05-27-2005, 12:00 AM
Here is an interesting interview from the past. If it has been seen before, please excuse this post. I find it quite useful!
Dok
Ken Eagle Feather
An Eagles Eye View of Don Juan and the Toltec Path
Interviewed by William J. Evarts
------------------------------------------------------------
SEVERAL BOOKS HAVE BEEN
WRITTEN BY CARLOS CASTANEDA
over the last few decades, recounting his experiences in the mysterious, awareness expanding world of sorcery, guided by a Mexican Indian sorcerer named don Juan. More recently, two women, Florinda Donner-Grau and Taisha Abelar have come forward with their own books about their adventures in sorcery and their affiliation with the legendary don Juan and Carlos Castaneda.
Until recently, however, another student of don Juan, Ken Eagle Feather, has remained in relative obscurity in comparison to the others. I first became aware of him by picking up his book,Traveling With Power, in a local new age bookstore. On the book cover I read that Ken had been a student of don Juan. I was intrigued and read the book, which delineates not only his experiences with don Juan but also his fascinating work at the Monroe Institute, involving the exploration and development of perception.
To my surprise, I found getting in touch with Ken as easy as writing him a letter. He responded personally. Later on I attended his seminar on developing perception and have stayed in touch ever since. I have known him about a year.
A towering, lean figure, Ken Eagle Feather stands around 6'5". His eyes are dark, shiny and penetrating. His hair is thick and dark, speckled with grey but in spite of it, he appears ten years younger than his actual forty something years. Observing Ken during the seminar, I noticed economical, graceful movements, a person totally comfortable and relaxed, yet fully aware and engaged in the moment. When a participant asked him a question, I was impressed with his patience and thorough answers. As I think back now, he fit my preconceived notion of what a warrior should be.
Ken first began his investigations into the nature of consciousness in 1963, when he used the Edgar Cayce readings at the Association for Research and Enlightenment in Virginia Beach, Virginia, to research a high school term paper on Atlantis.
Today he resides in Florida, writing books, expanding his awareness and traveling around the country delivering seminars on the exploration and development of perception. I caught up with him recently by telephone to discuss don Juan, Carlos Castaneda and A Toltec Path.
How did you first meet don Juan?
Ken Eagle Feather: I first met him while walking down Speedway Boulevard, a main avenue in Tucson, Arizona. The year before I physically met don Juan, I had a vision of him. It was during this period that I cured myself of a bleeding ulcer, and as it turns out, this was my introduction to all this. By practicing the techniques presented in Castaneda's books, specifically Journey to Ixtlan and Tales of Power, I was able to heal myself of the disease.
At this point I was running more on intuition than I ever had in my life, and I was pulled, driven, pushed--however you want to look at it--out to Arizona. The first thing on my mind was to meet somebody on par with don Juan. And also I went there to get back into college. It was quite beyond my imagination that I would actually meet the man.
I was living out there for about six months when one day I was walking to class and was a little late, so I was in a hurry. There was this Indian coming toward me on the same side of the street walking very purposefully. He had great command of himself without being externally commanding. He looked like what Carlos Castaneda's books referred to as having a "proper tonal."
I looked at him awkwardly, gawked at him and he looked at me like I didn't know what was going on in the world, and so I just passed him. I got to class and a wave of energy broke over me, telling me that the man I passed was don Juan. I kicked myself in the butt for not being alert enough to take action right then and there. But I also told myself I'd stop and talk with him if I ever saw him again.
A couple of days later, I was driving around on the outskirts of town, and I saw the same man again, only this time he looked drunk. He was stumbling around with his shirt pulled out over his pants, whereas the first time his shirt and sweater were buttoned all the way up. He appeared very proper and together. Now he was stumbling around as though he was drunk. It took me aback, but the more I gazed at him, the more I noticed he was doing it deliberately. It was like an act.
When I approached him, he straightened right up and assumed more of a proper demeanor. I went up to him and exchanged a few words. I really couldn't tell you what they were because I was shaking in my boots. I was very intimidated, and as I turned to leave, I heard, "lose your self importance," screaming in my head. It was his voice. After that I met him many times over the next three years, and it was always within the Tucson city limits, although he was also in my dreams giving me lessons as well.
Did he ever indicate to you who he was?
