The few Carlos pictures which exist could have used the benefit of photoshop. But I think they were all pre-computer.
[-]
u/[deleted]
0 points2019-06-16 21:47deleted
[deleted]
[-]
u/danl999
5 points2019-06-16 21:49
You said he died? When exactly was that?
I'm not convinced Wikipedia has the right date. I was surprised when I saw it.
Leigh would know, but he's just a lurker most of the time.
[-]
u/[deleted]
2 points2019-06-16 22:07deleted
[deleted]
[-]
u/danl999
3 points2019-06-16 22:13
Did he ever mention any other sorcerers in Peru?
One theory out there is, he actually learned sorcery in Peru, then studied Indians in southern California to get his PhD, which included the sorcerers at Morongo (closest reservation I know of which had sorcerers back then), plus the surrounding reservations leading all the way to Arizona.
Then he created don Juan. As far as I know, there's no actual evidence either way.
However, I have a friend from Peru who was running around in the early computer business back in the 80s, under the title of "Dr. So-And-So".
In truth, he was 17 years old. But it worked. Until amazingly beautiful young women started showing up and asking to be led to his office.
Turned out he'd started a modeling business also and was running it from his desk job.
When I learned that, my first thought was, no wonder Carlos was so tricky. It's peruvian.
[-]
u/[deleted]
1 points2019-06-16 22:15deleted
[deleted]
[-]
u/danl999
3 points2019-06-16 22:44
that happened to Maria Sabina
Here's an excerpt from Wikipedia:
"As the community was besieged by Westerners wanting to experience the mushroom-induced hallucinations, Sabina attracted attention from the Mexican police who believed her to be a drug dealer. The unwanted attention completely altered the social dynamics of the Mazatec community and threatened to terminate the Mazatec custom. The community blamed Sabina, she was ostracized from her community and her house was razed. Sabina later regretted having introduced Wasson to the practice, but Wasson contended that his only intention was to contribute to the sum of human knowledge.[8][9][10]
Late in life, María Sabina became bitter about her many misfortunes, and how others had profited from her name.[11] She also felt that the ceremony of the velada had been irredeemably desecrated and polluted by the hedonistic use of the mushrooms:
From the moment the foreigners arrived, the 'holy children' lost their purity. They lost their force, they ruined them. Henceforth they will no longer work. There is no remedy for it."
I'll add that Lowell Bean, an anthropologist from UCR who wrote books on shamanic sorcery, criticized Carlos because don Juan talked like a college professor.
The quotes from Maria in there, about how she prays, matched what Lowell claimed was authentic for shamanism. A kind of "spaced out" interpretation of the world, similar to what happens to people who eat LSD all the time, and start associating random things in the environment as being part of a larger "omen".
(In other words, they start to believe the second attention as much as the first)
I knew Lowell as a child. But having just looked him up, I'm reminded that he's worth looking at if you want to understand the context of what Carlos did.
[-]
u/danl999
4 points2019-06-16 23:13
Here's what Maria sounded like from wikipedia:
***
It is sung in a shamanic trance in which, as she recounted, the "saint children" speak through her:
Because I can swim in the immense
Because I can swim in all forms
Because I am the launch woman
Because I am the sacred opposum
Because I am the Lord opposum
I am the woman Book that is beneath the water, says
I am the woman of the populous town, says
I am the shepherdess who is beneath the water, says
I am the woman who shepherds the immense, says
I am a shepherdess and I come with my shepherd, says
Because everything has its origin
And I come going from place to place from the origin ...[14]
***
(I prefer the college professor approach)
[-]
u/[deleted]
3 points2019-06-16 23:57deleted
[deleted]
[-]
u/danl999
2 points2019-06-17 16:39
I'm going to be blunt here, but keep in mind, I hear this all the time. And not just in this group.
Like Carlos, I have multiple things going on, trying to preserve these techniques. And I don’t know if the following is true or not, but it’s probably better for all of you to assume it is in fact the truth.
I believe that’s just an excuse. The internal dialogue can make use of it at first. Up until then, it’s been the star of our universe. We’ve lived with the excitement of thinking too much about the opposite sex, thinking about the amazing cookies we’ll accumulate in our lives, working ourselves up into emotional frenzies over loved ones who actually aren’t all that nice. It both emphasizes and de-emphasizes whatever helps it remain in power.
