1 Pablito’s Mother To see what you’re up against if you want to understand Carlos Castaneda, consider this episode. Castaneda said it was a true story, it really happened.
At the end of it he described jumping off a cliff, the act that ended his apprenticeship with the sorcerer, don Juan.
‘You and I are one here! You know what to do!’ Despite his alarm, Castaneda was incapable of looking away and stared at her new, youthful body.
Castaneda recalled don Juan telling him that ‘our great enemy is the fact that we never believe what is happening to us’. He slowly realized dona Soledad had wrapped her hair band around his neck and was choking him ‘with great force and expertise’.
2 Why Read Castaneda?
It was dark and dangerous, borderline crazy, very farfetched yet still somehow compelling. There was no carefree ride to a wonderful future through expanded awareness with Castaneda. It was more like being whooshed away and then hurled into a dangerous place somewhere, alone. You have no idea where you are. You don’t remember where you came from, or how to get back. If you survive, you learn something.
Castaneda actually said the self should be curtailed and erased, not repaired and improved. To him, too much concern with self-pity and self-presentation was the main characteristic of modern man, and the crucial challenge for mankind to face in order to survive and go forward.
Who was Carlos Castaneda, really? According to his books, Carlos Castaneda was an anthropology student at UCLA who made repeated trips to the Southwest USA to “collect information on the medicinal plants used by the Indians of the area”, starting around 1960. He met Juan Matus, known as “don Juan,” a 70-year old Yaqui Indian who not only knew about medicinal herbs like peyote and datura but was also a sorcerer descended from a tradition of shamanism and magic that originated in Central Mexico more than 8,000 years ago.
According to Castaneda’s account, the sixteen sorcerers who trained him to become a new seer used a teaching method they inherited from antiquity. They utilized a form of awareness they called the “second attention.” Learning while in the second attention is similar to having experiences while under hypnosis or certain types of anesthesia. The old teachers could induce this state in Castaneda, like a hypnotist hypnotizing a patient. While Castaneda was in that state, which they also called “heightened awareness,” he would feel incredibly lucid and totally suggestible.
They taught him everything he needed to learn to master their system of knowledge and then made him forget it, and even forget that he had been with them. They left him with the task of remembering them and all the teachings on his own, to claim that knowledge as his own personal power. This type of remembering is similar to recovering lost events from early childhood in psychotherapy. For sorcerers in don Juan’s tradition it is done through special techniques of dreaming.
I tried, the explanation would go something like this: Castaneda says the first attention must become aware of the second attention by remembering it – then you have access to the totality of your being and your awareness. But you’re unlikely to survive the attempt.
The ‘flyers’ are creatures from the unknown depths of the universe that live with us on earth, unseen. There are millions of them, resembling giant, primitive ‘mud shadows’ that fly and hop around us all the time. Their constant malevolent presence terrorizes us. Whenever our consciousness rises to a better level they smother us, consuming our emerging awareness, which is their food. The flyers deprive us of our human birthright of magic. They reduce us to our petty, powerless and self-absorbed state.
Storytelling may be the highest form of sorcery, connecting our everyday consciousness with a deeper, ancient awareness.
Javanese mother-in-law calmly explained that Alex had been “pinched” by his guardian spirit. She says that when infants seem to smile or laugh at a private joke, and when they gaze over your head instead of looking at you, they are watching and reacting to gestures from this spirit.
They don’t bother with metaphysics; they just use magic words or wands. Castaneda labored mightily to explain how and why don Juan’s magic worked. He described, in minute detail, an entire universe where magic is possible. He told us how it used to be, and could still be, and dared us to prove or disprove it.
3 Power Plants
This time around, Castaneda remembered that Matus’ eyes shined ‘with a light of their own’ and that he had to avoid his gaze.
Matus insisted that everything was real, and asserted the seriousness of using the power plants, which didn’t cause hallucinations but just revealed what was there. Seeking power with power plants required the user to change his life. Castaneda wouldn’t have survived several of his experiences without Matus’ expert supervision and protection.
4 Emanations of Intent
Castaneda’s view is that life and awareness are inherently intertwined, pre-existing and eternal. At its most basic level, and from and to eternity, the universe consists of strands of luminous energy that are already alive and aware. Life with awareness does not evolve from a lifeless condition. It exists everywhere and manifests repeatedly in a multitude of different forms. It’s nearly impossible to describe these strands of aware energy because we are made of them. By projecting our limited imagination onto them, we can visualize them as filaments or emanations. We can’t say if they’re large or small. Each one stretches endlessly into an infinite length and eternity unto itself. Billions of them can pass through our being. This energy is aware and conscious of itself, sizzling, alive and moving with the universe’s momentum and purpose. These strands can be called the universe’s commands, or its intention. They are infinite strings of indescribable energetic awareness. ‘As I stared at the wondrous sight, filaments of light began to radiate from everything on that prairie. At first it was like the explosion of an infinite number of short fibers, then the fibers became long threadlike strands of luminosity bundled together into beams of vibrating light that reached infinity. There was really no way for me to make sense of what I was seeing, or to describe it, except as filaments of vibrating light. The filaments were not intermingled or entwined. Although they sprang, and continued to spring, in every direction, each one was separate, and yet all of them were inextricably bundled together.’
