell us what to do. We have to know.

Having been exposed to this for so long; having been with Don Juan, any way we can try to walk on this path, that has to be enough for Carlos. There was nothing he would do forcefully to make sure that we stayed on this path.


ABE: Different Naguals work in different ways. Is it true of Carlos Castaneda? I've heard him described as the Nagual of stalkers.


FLORINDA D: Yes, but I would say... I don't know. He's a dreamer.


ABE: Yeah, that emerges, too.


FLORINDA D: And then, what is this idea of dreaming, dreaming and being awake? It's a different state. It's not that you're zonked out. No, you are totally normal and coherent, but something in you plays energetically on a different level.


ABE: There's something in your eyes, too.


FLORINDA D: Yes.


ABE: Something in your eyes that is too to learn to look at two worlds simultaneously.


FLORINDA D: Exactly. And again this idea is that you have collapsed the barrier perception in terms of what we see.

Whatever we perceive has been defined us by the social order, no matter what. Intellectually we are willing to accept at perception is culturally defined, but we will not accept it on any other level. But it's absurd, because it exists on another level.

And I can only say, because we have been involved with these people- and certainly I'm also in the world- that is possible to see on those two levels and to be totally coherent in both, and impeccable on both levels.


ABE: Talk about impeccability. What is impeccability?


FLORINDA D: You know exactly what you have to do. Especially for women, we are reared to be very petty beings. Women are so petty, it's unbelievable.

And I'm not saying that men are not, but with men, no matter how we want to express it, men always are on the winning side. Whether they are losers or not, it's still male.

Our world is a male world, regardless how well off they are or not, regardless whether or not they believe in any kind of feminist ideology, it doesn't really matter. Men are the winners in our society.


ABE: In the book you talk about how women are actually enslaved by their attachment to the sexuality of men. Can you talk about that?


FLORINDA D: Definitely. First of all, to me, one of the most shocking things which I denied and refused to believe for quite some time, was this idea of the fog created by sexual intercourse.

They went even further to explain that basically what really goes on is that, when we have sexual intercourse, when the male ejaculates, not only do we get the semen.

In that moment of energetic outburst, what really happens is that they are what Don Juan calls 'energetic worms', filaments, and those filaments stay in the body.

From a biological point of view, those filaments ensure that the male returns to the same female and takes care of the offspring. Thc male will recognize that it is his offspring by the filaments at a total energetic level.


ABE: What is the exchange of energy in sexual intercourse?


FLORINDA D: She feeds the man energetically. Don Juan believes that the women are the cornerstone for perpetuating the human species, and the bulk of that energy comes from women, not only to gestate, to give birth and nourish their offspring, but also to ensure the male's place in the whole process.


ABE: So, the woman is enslaved, then, by this fog. How does she release herself?


FLORINDA D: If we talk about it from a biological point of view, is she enslaved? The sorcerers say yes, in the sense that she always views herself through the male. She has no option.

I used to be excruciatingly mad about this whole discussion. I used to go over and over it with them, and go back to this whole idea, especially because this was in the early seventies when the women's movement was at its peak.

I said "No, women have come a long way. Look at what they have accomplished.", and they said, "No, they haven't accomplished anything."

To them, the sexual revolution- and they were not prudes- they were not interested in morality, they were only interested in energy- so they said, that for women to be liberated sexually, in a way enslaved them even more, because suddenly they were feeding energetically not just one male, but many males.


ABE: That's interesting.


FLORINDA D: So for them it was absurd, and whatever's happening at the moment, he foresaw that in the seventies.

He said they're going to dive down on their noses. They're going to be weakened. And they are.

The few women I've talked to- I've given certain lectures, and the books- and when I've talked about this, it's very interesting that the women do agree. And I first thought I would have a great deal of difficulty with this subject, but especially women who have gone through the process of having multiple lovers said they were exhausted, and they don't know why.


ABE: So we are talking about something beyond the sexual.


FLORINDA D: Originally, beyond the the sexual aspect, the female, the womb ensures that the woman is the one that's closest to the spirit in this process of approaching knowledge as being-in- dreaming.

The man cones upward, and by the sheer definition of the cone, it comes to a finite end. It's an energetic force. He strives because he is not close to the spirit, or whatever we want to call that great energetic force out there.

According to the sorcerers, the woman is exactly the opposite. The cone is upside down. They have a direct link with it, because the womb for the sorcerer is not just an organ of reproduction. It is an organ for dreams; a second brain.


ABE: Or heart.


FLORINDA D: Or heart, and they do apprehend knowledge directly. Yet we have never been allowed to define what knowledge is in our society or in any society. And the women who do create or help to formulate the body of knowledge, it has to be done in male terms.

Let's say a woman does research. If she does not abide by the rules already established by the male consensus, she won't be published. She can deviate slightly, but omly within that same matrix. It is not allowed for women to do anything else.


ABE: So the sorceress is removed from the hypnotism of all that.


FLORINDA D: Of the social, yes. It's very interesting that you mention the idea of hypnotism, because Don Juan always said at the time when psychology produced Freud, we were too passive. We would have followed either Mesmer or Freud. We are mesmeric beings. We never really developed that other path...


ABE: Yes. The path of energy.


FLORINDA D: ...and this would never have happened to us if Freud wouldn't have had the upper hand.


ABE: Well, he's lost it now.


FLORINDA D: No, not really, because with all we do, who knows how many generations it takes? Let say he has been discredited intellectually, but our whole cultural baggage... We still talk in those terms, even people who don't even know who Freud is. It's part of our language; our culture.


ABE: Yes, I know. It's very frustrating, dealing with people who approach the whole of reality from this hackneyed psychological viewpoint.


FLORINDA D: Yes. And they don't even know where it comes from. It's part of our cultural baggage.


ABE: So the sorceress is freed from this condition.


FLORINDA D: Well, free in the sense that once you see what the social order really is- it's an agreement- at least you are more cautious in accepting that.

People say, "Oh but look how different life is from your grandmother's or mother's time." I say, it's not. It's only different in degree. But nothing is dif- ferent.

If I would have lived my life the way it had been established for me... yes, I was more educated, I had a better chance. But that's all. I still would have ended up the same way they had ended up. Married, frustrated, with children that by now I probably would hate, or they would hate me.


ABE: I keep trying to get you now to cross that line, and talk about what occurs now that you've realized that there is that thralldom and you begin to free yourself from it. What is it that opens up to perception?


FLORINDA D: Everything.


ABE: Everything. Good.


FLORINDA D: First of all, in your dreams you can see. For instance, my work is done in dreaming. Not that I don't have to do the work, but it comes in dreaming.


ABE: Now you're using the word dreaming in this very specific sense, which is in this tradition. Can you talk about what dreaming actually is?


FLORINDA D: In the traditional sense, when we fall asleep, as soon as we start entering a dream, in that moment when we're half awake and half asleep, and still conscious, you know from Casta- neda's work that the assemblage point flutters: It starts shifting, and what the sorcerer wants to do is that he wants to use that natural- that happens to every one of us- shift to move into other realms.

And for that you need an exquisite energy. Again it comes down to energy. We need an extraordinary amount of energy because you want to be conscious of that moment and use it without waking up.


ABE: Yes, a very high accomplishment.


FLORINDA D: For me, it's very easy to enter; to use it. The thing is, I had no control at that time- although I have now- over when it was going to happen.

But I could center into this state of what they call... I mean, the women were not interested in calling it the 'second attention': They were interested in calling it 'dreaming awake', because it is the same thing.

And you'd reach different levels, and what you do is that in that dreaming state eventually you have the same control you have in your daily life. And that's exactly what the sorcerers do. It's the same thing; there's no difference anymore.


ABE: So you are now able to exist in another reality?


FLORINDA D: Well, I don't really know. You see, we don't have the language to talk about it, except to talk about it in known terms. So in a weird way, when I ask myself, "Do I exist in another reality?", yes and no.

It's not quite right to really say that, because it is one reality. There is no difference.

Let's say there are different layers, like an onion. But it's all the same. And it becomes very bizarre. How am I going to talk about it? In metaphors? Our metaphors are already so defined by what we already know.


ABE: Yes, the problem of language.


FLORINDA D: You see we don't have the language to really talk about what then really happens when you are in the 'second attention', or when we 'dream awake'.

But it is as real as any other reality. What is reality? It is, again, a consensus. And you see, the thing is, we only want to agree about this intellectually on one level. But reality is more than just an intellectual agreement: Let's say, it can be more. And for that, again, we go back to that same thing- it all hinges on energy.


ABE: That's right. But it also hinges on something called 'intent'.


FLORINDA D: Exactly. But in order to hook yourself to 'intent'... See, 'intent' is out there, it's this force- Don Juan was not interested in religion- but, in a weird way maybe it is exactly what we call God, the supreme being, the one force, the spirit.

You see, each culture knows what it is. And the thing is, Don Juan, again, said you don't beg for it. You ask, and in order to ask for it, you need energy. Because not only do you need energy to hook yourself onto it, but you want to stay hooked.


ABE: Yes. So, this thing of intent, I mean it's an easy word to say, but it's actually a quite complex operation.


FLORINDA D: Yes, exactly, very complex. For Don Juan and his people, to talk about sorcery and witchcraft, with all those negative connotations, they couldn't care less what we called the practices.

For them it was very very abstract. To them sorcery is an abstraction, and it was this idea of expanding the limits of perception.

For them, our choices in life are limited by the social order. We really have boundless options; but by accepting the social order's choices, of course, we set a limit to our limitless possibilities.


ABE: And yet the human being seems...


FLORINDA D: ...constantly searching for that which has been...


ABE: ...lost...


FLORINDA D: ...lost or caged in by the social order. They put blinds on us the moment we are born. Look at the way we coerce the child to perceive the way we perceive.


ABE: Yes, the transmission of culture.


FLORINDA D: It's the most perfect example.

Children truly perceive more, obviously, a great deal more. But they have to make some order out of that chaos, and we, of course, are the perennial teachers of what is proper to perceive within our group.

And if they don't abide by that, my god, we shoot them with drugs, or lock them up in therapy with psychiatrists.


ABE: There have been these traditions, which have existed for a long, long time, and now in the last, say, twenty or thirty years in particular, we start to hear about them. Why did Castaneda write his books?


FLORINDA D: Because it was a task; it was a sorceric task that Don Juan impressed upon him. Castaneda is the last of his line. There is no one else. There's a group of Indians that we work with.

You see, Don Juan, in a weird way made almost a mistake with Castaneda when he first was put in touch with him; whatever the design or power of the spirit was which put Don Juan face to face with Castaneda.

And don Juan rallied right away with his circle of apprentices.

And I think it's in Tales of Power and The Second Ring of Power, when he talks about the people in Oaxaca and the Little Sisters and all those people.

And then, years later, Don Juan realizes that that's not the way Castaneda is going. Castaneda was even more abstract than Don Juan was. His path was a totally different path.

And then when don Juan gathered these other people- the people that are with Castaneda, we all met Don Juan before we met Castaneda.

Actually there was only five of us before- four of us and Castaneda.


ABE: So, there was the sorcerer's task of writing the books. What I'm trying to get at is that this knowledge, just as knowl- edge, becomes available now and is available to millions of people in this form. What is the purpose of that?


FLORINDA D: Well, somebody has to get hooked by it. And people do.

For us, for our mentality as the westem ape, as Don Juan always called us, you see, we have to be hooked first intellectually, because obviously that's how our whole being works.

When I was in school, I was just a step away from going into graduate school, and I had been in this world for two or three years, and I said, "What am I doing by continuing school? Why should I get a PhD.? It's absolutely redundant."

And Don Juan and all the women said it's absolutely not redundant, because in order to reject something you have to understand it at its most sophisticated. Because for you to say you're not interested in philosophy, or you're not interested in anthropology, it's meaningless. You can only say it after you have at least have made some attempt to understand it.

There's no reason to reject it, and when plunging into this world of the 'second attention' and 'dreaming awake', your mind has to be so well trained for you to emerge again, to come out with the knowledge. Because if you have not the brain or the mind to do it, you might as well just go throw stones in the desert; because it's meaningless.

For them it was extremely important that all of us are very well trained. Everyone working within this little group has a degree. There are historians, anthropologists, librarians.


ABE: So, the knowledge is made available to millions of people, and people become hooked by it.


FLORINDA D: On one level, they will, yes.


ABE: And does that mean that the tradition has now begun to proliferate itself in that way, also?


FLORINDA D: I don't know. If I go by Castaneda's mail, which he doesn't read, I would say yes.

But then, most of the stuff... I mean I open letters from time to time, and they're mad: They're crackpots most of them. Some of them are very, very serious enquiries, and most of them are just truly cracked people.

(laughter)

I mean they're cracked. Like, "I am the new Nagual." Or "I have been visited by you in dreams." I mean truly bizarre things.


ABE: Well, there are many levels to that, as you know. But I think that you women, you sorcerers there, and the whole Castanedan reality has actually affected the mass collective consciousness of, particularly, North America.


FLORINDA D: It is as you say; the work is out there. There's a great many people reading it. And some people are truly very serious about it.


ABE: And some of them are people who are non-Natives who have become involved in Native spirituality.

In a way, the work that has come from your group has had a tremendous quickening effect on Native spiritualities all over this continent, who have found a track back into their traditions.


FLORINDA D: You see, the whole point of Don Juan was that you don't go back, because we are caught again in the myth and the rituals.

And for Don Juan, myth and rituals... myth in the sense that yes, that you're part of this matrix, but not in the sense that you're going to live it by invoking certain rituals; certain powers that were, let's say, successful in the l9th century.

Because, he said, that's exactly the fallacy because originally a ritual is only to hook your attention. Once your attention is hooked, you drop it.

As the apes that we are, we of course are very comforted by the ritual. People that truly transcend a certain knowledge do it by exactly getting out of it. Yet the rest of the mass is mesmerized by the ritual.


ABE: Seeing the truth of that and the fact that Castaneda describes you as the new seers, how does that emerge?


FLORINDA D: The new seers? For the women it is very important, this idea that the womb is not just an organ of reproduction.

In order to activate this, our intent has to be different. In order to change our intent we go back again to energy.

You see, we don' t really know what it means to use the womb as an organ for being; an organ of light; of intuition.

For us, intuition really is something that has already been defined. There is no real intuition anymore, because we intuit with our brains.

Don Juan was interested in women, and people always ask, "Well, how come there's always so many women? Do you have orgies? Is there all kinds of stuff going on?"

He said, "No, it's because the male doesn't have the womb. He needs that magical 'womb power' (laughter)." It's very important, you see.


ABE: Let me ask some technical questions there, if I may, on behalf of my female readers. Does the womb have to be fully functioning? I mean, if a woman had her tubes tied, would her womb still work?


FLORINDA D: Yes, as long as she doesn't have a hysterectomy.


ABE: So long as the womb isn't removed...


FLORINDA D: ...if the womb is there, yes.


ABE: Then it can work.


FLORINDA D: Oh, absolutely. But the only thing is you need to summon that intent.

Like certain of the Goddess cults- "When God Was A Woman"- and I was talking to some women a month ago, and they were all in goddess groups. And every month they go into the forest; they go someplace up to Sequoia and they groove in the forest, in the trees, and oh, they have a great time hanging out, debating, making rituals in the river.

And I said, "But what the fuck are you doing? You go back home, and then you are the same assholes you were always. You open your legs whenever the master says "I need you""

And they were shocked. I mean, they quite dis- liked me, because they don't like to hear that. They said, "But we felt so good for three days."

And I said, "But what's the point of feeling good for three days if your life continues the same way?"

What are we resting from? Because our life is going to continue. Why don't we change? This idea of the rituals and even going back to the Native beliefs, it didn't even work back then, on one level. We were conquered.


ABE: So it's something that has to live now in a completely authentic way.


FLORINDA D: It has to be fluid, and the practitioner has to be fluid to accept these changes. Even within us, things are changing constantly, and we're so comfortable in a certain groove, until something blasts us out of it. And we resent it, but we have to be fluid. Only energy will give us that fluidity.


ABE: How do you accummulate energy?


FLORINDA D: To start off with, at least at the beginning, it was Don Juan's idea that the best energy that we have is our sexual energy. It's the only energy that we really have, and most of our sexual energy is squandered.


ABE: Now, is it the same for men and women?


FLORINDA D: Of course it's the same for men and women. The only thing is with women you see that energetically the woman takes on the burden of feeding the man through their energetic fila- ments. So, in that sense, it's worse for women. And for the man too, because the man is hooked. Energetically he is hooked, no matter what.

And we have all kinds of psychological explanations. People who we've had affairs with, and we can't get her out of our minds, whatever. You see, we have this gray barrage of description, but what really is going on is on a totally different level that we don't want to talk about because it's not part of our cultural kit.


ABE: So the primary way of accumulating energy, then, is to be celibate?


FLORINDA D: Well, it's very difficult, but it would be a good try, at least to start out with.


ABE: If a woman was called to this way, if she got hooked, or a man got hooked by this tradition, how would they know? How would they know that they had been hooked by a tradition and not just by some damn obsession?


FLORINDA D: For instance, Castaneda's books spell out very clearly... if you read Castaneda's books carefully, they're almost manuals.


ABE: Yes, I know. And you read them again and again, and you finally understand what they're talking about


FLORINDA D: You will know that something has changed, because you will feel it energetically.

And then there's this whole idea that you can abandon this idea of the self. It's not that you're going to laugh at others. But you find them despicable, and yet you don't want to judge them, either, because who the hell are we to judge anybody anyway?

But you know that you are not part of it, in the sense of the social agreement, and it's almost like a phony part of you that is clinging to you, because you do have to function in the world. You have to present a coherent idea of the self.

You know, Don Juan always said if some truthful change has taken place there is no way to be rejected, whatever it means to be rejected. I don't know. By intent coming in contact with us? I don't really know.

There have been two people that have come in contact with us, and they are there. I mean, we're never together anyway; each person lives on their own, and just from time to time we do get together.

Originally we had this little class when Castaneda was here. He teaches certain very interesting movements, basically to store up energy.

So, these people have been there for two years, and they're changing little by little, and it's amazing. You see, if you let something go, something in you will know.


ABE: You have published this book, for instance, and I read it. Now I don't have a physical image of you, but my feelings form a sense of who you might be, or what you might be like. Now, does that energy field affect you, now that there's this book out there?


FLORINDA D: One of the things that Don Juan made very clear to Castaneda... see, once the book is out, the book is out. It has nothing to do with you anymore.

For you to be wondering; living in hope- is the book doing well or not doing well?- see, that's a very, very difficult thing to divorce yourself from. Because somehow you are involved.

To truly let go is very very difficult. I had two other books- The Shabono and The Witches Dream- and it was very easy. With this one, because it's the first time I talk about my involvement with Don Juan, it's very difficult.

And maybe because for the first time I'm talking more openly- with the other ones I did absolutely nothing. With this one I am more involved. I have given lectures in bookstores to groups of people, which is very interesting, because, as you said before, there are a great many people who are truly very seriously interested, but intellectually, again.


ABE: Oh, I think I know a know people who've gone a little beyond intellect with it.


FLORINDA D: There are, definitely. I do believe that, yes.


ABE: Because we talk about different kinds of luminous bodies. There are people who read these books and suddenly it's self recognition time.


FLORINDA D: Precisely, yes.


ABE: Now these books, then, are affecting a change in the way people perceive themselves.


FLORINDA D: Yes. Basically the goal is how we perceive the world, and breaking those parameters of perception, in terms of how we perceive ourselves, too.

But, we don't want the focus on the 'I'. We want to be a witness. Because everything in our society is filtered through the 'I', through the 'me', we are incapable of telling a story or recounting an event without making us the main protagonist, always.

You see, Don Juan was interested to let the event unfold itself, and then it becomes infinitely richer because then it opens up. And even in the world, as an exercise, just become a witness; don't be the protagonist. It's amazing what opens up.


ABE: Now, on this long path, one of the things that's described in the literature is that the person, the seer and the Nagual, everybody, will reach a period of despondency where they're sure it's going to fail; nothing's going to ultimately happen.

And the reason I raise this is because I have a sense that this feeling is actually being shared by many people now. So, please talk to that for a moment.


FLORINDA D: Yes, exactly. (laughter) I'm going to add to your depression (laughter).

No, it is true. Something in us knows, and that's why there's the urgency with Don Juan.

The imperative from the point of view of Nature is the perpetuation of the species, and we are no longer interested.

We are interested in evolution, because evolution is an equal, if not a greater, imperative than procreation. Because if we don't evolve, if we don't mutate into something different, we are truly going to blast ourselves out of this planet, I think irredeemably.

We have destroyed our resources, I mean totally. Whether we have fifty or a hundred more years in terms of time, as a planet, is immaterial. It doesn't really matter.

We as a species are doomed. And in that sense, evolution is our only way out. And again, as Don Juan stresses, evolution is in the hands of women, not of men.


ABE: So, as a male, what do I do? I just sit here and wait for women to save the world?


FLORINDA D: Yes and no. You see the man has to relinquish his power, and he's not going to do it, not peacefully. He's not.

I'm not saying that, you know, you're beating your chest, saying "I will not relinquish my power". No, it's much more insidious than that.


ABE: Go into that. Talk about it.


FLORINDA D: Well, I don't think it's ever stated. For instance, okay, here's these sensitive men who have been in men's groups, trying to come to terms with their spirituality, and have become totally in agreement with their wives, their partners, the female they are with- but not quite. There are certain things they will not relinquish, it's too threatening.

Even this whole idea of the men's movement originally started out as a truly spiritual movement. But something in the male is threatened. It is this fear of relinquishing something that some of them do sense will have to be relinquished for us as a species to go on.

We certainly know that the female has to be given time, and has been given time in the past for something to evolve. For instance, for us to become erect, when the vagina had to change position, well, who had to adapt? The males. The penis had to grow larger. The female again needs time. And the male has to give her that time.

From one point of view the male has to give the female time for the womb to try to switch into its secondary function.


ABE: And that can't happen if the man is relating to the woman sexually. Is that what you're saying?


FLORINDA D: No. See, there have to be enough females who have that time that something will have to change in the womb. They have to drawn a new possibility. Don Juan said our evolution is intent. You see, that leap from the large reptiles to flying, this idea of wings, was intended. It was an act of intent


ABE: That's very interesting. So you feel that women all over the world currently, sisterhoods of different kinds, are intending a new human future?


FLORINDA D: They're not aware of it. Some women, I think, are, totally.


ABE: So the man is now going to take a back seat in the evolution of the species.


FLORINDA D: Exactly, right. Not a back seat. Again, those are words that define a positive/ negative kind of connotation. No. You have to provide the time.


ABE: How can the man do that? Talk about that functionally.


FLORINDA D: You see, we women are relegated to the status of second class citizens. No matter what power we have, we still don't have any real power.

We don't decide anything. And even for us to talk in little groups, it's almost like banging against a huge iron door, because whoever decides, whoever's in power, is not going to relinquish this for the hell of it.

Let's look in terms of politics, let's say Washington or your capital. I mean, do you think for a moment those men are going to even listen to what we're saying? Not in the least.

But some kinds of pockets have to be found for something new to develop. Otherwise we're doomed. And this idea for us to save the planet, the environ- ment, all we are really thinking is that we as a species will not survive.

The earth will certainly survive: It might go into some kind of horrendous winter, but eventually it will come out of it. But we as a species will not survive.


ABE: Why would a woman read this book Being-in-Dreaming?


FLORINDA D: Very interesting, hm. Well, if nothing else, I think people who have been interested in the Castaneda work would be interested to see it presented from a female's perspective; from somebody who has been in that work for over twenty years.

I do approach the problems differently, probably more directly. The thing is perception. Even our human bodies... the body is, again, a consequence of perception. We are trapped as persons; we are trapped in language, and that's exactly what the sorcerer, through energy, wants to get out of.

END

Magical Blend #35 - 1992

Being in Dreaming:
an introduction to TOLTEC SORCERY
an interview with Florinda Donner
by Brian S. Cohen

Magical Blend magazine, issue #35 (First quarter 1992)

Late one afternoon at a coffee shop in Tucson, a woman sporting a peculiar hairstyle sits at the counter and orders a hamburger. In an effort to humiliate the cook for allegedly refusing to serve an Indian friend of hers, she deftly deposits a large, dead cockroach on her meal and shrieks in revulsion. The cook picks up the food and studies the woman intently. "Either this cockroach fell from the ceiling, he replies, looking at her, "or it dropped out of her wig." Before the woman can reply, she is offered any meal, compliments of the house, and so she humbly enjoys a steak and baked potato. Yet when she gets to her salad, she notices a rather large spider crawling in her lettuce. Looking up, she sees the cook waving to her, a dazzling smile lighting his face.

Scenes like this one occur frequently in a society where many different cultures are vying for acceptance and control. Upon further inspection, however, this episode is not as straightforward as it seems. It is an introductory chapter into a world that we normally don't perceive, a parallel world inhabited by brujas and brujos—sorcerers descended from the Indians of the Oaxaca Valley prior to the Spanish conquest. You see, the cook's name is Joe Cortéz, known to his companions as Carlos Castaneda. The woman's friend is the nagual don Juan Matus.

Florinda Donner's introduction into this world, a world that we have filtered from our perception, a world that has been encrusted with layers of social norms and acceptance, pushed out of sight and forgotten, is the subject of her third book, Being-in-Dreaming (Harper-SanFrancisco, 1991). In it she tells her tale of the disruption of all her assumptions about space, time, reality, and femininity by a group of people who interact in a state of awareness that resides somewhere between being asleep and being awake. Drawn into this world through the energy of don Juan, Castaneda, and the female members of their group, Florinda experiences a clear, albeit confounding, perception of human ability and energy. Her experiences are not without discomfort, however, for she must reassess all her current knowledge and beliefs into a world that few are able to see.

I had the chance to speak with Florinda about her twenty-some years of association with don Juan and Castaneda, and it was easy to understand the benefits of being able to perceive that which we usually overlook. Highly spirited and energetic, Florinda is as comfortable talking about parallel realities as she is about her favorite pastime, going to the movies.

How do you describe yourself, and what are you currently doing?

Florinda Donner:   I am an anthropologist who no longer practices anthropology, and I have an interest in non-Western healing practices. My work with the Yanomamo Indians in South America was the subject of my first book, Shabono. I then did another study in which I worked with a healer in Northern Venezuela. By that time I had already been exposed to the world of don Juan, and carried a desire to continue with it. I am no longer involved in academic research. What I am trying to do now, along with the other people who are involved in the same quest, is to work and live the way don Juan taught us, within a whole other world that he and his cohorts opened for us.

What is, or is there, an objective of sorcery?

Florinda:   Sorcerers are interested in the inherent capacity to see energy directly. They describe their knowledge as the pursuit of this capacity to see the essence of things. What one normally does in everyday life is to perceive a world one already knows and just revalidate it. Apparently the job of civilization is to give one an a priori idea of thinking, and therefore no experiences are really new. People force their children to perceive the way they perceive, by hook or by crook. And once they have accomplished that, of course, their children are bona fide members of the group.

Once you are able to see energy in the environment around you, what do you do with that knowledge, that ability?

Florinda:   Most people are limited in terms of what they see. What sorcerers, including myself, want to do is expand the limits, the parameters, of normal perception. Not only do sorcerers see energy directly, we relate to it differently than most people. Our whole spectrum of what we are capable of as human beings changes. One's choices in life are very limited, because the choices have been defined by the social order. Society sets up the options, and the individual does the rest, because the options are only those that have been made available. One's only source of possibilities, it seems, comes from within those limitations. Sorcerer, the emphasis in the everyday world is to stay within socially accepted boundaries of perception.

How do you go about teaching people to enhance their perception?

Florinda:   Whether we are trained as a male or a female, we are conditioned to react in a certain manner. If we can stop that, or at least examine it, we can free up an enormous amount of energy. That energy can then be utilized for dreaming. For don Juan the whole thing always boils down to having enough energy. In the United States we are conditioned for instant gratification; we want an instant formula that will work right now. On one level the immediacy is extremely appealing, but, on the other hand, nothing is good unless you can push a button and have it instantly.

So, a sorcerer tries to re-channel this energy?

Florinda:   Not only that, we try to break the barriers that block our potentials. It is possible to break those barriers by the rigor of self- examination. One of the first exercises all sorcerers do—one that I did not do for years because I did not believe in it—is a recapitulation of their lives with all the people with whom they have had any kind of interaction. They start working on the present and work toward the past, and, of course, they end up with their parents. They don't, however, make a psychological interpretation. Sorcerers want to feel how they have interacted, what kinds of emotions they felt. As they go further and further back in time, they realize that the repetitiveness of their way of perceiving or interacting is so horrendously boring that there is nothing special about them.

Don Juan says there is this parallel world existing around us, a force of energy that we don't let in because we are too busy with upholding what the social order dictates. Dreaming is one of the main techniques for perceiving this parallel world. This "second attention," as Castaneda calls it, takes a lot of energy, energy which can only be gained by canceling the idea of the self. In dreaming, basically what we want to accomplish is the same control we have over the everyday world. The dream becomes as real as our everyday life. The gains are gigantic, tremendous, in terms of what we are capable of being. We realize that we are energetic beings.

Is lucid dreaming something similar to being-in-dreaming?

Florinda:   In Carlos' books, he talks a great deal about what the sorcerers call the "assemblage point." Perception takes place wherever that assemblage point becomes static. The greatest accomplishment of our human upbringing is to lock our assemblage point on its habitual position. Once immobilized there, our perception can be walked and guided to interpret what we perceive. We learn to perceive in terms of our system first; then in terms of our senses.

In dreaming, one sees the body as a luminous egg of energy. The assemblage point shifts inside the egg and assembles different perceptions; perceptions produced by the energy filaments that traverse the egg. In dreaming, prior to that moment that one falls asleep, the assemblage point starts to flutter. The sorcerer tries to control where that assemblage point fixes itself. The sorcerer is interested in manipulating it and using it at will. Someone who is adept at lucid dreaming can go into their dream and totally control it. And that is exactly what don Juan wants to do. Through dreaming it's possible to accomplish the ultimate goal of sorcery: to liberate perception from its social bindings in order to perceive energy directly.

One of the differences between your initial experiences and those of Castaneda is the use and non-use of drugs. There is no mention of drugs in your book.

Florinda:   Carlos was given psychotropic plants because it was so difficult for him to break through the barriers of perception. For a man it is much more difficult, if for no other reason than because they are the upholders and shapers of our definition of reality.

The conceptualization of reason has been done exclusively by man. This has allowed men to belittle women's gifts and accomplishments. Even worse, it has allowed men to exclude feminine traits from their conceptualized ideals. Women have been reared to believe that only men can be rational and coherent. Men define the very nature of knowledge and from it they have excluded all that is feminine. Though maybe we don't verbalize it, women instinctively know that man's rationale is not our own. Our commitment to this man-made reality, therefore, is not as strong as the male's. This gives us the ability to weave in and out of the parallel worlds, or to go more easily with the flow. The importance of women healers in the shamanistic practices has been ignored in the shamanistic literature. In the history of Western Medicine the role of women is not even acknowledged.

So how do you feel about male sorcerers?

Florinda:   Don Juan was the nagual of a group of 14 sorcerers. Castaneda is the nagual of a much smaller group. The male sorcerers know that without the female sorcerers, there is nothing. Don Juan and Castaneda are not the leaders in the sense that they are better or have more knowledge. The only reason that they are the leaders of their groups is that they have more energy. Don Juan knew that he did not have an inch of ground to stand on without the women. In that kind of relationship, men and women never take advantage of each other, because, energetically, they know that they need each other to such a large degree. The male sorcerers know that it is the female who has a direct link to whatever it is that is out there—knowledge, spirit, energy, whatever you want to call it.

Carlos' books reflect a different process, a process he is still going through. Men build knowledge step-by-step; they "cone" toward knowledge. This coning process limits men as to how far they can reach. The male wants the order, the structure, first. The female plunges into something, and then she makes order out of it. In women, the cone is inverted; it is open like a funnel. Women are able to open themselves directly to the source, or rather, the source reaches them directly.

When you first came across Castaneda, he was working as a cook in Tucson as part of a task assigned to him by don Juan. Did you have an assigned task?

Florinda:   My task was to finish school, get a Ph.D., and continue to study. From the sorcerers point of view it is useless not to utilize what the world has to offer. The way the rational mind has been developed, and works, is one of the most exquisite things we have. To negate that is criminal. It is very important to be very well trained both from the perceptual level and the rational level, for we can only reject something, or find its flaws, if we understand it to perfection. I had always thought, "I don't care." Why should I go through with my academic education if I'm not going to use it?" the sorcerers made me see how important it is to embody rational knowledge the same way I embody sorcery. We cannot reject it, because the best that man has to offer is his intellectual achievements. All the people of this group have upper degrees, because when you plunge into the darkness, if your mind is not so keen and so well trained from a rational point of view, you cannot make sense out of what you find in the darkness.

Even if the object is to understand it from a non-rational point of view?

Florinda:   In order for us to make sense as human beings, we have to be rational. If you have a keen intellect you can very easily go from one stage to another. From don Juan's point of view, we are "reasonable men," but not "men of reason." That is our own fault. We have the capacity for incredible intellectual possibilities. We haven't really profited from them because we don't take it's possibilities at face-value. The world of the sorcerer is a sophisticated world; it is not enough to understand its principles intuitively. One needs to absorb them intellectually. Contrary to what people believe, sorcerers are not practitioners of obscure, esoteric rituals. Sorcerers are men of reason. They have a romance with ideas. They have cultivated reason to its limits, for they believe that only by fully understanding the intellect can they embody the principles of sorcery without losing sight of their own sobriety and integrity. This is where sorcerers differ drastically from other people. Most people have very little sobriety and even less integrity.

That is quite a difficult change for most people to comprehend.

Florinda:   Yes, because what we are trying to do is reduce our involvement with the world by changing our routine ways of interacting and being in the world. You see, we always want to be the protagonist, we always want to be the "I." Every story, everything we see, everything we perceive, everything we tell, is always through the "I." If you can curtail the "I," and truly see as a witness, it is more enchanting. The enjoyment of experiencing the ability of a human being is gigantic. Any kind of normal situation becomes an event, becomes a story. It is very interesting to let the other person be the protagonist.

That is not something that Western culture tends to allow.

Florinda:   Of course. If you want to analyze it, the whole idea of the West is succeeding the "I," of seeing what you think. Yet what we don't see, which exists just as well, is limitless.

Your idea sound analogous to Buddhism's idea of no-self.

Florinda:   Except that Buddhism is a system that works inside the social order. Sorcery doesn't work within the social order. To truly embody sorcery, one has to be almost outside the social order. It is not that one is a deviant, but that one has to extract oneself. One has to truly see, to look from the bridge. Trying to grow by retreating to a monastery or to the desert is useless. Only by being challenged by our daily life, by what we know, will we be able to change. The pressure always becomes such that we cannot uphold this new rationale, precisely because we are being pressured. And we are only going to be pressured by the world we know. The thing is not to hook into our routine ways. To accomplish that one needs energy. The important thing is to convince ourselves of the need to modify our deep socialization in order to acquire that energy.

So sorcery is action, not just thought.

Florinda:   Exactly. Sorcery is not illusory; it is abstract. Sorcery is an abstract pursuit of re-making ourselves outside the parameters of what the social order has defined and allowed us to be.

We talked about the social value of sorcery before, but it doesn't seem that your work would have an effect on a large amount of people.

Florinda:   We, as individuals, have to change in order for us to assume that we can change anybody else.

And we can't just have intellectual change.

Florinda:   No. Intellectually we are willing to tease ourselves with the idea that culture predetermines who we are, how we behave, what we are willing to know, what we are able to feel. But we are not willing to embody this idea, to accept it as a concrete practical proposition. And the reason for this is that we are not willing to accept that culture also predetermines what we are able to perceive. On a practical level, we want everybody else to change, but we ourselves don't change. The civil wars in Central America, for instance, are not changes. They are merely switches in power. It is the same thing in this country. We haven't changed. The one hope is that people begin to realize that their predetermined world doesn't make sense. Collectively, we know that something is terribly wrong. What we have done to the Earth has already been done, and we can't change that. The Earth will continue its existence whether we are here or not. We are not doomed because the Earth is doomed; we are doomed because of our unwillingness to change.

To break with our habitual patterns, we need energy and the commitment that we truly want to do it. Don Juan was extremely forceful in the sense that he could practically grab you by the neck and put you into another world. Castaneda is different. All he is interested in is the person's commitment. It has to be your decision. He will not influence you. He will help you if something has to be explained, but he is not interested in coercion or in trying to brow-beat somebody into changing the world we live in. The change has to come from within first.

Copyright 1992 Magical Blend Magazine

KPFK Radio Interview - 1993

Taisha Abelar
KPFK Radio Interview (1993)

John Martinez: Taisha Abelar is author of The Sorcerers' Crossing, A Woman's Journey. She tells of her experience, how she became acquainted with sorcerers and the actual practice of sorcery. A colleague of Carlos Castaneda, Carol Tiggs, and Florinda Donner-Grau, Taisha Abelar in the following interview speaks on the validity of experiences in the non-ordinarily reality and explains in detail the sorceric process, as well as sorcerers' perspectives with implications regarding the social order, feminism and freedom.

Once again the author of The Sorcerers' Crossing, Taisha Abelar. And we are here with Taisha Abelar, author of The Sorcerers' Crossing, A Woman's Journey. First of all, Ms. Abelar, welcome to KPFK.

Taisha:   Yes, it's a great pleasure to be here and be given the opportunity to talk about my work and some of the concepts of sorcery.

John:   Taisha, if you could please start off with a short biography of yourself, your life prior to the actual material that's listed in the book to give our readers a background of who, exactly, Taisha Abelar is.

Taisha:   I mean the closest Taisha Abelar that -- the question you just asked don't really refer to Taisha Abelar because Taisha Abelar is a sorceric name that was given to me upon completing a certain amount of training. And the training that was involved was really moving the assemblage point -- and I'll talk about that -- to another position. So that's the position that I'm speaking to you from at this point, is the sorcerer's position, the position of a sorceress. And that is who Taisha Abelar is.

Prior to that I was an ordinary person. I entered Don Juan's world when I was in my early 20's an I had no special qualifications. I was just an ignorant young woman who had absolutely no interest in anything except finding a romance or being liked, worried about what people say about you. I had no academic training whatsoever.

So my background before coming into Don Juan's world is really comparable to anyone, any person. So I'm often asked the question, well, do you have any special qualifications in your past that made you open to this, or were you selected somehow? No, just think of myself as just a normal, regular person who somehow stumbled into Don Juan's world.

Or from my point of view it was stumbling because I was simply in the desert. I used to do drawing and I was doing some sketches and a woman approached me. And we started talking and I thought she was a very interesting person because she said she been in China and she had done martial arts. And prior to entering Don Juan's world, I did do some martial arts.

So that was some background. I was interested in movement and also drawing, but other than that there was nothing else of interest. She invited me to go with her to Mexico to stay with her for a few days and I accepted because I thought we were going to talk about Buddhism and oriental philosophy and things like that.

And so I went with her. I stayed with her a few days in Mexico and the days turned into weeks and eventually months and then she put me to doing this series of exercises which -- she said she took one look at me and she saw I was energetically depleted, and therefore I should do this training that she was showing me. And I had no idea that this was sorcery.

There was a cave near her house and I would go every day and sit in the cave. And she said I should do this process of recounting my life. And I didn't know that this was really an ancient sorceric technique called the recapitulation. And it merely involved breathing in the memories of the past, pulling back the energy of one's past history.

An I bring this up now because what happened during that procedure was that slowly I began to lose myself as I was as an ordinary person in the world. So that's the recapitulation sort of wiped out one's human self or one's regular self in terms of past, in terms of where one was born. All those things get dissolved and you lose your personal history so that you could build up your sorcerer's persona, personality.

So then I met Don Juan. When I had stored enough energy I was introduced to Don Juan Matus and some of his other cohorts, his colleagues, and they taught me some of the other techniques that were involved in sorcery.

And one of the things, the stipulations, was going back to my state at that time, was since I had no interest in education or knowledge or -- I couldn't think; I couldn't talk, prior to coming into this world. I was one of these people that I grew up learning you shouldn't speak unless you're spoken to, children should be seen but not heard. So there was no way of really expressing oneself -- couldn't have any idea of conceptualizing. Abstract thought was so foreign to me because I was only interested in the pragmatic things of everyday life, of meeting people, finding love, whatever interests women at that age.

So I was not unusual in that sense. So given as part of my training, they gave me the mandate of going to the university and receiving an education as part of the sorcerer's training. And the reason for that was not only to be able to alter the expectations that society has of women in terms of well, it's men should be educated and should get jobs and careers and things, but women well, it's sort of left up to them. If they want to, yes; if they don't, that's okay, too, because their fate is really already preset in terms of finding a husband, getting married, and having families and things like that, which was also my destiny.

So by receiving an education it had two aspects. One was that it sort of undermined my own expectations of my possibilities, my capabilities, or the expectations others had of me. And second, it gave me the opportunity to be able to think analytically, to conceptualize, to understand what sorcery is. Because even though they were teaching us techniques, certain practices, procedures, they also were giving us very abstract concepts as to what is sorcery. Why even be interested in something like this, how do sorcerers perceive the world, how do they see reality. And that requires a very keen intellect to be able to grasp the essence of what it is they're saying.

Otherwise you're at a certain level and you look at sorcery the way, let's say, anthropologists look at it, just from the outside and just see the surface of it. And you think sorcery involves chanting, curing, dances, wearing masks, doing weird ritualistic things. Those are our conceptions from the point of view of our society of what sorcery is and what sorcerers do.

I didn't know anything about sorcery at that time and I didn't even know that that's what they were teaching me, but it came out little by little. And as it came out, I had to understand not the superficial gloss of what sorcery is but what it really entails, and for that you have to have a very keen intellect and a deep education to be able to grasp those concepts.

John:   Taisha, could you -- I know Carlos Castaneda, who has written about the Yaqui way of knowledge and his quest to be a man of knowledge, and with the ingestion of peyote his work was popular in the late 60s and early 70s and is still read widely today. I know Castaneda writes your forward in your book. Could you address some of the issues that are constantly raised with Castaneda, first of all that it is fictional, his work, and that it promotes or gives the okay for what is now called illicit drug use and abuse. Could you mention anything in terms of Castaneda's influence now 20 years later?

Taisha:   Absolutely, because the training that I received in Don Juan's world was very similar to the training Carlos Castaneda received, because we're really a group of very few that were trained by Don Juan himself and his associates. And that's myself, Florinda Donner, who writes about her training in Being-in-Dreaming and Carol Tiggs and just a very handful of people, and we all received basically the same training.

But the works of Carlos Castaneda, of course, came out very early in the 60s and people read his works. And the first two books, The Teachings of Don Juan and A Separate Reality deal with the use of drugs -- well, not drugs but hallucinogenic plants. These are hallucinogenic substances that we call like mind-altering drugs, things like that.

Now there is several reasons. I can address this issue first and then go on to the validity of things later. The reason for Don Juan exposing Carlos Castaneda to these drugs in his training is twofold. One is because Carlos Castaneda was the new nagual. He was the one that was seen at that time to be a leader of a new group, although that altered dramatically. There is really no group at this point.

Something along the course of the training made Don Juan and his people realize that this generation is not the same as his generation. So there was marked, marked changes in his training as opposed to the traditional sense of training a sorcerer, but he did want to pass on -- at that point Don Juan thought that he would pass on the tradition of the use and how to prepare these plants because that was part of the sorcery tradition for Don Juan. And it was his duty to pass it on to his apprentice. So he taught him all the lore, all the preparation, the detail of the use of these plants.

Then the second reason was that the purpose of using the plants is to what sorcerers say, to move the assemblage point. I think I have to mention what the assemblage point is at this point because it will be coming up and otherwise it won't be clear to the listener.

When a sorcerer sees the energetic body of a person, they see a spot of luminosity, very intense, made of very brilliant light. And that is situated in a certain point on the energetic body and it lights up certain energetic filaments that are matched with the energetic fibers in the universe at large. So because there's an infinite number of possibilities making up the universe and also making up our energetic bodies. Only a very select few -- one band -- gets matched to what's outside in making, let's say, the perceptions that are out in the universe.

When that matching takes place, sorcerers say perception takes place; we constitute our reality. And that is dependent on the position of the assemblage point. So we are all born into a certain place. We have our assemblage points at a certain place that we can agree upon as to what we see, we can agree upon as to what we are perceiving.

The use of drugs, or the psychotropic plants, moves the assemblage point to a different position and lights up different filaments so that we perceive different things. Drugs through chemical reactions -- they affect the energetic body and you have different perceptions, you perceive things.

Now the reason Don Juan had Carlos exposed to the psychotropic plants was because of not just tradition, but as a rational being, it was very difficult for him to move his assemblage point using natural methods or the other sorceric practices. He had to be jolted out of that position fast, and that's what these the plants do, the use of the smoke or peyote. They move the assemblage point violently and very drastically to another position.

The dangers involved are tremendous, however. One is that there's no control. There is no telling where is it going to move, what universes are you going to perceive under the influence of the little smoke or in our day just drugs, whether it's marijuana, even tobacco -- doesn't have to be cocaine, things like that. The dangers are the same. We have no control as to what is going to happen to our perception of reality. And the physical dangers of the harm it does to the body, how harmful it is to the energetic body because it drains energy.

Any time you have an experience of moving the assemblage point, unless you do it with control, it's energetically depleting and you -- of course, the ultimate danger is that you can either die or go crazy or lose your mind, whatever. These things happen. We see that every day.

But Don Juan, of course, when he gave the tradition of the plants to Carlos Castaneda, he was always there and Don Genaro flanking him, to make sure that they knew where his assemblage point was moving. They knew exactly what realities he was lighting up through their seeing and they supplied the control to him that he was unable to supply himself because he was under the influence of something else, an external force. So they supplied the control and made sure that nothing happened to him, nothing bad happened to him, and to make sure that he could come back, that his assemblage point could move back, which it usually naturally does when the effects wear off.

But sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes sorcerers get lost in other realms and they just don't wake up; they don't come back; and they die. So there's extreme danger involved there. And to do this without a guide or leader is suicidal, really.

So the purpose is to get out of the rational fixation that we have, that this reality is the way it is; which from our point of view is a given, but from the point of view of sorcerers, it's an act of creation.

And phenomenologists also -- okay, I'm going to talk a little bit about phenomenology and then talk about the validity of his work. So we will hit both questions.

Just to conclude the part about the psychotropic plants, our training did not include any of these, the use of drugs or the peyote. That includes Florinda Donner, Carol Tiggs. Women do not have to be drastically jolted out of their hold on reality. Their assemblage points are very fluid and they move automatically. All of ours move during sleep when we dream, but, of course, they just jump back and forth and we have no control. But it's a natural movement of the assemblage point in sleep.

The women when they menstruate, their assemblage points get displaced very slightly. But they may see things; they may catch glimpses; they may hear things; they get emotionally very, very sensitive, because their assemblage point is being displaced monthly. They can use that natural displacement to do dreaming and to do sorcery, which is what the women, the female sorcerers do.

So only in rare cases and because Carlos Castaneda was the nagual, was he given the plants to actually understand and to use. His first two books deal with that work, but after that you don't hear much about them anymore. And you don't because he no longer -- his assemblage point was loosened enough so that it could move through other means, softer means, more natural means. And the rest of his training, all the other books, deal with the movement of the assemblage point using other sorceric means.

So I was going to talk a little bit about our conception of reality and the sorcerer's conception of reality because it ties in with the movement of the assemblage point. The sorcerers maintain that whatever we perceive in front of us is determined by the placement of that assemblage point. And we are born into that reality as children. Of course the assemblage point is erratic. Infants, they can't speak; they don't have language. They perceive the world differently. But as they grow, their perception of the world matches that of everyone around them so there's a matching that takes place.

Phenomenologists say that the facticity of the world is constructed; it's not a given although we assume that it is. Phenomenologists take that tacit agreement that we have of everyday life, that there was a yesterday in terms of temporality and spaciality and intersubjectivity that we can agree upon what others in the room are doing. Phenomenologists take those assumptions or taken-for-grantedness of those things and turn them into their phenomena for investigation.

The fact that we know that there was a natural history to things -- let's see, I'll give you some examples just to make this clearer. So that we know that, let's say, that door over there didn't just appear, we know that it was there before we came into the room. We know that it's going to remain there after we leave. That's a temporal continuity that's built into their perception of reality. Spatial continuity is built in.

We know that there is a street outside and beyond the street there is buildings, even though we don't directly perceive them. We know that there is an ocean a certain number of miles. We have mapped out our space, our spatial realm. Reality is based on our conception of space and time and the certainty that we have that other people also know that we're in a room. We built up the same glosses based on our language, of door, of street, of house.

Now sorcerers, they look at perception immediately. Instead of working on glosses the way we do in our everyday lives -- we don't perceive directly. We have already filtered perception through language, through our culture, through our past experience. We're not perceiving immediately. The sorcerers training is to get oneself back to that immediate perception of reality.

They ask the same questions as phenomenologists do: What is perception, what is reality, what is agreement. But they say that perception is really a question of having the assemblage point on the same position. Or let's say agreement is everyone having the assemblage point on the same place. When that moves, other realities just as real as the one we're in now are constituted.

The validity of anything can only be determined by actual experience. Everything that we do in our daily lives is real because we have experienced it or others have experienced it, and we share -- we have an intersubjective agreement and a common language that enables us to understand what it is we are talking about.

For example, an astronaut or a man walking on the moon, we saw that on television; we read papers; we even heard them speaking the "giant step for mankind" words that now have become so famous. So even though we didn't see them on the moon, we look up at the moon at night and say well, men were up there. Now is that a leap of faith? No, not exactly, not like the virgin birth or the immaculate conception. It's based upon the work of the men in NASA, the aerospace industry.

Each subgroup has what phenomenologists or even sociologists call membership in their group. They're able to validate their small segment. It's like layers and layers, like the layers of the astronaut suit. They have 24 or 25 layers in their suits. To me that defies imagination. We're used to thinking of a single layer duofold, two-ply wool and cotton. But no, they have 18, 20 layers, each one doing something very specific. The people that made those suits knew what they were doing, what they are talking about. We have to assume that they do because we don't have that direct knowledge.

Everyone working together with the tremendous concentration, years and years of training, have been able to make this feat reasonable, valid experience that there were men on the moon that now no one questions. But sorcery also takes years and years of training. You can't just say, lie down and all of a sudden you're a crow or something like that. Of course, that sounds absurd, and it is absurd. From the point of view of our everyday lives, from the reality of our being-in-the-world, the feats of sorcery are tales of energy, tales of power. They are only tales and therein arises the question of doubt and stories that people say that Carlos Castaneda's work, our work, is really basically fiction, they're tales. Well, from the point of view of everyday life, yes, because there's no way the average person has validated these things unless he gains membership.

But we can't go walking on the moon. That's not open to us. But to be a sorcerer or sorceress, yes, it's open to us. Anyone can validate for himself or herself what Carlos Castaneda or I am writing about in our books, because we don't just describe these other realities and say, oh, yes, they are out there and take it on faith. No, by describing them we're really being phenomenologists. We're describing what happened to us physically from the point of view of our physicality, our energetic body. We experienced those.

For us they're not tales of power, tales of energy, they're actually descriptions to the best of our ability. Depending on how much energy we have, we're able to describe these other positions of the assemblage point that we have moved to. And later on I want to be sure to talk about exactly how you can move your assemblage point.

The things that are in the book, the work, are guidelines. They tell everyone that if you do these things, if you practice the recapitulation, if you practice not-doing, if you practice losing your personal history, if you practice gazing, your assemblage point will move and your body will know. You will know with your very being what it is that sorcerers are talking about.

The validity is there, there for anyone to discover, but it's a process of creation just as putting a man on the moon is really a process of creation. It just doesn't happen at a snap of a finger. It takes tremendous energy, conceptual, mental power, mathematics, physics, astrophysics, physical training of astronauts. All of that gets put together to perform one single feat.

The same thing with sorcery. It takes years, our lives. I was in my early 20s when I came into Don Juan's world. From that moment on every single thing that I have done has been a training, sorcery training, and that includes going to the university. That was a mandate that they gave me. They said, "you have to cultivate a romance with knowledge". And I had to do the university training, receive a Ph.D., not from the point of view of the everyday person in the world the way people usually just go to school.

No, it was an exercise in stalking. I had to use petty tyrants that came around, professors. I had to curtail expectations that I grew up with through recapitulating. Recapitulating really enables you to see what your patterns are, your patterns of behavior and what your expectations are. So you apply what you learned through recapitulating. You apply it to your everyday life, your being in the world. And as you apply it, you're validating the sorcerer's position, rather than validating the position of everyday life, the position of your parents, the position of your peers, of what society tells you.

We're always validating that through our behavior and our thoughts and our language, our internal dialog. We keep repeating over and over the things that we should be repeating -- it's like a little circle -- to make sure that nothing else comes in. We're already loaded to maximum capacity in terms of our perception. It's a bubble. It's sealed so there is no escape. An opening has to come from outside, from another position of the assemblage point.

Don Juan gave us the entrance, the opening. He calls it the cubic centimeter of chance that pops up. And you either -- well, either you're so enthralled with yourself that you don't even see it, or you don't grasp it because of reasons of your own: You're too rational or too knowledgeable in the sense that you already know everything and you're closed minded, let's say. Or you do grasp it. And the people associated with us, Don Juan, we did grasp that quarter centimeter of chance. And we are continuing to validate everything that he had said sorcery is and the potentiality of being more than what was allotted in terms of being born into the world, into a certain position.

John:   If you would, just to finalize this point, there are critics in society that criticize Castaneda for his work and simplify it and say that it promotes drug use and abuse. Are they simply just showing their ignorance in terms of the context of Castaneda's path to knowledge?

Taisha:   What they're doing is looking at reading the books or looking at maybe they haven't even read some of the books -- maybe they haven't even read the books, maybe just the first two books and stopped there, because the first two books, as I said, deal just with the tradition of the psychotropic plants. But before they say anything, absolutely they should read all the books to see what the context is.

They're also speaking in terms from the point of view of everyday life, from the position that yes, drugs are bad. I don't think there is really a disagreement here in terms of drug use.

By we, I mean Carlos Castaneda and anyone practicing sorcery, we lead absolutely pure lives. And we're very careful of what we eat because anything that affects the energy body curtails the chances of sobriety, of control. If it affects the energetic body deleteriously, then you lack the control of what sorcerers call stalking, the stalker's ability.

And stalking is really the ability to take a new position of the assemblage point -- or it doesn't have to be a different one, it can be the one where we are -- and look at its ramifications, but for that you need energy. You need energy to observe what is reality, to rather than blindly going in and letting things happen to you, being at the mercy of the modality of the day, which is what Don Juan calls this particular point of where our assemblage point is.

We were born into that as characterized by the modality of our time. We are at the mercy of that whatever tumbles down on us, whatever our parents or peers, education system, whatever we hear and read in books and radios, newspapers. It all tells us certain things of what we can do and what we can be. So we are absolutely affected by that.

But to look at it, you have to have energy rather than be at the mercy of it. So let's say people who grew up, or the peers say yes, use marijuana, do this, do that. They don't have the energy to resist to -- I don't mean resist, but to question. They're sucked in by whatever their environment says and does. And they go with it no matter if it's suicidal or what.

Sorcery says the exact opposite. It says no, you question. You don't accept anything. You don't accept religious dogma; you don't accept what your friends say when they slip you a little packet of cocaine or whatever. But who can actually question these things? Only someone who has a strength that comes from elsewhere. And where is this elsewhere? Sorcerers say it's the energy body.

Every one of us has really two positions of the assemblage point: One, the one that is given to us, the one by our parents, the one we are born into, the one that makes this particular reality manifest itself and keep on going and be the force that makes us accept it as the one and only reality.

But we all have an energetic body in like a phantom position -- sorcerers call it the double -- another position we sort of activate in dreams, with intuition. We all have the feeling there is something else there but we don't have the energy to grasp it. Or we feel we might want to be different or more coherent, more clear, more alive. But we don't. We can't because of the burden of society, our work, the concerns of everyday life, our worries about ourselves, what is going to happen to me, me, myself, and I, are of primary concern. We don't have energy for anything else.

But Don Juan says yes -- or sorcerers, not just Don Juan. There is another position that we can all have and we should activate it. We should use that as a balance and that’s what's going to give us the energy to not be swayed by everyday life. It's going to give us -- it enables us to have a little perch, a little platform outside of the quagmire, let's say, where we are and enables us to see from a different perspective.

Where is this other perspective? It's another position of the assemblage point outside. And how do you get to it? How do you reinforce it? Because this is what sorcerers want to do. They want to be able to perceive more. It's a question of perceiving. They want to perceive more than is permissible or allowable from the point of view of our everyday reality.

Our reality says no, trees are trees, the house is there, you know there is an ocean. We have a system of glosses set up and those are like rigid. They're not flexible. Sorcery training enables the mind, the body, to acquire a flexibility of -- drugs or psychotropic plants move the assemblage point. Then it moves right back and you're again stuck worse off than before because you're energetically depleted; you have harmed your body; you've lost a sense of control, command. And you keep reinforcing that and you're not really going to be able to activate this energetic body. You're destroying it, in fact.

So the other methods of training, the recapitulation, is one of the key methods. And we all do it, all of us that train in sorcery. We practice; we do the recapitulation. Carlos Castaneda recapitulates constantly, constantly. All of us do.

What it is, is you're -- pragmatically it has two layers. By pragmatically, what it is, is you make a list of everyone you've ever known in your life, and you sit and you visualize from today, moving backwards, all the experiences that constitute your life, the memory of what you are, what makes up your persona, what you are.

And that, of course, includes your interaction with your family, your friends. All of that is intrinsically related to what makes you you because you have that intersubjectivity. You don't live in a vacuum and neither do sorcerers. But your assemblage point and your energy is constantly being bombarded by what others tell you and you respond, so there is this interaction.

What the recapitulation does is it allows you to look at that and to extricate your energy from your remembered self, from your past actions. So you close your eyes and you visualize your activities, very systematically. You have your list and you work backwards and you use the breathing, because breathing is a very subtle method of inhaling. You bring back the energy; you visualize; you begin on your --

Very specifically here I'm going to describe it, although it is described in The Sorcerers' Crossing. Begin on your right shoulder. You have your visualized scene and you inhale, moving your head to your left shoulder. And then you exhale everything that is extraneous to you, everything that they have poured on you verbally, physically, that you no longer want, because this is all in the past anyway. You push it; you exhale it. You give it back as you're moving your head back to your right shoulder and then you bring your head to the center. And you just continue sweeping the scenes in your memory and you're cleansing.

What you're doing is bringing back the energy that is trapped there so you can use it in the present. And where does it go? Of course you have to be very careful that you don't put it back into, like again reinforcing the self, but use it to build up your energetic body, to be able to have that extra energy so you can see what life is, what it is that you're doing. You have some control over your existence.

The recapitulation in an abstract sense, because sorcerers are very abstract, in fact, is so abstract that at this point, our bodies are really an idea. We're no longer at the position of the assemblage point of the facticity of the world that we have our physical body. The bench is here; the tree is there, no. We've questioned all that and we've seen that through the recapitulation, these things are only a matter of agreement. We were told this and our bodies themselves have responded to the agreement that we had no choice in because we were born into it.

So on an abstract level, what the recapitulation does is it builds another, a little platform for you to work off of, because while you're remembering the past, your energetic past, and you're working back, you are also working at two places at the same time. You're moving from here, from your energetic body, to these, the memories of the facticity of yourself, of what constituted your world. And you can see your patterns repeating themselves. You can hear what your parents told you and you see.

All of a sudden you see, but what is it that sees? Not you in the world, but this other being, the seer. Don Juan calls it the seer in you that's waking up. You're activating this phantom position of the assemblage point that we all have, but you're making it stronger. You're using it for once. Within your culture we're not allowed to use it. We don't even acknowledge that it's there.

Everything has all our concern, because of the modality of our day, really has gone into our immediate needs and wants and we don't even have a choice in the matter. This other position gets activated, becomes stronger, and then we're able to actually question and break through the barriers of perception that have been set up through the concerns of our everyday life.

John:   Taisha, you've talked now about terms and concepts within your book. Could you give us a general overview of your book in terms of the themes in your book, the issues raised, concepts. We can start like that.

Taisha:   Basically the first half of it deals with the recapitulation and it tells, explains in detail, how it's done and my own experiences with it and the difficulties in doing it and the procedures. And so that in itself gives the reader an opportunity to try it themselves. It's an invitation, really, for anyone, because sorcerers are not an elite group -- that you have to be selected or run into Don Juan or have a sorcerer as a leader.

No, anyone can pick up these books and do the things, the practices that are described in them. And that again is a means of validating what it is that we're talking about through your own experiences.

So the first part of the book is dealing with the recapitulation. And I was also, as I said, when I had enough energy, I was introduced to Don Juan and some of the other members of his group. And that's also described in the book, my encounters with them and the things that they taught me.

I was given certain practices that included gazing techniques, not-doing techniques. There are sorcery passes which work directly on the energy body, certain movements and breathing that activate again or cleanse the energy body and activate certain energy centers so that the assemblage point can move with fluidity.

And then the second part of the book, I suppose sort of near the middle, was because they though I was ready to make what they call the sorcerer's crossing, the great crossing, which all it is is a movement of the assemblage point, a displacement, because through the recapitulation it prepares you for that.

I was living or staying in this house and there was a left portion of the house that was always alluded to but I was never allowed to enter. And so at one point they decided yes, I'm ready to meet the other members of the party who were waiting for me on the left side of the house, which is really a movement of the assemblage point into a different reality because the left side of the house didn't exist in this realm as we know it.

And so I went through a series of techniques and energetic movements invoking intent. My energy body was able to activate itself, of course, also with the help of Nelida, who was there beside me. I activated my energy body, meaning I shifted my assemblage point. But rather than moving it harmoniously to a certain position they had expected me to, where they were waiting for me, I sort of shot out and had no recollection of where actually my assemblage point ended up. And I could not remember the details of my perceptual realm. That's the drawback. That happens also under some cases where there's no control. It's an erratic shift. In order words, my assemblage point shifted too erratically.

And so the second part of the book deals with different type of training. I found myself in a grove of trees in a tree house in the front part of the house. At that point I didn't know how I had gotten there. I just assumed that somebody had hoisted me up in a harness and I was up in a tree house. But what I didn't know then was that I did not wake up. My assemblage point didn't move back to it's normal position. It was a position where -- in another reality but not very far removed. I had come back from my wanderings and in that position -- so the second part of the training really dealt with stalking, which was to stabilize the position of the assemblage point wherever it is.

In my case this was in this grove of trees in the tree house in the front part of the house. But the training itself -- and it was conducted under the guidance of Emilito who also didn't exist in the reality of everyday life. He was in a position of the assemblage point, a dream position. So I had woken up in a dream position in a different place, but I had to cultivate stalkers technique in order to maintain that position and achieve a certain control over my energetic body.

And that training was very, very important for subsequent things that would be happening, because again, it doesn't make any difference at all if you move your assemblage point. Unless you can stabilize it at another position and stalk that reality, you have again, random glimpses, like what happens under, I suppose, under the influence of drugs. You have glimpses of random occurrences of monsters appearing or your assemblage point hops around and that's what's deleterious to the energetic body.

So you have to be able to stabilize it at another position. So the stalkers training - which was very, very important in my case because my assemblage point was erratic - was to explore the ramifications of a different reality. And in my case it was the realm of the trees in the tree house. But that tree house existed because other members of the sorcery group also -- whoever had that same problem, namely Zuleica, one of Don Juan's cohorts who was really Emilito, because Emilito was Zuleica's dream body in this other position. So whoever had the problem of erratic assemblage point movements was hoisted up in the harness, put in a tree house to learn to stabilize.

And why did they put them in trees? Because being surrounded by trees, being elevated from the ground, forces the body to develop a new relationship between what really was our energy body, but it really was as real and solid as our physical body and the ground and gravity. So by being in the trees, by climbing branches, by again recapitulating in the trees, by gazing in trees and all the other activities that you practiced in the trees off the ground, enabled me to explore a new position of the assemblage point, and was very limited because I never left the trees, the tree house. I stayed -- well, I would come down and enter the main house, you know, if I had to go to the restroom, the bathroom, but I would go right back up and my food would be hoisted up. Emilito would hoist up my food.

So well, all of my time was spent off the ground. I would sleep in the trees. And the concentration and sobriety it takes to climb trees is so intense, because any wrong movement you would fall, forced me keep all my attention focused on my immediate activity rather than letting my brain shift around in terms of past, present and future the way we do now at this position of the assemblage point.

We're hardly ever focus on the here and now where half of us is -- half of our energy is locked up in the past, past actions. The other is sort of projecting into some unknown future and not much of us is really engaged in whatever we're doing at this moment. But my being in the trees, everything, was -- and, of course, also having recapitulated already, there was no past, there was no temporal horizon.

So the sorcerers were really disrupting the spatial and temporal agreement that we have learned in our bodies by being in an enclosed space surrounded by something where you couldn't see the horizon. There was no spatial distance. You couldn't see very far, the trees were so dense. So there was no space in terms of distance and also there -- I could not assume the way we assume from this position of the assemblage point that yes, there's houses outside; there's streets; there's the ocean. I had no idea what was beyond the grove of trees. In fact, it was like a void.

All I had, my entire, quote, universe at that point were the trees. So the sorcery training had effectively disrupted the spatial and temporal continuity. There was not this here and there perspective that we have in our daily lives because we're -- like when we're sitting here from the point of view of everyday life there is always a there because we're here obviously. And we can get up and walk over there or we can imagine the there even if we can't get to it.

We can get to it by plane or train. I mean there is not -- I can't see it, but intentionality from the point of view of phenomenology makes us fill in the gaps, fill in the spatial blocks or deficiencies, but not in the sorcerers world. In the sorcerers world in the trees, whatever was in front of me was all there was to the world at that particular point. And that was a way of training to focus on what it is that you're doing.

Later, I used that stupendous training in my academic work to concentrate on what it is that I'm doing, not to assume that there's a university there somewhere. No, from the point of view of the trees and the tree house, the world of everyday life no longer existed. It was completely demolished or disappeared because there was no guarantee that I would ever come back either.

So the instructions, the things that I had to do, the recapitulation from the tree house was again a different layer of getting back anything that was left dangling in the past or other spaces, other areas, to bring everything in, to consolidate the energy body. And only by consolidating the energy body can you lean on it and use it. And so that was really the second part of my training.

I was given, also, dreaming tasks that I did from the tree house because after a while the immediacy of everything makes you want to expand. It's all right to be totally immediate but you also can from that position move the assemblage point elsewhere. So the second stage was to dream from the tree house which was already a dreaming position. So you use dream positions, use your energy body, to move.

The training of stalkers is to be absolutely fluid, to maintain a position of the assemblage point, but then also be able to move from that. But then wherever you are moving to, you move with sobriety and control and the same amount of discipline, and you explore your new reality in order to make that real. We create our reality as we move. As the assemblage point gets displaced, new realities get created in front of our eyes.

But we have to interact with them. So reality -- let's go back to our, to the reality of everyday life. It is not just there. It's there because we're interacting with it. We know that there is a here and there because we're moving through the room bypassing the furniture to get someplace. We're in it. We're creating this reality as we do things, as we think, as we're -- but we're creating it within the limits set up with our linear mind and our rational predilection.

This assemblage point limits to a great extent what it is that we can do from this point. We can't go through the wall, in other words, because it's solid. We know that it's there. But through gazing, which I did in the trees -- let's say, part of the training is gazing techniques because gazing is a very easy way -- basically anyone can do this -- a very fundamental way of realizing the validity of what I'm talking about.

See, all you do is look at a tree, a little plant. You start gazing at the leaves and pretty soon it becomes two dimensional. We're fleshing out the back of it. We don't see it. Intentionality says that a leaf has a front side and a back to it and has little veins through it. Botanists have many, many layers of intricate knowledge about trees and plants that we may not have, but there is definite layers of knowledge of something that we can agree upon. But when you start gazing at trees or leaves or gravel or whatever, you see just what is given to your energetic body, the immediacy. You really see; that's what you see. That is why sorcerers call it seeing, because that is when you're really seeing. You're placing your energy body at the disposition of the energy that emanates from what is out there and you're matching in a different way so that you're seeing energy. So you're looking at a tree or gazing at it and all of a sudden you realize no, it's not a fact; it's not solid; it's moving. It doesn't have a back to it the way we think or roots. We don't see that; we see swirls of light.

All of a sudden these leaves start to glow and you're seeing swirls of energy and you're saying oh, that is what a tree is. I had no idea until I started experimenting, playing around with this, some of these things. And if you try it you will also say oh, there is more to a tree than the gloss, tree. Really a tree is energetically alive just as the human body, just as we are energetically alive. And we can do infinitely more things than we were taught or we learned we're capable of doing with our physical bodies.

Gazing enables us to engage our energetic selves, a different position of the assemblage point, and that phantom position gets stronger and stronger. And then we see trees moving. All of a sudden we can shift them by focusing our energy on them and they're not rooted in one spot. Sorcerers say that entire groves of trees can all of a sudden be elsewhere.

Now, it's a tale of energy again, but they've actually seen, because when the world is fluid, nothing is rooted, is given, is a fact. It's in constant motion and that's the way the world is. That's the way reality is. It's we who make it limited, solid, factual. We impose on it its' limitations. But there's no reason -- to expand your capabilities as sentient beings and use other aspects that we haven't even conceived of, that it's possible to use or to see the world in different terms.

John:   Taisha, you're touching on these terms and concepts in your book, dreaming, stalking, assemblage point, recapitulating. Are there - or would it be too limited to try to attempt to do this? Are there any correlations in terms of analystic terms and concepts in science that are similar to these terms and concepts in your book?

Taisha:   Yes, there are correlates, and I talked extensively about one coming from philosophy, namely phenomenology. I don't need to go back into that, but phenomenologists, they know theoretically or they intuit that this is the way perception is, this is the way we ought to approach when we talk about reality and perception -- we should suspend judgment meaning not impose the facticity of our world onto what we are talking about. But when it's applied and in even phenomenology many, many people are familiar with that.

In fact, anthropologists, sociologists are very familiar with those concepts. But when they, let's say, go out and do field work or even live their daily lives, they never venture beyond the theoretical stage of using these things. They're scary because what sorcery does, for example, it disrupts the comforts or the certainty of everyday life that the world is such and such. It disrupts it and some of us don't want that disruption.

It creates great dissonance and very unsettling and it has to be done systematically. Otherwise can you absolutely freak out if all of a sudden just, you know, the wall disappears and you find yourself elsewhere without having actually walked over there. You wake up, you know, down the block, and say where am I. I mean it's very disrupting.

So the concepts are there. Phenomenology, anthropology use some of it in terms of actually going into other cultures, studying other realities. But they study it. The word study for them takes on sort of an academic sense of armchair theorizing. Although I'm sure anthropologists don't want to consider themselves armchair theorists anymore. That was in the 19th century. But in a way they're still doing it from hotel rooms or if they go into the field they may -- they still have a preset theory that they want to explore. They're not going in having suspended judgment as phenomenologists recommend one should do. And definitely they don't want to apply it to their daily lives and actually become something else, something other than they are.

And you can't study sorcery or understand what sorcerers do without giving up some of your holdings in the everyday world, without actually altering your ideas on the nature of what it is that you are, what it is that you do in your everyday life. If you're always using those assumptions to interpret what -- let's say Don Juan does -- and this is what happened with Carlos Castaneda's books, those assumptions were used to say oh, he is doing this and like he is doing, because whoever is saying these things hasn't validated for themselves what this other realm takes. But there is other areas of -- like eastern philosophy, they have some of the same concepts again of altering other realities, of being aware of the here and now. They have the term "the great crossing."

In fact, I was going to call my book "the great crossing" but that term is a very specific term used in Buddhist philosophy which is not what sorcery is. Although getting back to your question, on a theoretical level, it may appear the same. They're interested in exploring perception, expanding perception, of awakening the energetic body. Some of the techniques are very similar, quieting the internal dialog, using meditation. But the difference is that -- what a practitioner has to do is relinquish his mode of linear thinking and unless that is done and relinquished, the attachment to the self stays the fundamental obstacle -- and the eastern disciplines talk about that too. But all I can say is that we actually do that.

We spend a lifetime with it and we are still engaged in this procedure of actually doing that very thing, relinquishing the attachment to the world of everyday life, our humanness, that assemblage point into which we were born, and moving away and exploring these other dimensions. So we're doing -- so the difference then, I think that the concepts, yes, that they're there. They're not unique in that sense, but the practices -- you can't just have a concept without actually engaging in doing, because a concept by itself doesn't mean anything. It has to be a bodily experience.

And sorcery is really designed that you do these practices, you get the bodily experience, rather than just talking philosophically about something the way philosophers do or sometimes Oriental philosophers or even the physicists, the new age physics. I don't want to talk about it because I'm not really familiar with physics. I'm not a physicist. But they touch upon certain areas of indeterminacy, of limits of perception, of light, of what it means to see things. For example, an object to a physicist from their studies and experiments realizes it is not solid at all. That has to do with your perspective and size.

