Carlos's dialogue starts off:
"One thing to know, before you give your heart to mountains. They are powerfully jealous of each other. Pledge loyalty to one and it expects you to be faithful. Followers of religions believe they are following the one God. They are wrong. History tells them they are wrong, the Bible tells them they are wrong, but they are slaves to their partial understanding and believe what they want to believe.”
He raises his head toward Canigou, lifts his arms in salutation, and intones from the Bible in a clear-pitched voice.
"I will lift up mine eyes to the mountain. From whence shall my help come? My help cometh from the Lord who made heaven and earth.'" He lets the words resound awhile, then turns to me (Martin) to continue his lesson.
"Devotees of religions worship the Lord of a mountain. They are the mountain's cohorts, and will battle the world to proclaim his dominion over the earth. Call it Islam, Judaism, Christianity, any faction, even the Mormons of America with their own message brought down from their own mountain, they are all mountain religions. Don't think mountains have let people go. Never think that. They have roused us with their prophets, stirred us with their myths, hidden themselves in our religions the way they hide themselves in cloud. They divide the peoples of the world among themselves, and set them at each other's throats."
I stay quiet for a while.
"Buddhism," I suggest after some thought. "That doesn't fit your theory."
"The one religion without a God. You're right. And where did it start? On a mountain? Uniquely, no, it didn't. The Buddha found his enlightenment under a tree. That doesn't mean mountains haven't done their best to take Buddhism over. Mountains of the Far East are clustered with Buddhist shrines. The slopes and peaks of Tibet are stacked with ridiculous Buddhist mythology. No matter what sect, choose your flavor of Buddhism, study real hard, and then see which jealous mountain god you've attached yourself to.
"But remember this feeling about Buddhism. Remember how it started under a tree when you move your story down from the Andes to the Amazon. Until the new American churches based around ayahuasca, no religion ever came out of the jungle. You can't separate the jungle religions from their trees, you see. And that's enough of my talking. Here endeth my sermon on the mount. Come, Martin."
He stands and leads the way back down the path. I look east as we descend, away from the mountains, toward the strip of blue that is the Mediterranean Sea, and try and let its color wash me clean of so many alien thoughts.
THE BREAKFAST MAGICIAN
At home in my kitchen he pulls the sleeves of his jacket back across the cuffs of his shirt, holds up his hands, and purses his fingers. He's making an exhibition of himself.
I watch, because in a house as tiny as mine any exhibition is hard to ignore.
His shirt is mustard yellow, made of thick brushed cotton and buttoned up to the collar. His jacket has the brown color of peat and something of the same texture. With a flourish he dips his hands into the two jacket pockets and plucks an egg out of each. These he places in a bowl on the sideboard. His hands dip into the pockets again, then again, till six large brown-shelled eggs are collected in the bowl. Then he reaches into his breast pocket and picks out a sprig of fresh parsley.
"Voilà!" he says. "Le petit déjeuner."
"Where did you get them?" I ask as he assembles the chopping board and knife and cracks the first of the eggs into a second bowl, whisking it as it falls.
"You have no ears?" He cracks all the eggs, deftly using just one hand while whisking with the other. "Didn't you hear the cockerel?"
"You took eggs from there? From the neighbor's hen-house? But that's stealing."
"The hens didn't complain. Why do you? Sit yourself down and finish your story while I cook."
(this book was published in 2001)
Previous posts:
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/geilgs/the_meeting/
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/bf8sp9/martin_goodmans_i_was_carlos_castaneda_the/
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/gemwpk/the_reason/ - discusses the jungle
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/ge78zz/the_parable_of_the_lute_as_castaneda_lay_dying/
3 Comments
I've run into Carlos, don Genaro, and don Juan multiple times.
AWAKE...
Not meditating, not sleeping, not in dreaming.
I have to say that because new people are saturated with the idea these things are just visions or dreams. A side effect of "asian crap magic".
Make believe magic you do with your eyes closed, so you can make up whatever you like and no one can contradict you.
I was in fact awake. Eyes open. Completely sober.
And it "just happened".
Not much more you can say about it except that it was very convincing.
Carlos I know well and it looked just like him. Possibly younger however, as if he'd returned to being in his 40s.
I have no idea if Genaro or don Juan were correct, but it seemed to match the spirit of them from the books.
Don Juan "adjusted" my shoulder for me, actually physically touching it.
Which resulted in slightly better (or just different) darkroom magical effects.
Genaro made me chase him up a mountain path, which materialized on my east wall. I ran out of the room and above it on a 30 degree incline, by at least 300 feet.
Awake as I said. With no "transition" from my normal world, to a magical world which breaks the laws of physics. I just walked into it.
I was doing my tensegrity as usual, moving around my darkroom playing with stuff. Then I was simply walking up the east side of my room, on a mountain path. Trying to follow my visitors.
Genaro was with at least 2 others, but I didn't see who they were.
Once Carlos wanted me to follow him inside what I believed to be a shopping mall office area because it was just very long white corridors leading to rooms.
But I doubted it was him and tested him with a question.
He looked sad, and as I recall did answer it. Then I was forced back out of that.
Whatever it was.
