01-18-2006, 12:00 AM
From his last book "The Active Side Of Infinity" Carlos Castaneda writes:
"If you pay close attention to the darkness of the foliage without focusing your eyes, but sort of look at it from the corner of your eye, you will see a fleeting shadow crossing your field of vision.
Early night is the appropriate time of day for doing what I am asking you to do. It takes a moment to engage the necessary attention in you to do it. Don't stop until you catch that fleeting black shadow, fleeting black shadows all over the place. That's the universe at large, incommensurable, nonlinear, outside the realm of syntax. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were the first ones to see those fleeting shadows, so they followed them around. They saw them as you will see them, and they saw them as energy that flows in the universe. And they did discover something transcendental. They discovered that we have a companion for life. We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The predator is our lord and master. It has rendered us docile, helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it demands that we don't do so.
It's pitch black around us, but if you look out of the corner of your eye, you will still see fleeting shadows jumping all around you.
You have arrived, by your effort alone, to what the shamans of ancient Mexico called the topic of topics. I have been beating around the bush all this time, insinuating to you that something is holding us prisoner. Indeed we are held prisoner! This was an energetic fact for the sorcerers of ancient Mexico.
There is an explanation which is the simplest explanation in the world. They took over because we are food for them, and they squeeze us mercilessly because we are their sustenance. Just as we rear chickens in chicken coops, the predators rear us in human coops. Therefore, their food is always available to them.
Well, you haven't heart it all yet. Wait a bit longer and see how you feel. I'm going to subject you to a blitz. That is, I'm going to subject your mind to tremendous onslaughts, and you cannot get up and leave because you're caught. Not because I'm holding you prisoner, but because something in you will prevent you from leaving, while another part of you is going to go truthfully berserk. So brace yourself!
I want to appeal to your analytical mind. Think for a moment, and tell me how you would explain the contradiction between the intelligence of man the engineer and the stupidity of his systems of beliefs, or the stupidity of his contradictory behavior. Sorcerers believe that the predators have given us our systems of beliefs, our ideas of good and evil, our social mores. They are the ones who set up our hopes and expectations and dreams of success or failure. They have given us covetousness, greed, and cowardice. It is the predators who make us complacent, routinary, and egomaniacal.
In order to keep us obedient and meek and weak, the predators engaged themselves in a stupendous maneuver&endash;stupendous, of course, from the point of view of a fighting strategist. A horrendous maneuver from the point of view of those who suffer it. They gave us their mind! Do you hear me? The predators give us their mind, which becomes our mind. The predators' mind is baroque, contradictory, morose, filled with the fear of being discovered any minute now.
I know that even though you have never suffered hunger you have food anxiety, which is none other than the anxiety of the predator who fears that any moment now its maneuver is going to be uncovered and food is going to be denied. Through the mind, which, after all, is their mind, the predators inject into the lives of human beings whatever is convenient for them. And they ensure, in this manner, a degree of security to act as a buffer against their fear.
Sorcerers see infant human beings as strange, luminous balls of energy, covered from the top to the bottom with a glowing coat, something like a plastic cover that is adjusted tightly over their cocoon of energy. That glowing coat of awareness is what the predators consume, and when a human being reaches adulthood, all that is left of that glowing coat of awareness is a narrow fringe that goes from the ground to the top of the toes. That fringe permits mankind to continue living, but only barely.
To my knowledge, man is the only species that has the glowing coat of awareness outside that luminous cocoon. Therefore, he became easy prey for an awareness of a different order, such as the heavy awareness of the predator.
This narrow fringe of awareness is the epicenter of self-reflection, where man is irremediably caught. By playing on our self-reflection, which is the only point of awareness left to us, the predators create flares of awareness that they proceed to consume in a ruthless, predatory fashion. They give us inane problems that force those flares of awareness to rise, and in this manner they keep us alive in order to them to be fed with the energetic flare of our pseudoconcerns.
There's nothing that you and I can do about it. All we can do is discipline ourselves to the point where they will not touch us. How can you ask your fellow men to go through those rigors of discipline? They'll laugh and make fun of you, and the more aggressive ones will beat the **** out of you. And not so much because they don't believe it. Down in the depths of every human being, there's an ancestral, visceral knowledge about the predators' existence.
Whenever doubts plague you to a dangerous point, do something pragmatic about it. Turn off the light. Pierce the darkness; find out what you can see.
You saw the fleeting shadows against the trees, that's pretty good. I'd like you to see them inside this room. You're not seeing anything. You're just merely catching fleeting images. You have enough energy for that.