Ken Eagle Feather: I asked him once if he was don Juan, the man who taught Castaneda, and he said yes. Although part of me knew it was him when I first met him, there was also a part of me that just wouldn't accept it, and I was wracked by doubt. As time went on, I was aware that he would enter my dreams and actually manipulate the content. In the physical world I once saw him turn his head luminous, as though he had turned into a candle. On another occasion he changed his brown eyes to blue. He would do things like that which eventually left no doubt that he was don Juan. Of course verbally verifying it was crucial. That's when I relaxed a bit more.
What years were you were under his tutelage?
Ken Eagle Feather: About ten years, from the mid seventies to the mid eighties. I moved back to Florida in the late seventies and I would still have visions and dreams of him. He would give me instructions this way. This is how the communications continued. And then around 1983, all of the pieces of his teachings fell into place, a gestalt if you will. There have been times since then when I have been really hard pressed with a question. I'll tune into his energy and feel the response. Whether this is energy he implanted in me or actual real time one-on-one communications, I couldn't say.
Did you ever ask don Juan where he had gone, considering by Castaneda's account he had left the physical realm in the early seventies?
Ken Eagle Feather: Don Juan and his team executed the Fire from Within and evolved their physical mass into another dimension. He never addressed this issue with me specifically. It is my sense he reconstituted, if you will, his physical mass back into this dimension to perform certain tasks. One of those tasks may have been to give me lessons from time to time.
When I saw him I was always left with two memories. A right-side and a left-side body memory. On the right-side memory I would see him coming from the horizon, where if he took one step backward he would vanish. With the left-side memory I would see him descending an imaginary staircase coming out of a field of light. And when those two memories intersected, I would have another memory which was actually seeing him in the physical world. I think it was a matter of bringing his two energy fields together--the tonal and the nagual, or the first and second attentions--binding them together and pinpointing them on planet earth so he could appear physically. He would leave again by re-evolving his physical mass back into another dimension.
What is your definition of stalking and dreaming?
Ken Eagle Feather: Stalking consists of actions that enable you to garner internal integrity. It also has to do with the way you conduct yourself with other people in the way of strategy and tactics. Dreaming involves activities in the second attention, or what I call the second energy field, where you are dealing with the energy body of the luminous body. Basically, stalking involves the physical body while dreaming encompasses the entire energy body. Stalking is very focused, giving you fortitude. Dreaming is expansive in that it opens you up, enabling you to make significant leaps in awareness. Stalking tends to come first in that it allows you to maintain balance to handle the expansive forays of consciousness applied by dreaming.
What, in your opinion, is the ultimate objective of Toltec practices?
Ken Eagle Feather: I don't see an ultimate objective. I see an infinite ladder of practical objectives. But if you wanted to take it all the way from a human perspective, it would be the execution of the Fire from Within, which in my mind is the equivalent of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who resurrected his physical mass and put it in a more heavenly dimension. And so if there is an ultimate, it places you at the door of infinity. And if you are at the door of infinity, there is no end. It is a never ending story. If you are up to the adventure and mystery of it all, the Toltec path is one way to travel.
How does all of this tie together with the notion of God, or your notion of God?
Ken Eagle Feather: Don Juan was not one to really label the source of creation as God, because of his dealings with the Catholics who invaded Mexico. They tended to personify God and make it an entity that had rule and sway over our lives. One of the reasons I think he was of this mind was because he had developed his own perception to such an abstract level that to view God as a personified entity was rather foolhardy. The source of creation might be viewed as the Eagle and the Eagle's emanations, but we also have to balance that with the idea of the human mold.
Many times when people expand their consciousness through meditation or through near death experiences, they encounter a beam of light, and they come back thinking they found God or the ultimate answer to creation. Don Juan says they have met the human mold. And so when you meet the human mold, you are finding the energy that is all that is human. When a person dips into this energy, the first reaction is they have found everything, projecting and expanding from that state to all creation and mistakenly, I think, creating God in our image.
Do you, metaphorically speaking, see the Eagle, as referred to in Castaneda's bookThe Eagle's Gift, as the source of creation?
Ken Eagle Feather: Yes, that's one definition, that the Eagle is the source of all creation, the principal energy source from which all manifestations emanate, hence the Eagle's emanations. The human band of emanations is just one very narrow one out of an infinite number of bands. To think that we know the sum total of existence solely based upon the human capacity to perceive is walking the tightrope of foolishness.
From my understanding, the Eagle provides certain people the ability to perpetuate their awareness forever. What happens to the people who haven't garnered enough energy to do this? Are they simply snuffed out at the moment of death?
