Carlos Castaneda Overview

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Last-Updated: Mon Jan 19 01:19:27 MST 1998
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The Path of a Man of Knowledge

Source: ``The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge''; pages 82-87.

A man of knowledge is one who has followed truthfully the hardships
of learning. A man who has, without rushing or without faltering,
gone as far as he can in unraveling the secrets of power and
knowledge. To become a man of knowledge one must challenge and
defeat the four natural enemies.

The first enemy of a man of knowledge is Fear. A terrible
enemy--treacherous, and difficult to overcome. It remains
concealed at every turn of the way, prowling, waiting. And if
the man, terrified in its presence, runs away, his enemy will
have put an end to his quest. Once a man has vanquished fear,
he is free from it for the rest of his life because, instead of
fear, he has acquired clarity of mind which erases fear.

And thus he has encountered his second enemy; Clarity. That
clarity of mind, which is so hard to obtain, dispels fear, but
also blinds. If the man yields to this make-believe power, he
has succumbed to his second enemy and will be patient when he
should rush. And he will fumble with learning until he winds up
incapable of learning anything more.

He must defy his clarity and use it only to see, and wait patiently
and measure carefully before taking new steps; he must think,
above all, that his clarity is almost a mistake. And a moment
will come when he will understand that his clarity was only a
point before his eyes. And thus he will have overcome his second
enemy, and will arrive at a position where nothing can harm him
anymore. It will be true power; the third enemy of a man of
knowledge.

A man at this stage hardly notices his third enemy closing in on
him. And suddenly, without knowing, he will certainly have lost
the battle. His enemy will have turned him into a cruel, capricious
man. The man must defy his power, deliberately. He has to come
to realize the power he has seemingly conquered is in reality
never his. He will reach a point where everything is held in
check. He will know then when and how to use his power. And
thus he will have defeated his third enemy.

The man will be, by then, at the end of his journey of learning,
and almost without warning he will come upon the last of his
enemies: Old age. This enemy is the cruelest of all, the one he
won't be able to defeat completely, but only fight away. His
desire to retreat will overrule all his clarity, his power, and
his knowledge. But if the man sloughs off his tiredness, and
lives his fate through, he can then be called a man of knowledge,
if only for the brief moment when he succeeds in fighting off
his last, invincible enemy. That moment of clarity, power, and
knowledge is enough.

The Sorcerers' Explanation

Summarized from ``Tales of Power''.

The secret of the luminous beings is that we are perceivers, we
are an awareness without solidity or bounds. The world we think
we see is only a description of world told to us by our internal
dialog, a description that has been taught to us by others. We
are trapped inside that bubble of perception and what we witness
on its walls is a reflection of our world view, our description.

As luminous beings, our perception is controlled by the position
of our Assemblage Point (the point where our luminous being
focuses its awareness on the energy fibers of the universe).
There are infinite worlds outside our daily perceptions. By
stopping the internal dialog you break through this barrier to
the totality of oneself.

To this end sorcerers use "the right way of walking" as a practical
task; it saturates the tonal and without the one-to-one relation
with the elements of its description the tonal becomes silent.
Also used are acting without believing or expecting rewards;
erasing personal history; and "dreaming". To help erase personal
history the techniques of losing self-importance, assuming
responsibility, and using death as an adviser are applied. To
aide in "dreaming" the three techniques of disrupting the routines
of life, the gait of power, and not-doing are used. These
techniques are bound together by living like a warrior, to give
temperance and strength to withstand the path of knowledge.

pgs 272-278

The nagual is the unspeakable. All the possible feelings and
beings and selves float in it like barges, peaceful, unaltered,
forever. Then the glue of life binds some of them together and
a being is created. That being loses the sense of its true nature
and becomes blinded by the glare and clamor of the tonal, where
all unified organizations exist. That cluster is the bubble of
perception. The secret of the double is in the bubble of
perception. Through the nagual, the cluster of feelings can be
rearranged to any form and made to assemble instantly anywhere.
In other words, one can perceive the here and the there at once.
The nagual is witnessed by "will", and the tonal by "reason".

The tonal is but a reflection of that indescribable unknown filled
with order; the nagual is but a reflection of that indescribable
void that contains everything.

The Seven Gates of Dreaming

Summarized from ``The Art of Dreaming''.

First Gate:
You reach the first gate when you become aware you are falling
asleep or have a gigantically real dream. You cross the first
gate when you are able to sustain the sight of any item in your
dream.

In order to offset the evanescent quality of dreams, sorcerers
have devised the use of the starting point item. Every time
you isolate it and look at it, you get a surge of energy.
The most convenient thing to use is your hands (which follows
naturally from looking for your hands in your dreams). Originally it was your penis, but Castaneda's publishers made him change it! Women don't need to find their hands (or vaginas). They can enter dreaming directly.

Second Gate:
You cross the second gate when you are able to change from
dream to dream. For example, you wake up from a dream in
another dream or use an item of your dream to trigger another
dream.

Third Gate:
You reach the third gate when you dream yourself asleep. You
cross the third gate by moving your energy body after having
done so. At the third gate you begin to merge your dreaming
reality with the reality of the daily world.

Fourth Gate:
At the fourth gate, the energy body travels to specific, concrete
places either in this world, out of this world, or places that
exist only in the intent of others.

Go to sleep in a certain position, then in dreaming, dream that
you lie down in the same position and fall asleep again. This
is called the twin positions and it solidifies your dreaming
attention. The second dream is intending in the second attention:
the only way to cross the fourth gate of dreaming.

(the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Gates are not described in the books)

source - ftp://ftp.earth.com/pub/archive/cc/castaneda-overview