For anyone interested in outside confirmation of Castaneda's experiences such as losing the human form and stopping the internal dialogue/reaching inner silence, U.G. Krishnamurti (not Jiddu Krishnamurti) is a phenomenal resource.
U.G. refers to the events that happened to him during the summer of 1967 as the 'calamity':
"I call it 'calamity' because from the point of view of one who thinks this is something fantastic, blissful and full of beatitude, love, or ecstasy, this is physical torture; this is a calamity from that point of view. Not a calamity to me but a calamity to those who have an image that something marvelous is going to happen.... I can never tell myself or anybody that I'm an enlightened man, a liberated man, or a free man, or that I am going to liberate mankind."
He was sitting on the sofa and suddenly, in his words:
"There was a tremendous outburst of energy--tremendous energy shaking the whole body and along with the body, the sofa, the chalet and the whole universe--shaking, vibrating. You cannot cause that movement.... Whether it was coming from outside or inside, from below or above, I didn't know--I couldn't locate the spot. It lasted for hours and hours.... There was nothing I could do to stop it; I was totally helpless. This went on for days."
U.G. says that there is a built-in armor created by thought, which prevents us from being affected by things. So when this ionization of thought takes place (process of losing the human form), it throws out (leaves), and there is tremendous heat in the body as a result. (Castaneda talks about the physical torment and the heat that persisted in one of his knees as he was himself losing his human form over the course of a day.)
Afterward, he was cleansed of all his past experiences. The continuity of his person had been broken into pieces; gone was any central coordinator or a reference point.
One of the major reasons why U.G. express the `calamity' in pure and simple physical and physiological terms is that it has no psychological or mystical content or religious overtones. Such a thing, U.G. says, must have happened to many people. It is not something that one could especially be prepared for. There is no method necessary for such a thing to happen.
His last words on the matter were:
"There is nothing more to write about and there never will be. If people come and ask me questions, I answer. If they don't, it makes no difference to me... I have no particular message for mankind, except to say that all holy systems for obtaining enlightenment are nonsense...the natural state can happen only through biological mutation (beckoned by the cumulative power of your intent alone, nothing else)."
Sources:
http://ug-k.blogspot.com/2007/04/aftermath-uniqueness-of-individual.html?m=1
https://people.well.com/user/jct/ugbio/ugbio9.htm
http://ugkrishnamurti.net/ugkrishnamurti-net/thought.htm
There are a plethora of videos/audios of his interviews on YouTube, and full texts available for free online if you do a bit of digging. To say that some of the physiological affects he continued to experience are remarkable would be an understatement.
13 Comments
Definitely gonna dig
I'm so glad someone else picks up on the similarities between Castaneda stuff and UG stuff!
Thanks. This was interesting.
U.G. said that in his case the body underwent "actual clinical death". He says, "It was physical death. What brought me back to life, I don't know. I can't say anything about that because the experiencer was finished." (Remember that the period when Don Juan left his benefactor ended when he physically died and was buried in a shallow grave. He came back to life several days later, if I remember correctly). This happened soon after his realization that his search for enlightenment was the very thing that was keeping him from his natural state. This hit him like a bolt of lightning and led to the collapse of thought as a self -perpetuating process.
"People call me an 'enlightened man' — I detest that term — they can't find any other word to describe the way I am functioning. At the same time, I point out that there is no such thing as enlightenment at all. I say that because all my life I had searched and wanted to be an enlightened man."
"I discovered for myself and by myself that there is no self to realize — that's the realization I am talking about. It comes as a shattering blow. It hits you like a thunderbolt. You have invested everything in one basket, self-realization, and, in the end, suddenly you discover that there is no self to discover, no self to realize — and you say to yourself "What the hell have I been doing all my life?!" That blasts you."
Sources:
https://archive.org/stream/Self-realizationWithSpecialReferenceToU.g.Krishnamurti/Self-realizationWithSpecialReferenceToU.g.Krishnamurti_djvu.txt
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Mystique_of_Enlightenment/Part_One
People in Carlos' classes were fans of him also.
I always got confused because there were 2 of them. That was enough to stifle my interest.
"The grand trick of those sorcerers of ancient
times," don Juan continued, "was to burden the flyers'
mind with discipline. They found out that if they taxed
the flyers' mind with inner silence, the foreign
installation would flee, giving to any one of the
practitioners involved in this maneuver the total
certainty of the mind's foreign origin. The foreign
installation comes back, I assure you, but not as
strong, and the process begins in which the fleeing of
the flyers' mind becomes routine until one day it flees
permanently. A sad day indeed! That's the day when you
have to rely on your own devices, which are nearly
zero. There's no one to tell you what to do. There's no
mind of foreign origin to dictate the imbecilities
you're accustomed to."
Mud Shadows
THE ACTIVE SIDE OF INFINITY
Carlos Castaneda
> They found out that if they taxed the flyers' mind with inner silence, the foreign installation would flee, giving to any one of the practitioners involved in this maneuver the total certainty of the mind's foreign origin.
I'm not big on the concept of the fliers (thinking it's just a worthy opponent he made up for a large group), but the part about realizng the mind is a foreign installation, is absolutely true. You have to get silent to fully see it.
And I haven't encountered any place he could have borrowed that idea from.
Even people heavily into meditation don't seem to figure out they only need to be silent, and burn off the human form. They waste decades only partly getting silent, using meditation techniques.
It's kind of pity how much hazing Zen monks let themselves go through, rather than simply shutting off their minds on their own, and telling the master to go shove his koans into his donation box.
There are quite a few similarities between the flyers and the Archons of the Gnostic writings according to this website: https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/cienciareal/esp_donjuan13.htm
In my case I think I saw them 10 years ago. I was looking at the sky, sunset, the sun no longer bothered but the sky was still clear and white then in the distance and in the highest part of the sky, almost where the grounding is made with the earth I saw figures that looked like dark fish, went down and up as fish do in a fish tank. Remember one of the descriptions Don Juan had made about them. Although you already know what these types of experiences are like. So fleeting and so little reproducible.
Even having a rational mind, it is not hard for me to believe the existence of inorganic beings or the flying ones, although most people have not seen them according to the physics we know there is nothing that prevents them from existing.
This sounds similar to what happened to gobi Krishna.
A couple of weeks ago I noticed a circle of heat, as if burning, just below the knees.
I am losing the human form or I am getting older :-))
Strange sensations are a good sign of progress, listen to your body and don't mistake sudden sustained or acute pain for progress.
I personally think that trying to go all Christian Scientist and not go to a doctor, instead trying to cure medical conditions through intent or effort is bullshit.
Castaneda had a fistula on his hip from a cactus spine that one of the female members of don Juan's group told him he had to cure on his own, and that it sure would be a shame if the nagual Castaneda died fistulated.
I would have told her to shove it and go to get the cactus needle extracted and some antibiotics.
Directly Related Post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/jvzprh/la_gorda_on_losing_the_human_form_and_the_eye/
A comment string on U.G. Krishnamurti, made several years after this post...a more educated review!
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/1ach2ib/comment/ktmh57d/