The sorcerers of ancient Mexico saw the predator. They called it the flyer because it leaps through the air. It is not a pretty sight. It is a big shadow, impenetrably dark, a black shadow that jumps through the air. Then, it lands flat on the ground. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were quite ill at ease with the idea of when it made its appearance on Earth. They reasoned that man must have been a complete being at one point, with stupendous insights, feats of awareness that are mythological legends nowadays. And then everything seems to disappear, and we have now a sedated man.
What I'm saying is that what we have against us is not a simple predator. It is very smart, and organized. It follows a methodical system to render us useless. Man, the magical being that he is destined to be, is no longer magical. He's an average piece of meat. There are no more dreams for man but the dreams of an animal who is being raised to become a piece of meat: trite, conventional, imbecilic.
This predator, which, of course, is an inorganic being, is not altogether invisible to us, as other inorganic beings are, I think as children we do see it and decide it's so horrific that we don't want to think about it. Children, of course, could insist on focusing on the sight, but everybody else around them dissuades them from doing so.
The only alternative left for mankind is discipline. Discipline is the only deterrent. But by discipline I don't mean harsh routines. I don't mean waking up every morning at five-thirty and throwing cold water on yourself until you're blue. Sorcerers understand discipline as the capacity to face with serenity odds that are not included in our expectations. For them, discipline is an art: the art of facing infinity without flinching, not because they are strong and tough but because they are filled with awe.
Sorcerers say that discipline makes the glowing coat of awareness unpalatable to the flyer. The result is that the predators become bewildered. An inedible glowing coat of awareness is not part of their cognition, I suppose. After being bewildered, they don't have any recourse other than refraining from continuing their nefarious task.
If the predators don't eat our glowing coat of awareness for a while, it'll keep on glowing. Simplifying this matter to the extreme, I can say that sorcerers, by means of their discipline, push the predators away long enough to allow their glowing coat of awareness to grow beyond the level of the toes. Once it goes beyond the level of the toes, it grows back to its natural size. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico used to say that the glowing coat of awareness is like a tree. If it is not pruned, it grows to its natural size and volume. As awareness reaches levels higher than the toes, tremendous maneuvers of perception become a matter of course.
The grand trick of those sorcerers of ancient times 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 a 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.
My teacher, the nagual Julian, used to warn all his disciples that this was the toughest day in a sorcerer's life, for the real mind that belongs to us, the sum total of our experience, after a lifetime of domination has been rendered shy, insecure, and shifty. Personally, I would say that the real battle of sorcerers begins at that moment. The rest is merely preparation.
Discipline taxes the foreign mind no end, so, through their discipline, sorcerers vanquish the foreign installation.
I am going to give the flyers' mind, which you carry inside you, one more jolt. I am going to reveal to you one of the most extraordinary secrets of sorcery. I am going to describe to you a finding that took sorcerers thousands of years to verify and consolidate.
The flyers' mind flees forever when a sorcerer succeeds in grabbing on to the vibrating force that holds us together as a conglomerate of energy fields. If a sorcerer maintains that pressure long enough, the flyers' mind flees in defeat. And that's exactly what you are going to do: hold on to the energy that binds you together.
You are fearing the wrath of God, aren't you? Rest assured, that's not your fear. It's the flyers' fear, because it knows that you will do exactly as I'm telling you.
Don't worry, I know for a fact that those attacks wear off very quickly. The flyers' mind has no concentration whatsoever. You're being torn by an internal struggle. Down in the depths of you, you know that you are incapable of refusing the agreement that an indispensable part of you, your glowing coat of awareness, is going to serve as an incomprehensible source of nourishment to, naturally, incomprehensible entities. And another part of you will stand against this situation with all its might.
The sorcerers' revolution is that they refuse to honor agreements in which they did not participate. Nobody ever asked me if I would consent to be eaten by beings of a different kind of awareness. My parents just brought me into this world to be food, like themselves, and that's the end of the story.
The more you think about it, and the more you talk to and observe yourself and your fellow men, the more intense will be the conviction that something has rendered us incapable of any activity or any interaction or any thought that doesn't have the self as its focal point. Your concern, as well as the concern of everyone you know or talk to, is the self.
Focus your attention on the fleeting shadows that you actually see. The flyers' mind has not left you, it has been seriously injured. It's trying its best to rearrange its relationship with you. But something in you is severed forever. The flyer knows that. The real danger is that the flyers' mind may win by getting you tired and forcing you to quit by playing the contradiction between what it says and what I say.