So solidity of something is only because we are human beings and we can see something. A bee or a bat would have a totally different perspective of, let's say, a tree or a log or a piece of wood. He would see it totally different. So physicists explore the limits of reality, of what constitutes it. And there's books that combine eastern wisdom with physics. And so there is that connection.

But I don't know of any physicists who actually would practice all the things that he knows intellectually in his daily life. When he comes home he still sits down on that old chair and he has his wife there and he has his same behaviors, sociologists, too. They understand certain concepts that are similar to sorcery but sorcery is not just a concept.

Sorcery is an abstract way of life so that the totality of your being becomes as abstract as those concepts. So when we say that the energetic body is luminous, is composed of fluid filaments, that is what a sorcerer is. He's not just saying it. He is it because he uses it and his reality is based on that, the utilization of those filaments of light.

For example, a good example is from one of the books of Carlos Castaneda, when Don Genaro jumped over the waterfall. From the point of view of somebody just watching, in this case Carlos Castaneda in his early days, he just saw -- well, he saw half and half, just he saw somebody sort of jumping, very agile, doing weird things, antics, gyrations, acrobatics. Now, of course, if he would see the same thing he would know exactly what's taking place because he himself could do it. His body can understand because he can cast out his lines, fibers of light, and tie them to places. The recapitulation enables you to do that, too, to cast your fibers, energetic beams, back into the past and tie them on things or untie them. Basically you would dislodge the energy that's tied there. So yes, there's parallels but not really from the point of view of actual practice.

John:   Going now to your book again, you've mentioned what sorcery is briefly and what sorcerers do. Could you give a perspective -- this depends again on the milieu of the actual sorcerers themselves. Is there a sexual dichotomy between the male and female sorcerers? Is there anything in terms of the feminist concept? Could you give an explanation, a description of what a sorcerer's -- their role is. Are they still part of a social cultural milieu? Is there sort of an ethos, a world view that sorcerers hold in terms of how they see reality? Can you give more in terms of an in-depth description of sorcery and sorcerers?

Taisha:   Uh-huh, yes. There's several questions there. Let's just start with a definition of sorcery because that's very basic. Sorcery, basically, is the ability to perceive more than is allotted from the world into which we were born. They try to expand perception and they do it in -- they have certain techniques, dreaming, stalking, gazing techniques. Many of these, in fact, all of them are described in the books, the techniques.

But they all lead to displacements of the assemblage point and giving up your holding on the world of everyday life so that you are able to perceive more. How can you perceive another reality if you are only given to perceiving this one. I mean it's a contradiction. It can't be done. You have to let go.

It's like the monkey who is putting his fist in a bottle and he's grabbing a fist full of nuts. He can't pull his hand out to go elsewhere. He is stuck there, but if he lets go of what he is grasping he can slip his hand out and be free. So sorcerers, all they're doing is they're letting go of their holdings, the handful of nuts that we all grasp on and which consists of the expectations we have of ourselves and what we were taught that the world is like. So you let go of that and by the very fact that you are letting go, something else comes in; something else slips in. And that's what sorcerers do.

Now the training is basically the same for everyone, except I did mention that Carlos Castaneda, being the nagual, was trained in the uses of the psychotropic plants at the very initial stages. After that he was also trained -- did many recapitulations as we all do. That's fundamental.

The first thing that anyone does -- forget the marijuana, forget taking anything. You sit down and do a thorough recapitulation. That in itself will set you up and give you the possibility of moving elsewhere. Recapitulating your life is letting go of that handful of nuts that you're grasping on or whatever. As you let it go it's very painful because all our lives we're taught to hold on. The stronger your hold, the better person you are, the more ego strength you have.

So sorcerers teach the opposite. That's why we call sorcery training not-doing, because they don't really do anything in particular. They just not-do the things that we were trained to do. So it's very simple, but in its simplicity it becomes almost impossible and there's very few takers, of course.

People think that everyone wants to join Carlos Castaneda and his, quote, group. And the few people whose -- let's say their paths cross and somehow -- not that they're invited to be a member of any group but some of this -- maybe they're told to recapitulate or something.

Do they do it? No, because to recapitulate you have to take energy away from your daily life. And what, you have to take it away from the nights our on dates or whatever, going to the disco or watching TV or worrying about work or someplace or worrying about yourself. The energy to recapitulate has to come from somewhere because you have to first of all just make time. Physically you have to have time to do it.

So the opportunity is there really for anyone but the willingness has to be also balanced, has to come with the opportunity to actually do it. So otherwise it becomes only a tale of energy that you think about.

And we all have this idea that oh, I wish I would be different; I wish I could do this, but you don't have the energy. With the recapitulation as a method of training you get the energy; you make the energy; you no longer are wishing, you're intending. But intent is very different from wishing.

Intent is hooking up your energy, your purpose, to something that's already set up by the sorcerers. And if you hook to that, via, let's say the recapitulation, it pulls you. But you do have to do it.

This thing about another technique is gazing. I used to watch television a great deal when I first entered Don Juan's realm. And they told me well, okay, you spend what -- and this is true for anyone. We spend maybe what, two hours. They have done studies -- maybe two hours a day watching television. He said okay, watch television, but don't turn it on.

So there I was sitting in front of the television set gazing at the television. So that's an act of not-doing. That's an example of not-doing. And you do your own not-doings, make up your not-doings, whether it's looking at a little match and inhaling the light -- that's a not-doing -- or gazing at something.

So I found that when I was gazing at the television set -- of course, in private, you don't right there. If you start doing this in public and with someone around, they will start wondering what is the matter with you. So you do these things but you don't spread them around because everyone is going to judge you from the point of view of their perspective.

And the reality of everyday life is like Alcatraz. I mean there is no escaping. There is wardens and guards making sure that you don't get off that rock. So anybody who wants to venture into that shark-infested-waters -- and there is no guarantees that you will ever make it anywhere.

You do have to practice stalking and be very unobtrusive. A stalker, to give a definition of a stalker, is someone -- well, one of the definitions is someone who really makes it an art of being invisible. So you can get off the rock as long as nobody sees you. It's as simple as that. Nothing's holding you there really. You just let go of that handful of nuts. But make sure nobody sees you. You do it gradually. Otherwise they're going to make sure -- they're going to put impediments in your path, guaranteed.

So as I was gazing at the television and there right there you see that the facticity of what a TV set is is taken for granted because the thing starts dissolving, starts becoming two dimensional. The idea of three dimensional space is an assumption, is something that we learn as children, as infants, really to see three dimensionality. So that children when they cross the street or speak is something that children learn. They know that those cars are moving fast.

For a little infants or toddlers they don't know that. That's why the mother always has to say don't cross the street, cars are coming. They don't know what a car is capable of doing because they don't have the gloss, car, yet. They'll get it soon, hopefully not the hard way. But if they burn their finger on a flame, they'll realize what is heat and what the properties of fire is.

Even that is not a given fact because there's people that can walk on coals and not get burned. We learn the parameters of our reality. So gazing disrupts the facticity of our reality of everyday life.

Let me talk a little bit about women. I was trained by yes, basically the female members of Don Juan's group. Emilito, who to me, I mean he was absolutely male but he was Zuleica's dream body. Your dreaming would be anything male, female and of course, I was also trained by Don Juan himself because there were certain things that we needed to know and be able to understand because our -- Florinda Donner, Carlos Castaneda, Carol Tiggs -- our situation was not the same as his situation where he had the four dreamers, the four stalkers, and really the rule kind of governed how they would proceed.

Our training didn't follow the rule except in a very minimal sense. Whenever he trained Carlos Castaneda, he would ask the omens and that's pointed out in the books. He would look at the omens to see well, should we proceed like this or this. And the omens would say no, don't follow the rule, just let the thing happen and the same way with us.

We were trained in specific things but never by any rule. I mean I don't -- we all had to recapitulate but we could do it any way that suited us. I happen to -- I like being in enclosed spaces. I did it in a cave but Florinda Donner, you couldn't put her in a cave. She recapitulated walking down the street or just when something triggers something, maybe a memory of the past, and we still have a little agitation of some sort, we recapitulate it. We're on the spot wherever we are.

Or the sorcery passes. They're techniques, bodily movements to activate the energy body. But there's hundreds of them. So you do the ones that suit you. There's really no rigid rule of training. And the reason being is because in order to move the assemblage point you have to be fluid. I personally was given very heavy training in stalkers' techniques and stalking because my assemblage point was very erratic and so I needed that training.

Other people don't need the training. They have a natural bent for something, Florinda Donner for her dreaming and she discusses her training in Being-in-Dreaming. She has a very natural bend. Her assemblage point moves when she is sitting in front of me. All of a sudden her assemblage point is moving and she is amalgamating other bits of reality that come in very, very easily.

Women get to the -- females have a very natural facility for moving the assemblage point by two things, one biologically. They do have the cycles; they menstruate. Chemically things in their bodies change so that it gives them a chance to let other stimuli in. It just trickles in. They have wombs and there is something about the womb that as an organ is able to -- it has like a secondary function. It can sense and understand directly.

And we all say, well, women are more intuitive than men. We have that coming into our daily jargon and we have slogans: Women are more intuitive, they are so sensitive when they menstruate, and this and that. It's true but women can use it instead of being put down or it's a negative thing. They can use it to do sorcery, to recapitulate, to heighten their concentration when they're recapitulating. They will have a hard time reading phenomenology when they menstruate, but they will have an easy time doing dreaming. So they can do their dreaming during that time of the month.

The second reason it's easier for women is because our society doesn't make that may demands on them as it does on men. Men, boys, you know, mothers raise their children to educate them. They pour a great deal of attention on them, the males, because they're the ones that have to perpetuate the social order. They are the ones that get the education so they can teach and perpetuate whatever aspect that they're trained in, whether it's science or medicine, law.

Although now that's changing, of course. Women also are anything into those fields but basically for the wrong reasons. Women are going into these fields so they can be like men, equal with men. It's functional from the point of view of the social order. They're stabilizing their position because now they're lawyers and doctors. But it's not functional from the point of true sorcery because now they're making new ties, stronger links to the social order. So it has, of course, advantages and disadvantages.

Not to say that a sorcerer or somebody training in sorcery can't become a lawyer or a doctor. Every one of us, Florinda Donner, Carol Tiggs, we received a university education in order to be able to think abstractly and communicate, but not to be the bastions of the social order, you know, anthropology professors, lawyers or doctors.

Carol Tiggs has a tremendous knowledge in acupuncture, medicine of the body, the physical body and the energetic body, comparable to any doctor. She got that from the point of view of her sorcery training, so she can use that to move away. So women have a better, really, a better chance of moving out of the social order, off that Alcatraz rock because nobody is going to miss them that much.

Their function really is to perpetuate the family, not the social order. They have to "stand by" their man as the song goes, to uphold him under all circumstances. We're trained really to teach our children to be upstanding citizens and this and that, or to mourn them if they go astray, but they would only go astray within the structure. There is room for deviance, of course.

So the position of women in the everyday life, the world of everyday life, is a two-sided position. One, you can look at it in a negative way because women are, as I said, are there to really support the men. Behind every great man, we say, there is a woman. A woman should stay in the house and raise the family. So there's limits imposed on her in terms of education. She has less opportunities than men do. The demands or expectations of her reality gravitate around home.

But as I said, now it is changing, that women are going into work and academic areas. But they go in there with a double burden that now they have the home and they have the academic and their careers. So there is even less of a chance for them to have any extra energy to practice sorcery techniques. But on the other hand, women have a natural facility to expand perception, to move into other realities.

And Don Juan and the female members under which I was trained, they played on this natural facility. So we did the recapitulation; we did gazing techniques and especially dreaming techniques; and we utilized the times of our monthly cycle. We used that instead of just feeling bad and staying in bed a day or having cramps or premenstrual blues that are things that women have learned that they ought to have -- no, we used the changes, the natural changes that take place in order to displace the assemblage point and to do dreaming and stalking.

So there's really not -- I can't say there is a real difference in training between men and women, but each person in Don Juan's world and the way they trained us, depends on our predilection, on our natural capabilities. Like some women are fantastic dreamers as I said. The men, the males would go out more -- they were botanists for example, like Don Vicente. They would interact more within the world as stalkers.

But that doesn't mean that women weren't trained as stalkers. Since we had to come back and be in the world of everyday life -- we couldn't just stay in a cave dreaming -- we had to perfect our stalking techniques, being with people, using people as petty tyrants or seeing the world as controlled folly through gazing. Gazing is what enables one to really see that the world is not facts but energy. And gazing combined with the recapitulation -- really it's like it pulls the rug out from reality itself.

As I said, work or go to the university, but we always did it from the standpoint of this other platform that we had constructed, that we could lean on, which was our energetic body. We acted in the world as controlled folly. Women have a really easy way of entering that, a natural way, because they don't have that real strong affiliation to abstraction, ideas. They are very pragmatic.

And if somebody says -- well, this is too absurd, this example. But what if the earthquake in Florida or something -- they would say well, at least it's not here and if it's not here, that's okay. They wouldn't say it but they're more immediate. In order to be concerned for humanity as an abstraction, it's mostly males. Males are the priests; males are the politicians; males are in the army dealing with global scales. Males are the astronauts and in physics and aerodynamics.

So women, the way -- what we have learned from the position of this assemblage point into which we are born is that women are pragmatic and deal with immediate situations that have to do with the family, children, education, concerns of the husband, this type of thing. So that's easy to relinquish, just -- I'm not saying leave your husband, but, if you're not married, don't get a husband. Then you don't have to worry about children, family.

Then you have all your energy left to do sorcery because nobody's going to care that much if you don't become an astrophysicist, or at least your mother isn't. But if your son doesn't become a doctor or something good, she is going to worry. So you have more freedom. Females have more freedom.

But the training is basically the same. But everyone as I said has their own predilection to what they emphasize, what they enter. But the point of all of training really is to disrupt the taken-for-granted continuity of everyday life so that you can move into a different reality.

And where is this other reality? There's a position of the assemblage point that is very close to that of everyday life, the twin position, and that amalgamates a twin reality, a different reality. And you enter it by energizing your double, the assemblage point that governs the energetic body.

And sorcerers maintain that the universe is really braids of perception. It's like a braid that folds in upon itself and each braid is complete; it's a bubble; it's a reality in itself.

We were born into one of those bubbles, but that braid continues and there's a certain area where it overlaps with another reality. Or at least if you break through that barrier, the wall of fog that they talk about, it overlaps and that can slip out. So that's the first place that sorcerers, dreamers enter. And there you find yourself very naturally, very harmoniously, in a separate reality, a different reality.

Women can enter that very easily. They have no problem at all. So there is the advantage of really being female. And Don Juan and the sorcerers say that the universe, the whole universe, is female. The female energy, it can match other areas of the universe easier than a male energy that is rigid and incapable of relinquishing control -- but because men are thought to be in control and command of any situation. So it's very difficult for them to let go, to give up, to accept, to be taken into some of these other realms, whereas it's much easier for females to do this.

John:   Am I limiting the perspective of the sorcerers by asking these things in terms of phrasing the questions in a feminist perspective, Taisha, within the context of sorcery and being a woman, the benefits that you acquire from sorcery?

Taisha:   It's a valid question. Sometimes we're asked that and then we say, well, if you -- it's like being in a store, an expensive store, where the salesperson comes up, and you ask how much is this suit and he says well, if you have to ask how much, you can't afford it. So sometimes we think that, well, if you have to ask why even do this or get involved in it, then it's really not for you.

But it's a valid question because we, from our position of the assemblage point, we do ask, well, what's in it for me, why do it. We're grown up to have merchant mentalities, merchant minds to see the value of something. So in that respect there is an immediate value in sorcery and you would experience it by doing it.

And you can really approach this question two ways. One is by looking at do I want to stay at this particular position of the assemblage point into which I was born, into this reality. And most people would answer that there is something not quite right with it. The modality of our day is, according to the sorcerers, is really deteriorating. It's on a downhill course, heading for destruction.

Generally speaking, and also individually in terms of our own well-being. There's a list of hundreds of diseases that could attack us any moment and guaranteed one of them is going to get us in the end because we are all destined to die unless we practice sorcery. And sorcerers say that by moving the assemblage point, entering some of these other realities, your awareness remains intact and you escape this inevitable physical death that is really inevitable only from a position of the assemblage point.

And they can say that because the physical body is something that is closely tied or limited to our perception of reality. You change that perception of reality and by the same token you're changing the perception of your physical body and you're activating other aspects of your total potentiality. The physical body that's going to be ravaged by disease and death is only really a consequence of the position of the assemblage point.

So we have a feeling, every one of us has a feeling, that there is something more out there, that they wish they could do this. They wish they could be different. They wish they could have more energy but immediately what we do is we interpret that desire, that longing, that intuitive knowledge. We translate that into human terms, like I wish I could get a better job; I wish I could have a better relationship or more intense relationship; I wish things would be different at work or at home. We translate that discontent or whatever or energetic low into control, not really a control but it's a say in what our destiny is. And as I was coming here, I saw a billboard and it said -- I'm going to read it to you. It says, most people's plans for the future always fall a little bit short. And that was the billboard for a mortuary. And I said that's right; that's exactly it. I mean, our plans, they always fall short, not just a little bit, I mean way off the mark.

So sorcerers say no, don't be content with having your plans fall short and grumble and end up in the grave. Sorcerers think big. They think so big that they're abstractions. They make a leap into the infinite. They leap beyond reality that always makes our expectations fall short, makes us die disappointed, disgruntled or happy, but still dead. It doesn't matter if you die happy, rich, whatever, you still end up in the same place.

The fate of our parents is waiting for us. And we know that; we see it. We can see them get old, ill, lose the clarity, awareness. So sorcerers offer, through their training, an alternative in that they say no, think, grasp for everything that you can possibly be. Don't limit yourself to what you have learned and what your language, your linear mode of thinking says that's all you can be. Because our linear mode, it says it goes from birth and it ends up in death. That's a linear way of thinking, based on our culture. The modality of your day, which is the super-rational, linear and heading for destruction.

Sorcerers say, no, don't accept that. Question, question everything. Even question the facticity that that wall is there. Gaze at it and find out what is that wall. And then you see the energy that makes up the wall and that it's fluid, that you are fluid as sentient beings; reality is fluid.

I can definitely say that to have energy, to be energetically alive, to be able to utilize your energetic body, to have an alternative, to be clear, sober, is definitely better, superior than to be always in a state of lethargy, confusion, disappointment, or ecstatic highs and then deep lows, of the feeling of being trapped, that many people have by our jobs. They can only escape river rafting down the Colorado.

Sorcerers say no, don't limit yourself to that kind of escape or drugs or whatever, smoke, cigarettes or sex or whatever. Those are forms of escaping, in a way, the limits of our everyday lives. Sorcerers say no, don't settle for just crumbs. Take everything. They're as greedy as can be. They take -- they want to be alive with the totality of themselves. And everyone has this potential, the opportunity.

But let's say a sorcerer has the courage to not just wish but to actually put into practice through recapitulating ones life, through letting go of the handful of crumbs that we cling to, letting go so you can pull your hand out so you can see the vastness that is in front of us, to be able to perceive other things that were inconceivable from the point of view of everyday life, absolutely inconceivable, but perfectly valid and agreeable -- you can reach an agreement -- from the point of view of sorcerers.

So they journey into the vastness, into -- what they're really saying is they're displacing their assemblage point by storing energy. And all the techniques that are listed, that are described in the books, are really ways of storing energy, because unless you have the energy, you can't even -- I mean you can't even have a good day at work, let alone see your boss as a petty tyrant.

In order to do that you have to stand on a platform of the energetic self and laugh, be able to laugh at what you see around you and see it as controlled folly. Otherwise, you're forever condemned to see it, to take the world that was given to us as real. And sorcerers say no, it's not real. They say that there is this possibility and they turn the possibility into pragmatic action.

So they don't talk about it or theorize it like physicists, philosophers, eastern Oriental philosophers, but they turn it into pragmatic action. And so they say, the impetus they get, they take the techniques that are in the book. We offer them as an opening for anyone that wants to take them. And it's like we're casting a ladder and each one of those rungs are something, a technique of not-doing, as I said before, quieting the internal dialog or recapitulating.

And as you claim it -- anyone can do these things, and you don't have to worry about doing them correctly -- or I don't know if the breathing is exactly like this. This there is no rule. Look at the books; get what you can; and then trust that your energetic body will guide you, will tell you what to do, and do it.

Don't get discouraged but you just do it. And the more you do, the more you see the validity of what sorcery is and what we're talking about. You'll see it for yourself and you'll also, of course, see the utility because you're not going to feel those pangs of disappointment that ravage you whenever something goes wrong. All of a sudden you feel light like the burden has been lifted off your shoulders.

You'll see the advantage daily as you practice some of these techniques. The sorcerers have a saying. There is a song, a Mexican tune called "Valentina". And in it there is a line that says if you're going to die tomorrow, you may as well die today. And so that's what motivates sorcerers. They know we're going to die. I mean from the point of view of everyday life, that's all that awaits us. So you may as well take that leap and die now and then you'll find yourself in another realm and you'll see that alternatives are waiting for you, for your bewilderment and for your delight.

John:   Taisha, in terms of being in the Judeo-Christian context there is a myth how the world originated, how the universe and life originated and how it will end in terms of a son of God coming back and a new heaven. Is there any concern with the origins of life within sorcery, where life is going in terms of humanity? How would a sorcerer address that?

Taisha:   That's a very powerful question from the point of view of everyday life because, of course, we are concerned as to what our future will be. Every culture has its own myths as to how the world was created. And some cultures have like six, seven periods of destruction and the world was recreated and now we're in the fifth sun, different cycles. These are myths that are valid within each cultural framework to try to explain the course of humanity, where humanity is going.

But from the point of view of sorcerers, sorcery is really concerned with where the individual is going rather than the abstraction called culture or humanity, society, because as we all know, these things are made up of individual people and society isn't going to go anywhere that people aren't going to go. So sorcerers are concerned with the fate of individual beings, as people specifically.

And all these books were written, really, as a guideline so that any individual person who wishes to alter his fate, let's say, or have a chance to escape the natural course of evolution, whatever it may be. Sorcerers really don't speculate that much as to where it's going in the future. They don't spend their time prognosticating what the future will hold because they are concerned with activating their energy body so that they can maintain their awareness no matter where they find themselves.

Future, past, this linear way of thinking, doesn't really apply to the sorcerer's world. But you can think of it in the terms that wherever a sorcerer is, he is going to be there with the totality of himself, energetically intact, which means there's no concern as to what happened in some past because there is no past. He has recapitulated his life and he regrouped that energy to move in the immediate present.

And the ancient sorcerers used to have a different conception more in tune with the myths of different cultures, that there is a future time or a past time, a dreaming time. And we, our anthropologists at least, talk about a dreaming time. And they think of it as a maybe vague time in a chronological past prior to written documents. Or in China we have the yellow emperor and his mythical kingdom, or prior to him there were four mythical emperors and we think of it in terms of a linear progression or, I mean, a linear movement backwards to some unknown point. But that's again thinking in linear terms.

This is very easy to think that way and then, if you do, you come up with worries as to what will the future hold. But a sorcerer and everything I've said so far really, using the phenomenological perspective of expanding perception and of realizing that space and time are really a question of intentionality that we have encoded in our bodies so that we're incapable of perceiving just generally, but we have to perceive an object. And that object already has its future and its past by the mere fact that we're perceiving this reality.

Sorcerers, when they disrupt these taken-for-granted concepts, they also disrupt the idea that there is some future out there waiting for us. No, nothing is waiting. If there is anything waiting for us, it's that shark-infested water after we jump off Alcatraz. And what's in that water are, first of all, inorganic beings. There is other entities besides sentient human beings in the universe at large.

Dreamers go into realms or layers, not temporal or spatial layers, but just layers, energetic layers. The more energy you have, the more you move and transform yourself. But you're not moving in space and time the way the ancient sorcerers believed. They had an old different model of what takes place. They thought you were actually physically descending into the earth into different layers or you were ascending into seven layers in the sky. And this is also a model, sort of an eastern model of Buddhism where you have different layers of saints and holy personages, and then you come down to man and have the demons. Everything is layered. That is a linear model.

The ancient sorcerers used to think, yes, you descend into these other murky depths. But sorcerers have realized that this is not the way the reality is. It's a question of energy, energetically transforming whatever is in front of you. So you don't move at all. You just -- everything moves at the same time. So it's not you're here and something else is there. There's no here and there. They dissolved that right off. I learned to dissolve that in the trees.

We are always here now, in other words, but the here and the now is not always the same. I mean that's were stalking comes in. Stalkers find out what is this here, what does this now consist of, of this new dream position. And it's always changing, but we're always here now.

Sorcery has many contradictions, seeming contradictions, because our rational minds can't conceive this. The concern then is not the fate of the world or humanity, because they see -- as I said, reality of everyday life is in just one, let's say, a hair of a braid. And sorcerers want to move elsewhere. But whatever happens after they moved is no longer their concern energetically.

In terms of the fate of earth -- we can look at it in terms of astronomy. They tell us we find galaxies, total constellations of vast, vast, an unending universe, let's say, and each one is a world in its own. So the fate of one speck of dust isn't going to make any difference from the perspective of the whole.

And what sorcerers do is they take the grand perspective. It's going to mean a lot if we're here and an earthquake hits us or the nuclear bomb drops on top of us. It will mean a great deal to us but we won't be around to mourn, but from a broad perspective, if a sorcerer has moved away, those contingencies no longer enter into his stalkers world. But the concern there is that every individual can move away and explore his potential.

So this isn't an unhumanistic statement, because on the other hand, they contradict themselves and are very concerned and they say we've written these books so in case there's someone else who might be interested so they could grab hold of this ladder and experience some of these things.

Once the sorcerer moves away from the reality of everyday life, his interaction with his fellow man changes. And so we can address for a moment how he sees society -- not society at large, although sorcerers do make statement as to the modality of our day and they see that there are certain tendencies. They call it the "poor baby" syndrome that characterizes the modality of our times, but that is again related to the individual. The individual and everything we do or say or expect, we always turn it back so self reflection as to "poor baby, me" - what is going to help me. That is the modality of time. But it's an expression of an individual practice of what people actually do.

When a sorcerer moves away, he moves away from the concern of the self. He actually moves to a position the stalkers call of ruthlessness or detachment. And as he detaches himself, what he's really doing, he's no longer able to have this intersubjectivity with his fellow man. And that's why it's difficult for him to interact with people because people cannot read upon a sorcerer their expectations.

They think he's weird, there is something wrong. He is coming from somewhere they don't know where, and that is true. He is coming from somewhere other than from where they are. So the intersubjectivity, the possibility for communication, breaks down.

So if a sorcerer has to remain in the world with people, the only way he can do this is through what they call controlled folly, through stalking himself and others, through seeing everything as energy, as having no deep ultimate significance of human meaning, of concern, because all that comes from really a concern with the self.

A sorcerer no longer has a self to worry about and he can no longer be intersubjective in the sense of matching that self-concern. And other people can't read the self-concern in him as they do in themselves, so they see there is something strange. They don't have that looking glass, that mirror, they can see themselves in.

So a sorcerer can only interact in terms of controlled folly. And Don Juan, that's how he interacted with people, all of the members of the sorcery group. Now that's how we interact. Carlos Castaneda rarely sees people at all, because there comes a point where you move so far away from the assemblage point of everyday life that you no longer have any interest in anything of the daily world in interacting with people. And neither do you have the interest but you're almost physically incapable of or you would frighten the person if you suddenly would appear in the room because what happens when you move your assemblage point, you're activating, as I said, your energy body and it can disappear from the everyday realm. So as a sorcerer moves away, he moves away from, quote, the reality of everyday life. He essentially becomes invisible.

And that's the stalkers training. We become more and more invisible until there comes a time when we can walk down the street, if that's still there, and nobody will see us, because we have quieted the internal dialog that keeps reaffirming that I am in the world; I am so and so; I am such and such a person; I am me, you know. That concern has been placed off and you've used the energy to actually enter a different reality. And you find yourself, one day, very harmoniously in another realm where there's people but these people are not the people of the everyday life.

You have moved into another braid of that universe of awareness and there's other things there. It's not void. It's not that okay, this reality of everyday life into which we were born and there's nothing. That's what we would sort of like to think, or there's heaven or hell out there elsewhere. But that's really part of our own linear thinking. But then for the eastern people say that okay, there is void, there is nothing.

No there's an infinite number of fibers, of energetic fibers of awareness that you can experience empirically. And you see other things. Dreamers go into realms and realms of other universes where there's different planetary configurations, other dogs, animals with three legs, all kinds of organic forms that aren't found in this reality. They have a table of elements, the periodic table of elements, different elements than in this realm that aren't known to our physicists and chemists. And those things make up different combinations of things. So a stalker, when his position of the assemblage point has shifted, he starts to stalk and describe this other reality.

Carlos Castaneda has spent a great deal of his time, lately, dreaming and exploring some of these other areas. That's why he is not in the realm of everyday life. He will have a book coming out on the gates of dreaming, and describing the actual procedures, how to get out of the reality of everyday life and into some of these other realms (The Art of Dreaming). So that's what sorcerers do. But the reality of everyday life loses its importance.

John:   If you could briefly state your position or stage right now in the process of sorcery, how you intertwine the writer with -- I am assuming primarily, predominantly an oral tradition of sorcery in terms of obtaining knowledge. So anything you would like to, Taisha, in terms of summarizing where you are as a writer, where it's going, your path of knowledge, where you are now and any other notes that you have.

Taisha:   I can talk a little bit about writing, how these books are written or how I wrote my books. As you can tell, it deals with the very beginning stages of my training and so it took me years and years to write this. And why is it coming out now after so much time has elapsed. And the reason there is that because we don't -- and I'm speaking for myself, Florinda Donner, Carol Tiggs who have books printed.

We don't really write them the way people would write books in a linear fashion doing research and writing down the information or fictitiously imagining characters, outlining plot line and then coming up with their story. So we don't write in either of those fashions because our works aren't really written from the rational mind in the linear mode from the point of view of everyday life. They come from another position of the assemblage point. And everything that we've learned, all the training, at least most of the training that we have undergone, took place at a different position of the assemblage point.

Emilito who taught me, who was my second teacher and who really trained me in stalking, well he did not exist in the world of everyday life. So the bulk of my training came from a dream position. And that's why I started, when I started this talk, talked to you, I said that Taisha Abelar is really a dream position, that she wasn't born into the world of everyday life.

Whatever Taisha Abelar is and whatever I can say to you now is coming from elsewhere, from another position. And the energy that it took to not only experience whatever happened or whatever took place -- and then you needed a second layer of energy to be able to remember them, because there is much, much that happened in areas that I have no recollection. So my task now is to go back to them.

And the more energy I store, the more I can recollect and bring those things to the surface so that I can write them. And in a way, what we're doing is translation of something that's always here and now, circular, a different layer, energetic layer. We're translating it in a linear mode to the best of our ability through speaking, which is linear, and through writing.

So our books then are a translation of what our experiences were so that we can present them coherently. And there again was the importance of an academic education so that there was a root, a foundation, that I could now use and rely and not just say oh, this is fantastic. I mean, I saw fantastic things, I can't even talk about, because, when you are seeing those things, you cannot talk, believe me.

And when I think about them now, ever so often I get tongue tied if I really start to move my assemblage point back. I'm holding it now throughout this whole conversation at a certain position because of my stalkers training and only because of my stalkers training.

The minute I leave here, my assemblage point is moving elsewhere. Believe me, I'm going to go back where I came from, the here and now of another reality. And there I won't be able to speak in this fashion. So while this short time that I'm here, what I wanted to do is really to be able to convey and express to whoever is interested in understanding some of these concepts, the very difficult and yet very simple concept of what sorcery is.

And our books have the same purpose of trying to open this knowledge to the public because we really don't have apprentices. The rule that governed Don Juan's circle, his group, no longer holds.

The few people that were trained by him were trained in total fluidity and total sobriety so that we would be able to move our assemblage points from multiple, multiple positions with fluidity and with total consciousness and awareness and sobriety. And eventually we will move into total freedom where we won't be held in any one particular place. It will be so fluid that wherever the powers take us, the power of intent, that there that is where we are anything to end up.

John:   Speaking with Taisha Abelar, her book The Sorcerers' Crossing, A Woman's Journey. Taisha, thank you for taking time to speak with KPFK.

Taisha:   Okay. It was my pleasure to be here.

John:   This interview with Taisha Abelar took place February of this year at the office of Toltec Artists Incorporated in Los Angeles.

Copyright 1993 KPFK RADIO

KVMR Radio - Florinda Donner

Hanes Ealy:  Well I'm Hanes Ealy and my intent today is to talk to Florinda Donner and try to bring as much of the sorcerers' world to the listener as possible in one hour. I'm going to let Florinda introduce herself.

Florinda Donner:  So, I'm going to do this myself?

HE:  I'm going to ask you to tell who you are and what you're going to do today.

FD:  Oh. Actually I really don't know what I'm going to do today. I think that, well... I am Florinda Donner, I am an anthropologist. I have been working with Carlos Castaneda over twenty years and as a student of anthropology, I was drawn into the world of sorcerers and I have stayed there ever since.

HE:  Well the question that comes to mind right off the bat Florinda, is the world of the sorcerer doesn't allow any volunteers...

FD:  Well, not volunteers in the sense that "Yes, I want to be in the world of the sorcerers." Of course in a weird way we have to be totally volunteers because nobody is drawn into this world against their will. However... I don't know if you know about it? We have been giving a series of lectures lately in bookstores, Taisha Abelar and myself and Carol Tiggs and that is the recurrent question, you see? "What makes you so special?" or... I mean nothing makes us so special (laughter). We are truly and I'm not saying this out of false humility, we are very ordinary people and something very extraordinary has happened to us. The idea of there are not volunteers in the sense that this world is an extremely arduous and solitary world.

What we have noticed as we have been talking to different groups of people is most, I'm not saying all, but most of the people have... are used to having weekend workshops and seminars and they want answers, they want crystal clear answers in the sense of "What do I have to do to change my life?" Well, to change your life, you have to die practically in the sense what the sorcerers know as leaving the ego, which is a death in of itself. In order to accomplish that, its not that you really die, its a life time endeavor. You see, we have no clear answers, people want a program, they would like "Ok, Step one, two and three and four, five follows." Well it doesn't work that way at all. It is an extremely difficult proposition to get across, that its a way of life, its not just something you do in your free time. Your total life is involved in this, body, mind and spirit or whatever we want to define it.

HE:  So many people want to join the sorcerers' world. So many people, when they heard you were going to be on the show, starting coming to the local bookstore and saying "Is Florinda or Taisha going to come to our town?" They just have a tremendous, tremendous interest in what you do and yet there's no way the average person could even come close to doing what you do.

FD:  I just returned from Mexico, in fact I just came back. An hour ago I returned from Mexico. I was there with Carlos Castaneda and we talked to several people and its always the same thing, you know? "What can we do to join this world?" Well... "Why are you different from the different sorcerers, the different lines, lineage's of Naguals?" Well Carlos is different in the sense that he has written these books. These books are obviously available to the public, and in the books, and I'm not saying that you know, the book does not follow any kind of line, but in the books, it's very clearly stated in terms of what it involves to be in that world. People, I think, fail to see that the procedures, not the procedures but there is... It's a clearly delineated path in the sense that we have to totally cut off ourselves from the world with out retreating from the world.

Another point is that people when they say "I want to join the sorcerers' world, I need a teacher, I need a Guru. You had that too." Yes of course we did have it, but it was a very solitary, well it is a very solitary battle. People always talk in terms of "Well there is the group, there is the Castaneda group." Well, there is no group. We had the hardest time for 3 days in Mexico that there is no group. There is a place which Carlos calls the place of the second attention, the place of no self pity, of no compassion in the sense that we can not allow ourselves to be compassionate, to have compassion or pity for our fellow man when we haven't changed ourselves. And there is that place, no matter if we're in Mexico, Los Angeles, San Francisco that we do meet, you see? There is this place that we all get together and people from lets say, "the outside world", if there is such a thing that can be called, made a dichotomy. They do join us, even if it's only for a moment.

The things that are involved in this... like the first things I tell people is they have to recapitulate their lives. Its one of the main, lets say "procedures" to truly examine our life. Examine our life in such a minute detail, its not a psychological, lets say, analysis or investigation about ourselves. It's far from it. It's a total examination of what we are in the sense of how we have learned by the time we were three or four years old, how to manipulate the world and our fellow human beings and it becomes very clear how we have learned those patterns and what we want to do, we want to divest ourselves of those patterns. If we can not divest ourselves of those patterns, at least have a momentary second, or I guess, a momentary chance to not react the same way we react. According to don Juan, they say our energy, let's say, 90% of our energy is involved in the presentation of the self. Because of that nothing of what is out there really can come to us.

We are so filled with how we look to others, how we come across, either just physically or emotionally. The idea of the presentation of the self takes all our energy, all our endeavor. Its like we are already booked, we are closed to anything that can come in. Of course we have glimpses which we immediately discard "Oh well, something happened. That was whatever." Either its in dreams or in the everyday life of being awake.

HE:  In this recapitulation, I think it was in Taisha's book, or maybe Taisha said it, that you have to recapitulate every person that you've ever encountered in your life.

FD:  The way you want... Taisha's book...basically, it is... It deals with the recapitulation.

HE:  My problem is as a job, what I do for a living, as a physician, I've encountered over 500,000 people in my last 20 years.

FD:   (laughter)

HE:  I can't recapitulate the people I saw yesterday, let alone the 100,000th person I saw in 1975.

FD:  Oh no, but you see? Instead of saying that, you could say, well, you could certainly make an attempt because as you say, in the kind of job that you have, Let's say, I'm sure you have already a very standard and a very well worked out routine of what works in your line of work.

HE:  Indeed.

FD:  I mean it has to be, otherwise you wouldn't be able to survive.

So that is your public persona. In lets say, your private life, how you deal with your fellow human beings, with your wife, with your parents, with your children, I don't know what what... In terms of how you are engaged in terms of the world, but you see the certain patterns that are recurrent, the way we interact with our fellow man, which is always to protect the ego. We're always trying to protect the ego. If it gets attacked or if it's in anyway threatened, we immediately have this lets say, this background of ways of immediately repairing the damage which is emotionally, it's alright for us, but its not alright for the body. You see? The body acknowledges those blows.

According to don Juan, he said, illness and disease didn't really exist in his world because it is basically... I don't want to say it's self inflicted because that's going too far, but we do make ourselves sick with stress. And the stress basically comes because the ego can not deal with the world outside.

HE:  All these things that the ego does to maintain itself, its self importance, are energy drains, am I not correct?

FD:  What are the energy drains? For don Juan, sorcery was a world of energy. Basically, a sorcerer is interested in visualizing, of seeing... not visualizing, of apprehending, of perceiving energy directly.

HE:  And we're born with that power, we have enough energy when we're born to...

FD:  All of us, no matter what we are, all of us have that inheritance, we are perceptors. We are fields of energy.

HE:  And we squander that energy...

FD:  Exactly.

HE:  ...by maintaining the self importance, the self image.

FD:  The idea of the self. The idea of our self-image, whatever that entails.

HE:  And we can recapture that energy by recapitulating our lives as best as possible?

FD:  There is no guarantee. No. Its just one procedure to at least make us stop for a moment before we want to repeat our habitual behavior in terms of our presentation of the self.

Let's say if we are in the world, in a job, somebody insults us and says "look you didn't really do a good job" you see? Emotions, its like you can say like... "The asshole, he doesn't know what he was talking about", you know? "I really know what I'm doing. It doesn't really matter, I don't get insulted." But the body acknowledges that blow, you see? Especially our energetic body and that's exactly what don Juan was interested... But it doesn't happen, no matter how the world values you, it doesn't really matter, because they're only valuing an ideal of yourself anyway.

HE:  Is there any particular portion of the body where we store these energy blows?

FD:  Well it depends. Usually we store those energy blows in our weakest part, whether it's our organs, I mean, it depends... For instance, if you under stress, lets say you feel certain pains, or you feel drained, you get a cold, I mean you know your body better than anyone else. Well, that is exactly where the blow is going.

HE:  But its not universal, it isn't in the nervous system or in the tendons, or in the vascular system, it varies from person to person?

FD:  Varies person to person. For instance, I have very weak bronchitis, whenever I get drained, I start coughing very, very badly so whether is just something physically or I really got stressed out, you know, I start coughing. Of course in Los Angeles, very easy because with the smog.

HE:  Sure. Well, in the sorcerers' world, from each thing I've read whether its Carlos' book or your book or Taisha's book or from hearing you talk, it seems that you were lent energy by the Nagual...

FD:  Yes.

HE:  ...or by the other witches.

FD:  When we were in their company, we were running... It's not that they were lending - we were running on their energy. For us to meet them, for to be in their world, which is the world of the second attention, they were lending us their energy, yes, for them to actually do it, there has to be this total and... One of the interesting things, this idea, that when we give talks, people are extremely cautious, and of course, rightfully so. When I encountered the world of don Juan, there was no chance to be cautious. I either jumped or there was no game.

I'm not saying that's the thing to do, but for us, for me, in my case, there was no other way. Yes of course I resented it, its not that I resented it, but there were, you know... There were no really doubts but I was extremely, lets say, aberated in my patterns of behavior. Because from my perspective, I was the greatest thing that ever lived, I mean, the world validated my idea of the self. I grew up in South America, I had advantages just by the mere fact the way I looked. Children know how to manipulate that extremely well, I was President in my elementary school from kindergarten until sixth grade, I was in Venezuelan schools, I was... There were very few blond children. I mean, I was treated like a little goddess and I believed that that was my inherent right. You see, and then of course as an adult we do change, we alter these patterns, but there inherently is this self importance you know, "I'm the greatest thing that ever lived."

HE:  There are people in society, taking the opposite view point, who...

FD:  Yeah but you see what I'm saying... Taking the opposite view... I'm telling you in a very exaggerated manner, it doesn't really matter whether our idea of the self is positive or negative.

HE:  Ok.

FD:  The drain of energy is exactly the same, whether we maintain, we have a total loss of image or a bombastic idea of the self, it doesn't really matter, the drain of energy is the same, because we still have this idea... We have to defend this idea of what we truly are which is the sight of our fellow man. Inherently there is nothing to back it up. We know certain things, yes, we know to a degree that we are intelligent, we know how to do certain... Yes, but I'm not talking about this, I'm talking about our involvement with the self. The idea that we are all special in one way. We're always special, you see? What don Juan did with us, he bombarded this idea of being special. He said "If you're all special in the world, the world can't function." Which is absolutely true. That why we have, let's say, from a basic human point of view, we don't really know how to interact with each other because each one of us is always defending something.

HE:  How can we stop this? I mean, we can recapitulate, but I, in my own life, let me just give an example, because I'm sure this would be for everyone else, recapitulation takes time. It seems like the sorcerers world is a world of people who have lots of free time, they have nothing better to do, nothing is calling on them to do something else. They can go off and dream for nine days, or disappear from the world for ten years, or whatever they want, but the average person with a job, a family...

FD:  I totally agree with you.

HE:  ...tries to recapitulate and they might get a half hour's worth in if they're lucky and they might take two lifetimes at that rate to recapitulate anything.

FD:  Precisely, but like for instance, look, I've been in the sorcerers world I mean, I don't even want to mention... its way over twenty years, ok? That is a lifetime. The thing is, my lifetime has been spent in following the path. I have made that decision. That's all I do. There are people in our group that work jobs from what? 9 to 5 or whatever 6, whatever the hours are. Have totally ordinary jobs. Well one of them - I translate. I love to do translations, I translate from Spanish into English or vice versa or into German. So that's my income. I need to live. I'm certainly in the world in the sense that I do.. We have not retreated from the world but we are not in the world in the sense that whatever makes us react like our fellow man, we have curtailed this to the minimum. It doesn't really matter what they do to us anymore. How they bang us. Its not because we have succeeded at something, no, we are fighting this on a daily basis.

The people that have a family... I was just talking... In Mexico there was this man, he has 5 children, he has a wife, lovely woman, and she is of course is totally threatened by his interest in the world of sorcerers, in the world of don Juan and I said "No, but that is totally absurd because whatever he can get out of it, even by just recapitulating, if he really does it properly and is truly and sincerely interested, his life as a father and a husband has to get better. By the mere fact that he is changing will force you to change." Because especially in a relationship of husband and wife the only thing is well, "he has do, if I'm going to put this and this and this in, I'm going to change, he has to do it." In the world of sorcery it doesn't work that way. You change for the hell of it. What the other person does is none of your concern.

Your change of behavior will force the other person whether they want to or not, to change. I can tell you this with utter sincerity because that's exactly what happens in our world. I used to complain endlessly "Well SHE is not doing her job, HE's not doing his job. I'M trying to change, I'M doing this." You see? The "I","I", "I" never stops.

HE:  Indeed.

FD:  And then when don Juan said "you know, you're full of prunes. You give everyone you deal with a blank check. Whatever they do to you, short of killing you and injuring you, has nothing to do with you. You change for the hell of it." And sure enough, he's right. If we change, the "I" changes, you force the world around you to change. And that's my contention, the idea, whether we are interested from an ecological point of view, from a psychological point of view, whatever we are trying to do in the world. We are not willing to change ourselves. We try to implement change in others without changing ourselves or changing ourselves only - we say that we have changed. In the body, the energetic body knows when someone hasn't changed, when its not quite sincere or quite right. Yes, that they're struggling, I agree, but the change has... We have to change ourselves as a person in order to effect the world around us - without expecting them to change.

HE:  Our guest today on The Earth Mystery Show here on KVMR 89.5 FM is Florinda Donner. Florinda has been in the world of sorcery for the last twenty years. If you've just tuned in she's written several books. He latest, Being In Dreaming is available in bookstores and she has also written The Witches Dream and Shabono.

Speaking of change, you mentioned in Arizona at the Rim Institute when I first heard you, that men have more or less screwed up the world and its up to women to dream us a new world and change. Could you talk a little bit about the role of women?

FD:  No, no, no, I did not say that it's up to women. No, no, no. Women can not do it by themselves, you see, I think either I'm not coming across right or... I don't want to say I'm being misinterpreted because that's sort of absurd, no. What I'm saying is, yes, let's take the masculine principle, let's say, has taken us to where we are now. What I'm saying is that women have a great deal to contribute. What we contribute in, let's say, the world of everyday life is not that different from what men have been doing. Yes, women have advanced enormously by the pressure they have put on the masculine frame. But we copy your paradigm, the paradigm that rules us in that no matter in what aspect of life, its a masculine paradigm.

We are basically a male Universe. When the Universe, according to sorcerers... The Universe is basically a sentient Universe and its almost like it has been reversed in the sense that whatever rules us is only the male principle. What I am saying is that it has to be balanced and it can not be balanced by asking, let's say the male... I'm not talking any male in particular. It has to change, because if you just look around you, we have truly screwed up the planet, I mean there is no doubt about it. Our whole institutions are just pretty much... sick!

HE:  I agree but maybe I also misinterpreted what you said in Arizona, but also I felt you were calling on the women to stop being slaves, to stop accepting the paradigm of a male Universe when it's really basically a female Universe and start dreaming what the Universe should be for us.

FD:  Well what it should be, there's no way, like for instance say "What should it be?" For us to survive as a species we have to evolve. You see we have to evolve and I don't mean evolve in ideologies. The ideologies that rule us have been exhausted. We only come up with a different version of what has been going on for the last 5000 years. We haven't really done anything new. I don't know if I mentioned this, we have to INTEND something new. We can't intend what it is, what its going to be, the new thing, except that it has to be some change. For instance the dinosaurs, they intended flight. They didn't intend wings, the wings were the by-product of that intent. The same with us... and the women have, lets say, the biological constitution to evolve. That's the only thing I said. But for women to do that, they have to be given the time and protection from the males. They need that time to rule not just... look no matter what, lets say how sensitive, how.... you as a human being, let's say in your relationship with your family... that is not enough to make a difference. There are pockets, groups yes, the male is totally in agreement that something has to change. They are willing to give the female or the women, whatever, the time or lets say "Yes, you are in charge", but I'm not saying in terms of "You are in charge" again that is a masculine terminology. No one is in charge. It has to be a joint process of trying to change and that change can only come by changing ourself. The emphasis on the "I", on the ego, has to go. I think one of the reasons we are so enthralled with the idea of the self is because we have really nothing else to protect. Its like let's say in primitive man, prehistoric man, the idea of the cave. It's almost like a territoriality. We are treating the ego as a territory because we don't defend the cave anymore. Thetas already been taken care of. So we defend in the most exorbitant manner and a most exorbitant price, the idea of the self and if that goes, something will happen. I know because it happened to the sorcerers.

HE:  See, you mentioned "intending" and the word "intent" is used all through Carlos Castaneda's books and its mentioned in your book and that's something that is difficult I think for the average person to understand...

FD:  Very difficult for us to understand too. It is because it is extremely subtle, extremely powerful and yet it is not ... Intent speaks, lets say directly to the energy body. We all have an energy body. We voice our intent and yet it is not voiced as a psychological process and yet it sounds... You see it is very difficult and I'm not trying to say you know it's so esoteric or abstract, its not, its so simple. I think its it's own simplicity that makes it so hard to grasp and that again... I'm talking... it sounds like I am...

HE:   Let me see if I can say it the way I understand it and that is that "intent" is a spirit, is an energy that pervades the Universe and that spirit or that energy is benevolent, it wishes us well and it throws things in our face, every day, every night, all the time which are for our own good and we as energy beings, as egos, ignore it, look by it, pay attention to our own ego, our own life and ignore what the intent of the Universe is.

FD:  Ok, I want to correct only one thing, this idea that it is benevolent. No, it is only energy. It is neither good or bad, it is only energy. We make that interpretation. Energy is energy, its like something that is out there in the Universe, creating the Universe. Let's say almost from an astronomy point of view.

HE:   I used the word benevolent just because so many people are afraid of the word sorcery, they assume sorcery has something to do with evil.

FD:  Sorcery of course carries a whole range of.... When the New World was discovered by the Spaniards you had totally... was a Catholic view which the idea of good and evil is so prevalent that it was impossible for them to understand anything else, so whatever was destroyed in terms of a system of knowledge was so gigantic you know? Like for instance, like in Yucatan you have of course... you know about the old Spanish... the clergy Diego de Landa and whatever they have done in the new world was so gigantically negative in the sense that they burned... let's say the Mayas in the Yucatan, the libraries that Diego De Landa burned. It took four months of daily burning to burn all the manuscripts. I mean, that's inconceivable in terms of the kind of knowledge that was lost that has nothing to do with our Western point of view.

HE:   Well, there are, there are still people like you and your party who try and preserve small bits of this knowledge and who write books and bring some of this knowledge back to us, but there are obviously as you said four months worth of books that nobody is ever going to see again...

FD:   Yes..

HE:  Is it your intention and your party's intention to put all this stuff into print so that average person can read it and learn it and do it?

FD:  Our intent... the reading is basically, I mean whatever we have written is extremely personal in the sense that is exactly what has happened to us. In terms of what we know from the sorcerers of the lineage of don Juan, its only one line what we know, you see? I am sure there are many other systems of knowledge that express, let's say the terminology, the vocabulary is different, but ultimately the intent is the same. It is not that the different systems of knowledge... this system of knowledge is extremely pragmatic. It truly gives us the way, if you are interested, to follow certain... I don't want to say rules and regulations, because there are none, but does give us a very pragmatic way of trying to implement something that in other traditions we can only read about.

Rituals, exercises, yes they are fine only to hook our attention, but ultimately the only thing that counts from our experience is that inherent change, we truly want to do it, with no recompense in sight. There is nothing that guarantees us that we are going to make it, there is nothing in that scenario... I emphasize this again and again that people who are interested, I can not guarantee you that whatever the work you put into it - you're going to be successful. I don't know it myself! If I am going to succeed the way don Juan succeeded, if that was success, anyway, but at least the path, whatever we are trying to do or whatever we are doing is infinitely more exciting to us than if I would to follow my parents path and I'm not criticizing my parents, I love my parents dearly, I'm not criticizing, I just...I would like my life to end differently than I know the way their lives is going to end.

HE:   Let me take a minute to tell the listeners that you are listening to KVMR 89.5 FM and our guest today is Florinda Donner. She's written her latest book, "Being in Dreaming -- an Initiation into the Sorcerer's World", and she's also written the Witches Dream and Shabono.

Speaking of your parents, all of you have had to die to the world in once sense or another to become sorcerers... Carol Tiggs said that she was in a different place, a different world for ten years. What relation do you have with your past family?

FD:   With my past family? Actually I think I am the only one that has any kind of relationship with the family because of my circumstances. When I first entered, if there is such a thing, entered into the sorcerers world, I cut myself off, purposefully, from most people that I knew including my parents of course. My parents did not know for about ten, twelve years whether I was dead or alive. It was a very calculated move, because of the sorcerers point of view is that for us to change, for us to be able to change, we need to cut off from the people who know us so well because, not that they do it maliciously, but they prevent us from changing because they already know what we are and nothing that we do will make them change their mind. And I'm not talking about in terms of "OK you're not capable of doing certain things", no I'm talking about a fundamental change in our energy.

HE:  They're going to reinforce your self image that they knew before you changed.

FD:  And then I remember Florinda at one time said "Look, it doesn't matter, why not just go and see your parents?" and at that time... you know.. I had been working, you know I was doing... I was an anthropologist, actually I was in contact with one brother and from time to time I would let him know, I just wanted to at least re-assure them that I was not dead. I said I was involved in something that I had to cut myself off. Personally, I had parents who were extremely understanding and lets say, at least from my perspective, it went very well. When I lets say re-established contact with my parents, it was extremely interesting to see that my relationship with my parents was much more loving and understanding than it had ever been before.

HE:   You mentioned seeing, and to a sorcerer, a sorcerer being a person who can change his perceptions at will... Sorcerers see, I gather, the human as a luminous egg of energy fibers and within that luminous egg there is a place that you call the assembly point where we perceive and if you should shift that assembly point you perceive things totally differently, you are in a different world. And I assume that when we dream the assemblage point is shifting a little bit and that's why we perceive dreams, but you're able to dream "awake", you're able to dream consciously, and the dream world scenes from your books and what I've heard seem to be very, very real, realer than it is to most of us.

FD:  Ok, lets say that the .. one of the... lets say not the ultimate, but one of the greatest accomplishments of a bona fide sorcerer is that the world of the second attention, the world of dreaming awake, "dreaming" as in Castaneda's latest book, has to do that you want the same control as you have in world of everyday life, that you have in dreams. And I'm talking dreams in the sense that it is like some sort of psychological... lets say our ordinary dreams are basically.... you see, don Juan was never interested in the content of our dreams, he was interested in the control of the assemblage point. As you said, the assemblage point moves... shifts naturally, it vibrates in dreams. It crosses into new energy bands, new worlds are being... lets say, they are not being constructed, we enter into different layers of the onion.

A sorcerer wants to maintain that assemblage point long enough and that's what basically is referred to, what stalking is.. that you can fix the assemblage point in a new position for as long as you wish. And that's where the control of the assemblage point comes in, because you do assemble new worlds and you live in that world as you live in this world. For instance, the world of don Juan, the world of the sorcerers of don Juan's group was the world of the second attention. They were perennially in the world of the second attention.

HE:  The question arises, I'm sure you've been asked this many times... What is the difference between the world of the second attention or dreaming awake and lucid dreaming which many people experience routinely?

FD:  Well, the world of the second attention is a bona fide world. I think lucid dreamers do enter that world of the second attention, but not long enough. They can not sustain it because, as you already said before, we all have the inherent capacity to this way. The sorcerer extends that capacity and totally dominates it in the sense that he manipulates that world in the way that he manipulates the world of everyday life. He is master, in the sense of how he enters or exits from that world, where as a lucid dreamer does it... it's chance.

You see and then, whether we are in some sort of psychological turmoil will bring us into that world, hunger, drugs, alcohol, I think the emphasis of our society, let's say the fixation on drugs is basically that they know there is something out there that they want. You see, energetically they know that whatever this world is, is not enough. So they try to do it artificially, and of course by that, they have cut everything off, because they can erase the world of everyday life or their concerns with the world of every day life by either taking a drug or smoking marijuana or hashish, I mean it's incredible what we consume. Now we make it of course totally illegal and people are into pharmaceuticals, legal drugs. Which is as deleterious as anything else.

HE:  To enter the second attention one has to acquire enough energy but I mentioned this earlier, you borrowed the energy or it was given to you by the witches, the sorcerers. The average person doesn't have that benefit, nobody is going to give them an energy boost to the point where they can shift their assemblage point.

FD:   But the energy boost was also... let's say when I encountered the world of don Juan, it was... of course I entered their world, but I had to do my part. Because if I did not... and that had to do with in terms of, because I had their example in front of us. Ok, lets say when we go out in the world and we give lectures, basically, the audience is extremely, well, I wouldn't, no I mean its not because I've never had that encounter... The audience is extremely let's say...

HE:  Interested.

FD:  Interested and at the same time very disbelieving. And quite... very often discontented because of exactly that dimension... "Well you had don Juan, you had the old Florinda, you had this and this and this". Well, so what? At the moment all you've got is me in front of you or Carlos, or Taisha. Or Carol Tiggs. I'm not saying that by any stretch of the imagination that we are... in fact I reiterate that over and over again... we do not have the ability or the power that don Juan and his group had to truly force you into that world but we certainly are presenting the procedures of doing it. Because in terms of... yes, we were there with don Juan, but then we had to do the work, and look it took us 30 years to do what we are trying to do. At least (make) ourselves coherent enough and present something to the world.

And I think that is again the difference between males and females, the male talks about the struggle, look at... Carlos Castaneda's books are a witness to that. He talks about the process from the very beginning. Well, the three of us, the women, after living in this world for over 20 years, we finally can talk about the process because we have totally embodied it; and that is one of the basic differences, I think between being male and female and that is what don Juan said. Again, I repeat this over and again, I've had a lot of males extremely angry at us because suddenly the thought was "Well, this is just a world of females". It is not a world of females, neither is it a world of males. It is a totally... I don't want to say "integrated' because it has such a psychological load to it.. but it is a harmonious world in the sense that they are... no one is more than someone else.

The only thing that counts in our world is Energy. That the nagual is a male is because of his energy configuration and also because as females, don Juan always said that whether you are in the world of sorcerers or in the world of everyday life, "You are whackos. You need the energy of the male in order to function properly". And, from the feminist point of view this was one of the most difficult things for me to totally accept. Now I'm not accepting this in terms of defeat, but as a statement of fact. We do need the world of the male to make this world sober. I can see over and over again, I talk a lot to a lot of women, to friends, to small groups of women and believe me that when we all get together, it is so easy to get out of control. Everybody is just thinking "we're having a great time." No, it's a lack of control! Not of control, it is a lack of sobriety that the male principle, whatever it is, brings to the world, whether it's the world of everyday life or the world of the sorcery, it brings that sobriety which is necessary, no matter where we are acting.

HE:  The word sobriety... um... could we use the word "responsibility" or "sense of responsibility" in place of "sobriety?"

FD:  No, lets say, no, no, no. I'm specifically using "sobriety", its a sobriety.

HE:  I know you are using the word, but to most people that implies not being drunk.

FD:   Pardon me? Oh, the drunk... oh so yes, so yeah, it has that connotation. No, no, no, no, no... I don't think.... males drink more than females I think. No, no, no, it has nothing to do... no its.... yah, sober means, yeah not being drunk....yeah...

HE:  It just means, to me it means a responsibility, or some inner drive to be responsible and together.

FD:  No, not... No, I don't want to use "responsible" at all. No, no, no. It is some sort of coherence. Sobriety in the abstract, it's the sobriety... there is no... No, no... I think we have bastardized the word with alcoholism. But yeah, I want to go to the original meaning of sobriety.

HE:  Ok. Well this whole world is so fascinating, so interesting, I certainly wouldn't argue with you that it exists or not, I'm a fully... full believer in it. I, like many of the listeners would like to have some way of entering it, but obviously in my world, I have no energy to dream the way you dream and am not likely to acquire it.

FD:  No, no, no. The thing is... you see, you don't want to retreat from the world to follow, lets say the exercises or to follow something that... whatever you think we are doing. No, in your daily world you can become... what is your job description?

HE:  I'm a physician.

FD:  A physician; and what you do in the radio? What is it called when you do a radio, when you work for the radio?

HE:  This is called self amusement.

FD:  Self amusement, ok. As a self amuser, you can become a sorcerer in self amusement. You see, whatever you do, you do your job or whatever you are doing... You make an art out of it. And that is basically what we are interested in. That is what sorcery is. You make it into an art. Whether you do through recapitulating your life, by trying to stop the involvement with the self. Believe me that is all it takes for the world to open.

HE:  I love the concept of controlled folly. Ever since I've read that, I've thought of so many times where life really is controlled folly.

FD:  Exactly.

HE:  But the wild, imaginative world of Being In Dreaming is what I think many of us would like to enter. Even for a time, like going to the movies and I know you like movies, but to be able to let's say, go to another world, the world of the inorganic beings, something like that, and return and just even remember it for one time other than going to sleep at night and dreaming and forgetting it all.

FD:  But you see... that sounds... because let's say the work is presented in such a light, because that is my predilection and my delight. But the idea of entering into the world of dreaming, you see, that's exactly what I have talked in my lecture. You see, it would be interesting to do this for awhile and then return to the world of the everyday life - Well, it's not possible. You see, I can talk about the world of inorganic beings, I can talk about the world of the sorcerers in Mexico... you see, for me this world doesn't stop, It's real. I am in that world, even as I talk to you now. For other people, it could be just like a holiday and then life continues. Well, for us, it doesn't continue. The horror exists. Because in a weird way this is a horrifying world.

HE:  When you say continue... I was very curious, that your group is the last of a long line of Toltec sorcerers. Is there going to be any continuation or are you the last of it? Is this the end?

FD:  Don Juan told Carols that he was the last of his line. That's the last we knew from don Juan.

HE:  Then your intent, when you talk to me on the radio or talk to groups of people is.... what?

FD:  My intent? That we are going... let's say, we are going... Like somebody said in Mexico "Well, what's the matter with you now? Why are you going public now" quote. I said we are going public because we want to, lets say, gather... that's the wrong word because it means like we are looking for disciples; we are not. We want to at least, let's say, create a critical mass. If a critical mass exists in any kind of endeavor, some kind of change will ensue. We need a critical mass of interested parties that at least take us seriously. And I don't mean seriously as a hobby, I mean seriously as a profound change.

HE:  Let's say you have a critical mass of people who are recapitulating their lives, they're trying to decrease their self importance, their ego. They're doing sorcerer's passes which we haven't discussed, moves to increase personal energy. Let's say you get a group of those people, will you be able to tap the energy from those people for your own purposes?

FD:  Its not.... Look, are you married?

HE:   Yes indeed.

FD:  Children?

HE:  Four.

FD:  Pardon me?

HE:  Four children.

FD:  Four children. Look, if you take me seriously, I can guarantee you that your life and the life of your family changes.

HE:  I've noticed just from doing the sorcerer's passes and thinking about intent, phenomenal things happen.

FD:  In what degree that change, only you can decide. You see? That's why I am saying this idea of a guru, of someone taking you by the hand is...

HE:  No, but I'm asking specifically, when you get a group of people, a critical mass, will you use their energy? You being the sorcerer's group, not you personally.

FD:  Of course. I mean energy not in the sense of... we can not use your energy. I could only use your energy if you're... let's say, if you have divested yourself of the ego. That's the energy we want, because that's the energy that's going to open up your parameters of perception, that's going to blast you out of your idea of the self.

It's only energy. Not what I say or what I do. You have to... you see, you have to join me.

HE:  Indeed

FD:  And that's what we want. That's why we are going public.

HE:  Where are don Juan and don Genaro right now?

FD:   Well... I don't think.... hmmmm. I have already, you know? I have already, let's say, I have talked about it already and it doesn't get across quite properly.

They have made the jump into the inconceivable. They have jumped in terms of... if we want to put it in any kind of physical sense... lets say they have made the leap into the unknown. What is ultimately the unknown? Are they stuck in the world of the inorganic beings? We think, yes. So did don Juan finally make it and his group? In a weird way that's... let's say... it's a world of prisoners as our everyday life is. Its another system.

HE:  Well the reason I asked you about the energy of us, people listening to you, people who might be trying to increase their energy level, is could you use our energy to rescue don Juan from the world of inorganic beings, as you rescued Carlos from that world.

FD:  No, I don't... we don't really know. I think at one time, I think that misunderstanding comes because I thought, let's say, "Yes, if we have enough energy as we leap to pull him out of it", but that's almost like a metaphor, you see? There is... I don't really know what I... in terms of how can... you see, we don't have the lexicon to truly describe even the world of inorganic beings. We describe that world as metaphors, although they're not metaphorical or as something that is already known to us because we don't have the language to describe something that is unknown to us. It can only be described in something that is known. So, yes, on one level, yes. If we have enough energy we could, as we leap, whatever that means, that leap... just lets say formulate... as a physicist you probably know.

HE:  What I'm thinking is that um... as I mentioned earlier in this talk, or the interview, intent throws at us all the time in unknown ways. This is a camouflage universe, it is a universe of energy, but its camouflaged as what ever we perceive it as. Every once in awhile there are cracks in the screen, there's a tear in the screen that lets us know that this camouflage isn't really real.

FD:  Yes, precisely.

HE:  And those bits of intent, or bits of energy, or whatever you want to call it, in the dream world you would call them scouts.

FD:  Yes.

HE:  But if you could hook onto that scout, it will take you to another world, to the world where that scout is coming from.

FD:  Precisely.

HE:  How can the average person, just listening to this talk on the radio right now, how can that person see, feel, perceive when an event is something that intent is throwing in their face to hook onto and not let it slip by?

FD:  You need energy for that. You see, that is what I am saying. If you are divested of the idea of the self that's you know like... Just yesterday I was talking to those people in Mexico... exactly, I mean, almost word by word exactly the same question and I said "well that is premature". You know, they're all interested in the world, you know? Jumping into the second attention, meeting the inorganic beings, but its absurd to talk about that stage if they have not divested themself of the idea of the self.

You see? That's what I'm talking. The most important step for us is this idea of losing self importance, of reducing that ego to nothing. We're never going to lose it all, although it is possible. From my perspective Castaneda is totally egoless. He's so empty its scary to be with him - it's frightening.

HE:  I can understand.

FD:  At the same time, its the most addictive, lets say, substance that there is - a person who has no ego. It's a total addiction.

HE:  Isn't human life, the ego in human life, the addiction that we're all addicted to?

FD:  Yes, ultimately, yes. I think so.

HE:  The listeners that are listening to this stuff are um... are very sophisticated. They've heard lots of stuff and you said the same question comes up to you all the time and hopefully this talk, this interview, has been trying to give you the questions that you hear every time, because that's what interests all of us and that's what everybody wants to know. And it boils down to you have to get rid of this self importance, this ego, which is a lesson from religions all around the world, they all say the same thing. But in practical steps, if I'm understanding the world of sorcery, is to recapitulate our lives...

FD:  Exactly.

HE:  Go through everything, every event we can remember and try and see the patterns that we've been addicted to and try to recapture the energy from those patterns, then if we have done that successfully we will have enough energy to see intent when it throws itself in our face, or to grab hold of one of these scouts in a dream.

FD:  Precisely... in a dream or in our waking life. It happens to us all the time. Don Juan.... Carlos described in his book, I think, its the cubic centimeter of chance that pops out at the most incredible moments and if you have the energy to grab it, you go for it.

For me, even like for instance, entering lets say the world of sorcerers, it was a decision of a millisecond. "Yes, I'm going to go with that woman. I'm going to take her with me, I'm going to give her a ride." You see, if I can... if I take the time to re-examine certain moments, crucial moments in my life... lets say the chance of having done the wrong decision or of taking the wrong path were so innumerable that it scares me to death. Just to think about it gives me headaches. Because it's such a minute decision. You think at the moment that it is nothing, but it is monumental. And that's what this idea of, you know intent.... something talks to us directly, and usually we are so concerned with whatever the concerns of the world - to notice.

HE:  I still as a human, don't understand how we get rid of the concerns of the world. I mean, if you didn't go with that woman, or let's say, in my life someone came in and said "Would you go with me to Mexico, I would like you to start on this new life." I would have every thought in the world of "what about my children, what about my wife, what about my employees?" It would go on and on, it would never stop talking like that in my head, and yet that chance might be that one chance that you are talking about, that never comes again.

FD:  Its not going to be like this, "Why don't you come with me to Mexico." I don't think... it has nothing to do with that. For instance, in my particular case, it had nothing to with... it was a matter of "Can you give me a ride to Hermasillo?" or something like that.

Or you know, "I can put you in contact with someone" - its not that delineated. Those moments don't come like this. "Ok, come with me to Mexico, I'm going to introduce you to the world of sorcery." No! It not going to... it's never going to come like that. No.

Look, even the idea of the.... you, only you have let's say, the power, the facility, to truly make something different of yourself and of your life and no one ultimately is going to help you with that. Don Juan ultimately didn't help us in the sense that we had to do it ourselves. Now I'm not trying to belittle the importance of those people, I'm just trying to stress the amount of work and dedication that is involved in something like that. Will power, sheer will power and total abandon that ultimately you don't give a damn what happens to you. You see and of course as a person that is totally alone, with no responsibilities, its a much easier step to take but you already have your responsibility in front of you. You can make your childrens' life and your wife's life a work of art. The mere fact that... now I'm not talking from a moralistic point of view or a religious point of view, I'm talking from an energetic point of view. For you to wish and do everything in your power to make the best for them, I don't even mean in terms of giving them the life they are accustomed to, no. I mean from an energetic point of view. That in itself is so liberating, it will flip you into another universe! You see, the idea of that there is another universe - its right next to us. It's a matter of perception. Its has nothing that suddenly you will be taken into the world of inorganic beings, you will be taken into the second attention. I live in the second attention, as I talk to you... its the prism, the way that I'm looking through the world has been changed through energy.

HE:  Well, I'm hoping that you'll accept an invitation to come to our area. There was so much excitement about you being on the radio today that I know that if we could get you to come to Nevada City that there would be even more excitement in person for people to be able to talk to you as we've talked today.

FD:  Are you in Nevada City?

HE:  Yes.

FD:  Where is Nevada City?

HE:  It's northeast of Sacramento toward Lake Tahoe, off Route 80.

FD:  Thought for a moment I was in... talking to the state of Nevada.

HE:  No, Nevada City is in California and your friend Randy lives up here or is up here.

FD:  Oh, you know Randy Fuller?

HE:  He called me this morning.

FD:  Oh he called you. Yeah he called and left a message on my machine.

HE:  So, I know he has invited you, so I'm going to invite you for the sake of our radio audience and for myself to come here.

FD:  Yeah I definitely know... I think we will come as we came to the Rim Institute.

HE:  We would be very happy to set it up for you.

FD:  And have a weekend session and we go definitely into the... I want to bring the chacmools. There are two big chacmools and two little chacmools and we definitely want to blast the hell out of you.

HE:   Well...

FD:  No, no, I mean it because...

HE:  I'm going to take that as a promise then.

FD:  It is a promise.

HE:  Thank you.

FD:  Thank you!

HE:  Florinda, it's been so nice having you on the air and we feel honored. Thank you again.

FD:  And I hope we see ourselves very soon.

HE:  I hope so.

FD:  Ok, bye bye. Thank you.

HE:  Thanks again.

(end of tape)

Copyright KVMR Radio

KVMR Radio - Taisha Abelar 1993

Hanes Ealy:  Taisha, we're on the air, welcome to the Earth Mystery Show.

Taisha Abelar:  Well, its a pleasure to be here and may I before we begin, I know you announced my name and I don't know what kind of thing.... you gave an introduction, but I would like to state my name again because we always begin our lectures and interviews by stating our names. My name is Taisha Abelar and we state it because it is a dream.

Sorcerers say that when a person reaches the final stages of dreaming, they are what they dream, and so Taisha Abelar is the dream that I am dreaming so therefore for magical purposes we always begin by stating our names, our magical names.

HE:  I was going to ask you to do that 'cause I knew you would want to anyway.

TA:  Ok, Thank you.

HE:  Let me ask you just since we are on the name, a little bit more about the name. You met don Juan, the Yaqui Indian sorcerer Carlos Castaneda wrote ten books about, you met him under the name of John Michael Abelar.

TA:  Yes.

HE:  The name Abelar means what?

TA:  Well Abelar is really a line, a name that is given to the stalkers of don Juan's lineage, so if you've noticed, you also come across the name Grau.

HE:  Right. Florinda Donner Grau and your teacher, or your introduction to the sorcerers' world, Clara Grau.

TA:  Yes, so the stalkers were given the name Abelar and the dreamers were given the name Grau and they alternate generation to generation so even the Naguals are given Grau, the Nagual Julian was Julian Grau, and so that ever other generation, the name alternates, but those are just designators as to the predilection of the person, whether he should be a dreamer or a stalker.

HE:  But don Juan has also used the name Dilas Grau, hasn't he?