But the truth is, it's the ultimate “poor baby me” monster.
In this case what it’s telling you (and then you typed it for us), "It hurts mommy, I can't stop the voices in my head or they'll punish me!"
But eventually the internal dialogue is demoted to untrusted invader. That’s probably why Carlos created the idea of “the fliers mind”, and then created a slimy monster who licks us, but never actually takes a bite.
[-]
u/[deleted]
2 points2019-06-17 16:46deleted
[deleted]
[-]
u/danl999
3 points2019-06-17 16:52
That's certainly a surprise response. Keep posting what happens, it's valuable info.
I'm not entirely convinced someone couldn't create "marijuana sorcery", and embed it back at the Rosicrucians. I've been told their philosophy has gotten stale and doesn't actually work these days.
Trouble of course is what don Juan said, and what you affirmed: power plants damage the body.
[-]
u/[deleted]
2 points2019-06-17 17:00deleted
[deleted]
[-]
u/danl999
1 points2019-06-17 17:15
Power plants do that.
[-]
u/TechnoMagical_Intent
1 points2019-06-17 17:59
I can testify to this. I actually haven't formally recapitulated in years, I just focused on "cleaning the island of my tonal" externally. I basically just tried to live better, and really follow not just Castaneda's precepts but the very best of what I was brought up with as well.
You just have to want it enough, that unbending intent. If you don't have the right silence stones, and the crystals are too hard to keep get in place in the dark, try to find some better ones. If you can't after really looking both in your environment and online, then make your own alternatives. That's what I'm doing, in a dense hardwood instead of carbon steel which I don't have the right tools to work effectively, again because I'll no longer accept excuses.
If you can't afford $70 top of the line eclipse goggles, look for alternates, and find open-eye total blackout sleep masks for $15-$30.
Having concrete tools that you can employ helps to discourage excuses by supporting your intent externally, and makes it easier and more efficient to practice.
If you can't afford $70 top of the line eclipse goggles, look for alternates, and find open-eye total blackout sleep masks for $15-$30.
I'd stick with the $5 ones from China, until we figure out how to use them.
I'll say it again: Gazing in twilight is far different than gazing in darkness.
And we have no instructions for twilight gazing.
I constantly have to refer back to Zuleica's instructions, when I can't do the latest scheme I've come up with, to make use of the ally. If she won't show, I have to resort to continuing Zuleica's path.
If I didn't have one, it would be a little discouraging.
[-]
u/TechnoMagical_Intent
1 points2019-06-17 18:07
I'm going to use the total blackout mask because you can keep your eyes open with it on, and banish the last traces of light leakage for Zuleica's total darkness dreaming techniques. Again, no more excuses.
I'll get to twilight gazing eventually.
[-]
u/danl999
2 points2019-06-17 18:09
Check out the original cover of "The Art of Dreaming".
If I'm not mistaken, that's a blackout mask.
[-]
u/danl999
3 points2019-06-16 21:40
I thought you meant Carlos Castaneda. That's certainly not him.
Carlos always looked like he was thinking of a joke.
[-]
u/[deleted]
1 points2019-06-16 21:41deleted
[deleted]
[-]
u/[deleted]
1 points2019-06-17 15:11deleted
[deleted]
[-]
u/CruzWayne
2 points2019-06-17 15:51
In case anyone is interested… from some delving at least one person originally sourced this photo from
this video
, by a guy called Chris Douglas who says he studied with CC in the mountains of Colorado during the last two years of his life. This and another photo, of this same guy with Chris Douglas in a cafe somewhere, appear at the end of the video, which lends credence to it being Chris Douglas's photo at least.
[-]
u/[deleted]
2 points2019-06-17 16:35deleted
[deleted]
[-]
u/danl999
3 points2019-06-17 18:20
I wish I'd saved the books Carlos autographed for me. We could compare signatures to the one he shows.
But it did look like the general layout of how Carlos signs books.
When he died, he set up a doozy of a scandal. I got rid of every artifact I accumulated, except that I forgot about several in the back of the garage.