You see, the flyers' mind has no competitors, when it proposed something, it agrees with its own proposition, and it makes you believe that you've done something of worth. The flyers' mind will say to you that whatever Juan Matus is telling you is pure nonsense, and then the same mind will agree with its own proposition, "Yes, of course, it is nonsense," you will say. That's the way they overcome us.
The flyers are an essential part of the universe and they must be taken as what they really are&endash;awesome, monstrous. They are the means by which the universe tests us.
We are energetic probes created by the universe, and it's because we are possessors of energy that has awareness that we are the means by which the universe becomes aware of itself. The flyers are the implacable challengers. They cannot be taken as anything else. If we succeed in doing that, the universe allows us to continue.
It's time for another kind of maneuver. I want to propose a weird idea to you. I have to stress that it's a weird idea that will find endless resistance in you. I will tell you beforehand that you won't accept it easily. But the fact that it's weird should not be a deterrent. Your mind is always open to inquiry, isn't that so?
The weird idea is that every human being on this earth seems to have exactly the same reactions, the same thoughts, the same feelings. They seem to respond in more or less the same way to the same stimuli. Those reactions seem to be sort of fogged up by the language they speak, but if we scrape that off, they are exactly the same reactions that besiege every human being on Earth. I would like you to become curious about this and see if you could formally account for such homogeneity.
A task for you one day will be to see the predator. It is one of the most mysterious things of sorcerer, something that goes beyond language, beyond explanations. The mystery of sorcerer must be cushioned in the mundane. It must stem from nothing, and go back again to nothing. That's the art of warrior-travelers: to go through the eye of a needle unnoticed. Someday, when you are ready, sit and brace yourself by propping your back against something. Cross your legs and enter into inner silence. Enter into inner silence, but don't fall asleep. This won't be a journey through the dark sea of awareness, it will be seeing from inner silence.
When you can see from inner silence, the predator may appear as a gigantic shadow, leaping in the air and then landing with a silent thud. They are really heavy. Don't be frightened. Keep your inner silence and it will move away.
The predator is not something benevolent. It is enormously heavy, gross, indifferent. You can feel its disregard for us. Doubtless, it has crushed us ages ago, making us weak, vulnerable, and docile. You have your unbending intent, not to let them eat you."
"If you pay close attention to the darkness of the foliage without focusing your eyes, but sort of look at it from the corner of your eye, you will see a fleeting shadow crossing your field of vision.
Early night is the appropriate time of day for doing what I am asking you to do. It takes a moment to engage the necessary attention in you to do it. Don't stop until you catch that fleeting black shadow, fleeting black shadows all over the place. That's the universe at large, incommensurable, nonlinear, outside the realm of syntax. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were the first ones to see those fleeting shadows, so they followed them around. They saw them as you will see them, and they saw them as energy that flows in the universe. And they did discover something transcendental. They discovered that we have a companion for life. We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The predator is our lord and master. It has rendered us docile, helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it demands that we don't do so.
It's pitch black around us, but if you look out of the corner of your eye, you will still see fleeting shadows jumping all around you.
You have arrived, by your effort alone, to what the shamans of ancient Mexico called the topic of topics. I have been beating around the bush all this time, insinuating to you that something is holding us prisoner. Indeed we are held prisoner! This was an energetic fact for the sorcerers of ancient Mexico.
There is an explanation which is the simplest explanation in the world. They took over because we are food for them, and they squeeze us mercilessly because we are their sustenance. Just as we rear chickens in chicken coops, the predators rear us in human coops. Therefore, their food is always available to them.
Well, you haven't heart it all yet. Wait a bit longer and see how you feel. I'm going to subject you to a blitz. That is, I'm going to subject your mind to tremendous onslaughts, and you cannot get up and leave because you're caught. Not because I'm holding you prisoner, but because something in you will prevent you from leaving, while another part of you is going to go truthfully berserk. So brace yourself!
I want to appeal to your analytical mind. Think for a moment, and tell me how you would explain the contradiction between the intelligence of man the engineer and the stupidity of his systems of beliefs, or the stupidity of his contradictory behavior. Sorcerers believe that the predators have given us our systems of beliefs, our ideas of good and evil, our social mores. They are the ones who set up our hopes and expectations and dreams of success or failure. They have given us covetousness, greed, and cowardice. It is the predators who make us complacent, routinary, and egomaniacal.