Ken Eagle Feather: I think there's a whole number of things that can happen, depending how you look at it. We can, and at the same time cannot, bring in reincarnation. Don Juan, in one of Carlos' books, talks about how the energy body dissipates and chunks of personal awareness fly off in different directions. Perhaps one of those chunks flies off and meets up with seven chunks from seven different people and reorganizes into a single human awareness. So if a person who is that awareness now remembers a past life, is he just remembering a chunk of a previous sub-entity? Keep in mind, we are looking at this idea in linear terms, a cause and effect proposition, that there is a continuity of soul travel. I believe there's an infinite number of possibilities upon death, depending where you are focused.
Perhaps engaging the Fire from Within is the same as breaking the wheel of rebirth that we find in Eastern philosophies, so one is no longer subject to the forces of reincarnation. To elaborate further on reincarnation, we could shift from linear time to explore simultaneous, multiple reincarnations. So individual lives occurring in 1700, 1800 and 1900 all exist at the same time. It's only a matter of where you focus consciousness that determines which of these lives you experience. But then you can continue to work with this information and energy and get to a point where you identify yourself with every person in all places at all times. Once you take yourself to this level of abstraction, it completely collapses any model of reincarnation.
Each of these views is valid and correct in its own discipline, its own way of looking at the world. Each has its own integrity, which can be validated through your own experience, depending on where you want to focus yourself. You get to the point where the ultimate abstraction, if you will, is to just come back down and live your life day-by-day and do what you have to do, right here and right now, and work to expand your abstractions from ground zero or, as in the phrase Ram Dass made famous, "Be Here Now."
It is my understanding the assemblage point of all humankind is located on the same position--the position of "reason." Do you think that maybe God wants this assemblage point to remain locked in its present position and doesn't intend for humankind to move it?
Ken Eagle Feather: (laughing) I suppose you could garner some evidence for that statement. The other part of it is we have a number of systems--The Toltec Way, Buddhism, Esoteric Christianity, Taoism, Zen Buddhism--all challenging the ordinary position of the assemblage point. By enacting and living any of these systems you learn how to move the assemblage point. My counterpoint to your statement is that God gave us all these systems so we wouldn't be relegated to keeping our assemblage point in one place.
In Castaneda's book The Art of Dreaming, don Juan claims that inorganic beings have assemblage points that can be moved as well. Is it possible for them to move it so they appear in our first attention?
Ken Eagle Feather: Yes. It is my understanding their principal avenue of journey is through dreaming. There are inorganic beings all around, and it's a matter of expanding awareness to incorporate them, just like we incorporated the notion of space flight years ago. If enough people have developed the notion of inorganic beings then, as a culture, they would be brought into our worldview.
I think don Juan was very clear that the preeminent use of the inorganic world was that once you go into that world and experience a complete universe filled with intelligent, sentient entities that have no direct relationship with our world what-so-ever, reason can no longer uphold its normal mode, and ordinary rationalityis rendered obsolete. Reason is one of the principal forces keeping the assemblage point in a standard position. Once this force is interdicted, you've taken a tremendous stride in opening doors to other realities.
It may be we are getting into a time when the need to visit the inorganic world is becoming obsolete. There might be enough pressure coming from other sources, such as those we find in the new age movement. The Message Down Under and the Celestine Prophesy both have been on the New York Times' best seller list for months, and they are "new age novels." To have society sustain this kind of energy, inquiry and interest for this length of time is an indication that perhaps an additional force is applying pressure to the assemblage point.
According to don Juan, the average man's awareness at the moment of death is devoured by the Eagle. Isn't this kind of a bleak future for most of us?
Ken Eagle Feather: No, not necessarily. Some people could give a hoot about doing the Fire from Within. They figure they have a full life without engaging that adventure. I'd just as soon not carry around the bias that you're less of a person if you don't choose this particular path.
Say, for example, you have individual awareness at death beginning to expand, and as it does so it experiences more of its totality. As consciousness expands, it is naturally going to touch the Eagle, the ultimate abstract force. If the individual isn't trained to handle energetic abstractions, awareness will be ripped apart through contact with the abstract, because there's nothing to relate to anymore.
Now if a person has been devoted to building an abstract life and is evolving internal energies to be abstract, when their energy expands and they hit the major abstract force, they can handle it and go through the tension that normally pulls you apart. Part of the training is to completely let go and know you don't know a darn thing. The more you know that you don't know anything, the more abstract your individual awareness becomes. Then you'll be fine and dandy without knowing anything, because you'll be at home in the total mystery of the world.