[-]
u/TechnoMagical_Intent
1 points2019-06-17 18:30
I have a folder of images/scans of some of Castaneda's actual field notes for his Ph.D. dissertation from a site I skimmed years ago. They were an "easter egg" find. Again with the cookies...
[-]
u/danl999
1 points2019-06-17 19:23
Easter eggs are condemned in the bible. Something about making egg shaped cookies for the grove worship festival, where virgins run into the forest to be raped. If raped, they automatically become wives.
(Don't feel bad for them, they had older brothers and whoever rapes them is probably the one they wanted to get raped by.)
It comes from Isis, the goddess of the moon. She fell to earth and landed in the lake, in the form of an egg. The bunnies rolled her to the shore, and she became a goddess.
Oddly, her sex kept changing as the myth grew over time.
[-]
u/CruzWayne
1 points2019-06-17 18:43
A signed first edition of The Art of Dreaming is here with just the page here. On first sight, not a great match, but signature consistency may not have been one of CC's priorities. He uses the tilde on the "n" in the one in the video, which would be the correct Spanish spelling.
[-]
u/danl999
2 points2019-06-17 19:20
I guess in the end it doesn't matter if that's an alternate form for Carlos.
Cleargreen has endorsed 3 "me-too" naguals in the last couple of months.
One was even friendly with the group before Carlos' died.
Kylie is said to have been found at a Ken Eagle Feather workshop.
Probably everyone is thinking the same thing: We're at risk of losing Carlos' teachings, which could easily fade into the same category as Madam Blavatsky: An entertaining fraud relegated mostly to intellectuals.
[-]
u/CruzWayne
3 points2019-06-17 20:35
One of the siddhis is to manifest in multiple places at the same time, and I've heard of Tibetans splitting in this way too, though usually from lifetime to lifetime. So it's not unheard of.
Understandably, people want to know if the teachings are legit before they test them out, so they go online or whatever and find out what the prevailing opinion is, which in the case of Carlos is not always favourable. Unfortunately, the only way of discovering if any teachings are legit is to try them, and wholeheartedly. I think it's inevitable the truth of these teachings will be discovered by only a very few. Personally, I'm totally sold on them, and I've had enough results from other traditions to have no doubts, but still that's no guarantee I'll make any headway.
People want instant gratification, and if they're just looking to add "shape-shifter" or whatever to their inventory, unfortunately they'll have to completely de-inventorise first, which not only requires a lot of hard work but also goes against their initial intention, which is to aggrandise the self. It's a quandary: if you want to discover the mysteries of the self in order to be more interesting to others, then you have to be totally empty of any concept of the self, which is threatening.
[-]
u/danl999
2 points2019-06-17 21:48
It's a very good explanation of our plight.
Once you can use the second attention on demand (get into heightened awareness), you'll suddenly realize the GENIUS of the idea of an Island of the Tonal.
It's not a weird explanation. It's what you discover once you can use the second attention.
Don Juan and don Genaro gave Carlos a first-hand demonstration of that when they "found" various objects all over the place they were hanging out.
The compact poop was a dig at Carlos, but at the same time, a complement. At least the poop on his Island of the Tonal was now more tidy.
I suspect they didn't even know what they'd find, since it was a demonstration of "creativity". (See my post on manifesting objects).
32 Comments
[deleted]
And the photoshop remnants.
The few Carlos pictures which exist could have used the benefit of photoshop. But I think they were all pre-computer.
[deleted]
You said he died? When exactly was that?
I'm not convinced Wikipedia has the right date. I was surprised when I saw it.
Leigh would know, but he's just a lurker most of the time.
[deleted]
Did he ever mention any other sorcerers in Peru?
One theory out there is, he actually learned sorcery in Peru, then studied Indians in southern California to get his PhD, which included the sorcerers at Morongo (closest reservation I know of which had sorcerers back then), plus the surrounding reservations leading all the way to Arizona.
Then he created don Juan. As far as I know, there's no actual evidence either way.
However, I have a friend from Peru who was running around in the early computer business back in the 80s, under the title of "Dr. So-And-So".
In truth, he was 17 years old. But it worked. Until amazingly beautiful young women started showing up and asking to be led to his office.
Turned out he'd started a modeling business also and was running it from his desk job.
When I learned that, my first thought was, no wonder Carlos was so tricky. It's peruvian.
