Hi there!! i’m new to the books and this is the first book I started going through. It is being said that Don Juan was a fictional character. What are your thoughts
Hi there!! i’m new to the books and this is the first book I started going through. It is being said that Don Juan was a fictional character. What are your thoughts
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If Don Juan is fictional, then fiction overrides reality. I've seen a view of an ocean form in front of me while sober and awake, so I know that at least that much is 100% possible and probably more.
I’m just starting out with this book and know nothing about the practices and the work of Castaneda so excuse my ignorance but what do you mean by an ocean form infront of you
I had just finished practicing, and I saw with my eyes wide open, almost like an animation of an ocean appear in the air. On top of reading the books you should also be looking around this subreddit, because there is an absolute wealth of information here, a veritable treasure trove.
https://ia601204.us.archive.org/4/items/carlos-castaneda-all-books-in-one/carlos-castaneda-all-books-in-one.pdf
Is there a /r/castanedacirclejerk
Which book talks about ocean form?
It's not about the ocean, per se, it's about freedom of perception, to view different emanations. In my case, the first time was an ocean.
Which book though?
Which book? Do you think that freedom of perception is limited to only what is in the books? I think someone here has an ally who likes to look like Chun-Li from street fighter. Point being, no drugs are needed at all for the sorcery path and you don't need to be asleep either.
It is called intent I believe. I think it is equal to the no thing in other teachings.
If Don Juan is fictional, then Casteneda is one of the greatest geniuses of all time, and should be studied closely for that reason alone.
Fictional or not, the teaching resonates with me and in accordance with other resources I read and encountered
To have a complete picture you need to read all the books. The book you are reading is not a representative of the intent neither of the practices the sorcerers did since is only the first depicting a fragment of Carlos experience with Don Juan.
Don Juan was real and everything written on the books is real too. Since you don't have a picture of what all this is about I can only tell you that here we practice the practices that were inherented from Don Juans lineage to Carlos and his cohorts. We know that everything is real because we work for it and many people are able to practically experience the movement of the accemblance point. So we don't accept the writers that promote their own ideologies.
I would suggest you take a look at our wiki/posts to see if this path is for you to follow and practically apply.
Three things to keep in mind: first, is just how dense and academically fixated Castaneda was before meeting Don Juan in 1960. Only VERY rarely do people make the kind of progress that he made in the ensuing decade, and almost never without outside intervention.
Two, sorcerers obfuscate their personal history as a matter of course. There are multiple reasons for this (that I won’t get into here). So assuming that Carlos may have obscured some of the details surrounding who Don Juan was, it would just be further proof that he was actually taught.
Carlos was a blabbermouth, and keeping secrets went against his intrinsic nature (obscuring personal info was a not-doing for him).
Third, from the intro of our reputation section - “Do you know who could write a series of books, chronicling their path to transformation, as a narrative that on the surface some would call “fiction,” and that which when a sincere person honestly and pragmatically does any little bit of the detailed practices precisely as described...have it actually work!
Nobody, that’s who. That’s not how the universe rolls. No one person, operating in a vacuum, could ever create what Castaneda did and have it actually function like this, for people who never even met him. Period.”
There is more on this in the review section at the right bottom of this page:
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/wiki/reputation/
As Don Juan said at some point in the books: Don't believe, just do.
The books are extremely practical and fixating in something like this is an unnecessary distraction.
we are all fictional characters
I was there at 9 years old or so when Carlos first went looking for don Juan.
He first came to the Morongo indian reservation where my father was studying the shamans.
One was a devil's weed sorcerer, and the other a dreaming sorceress.
Of the two, it was most likely Ruby Modesto who told Carlos that they couldn't be his informant, because they were already working with UC Riverside.
Carlos was from UCLA.
So he really did go looking for a don Juan type teacher. That I can assure you from first hand knowledge.
Ruby is rumoured to have pointed him east, towards Arizona.
And Morongo did have a familiar female dreaming sorceress like Zuleica, with a male Devil's Weed sorcerer.
Just as Carlos wrote about.
Since then there are 9 eye witnesses to the identity of don Juan, and one famous anthropologist, Michael Harner, who even got an invite but didn't know what he was passing on.
We have, by the way, tracked down one of the homes don Juan used. The one up by Fort Ortiz, where the Yaqui wars ended, and many Yaquis were enslaved.
Including don Juan, who was taken to the east of Mexico, where you'll read he was under the power of a petty tyrant who could put him to death with a whim.
That's in the later books, but it agrees with historical records very nicely.
At any rate, if you practice hard you can go back in time and meet anyone from the books.
For real.
So don't listen to the scientologists who attacked Carlos
Two of them.
De Mille being one. He co-founded scientology.
The other made tapes of Carlos, which are still at the Scientology Building in Los Angeles to this day.