The way an individual expands awareness using the Toltec tradition is by regaining energy lost. One way to regain this energy is by recapitulating one's life. Could you describe recapitulation and how it brings energy back and then how one knows the energy has been retrieved?
Ken Eagle Feather: The technique utilizes the breath. You do sweeps from right to left across your energy body, breathing in energy that's been calcified, locked in place, forming like a cyst in your energy body. You let your body assimilate it, and then let it discharge this energy. There's enough references in Carlos' books and Taisha Abelar's book, The Sorcerer's Crossing, detailing the actual technique itself, and I also present it in detail in A Toltec Path.
So let me present another aspect to the recapitulation. Let's say you had a traumatic breakup with your girlfriend or boyfriend. This trauma has left its mark inside your energy body. Every time your assemblage point moves to that location, you can experience the trauma over and over again. Through indulging and focusing on worry you maintain this energy in place. So as you breathe this energy into you with an intent of working it out, sifting through it, living it again and then releasing it, you gain the energy back that has fixated this trauma in place. When you go back to relive the experience again, you can explore the knowledge of it and the memory of it without being sucked into the trauma of it.
You know it's working because you're going to feel better, have more energy, feel lighter, as though you never went through this trauma. You'll look at it as one of life's events rather than some major malfunction. The way you look at the world will be more clear, and you'll notice a lighthearted change about your whole demeanor.
Could you discuss other ways of retrieving energy?
Ken Eagle Feather: The entire stalking discipline is geared toward that as well. Another way is the use of what Castaneda and his crew call sorcery passes, where hand movements are used to massage and loosen up the energy body itself. It's like working directly with the energy body, the same way a massage therapist works with your physical body.
I know another way of gaining energy is by losing self-importance. How can you lose self-importance when you are thinking so much about yourself in the execution of these Toltec practices?
Ken Eagle Feather: Don Juan says the war of a warrior is against self-importance, and so each time you define yourself or define the world you are performing self-importance, you're self-reflecting. This entire world we build, whether it's a technological world or a Toltec dreaming world becomes self-reflection through defining and interpreting.
Self-importance is at the very heart of getting to the person of knowledge stage. Because you have reduced self-importance to such a degree that you no longer reflect the world but are the world, you are totally being in the world. You no longer think about yourself. You have molded your energy into a state that's so abstract and also has such great integrity behind it that you don't need to continue thinking and reflecting about yourself. You just are yourself.
To make that kind of radical transformative leap of consciousness, the work is entirely on the threshold of self-importance. Even when you're in the Toltec world you're building another world, defining stalking, dreaming, recapitulation, sorcery passes and all this stuff, so you're still reflecting. The person of knowledge takes another leap beyond the training and uses it to instill so much energetic integrity, so much balance, letting go so completely that the person merges into the world without losing their individual orientation.
This notion of losing self-importance is at complete odds with our Western value system. Doesn't it make a Toltec path exceedingly difficult?
Ken Eagle Feather: Yes, it makes it exceedingly difficult, especially when you're dealing in a world with people who don't share your values. Again, that's where stalking comes in. It provides you the strategies, structures and training to be able to deal with people while performing the principal quest of stalking yourself. The petty tyrant is probably the best means of practicing how to deal with people.
The petty tyrant is somebody in your life that exercises some control over you and drives you crazy, pushing every button you've got. The objective is to deal with them, working yourself into a position of nonattachment, rising above them pressing your buttons. In the meantime, you can recapitulate each and every button the petty tyrant pushes. The petty tyrant insures you have loads of practice.
Do you think you will meet don Juan again in material form?
Ken Eagle Feather: In material form? Yes. When you asked me, I heard a big "yes" inside my head. I have nothing to base this on, and I'm not really trying to intend it, although it would be interesting. He always scared the hell out of me, to tell you the truth. Not by anything he would do, he was just so intimidating. Just being in his presence shattered my energy, the way I was normally aligned with the world. Now that I've grown a little bit and can interact better in his world it would be interesting to see what would happen.
What was your last interchange with don Juan?
Ken Eagle Feather: It was within a block of where I first stopped and talked with him on the outskirts of Tucson. I was driving a pickup truck and heading downtown, and he was on the opposite side of the street walking in the same direction. There was no traffic, so I stopped right in the middle of the street and hollered, "Hey, do you want a ride?" He looked over at me and said, "No," and he pointed like he was heading straight ahead. I said, "Okay," and then he looked at me and smiled. Before that, he'd never given me that kind of a smile with so much warmth. It was a week after this meeting that I received a letter from a family member indicating some difficulty at home, so I moved back to Florida. That was the last time I physically saw him.