Life and awareness do not arise from a mass of primordial inert matter and unconscious energy accidentally combining and then evolving randomly. The universe is aware energy and has an uncountable number of moulds, or archetypes, for every kind of sentient being. It somehow casts or stamps us into human form. Our form, then, is a receptacle that interacts with the filaments of universal aware power to perform a magical act: perception. We materialize and appear as tiny bubbles floating in the immense ocean of indescribable awareness far beyond our understanding. Our existence is an infinitesimally small part of a process wherein this ocean of awareness organizes and knows itself. Our form of life and awareness is only one aspect of an immeasurable universal awareness that has its own intent, a swirling ocean impossible to conceive of or understand. The universe is basically predatory in nature. Multitudes of entities exist in the universe, preying on each other, seeking each other’s awareness. We are at the mercy of vast currents of energy which have awareness, that manifest in many forms. Life forms are born and die constantly. Sentient beings are lent awareness, and the purpose of life is to enrich that awareness and then return it to the endower in an enhanced form. The universe is predatory because the interaction between life and death is the necessary cause of enhanced awareness. Once a sentient being is born, it enters a dance with death. The constant presence of death, and the awareness of death, causes the enhancement of the individual’s and the universe’s awareness.
The infinite universal filaments that pass through us comprise a small part of the earth’s collection of infinite filaments. The lives of our human cocoons take place inside the earth’s much larger cocoon, and our fates are linked and intertwined.
Every living being’s cocoon contains universal strands of awareness that it uses for perception. Each cocoon is filled with billions of universal strings of aware energy, which comprise only an infinitesimally small part of the total strings of the entire universe. A single cocoon, though small in comparison to the whole, still contains countless billions of strings of aware energy inside itself.
Humans have an orb of bright energy about the size of a tennis ball located on the surface of the cocoon, about an arm’s length behind the right shoulder. This ball of energy is the agent which selects emanations passing through our cocoons to use for perception. It’s called the assemblage point because it’s the point where perception is assembled.
Perception is a magical process that happens when strands of universal energy passing through our human cocoons are selected and then lit up by our assemblage point. The assemblage point connects, aligns and lights up the internal and external parts of those selected strings of energy which extend out to infinity. The result is perception. We learn where to place our assemblage point and, therefore, what to perceive, from our parents and caretakers, starting from the moment of birth. We can say a human being has an assemblage point. It may be more correct to say that the universe has untold trillions of assemblage points. We are what we are, and live in our world because of the position of our assemblage point in the universe of aware energy.
We are usually not aware of them, but if we do become aware of them we can take the initiative and contact them, which can then open the door to relationship.
All living beings have cocoons and assemblage points in the flow of the universe’s string-like emanations of aware energy.
5 With the Dons in the Desert
In fact, by the end of the events in his second book, A Separate Reality, Castaneda stopped using all forms of power plants. He had used peyote, devil’s weed and the mushroom smoking mixture from 1960 to 1965, as described in the first book. But by the time he returned to Mexico in 1968, the stock of plants and mushrooms he cultivated earlier and then abandoned had died off or decomposed. From 1968 to 1969, he reported few instances when he smoked the mushroom mixture, but only because Matus insisted. He had to use Matus’ stash as he had none of his own. Matus explained that the plants were necessary to shake Castaneda out of a lethargic condition, although at significant cost to his body. He needed to be shocked into the realization that there are other states of consciousness and other worlds. To realize this, he had to have his shields broken down.
Our shields are composed of our internal and external dialog – our habitual and obsessive way of thinking and projecting our thoughts onto perception without pause. Shields are both the cause and effect of our assemblage point being held rigidly in one place. We were taught how to immobilize and stabilize our perception through our habitual talking and thinking; our talking and thinking processes then became our shields.
Finally, Matus would abruptly push him into whatever challenge had materialized. Castaneda would then fall into it haphazardly. He would misidentify opportunities and dangers, then invariably fall helplessly into a trap or peril by overindulging in his emotional reactions. Castaneda encountered a ‘guardian of the other world’, manifested as a giant gnat. He saw this guardian several times until one encounter turned dangerous. The guardian gave him a signal to go away: he mooned Castaneda, showing his backside. It had multi-colored designs on it…
Another time, Castaneda gazed dreamily at the water in an irrigation stream, ignoring don Juan’s warnings and instructions, and was transported away by the water. He found himself too far away, lost in an unknown realm, with no idea where he was or how to return. Matus again rescued him, but this experience made all bodies of…
Castaneda had lost some of the shields which formerly made his wall of perception to protect himself. He wasn’t ready, though, to take responsibility for his encounters in the separate reality he now encountered. He failed to identify opportunity and respect danger, or to remove himself from harm. He would only indulge in whatever came along, as if he didn’t believe it was…
The real danger, and the real adventure, began once don Juan stopped giving Castaneda power plants. The events in his apprenticeship began to have a different impact and value, and marked a new phase of his entire life. Once his apprenticeship continued without eating peyote or smoking mushrooms, he could no longer call…
‘The world is indeed full of frightening things and we are helpless creatures surrounded by forces that are inexplicable and unbending. The average man believes those forces can be explained or changed … sooner or later. By opening himself to knowledge a sorcerer becomes more vulnerable … by opening himself to knowledge he falls prey to such forces and has only one means of balancing…
Castaneda outgrew the need to be jolted by peyote or mushrooms.