TA:  Yes.

HE:  So he would be...

TA:  Grau, that is, Carlos uses that name. Carlos used the name Dilas in some of his uh... The names really don't... We use many many different names depending on what our purpose is. So that right now I am Taisha Abelar because this is the dream that we are dreaming now but those things change and the names just signify the intent that has been set up and its is like an amalgamation of a particular intent and that name triggers that dream.

HE:  I think I understand from my readings what stalking is but for the listeners who don't know what stalking is could you give us a brief description of what stalking is?

TA:  Yes. Stalking is really the the um, the... When the assemblage point moves... Now I think your listeners should be familiar with the term "assemblage point"? Its that position on the luminous... When you see the luminous body as an energy conglomeration, there's one place on it that is very well lit up and that is the center of consciousness and sorcerers call it the assemblage point. When you move that in dreaming, which it moves naturally in sleep, you have to be able to keep it in a position long enough in order to amalgamate or recognize that new reality, because if it just shifts randomly, you have random ah... Like in dreams, your dreams, your perception is very random. But stalking is the ability to maintain the assemblage point fixed in any particular position after it has been displaced through dreaming, so they really go hand in hand.

People say "well she's a stalker, Florinda Donner Grau is a dreamer." No, we're both and thats why the names really aren't rigid or fixed. Every dreamer has to be a stalker because if you don't have that discipline or the ability to keep the assemblage point fixed at any particular position, then the energy is dispersed, you are unable to perceive any reality, including our own, because what we are doing now in this reality, is we're stalking. We're stalking our world, the world of everyday life, by keeping our energy center or assemblage point fixed at a certain position enabling us to perceive the world of everyday life, and stalking on another level is the ability to lets say, flesh out the reality that we perceive by labeling, categorizing, creating order and thats what a stalker does. He takes the perceptions that come to him or her directly via his energy body and he creates order, he creates a structure that is recognizable and real, just as real as the reality of everyday life because we are also doing stalking, just we learned it very, very early when we learned to amalgamate perception and we also learned to do stalking so we could create the agreement that this whatever, world, that we live in is real. And sorcerers do stalking with other dream positions.

HE:  You've done some very interesting positions from what I've gathered in your life and if I might tell the listeners about one of them, it was Sheila Waters, the wonderful business woman...

TA:  Ah yes. You saw a demonstration of that.

HE:  I saw a demonstration of it and if I might tell them a small anecdote, after you were Sheila Waters and when you returned to Taisha Abelar, I came up just to play with you and I asked you "Would Sheila Waters get coffee for the men?"

TA:  Ah yes, I remember.

HE:  And you instantly became Sheila Waters, there wasn't even a microsecond of delay before you answered me as Sheila Waters so your stalking was perfect.

TA:  Of course we were very well trained, I mean all of our adult life, really, was in the sorcerers' world and that is what we have become. We have been dreaming different positions, therefore I say the name Sheila Waters is the name of a position of the assemblage point, a dream position.

In order to shift from one position to the next, the assemblage point has to be absolutely fluid. Stalking maintains it, so it seems to have a rigidity associated with it but it is not rigid the way we are in our everyday life where we maintain this world as the only world, our reality as the only reality and we are incapable of letting go. Especially lets say... Females tend to be more fluid in that they're not the bastions of the social order, where the males, just because our reality of our everyday life demands it, males need to be the upholders of the great institutions which are really institutions created in the domain of intent and consciousness. Even our political systems, our religious systems, the legal, the medical professions, all those are areas where we have put energy and we have built up - sociologists call it "glosses" or interpretive structures, structures of interpretation and those structures have to be held in place via energy, an intersubjective energy, in order that we can all agree what politicians do, or what is done in any other aspect of life.

Stalkers then would go into any of these areas and find out what is the structure, what is the interpretive system and energetically, not just intellectually, because of course, we're not doing any of this just intellectually in our every day world either. We ARE the politicians, we ARE these things. So a stalker would find out energetically the ramifications of any of these structures and then reproduce them energetically, but going back to what I was saying, the males need to uphold those structures, so their assemblage points are very fixed, rigid, so it is difficult for them to move. They are the masterful stalkers.

Its more difficult for them to do dreaming, although of course they do it at night, but if they are going to be doing dreaming like sorcerers do it, they would have to go through the seven gates of dreaming which Carlos Castaneda in his book The Art of Dreaming, he outlines each of these gates that the male sorcerer needs to pass through in order to move his assemblage point. Now females don't have to go through these seven gates, they just can do dreaming very, very naturally because their assemblage point is more fluid and even during their menstrual cycles the assemblage point already begins to shift slightly off of its moorings so that women can perceive things, other things, more readily that are not permissible within our social framework.

HE:  In order to get the energy for dreaming or get the energy for perfect stalking, in your book, you mentioned, at least Clara told you in your book Sorcerers' Crossing that the woman should be celibate. Is that true for a man to?

TA:  Well this question is always charged of course with all kinds of attachments and emotional commitments. It depends, it goes back to the sorcerers' idea, well its not an idea, they have come upon it through seeing, how energetic that person is. If a person was conceived with a great jolt of energy, of course coming from his parents, then he or she may have excess energy so that they don't have to be celibate. We're not saying that people can not get married or have families or anything. There are other avenues that they can express their impeccability in or their Sorcerers' training. But if a person does not have the energy, the initial energy that was given to him at conception, then it is better for them to conserve that energy and to use it for dreaming.

To do dreaming, sorcerers use the original sexual energy and it gets transformed in the energy body. Thats what everyone starts out with, the basic energy. Thats why when we talk about recapitulation, the process of regaining the energy that was spent and still caught in the past, we were told everyone has to make a list of their sexual encounters because that is the basic energy that they can then use to perform other sorcery feats, like dreaming or acquiring internal silence, because if you don't have the energy you can't be silent, now that sounds like a contradiction, but our internal dialog its like something was turned on and it just goes, runs on and on and on and it takes energy to shut it off because its a self propelling mechanism that keeps the social structure, the social order moving.

Our internal dialog, if we pay attention to it really is a constant re-affirmation of the world as we see it and particularly our place in the world, of how we see ourselves, what we want. Don Juan always said, that there's a dysfunction, a deterioration that has happened that gives too much emphasis on the self, that shouldn't really be there for our efficient functioning in our lives. Its an imbalance, too much energy is being given to the defense of the self. Its like a big mouth out there that says ME ME ME ME, it just goes on and on. And the me or the I has to constantly be fed and that takes a tremendous amount of energy.

All our waking hours are either deployed in defending the self, propping up the self, in the presentation of the self in the eyes of others, our daily lives, or in our mating and reproduction areas, in that we need to find love, relationships, marriage, reproduction. There is a mandate to reproduce, a biological mandate, but theres also that mandate to evolve, and to reproduce at this point with the conditions of the world the way they are, it is almost logical or more beneficial to move that energy into the mandate of evolving and reaching some of these other positions of the assemblage point that would in a sense recharge the human being, give him a jolt, an energetic jolt that he so desperately needs in our day and age where everything, even the world is at an energetic low in the sense that our resources are being depleted and physically our bodies aren't in such great shape. So there is that mandate to evolve and use other areas of our totality, our potential as sentient beings and by moving energy away from these areas of the reinforcing the self, the self image, that looking glass self, always making sure we don't lose face, fighting with the petty tyrants in our daily lives, all that takes energy. So the first stage if we want to do... We could call it sorcery, but you don't need to use that term, if we want to expand our perception, we need to redeploy energy from these areas that really take the brunt of our life force and move it elsewhere.

HE:  I have a couple of questions that are just technical questions. The first one is on recapitulating your life. You start by making a list of everybody you've ever met or delt with, especially your sexual partners....

TA:  Yes.

HE:  Then as far as the actual process goes, you take a deep breath starting with your face facing your right shoulder then you sweep across to your left shoulder taking a deep breath in. Then you breath it out as you go to your right shoulder. Then what?

TA:  Then you move your head back to the center.

HE:  Ok, in some places, I think it was in your book or maybe Carol Tiggs mentioned it, a sweeping breath, where you go back and forth with your head a couple of times without breathing after you come to the center. Is that...

TA:  Yes, now the technical aspect of the breathing isn't that crutial, neither is the place where the recapitulation is done and I should point this out because it always comes up "Well I don't have a cave where I can retreat to for a certain amount of time and do the recapitulation." The recapitulation is a wonderful sorcery technique that was handed down from the ancient sorcerers in order to free the energy trapped in the past, our remembered selves, our personal history. Now, that is the intent that is set up.

The most important thing of the recapitulation is to have internal integrity, an unbending purpose and to link yourself to that intent, the intent that is already there, that is in our books, that is set up. How this is done and where this is done and when this is done of course has to depend on individual circumstance.

HE:  Right.

TA:  Because not everyone is out in the desert and not everyone...

HE:  So you can just recapitulate in your car as your driving along without doing the breathing and just so long as your intent is correct?

TA:  Florinda Donner Grau did an enormous recapitulation riding on a bus in Mexico, riding down to Oaxaca under horrendous circumstances if your familiar with the busses.

HE:  Yes, I've been on them.

TA:  And you do many, many different recapitulations. We're recapitulating to this day. Walking down the street now I recapitulate - if something triggers something. Or lets say you're at work and you have a break, you recapitulate there. The reason they say that you should start with a list, and ideally you really should begin with some sort of structure because our concentration is not that well honed at the initial stages and the list does two things. One, first of all we start with the sexual experiences because again as I said that is the main energy that is going to help you do, help give you the energy to do the other areas.

The list serves as a matrix for hooking your concentration and to create a list of everyone you've ever known in your life in itself takes a great deal of concentration and in a way also determines, "Well, do you really want to do the recapitulation?" People start their list and then they stop because its too much effort or they're not really committed.

The list sets it up and then you go from your list and you find a place where if possible, a place that is quiet and puts some pressure on the energy body, the luminous egg is from the point of view of seers, about an arms distance from both... If you extend your arms to both sides and to the front, and draw a circle, that is the size of the luminous egg from the point of view of seerers. The assemblage point for human beings is to the back, between the shoulder blades and arms distance to the back. So if you sit in a car or a cave, a small cave, or in a small closet or in a shower stall, a big box, then you notice there is some pressure exerted on your energy body and that is why sorcerers say that ideally it would be advisable to sit in something like that. It keeps you alert, it stimulates the energy body, but you don't need to do it that way. People with claustrophobia wouldn't feel at all comfortable in small confined spaces so they can do it anywhere, anywhere at all where they can concentrate.

The breathing that accompanies it, in my context I call it the sweeping breath because you sweep and you are actually like a giant broom, you feel like fibers (using your energy body of course) you feel like fibers being swept free of debris and thats the sensation, after you've been recapitulating for awhile, that you will get because you will become aware of your energy body. Recapitulating - this technique works directly on the energy body.

And yes, you can start on your right shoulder, inhaling and you sweep to the left shoulder. As you inhale, you pull back everything that... The energy that was trapped as your visualizing, of course. First you have to set up the scene. That means that you see, you visualize all the detail, in as much detail as possible, the scene, if you're in your living room or whatever, where ever you're sweeping something, you see the couch, the curtains, the TV, the rug, the walls, all the detail and then you put yourself in the scene. Also the people of course, that are there and then you watch for awhile, see what goes on. You see yourself in "action" sorcerers say. This is the only way that you really see yourself.

(tape gap)

From left to right just giving all that back then you bring your head to the center. Or some people begin on their left shoulder and sweep to right inhaling and sweep to the left exhaling.

HE:  Let me tell the listeners that just might have turned on the radio that this is the Earth Mystery Show, I'm Hanes Ealy, our guest today is Taisha Abelar. Taisha Abelar has written a book called The Sorcerers' Crossing. We're talking about some of the techniques described in that book and this is KVMR 89.5 FM.

I have another small technical question that has puzzled me ever since I read your book and that is the dog Manfred, in the book don Juan said that he was part of his sorcerers party...

TA:  Yes.

HE:  And um, and he seemed like one of the most wonderful characters in the book. Tell me about Manfred a little bit.

TA:  Yes. Manfred was, and is because his awareness is still...

HE:  A dog?

TA:  ...in existence. No, he succeeded in going with don Juan's party. He was an old sorcerer that tried to make the crossing. The ancient sorcerers, through dreaming of course, they would take different forms in order to practice their dreaming and those forms, and those forms would be different positions of the assemblage point, but they, depending on their energy and their impeccability, some of them would be trapped in different dream positions and did not make it to the ultimate goal which is total freedom.

Manfred was a sorcerer that was trapped at a dream position which was the energy formation of a dog. He had enough energy at the moment of death or dissolution to get into this form of a dog so that he would not be... So his awareness would not totally be lost. So it was like an escape route that he used and of course he was profoundly one of the tragic cases because his awareness was so keen but his physical form was so limited and he would rage and rage. But on an energetic... This is a good question because when you perceive things, we perceive them in the shape of physical forms, and we are interacting with dogs and trees and people and things, objects. But our energy bodies perceive, can perceive, energy - and sorcerers, don Juan and especially Emilito who really - Manfred was his protege, his ward in that sense, they interacted with him on an energetic level, so he was not a dog. He was an energy being, an entity.

So when I was in Clara's house something in my body, out of I can only explain it - out of affection or compassion, enabled me to transcend seeing Manfred as a dog. I don't like dogs actually. I've always had a fear of dogs since childhood when I was not attacked by a dog, but a dog just sort of tumbled and jumped on top of me and I became terrified, but there was about Manfred that I could see was not a dog. There was an energetic link of pure affection because we were both tragic cases and in that sense we made a pact and we said who ever reaches the freedom, the energy level first will help pull the other one and that was a pact that stays.

Pacts and agreements between sorcerers or potential sorcerers, they last forever, for eternity. They transcend the realm of everyday life because this is not the realm that we really are interested in, we want to move out of this realm so that affection and vows and agreements like that, purpose, have to transcend the ordinary, the level of everyday life, we're not interested in giving in terms of love - human love that is replaceable as soon as you find something better. Sorcerers affection, it just stays forever, it can not be replaced, you can not change the head on the person and now you're loving someone else. Those vows stay forever and we have this agreement and I'm in touch with Manfred because he is pulling me.

He went with don Juan's group when they left. When they reached a certain stage they felt it was to... Ready to go, it was time to leave and they were able, because they had the mass to pull out of the realm of everyday life which is really saying that they had perfected all these other dream positions and their dream bodies to such a state that they could go with their awareness intact and of course Manfred now is the sorcerer that he always was, but he now has the mass of other people, uh not people, but other sorcerers, around him. But he... We definitely have this link and he's helping me to be impeccable. Just as I...

HE:  I love dogs and I love doggyness and everything that Manfred did in that book I still remember as the best part.

TA:  He would actually protect me and take me, show me things. In the beginning, of course, I didn't believe it, I thought he was a dog because my rational, our rational mind is so strong, the glosses, back to this term of glosses, that we have set up that make the world of everyday life perceivable and agreeable are of course so strong, we give all of our energy to the....

HE:  Gloss?

TA:  ...constructs. At this point in our daily life, human beings give all their energy to...

HE:  The mass of the self.

TA:  ...to keep the world in order. So therefore we see dogs and again trees and things like that. To break that perceptual bias takes recapitulating, takes energy.

HE:  Let me take a different tack here for our remaining 20 minutes or so.

TA:  Yes.

HE:  I'm not sure if you're familiar with the works of Bob Monroe, he was one of the first guests on my show. He has written books, Journeys Out of the Body, Our Journeys, basically talking about what he would call astral travel, and his technique that he teaches people involves lying down, relaxing yourself totally to a condition he calls "body asleep, mind awake" and during that process you take all of your past garbage that you can think of and you make up a dumpster, some kind of garbage can and you visualize all that stuff and you throw it in a garbage can and you close the lid to try and break free of all that attachment.

Then you visualize your energy body, the luminous fibers that the sorcerers talk about, and you try and put as much energy into that as you can and from that point forward you do various techniques to get out of your body, but basically you're becoming a focus of conscious awareness outside the body that can travel anywhere in the Universe and do anything it wants. How does that differ from conscious dreaming or the sorcerers idea of dreaming?

TA:  If we look at the book The Art of Dreaming, thats really where the whole structure of what the dreaming process is according to our sorcery tradition. Its outlined there in great detail. So I'm going to just say here that there are many different stages or gates of dreaming that you go through. Now what you've been describing has similarities to some of those stages of dreaming, yes, that first you need to recapitulate, except that this sounds like a very fast process, recapitulating takes, you can't just visualize and throw everything into a dumpster, you have to take every situation, because energy is trapped, every memory, every experience that we've had in our lives is trapped in really a tissue, a cellular level. The more we go back to the details, the more we release everything in our lets say "physical" bodies, we're not just interested in the astral, or energy body, we want to first cleanse the memories that trigger our behavior as we go through everyday life in the world.

Then the relaxation, yes, the first stage of dreaming you would relax and there's that twilight zone between being asleep and awake, and you let go of your memory of the physical body, but if the physical body is so full of emotionally charged memories, if the mind, if you can't quiet your internal dialog, then you wont be able to relax and let go, to even get into that dream state. So everything works hand in hand, the recapitulation enables you to do dreaming by focusing your concentration, by allowing your physical body to release all those charged emotions and allowing it to be empty and fluid. Then you do let go and you can either do dreaming while you're asleep and if you're asleep, then you have to have that control of what your perception is via finding your hands or any other object in the room but that in itself is tremendously difficult unless you've already honed your concentration and your energy body, the awareness of your energy body.

(radio frequency interference noises)

TA:  Oh, are you here?

HE:  Yes, I'm here, theres something weird...

TA:  Is that from you or from me?

HE:  Its not from me.

(interference ends)

TA:  Oh, I've changed channels.

HE:  On the topic of dreaming, I'm sure you get asked this everyday, and that is the difference of sorcerers dreaming and lucid dreaming.

TA:  Yes.

HE:  Could you say that in a short...

TA:  Yes, if you're really lucid, you're doing sorcerers' dreaming. If you have the awareness and control in your dream, then you're doing dreaming. You're assemblage point moved and you can act in that dream as if you were awake.

HE:  Don Juan said that the universe is a predatory universe that there's somebody out there that wants your energy whenever you get a little bit more and the second gate of dreaming, the world of inorganic beings, it sounds very much like that is a world that is very predatory. Is there any danger in attempting this type of dreaming without the supervision of somebody who knows what they are doing?

TA:  No, you don't need the supervision of somebody who knows what they're doing, what you need is sobriety and control. You yourself have to know what you are doing because you go into these dream stages alone.

Females of course don't have to worry because they are so fluid they just flow in and out, they move their assemblage points and the Universe according to sorcerers or seers is basically female energy and these predators, the inorganic beings are more after male energy.

But... This is where the dangers are that you can get trapped, but the traps are really if you indulge. If you haven't recapitulated and you're not fluid enough to not indulge in emotions like fear or affection, because the inorganic beings, they cater to our emotions, they want to give us what we want. Inorganic beings are really just energy formations, we don't want to think of them as beings from outer space. They are energy that seeks energy, and unless... If you're totally indulging and haven't recapitulated and don't have the control, then you become more or less a victim. For example, lets say if in your everyday life - we call it the "Poor Baby syndrome" - If you're always the victim and people are doing everything to you and you complain because the world isn't giving you this and that, you have this sort of defeatist attitude, and then you go into dreaming, well you're taking that with you.

HE:  Isn't that Poor Baby Me, isn't that the modality of our times? Isn't that what we all carry in some sense?

TA:  What we all carry inside. And all our waking days, our television, our radio, everything reinforces that. That is the modality of our day. We are victims. In a sense it is almost true, because we feel we don't have the energy to jolt ourselves out of that and we really don't because of our depletion, our depleted state. Its a self fulfilling cycle, only by redeploying that energy of everyday life, the sorcery passes, the movement, jolting the energy body, recapitulating, only through those sorcery techniques or not doing techniques that actually break that reflexivity, that intersubjective agreement that yes, I am a poor baby, everyone's a poor baby.

Of course everyone reinforces everyone else by giving solace and "let me tell you my problems" and "you don't understand me", "lets share our...". You know we feel great if everyone has problems and we really love people who are worse off than we are but its very difficult to love someone who's strong and happy and here we're the poor babies and they should be loving us. Its hard to give affection, but everyone wants affection.

So these things have to be straightened out, have to be cleared out through the recapitulation, through not doing, through stalking yourself, in the everyday life before you really tackle heavy duty dreaming. Then if you straighten those areas out and if you have a strong energy body, then you go into dreaming like a warrior, like an impeccable being, and what can touch you? Because what can touch you in this world?

If anything can deplete you or weaken you and call forth these poor baby things or self importance - "I'm the greatest thing that ever lived" - in the world of everyday life, then you know for a fact that its going to come up in your dream realities and that was the death-trap, the pitfall of the ancient sorcerers who were masterful dreamers, they could dream, take tremendous journeys into different folds of the braid, like different levels of reality, peels of the onion, astral plane, however you want to call it, the terminology doesn't matter. They would move their assemblage point to all these different levels but because of egomania, they were so rigid in their assertion of the self, and you take your self into dreaming, they got stuck there, they got lets say "bought" by the inorganic beings and they became their slaves in that sense, because of the power that they received from areas of dreaming.

HE:  Given this knowledge that the sorcerers' are now distributing to the world in the form of books and talks, wouldn't the answer be for us as a society or as a race to begin the recapitulation project in childhood, for parents to teach their children recapitulation, to sit around and do it together, to try and break this tyranny of the self before it ever begins?

TA:  Yes they could break that self importance before it begins, but not the recapitulation in terms of... Well, first the parent needs to recapitulate in order to serve as a model lets say for the child. The child emulates the position of the assemblage point of the parent. Whatever the parent is, that is what the child is going to copy and emulate, so if the parents, especially mothers who are so close in contact with their children, recapitulate, clear out some of these areas of self importance then the child won't even focus on these things, they'll be doing their work, they'll be learning, they'll be expanding the perception, they won't get twisted energetically, the way we have become because of a lack of awareness. You can recapitulate together with your children but it is more advisable just to clean up your life first and then serve as an example to the child because they don't have all that much to recapitulate.

HE:  Right, I was thinking that if they held onto their original energy so they wouldn't lose it and started recapitulating at an early age they would never come to the point where they'd have to spend years recapitulating, it would be a natural thing that would just....

TA:  They go out into the world or they'll be able to see what goes on, but that really comes from the parents awareness. If they don't have that impeccability of lets say giving affection without expecting things to return. Not this merchant mentality that we all have that is again a modality of our day, that we always want something, you know, "what's in it for me?". If the parents cling to that, then the child doesn't have a chance but if they recapitulate and be impeccable parents, then those children will be impeccable children and they will have what don Juan calls perfect tonals, that is, their being that is in the world of everyday life will be energetically strong and will have a positive outlook and will be able to function in the world on a high energetic level rather than being defeated by the world and the challenges that we all have to face on a day by day basis.

HE:  What do you see the future of the world in general as, considering that the modality of the time is the poor baby me and the merchant mentality as you mentioned, what hope is there for the spirit of the world in general?

TA:  Its very bleak in the sense that everywhere you look, the egomania is rampant and you can see it, just look for yourself, just open your eyes for a moment and if we look around us, at what's on television, the media, and what we encounter at work, what messages are being given us via the media and our world policies, then we see that the world, the resources are being depleted and yet we don't want to really change our lives and so its a downward spiral.

HE:  Could the energy, assemblage point of the world itself be shifted so that all this changes in the blink of an eye?

TA:  In the blink of an eye? You would need a cataclysm. Sorcerers say, they see that yes, there were times when the assemblage point of the world shifted maybe the ice age or great cataclysms that actually shifted... The earth was actually shifted on its axis at one point. Some people say it actually reversed it's rotation. Those of course are not within our conceptual range, but to shift now, you would need a total upheaval to shift suddenly but you can shift gradually. But in order to do this you can't say "lets save the rainforest" and then you drive your Mercedes or build your house of wood or something like that.

You have to start with yourself, you have to move your assemblage point as an individual and then set up a new arc of intentionality, the sorcerers intent. As it is, we are, our assemblage points are fixed and that spot is getting weaker and weaker because the position of the assemblage point was not always there on our energetic being, just as it wasn't always there on the totality of the earth itself. It has shifted over the ages and it can shift now and that is what sorcerers... that is really our hope, and why we are addressing people at this point, because we know, that it is possible to move the assemblage point and when you do that on an individual basis, you can attract what the sorcerers call "a critical mass." Others will also will be able to move their assemblage points because now we are building a new intersubjective agreement that people who have recapitulated or who are starting are able to say "yes, I see a difference" or people who do the sorcery passes or begin dreaming with integrity not indulging can say "yes, I see the difference in how I perceive the world" and that builds up a new intersubjectivity that revitalizes.

It will revitalize the world, but only if you revitalize you're own energetic self. And then of course, our children, what we talked about a moment ago, if the parents are vital strong human beings, our children will also reflect that and going back to the original, how children are conceived, whether we are energetically conceived or not, parents who have recapitulated and moved their assemblage point and then have a child, have sex and have a child, that offspring will be energetically strong. So all that reinforces itself and you can change.

HE:  I have one question before we go, the hour is winding down and that is, in all of Carlos Castaneda's books and your book and Florinda Donner's book, the idea of telepathy comes up. One of the sorcerers will anticipate your question or will comment about the contents of your thought.

TA:  Yes.

HE:  At what point in the sorcerers training does one become telepathic?

TA:  At the point where you quiet the internal dialog. When you no longer have your self being reaffirmed constantly in consciousness, when you no longer have any worries about "Whats going to happen to me?" or worries about your job or worries about everyday life, when you're silent, then you develop... And through the recapitulation, when you start jolting your energy body, you develop what the sorcerers call the "seer" in you or you could call it an emissary or the voice of seeing and that is just something that tells you. It doesn't have to be verbal, its a feeling that "oh they're thinking this" and sometimes you can even hear the thoughts of the other person.

HE:  You were a Buddhist monk for a number of years. You stalked the position of a male Buddhist monk.

TA:  Yes.

HE:  Does that position of quieting the internal thinking result in that discipline as well.

TA:  Of course there's many, many meditation techniques and the monks are... of any, it doesn't have to be Buddhist, in any sect... Zen... that is their goal to quiet inside. Originally, no, I had already done the recapitulation prior to any of this and some of the not doing techniques so I was able to stalk these positions, but that is not to say that if you practice Zen meditation you can't quiet your internal dialog.

There's many, many meditation techniques that shut off the internal dialog, but that is not enough, that's one thing I would like to say that just to have it quiet inside is fine, but what happens when you go back to work and you're surrounded by people and an angry boss or at home and your children and people are yelling at you? You want to be able to have silence and equanimity and resolve in any situation, so we were always sent back into work situations, into school, academic situations, where we would practice quieting the internal dialog. Not really sitting in zazen or a cave where you can practice meditation because I know and I have talked to Buddhist monks now, the Tibetan monks that have come to Los Angeles and they say its very difficult to maintain their equanimity and the same thing happened in China when the Chinese went up to the mountains where the Taoist temples were and more or less turned them into tourist spots, the monks say that now that the world has entered their domain they have destroyed some of the silence that they have built up, which is true, but sorcerers' say "Build up your silence not on a mountain top but within yourself" and that is what quieting the internal dialog means to us.

HE:  I think we're going to have to end at that point. Our guest today on the Earth Mystery Show is Taisha Abelar, she's written a wonderful book entitled The sorcerers' crossing, I'd highly recommend reading that and I'd recommend reading it in conjunction with Florinda Donner's book Being in Dreaming and Carlos Castaneda's book, The Art of Dreaming, the three of them really paint a picture thats hard to describe on the air.

Taisha, after I invited Florinda Donner to come up and do a seminar or lecture in our area she said she would, or she would like to and we had a tide of phone calls and letters saying "let me know, let me know, I want to hear those people." I'm extending the same invitation to you and to Carol Tiggs. Please put it into your dreams to come to the Grass Valley, Nevada City area and let us see you in person.

TA:  We would love to come up there. We'll put out the intent...
(end of tape)

Copyright 1993 KVMR Radio

Magical Blend #40 - 1993

An Exclusive Interview With Taisha Abelar
of Carlos Castaneda's Elusive Sorcerer's Clan.

Magical Blend Magazine, issue 40, October 1993.

"Reflections on don Juan by Carlos Castaneda"

by Keith Nichols

Real root expansion of thought is one that causes us to reevaluate the way that we interpret our reality. Although at first it may only affect our intellectual perspectives, its repercussions over time carry through our culture and civilization, changing the forms of who we are and what we will be. Root expansions are rare because they entail a breaking of any ethos or system of thought. Since the late sixties, an interesting root expansion occurred with the entry of the sorcerer apprentice Carlos Castaneda and his books about the training he received under the Mexican Indian sorcerer named don Juan. His books are a hallmark of the present-day urge to return to a cultural ethos where wonder, magic, and spiritual abilities break the chains that strict reason and cynicism have placed upon our realities. Taisha Abelar, sorcerer and author of The Sorcerer's Crossing, is one of the members of Carlos Castaneda's sorcerers' party. In this interview she discusses her lineage, how they see the mechanics of the energy body, and some of her sorcerer's techniques for attaining spiritual and perceptual freedom by breaking the intellectual and energetic chains that bind.

"If you try to hold back your present knowledge about the consequences of Columbus' trip and project yourself into his situation, then you can begin to see that our present moon exploration must be like a tea party compared to what he went through. Moon exploration doesn't involve any real root exploration of thought....It's really just an expansion of what he did." Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Could you tell us how you got involved with sorcery?

Taisha Abelar:   I met don Juan and his people when I was in my twenties. Most of my adult life was actually spent under their guidance and training. Don Juan belonged to a generation of sorcerers that have 27 Naguals, or spiritual leaders, behind him. Each Nagual had his certain apprentices that learned dreaming, stalking, and a number of other things. The techniques that we learned have a historical background that dates far back in this long line of sorcerers.

Are there any differences between the ancient and modern sorcerers?

Taisha:   Yes, when we talk about the ancient sorcerers we think in terms of manipulating people, amassing power, and controlling the entities from other realms or realities. As this tradition was handed down, subsequent seers realized that the practices of the ancient sorcerers didn't lead to freedom. Instead, it lead to a dependence upon rituals and compulsive behavior, such as the amassing of power and the enhancement of the self. Yet these practices were very effective in making the sorcerers very powerful beings who could control other people, command the elements in nature (such as rain), transform themselves into different animals, or perform other feats of sorcery. Despite these powers, modern sorcerers realized that power alone didn't lead to true freedom. Instead, most of the ancient sorcerers became entrapped behind what we call the Second Gate of Dreaming.

Can you explain what you mean by the Second Gate of Dreaming?

Taisha:   When the body changes energetically into the energy body, that energy can perceive "other realities," or other aspects of the universe. What is presented before us, or what we see now this room, that wall, the street outside is not the only reality that exists. Yet the modern seers saw that the ancient rituals and training didn't lead to the ultimate goal: freedom from entrapment within any reality; whatever that reality may be.

How have the techniques changed with the modern seers?

Taisha:   The techniques that were handed down to us were the only ones that they saw were the most likely to enable the practitioner to attain total liberation. This total liberation for us is freedom from "humanness" or anything human, and the ability to utilize the total potential of oneself. These techniques are the recapitulation and certain dreaming practices.

When did the division between the ancient sorcerers and the modern sorcerers occur during history?

Taisha:   The division came at the time of the Spanish Conquests of Mexico. When the Spaniards came, most of the ancient sorcerers were destroyed. In spite of their ability to turn into animals or harness the elements or manipulate allies, their power was unable to withstand the onslaught of the Spaniards. The ancient sorcerers were unable to affect the Spaniards because their culture was so strong and fixed that sorcery had almost no effect on them. The Spaniards were operating within a different cognitive field, or reality. Another turning point occurred within Don Juan's lineage in 1725 when an entity came into contact with the Nagual, Sebastian.

Who was that entity?

Taisha:   We call him the Death-defier. He is really one of the ancient sorcerers who had survived many hundreds of years by being entrapped behind one of the Gates of Dreaming. His consciousness was still intact, but there was no way that he could escape because of his training. We learned that inorganic beings who inhabit certain realms of dreaming entrapped the male sorcerers who entered because they preyed on their energy. The only way the Death-defier could escape was by making a pact with different Naguals in Don Juan's lineage. From that point on, he merged with our lineage and gave gifts of power in exchange for their energy.

What kind of gifts did the Death-defier give?

Taisha:   He gave different positions of what we call the Assemblage Point. We see that there is a place on the luminous cocoon or energetic body that is very bright. That place we call the Assemblage Point because it lights up filaments on lines of energy upon the energetic body. We have seen that when certain fibers light up, an alignment takes place with similar fibers outside the energetic body within the universe at large, that in turn, causes perception to occur. Sorcerers see that in order to perceive reality, this matching of the energetic filaments within and without the luminous cocoon always takes place. The Death-defier gave to this lineage the different positions of this Assemblage Point or the ability to perceive different realities, for each position lights up inconceivable possibilities. He gave each Nagual a different number of possible points, and these were handed down. The new sorcerers coming from this transition stage realized that sorcery really is a question of perception. A definition of sorcery is the ability to perceive more than the average human being, whose perception of the universe is limited because s/he has only one place of the Assemblage Point: the one into which s/he is born. As the seers became more experienced, they realized that any of these other positions were just as limiting as the reality to which man was born into. This had led us to realize that our goal is not to fix ourselves at any permanent position. This is what happened to the Death-defier; he was trapped at a certain position of the Assemblage Point.

How do you keep from being trapped?

Taisha:   Our practices are geared toward not becoming fixated at any one particular position. The recapitulation is one such method. All of the ancients' practices enhanced the elf to such an extent that they were no longer able to move or be fluid. This was one of the principle reasons why they were trapped in the different realms. So now we seek fluidity.

What is recapitulation?

Taisha:   The recapitulation is a method of bringing back all of the energy trapped in the world in order to have it available to use for other things. It enables one to see that the reality to which you're born isn't the only reality, but merely a fixation of energy. When an infant is born, his Assemblage Point is very erratic; he isn't able to perceive as a functional human being. As he matches the adults around him, his energetic body emulates their position. Energetically, he patterns himself on those who are around him. We all have the position of our Assemblage Points on more or less the same place, enabling us to perceive the same reality. The recapitulation enables you to move that point by using a psychic process of extending your breath to call back any energy you've left throughout your lifetime. Every epoch is characterized by what don Juan calls the "modality of the times": a specific pattern of ideas or cultural ethos. The modality of our times is what's on our televisions, in our books and newspapers. We're constantly bombarded with certain themes and ideas that we have to adhere to. Sorcerers call this ethos of our day the "poor baby, me" syndrome because everyone out there is dominated by that sentiment. It's not only a poor baby world, it's a poor baby universe with black holes consuming constellations and planets. Sorcerers see that our energy is constantly being consumed by something else. In order to go where we want to go, we have to have energy. In our waking state, all of our energy is used up in our waking concerns: our jobs, our families, or wherever we are. To move away from that position, we have to have extra energy. The recapitulation is the fundamental means of storing that energy.

How does one recapitulate?

Taisha:   First, you make a list of everyone you've known in your lifetime, every person you've ever come across. That, in itself, is an endeavor of intense concentration. Just making the list loosens up things and enables you to focus your attention on something specific. When you have your list, find a place that puts pressure on the energetic body, like a closet. Sit comfortably and begin with the first person on your list. Work backward, recapitulating or visualizing all the situations in which you encountered this person, those interactions in which energy was exchanged. See yourself interacting and going through all sorts of energetic maneuvers in order to maintain the situation. We all construct our reality energetically. Even when we are just driving down the street, we're constructing. We take that act for granted and say that the street is always there. But really, we're all sorcerers who are constituting the world around us, and we're agreeing upon it's tacticity. [Sic.] Through recapitulating, you take back energy of the past that is lost in your personal history and hangs around you like a comet's tail of debris. To disentangle yourself from your remembered pasts, start at your right shoulder and, moving your head from right to left, breathe in. Then, turn your head back again and exhale, sending everything back that you no longer want to be connected with. Then bring the head back to the center again. You don't have the sensation with every image, but you breathe everything out deeply, sending out lines with each breath. When you have pulled your energy back, breathe that in as a clump and proceed on until there is no more energy left there. The scene will be vacuous, empty because there's no energetic component in it.

What effect does recapitulating have on your life?

Taisha:   You'll find that your attachment with your family and friends will be lessened. You can still interact with them, but you're no longer attached to them because you won't have that energetic dependence upon them.

What is stalking?

Taisha:   Stalking is the ability to fixate the Assemblage Point on any given position in order to give structure and coherence to chaotic perception. We're stalking our realities every day, every minute, finding out what it means to drive down this street or be in the mall. Stalking means to make our categorization schemes of objects and things that we know by names.

How do sorcerers see dreaming?

Taisha:   Dreaming is a movement of the Assemblage Point that we do naturally when we sleep. That's our energetic body randomly moving. Dreaming for sorcerers is the control of one's dreams. You have to stalk your dreams, which is really just moving your point to a new location on purpose and holding it there for as long as your dreaming energy can allow you to do so. When you find yourself in a dream world, before it shifts away and turns into something else, you want to hold that reality and stalk it. If you're a very practiced stalker and dreamer then that reality can become your only reality. That's what happened to the ancient sorcerers when they became entrapped in another realm and could no longer return to our normal reality. In fact, time wiped out the reality into which they were born. Because they were able to sustain their energy within that reality for a longer period of time, hundreds of years they found themselves unable to return to our own because the modality was gone. When we stalk our realities, we never keep any of them as the primary reality. The minute we think that this or any other reality is the primary one, then we become imprisoned at that level, no matter where it may be.

What do you think is the significance of publishing The Sorcerers' Crossing and all of the other information about your lineage?

Taisha:   The reason that you and I can even talk is because of the tremendous necessity of altering the modality of our culture. Sorcerers say that inside the modality of our day, the prognosis is totally negative. If change is to come, it has to come from outside to show that movement is possible. We have put out this information, not as information, but as a possibility. First of all, it's an idea that people can grab hold of in order to realize there is something out there besides our popular culture, dominated by the "poor baby" syndrome. We are imprisoned in this reality as much as the Death-defier is imprisoned behind the second Gate of Dreaming. The Death-defier has said that the position of mankind has been pretty much the same for thousands of years with only minute changes. There were shifts in the Renaissance when man's perception of God shifted, causing a perceptual shift of himself. Another shift must have occurred in the Grecian times when we went from being able to see and have contact with fairies and gods to believing it was a myth or a product of man's imagination. So, there are shifts from things that we no longer perceive. Our lineage's contact with the larger cultural ethos of man is causing another shift: away from reason and a confined sense of reality toward a system where everything is alive and has awareness that we can perceive.

Where do you see your group going after death?

Taisha:   I see ourselves going into a never-ending revolution. We are merging with that inconceivable, unnamable force of which we are just a tiny speck. The less human we are energetically, the more we merge with the vastness. That might sound cold and heartless, but it's not. Sorcerers have feelings and tremendous affection, but they're almost impersonal. They're part of the energy that comes from a state of well-being. When your energetic body is in a healthy state, you have strong, positive feelings that come from the universe itself. Everything out there is aware and intelligent and is part of Intent itself. Affection is there; you need only link yourself to it to feel it. It doesn't stem from the personal self. These things are out there. It's not cold empty space. With the dreaming body you can move beyond the limitations of the body, take on different forms, and perceive reality from those configurations, which means you can go through walls and move into sheer energy that is our quest. When this merging takes place through evolution, we move into a different realm. We move away from anything human. Our apelike existence just falls away like prison bars and what remains is really inconceivable. The structure of language can't contain the vastness of silence that whispers to you directly without words. We won't stop knowing or becoming aware, because it'll trickle down from Intent. The awareness that fills you with wonder is our link to the vastness.

(The Sorcerers' Crossing, by Taisha Abelar, is available from Viking Penguin Press. Keith Nichols is a freelance writer, clairvoyant, and editor located in Berkeley, California.)

Copyright October 1993 Magical Blend Magazine

November 28, 1993

The Phoenix Book Store - Los Angeles, CA - Lecture by Carlos Castaneda.


DREAMING:

Don Juan said there is no evil... and that we can't feel compassion. Is that feeling sorry for someone else? Does that mean I believe I'm better off than they are? It's the ego that feels sorry, and the whole idea of feeling sorry is fraudulent. Use your energy for something else, to free yourself. You save energy by the exercise of recapitulation. Through recapitulation you will come to the place where energy becomes visible. Not by sight but by something incomprehensible. Something that's incomprehensible because we have no lexicon for it. When you see it, you realize you were doing it.

Not Doing is the cognitive dissonance that unentangles your awareness. The disarrangement of the world by doing something absurd. We must realize the world is an arrangement. It could be tying your shoes in a different way.

The dreamer through the teaching of sorcery is a warrior who sees himself as something indescribable, undefinable and open-ended. He has no limitation. No frame. He takes anything that comes as a challenge, and is never a loser even if he is biting the dust.

One of the of the most important things for a warrior to do is to keep an Album of Sublime Moments. Get out of the brain of the beast. We are repetitious. Where is our sense of pride? We must examine everything, curtail our routines, throw cognitive dissonance into them in order to become a sorcerer. We can see energy as it flows, why permit the brain of the beast to stop us.

The dreamer is capable of using his dreams as a trap door or a spring board into infinity. But we've used our dreams only in analytical, psychological, or scientific ways. To dream as a warrior, is to dream as one who has taken the responsibility of dying.

Dreams are precise. Something is drawn to fields of luminosity. The assemblage point becomes displaced. Fibers of energy are shooting off in thousands of directions. If the point becomes displaced we move into an entirely different world. Dreaming is the art of maintaining the assemblage point in a new position. If we had the opportunity, we could all become first class Dreamers.

The further we displace the assemblage point the more terrifying the dream. Our mind supplies order on these experiences. When these dreams become overlaid with demonic images. It's the way we anthropomorpize experience. Take Dreaming as a formal enterprise and the demonic disappears. The difficulty is to discipline ourselves so that nothing that happens in the dream will be upsetting.


The steps in dreaming:

Become aware that you are falling asleep.

Before going to sleep say 'I am a Dreamer'. It's a matter of stating your intent. Don't be concerned if you are a Dreamer or not, the mind won't know the difference. It's not lying to yourself. In linear affairs we think of it as lying. That should be nothing new, we lie to ourselves all the time.

So intend Dreaming from the point of view that we are going to die. As if it's a matter of life and death. What are you saving yourself for, senility? Are we waiting to shout "Nurse" in a restaurant?

What have they done to you? Don Juan would ask that question of me over and over. It needed to be repeated because I was stupid.

This is not the best of all possible worlds. Something is holding us back from seeing. From the point of view of one who is going to die the warrior becomes aware and the world is never the same. This is incredible. He sees the intruder in his dreams. They are scouts from inconceivable worlds. They use awareness as a sea. We can go anywhere if we have the energy. If we get rid of our self-importance.

A warrior takes leaps of incalculable lengths because he wants to know. My fate is to roam the infinite. We are travelers, traveling is our fate. In accepting the responsibility of his death the warrior gets an incredible boost. He can put an end to his self - importance and move to another level. You don't have to lower your head to anyone.

After finding the intruder in your dreams you can stop the dream and ask it to take you where it comes from. The intruder is compelled to take your awareness to other worlds. Stupendous worlds, a twin universe. The Dreamer then becomes a reconnoiter, a scout himself. The twin universe is alive, it's a world of awareness. The inorganic beings are teachers from a female universe that is in search of males. Women are replicas of inorganic beings on earth.

The battle is in this other world, and we will enter this universe whether we like it or not. It's unavoidable. The sorcerers are pragmatists. (What is exactly is this battle that happens in the other world?) Why wait until you die? Do it now while you are young and vigorous. Stop being so involved with your self importance. Always thinking me, and what I want until were too old to do anything else. Until the only thing we can say is "nurse." Be aware now. This is the moment and dreaming is the way. The Dreamer, having saved enough energy will get the jolt of his life when he enters the other world. It's inconceivable. What are we really? Not what my father told me. We are something else.

There are seven stages to Dreaming. The first is to be aware the you are falling asleep. This is so you will remain conscious during the dream state. Then once in the dream state and you can hold it as long as you don't stare. Once you begin to awaken in your dreams you will begin to get more energy. You will be stronger the next day.

Become aware in your dreams, this is the first stage. If you don't insist and set up intent your energy will then pull you. Let it happen. The pull of intent will break the parameters of historical perception.

If you recapitulate your life seriously, you will get enough energy. Only as warriors can we realize what we are.

In the first stage we examine everything, every element in our dreams. We begin by becoming aware that you are falling asleep. But that's not the goal of the technique. This is only to fool the mind. The real technique is to become aware of the elements of our ordinary dreams.

In dreaming, we can easily shift the assemblage point. Even a slight shift of the assemblage point will create a new person. We are putting an end to the old and becoming a new person.

Don Juan said the "here" and "there" are exchangeable, we do it all the time with our energy bodies. The energy body is the sum total projected out.

What have they done to us to make us so resistant? The terrible damage that society has done to us can be corrected by dreaming.

The next step or Gate of Dreaming is to wake up from the dream into another dream.

Once you have acquired the energy from recapitulation and dreaming you can lie down in the dream in the same position that you originally fell asleep in and move into another dream. When you enter a dream inside a dream you enter a state that is inconceivable and will blow your mind. This is the secret of the twin positions.

The secret of secrets is to claim it. We only need energy. This is real, not theory, and as a practitioner, I say we all can do it.

Eventually in Dreaming everything will shift. One day your attention becomes arrested or fixed by something in the dream and you don't know why. You won't be able to move until it releases you.

You're attention is caught by an inorganic being. They have more awareness than us but we have more energy. We are like powerful bullets of energy that burn brightly. They last forever and their awareness can hold us.

Now we will begin to here the voice of the Emissary. It will answer any questions. When we hear its voice as a woman we are hearing its true voice. It is by nature female.

Don't indulge yourself with the dream Emissary. Tell it to stay out of your affairs. Don't let it feed off you for free.

There is a wave that hits us and we turn it into sadness-- But it's from out there? "I never thought I was going to live forever, let's do it. Turn me loose,"

Practice the Not Doing of the album of the sublime. It will create the cognitive dissonance.

Create an album to remind you of your sublime moments. Of things and thoughts that have astounded you. The real revolution is in the next world. It easy to get involved in political protest, but what's the point. Do something from the point of view of a man who is going to die.

What have they done to you? What are you doing to yourself to your body? Look how you live. Stop smoking.

What have they done to you? Our natural heritage is to live and die like morons. This is the time for revolution.



Copyright assigned without charge to Carlos Castaneda.

Phoenix Bookstore - Dec 1993

An anonymous submission of notes taken at the Phoenix Book Store with Carlos Castaneda in Los Angeles, CA, December 1993


Setting up of the Path of the Warrior:

A Nagual is a person with a double energy configuration. There were 27 Naguals in don Juan's line. Don Juan called it sorcery. I think I could call it something else. Maybe Nagualism?

Don Juan was teaching a way to break the psychological conditioning of the cognitive division that keeps us cut off from our sources. The world, as we perceive it, was formed a priori. It was given to us.

The most important thing don Juan said was that all our energy is engaged in defending our self. All of our effort goes into that. We have been involved defending our self-concept for so long that we don't even notice.

It's time we begin to find out for ourselves. Begin to "recapitulate" our life. Every action, every event, to find the "hinge" that represents our life. Our hinge is the way we relate to people.

When I began to recapitulate I found I related to the world as a baby. I felt sorry for myself. My whole life was nothing but the endless repetition of this fact.

When don Juan had me recapitulate my life I saw how I spent my life defending this position. This was a horrendous realization. All I wanted was for someone to listen to my sad story and feel sorry for me.

These ideas of self importance blind us so much that we can't see anything else, but it's possible to dislodge one's self from ideas of self importance. Another way we do remain blind is by thinking fulfilment will come when we find a companion. We can even be married and still keep searching for someone to fulfil our needs. "She's just my wife."

We don't want to give, we are incredibly selfish, we only want to receive.

Warriors, seers, Naguals, love without asking, in this world or beyond, for anything in return.

We don't notice this self-importance that rules our existence. If we did we wouldn't do what we do to our bodies.

The idea of the self is not ours, it's time we untangle it. Don Juan gave a series of premises so we could begin to see what has happened to us, what they have done to us. Not as a comparison but as an enquiry.

Once I worked for a psychiatrist, as a research assistant, transcribing case histories from tapes. He had 3000 tapes with their stories. When I listened to the tapes I discovered they were all me. Their stories were my stories. Don Juan used to ask me what was my uniqueness. There was nothing unique about me.

There were 3000 different people on those tapes and they all were me. There's nothing unique, but there is something magical about us, we're all going to die. Don Juan pulled me out of the social order so I could see that they don't care if I lived or died. It is destroying us. Why do we adhere to this absurd social order that only leads to our destruction.


Affection, love - is only need.

If you examine the social order through yourself you will see it's not leading anywhere. Look at the social order not as a comparison but as an examination. A full realization of the social order and we see it has no meaning or purpose. Is it money or the other things we think has value? Or is it the biological imperative?

Recapitulation is a way to attack self-importance. We need the energy that is supplied by an unbiased examination of reliving our horse-shit, our self-importance.

Recreational drugs, ecstasy San Pedro? Saint Peter! We can't find meaning from that. Dope makes us incapable of sustaining pressure. Don Juan used plants to heal and train my attention because I didn't have an ounce of it.

Instead of using drugs to find the magic in life there's something much better.

Self-discipline. It's the only way out of the trap of the social order. With self discipline we can do wonders. The warrior that is aware of death, he is aware of the trap of social order, he is aware of the trap of self-importance, he is aware of the trap of reason, wants only freedom. Freedom is a leap into the inconceivable.

Self-discipline is not catholic, it is fluid and free-flowing enjoyment that comes from 25 hours of awareness.

These are the basic patterns of responsibility for a warrior: Don't ask stupid questions. Don't say I don't understand, or could you tell me why. There is no rational explanation. If you want to know you have to try it-- experiment.

1. Accepting that you are going to die. Death is non-negotiable, everyone that lived dies. Grab the idea and assume the responsibility that you are going to die.

Naming it aloud is the primal force that obeys our call and we never use it. Say out loud, "I want the responsibility that I'm going to die". It has to be said out loud, you just can't think it. Power is not a mind reader. As you progress there will be an adjustment. Make your word final. A warrior has the consistency to stand by his word. Be committed to something for once in your life even if it's your death. A warrior dies for his word. Saying something aloud is mysterious and magical but it's subtle. The loud and clear voicing of your intent is the secret of secrets. Do it. Look in unknown places. Assume the responsibility to stand in front of the boundless. It isn't weak-- it doesn't respond to supplication-- it will piss on you. It doesn't care. With the first premise alone you can have a stupendous experience. We have never been able to explain, with words alone.

We should sue the term index. We carry the world in us. The answer has to be constructed and we accept it. A warrior must stop right here.

2. The most important thing for a warrior is to voice the responsibility of perceiving.

We have no purpose, nothing to look forward to but senility.

Everything is possible. We are already magicians. Go to the bottom, the lowest level and formulate the world on what's there. At the bottom is death. I'm a human being therefore I am sublime. Voice your intent to be someone else to heal yourself. When I was ill I just jumped. I did what don Juan said. Disease is merely an indulgence. I loved my pain. You change your channel by voicing your intent. Then comes the Cloak of Confidence. Timidity and stiffness is our enemy. It's not reasonable to believe that wings are the only way to fly. There are other options. Look for them. Ask a being who is going to die. Ask the mirror. Something will happen.

3. The third item for a warrior is indebtedness. Who am I indebted to now for this? Become responsible for what is given to you. Acquire a new kit. In receiving a teaching you are responsible for it. You are indebted for the rest of your life. Only something out there can cancel it out. You are responsible for seeing what sustains us. In paying you become free, if you refuse you become entangled by it. A being that is going to die assumes responsibility. Without responsibility we're only egomanics.

The pee is for the Baba. Suffice it to say everything that comes out of the Baba is sacred.

In the next talks I'll talk about Dreaming, then Stalking and finally I'll talk about the ethereal man. I won't hold anything back. I tell you as a witness-- I've been there. I've seen incredible things. It's like tears in the rain.



Copyright assigned without charge to Carlos Castaneda.

DETAILS MAGAZINE. March 1994.

"You Only Live Twice" - by Bruce Wagner

With his vision of a separate reality, Carlos Castaneda transfixed a generation. In a rare interview, the legendary sorcerer talks to Bruce Wagner about don Juan, freedom, dreaming, and death - and the funny things that happen on the way to infinity.


YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE

Carlos Castaneda doesn't live here anymore.

After years of rigorous discipline-years of warriorism- he has escaped the ratty theater of everyday life. He is an empty man, a funnel, a teller of tales and stories; not really a man at all, but a being who no longer has attachments to the world as we know it. He is the last nagual, the cork in a centuries-old lineage of sorcerers whose triumph was to break the "agreement" of normal reality. With the release of his ninth book, The Art of Dreaming, he has surfaced-for a moment, and in his way.


COMMON SENSE KILLS

Castaneda: "My name is Carlos Castaneda.

"I would like you to do something today. I would like you to suspend judgment.

"Please: don't come here armed with 'common sense'. People find out I'm going to be talking- however they hear- and they come to 'dis' Castaneda. To hurt me. 'I have read your books and they are infantile,' or, 'All of your later books are boring.'

"Don't come that way. It's useless. Today I want to ask you, just for an hour, to open yourself to the option I'm going to present. Don't listen like honor students. I've spoken to honor students before; they're dead and arrogant. Common sense and idealities are what kill us. We hold onto them with our teeth- that's the 'ape'.

"That's what don Juan Matus called us: insane apes.

"I have not been available for thirty years. I don't go and talk to people. For a moment, I'm here. A month, maybe two... then I'll disappear. We're not insular, not just now. We cannot be that way. We have an indebtedness to pay to those who took the trouble to show us certain things. We inherited this knowledge; don Juan told us not to be apologetic. We want you to see there are weird, pragmatic options that are not beyond your reach. I get exotic enjoyment at observing such flight-pure esotericism. It is for my eyes only. I'm not needy; I don't need anything. I need you like I need a hole in the head. But I am a voyager, a traveler. I navigate- out there. I would like others to have the possibility."


THIS WAY OUT

The navigator has spoken before groups in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and his cohorts- Florinda Donner-Grau, Taisha Abelar, and Carol Tiggs- have given lectures, 'Toltec Dreaming-The Legacy of Don Juan', in Arizona, Maui, and at Esalen. In the last two years, Donner-Grau's and Abelar's books, in which they discuss Castaneda and their tutelage under don Juan Matus, have entered the marketplace: 'Being-in-dreaming' and 'The Sorcerer's Crossing', respectively.

The accounts of these two women are a phenomenological mother lode, bona fide chronicles of their initiation and training. They are also a great windfall, for never have readers of Castaneda had access to such direct illuminating reinforcement of his experience. Castaneda says, "The women are in charge. It is their game. I am merely the Filipino chauffeur".

Donner-Grau describes the collective consensus of these works as 'inter-subjectivity among sorcerers'; each one is like a highly individualistic road map of the same city.

They are 'energetic' enticements, a perceptual call to freedom rooted in a single, breathtaking premise. We must take responsibility for the non-negotiable fact that we are beings who are going to die. One is struck by the cogency of their case, and for good reason. The players, all Ph.D.'s from UCLA's department of anthropology, are stupendous methodologists whose academic disciplines are in fact oddly suited for describing the magical world they present- a configuration of energy called 'the second attention'. Not a place for the timid New Ager.


THE OFFENDING PARTY

Castaneda: "I do not lead a double life. I live this life: There is no gap between what I say and what I do. I am not here to pull your chain, or to be entertaining.

"What I am going to talk about today are not my opinions- they are those of don Juan Matus, the Mexican Indian who showed me this other world. So don't be offended! Juan Matus presented me with a working system backed by twenty seven generations of sorcerers. Without him I would be an old man, a book under my arm, walking with students on the quad. See, we always leave a safety valve; that's why we don't jump. 'If all else fails, I can teach anthropology.' We are already losers with losers' scenarios. 'I'm Dr. Castaneda... and this is my book, The Teachings of Don Juan. Did you know it's in paperback?'

"I would be the 'one book' man- the burnt-out genius. 'Did you know it's in a twelfth edition? It's just been translated into Russian.'

"Or maybe I'd be parking your car and mouthing platitudes: 'It's too hot... it's fine, but it's too hot. It's too cold... it's fine, but it's too cold. I gotta go to the tropics'..."


SORCERY ACTION THEATER

In 1960, Castaneda was a graduate student in anthropology at UCLA. While in Arizona researching the medicinal properties of plants, he met a Yaqui Indian, don Juan Matus, who agreed to help. The young field-worker offered five dollars an hour for the services of his picturesque guide.

The usher refused.

Unbeknownst to Castaneda, the old peasant in huaraches was a peerless sorcerer; a nagual who artfully drafted him as a player in the 'Myth of Energy'. Abelar calls it 'Sorcery Action Theater'.

In payment for his services, don Juan asked for something different: Castaneda's 'total attention'.

The astonishing book born of this encounter- 'The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge'- became an instant classic, neatly blowing the hinges off the doors of perception and electrifying a generation. Since then, he has continued 'to peel away at the onion', adding journals of his experience, magisterial elucidations of nonordinary realities that erode the self. A sweeping title for the work might be the 'Disappearance of Carlos Castaneda'.

"We need," he says, "to find a different word for sorcery. It's too dark. We associate it with medieval absurdities: ritual, evil.

"I like 'warriorism' or 'navigation.' That's what sorcerers do - they navigate."

He has written that a working definition of sorcery is 'to perceive energy directly'. Sorcerers said that the essence of the universe resembled a matrix of energy shot through by incandescent strands of consciousness- actual awareness. Those strands formed 'braids' containing all-inclusive worlds, each as real as this ours is merely one among an infinity. The sorcerers call the world we know the 'human band', or 'the first attention'.

They also 'saw' the essence of the human form. It was not merely an ape-like amalgamation of skin and bones, but an eggshaped ball of luminosity capable of traveling along those incandescent strands to other worlds.

Then what holds us back?

The sorcerers' idea is that we are entombed by social upbringing; tricked into perceiving the world as a place of hard objects and finalities. We go to our graves denying we are magical beings; our agenda is to service the ego instead of the spirit. Before we know it, the battle is over- we die squalidly shackled to the Self.

Don Juan Matus made an intriguing proposition: What would happen if Castaneda redeployed his troops?- if he freed the energy routinely engaged by the aggressions of courtship and mating?- if he curtailed self-importance and withdrew from the 'defense, maintenance, and presentation' of the ego- if he ceased to worry whether he was liked, acknowledged, or admired? Would he gain enough energy to see a crack in the world?

And if he did, might he go through? The old Indian had hooked him on the 'intent' of the sorcerers' world.

But now what does Castaneda do during the day?

Talks to the crazy apes- for now, anyway- in private homes, ballet studios, bookstores. They make pilgrimages from the world over- icons of 'New Awareness': past, present, and future; energy groupies, shrinks and shamans, lawyers, Deadheads, drummers, debunkers and lucid dreamers, scholars, socialites and seducers, channelers, meditators and moguls, even lovers and cronies 'from 10,000 years ago'. Furious note takers come, junior naguals in the making.

Some will write books about him; the lazier ones, chapters. Others will give seminars- that is, for a fee.

"They come," he says, "to listen for a few hours, and the next weekend they are giving lectures on Castaneda. That's the ape."

He stands before them hours at a time enticing and exhorting their energy bodies, and the effect is hot and cold all at once, like dry ice.

With numinous finesse, he wrests savage tales of freedom and power like scarves from the empty funnel- moving, elegant, obscene, hilarious, bloodcurdling, and surgically precise. "Ask me anything!" comes the entreaty. "What would you like to know?"

Why were Castaneda and Co. making themselves accessible? Why now? What was in it for them?


THE ENORMOUS DOOR

Castaneda: "There is someone who goes into the unknown and waits for us to join her.

"She's called Carol Tiggs- my counterpart. She was with us, then vanished. Her disappearance lasted ten years. Where she went is inconceivable. It does not yield to rationality. So please suspend judgment! We were going to have a bumper sticker: COMMON SENSE KILLS.

"Carol Tiggs went away. She was not living in the mountains of New Mexico, I assure you. One day I was giving a lecture at the Phoenix Bookstore and she materialized. My heart jumped out of my shirt fomp fomp fomp. I kept talking. I talked for two hours without knowing what I was saying. I took her outside and asked her where she had been-ten years! She became cagey and started to sweat. She had only vague recollections. She made jokes. The reappearance of Carol Tiggs opened an enormous door - energetically - through which we come and go. There's a huge entry where I can hook you to the intent of sorcery. Her return gave us a new ring of power; she brought with her a tremendous mass of energy that allows us to come out.

"That's why we are available at this moment. Someone was introduced to Carol Tiggs at a lecture. He said, 'But you look so normal.'

"Carol Tiggs said, 'What did you expect? Lightning coming out of my tits?'"


THE WHORES OF PERCEPTION

Who is Carlos Castaneda, and does he have a life?

It's 1994 already: Why doesn't he just get it over with? Tell us his age and have Avedon take the picture. Hasn't anyone told him that privacy is dead? That the revelation of details no longer diminishes?

In exchange for our total attention, he's got to orient us. There are things one would like to know- mundane, personal things.

Like where does he live? What did he think of Sinatra's Duets? What has he done with the egregious profits from his books?

Does he drive a turbo Bentley like all the big old Babas? Was that really him with Michael Jordan and Edmund White at uptown Barneys?

They've been trying to pin him down for years.

They even reconstructed his face from memories of old colleagues and dubious acquaintances; the absurd result looks like a police artist's rendering of benevolent Olmec man for Reader's Digest. In the '70s, a photo appeared in a Time cover story (only the eyes were visible)- when the magazine learned the model was a counterfeit, they never forgave him.

Around when Paul McCartney was declared dead, the rumor solidified. Carlos Castaneda was Margaret Mead.

His agent and lawyers are full-time hedges against the onslaught of correspondents and crazies, spiritual hang gliders, New Age movers and seekers, artists wishing to adapt his work- famous and unknown, with or without permission- and bogus seminars replete with Carlos impersonators.

After thirty years, there is still no price on his head. He has no interest in gurus or guruism; there will be no turbo Bentleys, no ranches of turbaned devotees, no guest-edit of Paris Vogue. There will be no Castaneda Institute, no Center for Advanced Sorcery Studies, no Academy of Dreaming-no infomercials, mushrooms, or Tantric sex. There will be no biographies and there will be no scandals. When he's invited to lecture, Castaneda receives no fee and offers to pay his travel fare. The gate is usually a few dollars, to cover rental of the hall. All that is asked of attendees is their total attention.

"Freedom is free," he says. "It cannot be bought or understood. With my books, I've tried to present an option-that awareness can be a medium for transportation or movement. I haven't been so convincing; they think I'm writing novels. If I were tall and handsome, things might be different- they would listen to the Big Daddy. People say, 'You're Iying.' How could I be Iying? You only lie to get something, to manipulate. I don't want anything from anyone- only consensus. We'd like there to be consensus that there are worlds besides our own. If there's consensus to grow wings then there'll be flight. With consensus comes mass; with mass there will be movement."

Castaneda and his confederates are the energetic radicals of what may be the only significant revolution of our time- nothing short of transforming the biological imperative into an evolutionary one. If the sovereign social order commands procreation, the fearless order of sorcerers (energetic pirates all) is after something less, well, terrestrial.

Their startling epical intent is to leave the earth the way don Juan did twenty years before: as sheer energy, awareness intact.

Sorcerers call this somersault 'the abstract flight'.


CRITICAL MASS

I met with Castaneda and 'the witches' over a period of a week at restaurants, hotel rooms, and malls. They're attractive and vibrantly youthful. The women dress unobtrusively, with a touch of casual chic. You wouldn't notice them in a crowd, and that's the point.

I skimmed a New Yorker outside the cafe of the Regent Beverly Wilshire. The ad for Drambuie seemed particularly hideous: Inevitably, no matter how much we struggle, in one way or another, one day we become our parents. Instead of resisting this notion, we invite you to celebrate this rite of passage with an exquisite liquor...

Don Juan was laughing in his grave- or out of it- which brought to mind a welter of questions: Where was he anyway? The same place Carol Tiggs came back from? If that were so, did that mean the old nagual was capable of such reentry?

In 'The Fire From Within' Castaneda wrote that don Juan and his party evanesced sometime in 1973- fourteen navigators gone, to the 'second attention'.

What exactly was the 'second attention'? It all seemed clear when I was reading the books.

I searched my notes. I'd scrawled 'second attention = heightened awareness' on the margin of a page, but that didn't help. Impatiently, I riffled through 'The Power of Silence', 'The Eagle's Gift', 'Journey to Ixtlan'. Though there was much throughout I didn't understand, the basics had been thoroughly, coherently described.

Why couldn't I hold any of it in my head? I was failing Sorcery 101.

I ordered a cappuccino and waited. I let my mind drift. I thought about Donner-Grau and the Japanese monkeys. When I'd spoken to her on the phone to arrange an interview, she'd mentioned Imo. Every anthropology student knows about Imo, the famous macaque. One day Imo spontaneously washed off a sweet potato before eating it; in a short while, the macaques of the entire island followed suit. Anthropologists might call this 'cultural' behavior, but Donner-Grau said it was a perfect example of critical mass monkey inter-subjectivity.

Castaneda appeared. He smiled broadly, shook my hand, and sat down. I was about to bring up the monkeys when he began to weep. His forehead crinkled; his entire body convulsed in lamentation. Soon he was gasping like a grouper thrown from the tank. His lower lip twitched, wet and electrified. His arm unfurled toward me, the hand palsied and trembling- then it opened like a night-blooming bud from 'Little Shop of Horrors', as if to receive alms.

"Please!" He declared a shaky truce with his facial muscles just to spit out the words. He bore down on me in needy supplication. "Please love me!"

Castaneda was sobbing again, a great broken, choking hydrant, his pathos effortless as he became an obscene weeping contraption. "That's what we are: apes with tin cups. So routinary, so weak. Masturbatory. We are sublime, but the insane ape lacks the energy to see-so the brain of the beast prevails. We cannot grab our window of opportunity, our 'cubic centimeter of chance.' How could we? We're too busy holding onto Mommy's hand. Thinking how wonderful we are, how sensitive, how unique.

"We are not unique! The scenarios of our lives have already been written," he said, grinning ominously, "by others. We know... but we don't care.

"'Fuck it', we say. We are the ultimate cynics. Cono! Carajo! That's how we live! In a gutter of warm shit.

"'What have they done to us?' That's what don Juan used to say.

"He used to ask me, 'How's the carrot?'

"I asked, 'What do you mean?'

"He would say, 'The carrot they shoved up your ass.'

"I was terribly offended; he could really do it to me! That's when he said, 'Be grateful they haven't put a handle on it yet.'"

"But if we have a choice, why do we stay in the gutter?"

"It's too warm. We don't want to leave- we hate to say goodbye. And we worry-ooo-fa, how we worry twenty-six hours a day! And what do you think we worry about?"

He smiled again, a rubbery Cheshire cat. "About me! What about me? What's in it for me? What's gonna happen to me? Such egomania! So horrendous. But fascinating!"

I told Carlos his views seemed a little harsh, and he laughed.

"Yes," he said, in the ludicrously constipated, judgey tones of an academic.

"Castaneda is a bitter and insane old man." His caricatures were drolly, brutally on target.

"The greedy ape reaches through a grate for a seed and cannot relinquish control. There are studies; nothing will make him drop that seed. The hand will cling even after you hack off the arm- we die holding onto 'mierda'. But why? Is that all there is- like Miss Peggy Lee said? That cannot be; That's too horrendous.

"We have to learn how to let go.

"We collect memories and paste them in books, ticket stubs to a Broadway show ten years ago. We die holding onto souvenirs.

"To be a sorcerer is to have the energy, curiosity, and guts to let go, to somersault into the unknown- all one needs is some retooling, redefinition.

"We must see ourselves as beings who are going to die. Once you accept that, worlds open up for you. But to embrace this definition, you must have 'balls of steel.'


THE NATURAL HERITAGE OF SENTIENT BEINGS: we don't perceive, we interpret.

Castaneda: "When you say 'mountain' or 'tree' or 'White House', you invoke a universe of detail with a single utterance; that's magic.

"See, we're visual creatures.

"You could lick the White House- smell it, touch it- and it wouldn't tell you anything. But one look, and you know everything there is to know: the 'cradle of democracy,' whatever. You don't even need to look, you already see Clinton sitting inside, Nixon on his knees praying- whatever. Our world is an agglutination of detail, an avalanche of glosses- we don't perceive, we merely interpret. And our interpretation system has made us lazy and cynical. We prefer to say 'Castaneda's a liar' or 'This business of perceptual options just isn't for me.'

"What is for you? What's 'real? This hard, shitty, meaningless daily world? Are despair and senility what's real?

"That the world is 'given' and 'final' is a fallacious concept. From an early age we get 'membership'. One day, when we've learned the shorthand of interpretation, the world says 'welcome'. Welcome to what? To prison. Welcome to hell.

"What if it turns out that Castaneda is inventing nothing? If that's true, then you're in a very bad spot.

"The interpretation system can be interrupted; it is not final. There are worlds within worlds, each as real as this. In that wall over there is a world, this room is a universe of detail. Autistics get caught, frozen in detail- they trace a finger on the crack until it bleeds. We get caught in the room of everyday life. There are options other than this world, as real as this room, places where you can live or die. Sorcerers do that-how exciting!

"To think that this is the only all-inclusive world . . .that's the epitome of arrogance. Why not open the door to another room? That's the natural heritage of sentient beings. It's time to interpret and construct new glosses. Go to a place where there's no a priori knowledge. Don't throw away your old system of interpretation- use it, from nine to five. After five? Magic hour."


NO SE HABLA ESPANOL AQUI: no me speak spanish here

But what does he mean by "magic hour"?

Their books are meticulously detailed evocations of the unknown, yet the irony remains; there's no real Lexicon for their experience. Magic hour isn't word-friendly- its surplus energies are experienced bodily. Whenever Castaneda left don Juan to return to Los Angeles, the old nagual liked to say he knew what his student would be up to. He could make a list, he said- maybe a long list, but still, a list- upon which Castaneda's thoughts and actions could inevitably be found. But it was impossible for Castaneda to do the same for his teacher. There was no inter-subjectivity between the two men. Whatever it was the Indian did in the second attention could only be experienced, not conveyed. Back then, Castaneda had neither the energy nor the preparation it took for such consensus.

But the ape is possessed by words and syntax. He must understand, at all costs. And there must be regimen to his understanding.

Castaneda: "We are linear beings: dangerous creatures of habit and repetition. We need to know: There's the chicken place! There's the shoelace place! There's the car wash! If one day one of them isn't there- we go bananas."

He insisted on paying for lunch. When the waiter returned with the slip, I had a sudden urge to grab the credit card and see if it was in his name. He caught my glance.

"A business manager tried to get me to do the old American Express ad: CARLOS CASTANEDA, MEMBER SINCE 1968." He laughed gleefully, circling back to his theme. "We are heavy, heavy apes, very ritualistic. My friend Ralph used to see his grandmother on Monday nights. She died. And he said, 'Hey Joe'- I was Joe then- 'hey Joe, now we can get together on Monday nights. Are you free Mondays, Joe?' 'You mean every Monday, Ralph?' 'Yes, yes! Every Monday. Won't it be great?' 'But every Monday? forever?' 'Yes, Joe! You and me on Mondays- forever!'"


SORCERY 101

Castaneda: "I met a scientist at a party- a well-known man. Eminent. A luminary. Dr. X. He wanted to 'dis' me, heavily. He said, 'I read your first book; the rest were boring. Look, I'm not interested in anecdotes. I'm interested in proof.'

"Dr. X confronted me. He must have thought I was as important as he was.

"I said, 'If I was to prove the law of gravity, wouldn't you need a degree of training to follow me? You'd need 'membership'- maybe even equipment. You'd need to have taken Physics 1, 2, 16, maybe even Physics 23. You'd have already made tremendous sacrifices to learn: to go to school, to study long hours. You may even have stopped dating.' I told him if he wanted proof he'd have to take Sorcery 101.

"But he wouldn't do that; that takes preparation. He got angry and left the room.

"Sorcery is a flow, a process. Just as in physics, you need a certain knowledge to follow the flow of the equations.

"Dr. X would have had to do some very basic things to be in a position to have enough energy to understand the flow of sorcery. He would have had to 'recapitulate' his life. So: the scientist wanted proof but didn't want to prepare. That's the way we are. We don't want to do the work- we want to be helicoptered to awareness, without getting mud in our shoesies. And if we don't like what we see, we want to be helicoptered back."


THE TRACKS OF TIME

It is tiring being with this man Castaneda. He's overly, ruthlessly present- the fullness of his attention exhausts. He seems to respond to my queries with all he has; there's a liquid, eloquent urgency to his speech, dogged and final, elegant, elegiac. Castaneda said he feels time 'advancing' upon him.