For the Standing Mother,
DG
Dok
Ken Eagle Feather
An Eagles Eye View of Don Juan and the Toltec Path
Interviewed by William J. Evarts
------------------------------------------------------------
SEVERAL BOOKS HAVE BEEN
WRITTEN BY CARLOS CASTANEDA
over the last few decades, recounting his experiences in the mysterious, awareness expanding world of sorcery, guided by a Mexican Indian sorcerer named don Juan. More recently, two women, Florinda Donner-Grau and Taisha Abelar have come forward with their own books about their adventures in sorcery and their affiliation with the legendary don Juan and Carlos Castaneda.
Until recently, however, another student of don Juan, Ken Eagle Feather, has remained in relative obscurity in comparison to the others. I first became aware of him by picking up his book,Traveling With Power, in a local new age bookstore. On the book cover I read that Ken had been a student of don Juan. I was intrigued and read the book, which delineates not only his experiences with don Juan but also his fascinating work at the Monroe Institute, involving the exploration and development of perception.
To my surprise, I found getting in touch with Ken as easy as writing him a letter. He responded personally. Later on I attended his seminar on developing perception and have stayed in touch ever since. I have known him about a year.
A towering, lean figure, Ken Eagle Feather stands around 6'5". His eyes are dark, shiny and penetrating. His hair is thick and dark, speckled with grey but in spite of it, he appears ten years younger than his actual forty something years. Observing Ken during the seminar, I noticed economical, graceful movements, a person totally comfortable and relaxed, yet fully aware and engaged in the moment. When a participant asked him a question, I was impressed with his patience and thorough answers. As I think back now, he fit my preconceived notion of what a warrior should be.
Ken first began his investigations into the nature of consciousness in 1963, when he used the Edgar Cayce readings at the Association for Research and Enlightenment in Virginia Beach, Virginia, to research a high school term paper on Atlantis.
Today he resides in Florida, writing books, expanding his awareness and traveling around the country delivering seminars on the exploration and development of perception. I caught up with him recently by telephone to discuss don Juan, Carlos Castaneda and A Toltec Path.
How did you first meet don Juan?
Ken Eagle Feather: I first met him while walking down Speedway Boulevard, a main avenue in Tucson, Arizona. The year before I physically met don Juan, I had a vision of him. It was during this period that I cured myself of a bleeding ulcer, and as it turns out, this was my introduction to all this. By practicing the techniques presented in Castaneda's books, specifically Journey to Ixtlan and Tales of Power, I was able to heal myself of the disease.
At this point I was running more on intuition than I ever had in my life, and I was pulled, driven, pushed--however you want to look at it--out to Arizona. The first thing on my mind was to meet somebody on par with don Juan. And also I went there to get back into college. It was quite beyond my imagination that I would actually meet the man.
I was living out there for about six months when one day I was walking to class and was a little late, so I was in a hurry. There was this Indian coming toward me on the same side of the street walking very purposefully. He had great command of himself without being externally commanding. He looked like what Carlos Castaneda's books referred to as having a "proper tonal."
I looked at him awkwardly, gawked at him and he looked at me like I didn't know what was going on in the world, and so I just passed him. I got to class and a wave of energy broke over me, telling me that the man I passed was don Juan. I kicked myself in the butt for not being alert enough to take action right then and there. But I also told myself I'd stop and talk with him if I ever saw him again.
A couple of days later, I was driving around on the outskirts of town, and I saw the same man again, only this time he looked drunk. He was stumbling around with his shirt pulled out over his pants, whereas the first time his shirt and sweater were buttoned all the way up. He appeared very proper and together. Now he was stumbling around as though he was drunk. It took me aback, but the more I gazed at him, the more I noticed he was doing it deliberately. It was like an act.
When I approached him, he straightened right up and assumed more of a proper demeanor. I went up to him and exchanged a few words. I really couldn't tell you what they were because I was shaking in my boots. I was very intimidated, and as I turned to leave, I heard, "lose your self importance," screaming in my head. It was his voice. After that I met him many times over the next three years, and it was always within the Tucson city limits, although he was also in my dreams giving me lessons as well.
Did he ever indicate to you who he was?
Ken Eagle Feather: I asked him once if he was don Juan, the man who taught Castaneda, and he said yes. Although part of me knew it was him when I first met him, there was also a part of me that just wouldn't accept it, and I was wracked by doubt. As time went on, I was aware that he would enter my dreams and actually manipulate the content. In the physical world I once saw him turn his head luminous, as though he had turned into a candle. On another occasion he changed his brown eyes to blue. He would do things like that which eventually left no doubt that he was don Juan. Of course verbally verifying it was crucial. That's when I relaxed a bit more.