According to don Juan Matus, this is the paradox of awareness: to protect ourselves from the inexplicable and unbending forces that are all around us we must control our awareness. But if all we do in life is control our awareness we deprive ourselves of our birthright as humans, as perceivers capable of magic.
They are lessons from Matus which, right from the start, taught him how to begin moving through the world like a ‘warrior’, to tap into new awareness and power while withstanding the assaults of the unknown.
A warrior in a battle can die at any moment. Therefore, the warrior goes to war with fear while wide awake. He respects his situation, stays alert to everything around him, and has full confidence in himself. He doesn’t waste his movements or energy, or indulge in unnecessary or unproductive thoughts. He doesn’t rely on others or blame them for his predicament. He doesn’t assert his status or identity
to exalt or protect himself. He sets aside his sense of self-importance; he is equal to everything and everyone. He knows that death is nearby, and even if he survives this battle he will still die another day. The awareness of death gives him a measure of freedom and abandon, which adds power and flair to his actions. He embraces a certain mood, and holds himself accountable for every experience and outcome. He takes everything seriously, while laughing at all of it.
According to Matus, the natural challenges that will elicit the mood of a warrior are around us all the time. We are literally surrounded by eternity. We keep ourselves inaccessible to it, separate and protected from it. We focus constantly, minute to minute, second to second, on the concerns of our personal lives, which interposes a wall of perception.
Matus endeavored to teach Castaneda the art of being open to the powers that exist all around us without being annihilated by them. He said, ‘this world is a mysterious place. To believe that the world is only as you think it is, is stupid.’ But to go into the unknown carelessly, in the wrong mood, is even more stupid as it exposes one to dangerous, uncontrollable and unrelenting forces.
While Castaneda argued that it was only the wind, which was caused by slight disturbances in air pressure and temperature, Matus asked him to collect some branches from nearby shrubs and bushes. He made Castaneda lie down while he covered them both with the branches and leaves. After lying there quietly for five minutes, the wind died down.
The secret of great hunters is ‘to be available and unavailable at the precise turn of the road’.
There is a difference between looking and seeing, just as there’s a separate reality. We look at one reality but are blind to the separate reality unless we see. Seeing involves using the entire human body, including the unseen parts, as an instrument for perception; seeing happens independently of the eyes.
According to Matus, normal human vision is ‘more interpretation than perception’. We don’t bother to use our feel, smell or even our hearing to make complex and binding identifications. Normally, we only ‘touch the incoming energy lightly with our eyes’, which triggers an interpretation system that immediately identifies and assigns attributes and values: tree, house, woman, old, beautiful, dangerous. Through our strobe-like looking, we make an entire world to live in. We work constantly to maintain and also sharpen our focus on that world, separated from the universe as it was before we learned to filter it through our thoughts and eyes.
Matus taught Castaneda that there is no casual eating or drinking. There’s no casual sex. There is no casual walking in the desert, or city either. In fact, there is no casual thinking. Every thought is an action that controls our awareness and perception, which determines everything. Philosophy is a life and death endeavour. Nothing is real, but everything matters.
Men and women are luminous balls of energy living amidst great swirls of energy bands. We perceive ourselves and our world by holding our assemblage point in a specific place, which creates an inner and outer world. The way to access new energy bands, which contain non-ordinary perceptions, is to move the assemblage point. But it cannot be moved by conscious command.
Psychoanalysis of dreams is a way of understanding them according to our existing point of reference, a way of updating or improving our normal perspective and performance by including new information taken from dreams. Castaneda wrote about developing our attention inside a dream, not looking at it from the outside.
In fact, our daily reality is a dream among many dreams, enforced and enhanced because of the agreement of all humans on our planet who share it and renew and enhance it together. The universe is full of dreams with beings sharing them based on their agreements. The universe is filled with assemblage points, places where aware energy is gathered and combined in the act of perception.
6 Throwing the Other Self Off a Cliff
According to Castaneda, all humans have another self which exists all the time alongside the self we are normally aware of. Two selves exist because of our two-step process of perception. The other self is a more basic and more complete version of our being than our self of daily life. It needs the daily self to thrive and survive as a predator, and to make sense of life – to have a life, basically. Having awareness of the two selves at the same time is being in touch with ‘the totality of ourselves’.