You sense his weight, something foreign you can't identify, ethereal yet indolent, densely inert- like a plug or buoy, a cork lying heavily on the waves.

We're walking in Boyle Heights. He stops to demonstrate a martial arts position called the horse- legs slightly bent, as if in the saddle.

He said, "They stood like this in Buenos Aires-in my day. Everything was very stylized. They were adopting the poses of men long dead. My grandfather stood this way. The muscle under here"- he points to the backside of his thigh- "that's where we store nostalgia. Self-pity is a most horrendous thing."

I asked, "What did you mean about 'time advancing' on you?"

"Don Juan had a metaphor. We stand in a caboose, watching the tracks of time recede. 'there I am a five years old! There I go-' We have merely to turn around and let the time advance on us. That way, there are no a prioris.

"Nothing is presumed; nothing presupposed; nothing neatly packaged."

We sat on a bus bench. Across the street a beggar held a piece of cardboard for the motorists. Castaneda stared past him toward the horizon.

He said, "I don't have a tinge of tomorrow- and nothing from the past. The department of anthropology doesn't exist for me anymore.

"Don Juan used to say, the first part of his life was a waste- he was in limbo. The second part of his life was absorbed in the future; the third, in the past, nostalgia. Only the last part of his life was now. That's where I am."

I decided to ask something personal and prepared to be rebuffed. For them, biographical evidence will mesmerize as surely as a crack in the wall- leaving everyone with bloody fingers.

"When you were a boy, who was the most important man in your life?"

"My grandfather- he raised me." His hard eyes were glinting. "He had a stud pig called Rudy. Made a lot of money. Rudy had a little blond face-gorgeous. They used to put a hat on him, a vest. My grandfather made a tunnel from the sty to the showroom. There would come Rudy with his midget face, trailing this huge body behind! Rudy, with his screwdriver 'pincho'; we watched that pig commit barbarities."

I asked, "What was he like- your grandfather."

"I adored him. He was the one who made the agenda; I was going to carry his banner. That was my fate, but not my destiny. My grandfather was an amorous man. He schooled me in seduction at an early age. When I was twelve, I walked like him, talked like him-with a constricted larynx. He's the one who taught me to 'go in through the window.' He said women would run if I approached them head-on-I was too plain. He made me go up to little girls and say: 'You're so beautiful!' Then I'd turn and walk away. 'You are the most beautiful girl I have ever seen!'-quickly walk away. After three or four times they'd say, 'Hey! Tell me your name.' That's how I got 'in through the window.'"

He got up and walked. The beggar was heading for the bushy dead zone that surrounded the freeway. When we got to his car, Castaneda opened the door and stood a moment.

"A sorcerer asked me a question, a long time ago: What kind of face does the bogeyman have, for you? I was intrigued. This thing I thought would be shadowy, murky, had a human face- the bogeyman often has the face of something you think you love. For me, it was my grandfather. My grandfather, who I adored. I got in and he started the car. The last part of the beggar disappeared into the grubby hedgerow.

"I *was* my grandfather. Dangerous, mercenary, conniving, petty, vindictive, filled with doubt- and immovable. Don Juan knew this."


FALLING IN LOVE AGAIN

Castaneda: "At seventy-five, we're still looking for 'love' and 'companionship'. My grandfather used to wake up in the middle of the night crying, "Do you think she loves me?" His last words were, "Here I go baby, here I go!" He had a big orgasm and died. For years I thought that was the greatest thing- magnificent.

"Then don Juan said, 'Your grandfather died like a pig. His life and death had no meaning.'

"Don Juan said death can't be soothing- only triumph can. I asked him what he meant by triumph and he said 'freedom': when you break through the veil and take your life force with you.

"'But there's still so much that I want to do!'

"He said, 'You mean there are still so many women you want to fuck.'

"He was right. That's how primitive we are.

"The ape will consider the unknown, but before he jumps he demands to know: 'What's in it for me?' We're businessmen, investors, used to cutting our losses- it's a merchant's world. If we make an 'investment', we want guarantees. We fall in love but only if we're loved back. When we don't love anymore, we cut the head off and replace it with another. Our 'love' is merely hysteria. We are not affectionate beings, we are heartless.

"I thought I knew how to love. Don Juan said, 'How could you? They never taught you about love. They taught you how to seduce, to envy, to hate. You don't even love yourself- otherwise you wouldn't have put your body through such barbarities. You don't have the guts to love like a sorcerer. Could you love forever, beyond death? Without the slightest reinforcement-nothing in return? Could you love without investment, for the piss of it? You'll never know what it's like to love like that, relentlessly. Do you really want to die without knowing?'"

"No- I didn't. Before I die, I have to know what it's like to love like that. He hooked me that way. When I opened my eyes, I was already rolling down the hill. I'm still rolling."


RECAPITULATE YOUR LIFE!

I had too many Cokes and was paranoid.

Castaneda said sugar is as effective a killer as common sense. "We are not 'psychological' creatures. Our neuroses are by-products of what we put in our mouths.'- I was certain he saw my "energy body" irradiating cola. I felt absurd, defeated-I decided I would binge that night on profiteroles. Such is the piquant, dark-chocolated shame of the picayune ape.

"I had a great love affair with Coke. My grandfather possessed a pseudosensuality.

"'I gotta have that pussy! I need it! I need it now!' My grandfather thought he was the hottest dick in town. Most extravagant. I had the same thing- everything went right to my balls, but it wasn't real. Don Juan told me, 'You're being triggered by sugar. You're too flimsy to have that kind of sexual energy.' Too fat to have this 'hot dick'."

Everyone's smoking in Universal CityWalk. Strange, sitting with Carlos Castaneda in this architectural approximation of middle-class Los Angeles- this 'agglutination of detail', this 'avalanche of glosses' that is a virtual city. There are no black people and nothing resembling heightened awareness; we've shifted from the human bond to the band of MCA . We are inhabiting a perversely bland version of a familiar scene from his books, the one where he abruptly finds himself in a simulacrum of the everyday world.

"You said that if Dr. X had 'recapitulated his life,' he might have retrieved some energy. What did you mean?"

"The recapitulation is the most important thing we do. To begin, you make a list of everyone you ever knew. Everyone you ever spoke to or had dealings with."

"Everyone?"

"Yes," he said. "You go down the list, chronologically re-creating the scenes of exchange."

"But that could take years."

"Sure," he agreed. "A thorough recapitulation takes a long time. And then you start over. We are never through recapitulating- that way there's no residue. See, there's no 'rest.' Rest is a middle-class concept- the idea that if you work hard enough, you've earned a vacation. Time to go four-wheeling in the Range Rover or fishing in Montana. That's horseshit."

"You re-create the scene--"

"Start with sexual encounters. You see the sheets, the furniture, the dialogue. Then get to the person, the feeling. What were you feeling? Watch! Breathe in the energy you expended in the exchange; give back what isn't yours."

"It almost sounds like psychoanalysis."

"You don't analyze, you observe," he said. "The filigrees, the detail- you're hooking yourself to the sorcerers' intent. It's a maneuver, a magical act hundreds of years old, the key to restoring energy that will free you for other things."

"You move your head and breathe--"

"Go down the list until you get to mommy and daddy. By then you'll be shocked; you'll see patterns of repetition that will nauseate you. Who is sponsoring your insanities? Who is making the agenda? The recapitulation will give you a moment of silence- it will allow you to vacate the premises and make room for something else. From the recapitulation you come up with endless tales of the Self, but you are no longer bleeding."


EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT ENERGY.. BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK

Castaneda: "When I came to don Juan, I was already fucked to death; I'd exhausted myself that way. I'm not in the world anymore, not like that; sorcerers use that kind of energy to fly off, or to change. Fucking is our most important act, energetically. See, we've dispersed our best generals but don't try to call them back; we lose by default. That's why it's so important to recapitulate your life.

"The recapitulation separates our commitment to the social order from our life force. The two are not inextricable. Once I was able to subtract the social being from my native energy, I could clearly see: I wasn't that 'sexy'.

"Sometimes I talk to groups of psychiatrists. They want to know about the orgasm. When you're out there flying in the immensities, you don't give a shit about the 'Big O'. Most of us are frigid; all this sensuality is mental masturbation. We are 'bored fucks'- no energy at the moment of conception.

"Either we're first born and the parents didn't know how to do it, or last born and they're not interested anymore. We're fucked either way. We're just biological meat with bad habits and no energy. We are boring creatures, but instead we say, 'I'm so bored.'

"Fucking is much more injurious for women- men are drones. The universe is female. Women have total access, they're already there. It's just they're so stupidly socialized. Women are portentous fliers; they have a second brain, an organ they can use for unimaginable flight. They use their wombs for dreaming.

"'Do we have to stop fucking?'- The men ask Florinda that. She says, 'Go ahead! Stick your little pee-pee wherever you want!'

"Oh, she's a horrible witch! She's worse with the women- the weekend goddesses who paint their nipples and go on retreats. She says, 'Yes, you're here being goddesses. But what do you do when you get home? You get fucked, like slaves! The men leave luminous worms in your pussy!' A truly terrible witch!"


THE COYOTE TRAIL

Florinda Donner-Grau takes no prisoners. She is small-boned, charming, and aggressive- like a jockey with a shiv.

When Donner-Grau first encountered don Juan and his circle, she thought they were unemployed circus workers who trafficked in stolen goods. How else to explain the Baccarat crystal, the exquisite clothes, the antiquarian jewelry?

She felt adventurous around them- by nature she was cocky, daring, vivacious. For a South American girl, her life had been freewheeling.

Donner-Grau: "I thought I was the most wonderful being who ever was- so bold, so special. I raced cars and dressed like a man. Then this old Indian said the only thing 'special' about me was my blonde hair and blue eyes in a country where those things were revered. I wanted to strike him- in fact, I think I did. But he was right, you know. This celebration of Self is totally insane. What the sorcerers do is kill the Self. You must die, in that sense, in order to live- not live in order to die."

Don Juan encouraged his students to have a 'romance with knowledge.' He wanted their minds sufficiently trained to view sorcery as an authentic philosophical system; in a delicious reversal distinctive to the sorcerer's world, fieldwork led to academia. The road to magic hour was funny that way.

She recalled the first time Castaneda took her to Mexico to see Don Juan.

"We went via this long, snaky route- you know, the 'coyote trail.' I thought he was taking a weird route so we wouldn't be followed, but it was something else. You had to have enough energy to find that old Indian. After I don't know how long, there was someone on the road waving us in. I said to Carlos, 'Hey, aren't you going to stop?' He said, 'It isn't necessary.' See, we had crossed over the fog."

We rocketed past Pepperdine. Someone was selling crystals by the road. I wondered if Shirley MacLaine's house had burned; I wondered if Dick Van Dyke had rebuilt. Maybe Van Dyke had moved into MacLaine's with the Sean Penn.

I asked her, "What happens with people who are interested in your work- the ones who read your books and write letters? Do you help them?"

"People are intellectually curious, they're 'teased' or whatever. They stay until it gets too difficult. The recapitulation is very unpleasant; they want immediate results, instant gratification. For a lot of the New Agers, it's The Dating Game. They case the room- furtive, prolonged eye contact with potential partners. Or it's just shopping on Montana Avenue. When the thing becomes too expensive in terms of what they have to give of themselves, they don't want to pursue it. You see, we want minimal investment with maximal return. No one is really interested in doing the work."

I interjected, "But they would be interested, if there was some kind of proof what you're saying--"

She said, "Carlos has a great story. There was a woman he'd known for years. She called from Europe, in terrible shape. He said come to Mexico- you know, 'jump into my world.' She hesitated. Then she said, 'I'll come- as long as I know my huaraches are waiting on the other side of the river.' She wanted guarantees she'd land on her feet. Of course, there are no guarantees. We're all like that: We will jump, as long as we know our huaraches are waiting for us on the other side."

I asked, "What if you jump- as best you can- and it turns out it was only a fever dream?"

She replied, "Then have a good fever."


CARLOS CASTANEDA'S PRIVATE PARTS

"This is not a book for people."

That's what someone who has known Castaneda for years said about 'The Art of Dreaming'. In fact, it is the crown of Castaneda's work, an instruction manual to an undiscovered country- the delineation of ancient techniques used by sorcerers to enter the second attention. Like his other books, it's lucid and unnerving, yet there's something haunting about this one. It smells like it was made somewhere else. I was curious how it all began.

"I used to take notes, with don Juan- thousands of notes. Finally, he said, 'Why don't you write a book?'

"I told him that was impossible. 'I'm not a writer.'

"He said, 'But you could write a shitty book, couldn't you?'

"I thought to myself, Yes! I could write a shitty book.

"Don Juan laid down a challenge: 'Can you write this book, knowing it may bring notoriety? Can you remain impeccable? If they love you or hate you is meaningless. Can you write this book and not give in to what may come your way?'

"I agreed. Yes. I'll do it.

"And terrifying things came my way. But the panties didn't fit."

I told Carlos I wasn't sure about the last remark, and he laughed.

He said, "That's an old joke. A woman's car breaks down and a man repairs it. She has no money and offers him earrings. He tells her his wife wouldn't believe him. She offers her watch but he tells her bandits will steal it. Finally, she takes off her panties to give him. 'No, please,' he says. 'They're not my size.'"


THE CRITERIA FOR BEING DEAD

Castaneda: "I had never been alone until I met don Juan. He said, "Get rid of your friends. They will never allow you to act with independence- they know you too well. You will never be able to come from left field with something shattering".

"Don Juan told me to rent a room, the more sordid the better.

"Something with green floors and green curtains that reeked of piss and cigarettes.

"'Stay there', he said. 'Be alone until you are dead.'

"I told him I couldn't do it. I didn't want to leave my friends.

"He said, 'Well, I can't talk to you ever again.' He waved goodbye- big smile.

"Boy, was I relieved! This weird old man-this Indian-had thrown me out. The whole thing had tied itself up so neatly.

"The closer I got to L.A., the more desperate I became. I realized what I was going home to-my "friends." And for what? To have meaningless dialogue with those who knew me so well. To sit on the couch by the phone waiting to be invited to a party.

"Endless repetition. I went to the green room and called don Juan. 'Hey, not that I'm going to do it- but tell me, what is the criteria for being dead?'

"'When you no longer care whether you have company or whether you are alone. That is the criteria for being dead.'

"It took three months to be dead. I climbed the walls desperate for a friend to drop by. But I stayed. By the end, I'd gotten rid of assumptions; you don't go crazy being alone. You go crazy the way you're going, that's for sure. You can count on it."


ASSEMBLING AWARENESS

We headed in his station wagon toward the cheap apartment house where Castaneda went to die.

"We could go to your old room," I said, "and knock on the door. For the hell of it." He said that might be taking things too far.

Castaneda: "'What do you want out of life?' That's what Don Juan used to ask me. My classic response: 'Frankly, Don Juan, I don't know.' That was my pose as the 'thoughtful' man- the intellectual. Don Juan said, 'That answer would satisfy your mother, not me.'

"See, I couldn't think-I was bankrupt. And he was an Indian. Carajo, cono! God, you don't know what that means. I was polite, but I looked down on him. One day he asked if we were equals. Tears sprang to my eyes as I threw my arms around him.

"'Of course we're equals, don Juan! How could you say such a thing!' Big hug; I was practically weeping.

"'You really mean it?' he said.

"'Yes, by God!'

"When I stopped hugging him he said, 'No, we are not equals. I am an impeccable warrior- and you are an asshole. I could sum up my whole life in a moment. You cannot even think.'"

We pulled over and parked underneath some trees. Castaneda stared at the seedy building with an odd ebullience, shocked it was still there. He said it should have been torn down long ago- that its perseverance in the world was some kind of weird magic. Children were playing with a giant plastic fire engine. A homeless woman drifted past like a somnambulist.

He made no move to get out. He began talking about what 'dying in that green room' meant. By the time he had left that place, Castaneda was finally able to listen unjaundiced to the old Indian's far-out premises.

Don Juan told him that when sorcerers see energy, the human form presents itself as a luminous egg. Behind the egg- roughly an arm's length from the shoulders- is the 'assemblage point', where incandescent strands of awareness are gathered. The way we perceive the world is determined by the point's position. The assemblage point of mankind is fixed at the same point on each egg; such uniformity accounts for our shared view of everyday life.

Sorcerers call this arena of awareness 'the first attention.' Our way of perceiving changes with the point's displacement by injury, shock, drugs- or in sleep, when we dream. 'The art of dreaming' is to displace and fix the assemblage point in a new position, engendering the perception of alternate, all-inclusive worlds- "the second attention".

Smaller shifts of the point within the egg are still inside the human band and account for the hallucinations of delirium- or the world encountered during dreams.

Larger movements of the assemblage point, more dramatic, pull the 'energy body' outside the human band to nonhuman realms. That is where don Juan and his party journeyed in 1973 when they 'burned from within', fulfilling the unthinkable assertion of his lineage: evolutionary flight.

Castaneda learned that whole civilizations- a conglomerate of dreamers- had vanished in the same way.

He told me about a sorcerer of his lineage who had tuberculosis- and was able to shift his assemblage point away from death. That sorcerer had to remain impeccable; his illness hung over him like a sword. He could not afford an ego- he knew precisely where his death lay, waiting for him.

Castaneda turned to me, smiling. "Hey..." He had a strangely effusive look, and I was ready. For three weeks I'd been awash in his books and their contagious presentation of possibilities. Perhaps this was the moment in which I'd make my pact with Mescalito. Or had we already 'crossed over the fog' without my knowing?

"Hey," he said again, his eyes fairly twinkling. "Do you want to get a hamburger?"


BOYCOTTING THE PAGEANT

Abelar: "That the assemblage point of man is fixed in one position is a crime."

I sat with Taisha Abelar on a bench in front of the art museum on Wilshire.

She didn't sync up with my image of her. Castaneda said that as part of Abelar's training, she'd assumed different personas- one being the 'Madwoman of Oaxaca', a lecherous, mud-smeared beggar woman- back in her days as a struggling actress in 'Sorcery Action Theater'.

"I was going to call my book 'The Great Crossing' but I thought that was too Eastern."

I said, "The Buddhist concept is pretty similar."

"There are lots of parallels. Our group has been crossing over for years but only recently have we compared notes- because our leaving is imminent.

"Seventy-five percent of our energy is there, 25 percent here. That's why we have to go."

I asked, "Is that where Carol Tiggs was? That 75 percent place?"

"You mean the Twilight Zone?"

She waited a deadpan beat, then laughed.

"We felt Carol Tiggs on our bodies when she was gone. She had tremendous mass. She was like a lighthouse; a beacon. She gave us hope-an incentive to go on. Because we knew she was there. Whenever I would become self-indulgent, I felt her tap me on the shoulder. She was our magnificent obsession."

I asked, "Why is it so difficult for the 'ape' to make his journey?"

"We perceive minimally; the more entanglements we have in this world, the harder it is to say goodbye. And we all have them- we all want fame, we want to be loved, to be liked. My gosh, some of us have children. Why would anyone want to leave? We wear a hood, cloaked... we have our happy moments that last us the rest of our lives. I know someone who was Miss Alabama. Is that enough to keep her from freedom? Yes. 'Miss Alabama' is enough to pin her down."

It was time to pose one of the Large Questions (there were a number of them): When they spoke of 'crossing over', did that mean with their physical bodies?

She replied that changing the Self didn't mean the Freudian ego but the actual, concrete Self- yes, the physical body.

"When don Juan and his party left," she said, "they went with the totality of their beings. They left with their boots on."

She said dreaming was the only authentic new realm of philosophical discourse- that Merleau-Ponty was wrong when he said mankind was condemned to prejudge an a priori world.

She said, "There is a place of no a prioris- the second attention. Don Juan always said philosophers were 'sorcerers manques.' What they lacked was the energy to jump beyond their idealities.

"We all carry bags toward freedom: Drop the baggage. We even need to drop the baggage of sorcery. "

I asked, "The baggage of sorcery?"

"We don't do sorcery; we do nothing. All we do is move the assemblage point. In the end, 'being a sorcerer' will trap you as sure as Miss Alabama."

A shabby, toothless woman shuffled toward us with postcards for sale- the Madwoman of the Miracle Mile. I picked one and gave her a dollar. I showed it to Abelar; it was a picture of Jesus, laughing.

"A rare moment," she said.


THE GUESTS ARRIVE

Where in this world is there left to explore?

It's all a priori-done and exhausted. We are slated for senility; it waits for us like magina, the river sickness. When I was a boy, I heard of it. A disease of memories and remembrance. It attacks people who live on the river shore. You become possessed of a longing that pushes you to move on and on- to roam without sense, endlessly. The river meanders; people used to say "the river is alive." When it reverses its course, it never remembers it was once flowing east to west. The river forgets itself.

There was a woman I used to visit at the convalescent home. She was there fifteen years. For fifteen years she prepared daily for a party she was throwing at the Hotel del Coronado. This was her delusion; she would ready herself each day but the guests would never come. She finally died. Who knows- maybe that was the day they finally arrived.


THE INDEX OF INTENT

"How should I say you look?", I asked Castaneda.

It was dusk in Roxbury Park. There was the steady, distant whomp of a tennis ball volleying against a concrete backstop.

His voice became unctuously absurd. He was Fernando Rey, the bourgeois narcissist- with just a hint of Laurence Harvey.

He said, "You may say I resemble Lee Marvin.

"I read an article once in Esquire about California witchcraft. The first sentence went: 'Lee Marvin is scared.' Whenever something is not quite right, you can hear me: Lee Marvin is scared."

We agreed I would describe Castaneda as wheelchair-bound, with beautifully 'cut' arms and torso. I would say he wore fragrance by Bijan and long hair that delicately framed a face like the young Foucault.

He began to laugh. "I knew this woman once, she gives seminars now on Castaneda. When she felt depressed, she had a trick- a way to get out of it. She'd say to herself: 'Carlos Castaneda looks like a Mexican waiter'

"This is all it took to pull her up. Carlos Castaneda looks like a Mexican waiter!- instantly refreshed. Fascinating! How sad. But for her, it was good as Prozac!"

I'd been leafing through the books again and wanted to ask about 'intent'. It was one of the most abstract, prevalent concepts of their world. They spoke of intending freedom, of intending the energy body-they even spoke of intending intent.

"I don't understand intent," I said.

"You don't understand anything," Castaneda replied.

I was taken aback. He continued, "None of us do! We don't understand the world, we merely handle it- but we handle it beautifully.

"So when you say 'I don't understand,' that's just a slogan. You never understood anything to begin with."

I was feeling argumentative. Even sorcery had a 'working definition.' Why couldn't he give one for 'intent'?

"I cannot tell you what intent is. I don't know myself. Just make it a new indexical category. We are taxonomists- how we love to keep indexes! Once, don Juan asked me: 'What is a university?' I told him it was a school for higher learning. He said, 'But what is a "school for higher learning"?' I told him it was a place where people met to learn. 'A park? A field?' He got me.

"I realized that 'university' had a different meaning for the taxpayer, for the teacher, for the student. We have no idea what 'university' is! It's an indexical category, like 'mountain' or 'honor.' You don't need to know what 'honor' is to move toward it. So move toward intent. Make intent an index.

"Intent is merely the awareness of a possibility- of a chance to have a chance. It's one of the perennial forces in the universe that we never call on- by hooking onto the intent of the sorcerer's world, you're giving yourself a chance to have a chance. You're not hooking onto the world of your father, the world of being buried six feet under. Intend to move your assemblage point.

"How? By intending! Pure sorcery."

I replied, "Move toward it, without understanding."

He said, "Certainly! 'Intent' is just an index- most fallacious, but utterly utilizable. Just like 'Lee Marvin is scared'."


POOR BABYISM

Castaneda: "I meet people all the time who are dying to tell me their tales of sexual abuse. One guy told me when he was ten, his father grabbed his cock and said, 'This is for fucking!' That traumatized him for ten years! He spent thousands on psychoanalysis. Are we that vulnerable? Bullshit. We've been around five billion years! But that defines him: He is a 'sexual abuse victim.' Mierda.

"We are all poor babies.

"Don Juan forced me to examine how I related to people when I wanted them to feel sorry for me. That was my 'one trick'. We have one trick that we learn early on and repeat until we die. If we are very imaginative, we have two. Turn on the television and listen to the talk shows: poor babies to the end.

"We love Jesus- bleeding, nailed to the cross. That's our symbol. No one's interested in the Christ who was resurrected and ascended to Heaven. We want to be martyrs, losers; we don't want to succeed. Poor babies, praying to the poor baby. When Man fell to his knees, he became the asshole he is today."


CONFESSIONS OF AN AWARENESS ADDICT

Castaneda has long eschewed psychotropic drugs, yet they were an enormous part of his initiation into the nagual's world. I asked what that was about.

He said, "Being male, I was very rigid - my assemblage point was immovable. Don Juan was running out of time, so he employed desperate measures."

"That's why he gave you the drugs?" I asked. "To dislodge your assemblage point?"

He nodded, saying, "But with drugs, there's no control; it moves helter-skelter."

I asked, "Does that mean the time came when you were able to shift your assemblage point and dream without the use of drugs?"

"Certainly!" he replied. "That was don Juan's doing. You see, Juan Matus didn't give a fuck about 'Carlos Castaneda'. He was interested in that other being, the energy body- what sorcerers call 'the double'. That's what he wanted to awaken.

"You use your Double to dream, to navigate in the second attention. That's what pulls you to freedom. 'I trust that the Double will do its duty,' don Juan said. 'I will do anything for it- to help it awaken.' I got chills.

"These people were for real. They did not die crying for their mommies- Crying for pussy."

We were at a little cafe in the middle of the Santa Monica Airport. I went to the bright bathroom to wet my face and take it all in. I stared in the mirror and thought about the Double. I remembered something don Juan told Castaneda in the Art of Dreaming. "Your passion," don Juan had said, "is to jump without capriciousness or premeditation to cut someone else's chains."

On the way back, I formed a question.

"What was it like- I mean, the first time you shifted your assemblage point without drugs?"

He paused for a moment, then moved his head from side to side. "Lee Marvin was very scared!"

He laughed. "Once you start breaking the barriers of normal, historical perception, you believe you are insane. You need the nagual then, simply to laugh. He laughs your fears away."


THE PLUMED SERPENT

Castaneda: "I saw them go- don Juan and his group, a whole flock of sorcerers. They went to a place free from humanness and the compulsive worshipping of man. They burned from within. They made a movement as they went, they call it the "plumed serpent." They became energy; even their shoes. They made one last turn, one pass, to see this exquisite world for the last time. Ooh-woo-woo! I get chills-I shake. One last turn . . . for my eyes only.

"I could have gone with him. When don Juan left he said, 'It takes all my guts to go. I need all my courage, all my hope- no expectations. To stay behind, you will need all your hope and all your courage.'

"I took a beautiful jump into the abyss and woke up in my office, near Tiny Naylor's.

"I interrupted the flow of psychological continuity: Whatever woke up in that office could not be the 'me' that I knew linearly. That's why I'm the nagual.

The nagual is a nonentity- not a person. In place of the ego is something else, something very old. Something observant, detached- and infinitely less committed to the Self. A man with an ego is driven by psychological desires.

The nagual has none. He receives orders from some ineffable source that cannot be discussed. That's the final understanding: The nagual, in the end, becomes a tale, a story. He cannot be offended, jealous, possessive- he can't be anything. But he can tell tales of jealousy and passion.

The only thing the nagual fears is 'ontological sadness.' [ontological: of or relating to the metaphysical study of the nature of being and existence]

Not nostalgia for the good old days- that's egomania. Ontological sadness is something different. There's a perennial force that exists in the universe, like gravity, and the nagual feels it. It's not a psychological state. It is a confluence of forces that unite to clobber this poor microbe who has vanquished his ego. It is felt when there are no longer any attachments. You see it coming, then you feel it on top of you.


THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG-DISTANCE REPLICANT

Castaneda used to love the movies, 10,000 years ago- back when they showed all-nighters at the Vista in Hollywood- back when he was learning the criteria for being dead. He doesn't go anymore, but the witches still do. It's a diversion from their freakish, epic activities- sort of like safe-sex dreaming. But not really.

He told me, "You know, there's a scene in Blade Runner that really got to us. The writer doesn't know what he's saying, but he hit something. The replicant is talking at the end: 'My eyes have seen inconceivable things.' He's talking about the constellations- 'I have seen attack ships off of Orion'- nonsense, inanities. That was the only flaw for us, because the writer hasn't seen anything. But then the speech becomes beautiful. It's raining and the replicant says, 'What if all those moments will be lost in time... like tears in the rain?'

"This is a very serious question for us. They may be just tears in the rain- yes. But you do your best, sir. You do your best and if your best isn't good enough, then fuck it. If your best isn't good enough, fuck God himself."


A FOOTNOTE TO FEMINISTS

Before I met him a final time, I was scheduled to see the mysterious Carol Tiggs for breakfast. Twenty years before, she had 'jumped' with don Juan Matus's party into the unknown. Unimaginably, she had returned, somehow triggering a veritable road show of sorcerers. I was feeling more and more uneasy about our pending appointment. Each time the Large Question loomed- "Where the hell were you those ten years?", it evanesced. I felt like I was on the tracks; Carol Tiggs was waving from the caboose.

In a universe of dualities, Tiggs and Castaneda are energetic counterparts. They are not in the world together as man and wife. They have 'double' energy; to a seer, their energetic bodies would each appear as two luminous eggs instead of one. This doesn't make them 'better' than Donner-Grau or Abelar or anyone- on the contrary. It gave them the predilection, as Juan Matus once said, to be "twice the asshole."

Until now, Castaneda wrote exclusively about don Juan's world, never his own. But The Art of Dreaming is suffused with Carol Tiggs's dark, extraneous presence- and rife with hair-raising accounts of their excursions into the second attention, including the precipitous rescue of a "sentient being from another dimension" who takes the form of an angular, steely-eyed little girl called the Blue Scout.

I was just about to leave when the phone rang. I was sure it was Tiggs, calling to cancel. It was Donner-Grau.

I told her a dream I had that morning. I was with Castaneda in a gift shop called the Coyote Trail. She didn't care! She said normal dreams were just "meaningless masturbations." Cruel, heartless witch.

She said, "I wanted to add something. People say to me, 'Here you are putting feminism down- the 'leader' of this group was Juan Matus and now the new nagual is Carlos Castaneda- why is it always a male?'

"Well, the reason those males were 'leaders' was a matter of energy-not because they knew more or were 'better.'

"You see, the universe truly is female; the male is pampered because he is unique. Carlos guides us not in what we do in the world, but in dreaming.

"Don Juan had this horrible phrase. He used to say women are 'cracked cunts'- he wasn't being derogatory. It's precisely because we are 'cracked' that we have the facility for dreaming. Males are rigid through and through. But women have no sobriety, no structure, no context; in sorcery, that's what the male provides. The feminists become enraged when I say females are inherently complacent, but it's true! That's because we receive knowledge directly. We don't have to endlessly talk about it- that's the male process.

"Do you know what the nagual is? The myth of the nagual? That there are unlimited possibilities for all of us to be something else than what we are raised to be. You don't have to follow the route of your parents. Whether I'm going to succeed or not is immaterial."


FOR YOUR EYES ONLY

Just after I hung up, the phone rang again. Carol Tiggs was calling to cancel. I expected to feel relief but it was a bringdown.

I'd spoken to people who had seen her lecture in Maui and Arizona. They said she was gorgeous; that she worked the room like a stand-up; that she did a mean Elvis. "I'm sorry we can't meet," she said. At least she sounded genuine. "I was looking forward to it."

I replied, "It's okay. I'll catch up with you at one of your lectures."

"Oh, I don't think I'll be doing that again for a while." There was a pause.

She said, "I have something for you. "

"Is it the lightning from your tits?"

She hesitated a moment then broke into peals of laughter.

She said, "Something much more dramatic."

I felt a tug at the pit of my stomach.

She continued, saying, "You know, they always said people have this split between mind and body- this imbalance, this 'mindbody problem.' But the real dichotomy is between physical body and energy body. We die without having ever awakened that magical Double, and it hates us for that.

"It hates us so much it eventually kills us. That's the whole 'secret' of sorcery: accessing the Double for abstract flight. Sorcerers jump into the void of pure perception with their energy body."

Another pause. I wondered if that was all she was going to say. I was about to speak but something held my words in check.

"There's a song that don Juan thought was beautiful- he said the lyricist nearly got it right. Don Juan substituted one word to make it perfect. He put in 'freedom' where the songwriter had written 'love'."

Then the ghostly recitation began:

      You only live twice
      Or so it seems.
      One life for yourself
      And one for your dreams.
      You drift through the years
      And life seems tame.
      'Til one dream appears
      And Freedom is its name.
      And Freedom's a stranger
      Who'll beckon you on
      Don't think of the danger
      Or the stranger is gone.
      This dream is for you
      So pay the price.
      Make one dream come true. . . *

   * From "You Only Live Twice" 
     by John Barry and Leslie Bricusse

She held back in silence a moment.

Then she said "Sweet dreams," parodied a witchy cackle, and hung up.


ITCH OF THE NAGUAL

As the days became chillier it was easy to feel regret- about anything, even Prozac. What if it turns out Castaneda is inventing nothing? If that's true, then you are in a very bad spot.

We met for the last time on a cold day at the beach, by the pier. He said he couldn't stay long. He was sorry I wasn't able to meet Carol Tiggs. Some other time. I felt much the poor baby - Damnit, I just want to be loved. I was scared as Lee Marvin; I was Rutger Hauer with a tin cup; a shrieking Miracle Mile Jesus. And Jesus looked down on all the people and said: I'm so bored. We sat down on one of the benches on the bluff. I wanted to detain him, just for a moment.

I said, "Tell me the last time you felt nostalgia."

He answered without hesitation.

"When I had to say goodbye to my grandfather. He was long dead by then. Don Juan told me it was time to say goodbye: I was preparing for a long journey, no return. You have to say goodbye, he said, because you will never come back. I conjured my grandfather in front of me- saw him in perfect detail. A total vision of him. He had 'dancing eyes.' Don Juan said, 'Make your goodbye forever.' Oh, the anguish! It was time to drop the banner, and I did. My grandfather became a story. I've told it thousands of times."

We walked to his car.

He said, "I feel an itch in my solar plexus- very exciting. I remember don Juan used to feel that, but I didn't understand what it meant. It means it will soon be time to go." He shivered with delight. "How exquisite!"

As he drove off, he shouted at me through the window: "Goodbye, illustrious gentleman!"


THE DIMMING OF THE LIGHTS

I heard about a lecture in San Francisco. I was finished writing about them but decided to drive up. To put a cork in it, so to speak.

The auditorium was in an industrial park in Silicon Valley. His plane was late; when he walked in, the hall was filled. He spoke eloquently for three hours without a break. He answered questions with incitements, solicitations, and parries. No one moved.

At the end, he talked about killing the ego. "Don Juan had a metaphor: 'The lights are dimming, the musicians packing away their instruments. There is no more time for dancing: It is time to die.' Juan Matus said there was endless time, and no time at all- the contradiction is sorcery. Live it! Live it gorgeously."

A young man rose from the audience.

"But how can we do this without someone like don Juan? How can we do it without joining-"

"No one 'joins' us. There are no gurus. You don't need don Juan," he said emphatically. "I needed him- so I can explain it to you. If you want freedom, you need decision. We need mass in the world; we don't want to be masturbators.

If you recapitulate, you'll gather the energy- we will find you.

But you need a lot of energy. And for that, you have to work your balls off. So, suspend your judgment and take the option. Do it.

"Don Juan used to say, 'One of us is an asshole. And it isn't me.'" He paused a beat. "That's what I came to tell you today." Everyone roared with laughter and rose in applause as Castaneda left through the back door.

I wanted to chase him down, screaming "Please love me!" That would have been good for a laugh, anyway. But I forgot my tin cup.

I walked the sidewalk edges of the pond in darkness. A light wind scattered the brittle leaves on its border. One of our conversations came back- he'd been talking about love. I heard his voice and imagined myself on the caboose, slowly turning to face the words as they advanced...

He had said, "I fell in love when I was nine years old. Truly, I found my other Self. Truly. But it was not fated. Don Juan told me I would have been static, immobile. My fate was dynamic. One day, the love of my life-- this nine-year old girl!-- moved away. My grandmother said, 'Don't be a coward! Go after her!'

"I loved my grandmother but never told her, because she embarrassed me- I thought she had a speech impediment. She called me 'afor' instead of 'amor.' It was really just a foreign accent, but I was very young, I didn't know.

"My grandmother put a bunch of coins in my hand. 'Go and get her! We'll hide her and I'll raise her!' I took the money and started to go. Just then, my grandmother's lover whispered something in her ear. She turned to me with an empty look. 'Afor,' she said, 'afor, my precious darling...' and she took the money back. 'I am sorry, but we have just run out of time.' And I forgot about it- it took don Juan to put it together, years later.

"It haunts me. When I feel the itch- and the clock says quarter to twelve- I get chills! I shake, to this day!

"'Afor... my darling. We have just run out of time.'"



Copyright March 1994 Details Magazine

Dimensions Magazine - 1994

"The Art Of Stalking True Freedom"

Taisha Abelar In Conversation with Alexander Blair-Ewart, Part 1.

In the long years when Carlos Castaneda first informed the world of the wonders of American aboriginal spirit knowledge, many recognized that a tradition of great significance had begun to reveal itself to the world. Over the years Castaneda has progressively shown the all-engulfing world view of the Toltecs in its reformed state as a work of spiritual art, shaped by the new seers, who have survived the devastating encounter with European colonial civilization.

Taisha Abelar, author of the new book The Sorcerer's Crossing (Viking Arkana) is one of the new seers whose designation "stalker" balances the world of the "dreamer" [see Dimensions Feb '92 interview with the "dreamer" Florinda Donner]. It is with true delight that we witness the emergence into the world of a new and genuine way of the spirit.

Alexander Blair-Ewart:   One meets people who have abandoned reason and logic, and the natural functions of the mind, and who end up in a kind of twilight zone of not really being able to derive any clarity about anything.

Taisha Abelar:   Yes, and that was one of the major pitfalls of the old sorcerers, who emphasized dreaming techniques to shift the assemblage point, but they did not have the stalker's technique to balance that out. It's a question of balance, because unless you have the sobriety and the control, what's the point of moving the assemblage point? You move it and you get lost in those realms and you're never able to return to this level, which is what we're doing at this point. We're moving into other realms, but we're also returning to this reality, shifting back and forth. And we have that control.

Abe:   So you also call that the 'day' and 'night' sides of consciousness. Is that correct?

Tashia:   Yes, you can think of it like that. although, when you are in the night side, you are absolutely in the night side, and that becomes your day. But it's true. You want to be able to maintain an order, because what stalking does is that it has to fixate the assemblage point to a new position, wherever that is. It could be out in a totally different reality. but you still want, within that, to maintain the sobriety and your consciousness, your awareness, that has to remain intact. And that's where your stalker's techniques come in, because if you lose that, either through fright or indulgence or just sheer ignorance, then you lose everything. It's like you say, you end up in this twilight zone, and you've lost the game, in other words. You want to be able to maintain the order, and in stalking you create the reality wherever you are by creating structure, by imputing order, be reasoning. You can reason even if you're in a totally different realm. You still maintain your awareness. You try to bring order to the inconceivable perceptions, the chaos that is the universe. And so wherever you move the assemblage point, the energy for maintaining your awareness intact has to also be there. So that's the prerequisite for shifting into different realities.

Abe:   So your essential beinghood, your essential humanity survives this transition into worlds of alternative reality?

Tashia:   I wouldn't say your humanity, but...

Abe:   ...I said your "essential" humanity...

Tashia:   ...your luminous "double".

Abe:   Yes.

Tashia:   Your luminosity and your awareness, which is the assemblage point, stays intact elsewhere. But it's not human. It doesn't have to be human, and there's the error that we don't want to make. No, you leave everything that's human behind.

Abe:   Now, most people would not really want to do that.

Tashia:   Exactly, no, they don't. And there's a lot of interest in our work, and in Carlos Castaneda, and in don Juan. But they don't really want it. What they like is an intellectual curiosity, the possibility that there's something else out there, because we all have that as human beings.

Abe:   So, in that sense, there's all of the work that Castaneda has published, and Florinda Donner. And now there's this book from you. And I have a hunch that there are going to be other books from other previously unheard of members of that spiritual school or tradition. And yet the books are going out there; literally millions of people, as you know, have read the books; hundreds of thousands of people have tried to do what is in them. And yet we're acknowledging here that this work, this sorcerer's path is really only for the few. Very very few people will actually walk this path. Why did you publish the book?

Tashia:   Good question. There's a double answer here. First of all, one reason is that Carlos Castaneda and Florinda Donner, myself and Carol Tiggs, we're the last of don Juan's line; he's the last of that lineage, the end of the line. They didn't know at the time that they were training us--and I came into don Juan's world very young, when I first became an adult. I'd been with don Juan and then with Carlos Castaneda all my adult life--and they didn't know that Carlos Castaneda was going to be the next Nagual, and that he would have his structure of people according to the rule, which is very specific, and sets up the dreamers and stalkers, and it has a certain numerical configuration. But they trained us in dreaming and stalking and many of the techniques that they use, they handed down to us. but then it turned out Carlos Castaneda is not at all a four-sided Nagual. A Nagual is one that has four energetic compartments, and this is really a question of the energetic makeup of luminous beings. He's a three-sided Nagual, meaning his mission is different, and one of the major differences is that the Nagual woman who usually goes with the previous Nagual's group, in this case Carol Tiggs, she went with don Juan, but one day she came back. The Nagual Carlos' intent, or Florinda Donner's and mine, we literally hold her back into this reality. In other words, her assemblage point shifted back, so that she is now with us. Now that's absolutely unheard of in all the generations of Naguals and seers in don Juan's lineage. So, because she came back, she gave us that energy of actually writing about our experiences.

Abe:   Carol Tiggs came back, and the idea was that she was going to go with don Juan Matus.

Tashia:   And she did. When they left they took her.

Abe:   And Carlos was supposed to find the next Nagual and the next Nagual woman. Then, when he would have taken her and the cycle would have continued. But now this unprecedented thing has occurred. What does it mean?

Tashia:   The designs of the Spirit are absolutely different from what they were for don Juan. His group followed the rules, they had a certain training procedure. Although they were abstract, they were in a sense very concrete. They were practitioners of the things that were handed down to them by the previous group. And they handed these things down to us. But the things that we actually only really keep are the most abstract things, like the recapitulation, the idea of impeccability, the things that we do or are not doing, which is the total negation of practices or procedures, and I am going to talk about those. but your question is why is it coming out now, and why are we writing. The Nagual woman gave us this extra energy to bring these things out into the ordinary reality. Otherwise, unless there's the energy, they would forever remain ideas. Although, we practice them; we are the ideas. There's no difference between what we say and what we do, and that's why we are able to move our assemblage points, because they're not only abstractions, but our bodies actually embody these things. So therefore our assemblage point moves. But unless the energy is there, one is not able to bring it out into this reality for other people to see. So a lot of these things, we've had, we've written down, we've had these things, we were taught them many many years ago. The things that I write about happened many years ago. But there wasn't that energy to put it out, to give it a concrete form, in other words. The second reason is that, since there are no apprentices, so to speak, the design of the Spirit, and I repeat that, I keep saying that, because it's nothing that we decide...There's no way I can say, oh, I'm going to write this and do this, because I have no volition in that sense. The design of the Spirit decides that this should be coming out now, and so it is, and because, I would say, there is no next generation, in the traditional sense. So it has to be put out to whoever is out there. And like you say, yes, there are thousands, maybe millions of people that are reading these things. And one of them could practice them and succeed in finding the way. And the reason I say that is because you don't need a teacher. Being abstract, the way all of us are in this last generation, we can see that all you need is like a minimal chance, and idea. Given the word, the possibility that this is what you can do, the recapitulation is like this, and then if somebody does it, they can move their assemblage point, and something will happen and the Spirit or the Intent itself will guide them and teach them. And that's already built into the recapitulation, into the not-doing exercises, into the books themselves. The intent is already there. Okay, so we said that most people won't want to leave the pack. They'll feel that this is not for them. That's the way it is, yes. But, there's some people out there that this will affect, and those are the people for whom the books are written, and who knows what will happen?

Abe:   Can you talk in a more specific way about the 'recapitulation'?

Tashia:   Okay. What it is is really a very very ancient technique handed down by the old sorcerer's in don Juan's lineage. But it was sort of forgotten by them, because they were more interested in power and having power over others, dominating people, that kind of thing. The furthest thing form their mind was the idea of losing self importance. But the technique was there, and the new sorcerers revived it, so to speak, and it was handed down, and it came to the Nagual Carlos and us. And we now consider it really the fundamental technique in sorcery of all the techniques we learned for moving the assemblage point. The recapitulation is really the best one for modern man, and the reason we put so much emphasis on it--don Juan put the emphasis on it, too--is because anyone can do it. You don't have to be a "sorcerer's apprentice" or anything like that. Just any individual with minimal interest--they don't even have to be absolutely devoted or anything, but have some curiosity--can start this. It is a technique for erasing the idea of the self, or what the self is, in terms of all the memories and associations with people that one had during one's lifetime. And it's not just an idea. I mean, I say idea, but it's an energetic idea, because when one interacts with persons, energy is exchanged, of course. Al lot of it is lost or left in things. Through concerns or deep emotions, it's left in the world and in people. And the strategy--because it is a sorcerer's strategy--is to regain that, to bring it back, so you can have it all with you now, in the present. Why leave it floating around in some mysterious past that kind of holds you fixed in the place where you are? So what you do is you sit, you find a place where you have some quiet and solitude, preferably a closet or big box or even a shower, because you want an enclosed space--the sorcerers used to have their recapitulation boxes, where they would bury themselves, or be in a cave. I started mine in a small cave. Something that encloses the energetic body, so that there's some pressure put on the luminous self. Before you sit, you make out your list. You have a list of everyone that you've every met, encountered, had anything to do with throughout your life. So this takes some doing, and some remembering. This remembering, in itself, sort of loosens the assemblage point. So it's kind of like a preliminary exercise. By going back in your mind and remembering everybody that you've every known, you work from the present backwards, and you write down all the people that you've worked with, your family, your associates, everybody that you've had anything to do with. Actually you make two lists. First of all your sexual experiences. Anyone that you've had any sexual dealings with. And sorcerers always say you start there, because that's the fundamental energy that's lost out there, and if you retrieve that, then that will give you the boost to do your other people. So you have your two lists, and then you sit in your recapitulation box, cave or closet, and you start the breathing. The third element besides the lists and the box or the place is the breath. And the breath is very important, because the breathing is what disentangles the energy. And this is already set up by Intent. Our interaction with others is done with our energetic body, and the breath moves the luminous fibres. You start on your right shoulder, where you put your hand--actually I describe this in my book pretty well--but you start on your right shoulder, and when you have set up the scene of people and places in your mind, you've situated everything and you've visualized it to perfection in all its detail, then you have your chin on your right shoulder and you breath in, turning your head to your left shoulder, and then you exhale moving your head back to your right shoulder, and then bring you head to the centre. You sweep it; it's like a sweeping of the scene. You just sweep the whole room or person or place, whatever. And you pull back whatever of that other person's energy was left in you. You exhale it and give it back. In a sense you detach yourself from that particular encounter. And you do this with everything.

FORMLESS AND PATTERNLESS:
After you've done it with your whole life, you detach pretty much from your remembered past. This is not an analysis, by the way. It's not meant to be like a real self analysis, but you can't help seeing in the way you act and behave and what is expected of you, a pattern forming, and absolute pattern emerging. And with the breath, you break that pattern. So what you essentially want to do is move into formless, patternless behaviour, which is the way a sorcerer acts. He's absolutely fluid. And that brings us back to stalking. A stalker is someone who makes himself inobtrusive, the art of being inobtrusive. He had no self, no pattern, nothing to assert, no point to make, no demands, no desires. And all this will be eliminated through the recapitulation. And then there's some other things that really need to be done with that, and that's quieting the internal dialogue. So that when you're now here it this today, you have all your energy with you so that you don't persist in repeating that same patterns of behaviour. And the way these patterns are ingrained in us is through that internal dialogue, in which we keep repeating certain things to ourselves, like "Oh, I'm no good" or "They don't like me" or "I have to be like this, prove myself here". Whatever goes through one's mind, which is a constant flow of thoughts or reaffirmations, really, of the self. And so, the sorcerers say that you really need to put a stop to that continual reinforcement of the self, which is that position of the assemblage point. Now when you do the breathing with the recapitulation, by moving back into the past, moving forward into now, and that intense concentration that is needed to sit there and visualize these things, that shifts your assemblage point minutely. And whoever does the recapitulation will see that. They'll see that oh, god, I'm doing this again, and ten years later doing it again. The same kind of relationships, again, the same type of man, the same type of woman. We know somebody who says he always picks difficult women. (laughter) I don't know what that means, but it's true. It's like this person is doomed to have difficult relationships. So patterns get repeated, no matter what they are, and whoever recapitulates will see that. So the seer within us gets to break out. And then, as you do this and you go back into your regular day to day life, you become more quiet, and then you do these techniques once a week to quiet the internal dialogue, and some of them are described in my book. There's lots of things like this in Carlos Castaneda's books on gazing, certain gazing techniques. Or you can do a match gazing technique. You just hold up the flame for a moment, and then you douse the tip of it, and then you turn it upside down, after you've kind of cooled off the tip while it's still burning, turn it upside down and hold it in your left hand and look at the flame as it burns the bottom of the match in front of your eyes, and that quiets the mind. You can use any minor meditation techniques. I wouldn't say go heavily into Oriental meditation techniques, because you're already doing recapitulation and you don't want to get fixed into any form. All we're doing now as abstract sorcerers is a minimal of technique so that we can get away from the self. We don't want to get heavier in the area of ego and ego enforcement, and "now we're meditators", or "now we're..."

Abe:   So you don't want to build up an image of yourself, even as a spiritual person.

Tashia:   No, you don't. You don't want to add to that. And when you look at how much you have to get rid of you'll be kind of careful not to add more. (laughter) And you don't want to add more in terms of becoming more important in other areas, just because you're getting rid of some of these old things. But you're putting that energy into fighting with your husband or wife. And that's where impeccability comes in. You want to maintain your daily behaviour on an impeccable level, and that means you just do your best, your humble best. We're no longer interested in reasserting the ego or the self, or defending the self. The brunt of energy really goes into defense of the self, because if it's attacked left and right...I mean, you can't go out of your house...even in your house, there's always something that is threatening, or your boss says something somebody looks at you the wrong way, and they gip you, this or that. Right away you have to go back and build up "I'm not that bad. They don't understand me." The mind rallies like lightning trying to patch up these things. No, you don't let it go. You're not interesting in defense of the self anymore. You're interested in getting rid of the self, in culminating the self. And don Juan had a good adage. He said, "Eliminate the self and fear nothing." So, if you don't have a self there's absolutely nothing to fear, because all the fears, the disappointments, everything comes from the idea of the self, or certain expectations that aren't met. Not just negative things, but if good things happen, then you feel good, you know. So it goes both ways. Stalkers, then are really indifferent, they're detached, and that gets us back to how we started this conversation. What stalkers really want to do is detach themselves from the self, which is saying that they want to detach the awareness from that position of the assemblage point where society, our parents, the sheer fact that we were born into a certain family, have certain relationships, has put us, has forced us, has imprisoned us, really. So when we recapitulate and detach ourselves from everything that's every happened, we're floating. The assemblage point becomes free. It can move, and very harmoniously. It can move without the aid of drugs, without the aid of some external person or Nagual. Because any time you have something external, you're not free, you're dependent on that thing. So the only thing that the modern sorcerer, or the stalker is really dependent on is something so abstract that he calls it the Spirit, the Unknown. By getting rid of the self, they give the self to the Eagle as a token. They give themselves in a symbolic death. And in that sense the Eagle, they say, allows the impeccable warrior to escape. And what that's metaphorically saying is that a person who has recapitulated and disentangled his energy from the expectations of the everyday world is able to move elsewhere. He's able to do dreaming with control, because even in dreaming he has no self. And this differentiates, again, the old sorcerers from the modern ones. When the old sorcerers did dreaming, they had very heavy ego and then of course they got lost and trapped in different levels of dreaming. They weren't able to move out again, because they were too heavy. But they had their ideas of power and they became obsessive. The stalker is absolutely not obsessed with anything. He treats the whole world as 'controlled folly'. What that means is that everything is there to be used. There's order; there's a structure. But it's not to be taken seriously, because there are other orders, other structures, an infinite number of layers to this onion of reality, and he can go elsewhere. But wherever he is, he creates his order and his structure, and when the Spirit moves him, something moves the assemblage point, and he moves elsewhere. And he's impeccable in his dreams, he's impeccable in this everyday reality, if and when he's here. But a stalker begins here in the everyday world, and that's why this recapitulation is really for everyone. They begin here, right wherever anyone is. That's where they start. And they start with their list and their place, they sweep the past, then they make themselves quiet internally, so that they don't accumulate more of the debris, using certain gazing methods--and I don't mean acrobatics or anything like that-- but there's some sorcery passes that have been handed down. Or just sitting quietly--you don't even have to call it meditating--just shut off the internal dialogue. And you elongate these moments of silence. And then you have the power that comes from sheer silence. That in itself will allow the assemblage point to move from your everyday state into heightened awareness. Then, that's when the practitioner--you don't even have to call them sorcerers-- that's when they enter heightened awareness. It's when they have that ability to have the silence extend itself into whatever they're doing. And they're active. If you've working, if you're driving, do whatever, but do it silently, because you don't have the idea of the self impinging. And them, of course, you use the petty tyrants of the world, because okay, so you've recapitulated... and I have to mention here that there's not just one recapitulation...it's really an ongoing process, because after you're finished all the sexual encounters, then you do everybody whom you've encountered in your life. Then you can go back to certain themes. Like you notice that there are still things like when you're working, or something happens during the day, you notice oh boy, that gave me a jolt, that really bothered me. Then you can see why did it bother you, and you can use certain themes. Like wanting to be liked seems to be so common. Everybody seems to want somebody to like them, support them, approve of them. That has to go, but that's a very strong driving force that keeps us in line, because as long as you still have that, it's just like the carrot being dangled in front of your nose. Whatever it is that somebody dangles out there that your body naturally would react to...

Abe:   Would you say it's a major accomplishment, then, on that part of the would be seer when they reach a point where they are no longer concerned with whether or not they're liked?

Tashia:   Yes, that's a major accomplishment. Absolutely. That is, for someone who is very concerned with that. Now, maybe there are the rare few that maybe just don't care, honestly. They have enough energy. And you know what that hinges on, really? Being liked, wanting to be liked? The sorcerers have a theory about the idea of the energy you were given at your conception. If your parents liked each other, and I mean sexually, if they had a very grand time, a great, great sexual experience, both of them, mother and father, when that child is conceived that child will have this great burst of energy. And he may not care whether people really like him or not because he has this intrinsic sense of energetic well-being. but, if one of the parents are bored--the sorcerer don Juan always called them 'bored conceptions'--or if they were made out of a very boring experience, with not much flash. Or maybe the partners didn't even like each other, they just went through the motions of having sex because they were married and it was the thing to do Friday night, then that child will come out into the world with really a disadvantage. And he will always feel that something is missing, and he wants to be liked. He wants his peers to like him, he wants his mama to like him, and she may not even like him at all. But that is not just theory, but it's something that sorcerers have arrived at through their seeing. They actually see how energetic a luminous being is. They can see how the energy moves. In some people it's very sluggish, stagnant, and of course that expresses itself in a very meek or low level zest for life. they sort of just barely get through the day. That kind of feeling. But others have a lot of energy. They meet everything as a challenge. Everything to them is an adventure. They dominate people naturally. They have this charisma, sort of a mesmeric effect on others, and on things around them. And they may not have this need, they're not as needy as other people they want to be liked and are needy.

Abe:   Of course, then that person who has all that energy, will attract all kinds of needy people who want to suck on it. (laughter)

Tashia:   Exactly. And you attract those people. The sorcerers say that the self is really a metaphorical dagger that we stab ourselves with. but, it's alright as long as we bleed in company. As long as there are others bleeding with us, we're okay. (laughter) As long as somebody else feels worse, we're happy. But the recapitulation will give those needy people...and I have to include myself in that category, because absolutely I was not a product of a zestful union...so those are demons and you will see them in the recapitulation. And that's why I say that the recapitulation is never done, because even when I was with don Juan and his people...okay with the, they had enough energy to cover up, let's say for my deficiency. Their energy would elevate me to this heightened level. But the minute they were gone or even left the room, I would slump back to my own natural level, and then I would want attention. And all the apprentices were like that. And of course they would test us by ignoring us, or not speaking to us, or doing things with others when we wanted to be included. So when I say recapitulation, it has to be tried and tested in the everyday world. You can't just escape into the desert and do it, and then feel good and that's the end of it. You have to get back with your mother, with your father. What do they do to you for you to react like the little girl, the little boy that wants mommy to do his laundry, to take care of his tummy? We still have those feelings. So, just recapitulation by itself is not enough. Stalkers stalk the self, and so when they're with people in the world, they're constantly stalking themselves and seeing what's happening.

End of Part 1.

"The Sorcerer's Crossing"

Taisha Abelar in conversation with Alexander Blair-Ewart, Part 2.

In the long years when Carlos Castaneda first informed the world of the wonders of American aboriginal spirit knowledge, many recognized that a tradition of great significance had begun to reveal itself to the world. Over the years Castaneda has progressively shown the all-engulfing worldview of the Toltecs in its reformed state as a work of spiritual art, shaped by the new seers, who have survived the devastating encounter with European colonial civilization.

Taisha Abelar is one of the new seers whose designation "stalker" balances the world of the "dreamer" [see Dimensions Feb.'92 interview with the "dreamer" Florinda Donner]. It is with true delight that we witness the emergence into the world of a new and genuine way of the spirit.

Alexander Blair-Ewart: Recognizing that this is a complex subject that can be understood only by people who are genuinely interested, can I get you to talk about stalking?

Taisha Abelar: That's a question that comes up often when I give lectures. People want to know exactly what is stalking. And there's two ways of approaching this. First, just a general definition is that a stalker is really someone who has made an art out of being inobtrusive. And that is he puts himself in the background, and there's a certain training that is involved in order to become inobtrusive, and I can tell you why it is necessary to be inobtrusive. Let me give you a couple other ways of talking about stalking. It's designed to give the sorcerer or the practitioner a jolt, and by a jolt we mean a push or a slight burst of energy, so that the assemblage point shifts ever so slightly. Now, I think I have to talk about the assemblage point because that is exactly what the stalkers are aiming at. They're aiming to move or shift the assemblage point, and through that to change the perception of the world. Perception, of course, can be changed through dreaming, but stalkers do it while they're awake. So the way sorcerers perceive the world is that they say that everything we see, while we are awake in this reality is a question of the position of the assemblage point. I'm sure you're familiar with Castaneda's books, and you know what the assemblage point is, but let me just describe it again. It is the focused awareness point of luminosity on the luminous cocoon (aura--ed).

We believe that the human being's energetic body is a mass of fibres of light that have infinite number, and each one of those is a specific awareness. So that they're not just light like electricity, but they're actually light like awareness. And on the luminous egg shape that makes up the energetic body there is a point of extra luminosity where the concentration of the person, his awareness, is assembled, and that point of luminosity is about the size of a golfball, from the point of view of the 'seer' who sees the person's luminous being. But it can change size; it also can change position on the luminous body. Now, where that is located determines what is perceived, because there's a matching of the fibres that are lit up within the luminous body and the fibres that are out in the universe at large, because sorcerers also maintain, of course, that the universe us a whole is an infinite number of both energetic fibres, some of which are perceivable, and others which are absolutely beyond our capacities as human beings to perceive. But where the position of this assemblage point is, this lighted up area on the luminous being, when that matches what is outside, then perception takes place.

Abe:   Would this apply to everyone?

Tashia:   We all have our assemblage point at pretty much the same place, because as an infant is born, by virtue of the fact that he is going to be a human infant and a human being, a social person, he has to match the location of his assemblage point to that of other human beings in the world so that he can interact with them, and perceive the same world, the same segment of the possibility of perception that is open to him, so that we can all agree as to what we are perceiving. Because our assemblage points are in the same place, we can have language, we can talk about trees and cars and solid walls and floors, and we can have a spatial and temporal continuity; we know that there was a yesterday, there'll be a tomorrow. All of that has to do with the position of the assemblage point. Time, our conception of everything we know to be so, is determined by where that heightened point of concentration awareness is located. And if by some anomaly it is not in the place where the human assemblage point ought to be, then these people are either sorcerers, (and we'll talk about that in a moment), or they're a candidate for the mentally ill. So you find these people in asylums, because their assemblage points are not fixed at the position where other human beings have theirs fixed. Therefore they don't have this intersubjectivity in terms of perception. And they can't have the agreements to what constitutes reality. There's a mandate, let's say, even a biological mandate that says that all human beings should have their assemblage point at this particular position so they can be what we call human. Animals have it at different places, and that's what fixes their species of animal. Trees have their assemblage point at a certain place in their luminous shell, and that makes them trees.

Abe:   So could we also call the assemblage point the position of collective persona reality agreement?

Tashia:   Exactly. It's our persona, it's our person. Now this person, sorcerers say, is not all that we are humanly capable of being. So we can we be more than just a social person. Now, in order to be more than what society, or what our birthright, has put forth for us, we have to move or shift the place of the assemblage point. We have to move it out of its position where it is stuck. So, not only is the assemblage point capable of moving elsewhere, but when it does, other luminous intelligent fibres of awareness are lit up and matched with the universe, and therefore other realities are constituted, and these other realities are as real and solid as the one we are in now, because the reason this reality where we are now is what we call undeniably real is because of the agreement that we have that this is what the world is like. And that is based on the fixation of the assemblage point. If it moves- and it does; it moves in dreams, by itself- we call that dream reality, to be separated of course from the waking state. So we acknowledge that there are other realms of experience, but we always refer to them from the position of everyday reality. But sorcerers don't do that. They say that you can move the everyday reality while you're awake. You don't have to do drearning... Dreaming, of course, is the control of the movement of the assemblage point in sleep, in dreams, and the fixation of it elsewhere.

Abe:   And you can do it without being insane.

Tashia:   Absolutely.

Abe:   That in itself is an enormously revolutionary statement.

Tashia:   Because our agreement says that yes, there's crazy people out there that have hallucinations. They see monsters and what not. But they're somehow deficient and in this sense, from the point of view of the social order, yes, they're deficient in the sense that they have not stabilized their assemblage point where everyone else has placed it. Somehow their assemblage point is in flux, it's constantly shifting, and therefore of course they're crazy because they're hallucinating, and they don't have the energy to maintain it at any one given position. If they did have that energy and the control, then they would be sorcerers, because they would be stalking that new position.

Abe:   Yes, I see that.

Tashia:   So what this all really boils down to is a question of having the energy to perceive more than we are allowed to perceive given the fact that we are born as human beings. Our social order doesn't allow us to venture into other realms except through insanity or through dreams, which they don't really count as real anyway. So those are two avenues that are open, but they're not really viable avenues. Now sorcerers say you can move the assemblage point, provided you have enough energy to fix it at another position, because you don't want to end up crazy and absolutely lost in these worlds upon worlds that they maintain exist out there, like the layers of an onion. So what is needed is control, energy and fluidity. And what they call 'unbending intent'. Now the fluidity enables one to shift the assemblage point to move away from the given spot that makes us persons, and we'll get back to this, because what this given spot that makes us persons really is is what we call the self. And that's where self-importance has to go out the window because as long as we maintain our allegiance to the self, what we're really doing is maintaining our allegiance to that particular position of the assemblage point. We'll never be able to perceive anything beyond what the taken-for-granted reality out there is. We're allowed only to perceive what is permissable by our given position within the social order. So we need fluidity to move the assemblage point elsewhere, and then we need the stability, the concentration, the energy to fix it on another position. And this is what sorcery really is, the movement and the fixation, fixing again the assemblage point at the different positions, thereby lighting up different realities that are just as concrete and real as what we take as reality of the everyday world.

Abe:   So sorcerers foster and cultivate energy in unique ways, and there's a way of fostering and cultivating dreaming energy, and your book is primarily about the way in which you foster and cultivate stalking energy. Would that be right?

Tashia:   Precisely. There are techniques, there are devices that sorcerers do, and they include 'not doing' techniques, 'recapitulation', which is the fundamental technique of enabling the assemblage point to move off its spot of the self, things like 'losing personal history', which also enables one to move away from what our expectation or our idea is of the self. Losing self- importance is the key, of course, because as I said, as long as we have this idea of a self, a strong self, an ego, a personality with which we interact with others in terms of an intersubjective agreement, they hold us. You see, the strength of the world, of the social order, is so gigantic through the agreement of billions of people holding that assemblage point at that particular spot.

Abe:   So, at a really crass level, you could call it 'peer pressure', and at a universal level you could call it 'the spirit of the times'.

Tashia:   Yes. At a very individual level you could call it 'self-indulging' or one's idea of the self, and then peer pressure. Exactly, all that, and then at a larger level the language itself, on a cultural level, and we have to get to the family, because that's fundamental, and you have to break through each of those barriers- individual, peer, family, cultural- and then some gigantic collective unconsciousness that holds everything in place. A sorcerer has to jump out of all of that onto a different level.

And then even behind this collective unconscious, you have the biological mandate that we're really trapped in this 'ape mold'. We have our biological drive, we need to be social, gregarious beings because we're social animals. Solitude is something that frightens people to death. I mean, that's one of the killers of neophytes, the idea that they have to have a solitary journey, a solitary quest, because the recapitulation is done in absolute solitude. But people think, well, they can meditate together, do things together, as long as they still have a group concensus. But you see, it's that very group concensus that prevents the subtle movement of the assemblage point. So you do have to get beyond that force, and you have to have the energy, and the energy comes from all the things that I mentioned before, including impeccability, and also using your death. You give a death, because you'll end up giving a death anyway. If you follow the sorcerer s path, if one wishes to move away from the self, from that given position of the assemblage point, and venture into the unknown, then it is like dying. The self has to capitulate, and it's a horrendous feeling. Emotionally, physically, it is like, you know, man against the universe.

Abe:   And that death is protracted, isn't it? I mean, it doesn't happen in one miraculous moment. It's something that progressively occurs. It will take years. When do you know you've really done it? When do you know that you've finally died to that old self, or become what is called in the literature a 'formless warrior'?

Tashia:   You have to be formless. You have to not have a self. First of all, like you say, it's not a sudden process, although it can be. The movement of the assemblage point can be, in some people, in some anomalous cases, sudden, or under a great shock all of a sudden it moves elsewhere, and a different reality is constituted in front of the person. All of a sudden he's somewhere else. But that usually doesn't last because it comes from an external force, and it usually shifts back. If it does last, he won't know what happened to him, and those are the cases for the asylums, the institutions. So, a gradual change is best

Abe:   I take it that drugs, power plants, can also induce this?

Tashia:   Yes, exactly. That too. Under the influence of psychotropic drugs you see different worlds, and the assemblage point is absolutely blasted out of its position. But you are not doing that, you don't have the control, again it's an external agent. The sheer presence of a Nagual moves the assemblage point, too. His impeccability can move the assemblage point in his students. He doesn't have to give them the slap on the back or anything like that. Sheer energy can cause apprentices to assemble different worlds. But you see, there again, whenever we were in the presence of Don Juan and his people, their force made us do fantastic things. Those things 1 write about in my book. But, when I came back to Los Angeles and they weren't around, there I was. I had the force of the social order on top of me, and my assemblage point moved back into the 'first attention'. And the tragedy, of course, is that unless you move your assemblage point back to the places that it was under the influence of don Juan and his people, you barely remember what you did or what those worlds consisted of. They're like dreams. So you have to store the energy to allow it to move into heightened awareness, so that you can maintain it there on your own, and venture. And then you move it further, and it's a gradual shift.

Abe:   How do you store or keep the energy to move your assemblage point?

Tashia:   The 'recapitulation' is the major one. I just want to mention that another way of moving it is sheer impeccability, by intending the movement. Intent is really a line, a force that connects one directly with the energy out there at large. And, because it has an intelligence, a guiding order of sorts. They call it the Spirit, the Eagle. But when man links his personal energy to the energy out there through impeccable acts, then the Spirit itself moves the assemblage point for him, because in a sense he has relinquished control. He has relinquished himself, his ego. He has let go, and is allowing the guiding force of intent to move him. And all of these sorcery activities that I mentioned, the recapitulation, all the not-doings, all those have the sorcerer's intent already linked to them. So a person just has to do these things and let the intent take him, and his assemblage point will move, because these are ancient techniques that have been handed down from generations within Don Juan's lineage, and they have already that link to the Spirit out there inherent in them. So the necessity of storing energy we already know, because that's the only way to get out of the mold that we are born into as humans. We always like to talk in terms of the human ape, because it really puts man in a proper perspective.

Abe:   Are you using that, though, as a metaphor, in the sense that what I understand is that these luminous beings that we are actually, in the process of "time", took on the form that we now have, that at some point we intended ourselves human or flesh and blood, but that what we intrinsically are is something that comes from that vast 'out there', but that we haven't, in the normal sense of evolution, evolved from monkeys? I mean, is that something that you deal with at all? I accept the ape metaphor very well. But the theory of evolution has never managed to explain to me how come we have these other capacities in us.

Tashia:   Ah hah. And what sorcerers say is that we are continually evolving. Therefore we should not stay or limit ourselves to that ape-like position of the assemblage point. As you say, within the luminosity of human beings is the potential for an infinite number of other possibilities. Yes, I would agree with you, that from the point of view of evolution we have sort of stopped there, and encrusted ourselves at that position. But the force of evolution continues. Sorcerers are beings who at one time were human beings. But they have evolved to something else. They are no longer human beings in the strict sense of the word, because they can move their assemblage point elsewhere and maintain those positions, and actually change their form. They don't have to maintain their human form. They can move downwards, shift down to the animal level, and they can change shape into animals, into crows, into birds, or any other animal or entity. Or they can shift into inconceivable realms that have no physical counterparts, but are abstractions.

Abe:   So there are old and new seers?

Tashia:   What the new sorcerers are doing...there is a distinction between the old sorcerers and the new sorcerers in Don Juan's lineage, or the modern day sorcerers, Don Juan and his teacher the Nagual Julian, and Don Juan's apprentice, the new Nagual Carlos Castaneda. These are all modern day sorcerers, and what they're interested in is this evolution towards the abstract, away from any of these downward shifts that are so easy to do in dreaming when the assemblage point by itself finds these positions. And for that reason all of the people associated with Carlos Castaneda, we're university graduates, educated, clear thinkers (hopefully). I mean, that is one of our tasks. An actual sorcery task is to be able to think coherently, to think clearly, to see where we are as human beings, and what our potential is, and be able to see and get to this level of actual truth, not only through reason, but using reason in its strictest sense, and not in the shoddy sense of reasoning something and then acting some other way totally in contradiction, which is what human beings do.

End of Part 2.

Copyright 1994 Dimensions Magazine

Magical Blend #44 - 1994

"Dreaming within The Dream"

By Merilyn Tunneshende of the sorcerer's party of Carlos Castaneda

The old Nagual found me in Arizona at the time that Carlos Castaneda was changing sorcerer's families. Carlos was leaving the sisters and the Genaros, and in transition toward his new party of Florinda, Taisha and Carol, for reasons that he himself explained. The problem resulting from this was a hole left in the original party, and Carlos' uncertainty as to the task left him by the Nagual.

I was, at that time, traveling through the southwestern U.S. and Mexico, recovering from the death of my fiance. I was a Spanish teacher with a master's degree on sabbatical. In Arizona, I met an old Native American man, who for my purposes shall be dubbed John Black Crow. He suggested that I stay in the area for a while to learn some things about the pre-Spanish conquest Americas. I was trained by him in some ancient magical practices; trained separately and then sent down to Mexico where I found Carlos, his original party and the consummate Dreaming teacher, who for my purposes shall be called Florentin (pronounced Florenteen).

According to the Nagual and his teachings, my body's energy configuration is that of a Nagual woman, which means that I am capable of leading a sorcerer's party or of flying with a male Nagual.

This is essential in a complete group. A female Nagual embodies the mystery. Therefore, it was hoped that I would close the hole in the original party, from which Carlos was departing.

Sorcerers can identify anyone's energy pattern. These patterns are like predispositions or natural talents. Actually, every being perceives these differences. All one has to do to solidify perception of the categories is be exposed to individuals who embody them. In writing about our world, we are each, of course, from our own category, trying to provide the rest of the world with the exposure necessary to form these perceptual refinements.

My training consisted of Dreaming and Stalking techniques, which I learned basically in the order and form that Carlos has presented in his books. However, I was also taught to Stalk through Dreaming; in other words, to set up, discover, and pursue the elements of a desired phenomenon in my Dreaming.

This technique is my path, and I now practice it most of the time. It brings extra energy to my awareness, and it requires me to spend tremendous amounts of time in the states of Dreaming and Dreaming Awake. Thus, in our group, I would classify myself technically as a Dreamer, though I am often Stalking as well.