What years were you were under his tutelage?
Ken Eagle Feather: About ten years, from the mid seventies to the mid eighties. I moved back to Florida in the late seventies and I would still have visions and dreams of him. He would give me instructions this way. This is how the communications continued. And then around 1983, all of the pieces of his teachings fell into place, a gestalt if you will. There have been times since then when I have been really hard pressed with a question. I'll tune into his energy and feel the response. Whether this is energy he implanted in me or actual real time one-on-one communications, I couldn't say.
Did you ever ask don Juan where he had gone, considering by Castaneda's account he had left the physical realm in the early seventies?
Ken Eagle Feather: Don Juan and his team executed the Fire from Within and evolved their physical mass into another dimension. He never addressed this issue with me specifically. It is my sense he reconstituted, if you will, his physical mass back into this dimension to perform certain tasks. One of those tasks may have been to give me lessons from time to time.
When I saw him I was always left with two memories. A right-side and a left-side body memory. On the right-side memory I would see him coming from the horizon, where if he took one step backward he would vanish. With the left-side memory I would see him descending an imaginary staircase coming out of a field of light. And when those two memories intersected, I would have another memory which was actually seeing him in the physical world. I think it was a matter of bringing his two energy fields together--the tonal and the nagual, or the first and second attentions--binding them together and pinpointing them on planet earth so he could appear physically. He would leave again by re-evolving his physical mass back into another dimension.
What is your definition of stalking and dreaming?
Ken Eagle Feather: Stalking consists of actions that enable you to garner internal integrity. It also has to do with the way you conduct yourself with other people in the way of strategy and tactics. Dreaming involves activities in the second attention, or what I call the second energy field, where you are dealing with the energy body of the luminous body. Basically, stalking involves the physical body while dreaming encompasses the entire energy body. Stalking is very focused, giving you fortitude. Dreaming is expansive in that it opens you up, enabling you to make significant leaps in awareness. Stalking tends to come first in that it allows you to maintain balance to handle the expansive forays of consciousness applied by dreaming.
What, in your opinion, is the ultimate objective of Toltec practices?
Ken Eagle Feather: I don't see an ultimate objective. I see an infinite ladder of practical objectives. But if you wanted to take it all the way from a human perspective, it would be the execution of the Fire from Within, which in my mind is the equivalent of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who resurrected his physical mass and put it in a more heavenly dimension. And so if there is an ultimate, it places you at the door of infinity. And if you are at the door of infinity, there is no end. It is a never ending story. If you are up to the adventure and mystery of it all, the Toltec path is one way to travel.
How does all of this tie together with the notion of God, or your notion of God?
Ken Eagle Feather: Don Juan was not one to really label the source of creation as God, because of his dealings with the Catholics who invaded Mexico. They tended to personify God and make it an entity that had rule and sway over our lives. One of the reasons I think he was of this mind was because he had developed his own perception to such an abstract level that to view God as a personified entity was rather foolhardy. The source of creation might be viewed as the Eagle and the Eagle's emanations, but we also have to balance that with the idea of the human mold.
Many times when people expand their consciousness through meditation or through near death experiences, they encounter a beam of light, and they come back thinking they found God or the ultimate answer to creation. Don Juan says they have met the human mold. And so when you meet the human mold, you are finding the energy that is all that is human. When a person dips into this energy, the first reaction is they have found everything, projecting and expanding from that state to all creation and mistakenly, I think, creating God in our image.
Do you, metaphorically speaking, see the Eagle, as referred to in Castaneda's bookThe Eagle's Gift, as the source of creation?
Ken Eagle Feather: Yes, that's one definition, that the Eagle is the source of all creation, the principal energy source from which all manifestations emanate, hence the Eagle's emanations. The human band of emanations is just one very narrow one out of an infinite number of bands. To think that we know the sum total of existence solely based upon the human capacity to perceive is walking the tightrope of foolishness.
From my understanding, the Eagle provides certain people the ability to perpetuate their awareness forever. What happens to the people who haven't garnered enough energy to do this? Are they simply snuffed out at the moment of death?