There is a tiny instant of time between the original direct perception and the secondary one. We use that interval to deny and forget our primary perception and move our full attention to the secondary perception instead. But we still have a self that exists in that first world of perception, even though we deny and disregard it.
‘The world doesn’t yield to us directly, the description of the world stands in between. So, properly speaking, we are always one step removed and our experience of the world is always a recollection of the experience. We are perennially recollecting the instant that has just happened, just passed. We recollect, recollect, recollect.’
actually the double that dreams the self of normal awareness. This is the mystery of the dreamer and the dreamed. The dreamer and the dreamed live almost concurrently, separated by a miniscule interval of time. They experience the same events, but perceive them differently. The dreamer’s awareness is much more broad and inclusive, while also more disordered and unruly. The dreamer perceives eternity, but cannot speak about it, or about anything. On the other hand, the awareness of the dreamed self is curtailed, blinkered, organized and protected. The dreamer is aware of the dreamed, but the dreamed has been taught to disregard and deny the dreamer.
The dreamed self collects a selection of perceived events during his life and plays them over and over in his mind. He calls this his memory. His personal history and identity are constructed from these selected memories. Most experience is forgotten, but still exists in hidden caches of denied and misunderstood imagery. The paradox of memory is that our memories of the normal self are mostly the denial of memory. To remember in a deeper sense is to remember the other self.
Unless we are taught about it, we are never aware of our double during life until the moment of death. Just before death, when our energy fails and we can no longer perform the two-step process of perception, we lose awareness of our “real” self and revert to our double in whatever condition it may be after a lifetime of neglect. The memories stored then explode into awareness, and we relive them one by one. Our life passes before our eyes.
From the position of their luminous beings, they push the assemblage point on his luminous being. Castaneda experiences this usually as a slap on the back. They often struggle to return him to normal awareness. Sometimes, they can bring him back with another slap on the back, but sometimes it requires throwing buckets of water on him.
The known is temporary, beginning at birth and ending at death. The unknown is always there, eternal. The unknown is aware of everything but cannot speak. The known can speak but has a limited controlled awareness; it can point in the general direction of the unknown, if called upon to do so, but is normally not aware of the unknown’s existence. The known goes a step further and actively denies the existence of the unknown.
We’re always surrounded by eternity, but we’re busy thinking of important things.
The known of any sentient being is best visualized as a small island suspended in a vast universe which is almost completely composed of the unknown. The unknown can be visualized as an entire universe of power and awareness that acts constantly and knows and directs everything, but cannot say anything or understand who it is or what it is doing. The unknown is everything that exists apart from the tiny island of the known. The unknown is unimaginably immense.
7 Finding the Other Self Again
This is Castaneda’s intention: to redefine how we perceive and remember experienced events. Due to the dual nature of our awareness, we select some parts of experience to be aware of and to remember consciously. All other aspects of our experience are ignored and forgotten. Those forgotten elements remain stored somewhere in our luminous being, though, and can be recovered later.
Castaneda passed the tests. One after another, his power emerged and he survived, injuring the other apprentices gravely. He then cured their wounds, which confirmed him as their leader. According to the instructions Matus left for them, they were then charged to help each other seek the requisite power and knowledge to enter ‘the other world’ where Matus and Genaro had gone. They needed and expected Castaneda to lead them.
The women performed a series of actions in which they became pure balls of energy. They grabbed onto lines of energy and used them to leap or fly, or to hide behind. Castaneda watched, but just like with Genaro Flores on the waterfall, he could only perceive their human images performing impossible acrobatic feats. His reason continued to assert itself and prevent him from seeing. It was frustrating for the group of young apprentices. Castaneda was meant to be their peerless leader, but he kept behaving like a beginner or, worse, an outsider. After a long struggle, they reluctantly accepted his limitations. Even though his powers could emerge when there was a life-or-death struggle, he couldn’t sustain his ability to see, so it was obvious he couldn’t lead their group. This meant they couldn’t progress further on their quests, and their prior training was useless.
At that moment, Castaneda’s ears popped. He re-remembered the events he had earlier witnessed. In this new remembering, he saw the pure balls and lines of energy that the women had used to perform their magic. He could see, as opposed to look at, them for the first time. Castaneda’s struggle revealed the central paradox of perception. In the two-step process which comprises perception, where we are constantly recollecting, we have two separate sets of perceived data, but we choose to see and remember only one.
He concluded that all of us look and see at the same time, but ‘we choose not to remember what we see’. In the two-step process of perception, we always see first, but immediately ignore what we see to focus only on what we look at instead. This act of perception is ‘the core of our being’. As we grow up, we develop our attention. Attention is the ability to ‘hold the images of the world’. Once we can perceive the agreed world and hold it in place, our perception becomes a constantly repeating two-step process which always produces the same being in the same world. The first step is the raw act of perception, in which the cocoon of aware energy interacts with other aware energy. The second step is our magical ability to set aside the primary perception and then impose the familiar images of our normal world onto what we are seeing. We always perceive the agreed-on images of our real world, the world we agree is real. We do this with others who’ve been taught the same. We all forcefully deny that any such thing would even be possible. When an assemblage point fixes itself in a position inside the cocoon and aligns the energy that goes through it, the result is a dream. We are all dreamers dreaming together. This is the basic act for all sentient beings, this act of magic.