In order to keep us obedient and meek and weak, the predators engaged themselves in a stupendous maneuver&endash;stupendous, of course, from the point of view of a fighting strategist. A horrendous maneuver from the point of view of those who suffer it. They gave us their mind! Do you hear me? The predators give us their mind, which becomes our mind. The predators' mind is baroque, contradictory, morose, filled with the fear of being discovered any minute now.
I know that even though you have never suffered hunger you have food anxiety, which is none other than the anxiety of the predator who fears that any moment now its maneuver is going to be uncovered and food is going to be denied. Through the mind, which, after all, is their mind, the predators inject into the lives of human beings whatever is convenient for them. And they ensure, in this manner, a degree of security to act as a buffer against their fear.
Sorcerers see infant human beings as strange, luminous balls of energy, covered from the top to the bottom with a glowing coat, something like a plastic cover that is adjusted tightly over their cocoon of energy. That glowing coat of awareness is what the predators consume, and when a human being reaches adulthood, all that is left of that glowing coat of awareness is a narrow fringe that goes from the ground to the top of the toes. That fringe permits mankind to continue living, but only barely.
To my knowledge, man is the only species that has the glowing coat of awareness outside that luminous cocoon. Therefore, he became easy prey for an awareness of a different order, such as the heavy awareness of the predator.
This narrow fringe of awareness is the epicenter of self-reflection, where man is irremediably caught. By playing on our self-reflection, which is the only point of awareness left to us, the predators create flares of awareness that they proceed to consume in a ruthless, predatory fashion. They give us inane problems that force those flares of awareness to rise, and in this manner they keep us alive in order to them to be fed with the energetic flare of our pseudoconcerns.
There's nothing that you and I can do about it. All we can do is discipline ourselves to the point where they will not touch us. How can you ask your fellow men to go through those rigors of discipline? They'll laugh and make fun of you, and the more aggressive ones will beat the **** out of you. And not so much because they don't believe it. Down in the depths of every human being, there's an ancestral, visceral knowledge about the predators' existence.
Whenever doubts plague you to a dangerous point, do something pragmatic about it. Turn off the light. Pierce the darkness; find out what you can see.
You saw the fleeting shadows against the trees, that's pretty good. I'd like you to see them inside this room. You're not seeing anything. You're just merely catching fleeting images. You have enough energy for that.
The sorcerers of ancient Mexico saw the predator. They called it the flyer because it leaps through the air. It is not a pretty sight. It is a big shadow, impenetrably dark, a black shadow that jumps through the air. Then, it lands flat on the ground. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were quite ill at ease with the idea of when it made its appearance on Earth. They reasoned that man must have been a complete being at one point, with stupendous insights, feats of awareness that are mythological legends nowadays. And then everything seems to disappear, and we have now a sedated man.
What I'm saying is that what we have against us is not a simple predator. It is very smart, and organized. It follows a methodical system to render us useless. Man, the magical being that he is destined to be, is no longer magical. He's an average piece of meat. There are no more dreams for man but the dreams of an animal who is being raised to become a piece of meat: trite, conventional, imbecilic.
This predator, which, of course, is an inorganic being, is not altogether invisible to us, as other inorganic beings are, I think as children we do see it and decide it's so horrific that we don't want to think about it. Children, of course, could insist on focusing on the sight, but everybody else around them dissuades them from doing so.
The only alternative left for mankind is discipline. Discipline is the only deterrent. But by discipline I don't mean harsh routines. I don't mean waking up every morning at five-thirty and throwing cold water on yourself until you're blue. Sorcerers understand discipline as the capacity to face with serenity odds that are not included in our expectations. For them, discipline is an art: the art of facing infinity without flinching, not because they are strong and tough but because they are filled with awe.
Sorcerers say that discipline makes the glowing coat of awareness unpalatable to the flyer. The result is that the predators become bewildered. An inedible glowing coat of awareness is not part of their cognition, I suppose. After being bewildered, they don't have any recourse other than refraining from continuing their nefarious task.
If the predators don't eat our glowing coat of awareness for a while, it'll keep on glowing. Simplifying this matter to the extreme, I can say that sorcerers, by means of their discipline, push the predators away long enough to allow their glowing coat of awareness to grow beyond the level of the toes. Once it goes beyond the level of the toes, it grows back to its natural size. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico used to say that the glowing coat of awareness is like a tree. If it is not pruned, it grows to its natural size and volume. As awareness reaches levels higher than the toes, tremendous maneuvers of perception become a matter of course.
The grand trick of those sorcerers of ancient times 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 a 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.