Ken Eagle Feather: I think there's a whole number of things that can happen, depending how you look at it. We can, and at the same time cannot, bring in reincarnation. Don Juan, in one of Carlos' books, talks about how the energy body dissipates and chunks of personal awareness fly off in different directions. Perhaps one of those chunks flies off and meets up with seven chunks from seven different people and reorganizes into a single human awareness. So if a person who is that awareness now remembers a past life, is he just remembering a chunk of a previous sub-entity? Keep in mind, we are looking at this idea in linear terms, a cause and effect proposition, that there is a continuity of soul travel. I believe there's an infinite number of possibilities upon death, depending where you are focused.
Perhaps engaging the Fire from Within is the same as breaking the wheel of rebirth that we find in Eastern philosophies, so one is no longer subject to the forces of reincarnation. To elaborate further on reincarnation, we could shift from linear time to explore simultaneous, multiple reincarnations. So individual lives occurring in 1700, 1800 and 1900 all exist at the same time. It's only a matter of where you focus consciousness that determines which of these lives you experience. But then you can continue to work with this information and energy and get to a point where you identify yourself with every person in all places at all times. Once you take yourself to this level of abstraction, it completely collapses any model of reincarnation.
Each of these views is valid and correct in its own discipline, its own way of looking at the world. Each has its own integrity, which can be validated through your own experience, depending on where you want to focus yourself. You get to the point where the ultimate abstraction, if you will, is to just come back down and live your life day-by-day and do what you have to do, right here and right now, and work to expand your abstractions from ground zero or, as in the phrase Ram Dass made famous, "Be Here Now."
It is my understanding the assemblage point of all humankind is located on the same position--the position of "reason." Do you think that maybe God wants this assemblage point to remain locked in its present position and doesn't intend for humankind to move it?
Ken Eagle Feather: (laughing) I suppose you could garner some evidence for that statement. The other part of it is we have a number of systems--The Toltec Way, Buddhism, Esoteric Christianity, Taoism, Zen Buddhism--all challenging the ordinary position of the assemblage point. By enacting and living any of these systems you learn how to move the assemblage point. My counterpoint to your statement is that God gave us all these systems so we wouldn't be relegated to keeping our assemblage point in one place.
In Castaneda's book The Art of Dreaming, don Juan claims that inorganic beings have assemblage points that can be moved as well. Is it possible for them to move it so they appear in our first attention?
Ken Eagle Feather: Yes. It is my understanding their principal avenue of journey is through dreaming. There are inorganic beings all around, and it's a matter of expanding awareness to incorporate them, just like we incorporated the notion of space flight years ago. If enough people have developed the notion of inorganic beings then, as a culture, they would be brought into our worldview.
I think don Juan was very clear that the preeminent use of the inorganic world was that once you go into that world and experience a complete universe filled with intelligent, sentient entities that have no direct relationship with our world what-so-ever, reason can no longer uphold its normal mode, and ordinary rationalityis rendered obsolete. Reason is one of the principal forces keeping the assemblage point in a standard position. Once this force is interdicted, you've taken a tremendous stride in opening doors to other realities.
It may be we are getting into a time when the need to visit the inorganic world is becoming obsolete. There might be enough pressure coming from other sources, such as those we find in the new age movement. The Message Down Under and the Celestine Prophesy both have been on the New York Times' best seller list for months, and they are "new age novels." To have society sustain this kind of energy, inquiry and interest for this length of time is an indication that perhaps an additional force is applying pressure to the assemblage point.
According to don Juan, the average man's awareness at the moment of death is devoured by the Eagle. Isn't this kind of a bleak future for most of us?
Ken Eagle Feather: No, not necessarily. Some people could give a hoot about doing the Fire from Within. They figure they have a full life without engaging that adventure. I'd just as soon not carry around the bias that you're less of a person if you don't choose this particular path.
Say, for example, you have individual awareness at death beginning to expand, and as it does so it experiences more of its totality. As consciousness expands, it is naturally going to touch the Eagle, the ultimate abstract force. If the individual isn't trained to handle energetic abstractions, awareness will be ripped apart through contact with the abstract, because there's nothing to relate to anymore.
Now if a person has been devoted to building an abstract life and is evolving internal energies to be abstract, when their energy expands and they hit the major abstract force, they can handle it and go through the tension that normally pulls you apart. Part of the training is to completely let go and know you don't know a darn thing. The more you know that you don't know anything, the more abstract your individual awareness becomes. Then you'll be fine and dandy without knowing anything, because you'll be at home in the total mystery of the world.
The way an individual expands awareness using the Toltec tradition is by regaining energy lost. One way to regain this energy is by recapitulating one's life. Could you describe recapitulation and how it brings energy back and then how one knows the energy has been retrieved?
