Carlos Castaneda
First part of a conference from the Nagual in 1993.
Casa Tibet Mexico.
CC: I once wrote down all the movements that don Juan did one day and he said that it was all a question of energy; that if you don’t have energy then life isn’t worth a plugged nickel; that is our tragedy, we don’t have energy. The sugar that we consume, like in Coca-Cola, is one way that we rid ourselves of energy, because when apparently we are climbing a stairway, and it gives us a boost, in reality we come down by two.
Our lack of energy is noted as well in the ear. Don Juan was old in age but very fluid and was not elderly and dona Florinda was a sensual woman although she was a little old lady and was a grandma when she was not anybody’s grandmother. The fact was that she was so naturally maternal that for nine months she wore pillows, and at nine months found a little girl that needed a mama, and she raised her.
We adopt nefarious positions for ourselves and that is why we have to search for energy.
The sexual energy is the only energy that we have. That energy is wrapped up in a biological command to reproduce ourselves, but don Juan Matus proposed another mandate to me: evolution. There is something that you can do, look, like this, like this (In that moment he executes, demonstrates, and explains a magical pass linked to the evolutionary command.) .. .for those sorcerers all the sexual energy is directed to evolve and if we were able to see how the energy fluctuates we would evolve, but without energy all the knowledge that we have are no more than an intellectual masturbation.
The problem is that since childhood we are transformed into people extremely occupied in the social world, when it is a very inefficient system because dealing with the daily world does not require so much energy. The daily world does not need so much energy from our part and what we really need is to put an end to the ego, and when we finish with it, it will not require so much energy to face the world. What robs our energy is that we cannot unhook ourselves from the “I”; we have to defend the “I”; defend the fatherland, and our cave is the ego. Oh what passion we have for ourselves! If they say something bad about me it makes my head spin and we get all cross-eyed, and only to defend the only possible territory for ourselves in this moment. On the other hand the idea of don Juan was to break with this territory: the “I”, and then we would be able to come to break the power of the concrete (world).
Don Juan left me with a series of apprentices of whom I have written about. He left me with the responsibility of pulling them until we came to arrive at the conclusion that we could not carry each other uphill. We cannot take responsibility of that because they are too concrete. Here in Casa Tibet there is an extraordinary capacity of understanding.
Q: Are you a guru Carlos?
CC: I don’t have anything to do with a guru, not in the least.
Q: What does one have to do to break the “I”?
CC: With Intent, and that Intent cannot diminish. Everyone has to make a deal, and if they are truly dedicated they will achieve it and find it. I am extremely dedicated in what I do but I do not lead a double life. I have written those books to bring a minimal opportunity in order to attain something maximum.
The impulse of arriving cannot review (revise?) itself and my deal is with that, not with don Juan, who was so impeccable that he did not transform me into his slave. I loved him so much that I would have been his enchanted servant and kiss his feet, but that the Nagual should have servants is inconceivable.
Don Juan believed that being impeccable is doing your maximum and then some, without morality nor immorality.
We are capable of incalculable forces (thrusts) which never leave us, that are hidden and come forth through impeccable acts. The impeccable warrior is he that ruminates, induces and throws himself (forward) regardless of what might happen.
The desire is sufficient. One has to have the boldness to formalize it, to back it up, to make a final call, but we are so replete with ideologies that we never arrive. I don’t want anyone to dictate to me what I have to do, and that is what I find because my impulse is impeccable. Don Juan was more coercive that I and he spun us around and when we would wake up we were in the pot being cooked and we had no escape.
I need an apex (crux) of despair in order to emerge because the daily world is not going to fix itself. It is going to worsen and we will make ourselves more old, more stupid, more senile.
Don Juan did not choose the most elite. I am proletariat. My mama was a communist. She made pamphlets. My first memory was of the odor of ink. We are all going to die that that is why we cannot be elitists and we all have the option towards liberty.
What I would like is that which I would here tell you would not be vocabulary, but rather a transformative option in order to carry you beyond that which is permissible.
Q: What is sorcery?
CC: For don Juan it is perceiving energy without the need of something interpretive; from the point of view of interpretation an office building is that hard rectangle, from direct perception they are luminous fibers and one sees clouds of energy.