8 Dreaming Together
Left-side awareness is awareness of the unknown when we encounter the vast ocean of awareness. It is ‘a realm of indescribable features: a realm impossible to contain in words’. In the unknown, we perceive with our entire being. The unknown is not constricted by reason. It’s beyond language and can’t be described with words. Reason and language only comprise a small part of the totality of our selves. In the other, much vaster, part another kind of knowledge exists without reason and language.
Our normal memory is more like a denial of memory; it’s only a small selective recollection of a few items that our rationality and identity have chosen as their flag to rally around. A vast reservoir exists beyond that where memories of the other self are, in the second attention. The luminous body stores memories starting from the moment of birth; they are part of the other self, unacceptable to the first attention and the normal self. The second attention, also known as the other self, the left side or the unknown, is aware of the first attention, which is the normal self, the right side or the known. But the first attention, the right side, is not aware of the left side. The task for us is to make the first attention accept the existence of the second attention, to remember the totality of one’s self.
According to Castaneda, by dreaming together he and La Gorda were recapitulating what all humans do as infants when we learn to join the world our elders impart to us. The luminous cocoon naturally and spontaneously dreams together with other cocoons, meaning they spontaneously put their assemblage points at the same positions.
If the underlying philosophy of the cocoons and filaments of energy is true, then all of Castaneda’s stories are possible and much more beyond. If the universe is composed of aware energy and holds a multitude of assemblage points where perception can be assembled into many worlds, then our partial mastery of our one point of perception, though absolutely crucial to our survival, is a small matter indeed. If our known world is just a tiny island in a vast unknown and inconceivable universe, then the only worthy activity for us is to organize our island as our launch pad from which we explore the vast unknown.
9 Cocoons and Filaments
The Fire from Within and The Power of Silence together comprise the summation of don Juan’s teachings to the extent of Castaneda’s understanding, which was not complete. Castaneda acknowledged his achievement was insufficient, and in his further works until the end it continued to be so.
They didn’t call themselves sorcerers, or call their teachings sorcery; rather, they taught ‘how to master three aspects of an ancient knowledge they possessed: awareness, stalking, and intent. And they were not sorcerers, they were seers.’ They came from a tradition that grew out of what they called ‘ancient sorcery’, but over time that tradition evolved beyond sorcery into something more modern.
In yet another progressive re-defining of terms, Castaneda now defined sorcery as the ability to force other people to change their awareness using secret knowledge. The old sorcerers used these powers to dominate and control their societies. The new seers still had these abilities, but only used them to help others gain freedom.
The art of stalking was about managing behavior to intentionally and harmoniously break up the flow of habitual events and perceptions in normal awareness. The mastery of intent was about discovering and nurturing our connection to the ‘spirit’, the flow of universal aware energy, until it could be summoned and utilized at will.
In the end, his effort to bring the ancient tradition of sorcery and magic to life only partially succeeded. He failed to achieve what he said were the maximal qualities of a successful stalking maneuver: ruthlessness, cunning, patience and sweetness. He was not ruthless enough with his own habits and personal characteristics to clear his own history. If he had kept his personal story out of the way, or kept his personal history more impeccable, he might have succeeded better at making the myth of don Juan Matus. It shouldn’t matter whether don Juan really existed, like it doesn’t matter if Achilles really existed, but it is a constant topic of debate. Don Juan repeatedly explained to Castaneda that there were two basic types of sorcerers. One sought adventure, including power over other beings, while the other sought freedom, and eschewed influencing others.
The full and final version of the mastery of awareness was gradually developed in The Fire from Within. Then, in the introduction to The Power of Silence Castaneda formally summarised ‘… the mastery of awareness, which was the cornerstone of his teachings, and which consist of the following basic premises: 1.The universe is an infinite agglomeration of energy fields, resembling threads of light. 2.These energy fields, called the eagle’s emanations, radiate from a source of inconceivable proportions, metaphorically called the Eagle. 3.Human beings are also composed of an incalculable number of the same threadlike energy fields. These eagle’s emanations form an encased agglomeration that manifests itself as a ball of light the size of the person’s body with the arms extended laterally, like a giant luminous egg. 4.Only a very small group of the energy fields inside this luminous ball are lit up by a point of intense brilliance located on the ball’s surface. 5.Perception occurs when the energy fields in that small group immediately surrounding the point of brilliance extend their light to illuminate identical energy fields outside the ball. Since the only energy fields perceivable are those lit by the point of brilliance, that point is named “the point where perception is assembled” or simply “the assemblage point”. 6.The assemblage point can be moved from its usual position on the surface of the luminous ball to another position on the surface, or into the interior. Since the brilliance of the assemblage point can light up whatever energy field it comes in contact with, when it moves to a new position it immediately brightens up new energy fields, making them perceivable. This perception is known as seeing. 7.When the assemblage point shifts, it makes possible the perception of an entirely different world – as objective and factual as the one we normally perceive. Sorcerers go into that other world to get energy, power, solutions to general and particular problems, or to face the unimaginable.