Ken Eagle Feather: The technique utilizes the breath. You do sweeps from right to left across your energy body, breathing in energy that's been calcified, locked in place, forming like a cyst in your energy body. You let your body assimilate it, and then let it discharge this energy. There's enough references in Carlos' books and Taisha Abelar's book, The Sorcerer's Crossing, detailing the actual technique itself, and I also present it in detail in A Toltec Path.
So let me present another aspect to the recapitulation. Let's say you had a traumatic breakup with your girlfriend or boyfriend. This trauma has left its mark inside your energy body. Every time your assemblage point moves to that location, you can experience the trauma over and over again. Through indulging and focusing on worry you maintain this energy in place. So as you breathe this energy into you with an intent of working it out, sifting through it, living it again and then releasing it, you gain the energy back that has fixated this trauma in place. When you go back to relive the experience again, you can explore the knowledge of it and the memory of it without being sucked into the trauma of it.
You know it's working because you're going to feel better, have more energy, feel lighter, as though you never went through this trauma. You'll look at it as one of life's events rather than some major malfunction. The way you look at the world will be more clear, and you'll notice a lighthearted change about your whole demeanor.
Could you discuss other ways of retrieving energy?
Ken Eagle Feather: The entire stalking discipline is geared toward that as well. Another way is the use of what Castaneda and his crew call sorcery passes, where hand movements are used to massage and loosen up the energy body itself. It's like working directly with the energy body, the same way a massage therapist works with your physical body.
I know another way of gaining energy is by losing self-importance. How can you lose self-importance when you are thinking so much about yourself in the execution of these Toltec practices?
Ken Eagle Feather: Don Juan says the war of a warrior is against self-importance, and so each time you define yourself or define the world you are performing self-importance, you're self-reflecting. This entire world we build, whether it's a technological world or a Toltec dreaming world becomes self-reflection through defining and interpreting.
Self-importance is at the very heart of getting to the person of knowledge stage. Because you have reduced self-importance to such a degree that you no longer reflect the world but are the world, you are totally being in the world. You no longer think about yourself. You have molded your energy into a state that's so abstract and also has such great integrity behind it that you don't need to continue thinking and reflecting about yourself. You just are yourself.
To make that kind of radical transformative leap of consciousness, the work is entirely on the threshold of self-importance. Even when you're in the Toltec world you're building another world, defining stalking, dreaming, recapitulation, sorcery passes and all this stuff, so you're still reflecting. The person of knowledge takes another leap beyond the training and uses it to instill so much energetic integrity, so much balance, letting go so completely that the person merges into the world without losing their individual orientation.
This notion of losing self-importance is at complete odds with our Western value system. Doesn't it make a Toltec path exceedingly difficult?
Ken Eagle Feather: Yes, it makes it exceedingly difficult, especially when you're dealing in a world with people who don't share your values. Again, that's where stalking comes in. It provides you the strategies, structures and training to be able to deal with people while performing the principal quest of stalking yourself. The petty tyrant is probably the best means of practicing how to deal with people.
The petty tyrant is somebody in your life that exercises some control over you and drives you crazy, pushing every button you've got. The objective is to deal with them, working yourself into a position of nonattachment, rising above them pressing your buttons. In the meantime, you can recapitulate each and every button the petty tyrant pushes. The petty tyrant insures you have loads of practice.
Do you think you will meet don Juan again in material form?
Ken Eagle Feather: In material form? Yes. When you asked me, I heard a big "yes" inside my head. I have nothing to base this on, and I'm not really trying to intend it, although it would be interesting. He always scared the hell out of me, to tell you the truth. Not by anything he would do, he was just so intimidating. Just being in his presence shattered my energy, the way I was normally aligned with the world. Now that I've grown a little bit and can interact better in his world it would be interesting to see what would happen.
What was your last interchange with don Juan?
Ken Eagle Feather: It was within a block of where I first stopped and talked with him on the outskirts of Tucson. I was driving a pickup truck and heading downtown, and he was on the opposite side of the street walking in the same direction. There was no traffic, so I stopped right in the middle of the street and hollered, "Hey, do you want a ride?" He looked over at me and said, "No," and he pointed like he was heading straight ahead. I said, "Okay," and then he looked at me and smiled. Before that, he'd never given me that kind of a smile with so much warmth. It was a week after this meeting that I received a letter from a family member indicating some difficulty at home, so I moved back to Florida. That was the last time I physically saw him.
For the Standing Mother,
DG
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