For the ordinary person, I would say that viewing life as a dream while awake is one of the most valuable meditations ever evolved in any discipline.

It brings the knowledge of the illusory nature of what we call reality and of the potential to dissolve this perception into clear white light, as one can dissolve a dream into light.

During the course of my training in these methods, I received a piece of information from the old Nagual that few in either of the two newer parties possess. This is something that many readers have wondered and asked about. Namely, where did the old Nagual go and how can one get there?

Part of my task is to make this information a little more accessible to others, and I have been instructed to do this in writing. The old Nagual left the world, but he is still in it. He left the planet, but he is still able to be part of the life of it if the designs of power create an opening. Some of us have as a gift the almost constant possibility of his presence and know how to get to him. Others can no longer even perceive him. That is the way things are. And in the times we are moving into, that is the way they are going to be. Either one is in tune with the primordial purpose or one is not. Either you will perceive your teachers or they will be like cigar store Indians, forever still, shadowy, silent, while you concentrate on nonsense. There are teachers out there, enough if the world will wake up.

Carlos, Florinda, and Taisha have presented excellent accounts of their instruction, and good explanations of the goals of the training. La Gorda (Maria Tena), who I call Butterfly Woman, at this time chooses not to write, although if she ever did, I'm sure she'd do an excellent job of it. The sisters and the Genaros are involved in other tasks, and dona Soledad is much too mercenary. So it falls to me to take it from this point.

The purpose of all our teachings as it has been stated, is to perceive energy directly. One does this through Seeing, but one has to build up enormous perceptual energy to See. One can build up this energy through any number of storage techniques, many of which are available to any sincere seeker. The next step is to use Seeing (perceiving energy directly) to move directly through energy in a desired direction, like flowing with the Tao. When a Nagual does this with superb unfettered skill, it is called Flying.

To illustrate this I will share an example from my own training....

"Objects are not as solid as they appear," says John Black Crow as he stands in front of me.

"People are not solid. Their energy can be changed, transformed, even passed through."

"Are you trying to tell me you can walk through walls, John?" I ask as a joke.

"Better than that." He smiles with a glint in his eye.

He puts his hands on my shoulders, and at that moment I feel John Black Crow stare fixedly at my left eye. It is as if I go to sleep but I am still awake. I have already been taught by him that this is the state he calls Dreaming Awake. Then, it is as if I see him from a great distance. He is very small, and I see him coming rapidly towards me, growing larger. I feel a rushing sensation. Then I feel John seize and take hold of a vertical crack within me. He opens it. His full-size image rushes through me. He is no longer in front of me. Then he is. I gaze at John Black Crow with my mouth open.

"That's what Naguals call mating," he jokes.

I am speechless.

"Do you want me to teach you to fly now?" He has a huge grin on his face.

I nod like a zombie in a trance.

"All right, you'd better sit down for this." We both sit on the desert ground. "Now, I want you to find that crack I went through and open it. Open it like a door to the wind. Pry it open in the center," he instructs.

To my amazement, I am able to perceive a crack in my energy and open it by focusing on it. I feel a rushing wind.

"Dissolve yourself in the wind!" I hear him call. "But not entirely. Let that rushing become a part of you."

I begin to feel that I am a hollow tube of rushing wind. Then I feel an incredible falling sensation.

"That's it!" he shouts. "Free fall! Now direct yourself. Fall to the left, to the right!" He goes on shouting instructions. "All right now, slowly narrow the crack and land," he says. "Feel yourself settling."

I open my eyes and look at John Black Crow. He is beaming at me, and I seem to be my normal self. He explains that the energy configuration of a Nagual in flight is like a comet. And that flying females are like hollow comets. He seems to be very pleased with me.

"We are joined together now," John Black Crow says pensively. "You will go with me. I See that now." He is smiling. "You and I are the same. But before we go, I'd better send you to Mexico. I know someone who is waiting for you down there."

The instruction I received in Mexico took an unexpected turn. I arrived in a town called Catemaco and found everyone at the market. It took several days of waiting and talking with the others about their progress before don Florentin showed up.

When he did, he separated me from the group. I would work with him until he Saw it was time to quit, and then I would return to the others to practice what I was learning. I was quite a mystery to the group, especially since they knew that they were separating from Carlos. Also, there was a matter of lineage that was emerging as a question. The old Nagual was Seeing that through the designs of power, I might actually belong with his own party.

Don Florentin Saw that I was already developing my body of Dreaming, so he taught me a more advanced technique that he called "Dreaming within the Dream," which is endless, and in its final extrapolation, is the same as Flying.

The technique is this: One enters into the state of Dreaming Awake. As one Dreams, one searches for energy vortexes where other Dreaming is going on. One Dreams oneself into this Dream, and one repeats the process endlessly. When done correctly, it is like a wormhole in the universe.

Don Florentin first taught me this technique waiting for a bus. "We have to wait for a Dreamed bus," he says with a crazy look in his eyes.

"You mean someone will be Dreaming a bus?" I ask, thinking that I am playing along with his sense of humor.

He raises his hands to indicate the vastness of the universe. "Someone will," he says with a beautiful, emphatic tone.

We wait for about half an hour and then, lo and behold, don Florentin sees his bus. "We have to hurry and get on," he says as he hustles me.

Once on the bus, don Florentin tells me that our destination is the center of Dreaming within that Dream. We are not to get absorbed in the Dream of the bus. We want to get off in the Dream within it. After a while, we both feel moved to get off. We find ourselves standing in a bus terminal, and I am gazing at a man who has gotten off another bus and is gazing back at me. He looks like Carlos will, at seventy years old.

Don Florentin seems thrilled with how we have traveled. He indicates that we will walk back to the market by way of the lake, to retrace our path.

"Did we move forward in time don Florentin?" I ask, as I keep up with his hopping gate.

He grins his huge grin at me and runs his fingers through the longish strands of dark hair which always seem to stick up on top of his head. "Hmmm. We'll go back now. This way. You follow me," he says in a maniacal tone. "We went forward. But we don't want to get stuck! Better not talk any more just yet."

As we walk, it is almost like watching a movie with the sound turned off. Don Florentin seems to do everything very deliberately. I don't let him out of my sight. When we arrive on the little tree lined street with the courtyards, where I stay, the sound pops back. Some children are playing and talking musically in front of a small restaurant.

"You'll be all right now. Here we are." says don Florentin and sweetly chucks me under the chin. "Go have a nice afternoon." And off he jaunts.

I know I'll see him the next morning, but he never says when, where, or even that I'll see him. It is just understood that he will be there, at the right place at the right time. It is always the same way with the old Nagual.

It often amazes people to find out how far back this magic really goes. John Black Crow told me that this sorcery predates even the Toltecs considerably. These sorcerers are unraveling time backward as well as forward. Each of us have our tasks that prepare us to move more and more into that world. Others hopefully will benefit from the mysteries that encroach into the moment. For in the final analysis, what is possible for any being is possible for us all.

"Originally," John Black Crow stated, "the Dreaming techniques evolved from the practice of shape-shifting, which always used dreaming as an entry. Stalking evolved from the vision quest and from hunting."

Currently, there are several handfuls of practitioners of these ancient arts residing throughout the Americas, but there are many more in the nagual. Once you gain entrance into that realm, the number of practitioners expands exponentially.

Don Florentin stressed that you have to be smart and brave to follow this path. "A real trailblazer, and a little crazy too!" I remember him say. "But trailblazing is one path that is worthwhile to follow, if you follow it with heart all the way." I would say that he is right. And so, to all my fellow travelers on the path, "I wish you well."

After submitting this article to the editor, he asked me a very pointed question. "What does Toltec sorcery have to do with everyone who doesn't practice it?" I have to admit I was completely taken aback. It was such a good question that I even contacted other members of the group about it. They all laughed uproariously and agreed that it was indeed the best question any of us had ever been asked. The unanimous answer was that we are (all beings) part of a whole trying to improve our lot.

If any one of us, or any group of sentient beings, can beat even one of the things that we are up against and then share that information, the rest might also benefit. To reiterate: In the final analysis what is possible for anysone is possible for all.

Merilyn Tunneshende currently resides in the southeastern United States where she is writing a book about her training and experiences. She travels to the southwestern U.S. and Mexico frequently. In 1992 she was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to do research on the Maya.



Copyright 1994 Magical Blend Magazine

New Age Journal - Mar 1994

Carlos Castaneda Speaks, An interview by Keith Thompson

Literary agents are paid to hype their clients, but when the agent for Carlos Castaneda claimed that he was offering me "the interview of a lifetime," it was hard to disagree. After all, Castaneda's nine best-selling books describing his extraordinary apprenticeship to Yaqui Indian sorcerer don Juan Matus had inspired countless members of my generation to explore mysticism, psychedelic drugs, and new levels of consciousness. Yet even as his reputation grew, the author had remained a recluse, shrouding himself in mystery and intrigue. Aside from a few interviews given seemingly at random over the years, Castaneda never ventured into the public spotlight. Few people even know what he looks like. For this interview, his agent told me, there could be no cameras and no tape recorders. The conversation would have to be recorded by a stenographer, lest copies of Castaneda's taped voice fall into the wrong hands.

The interview-- perhaps timed to coincide with the publication of Castaneda's latest and most esoteric book, The Art of Dreaming-- took place in the conference room of a modest office in Los Angeles, after weeks of back-and-forth negotiations with Castaneda's agent. The arrangements were complicated, the agent said, by the fact that he had no way of contacting his client and could only confirm a meeting after speaking with him "whenever he decides to call... I never know in advance when that may be."

Upon my arrival at noon, an energetic, enthusiastic, broad-smiled man walked across the room, extended his hand, and greeted me unassumingly: "Hello, I am Carlos Castaneda. Welcome. We can begin our conversation when you are ready. Would you like coffee, or perhaps a soda? Please make yourself comfortable."

I had heard that Castaneda blends into the woodwork, or resembles a Cuban waiter; that his features are both European and Indian; that his skin is nut-brown or bronze; that his hair is black, thick, and curly. So much for rumour. His mane is now white, or largely so, short and mildly dishevelled. If asked to guide a police artist in making a sketch, I would emphasize the eyes-- large, bright, lucid. They may have been gray.

I asked Castaneda about his schedule. "The entire afternoon is available. I should think we'll have all the time we need. When it's enough, we'll know." Our conversation lasted four hours, continuing through a meal of deli sandwiches that arrived midway.

My first exposure to Castaneda's work had been as much initiation as introduction. It was 1968. Police officers were clubbing demonstrators in the streets of Chicago. Assassins had taken Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Aretha Franklin's "Chain of Fools" topped the charts. All of this amidst an ocean of sandals, embroidered caftans, bell-bottoms, jangling bracelets, beads, and long hair for men and women alike.

Into all this stepped an enigmatic writer named Carlos Castaneda, toting a book called The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. I remember how it transformed me. The book I began reading was a curiosity; the book I held when I finished had become a manifesto, the kind of delirious cause celebre for which my psyche had been secretly training. What Castaneda seemed to be affirming-- the possibility of awesome personal spiritual experience-- was precisely what the Sunday-morning-only religion of my childhood had done its best to vaccinate me against.

Believing in Castaneda gave me faith that someday, some way, I might meet my very own don Juan Matus (don is a Spanish appellative denoting respect), the old Indian wise man/sorcerer who implores his protege Carlos to get beyond looking-- simply perceiving the world in its usually accepted forms. To be a true "man of knowledge," Carlos has to learn the art of seeing, so that for the first time he can truly perceive the startling nature of the everyday world. "When you see," don Juan says, "there are no longer familiar features in the world.

Everything is new. Everything has never happened before. The world is incredible!"

But, really-- who was this Castaneda? Where did he come from and what was he trying to prove, with his mysterious account of a realm that seemed to be of an entirely different order of reality?

Over the years, various answers to that question have been offered. Take your pick: (a) dissenting anthropologist; (b) sorcerer's apprentice; (c) psychic visionary; (d) literary genius; (e) original philosopher; (f) master teacher. For balance, let's not forget (g) perpetrator of one of the most spectacular hoaxes in the history of publishing.

Castaneda has responded to the bestowal of these conflicting ID tags with something like ironic amusement, as though he were an audience member enjoying the spectacle of a Chekhov comedy in which he himself may or may not be a character. The author has consistently declined-- over a span of nearly three decades-- to engage in the war of words about whether his books are authentic accounts of real-world encounters, as he maintains, or (as numerous critics have argued) fictional allegories in the spirit of Gulliver's Travels and Alice in Wonderland.

This strategic reticence was learned from don Juan himself. "To slip in and out of different worlds you have to remain inconspicuous," says Castaneda, who is rumored (his preferred status) to divide his time nowadays between Los Angeles, Arizona, and Mexico. "The more you are identified by people's ideas of who you are and how you will act, the greater the constraint on your freedom.

Don Juan insisted upon the importance of erasing personal history. If little by little you create a fog around yourself, then you will not be taken for granted, and you will have more room for change."

Even so, scattered clearings in the fog offer glimpses of tracks left by the sorcerer's apprentice in the years before his life faded to myth.

The scholarly consensus, unconfirmed by the author himself, is that Carlos Cesar Arana Castaneda was born in Peru on Christmas day 1925 in the historic Andean town of Cajamarca. Upon graduating from the Colegio Nacional de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe, he studied briefly at the National Fine Arts School of Peru. In 1948 his family moved to Lima and established a jewelry store. After the death of his mother a year later, Castaneda moved to San Francisco and soon enrolled at Los Angeles City College, where he took two courses in creative writing and one in journalism.

Castaneda received a B.A. in anthropology in 1962 from the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1968, five years before Castaneda received his Ph.D. in anthropology, the University of California Press published The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, which became a national best seller following an enthusiastic notice by Roger Jellinek in the New York Times Book Review:

"One can't exaggerate the significance of what Castaneda has done. He is describing a shamanistic tradition, a pre-logical cultural form that is no-one-knows how old. It has been described often... But it seems that no other outsider, and certainly not a 'Westerner,' has ever participated in its mysteries from within; nor has anyone described them so well."

The fuse was lit. The Teachings sold 300,000 copies in a 1969 Ballantine mass edition. A Separate Reality and Journey to Ixtlan followed from Simon & Schuster in 1971 and 1972. The saga continued in Tales of Power (1974), The Second Ring of Power (1977), The Eagle's Gift (1981), The Fire from Within (1984), The Power of Silence (1987), and The Art of Dreaming (1993).

(Bibliophiles may be interested to learn that Castaneda says he actually wrote a book about don Juan before The Teachings, titled The Crack Between Worlds, but lost the manuscript in a movie theater.)

In assessing the impact of his work, Castaneda's admirers credit him with introducing to popular culture the rich and varied traditions of shamanism, with their emphasis on entering nonordinary realms and confronting strange and sometimes hostile spirit-powers, in order to restore balance and harmony to body, soul, and society. Inspired by don Juan's use of peyote, jimsonweed, and other power plants to teach Castaneda the "art of dreaming," untold numbers of pioneers extended their own inner horizons through psychedelic inquiry-- with decidedly mixed results.

For their part, critics of Castaneda's "path of knowledge" dismiss his work as an ongoing pseudo-anthropological shenanigan, complete with fabricated shamans and sensationalized Native American religious practices. The writings, they claim, have netted an unscrupulous author tremendous wealth at the cost of denigrating the sacred lifeways of indigenous peoples through commercial exploitation. Castaneda's presentation, writes Richard de Mille in Castaneda's Journey, "appeals to the reader's hunger for myth, magic, ancient wisdom, true reality, self-improvement, other worlds, or imaginary playmates."

Appropriately, the Castaneda I encountered was a study in contrasts. His presence was informal, spontaneous, warmly animated, and at times contagiously mirthful. At the same time, his still heavily accented (Peruvian? Chilean? Spanish?) diction conveyed the patrician formality of an ambassador at court: deliberate and well-composed, serious and poised, earnest and resolute. Practiced.

The contradiction, like so much about the man, may strike some as a bothersome inconsistency. But it shouldn't. To reread Carlos Castaneda's books (as I did, astonishingly, all nine of them) is to see clearly-- perhaps for the first time-- that contradiction is the force that ties his literary Gordian knot. As the author had told me, intently, during our lunch break: "Only by pitting two views against each other can one weasel between them to arrive at the real world."

I had the sense he was letting me know his fortress was well guarded-- and daring me to storm it anyway.

---

Keith Thompson:
As your books have made a character named Carlos world-famous, the author called Castaneda has retreated further and further from public view. There have been more confirmed sightings of Elvis than of Carlos Castaneda in recent years. Legend has you committing suicide on at least three occasions; there's the persistent story of your death in a Mexican bus crash two decades ago; and my search for a confirmed photo and audio tapes was fruitless. How can I be sure that you're truly Castaneda and not a Carlos impersonator from Vegas? Have you got any distinguishing birthmarks?


Carlos Castaneda:
None! Just my agent vouches for me. That's his job. But you are free to ask me your questions and shine a bright light in my eyes and keep me here all night-- like in the old movies.


Keith Thompson:
You're known for being unknown. Why have you agreed to talk now, after declining interviews for so many years?


Carlos Castaneda:
Because I'm at the end of the trail that started over thirty years ago. As a young anthropologist, I went to the Southwest to collect information, to do fieldwork on the medicinal plants used by the Indians of the area. I intended to write an article, go on to graduate school, become a professional in my field. I hadn't the slightest interest in meeting a weird man like don Juan.


Keith Thompson:
How exactly did your paths cross?


Carlos Castaneda:
I was waiting for the bus at the Greyhound station in Nogales, Arizona, talking with an anthropologist who had been my guide and helper in my survey. My colleague leaned over and pointed to a white-haired old Indian across the room-- "Psst, over there, don't let him see you looking"-- and said he was an expert about peyote and medicinal plants. That was all I needed to hear. I put on my best airs and sauntered over to this man, who was known as don Juan, and told him I myself was an authority about peyote. I said that it might be worth his while to have lunch and talk with me-- or something unbearably arrogant to that effect.


Keith Thompson:
The old power-lunch ploy. But you weren't really much of an authority, were you?


Carlos Castaneda:
I knew next to nothing about peyote! But I continued rattling on-- boasting about my knowledge, intending to impress him. I remember that he just looked at me and nodded occasionally, without saying a word. My pretensions melted in the heat of that day. I was stunned at being silenced. There I stood in the abyss, until don Juan saw that his bus had come. He said good-bye, with the slightest wave of his hand. I felt like an arrogant imbecile, and that was the end.


Keith Thompson:
Also the beginning.


Carlos Castaneda:
Yes, that's when everything started. I learned that don Juan was known as a brujo, which means, in English, medicine man, curer, sorcerer. It became my task to discover where he lived. You know, I was very good at doing that, and I did. I found out, and I came to see him one day. We took a liking to each other and soon became good friends.


Keith Thompson:
You felt like a moron in this man's presence, but you were eager to seek him out?


Carlos Castaneda:
The way don Juan had looked at me there in the bus station was exceptional-- an unprecedented event in my life. There was something remarkable about his eyes, which seemed to shine with a light all their own. You see, we are-- unfortunately we don't want to accept this, but we are apes, anthropoids, simians. There's a primary knowledge that we all carry, directly connected with the two-million-year-old person at the root of our brain. And we do our best to suppress it, which makes us obese, cardiac, cancer-prone. It was on that archaic level that I was tackled by don Juan's gaze, despite my annoyance and irritation that he had seen through my pretense to expertise in the bus station.


Keith Thompson:
Eventually you became don Juan's apprentice, and he your mentor. What was the transition?


Carlos Castaneda:
A year passed before he took me into his confidence. We had gotten to know each other quite well, when one day don Juan turned to me and said he held a certain knowledge that he had learned from an unnamed benefactor, who had led him through a kind of training. He used this word "knowledge" more often than "sorcery," but for him they were one and the same. Don Juan said he had chosen me to serve as his apprentice, but that I must be prepared for a long and difficult road. I had no idea how astonishingly strange the road would be.


Keith Thompson:
That's a consistent thread of your books-- your struggle to make sense of a "separate reality" where gnats stand a hundred feet tall, where human heads turn into crows, where the same leaf falls four times, where sorcerers conjure cars to disappear in broad daylight. A good stage hypnotist can produce astonishing effects. Is it possible that's what don Juan was up to? Did he trick you?


Carlos Castaneda:
It's possible. What he did was teach me that there's much more to the world than we usually acknowledge-- that our normal expectations about reality are created by social consensus, which is itself a trick. We're taught to see and understand the world through a socialization process that, when working correctly, convinces us that the interpretations we agree upon define the limits of the real world. Don Juan interrupted this process in my life by demonstrating that we have the capacity to enter into other worlds that are constant and independent of our highly conditioned awareness. Sorcery involves reprogramming our capacities to perceive realms as real, unique, absolute, and engulfing as our daily so-called mundane world.


Keith Thompson:
Don Juan is always trying to get you to put your explanations of reality and your assumptions about what's possible inside brackets, so you can see how arbitrary they are. Contemporary philosophers would call this "deconstructing" reality.


Carlos Castaneda:
Don Juan had a visceral understanding of the way language works as a system unto itself-- the way it generates pictures of reality that we believe, mistakenly, to reveal the "true" nature of things. His teachings were like a club beating my thick head until I saw that my precious view was actually a construction, woven of all kinds of fixated interpretations, which I used to defend myself against pure wondering perception.


Keith Thompson:
There's a contradiction in there, somewhere. On the one hand, don Juan desocialized you, by teaching you to see without preconceptions. Yet it sounds like he then resocialized you by enrolling you in a new set of meanings, simply giving you a different interpretation, a new spin on reality-- albeit a "magical" one.


Carlos Castaneda:
That's something don Juan and I argued about all the time. He said in effect that he was despinning me and I maintained he was respinning me. By teaching me sorcery he presented a new lens, a new language, and a new way of seeing and being in the world. I was caught between my previous certainty about the world and a new description, sorcery, and forced to hold the old and the new together. I felt completely stalled, like a car slipping its transmission. Don Juan was delighted. He said this meant I was slipping between descriptions of reality-- between my old and new views.

Eventually I saw that all my prior assumptions were based on viewing the world as something from which I was essentially alienated. That day when I encountered don Juan in the bus station, I was the ideal academic, triumphantly estranged, conniving to prove my nonexistent expertise concerning psychotropic plants.


Keith Thompson:
Ironically, it was don Juan who later introduced you to "Mescalito," the green-skinned spirit of peyote.


Carlos Castaneda:
Don Juan introduced me to psychotropic plants in the middle period of my apprenticeship, because I was so stupid and so cocky, which of course I considered evidence of sophistication. I held to my conventional description of the world with incredible vengeance, convinced it was the only truth. Peyote served to exaggerate the subtle contradictions within my interpretative gloss, and this helped me cut through the typical Western stance of seeing a world out there and talking to myself about it. But the psychotropic approach had its costs-- physical and emotional exhaustion. It took months for me to come fully around.


Keith Thompson:
If you could do it over again, would you "just say no"?


Carlos Castaneda:
My path has been my path. Don Juan always told me, "Make a gesture." A gesture is nothing more than a deliberate act undertaken for the power that comes from making a decision. Ultimately, the value of entering a non-ordinary state, as you do with peyote or other psychotropic plants, is to exact what you need in order to embrace the stupendous character of ordinary reality. You see, the path of the heart is not a road of incessant introspection or mystical flight, but a way of engaging the joys and sorrows of the world. This world, where each one of us is related at molecular levels to every other wondrous and dynamic manifestation of being-- this world is the warrior's true hunting ground.


Keith Thompson:
Your friend don Juan teaches what is, how to know what is, and how to live in accord with what is-- ontology, epistemology, and ethics. Which leads many to say he's too good to be true, that you created him from scratch as an allegorical instrument of wise instruction.


Carlos Castaneda:
The notion that I concocted a person like don Juan is preposterous. I'm a product of a European intellectual tradition to which a character like don Juan is alien. The actual facts are stranger: I'm a reporter. My books are accounts of an outlandish phenomenon that forced me to make fundamental changes in my life in order to meet the phenomenon on its own terms.


Keith Thompson:
Some of your critics grow quite livid in their contention that Juan Matus sometimes speaks more like an Oxford don than a don Indian. Then there's the fact that he travelled widely and acquired his knowledge from sources not limited to his Yaqui roots.


Carlos Castaneda:
Permit me to make a confession: I take much delight in the idea that don Juan may not be the "best" don Juan. It's probably true that I'm not the best Carlos Castaneda, either. Years ago I met the perfect Castaneda at a party in Sausalito, quite by accident. There, in the middle of the patio, was the most handsome man, tall, blond, blue-eyed, beautiful, barefoot. It was the early '70s. He was signing books, and the owner of the house said to me, "I'd like you to meet Carlos Castaneda." He was impersonating Carlos Castaneda, with an impressive coterie of beautiful women all around him. I said, "I am very pleased to meet you, Mister Castaneda." He responded, "Doctor Castaneda." He was doing a very good job. I thought, He presents a good way to be Castaneda, the ideal Castaneda, with all the benefits that go with the position. But time passes, and I'm still the Castaneda that I am, not very well suited to play the Hollywood version. Nor is don Juan.


Keith Thompson:
Speaking of confessions: Did you ever contemplate downplaying the eccentricity of your teacher and presenting him as a more conventional character, to make him a better vehicle for his teachings?


Carlos Castaneda:
I never considered such an approach. Smoothing rough edges to advance an agreeable plot is the luxury of the novelist. I'm not unfamiliar with the spoken and unspoken canon of science: "Be objective." Sometimes don Juan spoke in goofy slang-- the equivalent of "By golly!" and "Don't lose your marbles!" are two of his favorites. On other occasions he showed a superb command of Spanish, which permitted me to obtain detailed explanations of the intricate meanings of his system of beliefs and its underlying logic. To deliberately alter don Juan in my books so he would appear consistent and meet the expectations of this or that audience would bring "subjectivity" to my work, a demon that, according to my best critics, has no place in ethnographic writing.


Keith Thompson:
Sceptics have challenged you to exorcise that demon once and for all, by presenting for public inspection the field notes based on your encounters with don Juan. Wouldn't that alleviate doubts about whether your writings are genuine ethnography or disguised fiction?


Carlos Castaneda:
Whose doubts?


Keith Thompson:
Fellow anthropologists, for starters. The Senate Watergate Committee. Geraldo Rivera...


Carlos Castaneda:
There was a time when requests to see my field notes seemed unencumbered by hidden ideological agendas. After The Teachings of Don Juan appeared I received a thoughtful letter from Gordon Wasson, the founder of the science of ethnomycology, the study of human uses of mushrooms and other fungi. Gordon and Valentina Wasson had discovered the existence of still-active shamanic mushroom cults in the mountains near Oaxaca, Mexico. Dr. Wasson asked me to clarify certain aspects of don Juan's use of psychotropic mushrooms. I gladly sent him several pages of field notes relevant to his area of interest, and met with him twice. Subsequently he referred to me as an "honest and serious young man," or words to that effect.

Even so, some critics proceeded to assert that any field notes produced by Castaneda must be assumed to be forgeries created after the fact. At that point I realized there was no way I could satisfy people whose minds were made up without recourse to whatever documentation I might provide. Actually, it was liberating to abandon the enterprise of public relations-- intrinsically a violation of my nature-- and return to my fieldwork with don Juan.


Keith Thompson:
You must be familiar with the claim that your work has fostered the trivialization of indigenous spiritual traditions. The argument goes like this: A despicable cadre of non-Indian wannabees, commercial profiteers, and self-styled shamans has read your books and found them inspiring. How do you plead?


Carlos Castaneda:
I didn't set out to write an exhaustive account of indigenous spirituality, so it's a fallacy to judge my work by that criterion. My books are instead a chronicle of specific experiences and observations in a particular context, reported to the best of my ability. But I do plead guilty to knowingly committing willful acts of ethnography, which is none other than translating cultural experience into writing. Ethnography is always writing. That's what I do. What happens when spoken words become written words, and written words become published words, and published words get ingested through acts of reading by persons unknown to the author? Let's agree to call it complex. I've been extremely fortunate to have a wide and diverse readership throughout much of the world.

The entry requirement is the same everywhere: literacy. Beyond this, I'm responsible for the virtues and vices of my anonymous audience in the same way that every writer of any time and place is so responsible. The main thing is, I stand by my work.


Keith Thompson:
What does don Juan think of your global notoriety?


Carlos Castaneda:
Nada. Not a thing. I learned this definitively when I took him a copy of The Teachings of Don Juan. I said, "It's about you, don Juan." He surveyed the book-- up and down, back and front, flipped through the pages like a deck of cards-- then handed it back. I was crestfallen and told him I wanted him to have it as a gift. Don Juan said he had better not accept it, "because you know what we do with paper in Mexico." He added, "Tell your publisher to print your next book on softer stock."


Keith Thompson:
Earlier you mentioned that don Juan deliberately made his teaching dramatic. Your writings reflect that. Much anthropological writing gives the impression of striving for dullness, as if banality were a mark of truth.


Carlos Castaneda:
To have made my astonishing adventures with don Juan boring would have been to lie. It has taken me many years to appreciate the fact that don Juan is a master of using frustration, digression, and partial disclosure as methods of instruction. He strategically blended revelation and concealment in the oddest combinations. It was his style to assert that ordinary and nonordinary reality aren't separate, but instead are encompassed in a larger circle-- and then to reverse himself the next day by insisting that the line between different realities must be respected at all costs. I asked him why this must be so. He answered, "Because nothing is more important to you than keeping your personal world intact."

He was right. That was my top priority in the early days of the apprenticeship. Eventually I saw-- I saw-- that the path of the heart requires a full gesture, a degree of abandon that can be terrifying. Only then is it possible to achieve a sparkling metamorphosis.

I also realized the extent to which the teachings of don Juan could and would be dismissed as "mere allegory" by certain specialists whose sacramental mission is to reinforce the limits that culture and language place on perception.

This approaches the question of who gets to define "correct" cultural description. Nowadays some of Margaret Mead's critics declare she was "wrong" about Samoa. But why not say, less dogmatically, that her writings present a partial picture based on a unique encounter with an exotic culture? Obviously her discoveries mirrored the concerns of her time, including her own biases. Who has the authority to cordon off art from science?

The assumption that art, magic, and science can't exist in the same space at the same time is an obsolete remnant of Aristotelian philosophical categories.

We've got to get beyond this kind of nostalgia in the social science of the twenty-first century. Even the term ethnography is too monolithic, because it implies that writing about other cultures is an activity specific to anthropology, whereas in fact ethnography cuts across various disciplines and genres. Furthermore, even the ethnographer isn't monolithic-- he or she must be reflexive and multifaceted, just like the cultural phenomena that are encountered as "other."

So the observer, the observed phenomenon, and the process of observation form an inseparable totality. From that perspective, reality isn't simply received, it's actively captured and rendered in different ways by different observers with different ways of seeing.

Just so. What sorcery comes down to is the act of embodying some specialized theoretical and practical premises about the nature of perception in molding the universe around us. It took me a long time to understand, intuitively, that there were three Castanedas: one who observed don Juan, the man and teacher; another who was the active subject of don Juan's training-- the apprentice; and still another who chronicled the adventures. "Three" is a metaphor to describe the sensation of endlessly changing boundaries. Likewise, don Juan himself was constantly shifting positions. Together we were traversing the crack between the natural world of everyday life and an unseen world, which don Juan called "the second attention," a term he preferred to "supernatural."


Keith Thompson:
What you're describing isn't what comes to mind for most anthropologists when they think about their line of work, you know.


Carlos Castaneda:
Oh, I'm certain you're right about that! Someone recently asked me, What does mainstream anthropology think of Carlos Castaneda? I don't suppose most of them think about me at all. A few may be a little bit annoyed, but they're sure that whatever I'm doing is not scientific and they don't trouble themselves. For most of the field, "anthropological possibility" means that you go to an exotic land, arrive at a hotel, drink your highball while a flock of indigenous people come and talk to you about the culture. They tell you all kinds of things, and you write down the various words for father and mother. More highballs, then you go home and put it all in your computer and tabulate for correlations and differences. That to them is scientific anthropology. For me, that would be living hell.


Keith Thompson:
How do you actually write?


Carlos Castaneda:
My conversations with don Juan throughout the apprenticeship were conducted primarily in Spanish. From the outset I tried to persuade don Juan to let me use a tape recorder, but he said relying on something mechanical only makes us more and more sterile. "It curtails your magic," he said. "Better to learn with your whole body so you'll remember with your whole body." I had no idea what he meant. Consequently I began keeping voluminous field notes of what he said. He found my industriousness amusing. As for my books, I dream them. I gather myself and my field notes-- usually in the afternoon but not always-- and go through all my notes and translate them into English. In the evening I sleep and dream what I want to write. When I wake up, I write in the quiet hours of the night, drawing upon what has arranged itself coherently in my head.


Keith Thompson:
Do you rewrite?


Carlos Castaneda:
It's not my practice to do so. Regular writing is for me quite dry and laboured. Dreaming is best. Much of my training with don Juan was in reconditioning perception to sustain dream images long enough to look at them carefully. Don Juan was right about the tape recorder-- and in retrospect, right about the notes. They were my crutch, and I no longer need them. By the end of my time with don Juan, I learned to listen and watch and sense and recall in all the cells of my body.


Keith Thompson:
Earlier you mentioned reaching the end of the road, and now you're talking about the end of your time with don Juan. Where is he now?


Carlos Castaneda:
He's gone. He disappeared.


Keith Thompson:
Without a clue?


Carlos Castaneda:
Don Juan told me he was going to fulfil the sorcerer's dream of leaving this world and entering into "unimaginable dimensions." He displaced his assemblage point from its fixation in the conventional human world. We would call it combusting from the inside. It's an alternative to dying. Either they bury you six feet deep in the poor flowers or you burn. Don Juan chose burning.


Keith Thompson:
I guess it's one way to erase personal history. Then this conversation is don Juan's obituary notice?


Carlos Castaneda:
He had come to the end, deliberately. By intent. He wanted to expand, to join his physical body with his energy body. His adventure was there, where the tiny personal tide pool joins the great ocean. He called it the "definitive journey." Such vastness is incomprehensible to my mind, so I can only give up explaining. I've found that the explanatory principle will protect you from fear of the unknown, but I prefer the unknown.


Keith Thompson:
You've travelled far and wide. Give it to me straight: Is reality ultimately a safe place?


Carlos Castaneda:
I once asked don Juan something quite similar. We were alone in the desert-- nighttime, billions of stars. He laughed in a friendly and genuine way. He said, "Sure, the universe is benign. It may destroy you, but in the process it will teach you something worth knowing."


Keith Thompson:
"What's next for Carlos Castaneda?"


Carlos Castaneda:
"I'll have to let you know. Next time."


Keith Thompson:
"Will there be a next time?"


Carlos Castaneda:
"There's always a next time."



Copyright March/April 1994 New Age Journal

Body Mind Spirit - Apr 1995

An Interview with Carlos Castaneda

CARLOS CASTANEDA'S TENSEGRITY:

The Modernization of Ancient Magical Passes

Introduction by Gaylynn Baker

Interview by Bruce Wagner

From the sixties until now, Carlos Castaneda has inspired seekers everywhere.

Unfathomed mysteries unfolded as magical adventures in a series of books that began as "The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge". After each spectacularly simple book, the literary world held its breath, awaiting the next adventure that was sure to be another best seller. Avid readers who wouldn't dream of leaving their armchairs traipsed through baffling worlds of sometimes conflicting, but always fascinating information. Thought of as the most mysterious writer of our time, Castaneda was never accessible to the public, and rarely ever granted interviews. Cynical marketing wizards with knowledge of the way things are "sold" to the soporific public voiced awe at the success of what they assumed was just a "take-away marketing" technique being used to build Castaneda's popularity.

Seekers, on the other hand, felt the books required Castaneda's willingness to disappear into a controversial cloud of smoke. Either way, reclusiveness became an accepted part of the Castaneda story. Finally, in the eighties, even the books stopped.

Then in the first three years of the 1990's, three new books appeared: Castaneda's "The Art of Dreaming", (HarperCollins), "Being-In-Dreaming" (Harper San Francisco) by Florinda Donner- Grau, and "The Sorcerers' Crossing" (Penguin USA) by Taisha Abelar. Each book gave a compellingly different account of apprenticeship in don Juan Matus' legendary world. To add to the excitement, mid-1993 brought the announcement that Florinda and Taisha would join Carol Tiggs, identified in the books as the Nagual Woman, to teach three separate workshops. The locations selected were the Rim Institute in Arizona, Akahi Farms in Maui, and Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. The workshops sold out as quickly as they were announced. A new buzz was on everyone's lips: Tensegrity.

Tensegrity passes were taught in the workshops by demonstration and audience participation. It was announced at the Rim Institute that a video of these movements would be forthcoming. Meanwhile, workshop attendees studied their hastily written notes and crude drawings in a frantic attempt to absorb. Everyone involved in the workshops longed for the video. Now, a year later, the first in a series of videos has appeared. Demonstrated in February at the Phoenix Bookstore in Santa Monica, California, and now being introduced at various workshops around the country, (see listing at the end of this article).

Body Mind Spirit asked writer/director Bruce Wagner to reach Dr. Castaneda for a deeper explanation and understanding of what Tensegrity really means.


Q:
While your body of work reflects an enormous generosity towards your readers, you're also well-known for a certain "unavailability". Now you've released a videotape of "energetic movements" called Tensegrity. This seems to us unprecedented. Would you share your reasons behind this spate of availability?


A:
There was a time when our teacher, don Juan Matus, imposed on us, his four disciples, Taisha Abelar, Florinda Donner-Grau, Carol Tiggs and myself, a model of behavior patterned on his own life: a model of total unavailability. Things have changed, though, and in this respect, we are no longer bound to follow his steps.

However, our present availability is not our invention but the result of our strict adherence to a concept he himself taught us: fluidity, the essential condition of his world. In other words, nothing in the sorcerers' world is permanent. Nothing in the world of everyday life is permanent either, but people are determined to ignore this fact, hiding behind empty idealities.


Q:
Would you care to explain what you mean by empty idealities?


A:
Sorcerers believe that we are socialized to hide our true needs behind empty shields, placebos with no meaning whatsoever. For example, our preoccupation with the presentation and defense of the self in everyday life is one of those empty shields. Sorcerers regard it as a placebo because it does not bear at all on our true needs, which are best described by such basic issues as the questions about the nature of awareness, the purpose of our lives, the unchangeable condition of our death. Don Juan taught us the form to address such questions; he called it "the warrior's way".

Throughout my entire work, I have tried nothing else but to live up to a most serious responsibility: to describe the warrior's way. All of don Juan's disciples are deeply concerned about the same issue. Since we believe there is very little time left for us, we have agreed that this is the moment for all of us together to assume responsibility for demonstrating the warrior's way. To present this video is an attempt to do so.


Q:
The movements shown in the Tensegrity video were taught to you by don Juan Matus. They explore the dualism between the self and the energy body.

What is the energy body?


A:
The movements shown in the Tensegrity video were indeed taught to us not only by don Juan Matus, but by all the other members of his party. These movements, which they called "magical passes", are part of their heritage as sorcerers. These movements are energetic maneuvers designed to isolate and enhance what sorcerers call the "energy body", or the conglomerate of energy fields that they consider to be the counterpart of the physical body.


Q:
You've said that men and women who lived in ancient Mexico wished to store enough energy to extend or enhance their awareness. The movements depicted in the Tensegrity video were used to accomplish that end. How were these movements invented?


A:
Men and women sorcerers who lived in Mexico in ancient times practiced these series of movements in order to store energy in their bodies and manipulate it. The movements were not really invented by them; the movements were rather discovered by them via their dreaming practices. Dreaming, for sorcerers, is the art of transforming ordinary, normal dreams into bona fide means of enhancing their perception. The explanation we were given was that in dreaming, those men and women were capable of reaching levels of optimum physical balance. In dreaming, they were also able to discover the specific movements that allowed them to replicate, in their hours of vigil, those same levels of optimum physical balance.

The belief of those sorcerers, derived from their dreaming observations, was that awareness is a glow focused on a specific spot on our energy bodies, a spot which is visible when we are seen as fields of energy. The greater the amount of energy the physical body can store and manipulate, the more intense the glow of awareness.


Q:
The persons demonstrating the movements are referred to in the video as "chacmools". Who are they? What is their significance?


A:
The three persons who present this video are Kylie Lundahl, Reni Murez and Nyei Murez. The three of them have worked with us for many years. Kylie Lundahl and Nyei Murez are Florinda Donner-Grau's wards; Reni Murez is Carol Tiggs'. Don Juan explained to us that the gigantic, reclining figures called chacmools, found in the pyramids of Mexico, were the representations of guardians.

He said that the look of emptiness in their eyes and faces was due to the fact that they were dream-guards, guarding dreamers and dreaming sites.

Following don Juan's tradition, we call Kylie Lundahl, Reni Murez and Nyei Murez chacmools, because the inherent energetic organization of their beings allows them to possess a single- minded purpose, a genuine fierceness and daring which make them the ideal guardians of anything they choose to guard, be it a person, an idea, a way of life, or whatever.

In the instance of our video, these three guardians demonstrate the techniques of Tensegrity because they are best qualified for the task, having the three of them completed the gigantic task of compiling the four individual strands of magical passes taught by don Juan and his people to us, his four disciples. And also because through their practice of Tensegrity, they have been able to transform the idea of routinary compulsive discipline into the art of the disciplined warrior, free of compulsion.


Q:
You say that don Juan had only four disciples: Taisha Abelar, Florinda Donner-Grau, Carol Tiggs, and yourself. What happened to the other disciples you mentioned in your earlier books?


A:
They are not with us any longer. They have joined don Juan. In terms of energetic configuration, they were dramatically different from us, and because of this, they were incapable of following my guidance; it was not that they did not want to-- it was rather that my actions and goals did not make any sense to them. There have not been any other disciples in don Juan's world. Claims that people have made of having been don Juan's or my students are absurd.

We have been thoroughly unavailable for thirty years. Allegations that anyone has known or worked with any of us are spurious. I am afraid people have made such statements out of sheer insanity, or worse yet, out of the reprehensible need to seek attention.


Q:
The movements of Tensegrity are also said to enhance well-being. Does one "feel better" doing them?


A:
Don Juan Matus himself said that not only does one feel better practicing the magical passes, but one becomes a better human being; the reason for such an assertion is very simple: increased energy generates calmness, efficiency and purpose. Don Juan used to say that the collective malady of our day is our total lack of purpose. He repeated to us endlessly that without sufficient energy there is no way of even conceiving any kind of genuine purpose in our lives. The magical passes, by helping us to store energy, do help us to grasp the idea of purpose in our thoughts and actions.


Q:
How did you come to call the movements "Tensegrity"? What does it mean?


A:
As I have said before, thanks to the effort of the three chacmools who compiled all the magical passes, we ended up with a vast system of body maneuvers. After that, all of us worked for years to turn such a system into a workable and veritable unit. I have called this unit "Tensegrity", a term which in architecture means: "the property of skeleton structures that employ continuous tension members and discontinuous compression members in such a way that each member operates with a maximum efficiency and economy".

The agreement among us is unanimous: such a term best describes the nature of this system of movements. Its essence consists of tensing and relaxing selected areas of the body at first, leading to the tension and relaxation of the entire body at the end. What we want is to replicate the efficiency of those men and women sorcerers of ancient times who discovered and practiced the magical passes.

To this effect, don Juan himself urged us to become versed in the practice of Oriental martial arts. He was inspired, no doubt, by one of his cohorts: Clara Boehm, Taisha Abelar's teacher, who had studied martial arts in ChinA: Clara's idea was that the discoverers of the magical passes poured an ominous obsession into the perfect execution of them. She said that in order to match that obsession, we needed the precision and the internal force acquired by the practice of Oriental martial arts: her predilection and bias. Every one of don Juan's disciples has been a student of martial arts at one time or another. The movements of Tensegrity, therefore, are already cushioned in something that would lead the body to develop maximum precision and internal force, in lieu of obsession.


Q:
In the video, you eschew the words "magic" or "sorcery", referring to the expertise of those men and women of ancient Mexico as the ability to "handle awareness". Why do "magic" and "sorcery" have negative connotations?


A:
"Sorcery" and "magic" are terms that have a negative connotation because of the way Western man faces the unknown. Sorcerers believe that he is imbued with an irrational fear of the unknown, and that in order to free himself of this fear, he has to change his basic orientation: instead of being terrified by the unknown, he must be intrigued by it. To avoid evoking anger or disapproval among the persons who might be interested in this video, I have refrained from arousing their fear at the use of terms like "sorcery" or "magic". What I would like to do is to entice them to suspend judgment and simply practice the movements. After all, if they faced the unknown with the increased energy resulting from practicing the movements of this videotape, they would have simply engaged themselves in handling awareness in a new fashion.


Q:
What would you say to those who approach the video as an exercise tape?

In other words, is there something to be gained by using the tape if one isn't up for the "abstract journey"? (Is the idea of gain reprehensible?)


A:
The idea of gain is not reprehensible at all. We practice Tensegrity exclusively to gain strength, fortitude, durability, youth. So, the idea that people might take the video as an exercise tape is perfectly acceptable. The grand trick, don Juan used to say, is not believing, but practicing. "You don't have to believe what I say," he told us repeatedly, "but do exactly as I tell you, because I am older than you and I know the road. At the end, what I recommend you to do will have its effect: it will change you."


Q:
We've heard through the grapevine that these movements may be offered in a workshop setting, taught by the chacmools".


A:
Yes, it is true that the chacmools are going to offer workshops on Tensegrity. The chacmools have deemed it necessary to teach Tensegrity to whomever wants to learn it on a direct basis. They came up with the idea of creating their own institution, "The Chacmool Center for Enhanced Perception".

Their argument is that don Juan's disciples, no matter how available they might want to be, are really inaccessible, by virtue of the practices don Juan left to them as a legacy. The position of the chacmools, on the other hand, is ideal for teaching, since they are young, accessible students of the rather inaccessible, older students.


Q:
We've also heard that the tape is the first volume of a projected series. How many movements are there?


A:
The tape is indeed the first volume of a projected series. The movements of Tensegrity are quite numerous and it is the chacmools' art to have compressed them into one single unit. Kylie Lundahl, being the chief of the guards, after years of painstaking effort, and in close consultation with don Juan's disciples, has selected for each videotape the most pertinent magical passes, ranging from the most simple to the most complex. In her selection, she has employed her best energetic output, always bearing in mind that what counts in practicing the movements of Tensegrity is the sorcerers' intent of storing energy and not merely their routinary repetition. Kylie Lundahl, in conjunction with all of don Juan's disciples, has organized the movements of Tensegrity for the maximum application to well-being and enhanced awareness.


Q:
Do you practice the movements each day yourself? If one applies oneself with abandon, when might one expect "results"?


A:
All of us practice the movements each day individually wherever we are. When we are all together, which is very rarely, the three chacmools lead the sessions. The positive results of Tensegrity are almost instantaneous, if one practices the movements meticulously and daily.


Bruce Wagner is a novelist, screenwriter and film director. He directed the first volume of Tensegrity: Twelve Basic Movements to Gather Energy and Promote Well-Being. At present he is the Writer and executive producer of Francis Ford Coppola's upcoming television movie, White Dwarf.


Copyright April 1995 Body Mind Spirit Magazine

Kindred Spirit - Jun 1995

An interview published in the Summer (June-August) 1995 issue of Kindred Spirit magazine.

INTERVIEW

A New Generation Of Sorcerers

From the sixties until now, Carlos Castaneda has inspired seekers everywhere. Here the three chacmools of his generation, Kylie Lundahl, Reni Murez and Nyei Murez answer our questions in the frank and particular way well known to all those familiar with their tradition.

---

Carlos Castaneda's Tensegrity

Castaneda:
More than twenty-five years ago I wrote my first book: The Teachings of Don Juan, a book about my apprenticeship with Don Juan Matus, a Yaqui Indian sorcerer from the state of Sonora, Mexico. I developed the theme of Don Juan's teachings in eight subsequent books, the latest of which, The Art of Dreaming, was published in 1994. Now there is a new expression of those teachings; I call it TENSEGRITY. TENSEGRITY, a term I borrowed from architecture, refers to the 'property of skeleton structures that employ continuous tension members and discontinuous compression members in such a way that each member operates with the maximum efficiency and economy'.

I have applied this term to a system of movements that don Juan's four disciples, Florinda Donner-Grau, Taisha Abelar, Carol Tiggs and myself, have developed, following the strict patterns of the sorcerers that lived in Mexico in ancient times.


THE HISTORY OF TENSEGRITY

Castaneda:
One of the major disadvantages that I encountered in portraying the teachings of don Juan for the reader was the use of the terms sorcerer and sorcery. The negative reaction that these terms evoke in us is something natural; the connotations that they bring to mind are all malignant and terrifying. In order to avoid such a reaction, I have opted for using the terms man of knowledge or seer.

The seers that lived in Mexico in ancient times discovered, by means of their dreaming practices, a series of movements conducive to physical well-being and mental sobriety. Dreaming for those seers meant the use of ordinary dreams as a means to enlarge the scope of their perception. Through such practices they used to enter into states of enhanced awareness, where they experienced a tremendous feeling of physical balance, an indescribable sense of well-being, and a great internal strength. Those men of knowledge longed for such feelings of well-being and internal strength when they were in their normal awareness; their longing was so intense and their efforts to repeat them were so overpowering that they finally discovered, in dreaming, bodily movements that allowed them to replicate at will those states of well-being and internal strength.

They called these movements magical passes, an in order to guard them, they transformed them into something tremendously secretive and mysterious by surrounding them with rituals.

The magical passes of the seers of ancient Mexico have survived to this day. They were handed down with utmost caution and great secrecy from generation to generation. Don Juan Matus and his cohorts taught to us, their four disciples, four different lines of magical passes. All of us kept our individual line of movements secret until ten years ago when we decided to amalgamate them into one single unit.


THE HISTORY OF THE CHACMOOLS

Castaneda:
The word Chacmool is applied to some monumental human figures made out of basalt found in the pyramids of Tula and Yucatan in Mexico. They portray human beings in a reclining position holding some sort of flat receptacle on their umbilical region. Scholars have classified the figures as incense burners; the sorcerer's of don Juan's lineage consider them to be the representation of a special class of fierce guardian warriors. For don Juan and other seers like him, the Chacmools were not incense burners, but rather the guardians of the pyramids as sites of power.

In the lifetime of those seers and throughout the ages, the chacmools were and are fierce warriors dedicated to guarding other men of knowledge; they guard their way of life, the places where they live, the spots where they do their dreaming. the chacmools are the custodians of the ideas, visions and possibilities of the seers under their care.

Among the men of ancient Mexico, the male or female entrusted with directing the actions of a whole generation within a given lineage of seers was known as the nagual. The nagual is a being gifted with a very special energy that gives him the quality of a natural guide, a conductor, a director.

Don Juan Matus was the guide of his generation and I am the nagual of the new one. In my generation there are three chacmools: Kylie Lundahl, Renata Murez and Nyei Murez; these three women are entrusted with the care of don Juan's four disciples.


THE CHACMOOLS AND TENSEGRITY

Castaneda:
The task of the chacmools, in their role of guardians of the ancient seer's way of life, was to compile the four lines of magical passes. It took them seven years to amalgamate them into a single unit. The chacmools, guided by us, don Juan's four disciples, erased the haze of mystery and enigma that surrounded the magical passes, and they transformed them into something that can be utilised by anyone.

Now the chacmools have prepared for use the first unit of the magical passes adapted to the new ideology that well-being and internal strength are the heritage of every human being. They have entitled the first unit TWELVE BASIC MOVEMENTS TO GATHER ENERGY AND PROMOTE WELL-BEING.

This first unit is the theme of their videotape-- which is already being sold in the United States and will soon be available all over the world-- and it is also the theme that they are going to develop in a series of workshops that they will conduct this year.

The seers of ancient Mexico believed that human beings are the beholders of a most peculiar dualism. They were not referring to traditional dualisms such as body and mind or matter and spirit, but to the dualism between the self and something they called the energy body. They considered the energy body to be a particular conglomerate of energy fields belonging to each of us individually.

The goal of those men of knowledge was to forge the energy body and transform it into a replica of the self, and vice versa, to forge the self and transform it into a replica of the energy body: a conglomerate of energy fields.

The necessary energy to accomplish the indescribable results of this dual transformation was obtained by those seers through their magical passes.

The TWELVE BASIC MOVEMENT TO GATHER ENERGY AND PROMOTE WELL-BEING were selected by us, don Juan's four disciples, in unanimous agreement, in order to serve as the basis to gather and store the necessary energy to give definition and scope to the energy body.

---

Question:
Can you tell us how you first came into contact with Carlos Castaneda and the sorcery tradition, and what impact this made on each of you?


Answer:
This question is impossible for us to answer on the basis that the sorcery tradition that Carlos Castaneda described in his books is a state of being. We cannot say in sincerity that there was a time when we came into contact with it.

This is no exaggeration on our part, nor is it a desire to give you a cynical, obscure, or cute answer. The truth of the matter is that we are barely coming into contact with it now. We began working with Carlos Castaneda about ten years ago, but our working with him had nothing to do with his world. We did research for gigantic upcoming book that he plans to publish some day, the title of which has changed through the years; it began as Ethno-hereneutics, but one of his best friends appropriated the name for his own research.

Then it changed to A New View of Interpretation; at present it's called Phenomenological-Anthropology. This work reveals Carlos Castaneda's deep interest in the social sciences that he has kept alive throughout all his life as an inheritor of don Juan Matus' sorcery tradition.

We cannot say, then, that when we came into contact with Carlos Castaneda we also came into contact with his world. The latter was a matter of gradual assimilation; we don't know when it took place. We feel, however, that it is taking place now.


Question:
In the books by Carlos Castaneda, humans are described as luminous beings who generally have a fixed assemblage point which locks then into 'normal reality' which is perceived as the external world. A movement of this assemblage point enables the adept to perceive and move into other equally 'real worlds'. Can you give us any examples of the experiences that might occur as a result of such a movement which might be more accessible to those unfamiliar with the sorcerer's path; would near death experiences be such an example?


Answer:
The assemblage point is displaced from its normal position during sleep. Sorcerers say that the farther away it is from its normal position, the more bizarre the experiences of that dream. This is the simplest example of the displacement of the assemblage point which occurs to all of us at all times.

Another example could be the displacement created by the intake of hallucinogenic plants or substances. Fatigue, hunger, fever, disease, dehydration and many other abnormal situations also produce a displacement of the assemblage point. The idea of sorcerers is that any displacement of the assemblage point produces a view of another world, but it is also their idea that we are incapable, under any conditions, of maintaining the fixation of the assemblage point on the place to which it is displaced. This incapacity results in a mere fleeting view of other worlds.

Near death experiences are certainly, we would say, the leading examples of a more sustained view of other worlds. Sorcerers maintain that the impact of death is so gigantic that it freezes everything in one place; therefore, the fixation of the assemblage point at the place where the impact of death displaces it must give the most sustained view of another reality to those who are not necessarily on the warrior's path.


Question:
We understand that, like his teacher don Juan Matus before him, Carlos Castaneda is now the nagual. What does this term mean?


Answer:
The term nagual refers to a man or woman who is the possessor of a special charge of energy which makes him or her appear to the eye of the sorcerers, who are viewing the world solely in terms of energy and energy flow, as a being double, meaning that what appears normally as a luminous egg or ball of energy appears in a nagual as one luminous ball of energy superimposed on another.

Sorcerers maintain that such beings are capable of guiding, directing and advising other sorcerers in a most natural way. Sorcerers define the nagual as the being who is best capable, due to his charge of energy, to express and to interpret the commands of the spirit. For Carlos Castaneda to be the new nagual means that he has assumed the responsibility of guiding us to freedom.


Question:
Has a successor to Carlos Castaneda been found?


Answer:
No. There is no successor to Carlos Castaneda - he is the last of his lineage.


Question:
For a tradition that is so secretive, enigmatic and mysterious, what has prompted the decision to undertake work in public at this time?


Answer:
The sorcerers' tradition is in no way secretive or enigmatic per se. The problem here is the reluctance on our part, as members of the Western world, to be serious about anything that does not stem from ourselves. In the case of the sorcery tradition of the Mexican Indians, ethnocentrism seems to be our cup of tea.

The other part of your question we can answer by saying that the nagual woman, Carol Tiggs, who came back from a most mysterious journey ten years ago, opened the door for a revolutionary attempt on the part of don Juan Matus' disciples-- Carlos Castaneda, Florinda Donner-Grau, Taisha Abelar, and herself-- to disseminate the seed of an extraordinary idea: freedom.


Question:
How can someone who is not in contact with yourselves participate in the tradition.


Answer:
Carlos Castaneda has given in his nine books all the necessary clues to follow the warrior's path. He has presented those clues in the same fashion in which they were presented to him. Underlying this procedure is the sorcerer's conviction that the intellect has to be pricked first; once the intellect is curious about something, persistence can open energetic doors that will make direct participation possible. This answer seems mysterious and enigmatic but that is only a superficial appearance. The sorcerers in don Juan's tradition said that it is impossible for the linear mind to fathom the intricacy of the universe.

Energy, as a bona fide affair that rules our lives, is not part of our understanding of the world. Another way to answer the question would be to say that if we persist in following the warrior's path, energy itself will make it possible for us to continue.


Question:
Could you briefly comment on the sorcerers' understanding of the earth energy lines and sacred power places.


Answer:
Sorcerers believe that the earth is a conscious being, but conscious at a level that is more incomprehensible to our minds. Being alive and conscious, the earth generates energy which sorcerers perceive as luminescent lines.

A sacred power place is a description given to a nucleus of energy lines, that is to say, a centre where energy emanates naturally from the earth, like water flowing from a hidden well.


Question:
Can you tell us something about the secondary function of the womb, according to the teachings, the primary function being childbirth?


Answer:
We have been taught that the secondary functions of the womb are very much like the function of the brain as we know them. The sorcerers have told us that we can think with our wombs. However, whatever they call 'thinking with the womb' is not at all the kind of thinking we are accustomed to. What a woman gets are not actual linear thoughts but tremendously clear and powerful thought-feelings that we have to later interpret linearly. There seems to be a natural progression in the life of a sorceress to quiet down the linear thoughts and allow the feeling thoughts to rise until there is an equal amount of both.


Question:
Does the tradition recommend celibacy and if so, for what reasons?


Answer:
No. The tradition does not recommend us to be celibate or to be libertines. Celibacy is an issue related exclusively to what the sorcerers call 'the way in which we were conceived.' They say that if we were conceived in the midst of tremendous physical and emotional passion, our natural level of energy would be so high that we could do whatever we wanted without any detriment to ourselves; we could be libertines to our hearts' content. On the other hand, if we were conceived in what sorcerers call 'a super-civilised environment', our level of energy is the exact replica of the physical and emotional state of our parents at the moment of conception.

Sorcerers call the product of that conception a 'bored fuck'. In a joking manner we call them 'B.F.'s.' Of the three of us here, two of us are B.F.'s for sure; one of us seems to have escaped that fate. For us B.F.'s, sorcerers recommend that we save our energy any way we can because we don't have any. Celibacy in this instance is not recommended, it is demanded as our only way of being on par with the best non-B.F.'s.


Question:
Don Juan Matus describes the world as being predatory in nature, which is at variance to perhaps all other mystical, shamanic and esoteric traditions. Can you comment on this?


Answer:
In the tradition of the sorcerers to which don Juan belongs, it is maintained that the universe is predatorial in nature. For sorcerers, this is not a matter of speculation or of metaphorical predilection-- they know for a fact that it is predatorial. Throughout the ages they have described the condition of man, which is about the bleakest description we know. As time goes by, this description gains more and more ground. Sorcerers say that just as we keep chickens, or gallinas in Spanish, in a coop, or a gallinero, some entities that come from a universe of awareness keep us in human coops. Sorcerers make a joke and say that those entities, which they call flyers, or voladores, keep us human beings, or seres humanos, cooped up in humaneros.

The flyers of the sorcerers' tradition are black shadows that we sometimes detect and explain away as floaters in the retina. Sorcerers know for a fact, by means of their capacity to see energy directly, that those shadows are predatorial and that they keep us alive in order to devour our awareness.

Sorcerers say that our awareness is like a sheen around our total field of energy that looks to them like a luminous ball. To them, this sheen of awareness is like a plastic cover that would make the luminous ball shine even more if it were not for the fact that it has been eaten away down to the level of our heels.

Here is where the sorcerers description gets very disturbing to us; sorcerers say that the only sheen of awareness left in us by our eaters is the awareness of self-reflection. Therefore, all we are left with is the concern with me, myself and I. In our personal lives we have corroborated that the only force left in the immediate world around us is the force of self-importance, which comes disguised in the form of humility, compassion, altruism, kindness, you name it.

This sorcerer's description is of course our ultimate nemesis; we don't want to believe that we are being raised for food. In this sense, naturally, the sorcerers' tradition is at total variance with any other kind of spiritual tradition.

Sorcerers say, and believe me, not out of cynicism, that every ideal we deal with in terms of spiritual traditions, religions, etc, is a device concocted by the flyers to keep us in a lull. Imagine our disquietude upon examining, weighing and pondering this proposition.


Question:
What is the 'jump for freedom' and what is 'death' to those people who have not made this 'jump'?


Answer:
We understand that the jump to freedom is equivalent to evolving in a premeditated way. For sorcerers, the natural reason for our lives, aside from being eaten by the flyers, is to fend off our attackers in order to allow our awareness to grow to its full capacity. To complete this task is an evolutionary step which sorcerers call the jump to freedom. We haven't reached that state so we truly don't know what it means.

Your question of what death is to people who have not made this jump can be answered by sorcerers very simply by telling you that people who do not allow the regrowth of awareness die by being eaten by the flyers.


Question:
Could you please explain why you do not allow any photographs of yourselves or tape recordings of your voices.


Answer:
In doing this, we are directly following the tradition of the sorcerers of ancient Mexico. Obeying their request is our only palpable link with them since our way of life and our situation, as the last members of this line of sorcerers, has made us reach areas that were never entered by preceding practitioners. We are immensely far away from the actual tradition that gives us sustenance. Sometimes what we have to do is in total opposition to that tradition. Our token adherence to it is our blind obeyance of this rule: no pictures and no recordings of our voices.


Question:
You are all now placing a great emphasis on 'the recapitulation'. Can you describe the method and purpose of this technique and tell us of its origins and explain why it has come to the forefront of the teachings at this time?


Answer:
No, it is not only now that we are placing a great emphasis on the recapitulation; Carlos Castaneda has been talking about it for years. The method of the recapitulation is to make a careful list of all the persons we have come in contact with in our lives; this is a formidable task.

Personally, we have found it staggering to remember every person we have met in our lives! When we were asked to do this we believed it was impossible. We were told then that once this list was made, if ever, we had to take the first person on the list, which goes from the present to the day we were born, and examine all the interactions we had and everything related to that interaction. In other words, we were told that we had to relive every experience, and that our list was a device to aid our recollection.

The reason for the recapitulation, we were told, was manifold. The first reason was explained as the certainty that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico had-- and they were the inventors of the recapitulation-- that an incredible force which they called the eagle, and which we call awareness at large, lends every newborn being, from a virus to a human being, a certain amount of awareness which they are to enhance by means of their life experiences. At the end of their lives, that force reclaims the awareness that was lent.

Those sorcerers maintained that this reclaiming of awareness is linked to our death only by contact, and that the force that lends us awareness is not interested in taking our lives-- that is a different process. They also maintained that by means of the recapitulation we can give that force what it wants, and in the end it will let us go through it without taking our lives away. This is what sorcerers understand as being consumed by the fire from within. Sorcerers don't really die the way the rest of our fellow men do.

The other function of the recapitulation is to give us fluidity. Upon reliving all our experiences, sorcerers say that we acquire a pliability that will facilitate our entrance into areas of perception veiled to normal human beings.

The last function, which sounds to us like the most important of them all, is that through recapitulating we can acquire a hard discipline which is the only means by which we can make ourselves unpalatable to the flyers. Sorcerers assert that the only awareness which cannot be eaten is the awareness produced by iron-handed discipline. The recapitulation seems to create a condition of fluidity and determination which is the discipline that sorcerers talk about, not the discipline of compulsive, routinary behavior.

We have corroborated in our lives that our awareness is different; we are certainly aware of things now that were inconceivable to us before.


Question:
What is the attitude towards using psychotropic teacher plants, such as datura and peyote, and others which were advocated by don Juan Matus in the early Castaneda books?


Answer:
We understand that the reason don Juan gave Carlos Castaneda a profusion of psychotropic plants was because Castaneda was a very difficult subject. The stiffness of his personality was so overwhelming that don Juan used to call him 'Mr Oldmann' and 'Mr Nightmare' and also 'Mr Bacon' because he was quite chubby. He himself says that being short, brown, chubby and homely made him an impossible subject, and that change was not his middle name. Castaneda's case was quite individualistic-- the rest of don Juan's disciples never took any psychotropic plants. Don Juan pushed them in the opposite direction to the point that they don't even drink tea.


Question:
We have heard that the nagual woman Carol Tiggs, who was introduced to the world in Carlos Castaneda's most recent book The Art of Dreaming, spent ten years in the second attention and then reappeared in a book shop in California.

Is this true and can you explain what it means?


Answer:
Yes, it is true. Carol Tiggs went to the Phoenix Bookstore in Santa Monica because she found out that Carlos Castaneda was giving a lecture there. He, Florinda Donner-Grau, and Taisha Abelar believed that Carol Tiggs was gone for the rest of their natural lives and was waiting for them somewhere in what the sorcerers call the second attention, where she would guide all of them some day. Carol Tiggs had returned from a ten-year journey two months prior to that encounter; she was still groggy from that experience; she couldn't conceive a way to get in touch with Carlos and the other two.

It is very difficult for us to explain what this means; the sorcerers would explain it by saying that don Juan's four disciples have not been eaten by the flyers for thirty years, so their level of awareness allows them extravagant play with perception and awareness. To try to make this into a linear explanation is impossible, unless we want to sound like three idiots babbling inanities. We hope we never get to that point.


Question:
What exactly is the 'second attention'?


Answer:
We have been taught that the second attention is the consciousness of human beings who have not been devoured by the flyers down to their heels. If a natural regrowth of awareness is allowed, the level of consciousness of that awareness that rises up allows the person who has it to enter into something indescribable. Since it has been impossible for us to get an idea of what this awareness is from a great number of people, all we have is our four wards; Florinda Donner-Grau, Taisha Abelar, Carol Tiggs and Carlos Castaneda. We haven't been able to really deal with this subject.

From our own personal experience we draw a near blank. We have changed, yes, but our consciousness cannot verbalise what we experience; it seems like the world we used to know but we know that it isn't.

We hope that a moment will come when it will be possible for us to verbalise what the second attention is beyond saying that it is a consciousness of heightened awareness. As we have already told you, by heightened awareness we mean awareness that has not been eaten by the flyers.

Our insistence on this point may be very displeasing to you, it is to us, but we are convinced that there is no other way to explain bona fide change in human beings. Consider this point: in the world of everyday life, no matter what we do, we never change. So what are we going to do? Remain the same while we talk and talk about unrealistic idealities? This is the point where the sorcerers squashed us. They said to us, if you really want to change and be different you must fend off the flyers. If you do not do this, forget about change-- all you will do throughout your lives is talk about how wonderful you are.


Question:
Are you working for the collective jump for freedom and are we in a race against time to complete the jump?


Answer:
The three of us are in perfect agreement with the four of don Juan's disciples; we would like to bring the idea of change and freedom and purposeful evolution to whoever wants to listen. We are not in a race against time; if we are, it is subliminal-- we are not aware of it. But now that you ask the question, you have us wondering.


Question:
We understand that don Juan is no longer in the world. Where is he now and do you have any contact with him still?


Answer:
We came years and years after don Juan left the world. We don't know where he is-- neither do his disciples; he apparently died a sorcerer's death, which means he took his body with him and kept his life force. Sorcerers describe this as burning from a fire from within and turning every bit of oneself into awareness-energy. If that is the case with don Juan, he and his people vanished into infinity without leaving a trace.



Acknowledgment: Our thanks to Simon Bridgewater for his help with this interview.

Editor's Note: In order to publish this interview, we agreed to the chacmool's condition of not editing any published replies to questions. We apologise to those with failing eyesight for the small print at the beginning of the article.

Copyright 1995 Chacmool Center for Enhanced Perception

Copyright June 1995 Kindred Magazine

Los Angeles Times - Tuesday, December 26, 1995

Home Edition

Section: Life & Style

Page: E-1

The Mystical Man; One of the most elusive writers of our time, Carlos Castaneda returns (briefly) to share a few secrets with devotees. To remain invisible, he says, is the sorcerer's way.

By: Benjamin Epstein

Special to the Times

Carlos Castaneda, the 20th century's own sorcerer's apprentice, has been nearly invisible for 25 years. Not that he was ever exactly in plain view. The author of nine books based on his experiences with Juan Matus, a Yaqui seer, Castaneda has been seen as a bridge to the unknown by millions of spiritual seekers-- especially in the soul-searching '60s and '70s.

Now he's back. Or was back.

Castaneda was center attraction earlier this month in Anaheim at a two-day "Tensegrity" seminar. More than 400 devotees paid $250 each to attend the seminar led by three women, called "chacmools," who taught a series of "magical passes," or movements.

Castaneda has succeeded in being one of the most elusive writers of our time-- to remain invisible, he says, is the sorcerer's way. In the '80s, he effectively vanished altogether. He never allows a photograph or a tape recording of his voice. He only rarely has granted interviews-- but unexpectedly agreed to one in Anaheim. (See accompanying story).

His books continue to sell-- 8 million copies in 17 countries-- and have never been out of print. Did he make up his fantastic desert tales, with their shimmering supernatural events, as his critics maintain?

"I invented nothing," he said at the seminar. "I'm not insane, you know. Well, maybe a little insane. But not ridiculously insane!"

In 1993, his book "The Art of Dreaming" (Harper Collins) was published. The same year, with the assistance of the chacmools, Castaneda and three fellow Don Juan disciples began presenting a few Tensegrity seminars. Tensegrity, Castaneda says, is derived from an architectural term relating to skeletal efficiency and seems to mean a way of tensing and relaxing the body.

Workshops were held in Arizona, Hawaii and at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. This month the show came to Anaheim.

"To be young and youthful is nothing," said Castaneda, exuberantly taking the stage before the devotees. "To be old and youthful, that is sorcery!" Castaneda is both. His hair is gray and cut short; his manner energetic and engaging. He's small and trim. He dresses simply and his olive complexion shows few signs of wear and tear.

The seminar participants, mostly middle aged, came from around the world-- about a third from California-- in hopes of seeing the charismatic Castaneda and to learn about Tensegrity. Many wore Tensegrity T-shirts ("The magic is in the movement").

In an open hall, the chacmools each stood on elevated platforms and demonstrated the elaborate Tensegrity sequences step by step, the seminar attendees following along closely. As each sequence was mastered, everybody stopped to applaud.

While learning Tensegrity filled most of the seminar hours, at least one couple came for another purpose: "We're not disinterested in Tensegrity," the woman said. "But we came to hear Carlos."

Among Castaneda's remarks to those at the seminar:

"We are all going to face infinity, whether we like it or not. Why do it when we are weakest, when we are broken, at the moment of dying? Why not when we are strong? Why not now?"

"We repeat slogans endlessly. We don't know how to think for ourselves... 'We are made in the image and likeness of God?' What does it mean? Nothing. Yet we hold on to it. Why?"

"Me, me, me. Everybody, it doesn't matter, is egomaniacal. The other person tells you what he did, then you say, ah, but I did this..."

It's hard to pin Castaneda down to one answer on points that, for most people, are pretty simply stated.

According to "Contemporary Authors," Castaneda lists his birth date and place as Dec. 25, 1931, in Sao Paulo, Brazil; immigration records indicate Dec. 25, 1925, in Cajamarca, Peru, and other sources the late 1930s. One New York Times article put him at 66 years old in 1981.

Similarly, biographies variously list the years he earned his degrees in anthropology. The records at UCLA, though, show he earned a bachelor's in anthropology in 1962, a doctorate in 1973.

In other words, this is one slippery organic being. (According to Castaneda, he spends a great deal of time among inorganic beings.)

While studying at UCLA, Castaneda traveled to Arizona to research medicinal plants. There he met Don Juan Matus, who sensed in the young man the possibility of a successor. Matus later moved to Sonora, Mexico, and Castaneda followed.

Castaneda's first three books-- "The Teachings of Don Juan" (University of California Press and Ballantine, 1968), "A Separate Reality" and "Journey to Ixtlan" (both Simon & Schuster, 1971 and 1972, respectively)-- describe a rather thickheaded student often bungling his way through a 12-year apprenticeship to become a "Yaqui man of knowledge."

All received enthusiastic reviews and made the bestseller lists. The most respected critics of the day praised them on one hand as "the best that the science of anthropology has produced" and, on the other, said that the tension between academic rationality and the magic of Don Juan's world made them first-rate literature, "remarkable works of art," in the words of Joyce Carol Oates. His more recent works have received somewhat less attention, but sell well nonetheless-- and increasingly well in other countries.