[deleted]
Here's an excerpt from Wikipedia:
"As the community was besieged by Westerners wanting to experience the mushroom-induced hallucinations, Sabina attracted attention from the Mexican police who believed her to be a drug dealer. The unwanted attention completely altered the social dynamics of the Mazatec community and threatened to terminate the Mazatec custom. The community blamed Sabina, she was ostracized from her community and her house was razed. Sabina later regretted having introduced Wasson to the practice, but Wasson contended that his only intention was to contribute to the sum of human knowledge.[8][9][10]
Late in life, María Sabina became bitter about her many misfortunes, and how others had profited from her name.[11] She also felt that the ceremony of the velada had been irredeemably desecrated and polluted by the hedonistic use of the mushrooms:
From the moment the foreigners arrived, the 'holy children' lost their purity. They lost their force, they ruined them. Henceforth they will no longer work. There is no remedy for it."
I'll add that Lowell Bean, an anthropologist from UCR who wrote books on shamanic sorcery, criticized Carlos because don Juan talked like a college professor.
The quotes from Maria in there, about how she prays, matched what Lowell claimed was authentic for shamanism. A kind of "spaced out" interpretation of the world, similar to what happens to people who eat LSD all the time, and start associating random things in the environment as being part of a larger "omen".
(In other words, they start to believe the second attention as much as the first)
I knew Lowell as a child. But having just looked him up, I'm reminded that he's worth looking at if you want to understand the context of what Carlos did.
Here's what Maria sounded like from wikipedia:
***
It is sung in a shamanic trance in which, as she recounted, the "saint children" speak through her:
Because I can swim in the immense
Because I can swim in all forms
Because I am the launch woman
Because I am the sacred opposum
Because I am the Lord opposum
I am the woman Book that is beneath the water, says
I am the woman of the populous town, says
I am the shepherdess who is beneath the water, says
I am the woman who shepherds the immense, says
I am a shepherdess and I come with my shepherd, says
Because everything has its origin
And I come going from place to place from the origin ...[14]
***
(I prefer the college professor approach)
[deleted]
I'm going to be blunt here, but keep in mind, I hear this all the time. And not just in this group.
Like Carlos, I have multiple things going on, trying to preserve these techniques. And I don’t know if the following is true or not, but it’s probably better for all of you to assume it is in fact the truth.
I believe that’s just an excuse. The internal dialogue can make use of it at first. Up until then, it’s been the star of our universe. We’ve lived with the excitement of thinking too much about the opposite sex, thinking about the amazing cookies we’ll accumulate in our lives, working ourselves up into emotional frenzies over loved ones who actually aren’t all that nice. It both emphasizes and de-emphasizes whatever helps it remain in power.
But the truth is, it's the ultimate “poor baby me” monster.
In this case what it’s telling you (and then you typed it for us), "It hurts mommy, I can't stop the voices in my head or they'll punish me!"
But eventually the internal dialogue is demoted to untrusted invader. That’s probably why Carlos created the idea of “the fliers mind”, and then created a slimy monster who licks us, but never actually takes a bite.
[deleted]
That's certainly a surprise response. Keep posting what happens, it's valuable info.
I'm not entirely convinced someone couldn't create "marijuana sorcery", and embed it back at the Rosicrucians. I've been told their philosophy has gotten stale and doesn't actually work these days.
Trouble of course is what don Juan said, and what you affirmed: power plants damage the body.
[deleted]
Power plants do that.
I can testify to this. I actually haven't formally recapitulated in years, I just focused on "cleaning the island of my tonal" externally. I basically just tried to live better, and really follow not just Castaneda's precepts but the very best of what I was brought up with as well.
You just have to want it enough, that unbending intent. If you don't have the right silence stones, and the crystals are too hard to keep get in place in the dark, try to find some better ones. If you can't after really looking both in your environment and online, then make your own alternatives. That's what I'm doing, in a dense hardwood instead of carbon steel which I don't have the right tools to work effectively, again because I'll no longer accept excuses.
If you can't afford $70 top of the line eclipse goggles, look for alternates, and find open-eye total blackout sleep masks for $15-$30.
Having concrete tools that you can employ helps to discourage excuses by supporting your intent externally, and makes it easier and more efficient to practice.