8.Intent is the pervasive force that causes us to perceive. We do not become aware because we perceive; rather, we perceive as a result of the pressure and intrusion of intent. 9.The aim of sorcerers is to reach a state of total awareness in order to experience all the possibilities of perception available to man. This state of awareness even implies an alternative way of dying.’
The force or energy in the aware filaments, which are the basic elements of the universe, is incomprehensible to us. The closest we can come to understanding that energy is to see it as the universe’s intent. Somehow, it expresses the intent of the universe. Those filaments can also be called the universe’s commands. They…
The perceiver learns to hold the assemblage point firmly and steadily at that point and prevent it from moving. The resulting alignment produces a being living in a world. That being develops his or her own intent and identity, which pursues its own objectives and forgets where it came from,…
The experiences encountered at the new position of the assemblage point are stored there. Memories and information are stored at very precise positions of the assemblage point. Once put in storage, the dreamer can later return to that point and relive that experience exactly as it happened before and have access to the knowledge there, with greater clarity and intensity than was originally.
When a dreamer begins to explore new worlds, by reaching new positions of the assemblage point, he gets on a path, which is familiar to other experienced dreamers. There are milestones on the early parts of the path that all dreamers necessarily pass through. There are several proximal positions that he will encounter early in his ventures. One of these initial destinations is the position of the mold of man.
It’s a one-shot affair, after which the mystic remembers the vision and feelings of awe and reverence, and assumes that he was in the presence of humanity’s god. One short vision of this sort can result in a lifetime of nostalgia.
To free their assemblage points for further exploration, the new seers intentionally viewed the mold many times to see it for what it really is. As part of that process of liberation, the force the mold normally leaves in the body, called the human form, is scared off and detaches itself. After the human form is gone, the seer can look at himself and his perceptions with more emotional detachment, which enhances his freedom.
During his or her life, a sorcerer – defined as one who can move his assemblage point with his intent – can gradually move it around within his cocoon to eventually contact and light up all the energy inside the cocoon that is in man’s band. Once this is accomplished, the entire cocoon is lit up from within in a flash and becomes like a huge conductor of channelled energy. The being enters the third attention, which is an alternative way of dying. This is called ‘burning with the fire from within’.
Don Juan said he was sure that thousands of seers accomplished this and entered on a ‘definitive journey’, keeping their life force, with infinity as their new realm. He believed that their awareness would last as long as the earth existed, and they would die when the earth died. An even larger number of sorcerers, though, including almost all the ancient sorcerers of Mexico, also did not die, according to Matus. Instead, while trying to navigate through the second attention they stumbled into realms that are arguably worse than death. Due to misguided efforts to prolong their lives, most of them ended up lost, kidnapped or imprisoned, somewhere in infinity.
To venture in the unknown is a challenge for humans, and Castaneda said the purpose of life is to enrich awareness by including parts of the unknown into the area of the known. This brings us close to the universe’s intention to know itself. New types of perception also bring new energy.
Works of great art can also move the assemblage point. Poems, statues, monuments, music and dance can all be among the highest forms of sorcery. They can bring us to a position of the assemblage point that the artist or builder knows about. Advertisers, salesmen and politicians also practice forms of sorcery. Our perception can be changed in a positive or negative way, and we may or may not notice that we’re being moved from one position of the assemblage point to another.
We could propose to go a step further and suggest that the quantum jump itself, where an observed heated electron jumps from one level to another instead of expanding smoothly, is the result of the duality of perception. Even using an electron microscope, scientists are still viewing events from the first attention.
Therefore, there is a tiny gap in time and space between what is observed and the pre-perceived raw energy of the universe. And, more generally, the reason light can be conceived as both wave and particle may also have to do with the first and second attentions.
11 Lost in a Dream
During our early life, we learn to immobilize our assemblage point at a position demonstrated and taught to us by our elders. Later in life, we rarely, if ever, allow it to move from its prescribed and agreed position. Normally, we are likely to fix it more precisely on one spot as we accumulate information during our life, which sharpens and hardens our focus. Rarely, the assemblage point can be moved by illness or shock or other extreme emotions; if so, this results in extreme fear and disorientation, forcing us to quickly return to our accustomed position. It’s impossible to move the assemblage point by a conscious command, but it does move naturally during sleep and dreaming. According to Matus, the ancient sorcerers developed techniques to take advantage of that natural movement of the assemblage point to develop our perceptual abilities beyond their normal capacities.
Juan Matus said dreaming was the only teaching method developed and prescribed by the ancient sorcerers to learn to use the second attention and reach the other self. He warned, however, that dreaming was ‘the most dangerous facet of the sorcerers’ knowledge … sheer dread, a veritable nightmare’. The path of dreaming led to ultimate tests for explorers of consciousness. The world of dreaming is a ‘two-way hatch’ between our world and other worlds.