My teacher, the nagual Julian, used to warn all his disciples that this was the toughest day in a sorcerer's life, for the real mind that belongs to us, the sum total of our experience, after a lifetime of domination has been rendered shy, insecure, and shifty. Personally, I would say that the real battle of sorcerers begins at that moment. The rest is merely preparation.
Discipline taxes the foreign mind no end, so, through their discipline, sorcerers vanquish the foreign installation.
I am going to give the flyers' mind, which you carry inside you, one more jolt. I am going to reveal to you one of the most extraordinary secrets of sorcery. I am going to describe to you a finding that took sorcerers thousands of years to verify and consolidate.
The flyers' mind flees forever when a sorcerer succeeds in grabbing on to the vibrating force that holds us together as a conglomerate of energy fields. If a sorcerer maintains that pressure long enough, the flyers' mind flees in defeat. And that's exactly what you are going to do: hold on to the energy that binds you together.
You are fearing the wrath of God, aren't you? Rest assured, that's not your fear. It's the flyers' fear, because it knows that you will do exactly as I'm telling you.
Don't worry, I know for a fact that those attacks wear off very quickly. The flyers' mind has no concentration whatsoever. You're being torn by an internal struggle. Down in the depths of you, you know that you are incapable of refusing the agreement that an indispensable part of you, your glowing coat of awareness, is going to serve as an incomprehensible source of nourishment to, naturally, incomprehensible entities. And another part of you will stand against this situation with all its might.
The sorcerers' revolution is that they refuse to honor agreements in which they did not participate. Nobody ever asked me if I would consent to be eaten by beings of a different kind of awareness. My parents just brought me into this world to be food, like themselves, and that's the end of the story.
The more you think about it, and the more you talk to and observe yourself and your fellow men, the more intense will be the conviction that something has rendered us incapable of any activity or any interaction or any thought that doesn't have the self as its focal point. Your concern, as well as the concern of everyone you know or talk to, is the self.
Focus your attention on the fleeting shadows that you actually see. The flyers' mind has not left you, it has been seriously injured. It's trying its best to rearrange its relationship with you. But something in you is severed forever. The flyer knows that. The real danger is that the flyers' mind may win by getting you tired and forcing you to quit by playing the contradiction between what it says and what I say.
You see, the flyers' mind has no competitors, when it proposed something, it agrees with its own proposition, and it makes you believe that you've done something of worth. The flyers' mind will say to you that whatever Juan Matus is telling you is pure nonsense, and then the same mind will agree with its own proposition, "Yes, of course, it is nonsense," you will say. That's the way they overcome us.
The flyers are an essential part of the universe and they must be taken as what they really are&endash;awesome, monstrous. They are the means by which the universe tests us.
We are energetic probes created by the universe, and it's because we are possessors of energy that has awareness that we are the means by which the universe becomes aware of itself. The flyers are the implacable challengers. They cannot be taken as anything else. If we succeed in doing that, the universe allows us to continue.
It's time for another kind of maneuver. I want to propose a weird idea to you. I have to stress that it's a weird idea that will find endless resistance in you. I will tell you beforehand that you won't accept it easily. But the fact that it's weird should not be a deterrent. Your mind is always open to inquiry, isn't that so?
The weird idea is that every human being on this earth seems to have exactly the same reactions, the same thoughts, the same feelings. They seem to respond in more or less the same way to the same stimuli. Those reactions seem to be sort of fogged up by the language they speak, but if we scrape that off, they are exactly the same reactions that besiege every human being on Earth. I would like you to become curious about this and see if you could formally account for such homogeneity.
A task for you one day will be to see the predator. It is one of the most mysterious things of sorcerer, something that goes beyond language, beyond explanations. The mystery of sorcerer must be cushioned in the mundane. It must stem from nothing, and go back again to nothing. That's the art of warrior-travelers: to go through the eye of a needle unnoticed. Someday, when you are ready, sit and brace yourself by propping your back against something. Cross your legs and enter into inner silence. Enter into inner silence, but don't fall asleep. This won't be a journey through the dark sea of awareness, it will be seeing from inner silence.
When you can see from inner silence, the predator may appear as a gigantic shadow, leaping in the air and then landing with a silent thud. They are really heavy. Don't be frightened. Keep your inner silence and it will move away.
The predator is not something benevolent. It is enormously heavy, gross, indifferent. You can feel its disregard for us. Doubtless, it has crushed us ages ago, making us weak, vulnerable, and docile. You have your unbending intent, not to let them eat you."