Edit: here's my research on the open-eye masks:
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/bz3f28/misc_stuff/erajkot?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
I'd stick with the $5 ones from China, until we figure out how to use them.
I'll say it again: Gazing in twilight is far different than gazing in darkness.
And we have no instructions for twilight gazing.
I constantly have to refer back to Zuleica's instructions, when I can't do the latest scheme I've come up with, to make use of the ally. If she won't show, I have to resort to continuing Zuleica's path.
If I didn't have one, it would be a little discouraging.
I'm going to use the total blackout mask because you can keep your eyes open with it on, and banish the last traces of light leakage for Zuleica's total darkness dreaming techniques. Again, no more excuses.
I'll get to twilight gazing eventually.
Check out the original cover of "The Art of Dreaming".
If I'm not mistaken, that's a blackout mask.
I thought you meant Carlos Castaneda. That's certainly not him.
Carlos always looked like he was thinking of a joke.
[deleted]
[deleted]
In case anyone is interested… from some delving at least one person originally sourced this photo from
this video
[deleted]
I wish I'd saved the books Carlos autographed for me. We could compare signatures to the one he shows.
But it did look like the general layout of how Carlos signs books.
When he died, he set up a doozy of a scandal. I got rid of every artifact I accumulated, except that I forgot about several in the back of the garage.
I have a folder of images/scans of some of Castaneda's actual field notes for his Ph.D. dissertation from a site I skimmed years ago. They were an "easter egg" find. Again with the cookies...
Easter eggs are condemned in the bible. Something about making egg shaped cookies for the grove worship festival, where virgins run into the forest to be raped. If raped, they automatically become wives.
(Don't feel bad for them, they had older brothers and whoever rapes them is probably the one they wanted to get raped by.)
It comes from Isis, the goddess of the moon. She fell to earth and landed in the lake, in the form of an egg. The bunnies rolled her to the shore, and she became a goddess.
Oddly, her sex kept changing as the myth grew over time.
A signed first edition of The Art of Dreaming is here with just the page here. On first sight, not a great match, but signature consistency may not have been one of CC's priorities. He uses the tilde on the "n" in the one in the video, which would be the correct Spanish spelling.
I guess in the end it doesn't matter if that's an alternate form for Carlos.
Cleargreen has endorsed 3 "me-too" naguals in the last couple of months.
One was even friendly with the group before Carlos' died.
Kylie is said to have been found at a Ken Eagle Feather workshop.
Probably everyone is thinking the same thing: We're at risk of losing Carlos' teachings, which could easily fade into the same category as Madam Blavatsky: An entertaining fraud relegated mostly to intellectuals.
One of the siddhis is to manifest in multiple places at the same time, and I've heard of Tibetans splitting in this way too, though usually from lifetime to lifetime. So it's not unheard of.
Understandably, people want to know if the teachings are legit before they test them out, so they go online or whatever and find out what the prevailing opinion is, which in the case of Carlos is not always favourable. Unfortunately, the only way of discovering if any teachings are legit is to try them, and wholeheartedly. I think it's inevitable the truth of these teachings will be discovered by only a very few. Personally, I'm totally sold on them, and I've had enough results from other traditions to have no doubts, but still that's no guarantee I'll make any headway.
People want instant gratification, and if they're just looking to add "shape-shifter" or whatever to their inventory, unfortunately they'll have to completely de-inventorise first, which not only requires a lot of hard work but also goes against their initial intention, which is to aggrandise the self. It's a quandary: if you want to discover the mysteries of the self in order to be more interesting to others, then you have to be totally empty of any concept of the self, which is threatening.
It's a very good explanation of our plight.
Once you can use the second attention on demand (get into heightened awareness), you'll suddenly realize the GENIUS of the idea of an Island of the Tonal.
It's not a weird explanation. It's what you discover once you can use the second attention.
Don Juan and don Genaro gave Carlos a first-hand demonstration of that when they "found" various objects all over the place they were hanging out.
The compact poop was a dig at Carlos, but at the same time, a complement. At least the poop on his Island of the Tonal was now more tidy.
I suspect they didn't even know what they'd find, since it was a demonstration of "creativity". (See my post on manifesting objects).
[deleted]