Our existence(s) are magic leaps of which we are not aware because we take it like something natural. If we were to have the discipline the leap is not so great. We could converse and dialog of something which is universal, that immeasurable thing and we reduce it to a universe of pure fear. People shake with fear with the universe of don Juan.
The human body is an incredible machine, extremely sophisticated, the body can carry us beyond the confines of the universe itself, one can make journeys that defy all explanation, journeys made in a matter of seconds. In Mexico there still remain pieces that speak of those journeys. The human body is an incredible machine that we only use daily to sweep.” (Moments later he speaks of a sculpture of a museum and executes a movement associated with it and which defines it as ‘Staring into the Infinite’).
Q: And what may one do in order to go with you to that universe?
CC: We can hardly carry our own selves. How can you believe that we can have you carry your self? Any person here is incredible to his friends, and to the spirit is an idiot. That is our tragedy. We are little tailless monkeys and we lack that tail for equilibrium. but who could make themselves believe to prince Charles that they are a little monkey? It would kill us! Because certainly one is not a mineral, nor a crustacean, but if you accept that you are a monkey you can change. On the other hand if accordingly you are an angel, then you are carried to ruin because an angel is perfect.
Once when I visited don Juan I told him, “But I am made in the form of God.” And he responded, “Yeah, if in the form of monkey god then there is no problem.”
Q: How does one acquire energy to change?
CC: One begins by recapitulating the life in order to see where the shoe squeezes us, and later without shouts nor psychiatry one enters naturally into a state of energetic savings, because there are charges that waste us to the maximum without showing any benefit and one has to rid themselves of them now; the only way being to becoming aware that the daily world is so boring, and that we are all so bored with each other. Surely everyone is thinking that I am speaking of someone else, and think, “Not me.” But I am speaking of you all.
Recapitulation is a way to make a total change. In modern psychology a patch is placed to try to adapt ourselves to the world and be more hardened in the personal “I”. There are entire courses on how to be aggressive in business, how to be the winner, how to do as you say, how to convince others, and so there is no exit. As such we can never perceive anything, because those are only tremendous flights of imagination. Nothing is real except the reality that bumps us and we say, “I have arrived at a certain age”, one retires, has a heart attack, dies and is finished and then you have sayings like, ‘Life is a bitch and then you die.’
Q: What is controlled dreaming?
CC: Controlled dreaming is a state of spirit, it is a state of being similar to a dream but it isn’t because the elements themselves in that situation generate energy. Everything that one sees in their dreams are only visions, while controlled dreaming is not a vision. Controlled dreaming for a sorcerer is living another life.
We cannot control our dreams because the energy of all of us is invested in maintaining the parameters of the daily world. I don’t feel ashamed because I do my best; because I give all of myself.
Don Juan believed that if in the moment when a couple copulated, that if there was a great deal of sexual intensity that the children could be born with a great intensity and if not, if they did it bored, like 90 percent of us people do it, then almost always will come one who is piggish, and precisely for that you have to make an account of everything; of how they (all) believe us so as to not waste energy.
One of the most intense of the wastes of energy is courtship. We waste an inconceivable quantity in courtship… What would happen if we reduce it by 5 percent? But what happens is that we give 100 percent, when we are pending all the time on a companion. What would happen if we cut this impulse? In that moment we would be sold an enormous earnings of energy, the dreams would begin to become clearer, and from lucid dreaming to controlled dreaming is one step, always when we leave to one side the defense of the personal I, because if not, from where are we going to draw the energy? The brain, that poor organ is very tired because we don’t have drive; it is trapped in stupidity.
The theory of the sorcerers is that in the luminous egg of the human being there exists a point that permits us to perceive and the art of them is moving that point so that they may see the perception of the world is not already final, that if the point moves another assemblage point prevails.
Q: How is the assemblage point moved?
CC: They move it with Intent which is the discipline, the fortitude, and that cannot be revised, cannot fall back. It fails when it is an intellectual exercise.”
With the desire to arrive to liberty one has to leave behind routines, like for example idealizing things.
There are billions of possibilities in changing the assemblage point. Don Juan thought that there were 600 identical worlds to this in reality but with different configuration and when one enters to that type of knowledge we are seriously shaken because we are reduced down to size, but rather we are so full of ourselves that we don’t arrive at anything.