While learning dreaming Castaneda faced dangers that were ‘enhanced a hundredfold’, once the belief had been irrevocably shattered that dreams are just something that happen while we sleep.
We need to lapse into some form of semi-conscious sleep state to rest from that effort. We don’t really rest until the assemblage point is temporarily released from its fixation. After that we are refreshed and can start again. Without real sleep, we go insane. Once our jabbering thoughts quieten down, we sleep. Our assemblage point releases and reverts to its natural condition where it moves fluidly.
However, according to Castaneda, this type of psychological analysis of dreams has limited value. It keeps us trapped in our world of self-reflection. He says it’s possible to use our dreams to go beyond that.
Most of us are usually unaware of the process of falling asleep. We’re not aware of our dreams starting and finishing, and then we wake up abruptly and forget everything, or almost everything. To make use of dreaming, Matus first taught Castaneda a three-step process. He taught him to be aware of the transition of falling asleep and entering a dream; then showed him how to hold the images in his dream steady; and finally trained him to remember the dream when he woke up. These three steps make up what Matus called ‘crossing the first gate of dreaming’.
Matus taught Castaneda to pause upon entering a dream, to arrange his attention, and to assemble the world inside that dream. This was done by moving his attention from item to item in the dream. With repeated practice, a dreamer can focus on items in a dreamed world the same way we focus on items in our awake world. He can learn to allow all the items in a dream to arrange themselves into a world by glancing from item to item quickly.
Castaneda said it took him two years of constant practice to pass the first gate of dreaming, at which point he became aware of falling asleep, could hold images in dreams, and his consciousness could enter his energy body. After that, his dreaming practice involved further training to develop and use the energy body. It must be perfected to the point that it has some control over the dreaming attention, to make it stop and return to normal awareness when needed.
If our normal awareness is overloaded with routines, heavy emotions and fears about the self, then when we dream our freedom will be curtailed by symbols of those fears and concerns. We won’t have the energy needed to cultivate awareness and volition in dreams. Energy must be freed up using the recapitulation technique. When a dreamer finds himself unable to progress further, he must return to the recapitulation, the extreme form of psychoanalysis described earlier. He must unearth more life memories where his energy has been lost and foreign energy left inside his luminous being. Eventually, he will eject enough foreign filaments and recover enough of his own lost energy to proceed again.
We are all travelers and explorers in a universe that wants to know itself. We are the means by which the universe knows itself.
We are usually unaware, but during dreams we are bombarded by visitors from the unknown. These onslaughts come from the next realm that dreamers can enter beyond the second gate. It’s a dimension full of various other energetic beings. Some are entities that also inhabit our earth; others visit from further away. They do not physically come to us, but they can project their energy bodies into our dream attention and appear to us, just as we can go into our energy bodies and appear to them in their dream attention. These scouts are perpetually curious about us. Like us, they are in search of more awareness and energy. When we dream, we enter a world where alien entities can reveal themselves to us. They send explorers to look for dreamers who are developing their awareness, and we are doing the same.
Crossing the second gate of dreaming implies the ability to change dreams without waking up, which means falling asleep into one dream and waking up from another. This can also be done by following a scout from dream attention to second attention by expressing the intention to do so.
Compared to them, we are like small children with lots of energy but no sophistication. They know we are vulnerable, and with their vast knowledge and long history of life on our planet they can easily manipulate us through curiosity, pleasure or fear. They want to entice us to enter their world and voluntarily take up residence there. The decision to stay in that world must be voluntarily made by the dreamer. Once made, it is irreversible, and the dreamer can be imprisoned in that world. That means he dies in his normal awareness and becomes an inorganic disembodied being living an infinitely long life in that realm. Don Juan called the inorganic beings, and the way our awareness interacts with theirs, diabolical.
In fact, our partner world, always there next to us behind its one-way mirror, is the ultimate home of the ancient sorcerers. According to Matus, the sorcerers of antiquity became overly involved with the inorganic beings and the dreaming voice. They assumed those beings were working in their interest, helping them wield power over their fellow humans.
Castaneda carried on a long courtship with this netherworld, which he kept secret from Matus. Finally, Castaneda was baited with the image of an imprisoned, helpless and innocent child, also called the ‘blue scout’. Taking the bait, Castaneda disappeared into that world to rescue the phantom child. That should’ve been the end of his story, but Don Juan and his cohorts found and rescued him, and brought him back to Mexico, with the blue scout catching a ride along with him. Castaneda was then totally spent of energy, and had to rest in bed for months, while Matus and the other sorcerers debriefed him and helped him recover.