One odd thing is that I was standing up prior to it, in an empty part of my darkroom.I saw that dream scene of a man standing in white corridors in a bubble in the air.
I zipped in with the assistance of my Ally "Fancy" who was floating slightly above me.
I interacted with Carlos, following him down the hall for at least 20 feet, then zipped back out to the "real" room.
Still standing up.
I have to wonder what would have happened if I stayed in there a few hours. Carlos seemed to want me to do that.
Would my tonal body still be standing there like a statue? Or fall over after a while?
Or do they "shrink", the way Carlos seems to have ditched his real body, when don Juan shoved him through a ticket office.
Carlos ended up perhaps a quarter of a mile away, maybe more. Then he walked back from where he went. Which turned out to be next sunday. Or last sunday. It certainly wasn't the day on which he entered the ticket office.
But it was again when he walked back from some different period in time!
Where did his physical body go during that time??
There's plenty you can't explain, once you get good at darkroom.
It's far between though, so don't anyone start thinking of becoming superman.
You can't get things to work when you want them to. And when they do work, you weren't even interested in that at all. And aren't amazed at what goes on.
Which is likely why it can happen.
Of course, no one should care if it's "the real version" of those people.
If it's the "real" Carlos.
No one cares about the Buddha's 4 strippers in blue dresses. Whether they were "real".
Yet some praise that ludicrous "Fire Kasina" document as "the highest sacred text in Buddhism".
The Buddha turns down 4 hookers, offering him free blowjobs forever?
Sitting with his eyes closed, grinning?
How wise he was!
So I'd suggest, we don't have to "prove" anything. No one else even comes close to trying to do that! Worse, you never get to do the things they never proved.
So you can't even verify their silly "tales of asian magical power". As far as you know, it's just another chinese grandpa making up stories to amuse the children.
For us, since we get to see such miracles, the main thing is how did you get that to happen?
Not what happened. "What" is for greed.
How is for the sake of knowledge and growth.
If you do darkroom you'll see all the proof you yourself need.
And realize what a distraction "practical magic" can become.
Someone asking for a demo of magic is much like them asking you to get a part time job, and send them the money.
On the other hand, I envy Cholita. Who can demonstrate magic when she feels like it.
She does it inside grocery stores, in the parking lot, and even sitting at a table in a very busy restaurant, surrounded by other people.
It's rather amusing if you watch carefully, because Cholita can move a little dish to the other side of the table if she's eaten all the food, but without touching it. It just moves because she's looking down at it, with an angry expression.
Then a waitress will just walk by and pick it up, not realizing a Jesus level miracle just took place.
It's possible however, that she needs another sorcerer around for it to work reliably.
Even if it's in public.
I'm trying to figure that out, but it's possible that a witch has far more power when there's a male sorcerer standing there, for her to demonstrate to.
We saw that in second ring of power when the little sisters got their "running on the walls" thing to work for the first time, because Carlos was there.
Or when La Gorda did some super cool magic, and then later informed Carlos it hadn't worked like that before.
There's something "key" in there, but we don't know what it is.
I'll hint at it. What if you found a scrawny alley cat, took it home to feed it, and then saw some magic. Your own magic, not from the cat.
And it turned out over time, that when the cat is around magic becomes very easy.
When the cat isn't around, it's incredibly hard to get any magic at all to happen.
That might be the situation in groups of sorcerers.
Could be to do with the emanations, and where the beam of awareness is focused. So that if there are 2 sorcerers, there's more chance to get fun stuff to happen than if there's only one. The fun stuff emanations are already "warmed up".
I wish I could ask Cholita what's going on, but if there's magic involved she becomes furious if you want her to talk about it.
As in pick up the nearest heavy object, raise it over her head, and give me 3 seconds to shut up. Or she'll bash it on my head.
Someone worked her over on the secrecy issue is my theory.
Maybe she got to see someone else doing magic, and that was part of the lesson.
NEVER do it for anyone, or you can end up dead.
Considering how ugly this subreddit gets with angry con artist invaders, it makes perfect sense that it's dangerous to "prove" magic to non-sorcerers.
I regularly get thieves trying to move me elsewhere so they can make some money off it.
Do you think Carlos, Don Juan and Don Genaro came from third attention? Also do you think Carlos died from liver cancer or that was the easiest death certificate to fake as they didn't find his body?
We don't have the answer to any of those questions.
But it was interesting that Carlos came to visit again 2 days ago, and this time he asked me a question.
I was a bit annoyed.
It must have been as he felt when I wouldn't follow him without testing him with a question.
He wanted to know what was the motivation of this subreddit.
But not in a criticizing way, he just wanted me to say it out loud.
Kind of like Yoda asking Luke, "Why must you become Jedi?"
Before Luke knew who he was.
He could also have been trying to get me to voice my "intent" at that level of reality.
Still, no one explained these things to us so you never know what's really going on. At the time you "know", but unfortunately that doesn't actually carry over to the blue line on the J curve.
I'd been trapped by one of my allies for a full hour before Carlos showed up. I was looking at snake scales, going back and forth to compare if they were exactly the same. But there was only 4 of them!
For an hour I tried to figure out why they seemed different.
But that's impossible! It was "the abstract".
Which is actually a bit pleasant to look at, even if you get trapped by it.