What dumb-asses! We are in a planet prison and if we leave we have to be fugitives. One leaves from the cell without anything. You cannot say, “It’s that in my cell there was such a beautiful little doll that I couldn’t leave”.
In order to have energy one must recapitulate, and that gives you the energy to feel it. Don Juan told me that he had hoped that it would not be me, the classic lucky fellow, of what it could have been, but wasn’t. The luck of the monkey is that it sees seeds in a trap and when it grabs the seeds and they kill it, and when they cut the hand loose from the seeds, there they remain for the next monkey. (Then the Nagual made a truly delightful act depicting the monkey that takes the seeds; when they cut the hand of that monkey, and when the next monkey arrives doing exactly the same… again and again.)
We are not well, nobody is well. We have already carried ourselves to ruin! (He says it practically screaming) There is no more time for that stuff about the innocent child inside of us. To hell with the inner child! There is no time for that. Recapitulation is so that you hear your own slavering and after hearing the same slavering again and again, that is the witch of exasperation that gives us the Intent to change.
If you like what you are being served, then why would you want to hear Carlos Castaneda?
The energy comes to you from restoring those unities that sustain themselves more because we don’t isolate them, we examine them and when we analyze them we throw them in the trash.
Don Juan placed plasters (of leaves) on my belly so that I wouldn’t be cold and I slept without anything, without a blanket or cloths in temperatures below zero. I noted all the names of each leaf and later followed my notes exactly and I froze my feet in the hotel. He told me that he was loaning me his energy and now I loan energy for other things, not for warming the feet of anyone.
You must persist…!
The art of controlled dreaming is moving the assemblage point. During the dream the assemblage point moves and the farther, the more intense the difference. The art of stalking is maintaining the assemblage point fixed in that new position and then one can move walls, and to attain that the only thing that we need is the suit of confidence.
One can do what one wants when they realize everything that one is in that moment, and what is necessary in order to control dreams is to decide to move yourself to where the assemblage point moves. Stalking is that which plants the assemblage point there, the sorcerer has no doubt. How could they doubt? They are playing with their lives!
Sorcerers are not beseeching, they don’t entreat, they push strong and stalking is an attitude of total confidence and affects the whole world and the world of all the days.
But as the personal importance has a thousand heads and you cut one and two more pop up. You have to be attentive 24 hours a day. You are going to die fighting against that because the self importance kills.
The energy takes off when you kill your self importance. I was an orphan and I believed that my grandfather was heaven and hell and furthermore I was born short and ugly and I was capable of doing everything to defend that.
The sky in Mexico is like an eight and that is marvelous for a sorcerer. There are scents of sentiment in the valley of Mexico. My crisis is that I no longer have internal dialog. Now I need something that might keep me afloat and one must undertake that journey for which one must have balls of steel; no complaining, “Its that when I was a little kid they did this to me”. The past is past and now is now! Nobody is going to live forever! What is the fear?
For us the death begins when they bury you. For a sorcerer death is giving all the consciousness of his being, on the other hand when you return what was loaned to you, then birth and death is gloomy, bestial, and that is why the sorcerer tries to leave the world living.
(Here the Nagual put on another act that words could not explain for the intensity and strength of the performance and for the great wave of nervous laughter that broke out. He mimicked somebody that is laying down about to die. This person has said goodbye to everyone; he gives them a kiss, a few of his belongings and some advice to each one. That person sobs and prepares himself to die when all of a sudden and in an instant a wave of amazement and intensity full of effulgence to that person who looks upwards, as if enlightened, full of energy, exclaims to himself, “Oh, oh, oh, look no more’. What is that?. Oooooh, look what wonders. What is that?. I have missed out on this all of my life and. and. and. and. .and how wanting to grasp that wonder he falls dead, very very dead.)
Recapitulation is the survival. A recapitulation makes you die, but not like your grandma, you die differently.
Don Juan wanted to go beyond the human, where one perceives beyond the luminous egg. The definitive journey for them was in that field, not in the possibilities of the present day world.”
Q: Nagual, do you give classes?