At least two volumes by other authors attempted to debunk Castaneda. One dismissed him as a fraud; the other, "Castaneda's Journey," (Capra Press, 1976) by Richard de Mille, found many discrepancies in his work, but the writer decided early on that Castaneda "wasn't a common con man, he lied to bring us the truth. ...This is a sham-man bearing gifts."

Shaman or sham-man, readers didn't care, and reviewers who saw him as a "trickster-hoaxer" still took him seriously. A Saturday Review critic wrote that Castaneda "works a strange and beautiful magic beyond the realm of belief... Admittedly, one gets the impression of a con artist simply glorifying in the game-- even so, it is a con touched by genius."

At UCLA in the '60s, Castaneda was perceived as "the little brown man with the big smile." Not much has changed; he's about 5 feet, 5 inches, funny and charming.

He can be amazingly convincing when describing some out-there ideas, such as: his life among inorganic beings; the assemblage point, a place about a foot behind our shoulder blades that can be shifted to visit other realms; a predatory universe in which "fliers" incessantly feed on mankind's awareness, taking the sheen off our luminous eggs and leaving only a rubble of self-absorption and egomania.

Back in the three-dimensional world of self-absorption and egomania, Castaneda is represented by talent agent Tracy Kramer. (Kramer also represents "Rug Rats," "Duck Man" and "The Real Munsters," and notes that "somewhere there's a purity about all of them.")

Both Kramer and Cleargreen Inc., which organizes the seminars, are based in Los Angeles. But it's unclear--as is so much else-- where Castaneda is based. Kramer contends that "the majority of [Castaneda's] time is not spent here. And what he does do here he doesn't share with me." Castaneda reportedly bought a home in Malibu sometime in the '70s. If a passing remark at the seminar was to be taken literally, he continues to pay property taxes somewhere.

At the center of Castaneda's books is the premise that the world as we know it is only one version of reality, a set of culturally embedded "agreements" and "descriptions." Time magazine described Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan Matus as "an enigma wrapped in mystery wrapped in a tortilla."

According to Castaneda, Matus gave him psychotropic plants-- peyote, Jimson weed and mushrooms-- only because he was such an intractable student.

Although the use of hallucinogens boosted the popularity of the first two books, they subsequently gave way to nonherbal perception-altering exercises. Castaneda believes that the negative connotations of the words sorcery and magic are rooted in Western man's irrational fear of the unknown. He recommends that people be intrigued rather than terrified by the unknown.

"It is a thinking universe, a living universe, an exquisite universe," he said. "We have to balance the lineality of the known universe with the nonlineality of the unknown universe."

"The Art of Dreaming" ends with Castaneda recounting an episode in the mid-'70s when he and fellow Matus disciple Carol Tiggs were "dreaming" in a hotel room in Mexico City and Tiggs disappeared into those dreams. According to Castaneda, Tiggs reappeared 10 years later in a bookstore in Santa Monica where he was giving a talk. It was the reconstituted Tiggs who provided the impetus to compile the "magical passes" of Tensegrity.

Castaneda and Tiggs were among four disciples of Matus who were each taught a separate line of magical passes. The others, Florinda Donner-Grau and Taisha Abelar, have also published accounts of their apprenticeships, markedly different from Castaneda's but still endorsed by him. Tiggs, Donner-Grau and Abelar attended a bonus Castaneda appearance the final night of the Anaheim seminar but didn't address the group.

The actual teaching of Tensegrity at the seminars and in instructional videos has been carried out by the three chacmools-- Kylie Lundahl, Nyei Murez and Reni Murez. The movements taught to seminar participants were often angular and fierce in character-- less like Yaqui yoga, more like martial arts. Tensegrity videos-- there are two volumes-- were on sale for $29.95.

According to Cleargreen President Talia Bey, proceeds from the seminar will help fund publication of a Castaneda periodical, the Warriors' Way: A Journal of Applied Hermeneutics.

At the close of the seminar, Castaneda delivered remarks both lighthearted and serious, and peppered with his self-deprecating humor.

But then, Castaneda obliquely dropped a bombshell: He was relieving the chacmools of their teaching duties. The announcement left many in the audience unsettled.

"Look, the whole front row is shaking in their boots!" Castaneda said. "The chacmools will be erased today. They go on to something else."

Seminar organizers later clarified: Although "erased," the chacmools will remain on the payroll at Cleargreen in capacities yet to be determined. And the teaching of Tensegrity will apparently continue-- a seminar is planned in Oakland, Feb. 9-11, and a women's workshop in Los Angeles for March 1-3. Said Castaneda: "If the chacmools go away, something else will appear. That is a world that is alive, in flux. ...If I am needed, I will be there. Just call me."


OK, Carlos. But who has your number?



Photo: Carlos Castaneda's "Tensegrity" seminars are led by three "chacmools," Kylie Lundahl, from left, Nyei Murez and Reni Murez, who teach "magical passes," a series of movements, angular and fierce in character.

Photo: Reni Murez, from left, Nyei Murez and Kylie Lundahl teach movements designed to heighten awareness, focus and increase energy.

Photographer: Kari Rene Hall / Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles Times - Tuesday, December 26, 1995

Tuesday, December 26, 1995

Home Edition

Section: Life & Style

Page: E-4

By: Benjamin Epstein

Q & A: A Rare Conversation With the Magical Mystery Man

When Benjamin Epstein caught up with Carlos Castaneda in Anaheim to ask if he would agree to an interview, Castaneda unexpectedly invited him to join his party for lunch. In a conversation over a this-worldly melted cheese sandwich, side of bacon and fries, Castaneda was personable and spontaneous.

Here's some of what he had to say:



Question:
Why don't you allow yourself to be photographed or tape recorded?


Answer:
A recording is a way of fixing you in time. The only thing a sorcerer will not do is be stagnant. The stagnant word, the stagnant picture, those are the antithesis of the sorcerer.


Q:
Is Tensegrity the Toltec t'ai chi? Mexican martial arts?


A:
Tensegrity is outside political boundaries. Mexico is a nation. To claim origins is absurd. To compare Tensegrity with yoga or t'ai chi is not possible. It has a different origin and different purpose. The origin is shamanic, the purpose is shamanic.


Q:
Where would Jesus fit into all this? Where would Buddha fit in?


A:
They are idealities. They are too big, too gigantic to be real. They are deities. One is the prince of Buddhism, the other is the son of God. Idealities cannot be used in a pragmatic movement.

The difference between religion and shamanic tradition is that the things shamans deal with are extremely practical. Magical passes [movements] are just one aspect of that.


Q:
Is that what you've been doing all this time, magical passes?


A:
Nooooo... I was very chubby. Don Juan [Matus] recommended an obsessive use of magical passes to keep my body at an optimum. So in terms of physical activity, yes, this is what we do. The movements force the awareness of man to focus on the idea that we are spheres of luminosity, a conglomerate of energy fields held together by special glue.


Q:
Where do you live?


A:
I don't live here. I'm not here at all. I use the euphemism, "I've been in Mexico." All of us divide our time between being here and being pulled by something that is not describable, but that makes us visitors into another realm. But you start talking about that and you start sounding like total nincompoops.


Q:
According to your book "The Eagle's Gift," Don Juan Matus didn't die, he left, he "burned from within." Will you leave, or will you die?


A:
Since I'm a moron, I'm sure I'll die. I wish I would have the integrity to leave the way he did, but there is no assurance. I have this terrible fear that I won't. But I wish. I work my head off-- both of my heads-- toward that.


Q:
I recall an article, at least a decade ago, calling you the "Godfather of the New Age."


A:
It was "grandfather!" And I thought, please call me the uncle, or cousin, not grandfather! Uncle Charlie will do. I feel like hell, being the grandfather of anything. I'm fighting age, senility and old age like you couldn't believe.

I've fought for 35 years. The three people I worked with have been at it for 35 years. They look like fabulous kids. They continually take this energy on and on and on in order to remain fluid. Without fluidity, there's no way to journey anywhere.


Q:
Matus taught you to see. When you look at me now, what do you see?


A:
I have to be in a special mood to see. It is very difficult for me to see. I've got to get very somber, very heavy. If I'm lighthearted and I look at you I see nothing. Then I turn around and I see her, and what do I see? "I joined the Navy to see the world, and what do I see? I see the sea!"

I know more than I want to know. It's hell, true hell. If you see too much, you become unbearable.


Q:
Talia Bey, seminar organizer and president of Clearwater Inc., seems to stick pretty close to you. Are you two a couple?


A:
We are ascetic beings. No relationships of a sexual order. This is very difficult, a difficult maneuver for us. Don Juan recommended that I had to be a conserver of energy, because I don't have much energy. I myself was not created under conditions of great sexual passion. Most people are not... [Talia] was born with enough energy that she can do what she wants.


Q:
Can married people do what they want?


A:
That question has come up a lot, and it's a question of energy. If you know you were not conceived in a state of real excitation, then no. On one level, it hasn't mattered if people are married. But with the launching of Tensegrity, we don't really know what is going to happen.


Q:
You don't know what is going to happen?


A:
How can you know? This is an implication of our syntaxical system. Our syntax requires a beginning, development and end. I was, I am, I will be. We are caught in that. How can we know... what you are going to be capable of if you have sufficient energy? That is the question.

The answer is, you are going to be capable of stupendous things, much more exciting than we can do now, with no energy at all... [Don] Juan Matus recommended me to be careful with energy, because he was grooming me for something. But I didn't know for what...


Q:
You talk about Matus' line of sorcerers. Are you aware of others?


A:
I ran across one marvelous Indian from the Southwest and that was a memorable event. It was the only time I met a sorcerer outside of Don Juan's lineage, a young man deeply involved in the type of activity in which Don Juan was involved. We talked for two days, [after which] for some reason he felt he owed me something.

One day, I was driving a VW in a sandstorm and it was just about to turn my car over. It had already ruined my windshield, the paint on one side was totally gone. A big rig came and stood between the wind and my car. I heard a voice call down from the cabin, "Hide alongside my rig." I did. We drove for miles along Highway 8. When the wind died down, I realized I was off the paved road. The guy stopped and it was that Indian.

He said, "I have paid my indebtedness. You are somewhere else. We are even now. Back up to the paved road." He went back, I went back. Once out on the main road, I went back and forth trying to find the dirt road but I could not. He took us into another realm. What power, what discipline, exquisite! I could hardly contain myself.

He had taken my VW, everything, there. I could barely take myself somewhere else at that time. I looked for any deviation in the road, but could never find it. Zippo. It was an entrance of sorts. He never talked to me again, ever.


Q:
Some of your biggest fans will say you've contributed great literature, even great anthropology, but would never call it nonfiction. Others would say you're laughing all the way to the bank.


A:
I invented nothing. Somebody once told me, "I know Carlos Castaneda..."

I said, "You met Carlos?"

He said, "No, but I saw him in the distance all the time. You know he admitted he made up all that in an interview."

I said, "Really? What interview, you remember?"

He said, "I read it, I read it..."


Q:
Why do you say you are the last sorcerer in Matus' line?


A:
For me to continue Don Juan's line, I would have to have a special energetic disposition I don't have. I'm not a patient man. My ways of moving are too sharp, too disturbing. For us, Don Juan was there, available always. He didn't disappear. He measured his appearances and disappearances to suit our needs. How can I do that?


Copyright 1995 Times Mirror Company

The words of Carlos Castaneda: Abridged From the Los Angeles Intensive Tensegrity Workshop lecture, August 13, 1995

=====

[At his point he paused, at which point one person from the audience asked him about the Death Defier, the proposed topic of this lecture]

As part of don Juan's lore, the "Death Defier" was...is...there was one person who appeared in 1725, who went to see the nagual Sebastian, who was a sexton for a church in Tula. The nagual could work in the church and was safe there. He took care of bells, and other property at the church. One day an old indian came to him and said, "I need your energy, or else I will denounce you as a practitioner of the black arts..." Of course with this, Sebastian was compelled to listen.

The indian wanted energy from only the nagual. We all have an umbilical, the belly button. We all die from here, it's a deadly place, a hole in the energy body from which life force escapes upon death. A nagual has twice the energy of a normal man, so the indian said that to give a minimal amount would do him no harm.

This indian was actually a sorcerer from 7000 years ago, he lives today by placing his assemblage point on different points, getting a "mortgage" on life. He moves his assemblage point to a key position, which gives him an insect-like quality. He then draws energy from the belly-button of the nagual, and has a "sac" into which he pulls this energy. His assemblage point then returns to the habitual position, then he's like everyone else.

He didn't need energy until 1725. Then, he became fixed to the lineage. He gave in exchange for the nagual's energy, gifts of positions of the assemblage point. Knowledge about how to attain these new positions, and what to expect. Sebastion was extraordinary. He received 8 new positions from this "death defier". Lujan got 52 positions! But this was not for don Juan, he was not interested in the death defier's gifts, nor was I. But he tapped me, he couldn't help it. Munched me to death, don Juan said.

I was willing to half-believe what don Juan was saying about the existance of the death defier. Corn was found in Mexico which was carbon-14 dated to 34,000 years ago. The first migration into Mexico suposedly happened only 10,000 years ago, and were simple hunter/gatherers. But don Juan said this was not true. He said, "we both have ways of measuring time; you measure, while I...ask."

One day don Juan said he'd take me to see the death defier. No problem, it's all horshshit, I thought. So he took me. Scared the living daylights out of me. I met this Indian with the weirdest accent. The accent was on all the wrong syllables. If a word had the accent on the first syllable, he'd put it on the second. But he did it so consistently as to convince me it was genuine.

The man was thin, wiry. He drove me nuts talking like that. He told me, "My eyes have feasted themselves on the helmets of the Spanish conquerors. I saw them, how they moved. I felt their discomfort, and felt how they had to sleep with their helmets and armor on, I felt their pain. I've seen incredible things. What do you want?"

"Nothing!", I replied.

"But we have an agreement. With you, it will be difficult, for you are the last..." Of course, he somehow knew I was to be the last nagual in this line, yet I myself didn't know it at the time. We met in a town in Mexico, it was a Saturday. I ate cheese with him, seemed very normal. We took a walk. The next thing I knew I was waiting for don Juan to pick me up, and I'd had no idea what had transpired. I left with a sensation, tremendously old, musty, kind, foreign, unthreatening. This weird nostalgia. It's been as if I'd been involved in a fight that had no end. This is the first time I truly realized that there were things with no end...

I woke up in a peculiar town. There was a paved road, which sloped high in the middle, a "1st gear" road. The first thing you see walking up this hill is the hats of the mexicans on the other side. It was a peculiar sensation, a "cinematic" one for me. So, I was watching that... (By the way, don Juan found this town to be the epicenter of "energetic convolutions".) I was waiting for don Juan with this sensation of nostalgia, but not for my life or past, it was foreign. So old, sad, yet charming, haunting. It's never left me, I'm always playing with that sensation, the neverending fight, with no possibility of looking for a lull. don Juan said it was poison that the death defier left me. It was like being prone, being ready, as if something is coming. A foreign feeling.

The next time I found the death defier, was at nearly the end of don Juan's life. A small church in Tula - met a gorgeous woman. I had much fear at the prospect, don Juan had to literally drag me to the church. There were two women nearby, with 3 men coming out from the church. The 3 men went down the stairs, and the two women went inside. "Where is he", I wondered to don Juan, "the men left."

Don Juan responded, "Who told you that the death defier is a man?" He pointed to the woman in the last pew. don Juan emplored me to "cross" myself, to observe the customs, and not to make a spectacle. The woman turned and smiled. At this point I ran out of the church, falling prey to a bout of asthma. I'd had asthma when I was a child...

Don Juan asked me, "why this fear?"

My family name is Carlos Arana (pronounced "Arania"), and in portugese, Arana means "spider". don Juan asked, "What's wrong, Mr. Spider?" The more I walked away, the more tachycardia (irregular heartbeat condition) acted up. Then I got insane and simply said to don Juan, "OK, lets go", and went back to the church and sat next to the woman.

She had a raspy voice, as she greeted me and held my hand, "I like your energy...muy bien." She took me to dreams upon dreams - 9 days I was lost, although I thought it was one. don Juan told me that I'd came to agreements that I'd not be aware of until I was "fully grown".

The death defier is as real as me or don Juan. Different, but bizarre possibility which is available to us all, not that we'll take it. The human unknown is as far away as anything, but it's still within our realm of possibilities. Wow! Who are we?!

Are we just some travellers caught in some disgusting trap? Maybe. For me, I saw the death defier and don Juan as navigators. I navigate, therefore who are we? Why accept what's been handed down--nagging, senile, discontent, repetitive, with endless regrets--no desicions whatsoever.

"I decided to come to this seminar--if it's chicken-shit, then so be it." That's the sorcerer's way. "Oh, I didn't get personal treatment..." People come, at the first twist, they tell us to go "blow our barracks". We've got to get rid of the ego, I say, but then it's, "Fuck you". We've got to be as sharp as a razor, go slowly at first, then you can jump. Don't give me this, "I volunteer for your group, take me, take me, I'll do whatever you want..." Stop being an egomaniac, I say. "Oh, I'm so disappointed, Carlos...no peyote in the desert?"

Last night I invited for you to read up on your "heritage" (writings of the Bible, Jesus, Mohammed, etc), and look for the "me, me me". It's a man talking for God. It can't be personalized. The minute it is, we inject "me" into it. What is heaven? Humanness for eternity? We don't want it! What is the Pace of heaven? I'm in a toga, walking like this [walks torturously slow for several steps]...

Then comes the death defier. An outstanding male of his time. The inorganic beings are also blasted by flyers. There's nothing they'd like to do more than to unite with us. But the only ones brave enough are the sorcerers, as beings wanting to enhance their wareness. You profess to be who you are in their realm, and they grab you! How else would they do it, as they have no way of making themselves known. We are being systematically separated [from the inorganic beings] by the flyers.

Don Juan said that the inorganic beings were dangerous. The death defier got grabbed by the inorganic beings, but he accepted the bidding. He spent thousands of years in that world. One day this ultimate freedom fighter discovered the way to escape. Turn into a woman! This is simple for a sorcerer. A woman has her assemblage point with its "shiny" side facing inward, while a man's assemblage point has its shiny side facing out. All one needs to do is to turn the assemblage point around, and your whole body turns into something else. It's not merely an illusion. As a woman the inorganic beings didn't know he existed, and he simply slipped by without notice. In making a deal with the inorganic beings, he lost his possibilities. But now hes' caput. I'm the last of the line, so what will the death defier do? He'll go with me, I'm his last chance. It gives me the goose bumps. Infinitely more exciting...

So, this death defier has escaped twice! First death itself, then the inorganic being world. I get emotional. What beauty/elegance. He chose not to be human, but is still a being who's going to die. He knows only fighting, it's a story, but NOT a story. He's everyone of us, but enhanced by his thirst for freedom. I don't think the death defier truly knows what freedom is, but so what? He goes to something not defined.

That's why I try to sneak out of it [talking about the death defier]. I would weep like an imbucile. Don't you dare believe that I wouldn't...

END

Los Angeles Magazine - May 1996

Los Angeles Magazine, Los Angeles, May 1996
Authors: Wagner, Bruce

Part I of II

ON THE PLANE BACK FROM MEXICO CITY WITH CARLOS CASTANEDA. And I'm wigged, because there is no fucking peyote. None offered; none smelt or dealt -- no child's-size button or gill-thin slice in evidence. No drugs! No mescalito! Only those cloying, silvery zip-locked honey-coated peanuts and a pallid fangy stewardess with purple-glossed Anistonian pout ("It's called'Manic Panic,"' she says. "I got it on Melrose.") who, upon seeing the outre fire-engine red CAA script in my lap hovers; a warm and fizzless 7-UP away from asking "what's shooting in Mex-hee-ko?" Seems she worked the Sundance shuttle and it really gave her the show-biz; bug. I'm tempted to say Dr. Castaneda and I are teaming on a Tim Burton or, "something with Drew." Or how's about we're headed for the famed Churubusco Studios to do a rewrite on the $38 million Honey, I Shrunk the Boundaries of Normal Perception (Touchstone)? Nah, she's 23 and wouldn't know Carlos Castaneda from a hole in Werner Erhard. After all, CC's no Learning Annex cover book. Suddenly, I'm mugged by that hideous L.A. Times movie promo, the one with the sexed-up rappelling location scout. (Director: "Where's my river?") It's all over me like a cheap Joan Osborne jingle -- in my personalized version, Purple Lips is the scout, and me the hairy, arrogant genius boy: "Where's my peyote?"

Sheesh. I had hoped a workshop in Mexico with Don Carlos was going to be my sinfully mystic moment; I'd expected nothing short of flying monkeys and a brand-new brain. The idea was to frolic through the spookily high-concept, coyote-strewn chaparral of those famous book covers, time and terrain collapsing as I duked it out with 18-foot shape-shifting allies, then morphed into a crow flying over an IMAX diorama of Sonoran sky, feeling what it's like to peck the shit out of some trippy little jackrabbit. You can't always get what you want.

Even stone-cold sober, I have to say Mexico was kicky. The archbishop decried "the pseudo-religion of the New Age" (you know, the kind that promotes una falsa vision de la realidad), while the smog-socked metropolis, oblivious to His Bunuelian imprecations, descended on a private club a thousand-strong to attend Castaneda's "Tensegrity" seminar, profits of which were donated to local orphanages. How retro! On line, the curious, the faithful, the fateful and the just plain media, fingered excerpts of CC's forthcoming book, Readers of Infinity, an exeges "from the world, as interpreted by sorcerers." For those who've followed the elusive nagual and his global peregrinations, Tensegrity is the heart of the big artichoke of his teachings: a mysterious set of physical movements, "magical passes developed by Indian shamans who lived Mexico in times prior to the Spanish Conquest."

Whoa.

THE CABIN SPASMS THROUGH A tunnel of turbulence; my cue to lurch to the loo. I'm forever fleeing to the washroom when I'm with the man -- I get morose and skittish, like a fucked-up Jimmy Olson. CC once told me bathrooms are dangerous places. If one gets "silent" enough on the bowl, a crack in the world opens up. One minute you're braced against the $600 ergonomic seat of your Snyder-Diamond toilet-bidet combo; the next you're shimmying through that pesky Third Gate, the one he talks about in The Art of Dreaming, where you find yourself staring at a sleeping snorer who turns out to be ... you! With a shudder, I stare at the 37,000-foot-high black rubber hole and ruminate on Dr. Castaneda's sorceric toilet-training riff.

"We're taught very carefully how to view the world -- and how to 'handle' it," he had said a few moments earlier, as a beastly dip jostled the stewardess into the easily bruisable arms of a stunned retiree. "The social order commands us: How to blow our nose, read a map or interpret the gesture of a stranger -- 'practical actions.' We learn so well, even a psychotic uses the toilet instead of the planter in a hotel lobby." He adds coyly: "Most psychotics. You have to learn a new set of 'practical actions' if you want to see that the world is not the way your mother described it." I'd told him that in order to break those boundaries, I need drugs -- I'm not talking Prozac or Percocet Nation. None of that Brentwood caca fo me. I'm talking Datura inoxia. I'm talking Lophophora williamsii and Psilocybe mexicana. Isn't that what his books were about (the early ones anyway)? UCLA student working on thesis seeks out expert on hallucinogenic plants, unwittingly meets Yaqui Indian brujo, Don Juan Matus. Don Juan tells him we are magical beings, exquisite animals, true perceivers -- now fallen, toothless lions, caged and flea-bitten, with no awareness of the meaning or majesty of our lives or deaths. Castaneda yawns at brujo. Don Juan napalms him with psychotropics until CC sees, writes bestseller and lands on cover of Time. Becomes cultural icon and so-called godfather of the New Age. Well, I've been trying three [...?] he wants me to know drugs are unnecessary(*) --"Yes, they shift the assemblage point, but in an unstable fashion."

STRAPPED IN MY SEAT NOW, NURSING drugless wounds and sending the stewardess those righteous Don't-Ask-Me-Anything-About-the-Business vibes. As we begin our slow, drug-free descent, I think of how I came to meet CC. I was working on a script for Ixtlan (Oliver Stone's company; we're all journeymen here), when I heard OS and the legendary shaman had broken bread. How slick! Hats off to wily, clowning, dharma-bumming, decade-foraging pop ethnographer Oliver, I thought (cumbersomely). Hmmm. Too good to pass up; I should do a little weaseling myself. I'd read all CC's books, had all the big-time apprentice/accidental-tourist fantasies.

If I could just finagle a dinner, a lunch, some time under the volcano, so to speak, then get on with it: write the definitive David Foster Wallace-size bio and get Annie Leibovitz'd for the New York Times Magazine cover ("Bruce Wagner's Warrior: On Shamans, Castaneda and the Elusive Art of Biography").

I'd met Billy Wilder through Oliver easily enough. But OS was off scouting in Thailand, as is his wont -- Where's my delta? -- so someone in-house put out feelers. Nothing happened. Gelson's sushi- and caffeine-sodden days blurred into weeks blurred in months; projects kindled, flared, sizzled, flickered, smoldered and died; scripts winked like horny burn patients from the ICU of their IKEA shelves. Still, all quiet on the energetic front. Finally, a San Rafael hippie source called to say CC was to speak at the Phoenix Bookstore in Santa Monica. So there I go an there he is, and it's weird! Because he's "diminutive" and gregarious with a broad, rubbery smile, and he's talking phenomenology, intentionality, sorceric intersubjectivity; Brentano, Husserl and Heidegger -- and then he's effervescing about ... Hollywood! Castaneda, at'70s studio pitch meetings! Reminiscing about all the suits who wanted to make movies from his books! And he's flat-out, obscenely, Orson Welles ? funny -- I say that because I used to drive Welles to Ma Maison in a limo, and Welles was the same conversational way, with those unexpected scarily au courant, trenchant tummy-roiling references. (We chauffeurs kept a board in the trunk to slide the custom-shod, ascoted elephant seal in and out of the car; did that with Larry Flynt, too, when we brought him to Martin Luther King hospital for rehab.) Between yuks -- CC says his jokes are a "dissonance" to soften people up so they'll suspend judgment -- he talked the oddest shit from his books that everyone there had of course read but kind of temporarily forgot with the shock of seeing the obsessive mythic diarist before them, in the flesh. I got the feeling half the group was trying to make sure it was him -- still uncommitted, not wanting to be Don Juan Barnum'd. After all, he's never been photographed, recorded, et cetera. When the crowd warmed up enough, he said things like

(1) We've been seduced into perceiving the world as a place of hard surfaces and finalities; (2) The universe is only energy-no good and no evil, only energy; (3) Definition of a sorcerer? Someone who "sees" that energy as it flows; (4) We're electromagnetic beings: When a sorcerer "sees" a man or woman energetically, they resemble "luminous eggs;" (5) Each luminous egg has an "assemblage point." Sorcerers learn to shift that assemblage point so that - That was all I could take.

NEARLY ON THE GROUND NOW. Under the trembling, mucousy wing rivets, Hollywood Park looks like something out of Toy Story -- impossibly big, bright, fun and dumb. The lurid stewardess faces us, from the safety high chair that flaps from the wall. She's definitely turned on me. Serves me right for traveling under CAA cover.

"The sorcerer's idea," says Castaneda, "is to venture to a place where socialization and syntax no longer rule. To dream, for a sorcerer, isn't to be the hero -- that's the 'lucid dreamer,' obsessed with self to the end. To dream oneself someplace else takes tremendous discipline. One dreams when there's nothing left: no desires or debts, anger or happiness -- only silence. Then, boom! Don Genaro Flores said that was the sound of the world stopping. When you stop the system of interpretation, that's what you hear: BOOM. At that moment, all of you goes to that other place -- hair, pocket money, shoes."

For now, that other place was Customs. We're back in L.A. I can tell, because it's the only airport I know that comes with paparazzi.

A FEW MONTHS ago, I got a call from the wife of an old friend, felled by a tumor in his head. Boom. A tousle-haired jock with a weed growing in the garden of his skull for what doctors guessed was the better part of a decade. They said it sat on the brain like a skullcap, but I saw it more like a man-o'-war gently riding cerebral fluids. This was the kind of bud you'd grimly joke with if it happened to someone else. How could it be? I saw him at Cedars after surgery, and he told me about a dream. He had dreamed a passel of ghouls. The ghouls, polite ones at that, asked in best ghoulish voice if he'd be so kind as to be the "official spokesperson for the disembodied." That gave me a chill. My friend went on to say he had agreed -- in the dream, that is -- "because now I had some time on my hands."

Jesus. That was one for Oliver Sacks -- or Carlos Castaneda.

"DEATH IS TOO SHOCKING," CC says, as we scan the lobby of the Chateau Marmont. "We prefer to be King of the Hill." His manner is casual, offhand. "Ten thousand years ago" he came here to visit a writer working on a screenplay of The Teachings of Don Juan. We walk pass the front desk on the way to Sunset Boulevard. Is that Judy Davis entering the lift?

"The sperm count of man is dropping -- did you read about it? It's below the level of hamsters. They blame it on migration to the cities, but that's absurd. The bats will win -- their sonar systems have become inconceivable. While the bats hone themselves, what does man do? He eats. He fights. He fucks. He defends his ego. Man is truly an insane ape! He has his holy men -- the special chair the guru sat in is on display. 'This is where Baba sat,' they say during the tour ... They've wrapped his feces in plastic. That's the New Age. I'm the Old Age!"

CC and I stroll into Bar Marmont. The hip setting lends a hallucinatory whiff to his juxtaposition, but he seems to be enjoying himself. I point out notables: Michael Stipe, a table with Abel Ferrara and Steve Buscemi, Paul Schrader and Bridget Fonda, a UTA agent with the super-model.

I think they call Shalom (a peace in any language). All in all, the perfect moment to ask about the luminous egg.

"Okay, let's say you, uh, see Michael Stipe standing before you. I mean, energetically."

"Michael Stipe would appear as a luminous sphere."

I'm into it now; the shadow-boxing apprentice is getting his see legs. "You've said that such luminous spheres have a bright spot called the assemblage point."

"Roughly at the height of the shoulder blades," he demonstrates, "an arm's length back. That's where perception is assembled and interprete The old sorcerers saw that the assemblage point is in the same position for all men -- that's why we view the world, this world, in such uniformity. The assemblage point is displaced when we dream -- and when that happens, new worlds come together, as real as our own. The sorcerer's art is to willfully displace that assemblage point, then fix its new position. That's the art of dreaming."

My energetic Everlasts torn, I rush back to my corner for solace and stitching -- the bathroom again, to sit on my stool. I think I understand what he's saying, but it makes me fucking uneasy. I stare at myself in the mirror and try to conjure the luminous egg ... so cogent one minute, outlandish the next. The world has always been extravagantly improbable; how, then, do we go about choosing what is or isn't so, personally? Is it merely a question of context?

I splash water on my face, grounding myself in the soothing petty paranoias of Film World. Edgily, I muse: Hey. Doesn't Stipe have some kind of "overall" at Miramax? He's probably already rushed over and introduced himself to Castaneda -- handshaking a deal right now on The EagI Gift. A little feature ... something around 7 to 10 -- with Buscemi as the brujo Don Juan. Schrader's already joined them, cobbling together a second act on a napkin, while hot-and-bothered UTA shoehorns Shalom as a Species-like Sonoran ally.

Castaneda is alone when I return, nursing his hot water. He's always drinking hot water. By the time I sit down, the luminous egg and its assemblage point are absurdities again. My attention span is sucky; maybe a little Ritalin would help me crack the energy code. Disconsolately I tell him I've been mulling those tricky shamanistic concepts but can't seem to suspend judgment. My ego's in id-lock.

"You're thinking too much, that's all," he says. "We're all ponderers." A scarily obese person lumbers toward us, then floats from view like a leaky barge -- today? factotum? publicist? "That's us: dying to be fat and useless. The difficult part about Don Juan's world is that you have to experience.

If all the pondering is properly examined, it's revealed to be meaningless. Pondering -- the obsession with linear response, with cause and effect -- is fallacious. There's no way to explain anything. We've been trained to believe we're curious to know the why of things. We think we can arrive at an 'understanding'; 'noble' intellectuals, totally unaccustomed to action. We pretend to seek answers, but our desire is to debunk. We're all Grand Inquisitors-I have met Torquemadas in my time! We hunger for the Big Question and we're enthralled by the Inadequate Answer, so we can go back to Seinfeld. The truth is, we're not curious at all."

PART II of II

AS WE WALK ALONG SUNSET, WE pass an enormous mobile home; pinch-faced men and women in black scurry about with garment bags. There's some kind of Vogue shoot going on in the Chateau garden, and we take a look. Helmut Newton is straddling a supermodel, six feet of pale, thrift-store Prada. It makes CC think of Fellini, who came to see him once in L.A. Il Maestro wanted to make a movie of his books; more to the point, he wanted to crash that Third Gate, swept through on the muscular black-tie arm of mescalito.(**) What a dream-date And, oh! How I sympathized with the dead, extravagant fish-mouthed auteur!

MY MOOD SWINGS LIKE A HAMMOCK in the caressing Santa Ana. I'm melancholy and mention my friend, he of the erstwhile tumor.

"We are beings who are going to die. That's exquisite -- think what can be accomplished by a being who knows he's going to die, who's fully aware. That's not morbid, that's a triumph. But we don't believe it, that's the flaw. Your friend, is he okay?"

"Yes. He seems to be recovering."

He brightens. "Ah! It's possible to reject all kinds of things. But then we need proof and assurances -- guarantees we're in remission. The doctors want to test endlessly. We are compulsive fatalists. I have a friend whose father e-mails him writings about his prostate; Daddy got the Big C and wants to make sure the son's on schedule. 'Cancer's just around the corner -- watch out!' We've been slated for conventional defeat, conventional death; we know how the end will come. For him, the prostate; for her, the breast. We hedge our bets with investments: retirement funds, pensions, vacation plans. The 'hot' hotel in Lanai is on the horizon! We want to know -- everything. Against that immensity out there, we know nothing! How could we? We cling: If only we could really know, like Leonard Nimoy."

I do the Vulcan spit-take. "Please explain."

"An Argentinean once wrote me a letter. 'My dear Carlos,' he said. 'For whatever it's worth, you must be aware of one thing: Leonard Nimoy knows."'

THE WORLD IS MAD, OF THAT much I'm certain. But is Carlos Castaneda? He believes we're magical beings; only the worst of cynics would disagree. He asserts our electromagnetism; the scientists nod. He wishes to replace the inner dialogue with silence; Buddhists wouldn' have a problem. He desires to navigate in the unknown with something called the double, or "energy body." Oh shit.

We meet downtown at the Pantry, where he occasionally came with Don Juan. If sorcerers dream of diners, surely they dream of this one. There's a quintessence-of-eatery about the place: burnished, vaguely haunted, perfectly distilled -- the diurnal bookend to Hopper's Night Hawks.

"I wanted to ask you about the double."

"We call that the 'energy body' or'dreaming body.'

"It's different than the luminous egg?"

"Yes, the double is something else. It's a counterpart. We all have one, but we're separated from it at birth -- like Spy magazine says. What sorcerers do is call back the double. They use it to navigate ... out there."

I get that urge again and quickly scan for bathroom egress. For the hell of it, I decide to break an old pattern and stay put -- what sorcerers call a "not-doing." This, then, will be my men's room not-going. Instead, I inquire about the crux of his recent seminars, the series of strange movements taught him by the legendary brujo -- "magical passes" never mentioned in any of his books. He calls this lost art "Tensegrity" and says it is essential to gathering enough energy to "cancel out our inherited view of the world."

"The magical passes were discovered by shamans of ancient Mexico during dreaming navigations. They were intensely secretive -- I never wrote about them because they were just too personal."

"But were Don Juan's explanations enough?" My not-going has left me feeling feisty. "I would think he business about dreaming navigations was a bit on the abstract side -- this was probably early in your apprenticeship, no? Weren't you more curious about the movements' origins?"

"Certainly! I wanted to know everything, to arrive at an 'understanding.' Oh, I ached to ponder. But Don Juan discouraged that particular discussion. Just as he discouraged me looking into a mirror or videotaping myself while dreaming."

"How freakish." Though I wasn't sure what he meant, I found the prospect genuinely unsettling.

"I assure you 'Mr. Nightmare'was more inquisitive than Geraldo -- or Mike Wallace." He laughed so hard he practically coughed up his porterhouse. "That's what Don Juan called me: Mr. Nightmare."

Cleargreen -- the company that sponsors CC's worldwide Tensegrity workshops -- recently announced over the Internet that "due to circumstances related to energy flow," L.A. would now have Castaneda's special focus. When I ask him to elaborate, he suddenly seems far away. Not nostalgic, just remote. "I'll never catch up to Don Juan. How beautiful! How much more beautiful than the shitty sadness I carried around for my parents and their fate. There isn't much time; I'm the end of Don Juan's line. Being here, in Los Angeles, is very real. You know Don Juan had a place of 'predilection' -- a valley around 60 miles north of Mexico City, near the pyramid of Tula. For me, he said that place of predilection was Los Angeles."

AT THE BUFFALO CLUB (WITHOUT him). On the way, I thought I hit a bird. Which alarms me because Castaneda had told me that was a standing joke back in Don Juan's time -- "Everyone was always nervously saying, 'I think I hit a bird."' Bad omens rising.

I sit at the Buffalo bar and drink. Steve Buscemi and Steve Bochco and Frank Stallone and Michael Stipe and Cameron Diaz and Lauren Shuler-Donner and Paul Schrader and Eric Idle and Traci Lords and Spike Jones and Bob Shaye and Shalom and Michael Mann and Elisabet Shue and Helmut Newton and Abel Ferrara and Dominick Dunne. None of them were there! Must be an off night. I imagine my friend with the excised tumor sweeping in, darkly Dolce & Gabbana'd, an insectoid Foreign Legion pin on lapel denoting Official Spokesperson for the Disembodied.

Over a martini, I review my crib notes: (1) We're magical beings, not just assholes; (2) We've been taught to see the world in a certain way; (3) We can temporarily cancel out what we've been taught and experience new worlds, real as our own; (4) There are no words to describe those new worlds; (5) Those worlds can be accessed during dreams, when our ironclad perceptual grip relaxes; (6) We use our birthright -- the double, or dreaming body -- to navigate; (7) To do that takes a shitload of energy; (8) Energy is accrued by shutting up the inner dialogue and doing strange, ancient physical movements; (9) Energy is accrued by "intent"; (10) Intent is a natural force, like gravity. (Sorcerers say dinosaurs intended to fly, so grew wings. If man is to evolve, so must he intend the abstract wings of freedom.)

I see Kim Cattrall and run the 10 points past her while her boyfriend, Daniel Benzali, the Murder One guy, visits the head. I ask what she thinks, and she says I sound PMS. I tell her about my erstwhile-tumored friend, and this opens the morbid floodgates: She mentions someone who got shot and I mention Elisabeth Leustig, the casting director mortally hit-and-run in Moscow. Regrettably, my mind, always looking after its own, segues to the novel I just wrote, the galleys of which arrived this morning in a torn FedEx package, the back of each page stamped with massive tire tracks. Bad omens rising!

I walk them out. A few pasty, subdued Baader-Meinhof types push colored pens and notebooks at her -- glossies from Bonfire, Star Trek and Masquerade. Kim talks to them in fluent German, but all the starstruck autograph hounds can muster is "Zuper!" While she signs, Daniel, having overheard my energy rant, references John Cage, then asks about Castaneda's idea of "silence. " He's gracious, trodding delicately -- the way one is around the emotionally challenged.

"He says that once you shut off the inner dialogue, you become empty. And that opens you to all kinds of bizarreness."

"And what was that you said about colors, Bruce?"

"When you're empty -- I mean, this is what Castaneda says -- you see a kind of sheet on the horizon. And it's lavender! He says there's a point of color on that sheet: pomegranate. He says the pomegranate point expands, then bursts into an infinity that can be'read."'

"As in literal text?" Kim asks.

A pause. She had me there. The charitable Daniel winces a goodbye.

FOUR A.M. HUNCHED AT THE MultiSync, surfing unofficial Internet newsgroups like alt.dreams.castaneda, Spanish poems -- Gorostiza, Vallejo, Neruda -- and tango lyrics exchanged. Advice to the love- and energy-lorn. Seems to me my tumorless bud will have to unseat incumbent Bill Gates -- the real spokesperson for the disembodied (you only vote by absentee). I ask the ether if Infinity can be read as text, an someone says, Yeah, that's how CC writes his books. Upcoming workshop gossip. Speculation about possible attendance of Blue Scout, a stellar wild child introduced in 1994's The Art of Dreaming. Names of passes dropped: "Preparing to Cross Over," "Stabbing Energy in Search of a New Position of the Assemblage Point," "The Female and Male Winged Being," "The Stellar Hatch." Someone says the latter draws on "the energy of dead stars," which provokes more queries: Do trees have assemblage points? Where is L.A.'s "power spot"? (Hint: Not Drai's.) Are there worlds where hues have scents? And what is the color of discipline?

THE WORKSHOP AT UCLA. Five hundred seekers, choreographed on the shiny wood court in a shamanistic half-time show. In keeping with the weekend's theme -- " Warriors on the Run" -- the passes seem speedier, more propulsive than those in Mexico: qi-soaked eruptions that resemble kung fu; then, sudden filigreed handwork akin to tai chi. But what the hell do I know.

"Tensegrity isn't a'fighting form,"' CC tells the group. "It isn't competitive. In the world, one thought competes with 10 others. We have to try and leave the world behind." The magical passes are'maneuvers designed to isolate and enhance what sorcerers call the'energy body"' -- not necessarily the goal of your average storefront dojo for savage young white boys. Someone asks if the movements were performed en masse in the days with Don J. "Not then -- because the passes were injurious. The movements taught to myself were solely for me, to balance my energetic conifiguration and purge its obsessive nature. You see, our idea is that the men and women who discovered these movements were a little dark, a little ... ominous. Those qualities had to be removed before the passes could be shared."

I DO 20 MINUTES OF TENSEGRITY in my living room; oddly, my limbs seem to remember one of the longer sequences. I imagine my dreaming body floating toward me like a ghostly pet at chow time. Then I lie down for one of the Silence exercises: Calves dangling, I place a weight on my belly, applying pressure to the top of the rib cage with my fingertips. I shut my eyes and transcend the lids, focusing somewhere far on the dark horizon. After flirting with silence, I swig down some Kahlua and dream liqueured inanities.

Awaken at four a.m. Turn on the television. Ping-pong between Bravo, CNN, VH- 1, Cops, IFC, Court-TV. On the latter, a compendium of trials: war criminals on the stand in The Hague; in Atlanta, a divorce attorney divorces his wife, herself a former client; a woman abandons her Alzheimer's-stricken father at an Idaho dog track. (A trend. The media calls it "granny-dumping.") Press the mute and drift ... What if Castaneda's right? hums the refrain in my vaguely nauseated head. What if, in fact, this Bosnian Citywalk reality we're so cockily possessive of turn out to be some Twilight Zone joke (the one where the drunken couple awakens in what turns out to be the dollhouse of an extraterrestrial little girl). What if the whole seductive bankrupt Barneys world is one shamelessly imposed -- not merely the imposition of laws or learned social niceties but, far more insidious, the dictator of how we perceive, tyrant of the way we watch the very things in front of us (it has our eyes) ... and, uh, if it's really true we've been mugged at birth, robbed of even the shitty amount of awareness it takes to see some kind of wonder beyond its well-worn, leeching inventory -- well that's, uh, like jail. Huh? A snakepit of dysfunction and fatal surprises for most of us -- and for the rest, well, kinda cushy really: a well-kept, well-lit federal jail with Burke Williams massages, AIDS walkathons, nec plus ultra cel phones, Internet lecheries, successful surgeries, successful adoptions, successful hardworking antidepressants and Four Seasons brunches with smiley omelet chefs in big puffy hats -- like one of those Tijuana prisons I read about, where money buys you a sort of brownstone and you can have weapons and whores and heroin and the family over for BBQ. What if it's really true that ... BOOM! As they say.

THE GETTY LOOMS AS WE PULL onto the 405. A cruddy promontory for a $750 million building, what with the freeway and the circular hotel and the garbage dump nearby -- talk about Your funky feng shui. But who am I to say'? I ask about local power spots, and CC mentions somewhere in El Monte.

"Do you actually go there?"

"Visiting those places," he says, "is something one does in one's youth -- it's not for me. I'm focused on the horizon.

"Does that mean," I ask, 'with the power spots and all, that the earth is aware? If it is, then it must have an assemblage point." My chest swells. Groovily conversant, I work the wild, newfound lingua franca.

"The earth is a conscious being," he answers. "It has a very weird pull, When you get a little hysterical, lie on it with your stomach -- it'll cure you. The earth absorbs; it holds us. Then, at a certain moment, it has nothing left. It tells a warrior,"You may go."' I glance over; he shivers. "The earth as a conscious being -- a superior mother-cuts the roots to let him float. 'Go!' she tells him. How gorgeous."

We embrace at the terminal. I wonder just where the hell he's going, flightwise. It isn't Mexico -- so one of his colleagues said. I wasn't about to press. A giant cop, shooing away the naked and the double: parked, works his way toward us. I linger, repeating what I had read the night before in Journey to Ixtlan:

"Don Juan said there was no way for you to go back to Los Angeles. 'What you left there is lost forever."'

"True. Very true. But he also said the feelings in a man don't die or change. 'The sorcerer starts on his way back home knowing he'll never reach it, knowing no power on earth, not even his death, will deliver him to the place, the things, the people he loved."'

Then he's gone and the cop is here, welcoming me back to the world.

(*) I'll be glad to see the end of the'90s: Can it be that even sorcerers aren't immune to the long arm of the Twelve Steps? "I came to believe I was powerless over the Social Order ... " What have things come to?

(**) In Sorcerers Anonymous, the secret handshake query is, "Are you friends of williamsii?"

Copyright Los Angeles Magazine, Inc. May 1996

Psychology Today - Apr 1996

"My lunch with Carlos Castaneda"

Psychology Today

New York, Mar/Apr 1996

Author: Epstein, Benjamin

He is the 20th century's own sorcerer's apprentice. He is the invisible man, ephemeral, evanescent: now you see him, now you don't. He is a navigator making his way through a living universe in exquisite flux. Or as Carlos Castaneda himself might say, he is a moron, an idiot, a fart. It's been said that Jesus Christ was either the Son of God or the greatest liar who ever lived.

Carlos Castaneda, who may have a cult following but says deities are the last thing people need, presents a similar conundrum. Critics grapple for middle ground: One called him a "sham-man bearing gifts... He lied to bring us the truth."

The jury has been out ever since books such as The Teachings of Don Juan took the public and academia by storm in the 1960s and 70s, and it's still out. Castaneda has now produced nine books he claims are based on his supernatural experiences with Don Juan Matus, a Yaqui seer.

To remain invisible, he says, is the sorcerer's way. He never allows photographs or a tape recording of his voice. He only rarely grants interviews. In the 80s, he effectively vanished altogether. But the books continue to sell (8 million in 17 countries) and have never been out of print. In 1993, he began to give occasional seminars, and the following year The Art of Dreaming appeared.

Despite ads promoting "Carlos Castaneda's Tensegrity," even event organizers didn't know whether Castaneda would actually show up at a recent weekend seminar near Disneyland in Anaheim. Yet 400 devotees from around the world-- about a third from California-- paid $250 each to attend, whether Castaneda showed or not. They came to learn a series of "magical passes," movements intended to heighten perception.

"It is a thinking universe, a living universe, an exquisite universe! " Castaneda said, exuberantly kicking off the seminar. "We have to balance the lineality of the known universe with the nonlineality of the unknown universe."

The charismatic Castaneda proved amazingly convincing when describing life among inorganic beings, with whom he apparently spends a great deal of time; the assemblage point, a place about an arm's length behind our shoulder blades that can be shifted to visit other realms; and a predatory universe in which "flyers" incessantly feed of mankind's awareness, taking the sheen off our luminous eggs and leaving only a rubble, of self-absorption and egomania.

He invents none of this, he insists "I'm not insane, you know. Well, maybe a little insane. But not ridiculously insane!"

He is also charming, energetic, fit, and funny. And at the conclusion of his opening talk, Castaneda responded to a request for an interview by unexpectedly inviting the writer to lunch.

Sitting in a coffee shop in Anaheim opposite Castaneda was enough to realign anybody's assemblage point: The writer later took his nonlineality to heart, slipping easily between lunch and workshop talks, and indulging in the conversational format that Castaneda often used to elucidate his master's ideas.

After all, Castaneda had replaced Don Juan as nagual, the head sorcerer, a being with double luminous spheres and if it was good enough for one nagual, it's good enough for another.


AT THE TABLE WERE SEVERAL Tensegrity staffers and the three women chacmools who helped Castaneda compile the movements and who taught them step-by-step at the seminar.

"Is this what you've been doing all this time, magical passes?" I asked Castaneda.

"Noooo... I was very chubby," he said. "Don Juan recommended an obsessive use of magical passes to keep my body at an optimum. So in terms of physical activity, yes, this is what we do. The movements also force our awareness to focus on the idea that we are spheres of luminosity, a conglomerate of energy fields held together by special glue."

"Is Tensegrity the Toltec t'ai chi? Yaqui yoga?" I asked.

"To compare Tensegrity with yoga or t'ai chi is not possible. It has a different origin and a different purpose. The origin is shamanic, the purpose is shamanic. It has to do with our reason for being. Our reason for being is to face infinity.

"We're all going to face infinity, at the moment of dying," he said. "Why face it when we are weakest, when we are broken? Why not when we are strong? Why not now! You have to face it pragmatically. No idealities allowed."

"Where would Jesus fit into all this? Where would Buddha fit in?"

"They are idealities," Castaneda replied. "They are too big, too gigantic to be real. They are deities. One is the Prince of Buddhism, the other is the Son of God... Idealities cannot be used in a pragmatic movement.

"Allowing your perception to break the interpretation system-- a tree ceases to be a tree and becomes sheer energy-- that is a pragmatic maneuver. The things shamans deal with are extremely practical. They break down parameters of normal historical reality. Magical passes are just one aspect of that."


CASTANEDA IS VERY NEGATIVE ABOUT religion. But these aren't your usual diatribes: "'Leave Jesus on the cross. He's very happy there!' Don Juan said, 'Don't bother him, leave him alone. Don't ask him "why are you there crucified." He'd go bananas trying to explain to you why.' So I did that. He said hello to me, and goodbye."

The waiter arrived to take our lunch orders. The only choices under discussion seemed to be top sirloin, prime rib, and filet mignon, hardly the snuggest fit with most New Age disciplines.

"The sorcerers say that whether you're eating lettuce or a steak, it's a sentient being," chacmool Kylie Lundahl explained. As it turned out, the chacmools, named for the gigantic, reclining guardian figures of the Mexican pyramids, were quite literally here today, gone tomorrow. Castaneda relieved them of their duties at the end of the seminar, during his closing remarks. Nobody ever said the warrior's way would be easy.

Castaneda ordered a melted cheese on rye with a side of bacon and fries.


DON JUAN WAS ONCE DESCRIBED AS "an enigma wrapped in mystery wrapped in a tortilla," and Castaneda followed suit. His agent, Tracy Kramer, and Cleargreen, Inc., which organizes the seminars, are based in Santa Monica. Where Castaneda spends his time is unclear. If a passing remark at the seminar was to be taken literally, he pays Property taxes somewhere.

"I don't live here," Castaneda said. "I'm not here at all. I always use the euphemism 'I've been in Mexico.' All of us divide our time between being here and being pulled by something that is not describable but that makes us visitors into another realm. But you start talking about that and you start sounding like total nincompoops.

"I had once an interview. First thing the interviewer said was, 'They tell me you turned into a crow. Is that true? Hahahaha.' I tried to explain to him about intersubjectivity. 'Pfhhhh,' he said, 'tell me yes or no.' I said no."

"Why don't you allow yourself to be photographed or tape-recorded?" I asked.

"Recording is a way of fixing you in time," Castaneda answered. "The stagnant word, the stagnant picture, those are the antithesis of the sorcerer... Maybe you've seen a drawing of Carlos Castaneda by Richard Oden for Psychology Today in December 1977. There was no photograph, so he drew it. This was 30 years ago. No good. He decided to draw it again. It was a flop."

Photographs are not all that stand still. "The Word of God is unchanging," he said. "It is a living universe. What is in flux is what is alive. An unchanging word must by definition pertain to a dead world. In a universe that is forced to change there is a written word not forced to change? That is the world of a taxidermist."

When Castaneda's melted-cheese sandwich arrived, the rye was marbled with pumpernickel. "What is this, chocolate bread?" he asked before sending it back.

My own mind was worlds away, perhaps on a bench in Oaxaca.

"According to your book The Eagle's Gift, Don Juan Matus didn't die, he left, he 'burned from within.' Will you leave or will you die?"

"Since I'm a moron, I'm sure I'll die," Castaneda replied. "I wish I would have the integrity to leave the way he did... I have this terrible fear that I won't. But I wish. I work my head off-- both heads toward that."


I RECALLED AN ARTICLE FROM AT least a decade ago calling Castaneda the "godfather of the New Age.

"It was 'grandfather'!" he protested. "And I thought, please call me the uncle, or cousin, not grandfather! Uncle Charlie will do. I feel like hell being the grandfather of anything. I'm fighting age, senility and old age, like you couldn't believe. I was senile when I met Don Juan, I've fought for 35 years...

"To be young and youthful is nothing," said Castaneda. "To be old and youthful, that is sorcery!"


CASTANEDA, FOR WHOM AMBIGUITY is a way of life to be ruthlessly pursued, is both. And his age is as good a place as any to get a sense of the man.

According to Contemporary Authors, Castaneda lists his birth date and place as December 25, 1931, So Paulo, Brazil; immigration records says December 25, but 1925, and Cajamarca, Peru; other sources cite the late 1930s. One New York Times article put him at 66 years old in 1981.

So he's somewhere between 60 and 80, most likely 64. Or 70. Similarly, otherwise reliable sources variously list the year he earned his Ph.D in anthropology from UCLA as 1970 and 1973. In other words, this is one slippery organic being.

I asked about inorganic beings.

"They are possessors of consciousness but not possessors of an organism," Castaneda responded. "Why should awareness be the exclusive possession of organisms?"

The Art of Dreaming ends with Castaneda recounting an episode in the mid-70s when he and Carol Tiggs were "dreaming" in a hotel room in Mexico City, and Tiggs disappeared into those dreams. (She was on a journey in the "second attention," a state of consciousness not devoured by the "flyers.") According to Castaneda, she reappeared 10 years later in a bookstore in Santa Monica, where he was giving a talk.


IT WAS THE RECONSTITUTED TIGGS who provided the impetus to compile the "magical passes" of Tensegrity. According to Castaneda Don Juan taught four disciples separate lines of ever-changing magical passes. The other two, Florinda Donner-Grau and Taisha Abelar, have each published accounts of their apprenticeships, both markedly different from Castaneda's but endorsed by him. Over the past 10 years, the group "fixed the passes," arriving at a consensus generic enough to be used by mankind. If the movements of Tensegrity (the name derives from an architectural term related to skeletal efficiency, happily combining "tension" and "integrity") often see angular and fierce in character, they are intended to produce a jolt.

"I saw once a beautiful science fiction movie in which creatures from another planet appeared," Castaneda said, "veeeery slowly. A change in perception is never like that. It is like this. Yank it out! You cancel the parameters of normal perception. You move into it like a robber band Almost immediately, the robber bandit comes back. It's just a moment. But the moments get longer and longer."

The chacmools may have been erased, but not Tensegrity. A new formation of warrior guardians were set to lead future seminars with lectures to be given by all four Don Juan disciples-- and an inorganic being called the blue scout.


DON JUAN'S PREMISE WAS THAT the world as we know it is only one version of reality, a set of culturally embedded "agreements" and "descriptions."

Castaneda addressed the futility of the usual avenues of inquiry: 'If you seek with the mind, it will not take you anywhere, except to a tautological situation where you repeat the obvious. In science, the tautological questions prove themselves. That's the art of our science... 'All these variables and nothing else.' We are champions of pseudo control-- we reduce the problem to manageable science. What a fantasy!

"One day on my way to the cafeteria at UCLA, I didn't see people anymore, I saw energies, blobs, luminous spheres. It was dazzling. Before that, nothing existed except me, me, me. I went to talk to a psychiatrist I worked with. He very kindly prescribed a tranquilizer and said, 'Carlos, you're working too hard. Take two days off.' It was impossible to establish a dialogue with him."

Castaneda's own inquiries have led him from academic anthropology to practical hen-hermeneutics, the science of interpretation; he launched a newsletter, The Warriors' Way: A Journal of Applied Hermeneutics, in January. Titles under consideration for a gigantic work in progress have included "Ethnohermeneutics" and "Phenomenological Anthropology."

"When sorcerers see, hermeneutics is the ultimate affair for us," Castaneda said. Seeing for the rest of us apparently involves only the visual sense, and then only minimally.

"When you look at me now, what do you see?" I asked.

"I have to be in a special mood to see," he said. "It is very difficult for me to see.

I've got to get very somber, very heavy. If I'm lighthearted and I look at you I see nothing. Then I turn around and I see her, and what do I see? 'I joined the navy to see the world, and what do I see? the sea!'

"I know more than I want to know. It's hell, true hell. If you see too much, you become unbearable."

Castaneda ordered a cappuccino, then meticulously removed the foamed milk teaspoon by teaspoon.


ACCORDING TO CASTANEDA, MOST sorcerers must remain celibate in order to conserve energy. It all depends on the circumstances under which they were conceived."

Most of us are what we call BFs, the product of bored fucks," he explained.

"How was I conceived? Was it in the middle of great sexual excitation, or was it nonsense, idiotic, pointless? Mine was stupid. The two people involved didn't know what they were doing. I was conceived behind a door, so I came out very nervous, watching. And this is the way I am, basically. For me to make use of energy I don't have is lethal."

"What about married people?"

"That question has come up a lot. It's a question of energy," he said. "If you know you were not conceived in a state of real excitation, then no. On one level, it hasn't mattered if people are married. With the launching of Tensegrity, we don't really know what will happen."

"You don't know what is going to happen? Sounds irresponsible."

"How can you know?" he asked. "This is an implication of our syntactical system. Our syntax requires a beginning, development, and end. I was, I am, I will be. We are caught in that. How can we know what you will be capable of if you have sufficient energy?

"I am giving you a series of ideas, if you have the balls to take them seriously. Maybe you say this is idiotical, what kind of shit is this? Like the little boy victims whining 'But what is going to happen to me?' They'll never find out.

"The other three disciples-- those farts-- have balls; these are huge women with the biggest balls you've ever seen. Try to stop Taisha Abelar and see what happens. Try to stop Florinda."

The fourth disciple is no squeaker himself.

"Don Juan categorized people into three types," he said. "One was farts, like me, a smelly fart-- very assertive, ready to tell you, 'Fuck you, are you sure that's the way to do it,' and Don Juan would very patiently assure me that, yes, he was sure. I don't have that patience myself. If somebody asks me am I sure, I go bananas because I'm not sure!

"The other, golden piss-- the sweetest, wonderful beings. They could die for you, or so they say. They won't, but they say it, which is very nice-- nicer than the fart-- but then you die for him.

"The third type, puke. Not fart, not piss, just puke--the kind that doesn't have anything to give, but promises the world, and has you begging...

"Fortunately I was fart. And Don Juan had a ball with this fart."



Copyright Sussex Publishers, Inc. Mar/Apr 1996

Carlos Castaneda's
The Warriors' Way | Readers of Infinity
Number 1. Volume 1.

---

Hermeneutics was first a method for interpreting sacred texts, essentially Biblical texts. Later, it covered the interpretation of literary texts and texts in general, and finally as it stand today, it is a philosophical method that deals with the interpretation of the historical, social, psychological, etc., aspects of our world.

It is called a method because it is a manner or mode, a systematic way to approach a topic of inquiry. Hermeneutics as a philosophical method seeks to examine the bases that structure the different aspects of our world and to lay bare their presuppositions.

What we propose to do in this journal of applied hermeneutics is to take the position delineated by don Juan Matus, a Yaqui Indian sorcerer from Mexico, and to describe the way which he and other sorcerers like himself interpreted the social, historical, psychological, etc., aspects of their world.

Thus our intention to emphasize the sorcerers' idea of practicality as opposed to the purely abstract reflection of a philosophical method; hence, our proposal to call it a journal of applied hermeneutics.

One premise of the warriors' way will be discussed in every one of our issues.

WE ARE PERCEPTORS. This is the first premise o the warriors' way, according to the form in which don Juan Matus taught it to his disciples. It seems to be a tautological statement: the reassertion of the obvious; something like saying a bald man is one that doesn't have hair, but it is not tautology, what we have here. In the sorcerers' world, it refers to the fact that we are organisms whose basic orientation is perceiving. We are perceptors, and that, according to sorcerers, is the only source from which we could establish our stability and obtain our orientation in the world.

Don Juan Matus told his disciples that human being as organisms perform a stupendous maneuver which, unfortunately, gives perception a false front; they take the influx of sheer energy and turn it into sensory data, which they interpret following a strict system of interpretation which sorcerers call the human form. This magical act of interpreting pure energy gives rise to the false front : the peculiar conviction on our part that our interpretation s stem is all that exists. Don Juan explained that a tree as we know tree is more interpretation than perception. He said that for us to deal with tree, all we need is a cursory glance that tells us hardly anything. The rest is a phenomena which he described as the calling of intent: the intent of tree, that is to say, the interpretation of sensory data pertaining to this specific phenomena that we call tree.

And just like this example, the whole world for us is composed of an endless repertoire of interpretations where our senses play a minimal role. In other words, only our visual sense touches the energy influx which is the universe, and it does so only minimally. Sorcerers maintain that the majority of our perceptual activity is interpretation ; they maintain that human beings are the kind of organisms that need a minimal input of sheer perception in order to create their world or, that they perceive only enough to serve their interpretation system. To assert that we are perceptors is an attempt on the part of sorcerers to push us back to our origin; to push us back to what should be our original stand : perceiving.

---

One of the questions that has been asked with remarkable insistence has to do with the three persons who have been teaching the seminars and workshops so far: Kylie Lundahl, Reni Murez and Nyei Murez. They have been called "the chacmools." This is a term taken from the name given to some massive human figures found in the pyramids of Tula and Yucatan in Mexico. Archeologists have classified those massive figures of reclining men as incense burners set at the doors of the pyramids, but don Juan Matus believed that they were representations of warrior guardians that protected the pyramids as sites of power.

These figures were first encountered in the Mayan town of Chacmool, hence the name "chacmool." The three persons mentioned above fit into this general category of warrior guardian. However, it is erroneous to believe that the three of them by themselves constitute this category of warrior. The three of them are the ones on which has rested, so far, the responsibility of sustaining the idea of a warrior guardian. Any one of us who accepts the responsibility of guarding becomes, ipso facto, a chacmool. Carlos Castaneda, as the nominal head of our enterprise of freedom, is the chacmool of all of us, and by the same measure, so is Carol Tiggs.

On Kylie Lundahl, Reni Murez and Nyei Murez falls, nevertheless, the burden of having been the first ones to apply to dayly living some movements called magical passes discovered and developed by shamans who lived in Mexico in ancient times ; on these three women falls also the joy and the honor of having brought those magical passes to the public in general. And the act of bringing them out should have liberated them; it should have further cut their ties with the self-importance that rules the acts of everyday life. Ideally, Tensegrity should bring freedom to its practitioners, and the three chacmools known to the participants in our seminars and workshops should profit from this situation. However, the novelty of our bringing out for public consumption something so secretive as the magical passes has been a pitfall we had no means to anticipate.

After having said thank you and good-bye, in the seminar and workshop of December 9 and 10 of 1995, to their audience, the three of them will head for another strata of the multi-leveled affair that is the warriors' path. They will part to test their discipline against indeterminable odds.

Another question that has been asked consistently is "What is Tensegrity ?" Tensegrity is the modernized version of some movements called "magical passes" developed by Indian shamans who lived in Mexico in times prior to the Spanish Conquest.

"Times prior to the Spanish Conquest" is a term used by don Juan Matus, a Mexican Indian sorcerer who introduced Carlos Castaneda, Carol Tiggs, Florinda Donner-Grau and Taisha Abelar to the cognitive world of shamans who lived in Mexico, according to Don Juan, between 7000 and 10000 years ago.

Don Juan explained to his four disciples that those shamans, or sorcerers, as he called them, discovered through practices that he could not fathom, that it is possible for human beings to perceive energy directly as it flows in the universe. In other words, those sorcerers maintained, according to don Juan, that any one of us can do away, for a moment, with our system of turning energy inflow into sensory data pertinent to the kind of organism that we are (in our case, we are apes). Turning the inflow of energy into sensory data creates, sorcerers affirm, a system of interpretation that turns the flowing energy of the universe into the world of everyday life that we know.

Don Juan further explained that once those sorcerers of ancient times had established the validity of perceiving energy directly, which they called seeing, they proceeded to refine it by applying it to themselves, meaning that they perceived one another, whenever they wanted it, as a conglomerate of energy fields. Human beings perceived in such a fashion appear to the seer as gigantic luminous spheres. The size of these luminous spheres is the breadth of the extended arms.

When human beings are perceived as conglomerates of energy fields, a point of intense luminosity can be perceived at the height of the shoulder blades an arm's length away from them, on the back. The seers of ancient times who discovered this point of luminosity called it "the assemblage point," because they concluded that it is there that perception is assembled. They noticed, aided by their seeing, that on that spot of luminosity, the location of which is homogeneous for mankind, converge zillions of energy fields in the form of luminous filaments which constitute the universe at large. Upon converging there, they become sensory data, which is utilizable by human beings as organisms. This utilization of energy turned into sensory data was regarded by those sorcerers as an act of pure magic : energy at large transformed by the assemblage point into a veritable, all-inclusive world in which human beings as organisms can live and die. The act of transforming the inflow of pure energy into the perceivable world was attributed by those sorcerers to a system of interpretation. Their shattering conclusion, shattering to them, of course, and perhaps to some of us who have the energy to be attentive, was that the assemblage point was not only the spot where perception was assembled by turning the inflow of pure energy into sensory data, but the spot where the interpretation of sensory data took place.

Their next shattering observation was that the assemblage point is displaced in a very natural and unobtrusive way out of its habitual position during sleep. They found out that the greater the displacement, the more bizarre the dreams that accompany it. From these seeing observations, those sorcerers jumped to the pragmatic action of the volitional displacement of the assemblage point. And they called their concluding results the art of dreaming.

This art was defined by those sorcerers as the pragmatic utilization of ordinary dreams to create an entrance into other worlds by the act of displacing the assemblage point at will and maintaining that new position, also at will. The observations of those sorcerers upon practicing the art of dreaming were a mixture of reason and seeing energy directly as it flows in the universe. They realized that at its habitual position, the assemblage point is the spot where converges a given, minuscule portion of the energy filaments that make up the universe, but if the assemblage point changes location, within the luminous egg, a different minuscule portion of energy fields converges on it, giving as a result a new inflow of sensory data : energy fields different from the habitual ones are turned into sensory data, and those different energy fields are interpreted as a different world.

The art of dreaming became for those sorcerers their most absorbing practice. In the course of that practice, they experienced unequaled states of physical prowess and well-being, and in their effort to replicate those states in their hours of vigil, they found out that they were able to repeat them following certain movements of the body. Their efforts culminated in the discovery and development of a great number of such movements, which they called magical passes.

The magical passes of those sorcerers of Mexican antiquity became their most prized possession. They surrounded them with rituals and mystery and taught them only to their initiates in the midst of tremendous secrecy. This was the manner in which don Juan Matus taught them to his disciples. His disciples, being the last link of his lineage, came to the unanimous conclusion that any further secrecy about the magical passes was counter to the interest that they had in making don Juan's world available to their fellow men. They decided, therefore, to rescue the magical passes from their obscure state. They created in this fashion, Tensegrity, which is a term proper to architecture that means "the property of skeleton structures that employ continuous tension members and discontinuous compression members in such a way that each member operates with the maximum efficiency and economy."

This is a most appropriate name because it is a mixture of two terms : tension and integrity ; terms which connote the two driving forces of the magical passes.

---

Cleargreen announces that its first seminar in 1996 will be given on February 9, 10, and 11 in San Francisco. The theme of this seminar will be Intentionality. Intentionality is a theme of philosophical discourse which pertains to the tacit act of filling out the empty space, left by direct sensory perception. In other words, what is called Intentionality is the act of enriching the observable phenomena by an act that calls intention as its main driving force. When we try to explain intentionality we are trying deliberately to stay away from the standard philosophical definitions of it. We want a pragmatic slant to whatever we do. There is an entry in the discipline of philosophy called intentionality ; and there is an entry in the sorcerers' discipline which is named calling intent. We believe that the philosophers' intentionality in an intuitive version of the pragmatic sorcerers' calling of intent. We want to explore this difference/similarity to the course of this seminar. The magical passes taught in this workshop have been singled out exclusively because of their effects in producing the internal quietness necessary for the calling of intent. The magical passes will be taught by a new formation of warrior guardians called the PATHFINDERS.

The second seminar sponsored by Cleargreen, Incorporated in 1996 will be given on March I, 2, and 3 in Los Angeles. The theme of the workshop and seminar will be The Female Energy Body. Efforts are going to be geared towards explaining certain basic sorcerers propositions presented by don Juan Matus to his three female disciples : Carol Tiggs, Florinda Donner-Grau and Taisha Abelar. The magical passes which will be taught in the workshop will be in the exclusive realm of the female body. Their stated purpose is the enhancement of faculties proper to women only ; faculties which, if exercised, lead women to a state of profound quietude and alertness at the same time. The magical passes will be taught by don Juan's three female disciples : Carol Tiggs, Florinda Donner-Grau and Taisha Abelar, and by the blue scout. Each one of them will teach an original and unadulterated magical pass taught to them personally. They will each be assisted by a warrior guardian most closely related to them who will show the same pass, but in a more generic form. The lectures will be given by Carlos Castaneda, Carol Tiggs, Florinda Donner-Grau, Taisha Abelar, and the blue scout, interspersed with the performance of the magical passes.

Another issue of interest for our readers this month is the release of our new video on Tensegrity, called Redistributing Dispersed Energy. This video is now available in both VHS and PAL formats. Volume 1 of Tensegrity, Twelve Basic Movements to Gather Energy and Promote Well-Being. is also available now in PAL format. The cost of each video is $29.95, including shipping and handling in the United States. Canada and Mexico, add $5. All other countries add $8. To order, please call (800) 490-3020 or (214) 243-6809. The Spanish language domestic edition of The Art of Dreaming -- El Arte de Ensoñar -- will appear in the United States, published by Harper Collins this month.

All articles in this issue of The Warriors' Way, were written by Carlos Castaneda and edited by Nyei Murez. Journal design by Elaby Gaethen. To subscribe to The Warriors' Way please send a check, money order, or major credit card number with expiration date to Cleargreen, Incorporated. 11901 Santa Monica Boulevard, Suite 599. Los Angeles, California 90025 Attn. : The Warriors' Way Subscription Department. Annual Subscription : $24 for twelve copies plus a special issue. Single Copies : $2.50. Outside North America : $30 for annual subscription, $3.00 for single copies.

Cleargreen. Incorporated email address: TGAQ72A @ PRODIGY.COM

Published by Cleargreen, Incorporated. Copyright 1996, Laugan Productions, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part of this text cannot be done without permission of the publishers.

Carlos Castaneda's
The Warriors' Way | Readers of Infinity
Number 2. Volume 1.

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For purposes of elucidation, it is necessary that language be used in this journal in its fullest permissible scope. Thus, philosophical discourse will be rendered as formally as it demands. Sorcerers' discourse, on the other hand, will be rendered as it was stated. The fullest permissible scope of language enters into play in this instance.

In the first issue of this journal, intentionality was defined as "the tacit act of filling out the empty spaces left by direct sensory perception, or the act of enriching the observable phenomena by means of intention." This definition is an attempt at staying away from the standard philosophical explanations of intentionality. The concept of intentionality is of key importance in elucidating the themes of sorcery, as bona fide topics for philosophical discourse. The slant proposed for this journal -- applied hermeneutics -- is expressed through the revision and reinterpretation of themes pertinent to the discipline of philosophy ; themes which are congruous with other themes pertinent to the discipline of sorcery.

In the discipline of philosophy, intentionality is a term first used by the Scholastics in the Middle Ages to define, in terms of natural and unnatural motion, the intent of God in relation to his creation and the free will of man to choose or reject a virtuous life ; Scholastics were Western European scholars who developed a system of theological and philosophical teachings based on the authority of the church fathers and of Aristotle and his commentators.

The term intentionality was restructured in the late 19th century by Franz Brentano, a German philosopher, whose main concern was to find a characteristic which separates mental from physical phenomena. He said, "Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional or the mental inexistence of an object, and what we would like to call the reference to a content, the directness toward an object, which in this context is not to be understood as something real. In the representation, something is represented, in the judgment, something is acknowledged or rejected, in the desiring, something is desired. This intentional inexistence is peculiar alone to mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon shows anything like it. And thus, we can define mental phenomena by saying that such phenomena contain objects in themselves byway of intentionality."