After years of training, though, Castaneda’s dreaming body could now move about at will. He shifted worlds repeatedly in dreaming, and eventually found that items from his dreams came into his daily world. He was in a position where he didn’t always know whether he was in normal awareness, in a normal dream, or in a dangerous and unknown dreamed world. With scouts from other realms stalking him, ready to whisk him off to unknown realms, and inorganic beings trying to suck him back to their world, it became imperative for Castaneda to always know what he was confronting. He had to know whether any being he met was just a neighbor from down the street or an unknown power from another realm likely to attack him for no reason, as he might kill an insect scurrying across his desk.
Matus revealed that one of the favorite pastimes of the primitive old sorcerers was to effectively sell their apprentices into slavery in another realm in exchange for power or energy. By the time the apprentice reached the point where he could travel in someone else’s intent, his teacher could then manipulate him into a realm that the teacher knew about and leave him there, stranded in the unknown. The ancient sorcerers were known to move entire groups of people into other worlds.
In this state, she managed to bring one of Castaneda’s new cohorts, a woman named Carol Tiggs, into the dream with them and then effectively kidnap her. Assuming he had been gone for two days and one night, Castaneda woke from this adventure and found don Juan and his cohorts waiting for him. They somberly informed him he had been missing for nine days, not two. When he told his story, they concluded that the death defier managed to take Carol away with her to join in her destiny – hopefully to go into the third attention with Castaneda and his party.
12 Coming Down in L.A
Her learning focussed on using the womb as the main locus of power and intelligence. She said she didn’t seem to need to endure the years of doubt and questioning, tricking and cajoling that characterized Castaneda’s training. Dreaming on many levels came naturally to her. On the other hand, she barely wrote about the underlying philosophies of the luminous being and assemblage point. Castaneda said the main difference between male and female apprentices was that ‘male warriors must be given serious reasons before they safely venture into the unknown. Female warriors are not subject to this and can go without any hesitation, providing they have total confidence in whoever is leading them.’ Another way to explain this is that men have more sobriety and sense of purpose, while women have more pure talent and intensity.
She was also taught ‘magical passes’, physical movements designed to re-route energy in the body and the double.
Castaneda said Matus taught him that the body has six main centers of vitality. The duress and stress of everyday life pushes energy away from these centers. The unused energy gathers on the periphery of the luminous sphere, where it hardens into a shell. Performing the magical passes breaks up this encrusted energy and returns it to the body’s centers of vitality.
Castaneda said that the center of energy at the top of the head had been taken over by a foreign power, and had a foreign energy in it. ‘The sixth center of energy,’ he said, ‘doesn’t quite belong to man. You see, we human beings are under siege, so to speak. That center has been taken over by an invader, and unseen predator. And the only way to overcome this predator is by fortifying all the other centers.’
13 A Yaqui Conclusion
If the story of human awareness is compared to a river, Matus said that we have become trapped in a small eddy, and moved into a shallow side pool of the main river, where we spin endlessly, going nowhere. He said this is a temporary condition imposed on us from outside. In the earlier age of silent knowledge, as opposed to today’s age of reason, a different realm of awareness and knowledge existed along with a different kind of human. Matus’ religion ruled then, and its leaders were men and women who we now call sorcerers. Their arena of activity in the realms of awareness was much vaster than ours is now. It was undeniably a much darker time, as well.
We are kept like livestock, and repeatedly stripped of our awareness. In an ingenious process, the predator takes the best part of our awareness and leaves us only the part that flares up with self-pity and self-importance. These impotent flares are also consumed in a repeating process that generates hopelessness and impotent fury. Like prisoners serving an impossibly long sentence without even knowing what their crime was, we direct our energy onto fighting over what meagre status and privileges we are allowed in our prison. This predator somehow installed its own mind on top of our natural mind. Being a secret predator engaged in a nefarious activity, this predator mind is conspiratorial, cunning, furtive, evasive and insidious. Most of all, it is afraid of being discovered and exposed. Because the predator has installed its mind onto us, we believe that its fearful and paranoid feelings and concerns are our most important feelings and concerns. When we take steps to remove the predator from our lives, we fear the wrath of a higher justice, because those are the concerns of the predator itself. It is deathly afraid of being caught and exposed in its nefarious doings, and then deprived of food.
When the ‘flyer’ is faced repeatedly with a silent mind it goes away. Inner silence, the opposite of inner dialog, makes us indigestible to the predator. When the predator departs our awareness returns. We can recover our coat of awareness, our sheen. According to Matus, that is ‘the toughest day in … life, for the real mind that belongs to us, the sum total of our experience, after a lifetime of domination has been rendered shy, insecure, and shifty. Personally I would say that the real battle … begins at that moment. The rest is merely preparation.’
This fearsome monster that rules and imprisons us is an integral part of the universe, just as we are. Humans are sophisticated ‘energetic probes created by the universe’. Through us the universe intends to become aware of itself. The monsters who imprison us are our challengers. There is no other way to look at them. If we take them as such, we can continue.
14 Grandfather and Antoine
15 Twelve Books, Thirty Years
The double is encountered in dreaming, and then we learn that it is the double that dreams us – this is the mystery of the dreamer and the dreamed.