CC: I don’t have the patience in order to take disciples, I move too quick. I want to tell them that I don’t have favorite disciples, and I don’t even know those who say that they are my disciples. Those who give classes about Carlos Castaneda are not interested in what don Juan wanted to say. Furthermore, if in my home they clean everything for me and give me food three times a day, what do they want Carlos Castaneda for? I can only help any person who wants to do a somersault and say, “I don’t think that I am going to live forever. And let loose the bulls upon me!”.
There are people who give Carlos Castaneda classes, of the warriors path, and there are pendejos that pay to hear them and when I hear of it my hair stands on end. I know that there is an Argentinean lady that begins all of her classes saying, ‘Carlos Castaneda as a person is soooo insignificant. (He says this stretching out the words and adding the classic Argentine accent.) But if one is going to give classes that might say something more impacting, what I would do is very serious because I place my life in this.
Each one of us has an affinity through doing nothing, to find negative support. When you make a total vow to recapitulate, do it, and don’t tell anybody.
I took notes of everything and one day don Juan told me, “Write a book.” I told him, “but I am not an author.” Don Juan said to me, “You can’t write a book but you can write a notebook full of shit. Write it! In my books I didn’t make anything up. My “I” is not wrapped up in this. I write what don Juan told me and of what happened to me with what he told me. I have adopted a phenomenology attitude. Don Juan was an Indian philosopher but his philosophy was not European. It was directed towards the search, and caused me to discover the phenomenon. My interest was in taking notes but nothing satisfied me… What I always said to him was, “Yes, but really no.”; because what don Juan was telling me was inadmissible until the day came that I got tired; because a day arrives that one grows tired of being so pendejo! One day I left behind being the pendejo that I have always been. I give you all the information possible in those books and if something happens to someone who reads them and I can’t edit, because the acts of sorcery do not get angry.
If you were to truly leave behind the presentation of the personal “I” you would have sufficient energy to arrive at a place where compassion does not exist, and there you go to wait and that is not a metaphor. And note that one must do it now! We are not going to be eternal!
I don’t take drugs, neither with Indians, nor with myself. Don Juan gave me hallucinogenic plants in order to move my assemblage point that was completely fixed and later the assemblage point moved so much that I could not stop it.
I, an impeccable warrior, never throw (have sexual release). I have a daughter that is from another world. She is frightening; an unbearable thin girl but she is a fighter that in a second changes the direction. She is a ferocious contender. She came from another world and another energy. How can I throw her out if she is an impressive fighter? But why would you want a soberer? We can all change but we don’t want to!
In order to change one needs energy and resolution. If we arrive at a certain age we know that there is more than this, and although we say, ‘I don’t know how.’ And yes we know! You should do recapitulation, not be intellectual.”
Q: How does one recapitulate?
CC: Recapitulate making a list of all the persons that you have known and begin working from today backwards to examine that relation. See yourself acting with that person and begin with the next, until you arrive with your parents and you little brothers and sisters and you see them as the are, not like you want to see them nor like they want to be seen but rather see them as they are, and that makes you move in this world and in whichever. I recapitulate daily!
I am not interested in the social part, but rather the personal part. The only way of entering into that world is perceiving it, not intellectualizing it. Don Juan said to me, ‘Don’t take my word for it, perceive it! And when you perceive it speak…’
The road to impeccability is that I cannot say anything to you that I don’t do, and you should not depend on what I say, but rather on what you do. When that door opens you will have so much energy that nothing happens (hurts) to you, nobody can hurt you, but first one must get rid of the courtship and the defense of the personal “I”.
The Nagual does not have psychological continuity. I threw myself into the abyss and I experienced it and in the next moment I am in my bed. There is nothing that I could have done to make that bridge. Someone has to decide without explanations. It could be extraordinary if we were able to liberate ourselves from that, of trying to convince others that I am right, liberating us as such as if to say, ’And if I am not right? because the defeat is already here.
One must recapitulate and put an end with the things that don’t serve us and that will give you the energy and carry you to perceive what is neither good nor bad. The energy fluctuates and passes right over you because of the egomania that does not allow anything to pass. The change only comes when you decide that there is no way out, but there are other options, and when you are not so egomaniacal, as to become angry with the world, the world arranges itself with the little finger and we can do a somersault in perceiving, and there if there is help. The spirit cannot be felt, but it can be used. One judges what made the link with the spirit because doors open that did not exist.
The wind is not a friend. It slips inside and can kill you…
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