Brentano's understanding was that it is the property of all mental phenomena to contain objects as inexistents, combined with the property of referring to those objects. Therefore, for him, only mental phenomena encase intentionality. Thus, intentionality becomes the irreducible feature of mental phenomena. He argued that since no physical phenomena could encase intentionality, the mental (the mind) cannot stem from the brain.

In the discipline of sorcery, there is an entry called calling intent. It refers to the definition of intentionality that was given in this journal: "the tacit act of filling out the empty spaces left by direct sensory perception, or the act of enriching the observable phenomena by means of intention." Sorcerers maintain, as Brentano intuited, that the act of intending is not in the realm of the physical ; that is to say, it is not part of the physicality of the brain or any other organ. Intent, for sorcerers, transcends the world we know. It is something like an energetic wave, a beam of energy which attaches itself to us. A

There are two questions that we would like to address ourselves to in this issue. The first is:

".. I have been doing Tensegrity steadily, and I have been recapitulating as much as I can. What's next?"

To see energy as it flows in the universe has been the primary goal of sorcerers since the beginning of their quest. For thousands of years, according to don Juan, warriors have endeavored to break the effect of our interpretation system and be able to perceive energy directly. In order to accomplish this, they developed, over the millennia, very exigent steps. We don't want to call them "praxes" or "procedures," but rather, "maneuvers." The warriors' way, in this sense, is a sustained maneuver designed to buttress warriors so they might fulfill the goal of seeing energy directly.

As the various premises of the warriors' way are discussed in each issue of this journal in the section called The Warriors' Way Viewed as a Philosophical-Practical Paradigm, it will become obvious that the sorcerers' efforts have been and are directed at obliterating the predominance of self-importance, as the only means to suspend the effects of our interpretation system. Sorcerers have a description of suspending that effect ; they call it stopping the world. When they reach this state, they see energy directly.

The reason don Juan advised refraining from focusing on praxes and procedures is because, along with doing Tensegrity or recapitulating or following the warriors' path, practitioners must intend their change ; they must intend stopping the world. So, it is not merely following the steps that counts ; what is of supreme importance is intending the effect of following the steps.

".. Today, I felt something moving on my back and I am afraid. I have stopped doing Tensegrity until you clarify this point.

It has been our experience that the most rational people, such as lawyers, for instance, or psychologists, have asked this type of question. Some years ago, Florinda Donner-Grau made the following statement in Spanish to one of her friends, a very serious, cultured woman : "Eres tan linda que te queremos robar." "You are so darling that we want to steal you." In Spanish, this locution is thoroughly correct as an expression of endearment.

Florinda did not see her friend until a year later, when she announced to Florinda that she had to see her on her psychiatrist's advice. She wanted to confront Florinda and her cohorts, after a year of analysis spurred by obsessive, recurring dreams in which an inhuman force was trying to take her away from her family and her close friends. In her mind, that inhuman force was, of course, Florinda DonnerGrau and her cohorts.

Nothing of this is new to us. Every one of us has had the same feelings and asked the same question to don Juan Matus in varying degrees of coarseness. We all felt something moving on our backs. Don Juan said that it was a thankful muscle which had been fed with oxygen for the first time ever, after we had done the magical passes. He assured every one of us, self-important complainers, that he needed us as he needed a hole in the head. He reminded us that he had daily appointments with the infinite ; appointments that he had to attend in a state of profound ease and purity, and that influencing others was not in any way part of that needed ease and purity. He pointed out to us that the idea that we were being manipulated by some evil force that had us by the neck, like guinea pigs, was a product of our lifetime habit of relishing being victims. He used to chide us in a mocking tone of despair, "He's doing it to me, and I can't help myself."

Don Juan's recommendation to us, regarding our fears of being unduly influenced, was a sort of parody of the political turmoil of the sixties, when the following statement was an axiom of the political activists of the time: "In case of doubt, burn." Don Juan modified it to : "In case of doubt, be impeccable."

Nowadays, we understand don Juan's position when he said, "It is inconceivable to fulfill, loaded with misgivings, misconceptions and wrongdoings, the true goal of sorcery : a journey to infinity."

When we hear our old complaints voiced by someone else, our act of impeccability is to assure the complainer that we are in search of freedom and that freedom is free ; free in the sense that it is gratis and free in the sense of not having the staggering grip of unwarranted and obsessive self-importance.

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In the previous issue of this journal, the first premise of the warriors' way was stated as : We Are Perceptors. Perceptors was used in place of perceivers. This was not an error, but the desire to extend the use of the Spanish language term perceptor which is very active, in order to connote in English the urgency of being a perceiver. In this journal of applied hermeneutics, the problem of enhancing the meaning of a term by propping it with a foreign cognate is going to arise quite often ; sometimes even to the point of forcing the creation of a new term ; not as a show of snobbery, but because of the inherent need to describe some sensation or experience or perception that has either never been described before, or if it has, it has escaped our knowledge. The implication is that our knowledge, no matter how adequate it might be, is limited.

The second premise of the warriors' way is called WE ARE WHAT OUR INCEPTION IS. This is one of the most difficult premises of the warriors' way ; not so much because of its complexity or rarity, but because it is nearly impossible for any of us to admit certain conditions pertaining to ourselves, conditions which sorcerers have been aware of over the millennia.

The first time don Juan Matus began to explain this premise, I thought he was joking, or that he was merely trying to shock me. He was teasing me at the time about my stated concern with finding love in life. He had asked me once what were my aims in life. Since I couldn't come up with any intelligible answer, I replied to him half jokingly that I wanted to find love.

"The search for love, for the people who reared you, meant having sex," don Juan had said to me on that occasion. "Why don't you call a spade a spade? You are in search of sexual satisfaction, true ?"

I denied it, of course. But the topic remained with don Juan as a source for teasing me. Every time I saw him, he would find or construct the proper context to ask me about my search for love, i.e. sexual satisfaction.

The first time he discussed the second premise of the warriors' way he began by teasing me, but suddenly he became very serious.

"I recommend that you change venues," he said, and abstain totally from continuing your search. It will lead you nowhere at best ; at worst, it will lead you to your downfall."

"But why don Juan, why must I give up sex?" I asked in a plaintive voice.

"Because you are a bored fuck," he said.

"What is that, don Juan? What do you mean, bored fuck?"

"One of the most serious things warriors do," don Juan explained, "is to search, confirm, and realize the nature of their inception. Warriors must know as accurately as they can whether their parents were sexually excited when they conceived them, or whethertheywere merely fulfilling a conjugal function. Civilized lovemaking is very, very boring to the participants. Sorcerers believe, without a shadow of a doubt, that children conceived in a civilized fashion are the products of a very bored . . . fuck. I don't know what else to call it. If I used another word, it would be a euphemism, and it would lose its punch."

After being told this incessantly, I began to ponder seriously what he was talking about. I thought I had understood him. Then doubt crept up on me every time and I found myself asking the same question : "What is a bored fuck, don Juan ?" I suppose I unconsciously wanted him to repeat what he had already said dozens of times.

"Don't begrudge my repetition," don Juan used to say to me every time. "It'll take years of pounding before you admit that you are a bored fuck. So, I'll repeat to you again : If there is no excitation at the moment of conception, the child that comes out of such a union will be intrinsically, sorcerers say, just as he was conceived. Since there is no real excitation between the spouses, but perhaps merely mental desire, the child must bear the consequences of their act. Sorcerers assert that such children are needy, weak, unstable, dependent. Those, they say, are the children that never, ever leave home ; they stay put for life. The advantage of such beings is that they are extremely consistent in the midst of their weakness. They could do the same job for a lifetime without ever feeling the urge to change. If they happen to have a good, sturdy model as children, they grow to be very efficient, but if they fail to have a good pattern, there is no end to their anguish, turmoil and instability

"Sorcerers say with great sadness that the enormous bulk of humanity was conceived like that. This is the reason we hear endlessly about the urge to find something that we don't have. We search, for the duration of our lives, according to sorcerers, for that original excitation that we were deprived of. That's why I said that you are a bored fuck. I see anguish and discontent written all over you. But don't feel bad. I am also a bored fuck. There are very few people, in my knowledge, who are not."

"What does this mean to me, don Juan?" I asked him once, genuinely alarmed.

Somehow don Juan had hit my inner core directly with every one of his words. I was exactly what he had described as the bored fuck reared in a bad pattern. Finally one day, it all boiled down to a crucial statement and question.

"I admit I'm a bored fuck. What can I do?" I said.

Don Juan laughed uproariously, tears coming to his eyes. "I know, I know," he said, patting me on the back, trying to comfort me, I suppose. "To begin with, don't call yourself a bored fuck."

He looked at me with such a serious, concerned expression that I began to take notes.

"Write everything down," he said encouragingly. "The first positive step is to use just the initials : B.F."

I wrote this down before I realized the joke. I stopped and looked at him. He was veritably about to split his sides laughing. In Spanish, bored fuck is cojida aburrida, C. A., just like the initials of my birth name, Carlos Aranha.

When his laughter had subsided, don Juan seriously delineated a plan of action to offset the negative conditions of my inception. He laughed uproariously as he described me as not only an average B.F., but as one that had an extra charge of nervousness.

"In the warriors' path," he said, "nothing is finished. Nothing is forever. If your parents didn't make you as they should have, remake yourself."

He explained that the first maneuver of the sorcerers' kit is to become a miser of energy. Since a B.F does not have any energy, it is useless to waste the little bit that he has in patterns that are not adequate to the amount of energy available. Don Juan recommended that I abstain from engaging in patterns of behavior that demanded energy I did not have. Abstinence was the answer, not because this was morally correct or desirable, but because it was energetically the only way for me to store enough energy to be on par with those who were conceived under conditions of tremendous excitation.

The patterns of behavior he was talking about included everything that I did, from the way I tied my shoes, or ate, to the way I worried about my selfpresentation, or the way I pursued my daily activity, especially when it referred to courtship. Don Juan insisted that I abstain from sexual intercourse, because I had no energy for it.

"All you accomplish in your sexual foragings," he declared, "is to get yourself into states of profound dehydration. You get circles under your eyes ; your hair is falling off ; you have weird spots on your nails ; your teeth are yellow ; and your eyes are tearing all the time. Relationships with women cause you such nervousness that you devour your food without chewing it, so you're always plugged up."

Don Juan enjoyed himself immensely, telling me all this, which added enormously to my chagrin. His last remark was, however, like the act of throwing a lifesaver to me.

"Sorcerers say," he went on, "that it is possible to tuma B.F into something inconceivable. It is just a matter of intending it ; I mean, intending the inconceivable. To do this, to intend the inconceivable, one must use anything that is available, anything at all."

"What is 'anything at all,' don Juan ?" I asked, genuinely touched.

"Anything is anything. A sensation, a memory, a wish, an urge ; perhaps fear, desperation, hope ; perhaps curiosity"

I didn't quite understand this last part. But I understood it sufficiently to begin my struggle to get out from the underpinnings of a civilized conception. A lifetime later, the Blue Scout wrote a poem that explained it to me in full.

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It was stated in the previous issue, that for don Juan and other practitioners like him, a sorcerer was any person who, through discipline and purpose, was capable of interrupting the effect of the interpretation system we use to construct the world that we know. Sorcerers maintain that energy at large is transformed into sensorial data and these sensorial data are interpreted as the world of everyday life. Sorcery is, therefore, a maneuver of interference ; a maneuver by means of which a flow is interrupted. For sorcerers, sorcery has nothing to do with incantations or rituals, which are mere concatenations designed to obscure purposefully its true nature and goal : the enlargement of the parameters of normal perception.

For don Juan Matus, the practitioners of sorcery were fighters who struggled to return their perceiving attributes to an origin that was more engulfing than the perceiving accomplished in daily living. He called this kind of fighter, warrior guardian, and said that all the practitioners like him were warrior guardians. Warrior guardian was for him a synonym for sorcerer.

The only thing that differentiates some warrior guardians from others is the fact that a specific goal or purpose has been designated for some of them, and not for others. A case in question is, for example, the three Chacmools, known to the attendants of the Tensegrity seminars and workshops. Their specific purpose was to guard the other warrior guardians and, as a unit, teach Tensegrity.

Circumstances beyond anybody's control appeared on the scene, and the reactions of those three warrior guardians made it imperative to dissolve their configuration. Don Juan had already warned his disciples that whoever takes the warriors' path is subject to the effects of energy, which opens the way or closes it. He insisted that his disciples have the prowess to obey the dictums of energy and not try to command it by imposing their wills.

When a state of profound sobriety is reached by a practitioner, there is no mistake whatsoever when reading the commands of energy. It is as if energy is conscious and alive, and it gives manifestations of its will. To go against it means an unnecessary risk which practitioners pay for dearly when, due to ignorance, or willfulness, they refuse to follow energy indications.

The present format of warrior guardians that has replaced the Chacmools, has been selected by energy itself. This new format is called the Energy Trackers. At the beginning, when the formulation presented itself, the Energy Trackers were called, for a moment, the Pathfinders. The belief was that the Pathfinders would find new paths, new procedures, new solutions. In the act of working together, it became apparent that what they were doing was tracking energy.

The explanation of tracking energy that don Juan Matus gave was somewhat confusing at the beginning. It became more and more clear as time went by, until it reached a level of being obvious to the point of redundancy.

"To track energy is to be able to follow the tenuous trail that energy leaves as it flows," don Juan explained. "Not every one of us is an energy tracker ; however, a moment comes in the life of every practitioner when he can follow the flow of energy, even if he does it in a clumsy manner. So I could say that some warriors are more elegant energy trackers than others, because their proclivity is to track energy."

The sparseness of his explanation made it very difficult for me even to conceive what he was referring to. Later on I became more acutely cognizant of what don Juan had in mind. My change of awareness was at first a vague sensation, derived mostly from a curious intellect, which affirmed that it is reasonable to assume that energy, although I didn't know what energy was, must leave a trail. As my involvement with don Juan Matus' world became super-intense, I became convinced that all of his concepts were based on direct observations made at a level incomprehensible to my daily awareness.

Don Juan explained my queries and sensations as a natural consequence of an inner silence I had gradually learned to attain.

"What you are feeling is the flow of energy," don Juan told me. "It is like a very mild electric charge, or a weird itching on your solar plexus, or above your kidneys. It is not a visual effect, yet every sorcerer I know speaks of it as seeing energy. I'll tell you a secret. I have never seen energy. I only feel it. My advantage is that I have never tried to explain what I feel. I just feel whatever I feel, end of the story."

His statements were a revelation to me. I happened to feel what he was describing. From there, I passed to the acceptance of those new feelings as events in my life without trying to explain them by finding a relationship of cause and fect [fact].

On the topic of tracking energy, don Juan also said that a nexus of warrior guardians could be formed, because of their close proximity to one other ; and that the members of such a nexus that could very well show a remarkable capacity for tracking energy. Such an event took place among us after the Chacmools' collapse. And a new format emerged ; a group of warrior guardians became, quite suddenly, strangely capable of tracking energy. This was manifested by their unusual nervousness and their agility to grab onto new situations with uncanny certainty.

If the modern jargon were to be used, it could be said that energy trackers are "channelers" par excellence. But the idea of channeling implies a certain degree of will on the part of the practitioner, who as the term describes, channels things into himself or herself. Energy trackers, on the other hand, do not impose their volition. They simply allow energy to show itself to them.

Carlos Castaneda's
The Warriors' Way | Readers of Infinity
Number 4. Volume 1.

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The April issue of Readers of Infinity: A journal of Applied Hermeneutics, is being published at this late date, because it, together with the first three issues, belongs to an original set of four, specifically conceived in harmony with the sorcerers' idea that the number four implies order and permanency.

It was the writer's utmost wish to give this journal a character as distant as possible from temporariness, whatever that character may turn out to be. It seems that in this case, it turned out to be the publication of this journal in book form. So be it. Since the fourth issue was already finished by late March and ready to go to press, it became impossible to pass up the opportunity to publish it as a monthly issue.

We have briefly discussed in the previous issues of this journal the idea of Hermeneutics as a method of interpretation, the idea of the Phenomenological Method, and the idea of intentionality. I would like to outline now the possibility of a new area of philosophical inquiry. The elucidation of this topic is hinged on the definition of certain concepts that were developed by sorcerers or shamans who lived in Mexico in ancient times.

The first of such concepts, which is the cornerstone of sorcerers' activities and beliefs, is called seeing. By seeing, sorcerers mean the capacity that, in their belief, human beings have to perceive energy as it flows in the universe. The claim that sorcerers make, which is substantiated by their practices, is that energy can be perceived directly as it flows in the universe, using our entire organism as a vehicle for perception.

Sorcerers make a distinction between the body as part of the cognition of our everyday life, and the entire organism as an energetic unit which is not part of our cognitive system. This energetic unit includes the unseen parts of the body, such as the internal organs, and the energy that flows through them. They assert that it is with this part that energy can be directly perceived.

Because of the predominance of sight in our habitual way of perceiving the world, sorcerers describe the act of directly apprehending energy as seeing. For sorcerers to perceive energy as it flows in the universe means that energy adopts nonidiosyncratic, specific configurations that repeat themselves consistently, and that can be apprehended in the Same terms by anyone who sees.

The most important example of this consistency of energy in adopting specific configurations is the human body when it is perceived directly as energy. Sorcerers perceive a human being as a conglomerate of energy fields that gives the total impression of a clear-cut sphere of luminosity. Taken in this sense, energy is described by sorcerers as a vibration that agglutinates itself into cohesive units. They describe the entire universe as composed of energy configurations that appear to the seeing sorcerers as filaments, or luminous fibers that are strung in every which way, but without ever being entangled. This is an incomprehensible proposition for the linear mind. It has a built-in contradiction that can't be resolved: how could those fibers extend themselves every which way and yet not be entangled?

Sorcerers, as unstudied practitioners of the phenomenological method, can only describe events. If their terms of description seem inadequate and contradictory, it is because of the limitations of syntax. Yet, their descriptions are as strict as anything can be. The luminous energetic fibers that make up the universe at large do extend themselves to infinity in every which way, and yet, they are not entangled. Each fiber is an individual, concrete configuration; each fiber is infinity itself.

In order to deal with these phenomena more adequately, perhaps it would be proper to construct an entirely different way of describing them. According [actual page 3/12] to sorcerers, this is not at all a far-fetched idea, because perceiving energy directly is something that can be achieved by every human being. Sorcerers argue that this condition accords human beings the potential of reaching, through an evolutionary consensus, an agreement on how to describe the universe.

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Another sorcerers' concept that deserves close scrutiny in terms of this elucidation is something they call intent. They describe it as a perennial force that permeates the entire universe ; a force that is aware of itself to the point of responding to the beckoning or to the command of sorcerers. The act of using intent they call intending. By means of intending, sorcerers are capable, they say, of unleashing not only all the human possibilities of perceiving, but all the human possibilities of action. They maintain that through intent, the most far-fetched formulations can be realized.

The limit of sorcerers' capability of perceiving is called the band of man, meaning that there is a boundary that marks human capabilities as dictated by the human organism. These boundaries are not merely the traditional boundaries of orderly thought, but the boundaries of the totality of resources locked within the human organism. Sorcerers believe that these resources are never used, but are kept in situ by preconceived ideas about our limitations, limitations that have nothing to do with our actual potential.

The point that sorcerers present is that since perceiving energy as it flows in the universe is not arbitrary or idiosyncratic, seers witness formulations of energy that happen by themselves and are not a product of interpretation on our part. Sorcerers declare that the perception of such formulations is, in itself and by itself, the key that releases the locked-in human potential that never enters into play. Such formulations of energy, since they happen, by definition, independently of man's volition or intervention, are capable of creating a new subjectivity. Being cohesive and homogeneous for all human beings that see, these energy formulations are, for sorcerers, the source of a new intersubjectivity.

According to sorcerers, the subjectivity of everyday life is dictated by the syntax of our language. It necessitates guidelines, and teachers, who, by means of well-placed traditional commands that seem to be the product of our historical growth, begin to direct us, from the instant of our birth, to perceive the world. Sorcerers maintain that the intersubjectivity resulting from this syntax-guided rearing is, naturally, ruled by syntactical description-commands. They give as an example the statement, "I am in love," a feeling which is shared intersubjectively by all of us, and which, they point out, is released upon hearing that description-command.

Sorcerers are convinced that, on the other hand, the subjectivity resulting from perceiving energy directly as it flows in the universe is not guided by syntax. It does not necessitate guidelines and teachers to point out this or that by commentary or command. The resulting intersubjectivity among sorcerers exists by means of something which they call power, which is the sum total of all the intending brought together by an individual. Since such intersubjectivity is not elicited through the aid of syntactical commands or solicitations, sorcerers claim that this subjectivity is a direct byproduct of the total human organism at work, fixed on one single purpose : intending direct communication.

In summation, intentionality or intending, for sorcerers, is the pragmatic utilization of intent, the force that expedites everything. For them, intent is a pragmatic channel for attainment, and intentionality is the means to use it. It is not merely, as it is with the philosophical discourse of the Western man, the intellectual account of the growth of human awareness from basic sensations to complex processes that can produce knowledge. Given that sorcerers are thoroughly pragmatic in their approach to life and living, intentionality is an active affair. It entails a posture on the part of sorcerers that they describe as a stand of power. From this stand, they can actually call intent. In this sense, intentionality becomes the [actual page 4/12] completely conscious act of intending. Sorcerers explain that these phenomena are actualized when the total human organism, in all its potential, is engaged in one single, all-inclusive purpose: intending.

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Taking sorcerers' capacity to perceive energy directly as a point of departure, it is possible to conceive a new area for philosophical discourse. The impediment to the realization of this possibility has been, so far, the lack of interest on the part of the sorcery practitioners in conceptualizing their knowledge and their practices. Sorcerers claim that after reaching certain thresholds of perception, which are like entrances into other realms of existence, the interest of practitioners is focused solely on the practical aspect of their knowledge.

Because of this bent towards pragmatism, sorcerers can seriously contemplate the transformation of philosophy and philosophical inquiry into a realm of practicalities by incorporating in it a more inclusive view of human potential. They consider that the direct perception of energy is then the usher that would lead us into a new subjectivity, free from syntax. Sorcerers propose that this new subjectivity is the way to reach intent, through the active process of intentionality.

The fourth unit of the warriors' way is THE ENERGY BODY. Don Juan Matus explained that, since time immemorial, sorcerers have given the name of energy body to a special configuration of energy which belongs to each human being individually. He also called this configuration the dreaming body, or the double or the other. His preference, in accordance with a sorcerers' agreement to emphasize abstract concepts, was to call it the energy body. But he also told me about a secret fun name for the energy body, which was used as a euphemism, a nickname, a term of endearment, a friendly reference to something incomprehensible and veiled : que ni te jodan -- which in English means, "they shouldn't bother you, energy body, or else."

Don Juan formally explained the energy body as a conglomerate of energy fields which are the mirror image of the energy fields that make up the human body when it is seen directly as energy. Don Juan said that for sorcerers, the physical body and the energy body are one single unit. He further explained that sorcerers believe that the physical body involves both the body and the mind as we know them, and that the physical body and the energy body are the only counterbalanced energy configurations in our human realm. Since there is no such thing as a dualism between body and mind, the only possible dualism that exists is between the physical body and the energy body.

The contention of sorcerers is that perceiving is a process of interpreting sensory data, but that every human being has the capacity to perceive energy directly, that is to say, without processing it through an interpretation system. As it has already been stated, when human beings are perceived in this fashion, they have the appearance of a sphere of luminosity. Sorcerers affirm that this sphere of luminosity is a conglomerate of energy fields held together by a mysterious binding force.

"What do you mean by a conglomerate of energy fields?" I asked don Juan when he first told me about this.

"Energy fields compressed together by some strange agglutinating force," he replied. "One of the arts of sorcerers is to beckon the energy body, which is ordinarily very far away from its counterpart, the [actual page 5/12] physical body, and bring it closer so it can begin to preside energetically over everything the physical body does."

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"if you want to be very exact," don Juan went on, "you can say that when the energy body is very close to the physical body, a sorcerer sees two luminous spheres, almost superimposed on each other. To have our energy twin close by would be our natural state, were it not for the fact that something pushes our energy body away from our physical body, starting at the very moment of our birth."

The sorcerers of don Juan's lineage put an enormous emphasis on the discipline required to bring the energy body closer to the physical body. Don Juan explained that once the energy body is within a certain energetic range, which varies for each individual, its proximity allows sorcerers the opportunity of forging the energy body into the other or the double : another being, solid and three-dimensional, exactly like themselves.

Following the same practices, sorcerers can change their solid, three-dimensional physical bodies into a perfect replica of the energy body ; that is to say, a conglomerate of pure energy fields which are invisible to the normal eye, as all energy is ; an ethereal charge of energy capable of going, for example, through a wall.

"Is it possible to transform the body to such an extent, don Juan? Or are you merely describing a mythical proposition?" I asked, amazed and bewildered when I heard these statements.

"There's nothing mythical about sorcerers," he responded. "Sorcerers are pragmatic beings, and what they describe is always something quite sober and down-to-earth. Our handicap is to be unwilling to stray away from our linearity. This makes us into disbelievers who are killing themselves to believe the damnedest things one can imagine."

"When you talk like this, don Juan, you always mean me," I said. "What am I killing myself to believe ?"

"You are killing yourself to believe, for instance, that anthropology is meaningful or that it exists. Just like a religious man kills himself to believe that God is a man who resides up in heaven and that the devil is a cosmic evildoer who has taken residence down in hell."

It was don Juan's style to make cutting but astoundingly accurate remarks about my person in the world. The more cutting and direct they were, the greater their effect on me and the greater my chagrin upon hearing them. Another of his didactic devices was to give extremely pertinent information about sorcerers' concepts in a mood that was light, but deeply critical of my compulsion to commit him to linear explanations. I asked him once, while discussing the topic of the energy body, one of my convoluted questions:

"Through what processes," I said, "can sorcerers transform their ethereal energy bodies into solid, three-dimensional bodies, and their physical bodies into ethereal energy, capable of going through a wall?"

Don Juan, adopting a professorial seriousness, raised his finger and said : "Through the volitional -- although not always conscious -- yet quite within our capabilities, but not altogether within our immediate ability -- use of the binding force that ties the physical and the energy bodies together, as two conglomerates of energy fields."

Stated in the vein of teasing, his explanation was nonetheless an extremely accurate phenomenological description of processes inconceivable to our linear minds, yet continually accomplished by our hidden energetic resources. Sorcerers maintain that the link between the physical body and the energy body is a mysterious agglutinating force which we use incessantly without ever being aware of it.

It has been stated that when sorcerers perceive the body as a conglomerate of luminous energy fields, they perceive a sphere the size of both arms extended [actual page 6/12] laterally and the height of the arms extended upwardly. They also perceive that in this sphere exists something they call the assemblage point ; a spot of even more intense luminosity, the size of a tennis ball, located towards the back, at the height of the shoulder blades, at an arm's length away from them.

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Sorcerers consider the assemblage point to be the place where the flow of direct energy is turned into sensory data and interpreted as the world of everyday life. Don Juan said that the assemblage point, aside from doing all this, also has a most important secondary function: it is the linking connection between the physical body and the assemblage point of the energy body. He described such a connection as being analogous to two magnetized circles, each the size of a tennis ball, coming together, attracted by forces of intent.

He also said that when the physical body and the energy body are not joined, the connection between them is an ethereal line, which sometimes is so tenuous that it seems not to exist. Don Juan was certain that the energy body is pushed farther and farther away as one grows older, and that death comes as the result of the severance of that tenuous connection.

There has been a series of questions posed by different people on the same topic. This concern could be classified in general terms as, "What's going to happen to me?" People have asked me this question personally, they have written to me about it, or I have heard about this worry through third persons.

The following question was asked in this vein: "I understand that you are trying to gather a mass of people, because your original sorcerers' plan failed. I am hooked by what you do. What do you plan to do with me?"

This is a question that should be addressed to a guru, to a spiritual teacher. I see myself as neither a guru nor a spiritual teacher, but as someone who is trying to fit a definition given by don Juan. He was referring to my role in relation to the rest of his disciples, my cohorts, when he said :

"All you can aspire to be is a counselor. You must point out an error if you see one; you must advise about the proper way to do something, because you will be viewing everything from the vantage point of total silence. Sorcerers call this a sight from the bridge. Sorcerers see the water - life - as it rushes under the bridge. Their eyes are, so to speak, right at the point where the water goes under the bridge. They cannot see ahead. They cannot see behind. They can see only the now."

I have made the utmost effort, and I will continue to do so, to fulfill this role. When a person is interested and says, "I am hooked," I don't dare believe that that person is hooked onto me. To have a personal link with a teacher is a response that all of us have learned and practiced. It stems, no doubt, from, being personally attached to Mother or Father, or both, or to someone else who fulfills that role in the family or in our circle of friends.

If I have given, in my books, the impression that don Juan was personally related to me, it was my own unconscious misinterpretation. He worked incessantly, from the moment I met him, to exterminate this drive in me. He called it neediness and explained that it is developed and sponsored by the social order, and that neediness is the most obscene manner of creating and nourishing a slave's mentality. He said that if I believed that I was "hooked," I was hooked not to him personally, but to the idea of freedom, an idea which sorcerers had spent generations formulating.

With regard to the original plan failing, all I can [actual page 7/12] say is that I have indeed stated that don Juan's lineage terminates with me and don Juan's other three disciples, but this is not the indication of a failure of any plan. It's simply a situation which sorcerers explain by saying: "it is a natural condition of any order to come to an end."

---

The fact that I have said that I would like to reach as many people as possible and create a mass of consensus is a consequence of realizing that we are the end of a most interesting line of thoughts and actions. We do feel that we are the undeserving recipients of a gigantic task : the task of explaining that the sorcerers' world is not an illusion, nor is it wishful thinking.

Another question is: "You had a teacher. How can I advance without one? I worry because I don't have a don Juan."

To worry is a bona fide way of interacting in our social milieu, thus, we worry about everything. To "worry" is a syntactical category, similar to saying, "I don't understand." To worry doesn't mean to be preoccupied with something ; it's simply a way of underlining a topic that has importance to us. To say that you worry because there is not a don Juan available is already a declaration of possible defeat. It is as if that statement opens a way out which remains ready for use at any time.

Don Juan himself told me that all the force he put into guiding me was a mandatory procedure set up by the sorcerers' tradition. He had to prepare me for continuing his lineage. Throughout the years, there have been scores of people who traveled to Mexico to look for don Juan. They took the narration in my books as a description of an open possibility. That is again my fault. It is not that I wasn't careful, but rather, that I had to abstain from making bombastic claims that I was in any way special.

Don Juan was interested in perpetuating his lineage, not in teaching his knowledge. I have already made this point, but it is important that I stress it repeatedly : don Juan was not a teacher at all. He was a sorcerer passing on his knowledge to his disciples, exclusively for the continuation of his lineage.

Since his lineage comes to an end with me and his other three disciples, he himself proposed that I write about his knowledge. And it is precisely because his line comes to an end that his disciples have opened the otherwise closed door to the sorcerers' world, and are now endeavoring to explain what sorcery is and what sorcerers do.

Sorcerers say that the only possible teacher or guide that we can have is the spirit, meaning an abstract, impersonal force that exists in the universe, conscious of itself. Perhaps it could be called by another name, such as awareness, consciousness, cognition, life force. Sorcerers believe that it permeates the total universe, and can guide them, and that all they need to reach this force is inner silence ; thus their assertion that our sole worthwhile link is with this force, and not with a person.

Another question asked quite often is : "How come you never talked about Tensegrity in your books, and why are you talking about it now?"

I had never talked about Tensegrity before because Tensegrity is don Juan's disciples' version of some movements called magical passes, developed by shamans who lived in Mexico in ancient times, and who were the initiators of don Juan's lineage. Tensegrity is based on those magical passes, and it stems from an agreement reached by don Juan Matus' four disciples to amalgamate the four different lines of movements taught to each of them individually to fit their physical and mental configurations.

Following don Juan's request, I have abstained throughout all these years from mentioning the magical passes. The highly secretive manner in which they were taught to me entailed an agreement on my part to surround them with the same secrecy. The closest I ever came to mentioning them was when I wrote about the way don Juan "cracked his joints." In a joking manner he suggested that I refer to the magical passes, which he practiced incessantly, as "the way in which he cracked his joints." Every time he [actual page 8/12] executed one of those passes, his joints used to make a cracking sound. He used this as a device to entice my interest and to hide the true significance of what he was doing.

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When he made me aware of the magical passes by explaining to me what they really were, I had already been trying compulsively to replicate the sound his joints made. By arousing my competitiveness, he "hooked me," so to speak, to learn a series of movements. I never achieved that cracking sound, which was a blessing in disguise because the muscles and tendons of the arms and back should never be stressed to that point. Don Juan was born with a facility to crack the joints of his arms and back, just like some people have the facility to crack their knuckles.

When don Juan and the rest of his companion sorcerers formally taught me the magical passes, and discussed their configurations and effects, they did it in accordance with the strictest procedures ; procedures which demanded utmost concentration and were cushioned in total secrecy and ritualistic behavior. The ritualistic part of those teachings was quickly cast aside by don Juan, but the secretive part was made even more emphatic.

As previously stated, Tensegrity is the amalgamation of four lines of magical passes which had to be transformed from highly specialized movements that fit specific individuals into a generic form that would fit everybody. The reason why Tensegrity, the modern version of the ancient magical passes, is being taught now is because don Juan's four disciples agreed that, since their role is no longer that of perpetuating don Juan's lineage of sorcerers, they had to lighten their burden, and do away with the secrecy about something which has been of incommensurable value to them for their well-being.

The magical passes were treated by the shamans of ancient Mexico from the start as something unique, and were never used as sets of exercises for developing musculature or agility. Don Juan said that they were viewed as magical passes from the first moment that they were formulated. He described the "magic" of the movements as a subtle change that the practitioners experience on executing them; an ephemeral quality that the movement brings to their physical and mental states, a kind of shine, a light in the eyes. He spoke of this subtle change as a "touch of the spirit" ; as if practitioners, through the movements, reestablish an unused link with the life force that sustains them. He further explained that the movements were called magical passes because by means of practicing them, sorcerers were transported, in terms of perception, to other states of being in which they could sense the world in an indescribable manner.

"Because of this quality, because of this magic," don Juan said to me once, "the passes must be practiced not as exercises, but as a way of beckoning power."

"But can they be taken as physical movements, although they have never been taken as such?" I asked.

I had faithfully practiced all the movements that don Juan had taught me, and 1 felt extraordinarily well. This feeling of wellbeing was sufficient for me.

"You can practice them as you wish," don Juan replied. "The magical passes enhance awareness, regardless of how you take them. The intelligent thing would be to take them as what they are : magical passes that on being practiced lead the practitioners to drop the mask of socialization."

---

"What is the mask of socialization?" I asked.

"The veneer that all of us defend and die for," he said. "The veneer we acquire in the world ; the one that prevents us from reaching all our potential ; the one that makes us believe we are immortal."

Tensegrity, being the modernized version of those magical passes, has been taught so far as a system of movements because that has been the only manner in which this mysterious and vast subject of the magical passes could be faced in a modern setting. The people who now practice Tensegrity are not shaman practitioners ; therefore, the emphasis of the magical passes has to be on their value as movements.

The point of view that has been adopted in this case is that the physical effect of the magical passes is the most important issue for the purpose of establishing a solid base of energy in the practitioners. Since the shamans of ancient Mexico were interested in other effects of the magical passes, they fragmented long series of movements into single units, and practiced each fragment as an individual segment. In Tensegrity, the fragments have been reassembled into their original long forms. In this manner, a system of movements has been obtained, a system in which the movements themselves are emphasized above all.

The execution of the magical passes, as shown in Tensegrity, does require a particular space or prearranged time, but ideally, the movements should be done in solitariness, on the spur of the moment, or as the necessity arises. However, the setting of urban life facilitates the formation of groups, and under these circumstances, the only manner in which Tensegrity can be taught is to groups of practitioners. Practicing in groups is beneficial in many aspects and deleterious in others. It is beneficial because it allows the creation of consensus of movement and the opportunity to learn by examination and comparison. It is deleterious because it fosters the emergence of syntactical commands and solicitations dealing with hierarchy ; and what sorcerers want is to run away from subjectivity derived from syntactical commands. Unfortunately, you cannot have your cake and eat it, too ; so Tensegrity should be practiced in whatever form is easier : either in groups, or alone, or both.

In every other respect, the way Tensegrity has been taught is a faithful reproduction of the way in which don Juan taught the magical passes to his disciples. He bombarded them with a profusion of detail and let their minds be bewildered by the amount and variety of movements, and by the implication that each of them individually was a pathway to infinity.

His disciples spent years overwhelmed, confused, and above all, despondent, because they felt that being bombarded in such a manner was an unfair onslaught on them. Don Juan, following the traditional sorcerers' device of clouding the linear view of practitioners, saturated the kinesthetic memory of his disciples. His contention was that if they kept on practicing the movements, in spite of their confusion, some of them, or all of them, would attain inner silence. He said that in inner silence everything becomes clear to the point that we are able not only to remember, with absolute precision, magical passes already forgotten, but that we know exactly what to do with them, or what to expect from them, without anybody telling us or guiding us.

Don Juan's disciples could hardly believe such statements. However, at one moment, every one of them ceased to be confused and despondent. In a most mysterious way, the magical passes, since they are magical, arranged themselves into extraordinary sequences that cleared up everything. The concern of people practicing Tensegrity nowadays matches exactly the concern of don Juan's disciples. People who have attended the seminars and workshops on Tensegrity feel bewildered by the amount of movements. They are clamoring for a system that would allow them to integrate the movements into categories that could be practiced and taught.

I must emphasize again what I have been emphasizing from the beginning : Tensegrity is not a standard system of movements for developing the body. It indeed develops the body, but only as a byproduct of a more transcendental purpose. The [actual page 10/12] sorcerers of ancient Mexico were convinced that the magical passes conduce the practitioners to a level of awareness in which the parameters of normal, traditional perception are canceled out by the fact that they are enlarged. And the practitioners are thus allowed to enter into unimaginable worlds ; worlds which are as inclusive and total as the one in which we live.

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"But why would I want to enter into those worlds?" I asked don Juan on one occasion.

"Because you are a traveler, like the rest of us human beings," he said, somewhat annoyed by my question. "Human beings are on a journey of awareness, which has been momentarily interrupted by strenuous forces. Believe me, we are travelers. If we don't have traveling, we have nothing."

His answer didn't satisfy me in the least. He further explained that human beings have decayed morally, physically and intellectually since the moment they ceased to travel, and that they are caught in an eddy, so to speak, and are spinning around, having the impression of moving with the current, and yet remaining stationary.

It took me thirty years of hard discipline to come to a cognitive plateau in which don Juan's statements were recognizable and their validity was established beyond the shadow of a doubt. Human beings are indeed travelers. If we don't have that, we have nothing.

Tensegrity must be practiced with the idea that the benefit of those movements comes by itself. This idea must be stressed at any cost. At the beginner's level, there is no way to direct the effect of the magical passes, and there is no possibility whatsoever that some of them could be beneficial for one organ or another. As we gain in discipline and our intending becomes clearer, the effect of magical passes can be selected by each one of us personally and individually, for specific purposes pertinent to each of us only.

What is of supreme importance at the present is to practice whatever Tensegrity sequence one remembers, or whatever set of movements comes to mind. The saturation that has been carried on will give, in the end, the results sought by the shamans of ancient Mexico : entering into a state of inner silence and deciding from inner silence what the next step will be.

Naturally, when I was told, in more or less the same terms, about the sorcerers' maneuver to saturate the mind into inner silence, my response was the response of any person who is interested in Tensegrity today : "It's not that I don't believe you, but it's something very hard to believe."

The only answer that don Juan had to my more than justified queries and the queries of his other three disciples was to say, "Take my word, because mine are not arbitrary statements. My word is the result of corroborating, for myself, what the sorcerers of ancient Mexico found out : that we human beings are magical beings."

Don Juan's legacy includes something that I have been repeating and I will continue to repeat : human beings are beings unknown to themselves, filled to the brim with incredible resources that are never used.

By saturating his disciples with movement, don Juan accomplished two formidable feats : he brought those hidden resources to the surface, and he gently broke our obsession with our linear mode of interpretation. By forcing his disciples to reach inner silence, he set up the continuation of their interrupted journey of awareness. In this manner, the ideal state of any Tensegrity practitioner, in relation to the Tensegrity movements, is the same as the ideal state of a practitioner of sorcery, in relation to the execution of magical passes. Both are being led by the movements themselves into an unprecedented culmination : inner silence.

From inner silence, the practitioners of Tensegrity will be able to execute, by themselves, for whatever effect they see fit, without any coaching from outside sources, any movement from the bulk of movements with which they have been saturated ; they will be able to execute them with precision and speed, as they walk, or eat, or rest, or do anything.

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Cleargreen, Incoeporated is organizing and sponsoring an intensive six-day seminar and workshop on Tensegrity.

It will take place from July 20th to July 25th of this year in Los Angeles. The seminar and workshop will consist of two parts. The first will be a concentrated practice of a group of magical passes entitled "The Westwood Series" ; a series which will be taught in all the seminars and workshops that will be given during the current year. The goal pursued by practicing the same series is to gain an instant of homogeneity of movement. The consensus derived from this homogeneous effort is something of untold value to all the participants.

The second part of the seminar and workshop will consist of an intensive examination of key aspects of the warriors' way, including Recapitulation and Dreaming. The key premises of the warriors' way that will be emphasized will entice or even lead the participants to attain the most coveted state that shamans of ancient Mexico sought: inner silence.

Topics include :

"Optimal Positions for Recapitulating."

"The Implications of the Warriors' Way."

"The Need for Ultimate Pragmatism on the Warriors' Way."

"Reaching the Threshold of Inner Silence."

"The Beginning of Dreaming."

"The Magical Possibilities of Human Beings when Seen as a Conglomerate of Energy Fields."

"Relaxation Techniques Used by Shamans of Ancient Mexico."

"The Sum Total of the Realizable Options Offered by the Warriors' Way."

The persons who will conduct this seminar and workshop are Carlos Castaneda, Carol Tiggs, Florinda Donner-Grau, Taisha Abelar and the Blue Scout. The Tensegrity movements will be taught and demonstrated by six Energy Trackers.

To register, please call Cleargreen at (310) 264-6126. Fax: (310) 264-6130. For a complete schedule and description of this workshop, please visit our web site (address listed on following page).

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Cleargreen also announces the release of the third videocassette on Tensegrity called Energetically Crossing from One Phylum to Another.

The movements of the third videocassette were selected because they are a natural sequence of magical passes, which sorcerers use to enhance the scope of their awareness. Sorcerers contend that it is possible for the awareness of man to take a giant leap of perception and actually perceive the world under conditions that defy the imagination. They believe, for example, that it is possible to perceive and interpret the world in the terms of other organisms that belong to different phyla.

According to don Juan Matus, such beliefs were not mere assertions of the intellect. He said that sorcerers were not involved in any way in wishful thinking, but that they were genuine navigators of the unknown. One of the points on their navigation charts, so to speak, was crossing, perception-wise, from one phylum to another. This claim staggers the linear mind. It seems inconceivable that something like this could take place. Don Juan asserted that it was inconceivable merely in the syntax of our languages, because the pragmatic option of crossing from one phylum to another was never selected as a feasible alternative.

The purpose of the movements of the second volume on Tensegrity, Redistributing Dispersed Energy, is to redistribute the energy which the wear and tear of daily living drives away from our natural centers of energy : the liver and gallbladder ; the pancreas and spleen ; and the kidneys and adrenals.

The purpose of the movements shown in the first volume, Twelve Basic Movements to Gather Energy and Promote WellBeing, is to condition the muscles and tendons to respond quickly and efficiently to other sequences of movement that require greater concentration and kinesthetic memory.

There is also available an instructional booklet in Spanish that accompanies the first videocassette, Twelve Basic Movements to Gather Energy and Promote Well-Being. It consists of a translation of the explanatory text that goes along with the movements shown on the videocassette.

Two new videocassettes on Tensegrity are in production at the present and will be released at the end of the year. One is about movements for women. Most of the movements in this series were taught in the Women's Seminar that took place in March of this year in Los Angeles. The second videocassette is entitled The Oakland Series, and consists of the magical passes which were taught in the Oakland seminar of April of this year.

For continuing Information about forthcoming events and other announcements, please visit the Cleargreen web site at http://www.webb.com/Castaneda

Cleargreen's e-mail address is : infinity@webb.com

All articles in the journal were written by Carlos Castaneda and edited by Nyei Murez.

journal design © Elaby Gaethen.

Published by Cleargreen, Incorporated. © 1996, Laugan Productions, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Reproduction in whole or in part of this text cannot be done without permission of the publishers.

The Sun Magazine - Feb 1996

Luck Disguised as Ordinary Life

By Nina Wise

My fortieth birthday was approaching like a tidal wave. I was single, childless, and questioning my life as a performance artist with a cult following but no steady income. I lacked the requisite evidence of adulthood: a couch, a dining-room table, a matched set of dishes, a color television. Although I tried to convince myself that this was because I had recently separated from a lover who owned nearly all of the furniture and electronic devices I had used for seven years, I knew the real problem was that I'd dedicated my life to my work and I wasn't getting famous fast enough. There were no book contracts, no movie deals, no television appearances coming my way. I needed help, a map to guide me through the midlife moonscape of defeat.

One of the great benefits of disappointment is that it drives you to religion- usually not the one you were raised with; if that had worked, you wouldn't be in this condition. It would take an exorcism to stave off the demons who had caught wind of my approaching birthday and were flicking their icy tongues in my ear, chanting a liturgy of symphonic discontent. I decided to learn to meditate, discovered a Vipassana Buddhist teacher in my neighborhood, and began to sit every morning on my purple zafu.

One afternoon, my friend Martina called to tell me the Dalai Lama was coming to Santa Monica to give the Kalachakra Initiation. I'd met Martina when she came backstage after one of my performances. "That sex fantasy with the refrigerator was divine," she'd told me later at one of her Pacific Heights dinner parties, while butlers carrying silver trays of smoked salmon and caviar toasties waded through an effervescent crowd of environmentalists, publishers, writers, and philanthropists. Martina had grown up in Argentina, where it was traditional for the wealthy to create around themselves an international milieu of royalty, intellectuals, and artists. Her warm brown eyes exuded confidence, her cheeks were aphrodisiac, and she wore a silver streak in her brown hair to show that, even though she was holding forth on a white rug arrayed with priceless antiques, she was really a rebel. Over champagne, Martina and I discovered that we were both seekers. We began going to retreats, dharma talks, satsangs, and darshans together.

"Do you want to go to Santa Monica with me and be my roommate?" Martina now asked over the phone.

The Kalachakra Initiation is one of the most esoteric and advanced practices in Tibetan Buddhism. During the ceremony, participants vow to devote their lives to altruism and to become bodhisattvas, enlightened people who, instead of stepping off the wheel of incarnation upon their death, return to earth to serve all living beings. Normally, the initiation is given only to students with years of preliminary practice under their belts, but, because the world was in such an escalated state of environmental devastation, the Dalai Lama had decided to offer the transmission to Anyone who felt moved to participate. Many of my friends were heading to southern California for this event. I accepted Martina's invitation without pause.

When I arrived at the Shangri La, an upscale, art deco hotel on Ocean Boulevard, Martina was spread out on the king-sized bed balancing Mothering magazine on her stomach, which rose like a whale from a calm ocean. She was expecting her fifth child after a twelve-year hiatus, and she needed to get current on parenting. I lay down next to her and pulled out the forty-page text we'd been given for the five-day initiation process:

From this time until enlightenment, I will generate the altruistic intention to become enlightened, Generate the very pure thought, And abandon the conception of I and mine.

I wasn't sure I was following this. "Martina, what's 'the very pure thought'?" I asked, hoping for an in-depth dharma discussion.

"It doesn't matter. We'll get it by osmosis. Do you think I should get a diaper service!"

"Definitely", I said, turning back to the incomprehensible text.

In the morning, we waited in a line that stretched around the block until it was our turn to take three mouthfuls of saffron-blessed water and spit out our mental and emotional toxins into an enormous white plastic bucket.

"I'm going to throw up," Martina groaned, covering her eyes so she didn't have to look at the frothy, urine-colored spittle.

We did three prostrations as we entered the hall-- one for the Buddha, one for the teaching, and one for the community of seekers. As we searched for our places in the crowded auditorium, I tried not to stare at the celebrities.

We settled into velvet seats, pulled out our books, and studied the stage, where monks in one-armed wine-colored robes and buttercup yellow chicken-comb headpieces chanted a multi-octave, deep-throated drone, and the Dalai Lama recited detailed instructions in Tibetan.

"What page are we on?" I asked Martina.

"It doesn't matter," she said, waking from a nap. "Just breathe. Meditate."

"But we're supposed to be visualizing some deity with green arms and a flower on his forehead."

"Relax," she said as she closed her eyes again, stretched out her legs, and leaned her head back against the seat.

But I couldn't relax. This was my opportunity to receive an important transmission. I struggled to follow the text:

Within the great seal of clear light devoid of the elaborations of inherent existence, in the center of an ocean of offering clouds of of Samantabhadra, like five-colored rainbows thoroughly bedecked...

At the break, people dashed to the lobby, where sinuous lines radiated like Medusa's hair from the pay phones. Men in denim jeans and Izod shirts paced outside in the Santa Monica sunshine, portable phones pressed against their ears:

"Did you get directions to Richard Gere's party for the Dalai Lama?"

"Has my agent called?"

"Cancel my 2:30. This is tedious, but I think I'll stick it out. Say I had an emergency or something."

"He said he would sign? Fantastic. Maybe this stuff works."

"I hear there are three parties tonight, and a tea somewhere. Isn't Barbra Streisand involved? Find out."

At the sound of the gong, people rushed back into the auditorium. Steeped in the summer heat, we planted ourselves in the plush seats and prayed to be truthful, kind, compassionate. Two thousand of us vowed together to dedicate our lives to the well-being of others.

On the way back to the hotel, Martina whispered in a conspiratorial tone that her friend Carlos Castaneda was coming to join us for tea. "Don't tell anyone. It's just for us. He's a bit finicky about who he hangs out with."

We had only half an hour to prepare. Like college roommates getting ready for a double date, we took turns in the shower, hovered shoulder to shoulder in front of the bathroom mirror with our blow-dryers and lipstick, and finessed each other's outfits. Our wrists were still moist with Martina's French perfume when we heard a knock. Martina glided across the room with cultivated poise and opened the door. A short, gray-haired man in a wrinkled polyester suit and dusty cowboy boots embraced her in the hallway.

That can't possibly be him, I thought. I had imagined someone tall, with broad shoulders and a swatch of thick dark hair-- an air of Mexican aristocracy steeped in shamanism and desert ravines. In college, I had read all of Castaneda's books, and they had affected me more than anything I'd studied.

Castaneda's accounts of his encounters in Mexico with the Yaqui Indian sorcerer don Juan Matus had informed my entire generation. My friends and I would quote don Juan to each other. "Follow a path with heart," we would say. "Keep death over your left shoulder." We were taking psychedelics and trying to change the world into a place that valued love over materialism and magic over science. Castaneda and don Juan were our guides through a terrain outside the law-- one that our parents were too conservative and too terrified to explore.

Castaneda was our surrogate father, don Juan our spiritual teacher, our prophet.

"Carlos, this is Nina," Martina said, smiling with seamless grace. "Nina, Carlos Castaneda."

Like earth opened by a plow, Carlos's face fell into a wide grin as he shook my hand. His hand was as warm as a chicken's nest. He sat down in a floral-print easy chair and asked for a glass of water. I could hardly believe I was in the same room with this man.

Martina dove right in. "I've been waiting to ask you for ages: what really happened to don Juan? Did he die?"

"No, no," Carlos said with a chuckle, "he didn't die. He disappeared. He went to the other place. I am learning this, too: to become immortal. This is my work now. Most people think that their work is what they do during the day, but the real work happens after dark. Most people waste their lives because they forget they are going to die. It is at night, in dreams, that I practice. When you learn how to die, you learn to live forever.

"After don Juan crossed over, La Gorda became my benefactor," he went on, leaning forward and looking us both directly in the eye. "She was fat and ugly, with coal black hair and dark eyes. I was completely under her spell."

I was completely under his spell by now. His voice, the lilt of his Spanish accent cradling impeccable English, hypnotized me. His eyes glowed with the satisfaction of our capture.

"And anything La Gorda wanted me to do, I had to do it. One day, when I was preparing to leave Mexico and go back to Los Angeles, she told me to go to Tucson instead. She said I should work as a cook in a cafe.

"No," I said to her, "I like my life in Los Angeles. I like my friends. I'm not going to Tucson. I don't know how to cook."

"I got into my truck, and I drove off. Six hours outside of Nayarit, I was thinking, 'My life in Los Angeles isn't that great.' Twelve hours outside of Nayarit, I was thinking, 'My life in Los Angeles has its ups and downs.' Eighteen hours outside of Nayarit, on the border of Arizona, I found myself thinking, 'My life in Los Angeles is completely miserable.' I drove to Tucson, pulled up to the first greasy spoon I laid eyes on, walked in and asked for a job."

At this point in the story, Carlos crossed his arms, puffed up his chest, and deepened his voice.

"Do you know eggs?" the boss said. "You see, hamburgers and fries are easy, but we serve breakfast all day, and you've got to know eggs."

"I didn't know eggs, so I found a studio apartment, and I practiced cooking eggs for two weeks - scrambled, over easy, over hard, soft-boiled, hard-boiled, omelets, poached. Then I went back to the cafe. " 'Do you know eggs?' the boss asked me again.

"Yeah, I know eggs," I said.

"So I got the job. After a month, they promoted me, put me in charge of hiring and firing. One day, this young girl named Linda came in and wanted a job as a waitress. She seemed bright, so I hired her. We got to be friends, and she told me she was a fan of Carlos Castaneda. She gave me a couple of his books to read. I didn't know what to say. I took the books, and a couple of days later I gave them back. I told her I didn't really understand them."

Carlos chuckled, enjoying the story. I sat with my legs pulled up on the pastel hotel couch and studied his face. Critics in the press had recently tried to discredit his claims to have apprenticed with a witch doctor in Mexico.

Sympathetic critics suggested it was poetic license. Harsher ones accused him of fraud. I listened to Carlos's story like a detective, seeking factual flaws. I examined his brown and wrinkled face, his eyes, for evidence of deception. But I was seduced by his enthusiasm, his sunny chuckle, his intelligence, and I fell into the story as if carried away by rushing water.

"One morning," he continued, "Linda came into the cafe and was very jumpy."

"What's going on?" I asked. "Que pasa?"

Carlos sat up straight in his chair, crossed his legs tightly together, and spoke in a high-pitched voice.

"'He's here,' she said. 'Carlos Castaneda. In the alley. There's a tall, dark Mexican man sitting in a white limousine with the windows rolled up, and he's scribbling notes on a yellow pad. I'm sure it's him-- there are rumors that Castaneda is in Tucson. What should I do?'

"I didn't know what to say. I told her to just go out there and introduce herself. She thought she was too fat, and that Castaneda would never fall for a waitress at a greasy spoon. I looked at her standing there in her cap and apron. She looked beautiful to me, radiant. She was young and lively and had a quick mind. 'You're perfect just the way you are,' I told her.

"So she put on lipstick and fixed up her hair and went out to the alley. Two minutes later, she came back with tears streaming down her face.

"'What happened?' I asked. She could hardly talk.

"'I knocked on his window... and he rolled it down... and I said "Hi," and told him my name was Linda... but he just rolled the window up... and wouldn't even talk to me.'

"I felt real bad," said Carlos, sadness darkening his eyes. "Of course I knew it wasn't Castaneda, but I'd thought maybe she'd meet some guy who'd take her out to dinner. I didn't know what to do. I took her in my arms, and I held her." He paused, looking out the window at the silhouettes of palm trees lining the street.

"And I started to cry, too. You see, I'd come to really love this girl. We'd been best friends for nearly a year. I wanted to tell her who I was, but I knew she'd never believe me. She'd think I was making it up to make her feel better. You see, for all this time, she'd known me as Joe Gomez.

"Carlos Castaneda, the man she dreamed of meeting, was holding her in his arms, crying with love for her. But she didn't recognize him. Love slips by with an alias. I'm like Linda, I realized, thinking that what I long for is something other than this life unfolding moment to moment in ways I could never plan or even imagine."

Carlos paused and looked at me. Outside, seagulls cried, and the sun went down, marbling the sky. We sat in the dim pink of sunset. No one moved.

"When I got back to my studio apartment, La Gorda was sitting there, waiting for me. I don't know how she got in, but she always did, always found me. I told her what had happened and asked what I should do."

"'Vamanos,' she said.

"'But I can't just leave,' I told her. 'I have to give two weeks' notice, train a replacement, say goodbye to my friends.'

"'What's the matter?' she said. 'You're afraid no one can cook eggs as good as Carlos Castaneda? Vamanos.' And we got into my truck and drove off."

Carlos got up to go, shook out his suit, and extended his arms. I walked right into his strong hug, and a happiness moved through me like moonlight sweeping the horizon.

Several days later, as the Kalachakra Initiation was drawing to a close, Martina and I sat in our velvet seats in the dark, sweltering Santa Monica auditorium. We tied red blindfolds over our eyes. We cast toothpicks into the air seven times. We visualized ourselves as the four-faced Kalachakra deity with twenty-four arms embracing his four-faced, eight-armed, saffron yellow consort. We licked sweet yogurt out of our right palms. We imagined red dots moving up our spines and mingling with white dots moving down our spines.

The Tibetan monks chanted their polytonal drone, pounded drums, banged gongs, crashed cymbals, and blew seven-foot horns in a symphony that vibrated out bones. We vowed to tell the truth, to be kind, to be generous, to cultivate love, and to dedicate ourselves to the enlightenment of all beings.

On the way back to the hotel, Martina, a mischievous grin on her full lips, told me that Carlos was going to pay us another visit tonight. We put out a plate of crackers and cheese, a bowl of fruit, and bottles of mineral water. As the sun hovered on the horizon, we heard his knock.

Carlos was wearing the same wrinkled suit I'd seen him in several days earlier. He placed his hands on Martina's bulging belly and leaned over. "Hola, chica. Que tal?" he purred to her unborn child. "Tienes una madre muy bonita, muy sympatica, y muy especial." He closed his eyes and stood there silently for a moment, then turned to me and gave me a rugged hug.

Martina propped herself against a mound of pillows on the bed, I sat on the couch, and Carlos took his seat in the easy chair. He asked Martina about her husband, her children, their mutual friends. We talked about the weather; he was theatrical even when discussing smog, switching from precise, lucid language to a stream of amused profanity in an instant. His liveliness warmed the room like an open fire.

"Tell me more about La Gorda," Martina finally ventured, leaning back against the pillows like a child wanting a favorite bedtime story.

Carlos paused for a moment, his gaze lingering on each of ours a second too long, the way you look into the eyes of a potential lover.

"Another time, I was getting ready to leave Nayarit," he said, "and La Gorda gave me these instructions."

Carlos leaned back in his chair, spread his knees apart, pushed his belly out, and spoke in a high voice. I could see La Gorda, fat and dark.

"'Carlos, go to Escondido. Check into a motel room, the kind with olive green carpets stained with coffee and cigarette burns, and cigarette smoke smelling up the furniture.'

"'How long do I have to stay there?' I asked.

"'Until you die,' she said with a smile that made my bones shiver.

"'I'm not doing it,' I told her. 'I like my life in Los Angeles. I like my friends. I like my apartment.'

"I got in my old truck, and I drove off. After a few hours on the Mexican highway, I started thinking my life in Los Angeles wasn't that great. After a few more hours, I started thinking my life in Los Angeles had its unpleasant aspects. As I approached the border at Tijuana, my life in Los Angeles seemed completely miserable. I drove to Escondido, pulled into the first motel I could find, and checked into a room. It had an olive green carpet with coffee stains and cigarette bums, and reeked of stale smoke. I stayed alone in that room for weeks. Maybe months." Carlos sighed.

I had recently completed a performance work about solitude. To develop the piece, I had studied my private gestures: the way I ate meals in front of the television; the way I stood in the light of the open refrigerator, staring at a carton of milk, a bottle of orange juice, tofu floating in a bowl of water; the intonations and language used when I talked to myself, the way my body curled up in bed; the melody of my tears. I was trying to unravel loneliness so I could examine its core. I thought then the pain might disappear, the way particles of matter transform into waves of light upon examination under electron microscopes. The work had received rave reviews, but loneliness still assaulted me. I needed advice.

"What did you do?" I asked Carlos, hardly able to contain my curiosity. "Did you watch television, listen to the radio, read books, talk on the telephone?"

"Nothing," Carlos said quietly, catching my eye for a moment and then letting his gaze fall onto his folded hands. "I did... nothing." He spoke slowly. "I studied the patterns of cigarette burns on the carpet. I stared at the ceiling. I watched motes of dust dance in the light that came through the sliding glass doors. I drank coffee. I ate. Fear would come, and I'd huddle under the bedcovers-- Sometimes the heat of anxiety made me sweat so much I threw the blankets on the floor. At times, the terror was so strong I curled over the edge of the bed and pressed the corner of the mattress against my belly, my solar plexus, just trying to stay alive. I felt for sure I would die. Then one day, finally... I let go."

He paused and looked at me, and I looked back at him, the way you lock eyes with a deer until one of you moves.

"Suddenly, something shifted," he continued. "The fear lifted. And everything I'd ever cared about-- the pain of childhood, the struggles of my career, fame, money, romance, the women who had left me, the ones I still wanted, the past, the future, the 'Do you like me?, Does he like me!, Does she like me?': how we waste our lives... it all fell away. In an instant, I was completely free. And I had never felt so happy in my entire life."

Carlos took a sip of water and gazed out the window. The sky was dark, and the night sounds of traffic invaded the room.

"I called my friends in Los Angeles," he said, smiling.

"'Divide my things,' I told them. 'I'm not coming back.' They thought I was drunk.

"'I'm not drunk,' I assured them. 'I'm perfectly sober. If you don't take my things, the landlady will.'

"The next morning, I checked out of the motel, got in my truck, and drove off. I didn't know where I was going, and I didn't care. I'd never been happier in my entire life.

"You see," Carlos said, settling back again in his chair, "the difference between me and most people is that most people look at their lives as if they're on a train and they're sitting in the caboose. They watch the tracks sweep out behind them and see that this has happened and that has happened, and they're disappointed. But they adjust. And they know exactly what will happen next because of what's happened before. They believe their future will be just like their past-- the same box of disappointments, the same box of pleasures."

"But me, I look at my life as though I'm sitting in the locomotive. Ahead of me, the landscape disappears into the distance. I don't know where I'm going, and I have no idea what's going to happen next. No matter what went on yesterday, I know that today anything can happen. That's what keeps me happy. That's what keeps me alive."

Carlos sparkled with energy and ease. His well-being was contagious. "You have to listen to the quiet callings of the heart", he said, his voice calm and private. "Ambition: it's the enemy of intuition. You have to be silent. You have to listen to the quiet callings of the heart and know that anything can happen."

I sat quietly, listening. It was as if Carlos's words had devoured the demons of despondency who had made their home on the walls of my chest like mollusks. I have to remember this story, I thought to myself.

"Es muy tarde," Carlos said, standing up and stretching his legs. "Martina, you have to get some sleep. And me, I work at night, so I have to move along."

"Right, immortality practice. Look, do me a favor and don't disappear from this plane before you visit me in San Francisco," Martina said, grinning.

"Don't worry," Carlos reassured her, placing his hand again on her belly. We accompanied Carlos to the door, and he gave me a final hug. He whistled as he walked down the hall. I longed to run after him, to fall to my knees and beg him to take me along. I wanted to enter the dream world and wend my way through the postdeath realms with Carlos as my guide. I wanted to learn how to die without dying.

"Martina' can't we go with him?" I pleaded.

"Are you kidding? I'm exhausted," she groaned, collapsing onto the bed and grabbing the phone. "Let's order hot-fudge sundaes, crawl under the covers, and watch David Letterman."

That did sound like a good idea.

A wave of ordinary-world glee took hold of me. As Martina dialed room service, I walked to the window and sighted Carlos walking at a brisk pace under the arcade of palm trees. No one stopped to stare, or took his picture, or asked him for his autograph. He was completely anonymous. I followed his progress down the sidewalk until he climbed into his old truck and drove off.



Copyright February 1996 Sun Magazine

Arizona Republic (2) - Aug 1997

Luminous Encounter: Elusive Castaneda remains complex man.

Ordinary 'egg' catches up with literary sorcerer Carlos Castaneda

By Thomas Ropp

The Arizona Republic

August 3, 1997

Los Angeles



I could have asked him anything.

"I am your prisoner," Carlos Castaneda said.

We talked about ravens. I specifically wanted to know how one could tell when a raven wasn't really a raven.

"You look at its energy," Castaneda said. "A raven that's a sorcerer glows amber."

He didn't tell me what color a regular raven glowed. But then, it wouldn't have mattered anyway since I don't see pure energy. Castaneda does-- says he has for many years. He began seeing humans as energy forms, or "luminous eggs," in the cafeteria of UCLA when he was working on his doctorate in anthropology some 30 years ago.

That's how my lunch with Carlos Castaneda began. It was a Thursday, 2 p.m. We met at a Cuban restaurant near West Hollywood. I didn't know till the last moment where I'd be meeting Castaneda. His staff said that's how Castaneda does it. He reads energy to determine meeting locations and most other matters.

"Everything that we know is an interpretation of energy," Castaneda said. For the longest time I feared I'd have to find Castaneda in L.A. without directions as a test of my unbending intent and worthiness to speak to the enigmatic cult legend and author of nine bestsellers, including his classic "The Teachings of don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge."

So there we were, just two luminous eggs having lunch. In my best Spanish I ordered moros y cristianos (what Cubans call white rice and black beans) y tostones (fried plantains). He looked up from his menu and in perfect English ordered: "Number 12." Steak and potatoes.

I felt muy estupido.

The interview came about because of Castaneda's Tensegrity workshop, which is coming to Phoenix next weekend. I was told by his people that I would have to fly to L.A. because Castaneda does not do interviews over the phone. In fact he rarely does interviews at all. Whole decades have passed without a glimpse of Castaneda. Then he'd surface. A lecture here. A lecture there. Only to disappear again.

Having read all nine of his books (several times) and sharing a common interest in cultural anthropology, metaphysics and, especially, Yaqui mysticism, my assemblage point-- a Castaneda term for perception center-- was all aquiver at this rare opportunity.

However, I was told there were ground rules, including no photos and no tape recorder. I was allowed to use a laptop, but opted to just listen and remember (although I did take a few notes blindly under the table on a reporter's notebook).

In retrospect, and in the tradition of shaman synchronicity, I suppose this lunch wasn't really an accident at all, Just two weeks before the interview I had mentioned to someone that I was surprised my path had not yet crossed Carlos Castaneda's.

And then there was this raven.

Several days before I learned of the interview, I was awakened at six in the morning by the booming caw-caw-caw of the largest raven I had ever seen. It was sitting on the top stalk of a soaptree yucca outside my screened patio. Its call was so loud that the echoes reverberated off nearby mountains, creating an effect similar to thunder.

I approached the bird but it was not afraid. It looked at me once then focused its total attention back to filling the air with vocalizations. I took my eye off the bird for only a moment to see how my cats were reacting.

When I looked up the raven had disappeared.

Castaneda was interested in my raven story, but he didn't offer an explanation.

Ravens and crows, as all shape shifters know, are popular forms of travel in the Americas.

Relatively little is known about Castaneda. De-emphasizing self and erasing personal history is the way Castaneda's line of seers has evolved into warriors of true knowledge. It's also why photos and voice imprints are prohibited.

"There is nothing to Carlos Castaneda," he said. "Personality is a pretense. Fame? Success? Who gives a (expletive)? If we weren't so involved in ourselves, we wouldn't do such barbaric things to ourselves."

Yet, there are some records, and Castaneda himself lets slip a personal fillip now and then. Apparently Castaneda was born around 70 years ago in Peru and was reared by a hedonistic grandfather. But he has spent most of his life in Los Angeles. He graduated from Hollywood High School and received his Ph.D. in anthropology from UCLA. For a brief time, he taught cultural anthropology at the University of California-Irvine.

Castaneda does not stand out in a crowd. In fact, you probably wouldn't even see him in a crowd. He's diminutive, not much taller than 5 feet and probably less than 90 pounds. His substantial hair is mostly gray and brushed forward.

He likes to joke about how people have described him as looking like someone's gardener or chauffeur or a Mexican waiter. L.A. writer Bruce Wagner once asked Castaneda how he should describe what he looks like. Castaneda suggested Lee Marvin.

Sitting across from me, dressed in an amber, short-sleeve buttoned shirt and khaki pants, hair mussed, he reminded me of an iconoclastic professor retired, the professor of not doing, doing lunch. Except this professor has the eye of the sorcerer, the left one, that grabs at your awareness with unimaginable force.

But all the descriptions are deceptive and fragile. Castaneda doesn't have one look. He has many. His appearance changes with his moods, which shuffle easily. Like his teachers don Juan and don Genero, he laughs, he curses, he makes unearthly voices and exaggerated smacking sounds with his lips. Then he turns fierce as he cogently and eloquently pours out his thoughts on the nature of things.

Castaneda is complex, I expected that. At times he talks in a different language. I expected that, too. It's impossible for most of us luminous eggs to understand all the ideas. Don Juan said that we understand nothing anyway, and that true knowledge is not accomplished through our intellects.

I didn't expect Castaneda's immense humor. "We must laugh to balance us," he said.

He told stories, that cannot be repeated in this publication. I believe he keeps up on current events. He was especially interested in the story of Virginia fertility specialist Cecil Jacobson, who is now in prison for using his own semen to impregnate up to 70 of his patients.

There was no discussion of peyote or Mescalito or little smoke, but he did illustrate for me on a napkin how to cut off the top of a barrel cactus and recover its juice.

"You drink just a little for rejuvenation," Castaneda said, and smacked his lips approvingly.

Arizona is particularly prominent in the Castaneda saga. He met Don Juan in Nogales, Ariz., and spent much time in our state during his apprenticeship and even later. Castaneda's eyes became moist when he recalled the Arizona years.

"Arizona is a magical place," Castaneda said. "The Sonoran Desert has a specific confluence." He said he could not go back to Arizona because it brings back too many strong and poignant memories.

"A warrior knows whatever he sees he will not see again," Castaneda said. "I would seriously weep. I need all my strength.

We are all alone.

Castaneda didn't like his steak. He said it smelled like excrement. He dismissed it, then plowed on to another thought: "The universe is not predictable no matter what scientists tell you," Castaneda said.

It's a theme he hits hard upon, and that we are truly all alone. "God doesn't love, you, believe me." The problem, Castaneda insists, is that we're so trapped in our own egos, we never see the bigger picture of existence. We are not individuals surrounded by other individuals or houses or shopping malls. We are individuals surrounded by infinity."

Castaneda is vague on how he spends his day, but he still writes. Next year Simon & Schuster will issue a 30th-anniversary edition of "The Teachings of Don Juan A Yaqui Way of Knowledge," with a new foreword by Castaneda. There will also be a new book next year published by HarperCollins, "Magical Passes: The Practical Wisdom of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico." Castaneda has also completed what he calls his "last book" with the working title "The Active Side of Infinity."

"I don't think I can write anymore," Castaneda said. "The universe is predatorial. It produces profound waves of sadness that are homing in on me. This ontological sadness, you see it coming, then you feel it on top of you."

Even the path with heart is no cakewalk. Castaneda may not be with us much longer. He has told his staff as much. "But he won't die a physical death," said Tensegrity instructor or "energy tracker" Kylie Lundahl. "He will disappear the way Don Juan did. He knows there isn't much time left before that happens."

The goal of don Juan's line of Mexican seers has been to complete what they call the "abstract flight," to "evanesce with the totality of their beings" into infinity-- disappear with their boots on, so to speak. Castaneda's teacher don Juan and his party are supposed to have done this in 1973.

But Castaneda may have a problem in this regard. One gets the feeling from reading his later books and from personal conversation that something is wrong, and that Lee Marvin is scared.

Before he left this world don Juan Matus made it clear to Castaneda and his other apprentices that this line of Mexican seers of antiquity would end with Castaneda, the last nagual. Something in the energy configuration of the seers left behind was not propitious to continue the line. So, in essence, Castaneda and his party were left with the task of "closing out" the line.

Is it possible that Castaneda, like E.T., has been stranded in this world? Is there something don Juan neglected to tell him about storing enough personal energy for the abstract flight?

During our lunch, which lasted nearly three hours, I couldn't help but disengage myself occasionally from his left eye and wonder what he saw irradiating from my energy body-- no doubt something nasty and pink from all the years of loading up on diet colas and sugar-free gum.

I also wondered whether he knew more about that raven than he was letting on.

We said our good-byes in the restaurant's parking lot. He said he liked me and enjoyed our conversation. I said: Somos monos extranos. We are strange apes.

He smiled, but didn't answer. He didn't need to. For a moment Castaneda's predatorial universe hooked me with one of its waves of sadness as I remembered what he had said about a warrior knowing whatever he sees he will not see again.

I took a few steps toward my rental car, wondering whether Castaneda would indeed make that connection with his abstract flight. I sincerely hoped so.

When I looked back, Castaneda, like the raven, had vanished.



Sidebar: "This Is The One You Have Been Waiting For!"

Copyright August 1997 The Arizona Republic

Kindred Spirit - Jun 1997

Kindred Spirit Magazine

The Guide to Personal & Planetary Healing

Quarterly, Summer (June - August 1997)

In the early 1960's, Carlos Castaneda made a profound impact on the world when he published his first of nine books, "The Teachings of Don Juan - A Yaqui Way of Knowledge." In this work he related his experiences as a sorcerer's apprentice under the guidance of a Yaqui Indian from Sonora, Mexico. As an anthropology student as UCLA, he encountered don Juan Matus while collecting information for his Ph.D. about the hallucinogenic cactus peyote.

From the moment of the book's publication, Castaneda became a cult figure. Although he rarely gives interviews Castaneda spoke out in February this year, and we thought you'd like to see what he had to say.

Castaneda's works presented a vision of 'the warrior's way', living impeccably, erasing personal history, using death as one's advisor and losing self-importance. Castaneda's interactions with don Juan and his fellow teachers and apprentices are intimately portrayed, revealing a serious Western scholar who becomes the target of jeers and criticisms, then puts aside his social paradigm, and awakens to the mysteries of the unknown.

Besides its pragmatic value, Castaneda's work has an indisputable literary quality. It is filled with poetry, magic and beauty. His nine books have greatly surpassed the best seller category and are translated into all major languages.

Castaneda's companions, Taisha Abelar and Florinda Donner-Grau, have also related their experiences with don Juan in "The Sorcerer's Crossing" and "Being-In-Dreaming." Carol Tiggs, a protagonist in some of Castaneda's books, as yet remains unpublished.


Carlos Castaneda's Tensegrity: Magical Passes from the Shamans of ancient Mexico

At present, Carlos Castaneda and his companions Taisha Abelar, Florinda Donner-Grau and Carol Tiggs are interested in making don Juan's world more accessible. Recently they have come forth with a discipline of physical movements taught to them by don Juan Matus and which they call Tensegrity.

This modernized version of some movements called "magical passes", developed by Indian shamans who lived in Mexico in times prior to the Spanish Conquest, are designed to enhance perception and to physically strengthen the body. Tensegrity borrows a term from architecture to represent the quintessence of tensing and relaxing the muscles and tendons of the body.

When applied to the body, this term describes most appropriately the interplay of tension and integrity that drives the magical passes.

Tensegrity seminars, ranging in length from weekends to week-long workshops, dedicate several hours daily to these movements. Also three videos have been released for the individual learner: Volume 1, Twelve Basic Movements to Gather Energy and Promote Well-Being; Volume 2, Redistributing Dispersed Energy, and Volume 3, Energetically Crossing from One Phylum to Another, all available through Cleargreen, Incorporated, Santa Monica, California or through www.castaneda.com (www.webb.com/Castaneda). Cleargreen will also publish a book on Tensegrity by Carlos Castaneda later this year.

In February this year Castaneda answered the questions presented to him by Daniel Trujillo Rivas for the Chilean and Argentinean magazine Uno Mismo: Facing Carlos Castaneda, this unclassifiable writer surrounded by 30 years of legend and myth, was a terrifying moment for me. He has become one of the most important literary phenomena of the century, revolutionizing ideas about pre-Colombian American culture.

After nine books I still had many of the same questions about Castaneda I had at the beginning, starting with: Who is he really? An anthropologist? A gifted writer? A sorcerer's apprentice? Or an accomplished shaman in his own right? Now being able to speak to him personally I hoped to have some of these questions answered.

---

Q:
Mr. Castaneda, for years you've remained in absolute anonymity. What drove you to change this condition and talk publicly about the teachings that you and your three companions received from the nagual Juan Matus?


A:
Carlos Castaneda: What compels us to disseminate don Juan Matus' ideas is a need to clarify what he taught us. For us, this is a task that can no longer be postponed. His other three students and I have reached the unanimous conclusion that the world to which don Juan Matus introduced us is within the perceptual possibilities of all human beings.

We've discussed amongst ourselves what would be the appropriate road to take. To remain anonymous the way don Juan proposed to us? This option was not acceptable. The other available road was to disseminate don Juan's ideas: an infinitely more dangerous and exhausting choice, but the only one that, we believe, has the dignity don Juan imbued into all his teachings.


Q:
Considering what you have said about the unpredictability of a warrior's actions, which we have corroborated for three decades, can we expect this public phase you're going through to last for a while? Until when?


A:
There is no way for us to establish a temporal criteria. We live according to the premises proposed by don Juan and we never deviate from them. Don Juan Matus gave us the formidable example of a man who lived according to what he said. And I say it is a formidable example because it is the most difficult thing to emulate; to be monolithic and at the same time have the flexibility to face anything. This was the way don Juan lived his life.

Within these premises, the only thing one can be is an impeccable mediator. One is not the player in this cosmic chess match, one is simply a pawn on the chessboard. What decides everything is a conscious impersonal force that sorcerers call Intent or the Spirit.


Q:
As far as I've been able to corroborate, orthodox anthropology, as well as the alleged defenders of the cultural pre-Colombian cultural heritage of America, undermine the credibility of your work. The belief that your work is merely the product of your literary talent continues to exist today. There are also other sectors that accuse you of having a double standard because, supposedly, your lifestyle and your activities contradict what the majority expect from a shaman.

How can you clear up these suspicions?


A:
The cognitive system of the Western man forces us to rely on preconceived ideas. We base our judgments on something that is always a priori. For example, the idea of what is 'orthodox.' What is orthodox anthropology? The one taught in university lecture halls? What is a shaman's behavior? To wear feathers on one's head and dance to the spirits?

For thirty years, people have accused Carlos Castaneda of creating a literary character simply because what I report to them does not concur with the anthropological 'a priori' - the ideas established in the lecture halls or in the anthropological field work. However, what don Juan presented to me can only apply to a situation that calls for total action and, under such circumstances, very little or almost nothing of the preconceived occurs.

I have never been able to draw conclusions about shamanism because in order to do this one needs to be an active member in the shamans' world. For a social scientist, let's say a sociologist for example, it is very easy to arrive at sociological conclusions over any subject related to the Occidental world, because the sociologist is an active member of the Occidental world.

But how can an anthropologist, who spends at the most two years studying other cultures, arrive at reliable conclusions about them?

One needs a lifetime to be able to acquire membership in a cultural world. I've been working for more than thirty years in the cognitive world of the shamans of ancient Mexico and, sincerely, I don't believe I have acquired the membership that would allow me to draw conclusions or to even propose them.

I have discussed this with people from different disciplines and they always seem to understand and agree with the premises I'm presenting. But then they turn around and they forget everything they agreed upon and continue to sustain orthodox academic principles, without caring about the possibility of an absurd error in their conclusions. Our cognitive system seems to be impenetrable.


Q:
Why do you not allow yourself to be photographed, have your voice recorded or make your biographical data known? Could this affect, and if so how, what you've achieved in your spiritual work? Don't you think it would be useful for some sincere seekers of truth to know who you really are, as a way of corroborating that it really is possible to follow the path you proclaim?


A:
With reference to photographs and personal data, I and the other three disciples of don Juan follow his instructions. For a shaman like don Juan, the main idea behind refraining from giving personal data is very simple. It is imperative to leave aside what he called "personal history". To get away from the "me" is something extremely annoying and difficult. What the shamans like don Juan seek is a state of fluidity where the personal "me" does not count.

He believed that an absence of photography and biographical data affects whoever enters into this field of action in a positive, though subliminal, way. We are endlessly accustomed to using photographs, recordings and biographical data, all of which spring from the idea of personal importance.

Don Juan said it was better not to know anything about a shaman; in this way, instead of encountering a person, one encounters an idea that can be sustained. This is the opposite of what happens in the everyday world where we are faced with people with psychological problems and without ideas, all of these people filled to the brim with "me, me, me."


Q:
How should your followers interpret the publicity and the commercial infrastructure-- a side of your literary work-- surrounding the knowledge you and your companions disseminate? What's your real relationship with Cleargreen Incorporated and the other companies such as Laugan Productions and Toltec Artists? I'm talking about a commercial link.


A:
At this point in my work I needed someone able to represent me regarding the dissemination of don Juan Matus' ideas. Cleargreen is a corporation that has great affinity with our work, as do Laugan Productions and Toltec Artists.

The idea of disseminating don Juan's teachings in the modern world implies the use of commercial and artistic media that are not within my individual reach. As corporations having an affinity with don Juan's ideas, Cleargreen Incorporated, Laugan Productions and Toltec Artists are capable of providing the means to disseminate what I want to disseminate.

There is always a tendency for impersonal corporations to dominate and transform everything that is presented to them and to adapt it to their own ideology. If it wasn't for the sincere interest of Cleargreen, Laugan Productions and Toltec Artists, everything don Juan said would have been transformed into something else by now.


Q:
There are a great number of people who, in one way or another, 'cling' to you in order to acquire public notoriety. What's your opinion of the actions of Victor Sanchez, who has interpreted and reorganized your teachings in order to elaborate a personal theory? And what of Ken Eagle Feather's assertions that he has been chosen by don Juan to be his disciple, and that don Juan came back just for him?


A:
There are a number of people who call themselves my students or don Juan's students, people I've never met and whom, I can guarantee, don Juan never met. Don Juan Matus was exclusively interested in the perpetuation of his lineage of shamans. He had four disciples who remain to this day. He had others who left with him.

Don Juan was not interested in teaching his knowledge; he taught it to his disciples in order to continue his lineage. Due to the fact that they cannot continue don Juan's lineage, his four disciples have been forced to disseminate his ideas.

The concept of a teacher who teaches his knowledge is part of our cognitive system but it isn't part of the cognitive system of the shamans of ancient Mexico. To teach was absurd for them. To transmit this knowledge to those who were going to perpetuate their lineage was a different matter.

The fact that there are a number of individuals who insist on using my name or don Juan's name is simply an easy maneuver to benefit themselves without much effort.


Q:
Let's consider the meaning of the word "spirituality" to be a state of consciousness in which human beings are fully capable of controlling the potentials of the species, something achieved by transcending the simple animal condition through a hard psychic, moral and intellectual training. Do you agree with this assertion? How is don Juan's world integrated into this context?


A:
For don Juan Matus, a pragmatic and extremely sober shaman, "spirituality" was an empty ideality, an assertion without basis that we believe to be very beautiful because it is encrusted with literary concepts and poetic expressions, but which never goes beyond that.

Shamans like don Juan are essentially practical. For them there only exists a predatory universe where intelligence or awareness is the product of life and death challenges. He considered himself a navigator of infinity and said that in order to navigate into the unknown like a shaman does, one needs unlimited pragmatism, boundless sobriety and "guts of steel". In view of all this, don Juan believed that 'spirituality' is simply a description of something impossible to achieve within the patterns of the world of everyday life, and it is not a real way of acting.


Q:
Do some of the concepts of your work, such as the assemblage point, the energetic filaments that make up the universe, the world of the inorganic beings, intent, stalking and dreaming, have an equivalent in Western knowledge? For example, there are some people who consider that man seen as a luminous egg is an expression of the aura.


A:
As far as I know, nothing of what don Juan taught us seems to have a counterpart in Western knowledge. Once, when don Juan was still here, I spent a whole year in search of gurus, teachers and wise men to give me an inkling of what they were doing. I wanted to know if there was something in the world of that time similar to what don Juan said and did. My resources were very limited and they only took me to meet the established masters who had millions of followers and, unfortunately, I couldn't find any similarity.


Q:
One can find truly incredible episodes in your literary work. How could someone who's not an initiate verify that all those "separate realities" are real, as you claim?


A:
It can be verified very easily by lending one's whole body instead of only one's intellect. One cannot enter don Juan's world intellectually, like a dilettante seeking fast and fleeting knowledge. Nor, in don Juan's world, can anything be verified absolutely. The only thing we can do is arrive at a state of increased awareness that allows us to perceive the world surrounding us in a more inclusive manner.

In other words, the goal of don Juan's shamanism is to break the parameters of historical and everyday perception and to perceive the unknown. That's why he called himself a navigator of infinity. He asserted that infinity lies beyond the parameters of daily perception.

To break these parameters was the aim of his life. Because he was an extraordinary shaman, he instilled that same desire in all four of us. He forced us to transcend the intellect and to embody the concept of breaking the boundaries of historical perception.


Q:
You have recently presented a physical discipline called Tensegrity. Can you explain what it is exactly? What's its goal? What spiritual benefit can a person who practices it individually get?


A:
According to what don Juan Matus taught us, the shamans who lived in ancient Mexico discovered a series of movements that when executed by the body brought about such physical and mental prowess that they decided to call those movements magical passes.

Don Juan told us that, through their magical passes, those shamans attained an increased level of awareness which allowed them to perform indescribable feats of perception.

Through generations, the magical passes were only taught to practitioners of shamanism. The movements were surrounded with tremendous secrecy and complex rituals. That is the way don Juan learned them and that is the way he taught them to his four disciples.

Our effort has been to extend the teachings of such magical passes to anyone who wants to learn them. We have called them Tensegrity, and we have transformed them from specific movements pertinent only to each of don Juan's four disciples, to general movements suitable for anyone.

Practicing Tensegrity, individually or collectively, promotes health, vitality, youth and a general sense of well-being. Don Juan said that practicing the magical passes helps accumulate the energy necessary to increase awareness and to expand the parameters of perception.


Q:
Besides your three cohorts, the people who attend your seminars have met other people, like the Chacmools, the Energy Trackers, the Elements, the Blue Scout ... Who are they? Are they part of a new generation of seers guided by you? If this is the case, how could one become part of this group of apprentices?


A:
Every one of these persons are defined beings whom don Juan Matus, as director of his lineage, asked us to wait for. He predicted the arrival of each one of them as an integral part of a vision. Since don Juan's lineage could not continue due to the energetic configuration of his four students, their mission was transformed from perpetuating the lineage into closing it, if possible with a golden clasp.

We are in no position to change such instructions. We can neither look for nor accept apprentices or active members of don Juan's vision. The only thing we can do is acquiesce to the designs of Intent.

The fact that the magical passes, guarded with such jealousy for so many generations, are now being taught, is proof that one can, indeed, in an indirect way, become part of this new vision through the practice of Tensegrity and by following the premises of the warrior's way.


Q:
Here's a question that I've often asked myself: does the warriors' path include, like other disciplines do, spiritual work for couples?


A:
The warriors' path includes everything and everyone. There can be a whole family of impeccable warriors. The difficulty lies in the terrible fact that individual relationships are based in emotional investments, and the moment the practitioner really practices what she/he learns the relationship crumbles.

In the everyday world, emotional investments are not normally examined, and we live an entire lifetime waiting to be reciprocated. Don Juan said I was a diehard investor and that my way of living and feeling could be described simply: "I only give what others give me".


Q:
What aspirations of possible advancement should someone have who wishes to work spiritually according to the knowledge disseminated in your books? What would you recommend for those who wish to practice don Juan's teachings by themselves?


A:
There's no way to put a limit on what one may accomplish individually if the intent is an impeccable intent. Don Juan's teachings are not spiritual. I repeat this because the question has come up over and over.

The idea of spirituality doesn't fit with the iron discipline of a warrior. The most important thing for a shaman like don Juan is the idea of pragmatism. When I met him, I believed I was a practical man, a social scientist filled with objectivity and pragmatism. He destroyed my pretensions and made me see that, as a true Western man, I was neither pragmatic nor spiritual. I came to understand that I only repeated the word "spirituality" to contrast it with the mercenary aspect of the world of everyday life. I wanted to get away from the mercantilism of everyday life and the eagerness to do this is what I called 'spirituality'.

I realized don Juan was right when he demanded that I come to a conclusion: to define what I considered spirituality. I didn't know what I was talking about.

What I'm saying might sound presumptuous, but there's no other way to say it. What a shaman like don Juan wants is to increase awareness, that is, to be able to perceive with all the human possibilities of perception; this implies a colossal task and an unbending purpose, which cannot be replaced by the spirituality of the Western world.



Copyright June 1997 Kindred Spirit Magazine

Mas Alla - April 1997

Excerpt from an Interview with
Florinda Donner-Grau, Taisha Abelar and Carol Tiggs.

by Concha Labarta

Translated from Spanish. First appeared in Mas Alla, April 1, 1997, Spain.

All the answers were given by Carol Tiggs, Taisha Abelar and Florinda Donner-Grau.



Question: You were, along with Carlos Castaneda, students of don Juan Matus and his sorcerer cohorts. However, you remained in anonymity for years, and it was not until recently that you decided to speak about your own apprenticeship with don Juan. Why this long silence? And what's the reason for this change?

Answer: First of all, we would like to clarify that each one of us met the man Carlos Castaneda calls the nagual don Juan Matus under a different name: Melchior Yaoquizque, John Michael Abelar and Mariano Aureliano. To avoid confusion, we always call him the old nagual; not old in the sense of old age but in the sense of seniority, and above all, to differentiate him from the new nagual, Carlos Castaneda.

Discussing our apprenticeship with the old nagual wasn't at all part of the task he conceived for us. That's why we remained in absolute anonymity.

The return of Carol Tiggs in 1985 marked a total change in our goals and aspirations. She was traditionally in charge of guiding us through something which, for modern man, could be translated as space and time, but which, for the shamans of ancient Mexico, meant awareness. They conceived a journey through something they called the dark sea of awareness.

Traditionally, Carol Tiggs' role was to guide us to make that crossing. When she returned, she automatically transformed the insular goal of our private journey into something more far-reaching. That's why we decided to end our anonymity and teach the magical passes of the shamans of ancient Mexico.



Q: Was the instruction you received from don Juan similar to that of Carlos Castaneda? If it wasn't, what were the differences? How would each of you describe don Juan and his male and female cohorts?

A: The instruction given to us was not at all similar to that given to Carlos Castaneda for the simple reason that we are women. We have organs that men don't have: the ovaries and the uterus, organs of tremendous importance. The old nagual's instruction for us consisted of pure action. Regarding the description of the old nagual's male and female cohorts, all we can say at this moment in our lives is that they were exceptional beings. To talk about them as people of the everyday world would be inane for us at this time.

The least we can say is that all of them, and they were sixteen including the old nagual, were in a state of exquisite vitality and youth. They were all old and yet at the same time, they weren't. When, out of curiosity and amazement, we asked the old nagual what was the reason for their exorbitant vigor, he told us that what rejuvenated them every step of the way was their link with infinity.



Q: While many modern psychological and sociological trends advocate putting an end to the distance between the masculine and the feminine, we have read in your books that there are notable differences between men and women in the way they each access knowledge. Could you elucidate on this subject? How are you, and your experiences as female sorcerers, different from those of Carlos Castaneda?

A: The difference between male and female sorcerers in the lineage of the old nagual is the simplest thing in the world. Like every other woman in the world, we have a womb. We have different organs from men: the uterus and the ovaries, which, according to sorcerers, make it easy for women to enter into exotic areas of awareness. According to sorcerers, there is a colossal force in the universe; a constant, perennial force which fluctuates but which doesn't change. They call this force awareness or the dark sea of awareness. Sorcerers assert that all living beings are attached to this force. They call this point of union the assemblage point. Sorcerers maintain that, due to the presence of the womb inside the body, women have the facility to displace the assemblage point to a new position.

We would like to emphasize that sorcerers believe that the assemblage point of every human being is located in the same place; three feet behind the shoulder blades. When sorcerers see human beings as energy, they perceive this point as a conglomerate of energy fields in the form of a luminous ball.

Sorcerers say that since the male sexual organs are outside the body, men don't have the same facility. Therefore, it would be absurd for sorcerers to try to erase or cloud these energetic differences. Regarding the behavior of male and female sorcerers in the social order, it is almost the same. The energetic difference makes the practitioners, men and women, behave in different ways. In the case of sorcerers, these differences are complementary. The female sorcerers' great facility to displace the assemblage point serves as a base for male sorcerers' actions, which are characterized by greater endurance and more unyielding purpose.



Q: We also have read in your books that Florinda Donner-Grau and Taisha Abelar each represent a different category in the world of shamanism. One of you is a dreamer and the other a stalker. These are attractive and exotic terms but many people use them indiscriminately and interpret them in their own way. What's the real significance of such classifications? When it comes to action, what are the implications for Florinda Donner-Grau to be a dreamer and for Taisha Abelar to be a stalker?

A: Once again, as in the preceding question, the difference is very simple because it is dictated by each of our energies.

Florinda Donner-Grau is a dreamer because she has an extraordinary facility to displace the assemblage point. According to sorcerers, when the assemblage point, which is our point of attachment to the dark sea of awareness, is displaced, a new conglomerate of energy fields is assembled, a conglomerate similar to the habitual one, but different enough to guarantee the perception of another world which is not the world of everyday life.

The gift of Taisha Abelar as a stalker is her facility to fix the assemblage point in the new position to which it has been displaced. Without this facility to fix the assemblage point, the perception of another world is too fleeting; something very similar to the effect produced by certain hallucinogenic drugs: a profusion of images without rhyme or reason. Sorcerers believe that the effect of hallucinogenic drugs is to displace the assemblage point, but only in a very chaotic and temporary manner.



Q: In your most recent books, Being-In-Dreaming and The Sorcerers' Crossing, you talk about personal experiences that are difficult to accept. Accessing other worlds, traveling into the unknown, making contact with inorganic beings, are all experiences which challenge reason. The temptation is either not to believe such accounts at all, or to consider you as beings that are beyond good and evil, beings that are not touched by sickness, old age or death. What's the everyday reality for a female sorcerer? And how does living in chronological time fit with living in magical time?

A: Your question, Miss Labarta, is too abstract and farfetched. Please forgive our frankness. We are not intellectual beings and are not in any way capable of taking part in exercises in which the intellect engages words which in reality don't have any meaning. None of us, under any agreement, are beyond good and evil, sickness, or old age.

What happened to us was that we were convinced, by the old nagual, that there are two categories of human beings. The great majority of us are beings which sorcerers call (in a pejorative manner, we would add) "the immortal ones." The other category is the category of beings that are going to die. The old nagual told us that, like immortal beings, we never take death as a point of reference, and we therefore allow ourselves the inconceivable luxury of living our entire lives involved in words, descriptions, polemics, agreements and disagreements.

The other category is the category of sorcerers, of beings that are going to die, who cannot, at any time and or under any circumstances, allow themselves the luxury of making intellectual assertions. If we are anything, we are beings without any importance. And if we have anything, it is our conviction that we are beings that are going to die and that someday, we will have to face infinity. Our preparation is the simplest thing in the world: we prepare ourselves twenty-four hours a day to face this encounter with infinity.

The old nagual succeeded in erasing in us our confounded idea of immortality and our indifference to life, and he convinced us that, as beings that are going to die, we can enlarge our options in life. Sorcerers maintain that human beings are magical beings, capable of stupendous actions and accomplishments once they rid themselves of ideologies that turn them into ordinary human beings.

Our accounts are, in reality, phenomenological descriptions of feats of perception that are available to all of us, especially to women, feats that are bypassed due to our habit of self-reflection. Sorcerers assert that the only thing that exists for us human beings, is Me, ME, and only ME. Under such conditions, the only thing possible is whatever concerns Me. And by definition whatever concerns Me, the personal 'I', can lead only to anger and resentment.



Q: The physical presence of a teacher may not be indispensable but, in any case, it is of great help. You received direct instruction from don Juan and his cohorts to guide you into the world of shamanism. Do you really think that that world is accessible to anyone, even when they don't have a personal teacher?

A: In a way, the insistence on having a teacher is an aberration. The idea of the old nagual was that he was helping us to break away from the dominion of the Me. With his jokes, and his terrifying sense of humor, he succeeded in making us laugh at ourselves. In this sense, we firmly believe that change is possible for anyone, a change similar to ours, for example, by practicing Tensegrity, without the need for a particular and personal teacher.

The old nagual wasn't interested in teaching his knowledge. He was never a teacher or a guru. He couldn't have cared less about being one. The old nagual was interested in perpetuating his lineage. If he guided us personally, it was to inculcate in us all the premises of sorcery that would allow us to continue his lineage. He expected that someday, it would be our turn to do the same.

Circumstances outside of our volition, or his, conspired to prevent the continuation of his lineage. In view of the fact that we cannot carry out the traditional function of continuing a sorceric lineage, we want to make this knowledge available. Since the Tensegrity practitioners are not called upon to perpetuate any shamanistic lineage, they have the possibility of accomplishing what we have accomplished, but via a different path.



Q: The possibility of an alternative form of death is one of the most striking points of don Juan Matus' teachings. According to what you have told us, he and his group attained that alternative death. What is your own interpretation of their disappearance, when they transformed themselves into awareness?

A: This may seem like a simple question, but it is very difficult to answer. We are practitioners of the teachings of the old nagual. It appears to us that, with your question, you are soliciting a psychological justification, an explanation equivalent to the explanations of modern science.

Unfortunately we cannot give you an explanation outside of what we are. The old nagual and his cohorts died an alternative death, which is possible for any one of us, if we have the necessary discipline.

All we can tell you is that the old nagual and his people lived life professionally, meaning that they were responsible for all their acts, even the most minute ones, because they were extremely aware of everything they did. Under such conditions, to die an alternative death is not such a farfetched possibility.



Q: Do you feel ready to face the last jump? What do you expect in that universe, which you regard as impersonal, cold and predatorial?

A: What we expect is an endless fight and the possibility of witnessing infinity, either for a second or for five billion years.



Q: Some readers of Carlos Castaneda's literary works have reproached him for the lack of a bigger spiritual presence in his books, for never having used words like "love." Is the world of a warrior really that cold? Don't you feel human emotions? Or do you perhaps give a different meaning to those emotions?

A: Yes, we give them a different meaning, and we don't use words like "love" or "spirituality" because the old nagual convinced us that they are empty concepts. Not love or spirituality themselves, but the use of these two words. His line of argument was as follows: if we really consider ourselves immortal beings who can afford the luxury of living amongst gigantic contradictions and endless selfishness; if all that counts for us is immediate gratification, how can we make love or spirituality something authentic? For the old nagual these concepts were manqué, lifeless, words that nobody is prepared to back up. He said that every time we are confronted with these contradictions, we solve them by saying that, as human beings, we are weak.

The old nagual told us that, as a general rule, we human beings were never taught to love. We were taught only to feel gratifying emotions, pertinent exclusively to the personal Me. Infinity is sublime and without pity, he said, and there's no room for fallacious concepts, no matter how pleasant they may seem to us.



Q: It seems that the key to expanding our capabilities for perception lies in the amount of energy we have at our disposal, and that the energetic condition of modern man is very meager. What would be the essential premise for storing energy? Is this possible for someone who has to take care of a family, go to work every day, and participate fully in the social world? And what about celibacy as a way of saving energy, one of the most controversial points in your books?

A: Celibacy is recommended, the old nagual told us, for the majority of us. Not for moral reasons, but because we don't have enough energy. He made us see how the majority of us have been conceived in the midst of marital boredom. As a pragmatic sorcerer, the old nagual maintained that conception is something of final importance. He said that if the mother wasn't able to have an orgasm at the moment of conception, the result was something he called "a bored conception." There is no energy under such conditions. The old nagual recommended celibacy for those who have been conceived under such circumstances.

Another thing he recommended as a means of storing energy was the dissolution of patterns of behavior that lead to chaos, such as the incessant preoccupation with romantic courtship; the presentation and defense of the self in everyday life; excessive routines and, above all, the tremendous insistence on the concerns of the self.

If these points are achieved, any one of us can have the necessary energy to use time, space and the social order more intelligently.



Q: The magical passes of Tensegrity, which you consider to be of great importance, are your most recent contribution to those interested in don Juan Matus' world. What can Tensegrity bring to those who practice it? Can this be equated with any other physical discipline, or does it have its own characteristics?

A: What Tensegrity brings to those who practice it is energy. The difference between Tensegrity and any other system of physical exercises is that the intent of Tensegrity is something dictated by the shamans of ancient Mexico. This intent is the liberation of the being that is going to die.



Copyright 1997 - Mas Alla

New Times Magazine - Jul 1997

The New Times Interview

"TENSEGRITY" AND MAGICAL PASSES

Carlos Castaneda interviewed for The New Times by Clair Baron

More than thirty years ago, as an anthropologist doing fieldwork among the Yaqui Indians in the state of Sonora, Mexico, Carlos Castaneda met a Mexican Indian shaman named don Juan Matus. Don Juan became his anthropological informant, and then his teacher. He introduced Carlos Castaneda into the cognitive world of the shamans who lived in Mexico in ancient times, and who were the founders of his lineage of shamans.

Carlos Castaneda has written about his apprenticeship with don Juan in nine best-selling books, beginning with The Teachings of don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge in 1968, and most recently, The Art of Dreaming in 1993. All nine books are still in print, and have been translated into more than seventeen languages.

Scheduled to appear in 1998 is a new book from HarperCollins by the author, entitled Magical Passes: The Practical Wisdom of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico. Here, Carlos Castaneda provides the reader with direct instruction on the magical passes, a series of bodily movements taught to him by don Juan Matus.

Tensegrity is the name given to the modern version of these movements, and the name of a series of three videos which have appeared over the last year and a half, drawing enthusiasts to filled-to-capacity workshops on Tensegrity in the U.S., Mexico, South America and Europe.


=========


Clair:
What is Tensegrity?


Carlos:
Among the infinitude of things that don Juan taught me were some bodily movements which were discovered and used by the shamans of ancient Mexico to foster states of profound physical and mental well-being. He said that those movements were called magical passes by the shamans who discovered them, because their effect on the practitioners was so astounding. Through practicing these movements, those shamans were able to achieve a superb physical and mental balance.

I have labored for ten years to make a synthesis of those movements. The result has been something I have called Tensegrity: the modern version of the magical passes. The word Tensegrity is a combination of tension and integrity, the two driving forces of the magical passes.


Clair:
You say that those movements were "discovered"...


Carlos: Don Juan explained to me that in specific states of heightened awareness called dreaming, those men and women were able to reach levels of optimum physical balance. They were also able to discover-- in dreaming-- the exact movements that allowed them to replicate, in their hours of vigil, those same levels of optimum physical balance.


Clair:
Why weren't these movements mentioned in your earlier books?


Carlos:
The magical passes became the most prized possession for the shamans of Mexican antiquity who discovered them. They surrounded them with rituals and mystery and taught them only to their initiates in the midst of tremendous secrecy. This was the manner in which don Juan Matus taught them to his students: Taisha Abelar, Florinda Donner-Grau, Carol Tiggs and myself. I never touched on the subject of the magical passes because they were taught to me in secrecy and to aid me in my personal need; that is to say that the passes that I learned were designed for me alone, to fit my physical constitution.

Each of his other students has a set of magical passes taught exclusively to them, exclusively geared to each of their energetic configurations-- to their personalities. The four of us, being the last link of his lineage, came to the unanimous conclusion that any further secrecy about the magical passes was counter to the interest that we had in making don Juan's world available to our fellow men and women.

We decided, therefore, after a lifetime of silence, to join forces to deal with the magical passes and to rescue them from their obscure state. After years of effort, we succeeded in merging our four highly individualistic lines of magical passes into modified units of movements applicable to any physical constitution, and all of us together arrived at composites that fulfilled our innermost expectations.

We call these composites Tensegrity.


Clair:
What is the difference between the magical passes of Tensegrity and other forms of exercise like aerobics or calisthenics?


Carlos:
The difference between the magical passes and aerobics or calisthenics is that the latter are designed to exercise the surface muscles of the body, while the magical passes are the interplay of relaxation and tension at a deep bodily level. The magical passes go beyond the musculature to the glandular system: the base of energy in the body.

Don Juan said that the movements were viewed as magical passes from the first moment that they were formulated. He described the "magic" of the movements as a subtle change that the practitioners experience on executing them; an ephemeral quality that the movement brings to their physical and mental states, a kind of shine, a light in the eyes.

He spoke of this subtle change as a "touch of the spirit"; as if practitioners, through the movements, reestablish an unused link with the life force that sustains them. He further explained that the movements were called magical passes because by means of practicing them, shamans were transported, in terms of perception, to other states of being in which they could sense the world in an indescribable manner.


Clair:
What would you say to those who have never done the movements? When can one expect "results"?


Carlos:
The positive results are almost immediate, if one practices meticulously and daily-- increased energy generates calmness, efficiency and purpose. We all want instant enlightenment, instant expertise; that's the flaw.

Don Juan used to say the collective malady of our day is our total lack of purpose. He repeated to us endlessly that without sufficient energy there is no way of conceiving any kind of genuine purpose in our lives. The magical passes, by helping us store energy, help us to grasp the idea of purposefulness in our thoughts and actions.

---

Next year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of The Teachings of don Juan; Simon and Schuster will publish a special thirtieth-year edition of the book, complete with a new preface from the author.

Copyright July 1997 The New Times Magazine

The Sun Magazine - Sep 1997

Of Sorcery and Dreams: An Encounter With Carlos Castaneda

By Michael Brenan

Published in "The Sun", September 1997

Dreaming was once an extraordinary affair for me. When I was thirteen, I had frequent conscious dreams and out-of-body experiences. Typically, just prior to sleep, when my body was completely relaxed, I would shift without warning into a remarkable state of alertness. My physical body would feel numb and heavy, yet I would be entirely awake. Somehow I knew that it was then possible for me to leave my body.

Nearly every night over the next three years, I would drift toward sleep, only to wake up and venture into dream worlds of breathtaking clarity and beauty. I was fully conscious, and tremendously curious about everything I encountered. I experimented endlessly with my senses, and with my ability to manipulate these strange environments. But I could never determine whether the worlds I entered were objectively real, or merely projections.

At age sixteen, I took part in a pioneering research study headed by Stephen LaBerge. Using laboratory equipment and a series of prearranged signals, LaBerge demonstrated that humans had the ability to be conscious within a physical state of sleep. He called the phenomenon "lucid dreaming."

Yet even this scientific validation did not entirely dispel my uncertainty, because it didn't explain, for example, how I could sometimes be simultaneously aware within both my physical body and this "other" body. In the end, I decided my questions were unanswerable for the moment, and the answers didn't matter much anyway. The sense of exhilaration, freedom, and joy I encountered in those inner worlds was the true value of the experience.

Before long, that same heightened state of awareness began to carry over into my ordinary day-to-day existence, imbuing it with richness and magic. Life became a waking dream. As this sensibility grew, it came into conflict with everything I was being taught.

The priests who schooled me seemed to believe that the age of miracles had ended two thousand years before. Science suggested that everything could be reduced to base mechanics. And contemporary society counseled a safe and bloodless course of birth, school, work, and death, interspersed with vapid consumerism.

By the time I was seventeen, I had begun to feel that there was something wrong with me. I was beset by the usual adolescent insecurities, but on top of that, my perception of the world did not match up with that of my peers. My fears overwhelmed the spirit of beauty that I longed to articulate.

To compensate for my perceived cowardice, I embarked on a roguish course, taking up with a bad crowd and acting out the turmoil inside me. In so doing I betrayed everything that was sacred to me, and my anguish was enormous. Over the next fifteen years, I suffered extended bouts of addiction, homelessness, and incarceration in jails and asylums. My dreams had deserted me, only to be replaced by a waking nightmare. I was committing slow-motion suicide, a process that reached its conclusion seven years ago, when I shared bloody needles with two fellow addicts in a Lower East Side tenement in New York City.

Since then, my junkie companions on that occasion have both died of AIDS.

Now, sitting on the cusp of death myself, I find an empty space within me.

Oddly, this emptiness carries with it a certain abandon and a delicious sense of anticipation-- I have nothing to lose. My imminent mortality seems to offer a slim chance of recouping what I've lost: my experience of the world as a waking dream of great beauty and mystery.

It is in this state of mind that I receive an invitation to attend an Oakland workshop given by associates of Carlos Castaneda, and to write about it as a journalist. The purpose of the workshop is to teach a magical discipline Castaneda purportedly learned from the Yaqui seer don Juan Matus. According to Castaneda, the seers of ancient Mexico experienced states of enhanced awareness while dreaming. They learned to recreate these states white awake using a collection of precise movements called "sorcery passes."

Shrouded in secrecy, this discipline was passed down through twenty-seven generations of sorcerers, of which don Juan Matus was the last. Now Castaneda and a few of his cohorts claim to be the contemporary stewards of this ancient sorcerers' art, which Castaneda has named "tensegrity," after an architectural term for opposing forces in balance.

Another perspective, offered by Castaneda's critics, is that he is the inventor of this discipline, and of the myth of don Juan Matus. According to them, Castaneda's myth has its origins not in the preconquest world of the Toltecs, but in the summer of 1961, when the then thirty-seven-year-old UCLA anthropology student ventured into the Sonoran desert in search of his Ph.D. There, beneath the broiling Mexican sun, Castaneda presumably cooked up his engaging tales of sorcery.

Despite high praise for Castaneda from respectable academic, scientific, and literary quarters, skeptics remain troubled by chronological inconsistencies in his books, by his refusal to bring forth don Juan for public scrutiny, and by the author's own inaccessibility. In the end, don Juan Matus seems destined to haunt us like a phantom glimpsed at the edge of our vision, quickening our hearts with the possibility that sorcery still exists.

Six years ago, a new dimension to the controversy arose when two women-- Florinda Donner-Grau and Taisha Abelar-- wrote elegant, dreamlike books describing their own encounters with don Juan. Donner-Grau and Abelar revealed themselves to be colleagues of Castaneda.

A third colleague, Carol Tiggs, was mentioned in Castaneda's latest book, The Art of Dreaming, in which he described how, while "dreaming together" with him in a Mexican hotel room, Tiggs disappeared from this world, borne on the wings of "intent." The "gales of infinity" blew her back to this dimension ten years later, when Castaneda discovered her wandering in a daze in Santa Monica's Phoenix Bookstore. Her improbable return had "ripped a hole in the fabric of the universe."

Castaneda, Donner-Grau, and Abelar were thoroughly disconcerted by the implications of this event. In the end, Tiggs persuaded her fellow travelers to adopt a radical new approach to their work: for the first time, they would present the teachings of don Juan openly, offering seekers the opportunity to explore in detail the legendary seer's fantastic practices.

They arrived at this unprecedented decision, they say, because they are the last of their lineage and will soon "ignite the fire from within and complete the somersault into the inconceivable." More, they are opening up their discipline out of gratitude to their teachers and benefactors, so that their ancient knowledge may live on.

Like many readers, I have been greatly moved and inspired by Castaneda's books- especially (for obvious reasons) his writings about the magical possibilities of dreams. At the same time, I have maintained a journalist's skepticism about the whole affair.

But now the creatures molded by the myth of don Juan Matus have emerged from the fog of their inaccessibility and rustle through my awareness like windblown leaves. I go to hear their message bearing questions, doubts, anticipation, and a longing for magic to refute the soulless dreams of contemporary society.

The six female instructors, called "energy trackers," are standing in pairs atop three raised platforms in the Oakland Convention Center. They are dressed martial arts style, in loose-fitting pants and shirts, their hair cut short, all of them exuding an attractive strength and athleticism. They range in age from eleven to thirty-six, and come from Europe and America. Their manner is simultaneously friendly and no-nonsense. They are here to teach, and the three-hundred odd individuals surrounding them are here to learn.

Over the next two days the energy trackers demonstrate an elaborate series of movements-- the "sorcery passes" Castaneda has written about. The movements have evocative names: Cracking a Nugget of Energy, Stepping over a Root of Energy, Shaking Off the Mud of Energy. I have years of hatha yoga practice, and can confirm some parallels between the two disciplines. Many movements also have a fierce, martial mood reminiscent of aikido and karate.

But there are some unusual elements to the tensegrity system that I cannot place in any familiar context.

Among participants, there is an enormous mix of occupations-- physicists, teachers, engineers, artists, laborers, biologists-- and nationalities: Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, American, French. I speak to a variety of people, searching for testimony to the movements' effectiveness, and what I hear slowly begins to shake my doubts.

One man, who in his youth practiced karate for six years, says he finds the tensegrity movements uniquely powerful. "The more I'm exposed to tensegrity," he tells me, "the more I think that nobody could just make these movements up. There are too many of them, they're too sophisticated and systematic, and the results are just too powerful."

Mario, a Tarahumara Indian raised in northern Mexico who now lives in Los Angeles, says he and a group of Mexican and Indian friends have long gathered informally to practice strategies gleaned from Castaneda's books. Now, due to this more formal presentation of the teachings, they have increased their efforts. When Mario describes some of his dreaming adventures, I am struck by their evident similarity to the conscious dreams of my childhood.

"Recently, I found myself awake within a dream," Mario says. "I was beneath a tree on a hilltop; I am not sure where. My brother Joss, who lives in Oaxaca, was with me. He asked me what I had learned in the workshop I had attended. I told him, and we exchanged more information about our personal lives. I was fully conscious during the dream, but when I awoke I had forgotten something: Joss had told me something at the very end of the dream, and I could not recollect it.

"A week later, he called me from Mexico. Before I could speak he began describing the dream to me: the same hill, the same tree, the same conversation. I felt a chill, and a sense of awe. Then he asked if I remembered what he had told me at the end of our dream, Before he could say anything more, my ears began ringing loudly, and the forgotten scene replayed itself in a flash. He had thanked me for bringing him to this path."

Over the course of the weekend we hear from all three of Castaneda's fellow teachers. Speaking first, Florinda Donner-Grau looks out over the audience and smiles like a Cheshire cat. Her brush-cut blond hair and elegant cheekbones look strongly Teutonic, and she speaks with precise diction, as if each word were a delectable morsel:

"Don Juan Matus presented four faces to his four disciples. To Carlos Castaneda he was a fierce and fearsome presence of terrible import and beauty. To Taisha Abelar he was an enigmatic yet intensely familiar figure. For myself he was an abrupt intrusion into my world, at once unsettling and soothing. For Carol Tiggs he was a gentle, fatherly figure capable of tremendous affection."

She goes on to tell us that, in the world of sorcerers, women are gifted creatures by virtue of their affinity with the feminine nature of the universe. Using their womb, they are able to access universal energy and accomplish stupendous feats of transformation. But at the same time, women must contend with the immensely stupefying effects of their socialization. In short, they are trained from birth to be bimbos, and only by unyielding effort can they escape that fate.

"Don Juan asked me," Donner-Grau says, "in a very matter-of-fact tone, whether I wanted to be a stupid cunt for the rest of my life... You must understand, I come from a very proper Spanish-German family. No one especially not a man-- had ever used that word in my presence. I was horrified and insulted."

Given the delight with which she recounts the episode, I can only conclude that at some point she got over her mortification.

For me, the defining moment of her talk comes when she speaks of death:

"Death is your truest friend, and your most reliable advisor. If you have doubts about the course of your life, you have only to consult your death for the proper direction. Death will never lie to you.

Taisha Abelar is elegant yet energetic. I cannot place her accent, but her overall speech and appearance bring to mind a sixtyish Katharine Hepburn. I am intrigued by the differences between her dream experiences and mine.

"I was on the roof of a building," Abelar says, "in the middle of a strange city. Suddenly, from above I heard a terrible racket, and I saw a black shape descending toward me out of the sky. I moved immediately, and as I did saw that the black shape was actually a helicopter, and the horrible noise was the sound of its blades slicing the air. If I had stayed another second on that roof, I would have been mincemeat."

At first I am puzzled by this, because in my conscious dreams I could manipulate the environment in extraordinary ways. I wonder why Abelar did not will the helicopter away, or make it burst into flames. Then it dawns on me: she's talking about transporting her physical body into those worlds.

For the next hour, she recounts wild tales that make me think her either insane or an accomplished liar. But everything in her manner suggests sobriety and sincerity, and I am forced to recognize a third, nearly inconceivable alternative: that she is faithfully reporting her experiences.

For her part, Carol Tiggs describes dreaming adventures every bit as bizarre and otherworldly as Abelar's, but most of her tales involve dreaming together with Carlos Castaneda. Like Castaneda, Tiggs identifies herself as a nagual, a Toltec term meaning "teacher" or "leader." The affinity that links a nagual woman and a nagual man and allows them to dream together is described in several of Castaneda's books. It is neither a romantic nor a sexual bond, but something much more profound.

Toward the end of her talk, Tiggs answers a question from the audience about Castaneda's health (word is that he's ill), and I sense the fierce affection between them. She grows still. Drawing a deep breath and releasing it slowly, she smiles as if through tears and says, "Our brother Carlos could not join us because he is battling an infection. We do not know the nature of his illness. A sorcerer cannot avail himself of traditional medicine; he must rely on the spirit, and on his own resources.

"Before a sorcerer reaches the threshold where his body no longer functions, he will choose, if he can, to kindle the awareness of his entire being, in order to leave this world intact and whole. And our brother Carlos has made a promise to include us in that final act. But we do not know if this is the time of his leaving."

She pauses, and when she speaks again, her voice is hushed with wonder. "We are here together, in a bubble outside of time, dreaming the dream of the ancient Toltecs. By your efforts, you have helped us to expand and accelerate into the unknown. We thank you, " she concludes softly, spreading her arms to the audience, "and we embrace you in the dream."

As I drive back to Portland Sunday night, I look for changes in myself and find instead that the discontent and emptiness that have plagued me for half my life have intensified tenfold. I remain outside the great mysteries, endlessly writing, endlessly doubting.

On top of this, my body erupts: my left testicle swells to twice its normal size, and chickenpox afflicts me from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet. I go to a traditional Chinese doctor whose wisdom is derived from a long historical lineage. He takes my pulses and examines my tongue, then sits back and nods his head repeatedly, like a thirsty crane dipping for water, all the while murmuring in Chinese. He prepares a complex concoction of herbs, which I consume, summoning what gratitude I can for the plants that have given their lives for mine.

A few weeks pass, and I regain my equilibrium, but my doubts about Carlos Castaneda, which have never really left me, become more insistent. I vacillate between my memories of the practical results reported by the tensegrity practitioners, and knowledge of our ability to interpret myths in the fashion most befitting our needs.

Everything comes down to the authenticity of don Juan and his Toltec predecessors. Was don Juan Matus a myth invented by Carlos Castaneda, or was he a flesh-and-blood sorcerer of mythic proportion? I am aware that only one person can answer that question for me.

Then the seemingly impossible happens: my silent wish is granted, and I receive an unexpected invitation to meet with and interview Carlos Castaneda. Given my shortcomings-- I have led a life of indulgence, have written no grand epics, barely graduated high school, and know nothing of science or anthropology-- I should be enormously intimidated.

But instead, from the moment the invitation is extended, I experience a profound and soothing sense of surety. If Castaneda is merely an inventive rogue, then I will have lost nothing but my illusions. But if he is a bona fide heir to the legacy of Toltec seers, then I will have gained a gift of incalculable value-- the possibility of restoring magic to the remainder of my life.

A lovely quietude comes over me in the wake of this realization, bringing with it a tremulous sense of anticipation and- most remarkable for me-- an overwhelming ease and confidence. Everything has come full circle. There seems nothing left to do but greet the unknown.

I look up from the four single-spaced pages of questions I have prepared and glimpse a party of three weaving their way toward me through the Santa Monica restaurant. The woman who arranged the interview for me is in front. She introduces me to one of the energy trackers from the workshop, and then to the little man behind her-- Carlos Castaneda. The ease of the last few days does not abandon me, and I greet Castaneda with a relaxed mixture of respect, affection, and professional skepticism.

He is gracious and unpretentious, and rolls up the sleeves of his rumpled white shirt with Old World courtliness as we settle into our seats. I fuss with my notes and study him with covert glances. From my research I know that he is Peruvian-born and at least seventy-one years old. He appears, however, to be in his early sixties. He is perhaps five-foot-two, with skin the color of burnished copper, a thatch of salt-and-pepper hair, and an elfin frame. His face is handsome and weathered, a symphony of angles and furrows that suggest classic Spanish features. His eyes are sharp and lucid, his expression by turns thoughtful, friendly, and playful.

He offers me some bottled water, and this small gesture seems to embody generosity. I feel as if I am among friends.

For the next three hours I ask sporadic questions from my lengthy list, but mostly I am absorbed in listening and taking notes.

"This discipline is an internal affair," Castaneda says at one point. "There are techniques, but they must be fortified by a decision, and by a feeling from within. You need to arrive at that decision and feeling yourself. For me, it is a matter of daily renewal."

Talk of discipline prompts me to ask about something he once said: that quitting smoking could be a revolutionary act.

"You don't smoke, do you?" he inquires, frankly curious.

"In honor of this occasion," I reply, "I have left my smokes at home."

He seems unperturbed by my admission, and by the banality of my problems.

"I started smoking when I was eight," he says. "I wanted to be like these older Argentinian guys. You should have seen them; they were the coolest guys in the world." With an absurdly suave pantomime he mimics the coolest guys in the world, squinting his left eye and tilting his head to blow an invisible cloud of smoke into the air. "One day, don Juan told me to stop smoking. I replied that I liked smoking and would stop when I was ready.

"Then I tried to quit and couldn't; not the first time, or the second time. Even all these years later, I still find myself patting my breast pocket for the cigarettes that are no longer there. These routines are difficult, but not impossible, to break," he concludes. "You merely have to jump the---"

His last word is lost to the lilt of his accent. I let it pass and listen as he describes a woman friend of his who was dying in a hospital. (I have said nothing of my own illness at this point, nor does my appearance give any clue.) "I loved this woman dearly," he says. "She was a tremendous friend. I asked don Juan what I could do for her.

"He described a strategy to me, and I passed it on to her. I told her she must push her illness away with her hand, with her intent, repeatedly, for as long as it took. She replied that she was too weak to lift her arm. 'Then use your foot!' I cried. 'Use your heart; use your mind! Intend it out of you!' But she no longer had the energy to do so."

Without prompting on my part, he begins talking about his recent illness, which he describes as "a vicious viral infection." I am spooked by the parallel to my own life, and momentarily stop taking notes in order to observe him. He matter-of-factly describes a bout with a deadly infection, and how his discipline compelled him to refuse the conventional treatments offered by a doctor.

The upshot-- that his apparently life-threatening condition resolved itself-- is obvious from the fact that he now sits across from me, a bundle of energy.

"I have been reading a book by the ex-wife of Carl Sagan," he continues. "She has this theory about the viral nature of the body. She theorizes that, physically, we are simply sacks of viruses. We live in a predatory universe, and nothing is more predatory than viruses.

"We are creatures who will die," he adds, almost as a non sequitur, and it is too much for me. I have come here under the guise of a journalist, but in fact I've known all along that I am seeking a healing of the heart before I leave this earth. My time seems short, and before I can stop myself, I rudely interrupt him.

"I have a personal question," I begin.

"Please, please," he says kindly, beckoning with his hands. "Ask anything you like."

"Well," I say, "I hate melodrama. So I will just say that I have a health condition. There is a lot of leeway with it, but the conventional wisdom is that..." I look away, loath to appear manipulative or needy.

"Perhaps a few more seasons," I murmur. "A few more blows to my system, and..."

I flick my wrist as if sweeping dust from the table: poof, swish, gone.

What I have done seems terribly unprofessional to me; yet, I think childishly, he started it, with his books, with his straightforward assertions that in this day and age we are still capable of experiencing the world as magic.

I feel a sense of displaced anger and longing, as well as the anguish that I have carried since I first turned my back on all that was sacred to me.

Holding my gaze intently yet dispassionately, Castaneda launches into another lengthy tale, this one about an alcoholic friend of his. He regards me from beneath slightly lowered lids, as if squinting into the sun. His eyes are keen and bright, like slivers of obsidian, yet their effect is neither hypnotic nor overpowering. Rather, they seem to hold a kind of open challenge.

"So," he concludes, like a professor summarizing his wisdom, "I would move. I would jump the---."

Again, I lose his last word, and my anxiety must be apparent, because he repeats slowly, "I would jump the groove."

He pauses to lift an invisible needle from a turntable, his eyes never leaving mine.

"I would change the groove," he says. "I would move."

My adolescent journals are full of this same metaphor. At that time, the one-track groove that the stylus followed on a record symbolized for me the habitual nature of my mind. Changing the groove meant changing those habits that robbed me of my ability to experience ordinary life as full of beauty and wonder.

The three routines I most sought to change were my habit of picking my nose, my adolescent temper. and-- hardest of all my endless capacity for rehashing old events in my mind instead of simply letting go.

Now, at age thirty-six, I find it is only my temper that has mellowed. I still pick my nose, and I am still capable of endlessly justifying, defending, and excusing my past actions. To these insipid routines I have added, over the past seven years, the habitual momentum of dying.

I have known from the moment I shared that needle that a part of me was conspiring in my own death. In the interim, that same part has come to view AIDS as a fitting punishment for my sins, or perhaps as the articulation of my spiritual barrenness.

Yet, throughout it all, something resilient within me has refused to die. I prefer to call that inviolate something "spirit," and it is that same spirit that is aroused in me now as I listen to Castaneda's prescription for change. Death is the one inexorable fact in our transitory lives. Perhaps I will die a doddering old fool; perhaps I will die before the sun sets tonight. But I will die- that much is certain.

In the meantime, what remains within my control is the groove of my life, the track upon which I choose to walk between the exclamation of my coming and the ellipsis of my going. At its purest, this track is trackless, like a path covered by freshly fallen snow.

And trodding such virgin paths is the most enduring image of my adolescent dreams. By speaking directly to that memory, Castaneda has reawakened it within my heart. Given the perilously low ebb I have reached in life, I can only describe this feat as a genuine act of sorcery.

Ah, but what of don Juan Matus, the mythic Yaqui seer whose bones I have come to exhume? Does he sit before me now, a trickster-teacher weaving deceptive tales of wisdom, folly, and truth? I do not know, and cannot say.

Three hours have passed, and Castaneda is gently signaling the end of our meeting by unrolling the sleeves of his weathered cotton shirt. There is still time for that final and most compelling journalistic question, but something within me lets it pass.

And then, unexpectedly, the silence is broken once more by Castaneda's lovely accent. His gaze is fixed in the distance, and he speaks softly, his words like those of a man confronting an insoluble mystery. Again, I study him for evidence of deception and come away empty-handed.

"If I could ask don Juan one final question," he begins slowly, "I would ask, How did he move me so? How did he touch my spirit so that every beat of my heart is filled with the feeling of this path?"

"Every beat of my heart," he repeats quietly, and for a brief moment his words seem to hang in the air like fog. Then his whispered phrase is touched by time, and disappears into the mystery that surrounds us.



Copyright September 1997 The Sun

Uno Mismo - Feb 1997

Navigating Into the Unknown

An Interview with Carlos Castaneda for the magazine Uno Mismo, Chile and Argentina, February, 1997 by Daniel Trujillo Rivas



Question:
Mr. Castaneda, for years you've remained in absolute anonymity. What drove you to change this condition and talk publicly about the teachings that you and your three companions received from the nagual Juan Matus?


Answer:
What compels us to disseminate don Juan Matus's ideas is a need to clarify what he taught us. For us, this is a task that can no longer be postponed. His other three students and I have reached the unanimous conclusion that the world to which Don Juan Matus introduced us is within the perceptual possibilities of all human beings.

We've discussed among us what would be the appropriate road to take. To remain anonymous the way don Juan proposed to us? This option was not acceptable. The other road available was to disseminate don Juan's ideas: an infinitely more dangerous and exhausting choice, but the only one that, we believe, has the dignity don Juan imbued all his teachings with.


Q:
Considering what you have said about the unpredictability of a warrior's actions, which we have corroborated for three decades, can we expect this public phase you're going through to last for a while? Until when?


A:
There is no way for us to establish a temporal criteria. We live according to the premises proposed by don Juan and we never deviate from them. Don Juan Matus gave us the formidable example of a man who lived according to what he said. And I say it is a formidable example because it is the most difficult thing to emulate; to be monolithic and at the same time have the flexibility to face anything.

This was the way don Juan lived his life. Within these premises, the only thing one can be is an impeccable mediator. One is not the player in this cosmic match of chess, one is simply a pawn on the chessboard. What decides everything is a conscious impersonal energy that sorcerers call intent or the Spirit.


Q:
As far as I've been able to corroborate, orthodox anthropology, as well as the alleged defenders of the pre-Colombian cultural heritage of America, undermine the credibility of your work. The belief that your work is merely the product of your literary talent, which, by the way, is exceptional, continues to exist today. There are also other sectors that accuse you of having a double standard because, supposedly, your lifestyle and your activities contradict what the majority expect from a shaman. How can you clear up these suspicions?


A:
The cognitive system of the Western man forces us to rely on preconceived ideas. We base our judgments on something that is always "a priori," for example the idea of what is "orthodox." What is orthodox anthropology? The one taught at university lecture halls? What is a shaman's behavior? To wear feathers on one's head and dance to the spirits?

For thirty years, people have accused Carlos Castaneda of creating a literary character simply because what I report to them does not concur with the anthropological "a priori," the ideas established in the lecture halls or in the anthropological field work.

However, what don Juan presented to me can only apply to a situation that calls for total action and, under such circumstances, very little or almost nothing of the preconceived occurs. I have never been able to draw conclusions about shamanism because in order to do this one needs to be an active member in the shamans' world.

For a social scientist, let's say for example a sociologist, it is very easy to arrive at sociological conclusions over any subject related to the Occidental world, because the sociologist is an active member of the Occidental world. But how can an anthropologist, who spends at the most two years studying other cultures, arrive at reliable conclusions about them? One needs a lifetime to be able to acquire membership in a cultural world. I've been working for more than thirty years in the cognitive world of the shamans of ancient Mexico and, sincerely, I don't believe I have acquired the membership that would allow me to draw conclusions or to even propose them.

I have discussed this with people from different disciplines and they always seem to understand and agree with the premises I'm presenting. But then they turn around and they forget everything they agreed upon and continue to sustain "orthodox" academic principles, without caring about the possibility of an absurd error in their conclusions. Our cognitive system seems to be impenetrable.


Q:
What's the aim of you not allowing yourself to be photographed, having your voice recorded or making your biographical data known? Could this affect what you've achieved in your spiritual work, and if so how? Don't you think it would be useful for some sincere seekers of truth to know who you really are, as a way of corroborating that it is really possible to follow the path you proclaim?


A:
With reference to photographs and personal data, the other three disciples of don Juan and myself follow his instructions. For a shaman like don Juan, the main idea behind refraining from giving personal data is very simple. It is imperative to leave aside what he called "personal history". To get away from the "me" is something extremely annoying and difficult. What shamans like don Juan seek is a state of fluidity where the personal "me" does not count.

He believed that an absence of photographs and biographical data affects whomever enters into this field of action in a positive, though subliminal way. We are endlessly accustomed to using photographs, recordings and biographical data, all of which spring from the idea of personal importance.

Don Juan said it was better not to know anything about a shaman; in this way, instead of encountering a person, one encounters an idea that can be sustained; the opposite of what happens in the everyday world where we are faced only with people who have numerous psychological problems but no ideas, all of these people filled to the brim with "me, me, me."


Q:
How should your followers interpret the publicity and the commercial infrastructure a side of your literary work surrounding the knowledge you and your companions disseminate? What's your real relationship with Cleargreen Incorporated and the other companies (Laugan Productions, Toltec Artists)? I'm talking about a commercial link.


A:
At this point in my work I needed someone able to represent me regarding the dissemination of don Juan Matus's ideas. Cleargreen is a corporation that has great affinity with our work, as are Laugan Productions and Toltec Artists. The idea of disseminating don Juan's teachings in the modern world implies the use of commercial and artistic media that are not within my individual reach. As corporations having an affinity with don Juan's ideas, Cleargreen Incorporated, Laugan Productions and Toltec Artists are capable of providing the means to disseminate what I want to disseminate.

There is always a tendency for impersonal corporations to dominate and transform everything that is presented to them and to adapt it to their own ideology. If it weren't for Cleargreen's, Laugan Productions' and Toltec Artists' sincere interest, everything don Juan said would have been transformed into something else by now.


Q:
There are a great number of people who, in one way or another, "cling" to you in order to acquire public notoriety. What's your opinion on the actions of Victor Sanchez, who has interpreted and reorganized your teachings in order to elaborate a personal theory? And of Ken Eagle Feather's assertions that he has been chosen by don Juan to be his disciple, and that don Juan came back just for him?


A:
Indeed there are a number of people who call themselves my students or don Juan's students, people I've never met and whom, I can guarantee, don Juan never met. Don Juan Matus was exclusively interested in the perpetuation of his lineage of shamans. He had four disciples who remain to this day. He had others who left with him. Don Juan was not interested in teaching his knowledge; he taught it to his disciples in order to continue his lineage.

Due to the fact that they cannot continue don Juan's lineage, his four disciples have been forced to disseminate his ideas. The concept of a teacher who teaches his knowledge is part of our cognitive system but it isn't part of the cognitive system of the shamans of ancient Mexico. To teach was absurd for them. To transmit his knowledge to those who were going to perpetuate their lineage was a different matter. The fact that there are a number of individuals who insist in using my name or don Juan's name is simply an easy maneuver to benefit themselves without much effort.


Q:
Let's consider the meaning of the word "spirituality" to be a state of consciousness in which human beings are fully capable of controlling the potentials of the species, something achieved by transcending the simple animal condition through a hard psychic, moral and intellectual training. Do you agree with this assertion? How is don Juan's world integrated into this context?


A:
For don Juan Matus, a pragmatic and extremely sober shaman, "spirituality" was an empty ideality, an assertion without basis that we believe to be very beautiful because it is encrusted with literary concepts and poetic expressions, but which never goes beyond that.

Shamans like don Juan are essentially practical. For them there only exists a predatory universe in which intelligence or awareness is the product of life and death challenges. He considered himself a navigator of infinity and said that in order to navigate into the unknown like a shaman does, one needs unlimited pragmatism, boundless sobriety and guts of steel. In view of all this, don Juan believed that "spirituality" is simply a description of something impossible to achieve within the patterns of the world of everyday life, and it is not a real way of acting.


Q:
You have pointed out that your literary activity, as well as Taisha Abelar's and Florinda Donner-Grau's, is the result of don Juan's instructions. What is the objective of this?


A:
The objective of writing those books was given by don Juan. He asserted that even if one is not a writer one still can write, but writing is transformed from a literary action into a shamanistic action. What decides the subject and the development of a book is not the mind of the writer but rather a force that the shamans consider the basis of the universe, and which they call intent.

It is intent which decides a shaman's production, whether it be literary or of any other kind. According to don Juan, a practitioner of shamanism has the duty and the obligation of saturating himself with all the information available. The work of shamans is to inform themselves thoroughly about everything that could possibly be related to their topic of interest. The shamanistic act consists of abandoning all interest in directing the course the information takes.

Don Juan used to say, "The one who arranges the ideas that spring from such a well of information is not the shaman, it is intent. The shaman is simply an impeccable conduit." For don Juan writing was a shamanistic challenge, not a literary task.


Q:
If you allow me to assert the following, your literary work presents concepts that are closely related with Oriental philosophical teachings, but it contradicts what is commonly known about the Mexican indigenous culture. What are the similarities and the differences between one and the other?


A:
I don't have the slightest idea. I'm not learned in either one of them. My work is a phenomenological report of the cognitive world to which don Juan Matus introduced me. From the point of view of phenomenology as a philosophical method, it is impossible to make assertions that are related to the phenomenon under scrutiny. Don Juan Matus' world is so vast, so mysterious and contradictory, that it isn't suitable for an exercise in linear exposition; the most one can do is describe it, and that alone is a supreme effort.


Q:
Assuming that don Juan's teachings have become part of occult literature, what's your opinion about other teachings in this category, for example Masonic philosophy, Rosicrucianism, Hermeticism and disciplines such as the Cabala, the Tarot and Astrology when we compare them to nagualism? Have you ever had any contact with or maintain any contact with any of these or with their devotees?


A:
Once again, I don't have the slightest idea of what the premises are, or the points of view and subjects of such disciplines. Don Juan presented us with the problem of navigating into the unknown, and this takes all of our available effort.


Q:
Do some of the concepts of your work, such as the assemblage point, the energetic filaments that make up the universe, the world of the inorganic beings, intent, stalking and dreaming, have an equivalent in Western knowledge? For example, there are some people who consider that man seen as a luminous egg is an expression of the aura


A:
As far as I know, nothing of what don Juan taught us seems to have a counterpart in Western knowledge. Once, when don Juan was still here, I spent a whole year in search of gurus, teachers and wise men to give me an inkling of what they were doing. I wanted to know if there was something in the world of that time similar to what don Juan said and did. My resources were very limited and they only took me to meet the established masters who had millions of followers and, unfortunately, I couldn't find any similarity.


Q:
Concentrating specifically on your literary work, your readers find different Carlos Castanedas. We first find a somewhat incompetent Western scholar, permanently baffled at the power of old Indians like don Juan and don Genaro (mainly in The Teachings Of Don Juan, A Separate Reality, A Journey To Ixtlan, Tales Of Power, and The Second Ring Of Power.) Later we find an apprentice versed in shamanism (in The Eagle's Gift, The Fire from Within, The Power of Silence and, particularly, The Art Of Dreaming.)

If you agree with this assessment, when and how did you cease to be one to become the other?


A:
I don't consider myself a shaman, or a teacher, or an advanced student of shamanism; nor do I consider myself an anthropologist or a social scientist of the Western world. My presentations have all been descriptions of a phenomenon which is impossible to discern under the conditions of the linear knowledge of the Western world.

I could never explain what don Juan was teaching me in terms of cause and effect. There was no way to foretell what he was going to say or what was going to happen. Under such circumstances, the passage from one state to another is subjective and not something elaborated, or premeditated, or a product of wisdom.


Q:
One can find episodes in your literary work that are truly incredible for the Western mind. How could someone who's not an initiate verify that all those "separate realities" are real, as you claim?


A:
It can be verified very easily by lending one's whole body instead of only one's intellect. One cannot enter don Juan's world intellectually, like a dilettante seeking fast and fleeting knowledge. Nor, in don Juan's world, can anything be verified absolutely.

The only thing we can do is arrive at a state of increased awareness that allows us to perceive the world around us in a more inclusive manner. In other words, the goal of don Juan's shamanism is to break the parameters of historical and daily perception and to perceive the unknown. That's why he called himself a navigator of infinity.

He asserted that infinity lies beyond the parameters of daily perception. To break these parameters was the aim of his life. Because he was an extraordinary shaman, he instilled that same desire in all four of us. He forced us to transcend the intellect and to embody the concept of breaking the boundaries of historical perception.


Q:
You assert that the basic characteristic of human beings is to be "perceivers of energy." You refer to the movement of the assemblage point as something imperative to perceiving energy directly. How can this be useful to a man of the 21st century? According to the concept previously defined, how can the attainment of this goal help one's spiritual improvement?


A:
Shamans like don Juan assert that all human beings have the capacity to see energy directly as it flows in the universe. They believe that the assemblage point, as they call it, is a point that exists in man's total sphere of energy. In other words, when a shaman perceives a man as energy that flows in the universe, he sees a luminous ball.

In that luminous ball, the shaman can see a point of greater brilliance located at the height of the shoulder blades, approximately an arm's length behind them. Shamans maintain that perception is assembled at this point; that the energy that flows in the universe is transformed here into sensory data, and that the sensory data is later interpreted, giving as a result the world of everyday life.

Shamans assert that we are taught to interpret, and therefore we are taught to perceive.

The pragmatic value of perceiving energy directly as it flows in the universe for a man of the 21st century or a man of the 1st century is the same. It allows him to enlarge the limits of his perception and to use this enhancement within his realm. Don Juan said that to see directly the wonder of the order and the chaos of the universe would be extraordinary.


Q:
You have recently presented a physical discipline called Tensegrity. Can you explain what is it exactly? What is its goal? What spiritual benefit can a person who practices it individually get?


A:
According to what don Juan Matus taught us, the shamans who lived in ancient Mexico discovered a series of movements that when executed by the body brought about such physical and mental prowess that they decided to call those movements magical passes. Don Juan told us that, through their magical passes, those shamans attained an increased level of consciousness which allowed them to perform indescribable feats of perception.

Through generations, the magical passes were only taught to practitioners of shamanism. The movements were surrounded with tremendous secrecy and complex rituals. That is the way don Juan learned them and that is the way he taught them to his four disciples.

Our effort has been to extend the teachings of such magical passes to anyone who wants to learn them. We have called them Tensegrity, and we have transformed them from specific movements pertinent only to each of don Juan's four disciples, to general movements suitable to anyone.

Practicing Tensegrity, individually or in groups, promotes health, vitality, youth and a general sense of well-being. Don Juan said that practicing the magical passes helps accumulate the energy necessary to increase awareness and to expand the parameters of perception.


Q:
Besides your three cohorts, the people who attend your seminars have met other people, like the Chacmools, the Energy Trackers, the Elements, the Blue Scout... Who are they? Are they part of a new generation of seers guided by you? If this is the case, how could one become part of this group of apprentices?


A:
Every one of these persons are defined beings who don Juan Matus, as director of his lineage, asked us to wait for. He predicted the arrival of each one of them as an integral part of a vision. Since don Juan's lineage could not continue, due to the energetic configuration of his four students, their mission was transformed from perpetuating the lineage into closing it, if possible, with a golden clasp.

We are in no position to change such instructions. We can neither look for nor accept apprentices or active members of don Juan's vision. The only thing we can do is acquiesce to the designs of intent.

The fact that the magical passes, guarded with such jealousy for so many generations, are now being taught, is proof that one can, indeed, in an indirect way, become part of this new vision through the practice of Tensegrity and by following the premises of the warriors' way.


Q:
In Readers of Infinity, you've utilized the term "navigating" to define what sorcerers do. Are you going to hoist the sail to begin the definitive journey soon? Will the lineage of Toltec warriors, the keepers of this knowledge, end with you?


A:
Yes, that is correct, don Juan's lineage ends with us.


Q:
Here's a question that I've often asked myself: Does the warriors' path include, like other disciplines do, spiritual work for couples?


A:
The warriors' path includes everything and everyone. There can be a whole family of impeccable warriors. The difficulty lies in the terrible fact that individual relationships are based in emotional investments, and the moment the practitioner really practices what she or he learns, the relationship crumbles.

In the everyday world, emotional investments are not normally examined, and we live an entire lifetime waiting to be reciprocated. Don Juan said I was a diehard investor and that my way of living and feeling could be described simply: "I only give what others give me."


Q:
What aspirations of possible advancement should someone have who wishes to work spiritually according to the knowledge disseminated in your books? What would you recommend for those who wish to practice don Juan's teachings by themselves?


A:
There's no way to put a limit on what one may accomplish individually if the intent is an impeccable intent. Don Juan's teachings are not spiritual. I repeat this because the question has come to the surface over and over. The idea of spirituality doesn't fit with the iron discipline of a warrior.

The most important thing for a shaman like don Juan is the idea of pragmatism. When I met him, I believed I was a practical man, a social scientist filled with objectivity and pragmatism. He destroyed my pretensions and made me see that, as a true Western man, I was neither pragmatic nor spiritual.

I came to understand that I only repeated the word "spirituality" to contrast it with the mercenary aspect of the world of everyday life. I wanted to get away from the mercantilism of everyday life and the eagerness to do this is what I called spirituality. I realized don Juan was right when he demanded that I come to a conclusion; to define what I considered spirituality. I didn't know what I was talking about. What I'm saying might sound presumptuous, but there's no other way to say it.

What a shaman like don Juan wants is to increase awareness, that is, to be able to perceive with all the human possibilities of perception; this implies a colossal task and an unbending purpose, which can not be replaced by the spirituality of the Western world.


Q:
Is there anything you would like to explain to the South American people, especially to the Chileans? Would you like to make any other statement besides your answers to our questions?


A:
I don't have anything to add. All human beings are at the same level. At the beginning of my apprenticeship with don Juan Matus, he tried to make me see how common man's situation is. I, as a South American, was very involved, intellectually, with the idea of social reform.

One day I asked don Juan what I thought was a deadly question: How can you remain unmoved by the horrendous situation of your fellow men, the Yaqui Indians of Sonora? I knew that a certain percentage of the Yaqui population suffered from tuberculosis and that, due to their economic situation, they couldn't be cured.

"Yes," don Juan said, "It's a very sad thing but, you see, your situation is also very sad, and if you believe that you are in better condition than the Yaqui Indians you are mistaken. In general the human condition is in a horrifying state of chaos. No one is better off than another. We are all beings that are going to die and, unless we acknowledge this, there is no remedy for us."

This is another point of the shaman's pragmatism: to become aware that we are beings that are going to die. They say that when we do this, everything acquires a transcendental order and measure.



Translated from Spanish. Reprinted here with permission from Uno Mismo.

Copyright 1997 Laugan Productions.