The Spirit Catcher
“Now let us call that spirit of the water hole,” he said.
I tried to turn my head to look at him. He held me vigorously by the hair and said that I was in a very vulnerable position and in a terribly weak physical state and had to remain quiet and motionless. He had put all those special branches on my belly to protect me and was going to remain next to me in case I could not take care of myself.
He was standing next to the top of my head, and if I rolled my eyes I could see him. He took his string and tensed it and then realized I was looking at him by rolling my eyes way into my forehead. He gave me a snappy tap on the head with his knuckles and ordered me to look at the sky, not to close my eyes, and to concentrate on the sound. He added, as if on second thought, that I should not hesitate to yell the word he had taught me if I felt something was coming at me.
Don Juan and his “spirit catcher” began with a low-tension twang. He slowly increased the tension, and I began to hear a sort of reverberation first, and then a definite echo which came consistently from a southeasterly direction. The tension increased. Don Juan and his “spirit catcher” were perfectly matched. The string produced a low-range note and don Juan magnified it, increasing its intensity until it was a penetrating cry, a howling call. The apex was an eerie shriek, inconceivable from the point of view of my own experience.
The sound reverberated in the mountains and echoed back to us. I fancied it was coming directly toward me. I felt it had something to do with the temperature of my body. Before don Juan started his calls I had been very warm and comfortable, but during the highest point of his calls I became chilled; my teeth chattered uncontrollably and I truly had the sensation that something was coming at me.
At one point I noticed that the sky had become very dark. I had not been aware of the sky although I was looking at it. I had a moment of intense panic and I yelled the word don Juan had taught me.
Don Juan immediately began to decrease the tension of his eerie calls, but that did not bring me any relief.
“Cover your ears,” don Juan mumbled imperatively.
I covered them with my hands.
After some minutes don Juan stopped altogether and came around to my side. After he had taken the branches and leaves off my belly, he helped me up and carefully put them on the rock where I had been lying. He made a fire with them, and while it burned he rubbed my stomach with other leaves from his pouch.
He put his hand on my mouth when I was about to tell him that I had a terrible headache.
We stayed there until all the leaves had burned. It was fairly dark by then. We walked down the hill and I got sick to my stomach.
A Separate Reality: Chapter 11. [Carlos Castaneda]
Yopo Vision (Trip report)
Yopo snuff or Anadenanthera peregrina is a psycho-active substance prepared and used by The Yanomamo (Yah-no-mah-muh) tribe of the Amazon regions of Brazil and Venezuela. Also called the Yanomami, and Yanomama, they are deep jungle Indians believed to be the most primitive, culturally intact people in existence in the world. They are literally a stone age tribe.
I was in Nevada visiting friends. We had spoken about doing a Yopo trip when I came out to visit them. And just as planned we headed out to the desert at night fall. Arriving at the canyon were going to stay we set up camp and lit a fire. This particular Canyon just outside Las Vegas, is noted for it Petroglyphs and cave paintings, it seems like a very ancient site.
After sorting some food and a hot drink, we sat by the fire. The mood was quiet and medative. I could feel the energy of this place and my feeling was that this was a sacred place. I listened to the silence and entered into slight trance which I saw as a positive omen. I used the opportunity to pray to the ancestors and to the spirit of the Yopo herself.
After asking for advice, guidance and protection, we set about discussing how much Yopo we were going to take. My companion had tried this batch on a previously occasion but it became clear that the dose had been too large. So I placed a small amount of the substance on a flat surface and snorted it. Not wanting to make the same mistake, my companion took half the amount.
At first nothing seemed to happen but then in a wave which seemed to come sweeping across the desert floor from in front of me – Yopo came and gripped me. I felt like I was suddenly covered in a blanket. The next thing I noticed was that we were surrounded by something like a caged dome although it was not to imprison. It rested on the desert floor and we were somehow inside this huge structure. The cactus and plants that were around were all dancing in the fire light. The cactus’ took the appearance of somehow not being real but rather cardboard cut outs. It was at this point I also noticed we were not alone. A host of different entities had come to call. The first type I notice due to their unmistakable size was that Atlantean giants were moving in. Passing right through where we were sat near the fire, these beings were 18ft tall, dark stony figures obvious against the night sky. I was a little unnerved at this point but recollected myself and I gazed at the scene once more. These Atlantean Toltec giants were so exactly like the giants that stand at top of Quetzalcoatl’s Pyramid in Tula Mexico, as to be indistinguishable from them.
I was then rushed by a different type of inorganic being smaller and brighter. This seemed to open me up even further and in astonishment, I realised just how many beings had gathered around us. As I focused on each type of inorganic being the next would reveal itself to me. There were a host of different entities maybe 5 or 6 types including the giants. But also on the edge of the firelight I saw the ancestors gathered. These were smallish red people, wearing red squares of material covering their private parts and painted up ceremonially – they were sort of checking me out whenever I remembered them and turned to look. They peeked out at me from the desert night making odd gesture now and again, as I took turn to look at them.
I looked into the sky and saw what was like a mother ship sliding in from the north – it was kind of like a sheet or film that covered the sky but had definite size, direction and purpose. It was like a diamond shape. The MATRIX was then lowered down over me and what seemed like a probe of a luminous fibre came down and engulfed me making me puke. I snorted out the Yopo from my nostrils and within about 20 minutes I was down completely. We explored the caves and the canyon. The really extraordinary thing that we discovered was that within the cave a short distance from where we were camped there was a stone approximately the shape of the matrix that had descended. It was pitted with carved regular sized indentures all over the surface. There was also a square on the cave wall, carved with the same indentures and cave paintings of what looked like beings.
I was surprisingly calm throughout the experience; probably the overwhelming nature of the Yopo. But even when the Atlanteans Toltec warriors decided it would be fun to pick the fire up to demonstrate their size I was not afraid. Throughout the experience, I was constantly reassured: “there is nothing here that is going to harm you”.
The Inorganic Beings
The inorganic beings are our counter-part, our twin flame, “our cousins” the ‘manikiri’ (The invisible ones). They are first order creators and make all activities for the warrior possible. When one starts out on the warrior’s path we accept this arrangement. For a warrior there is agreement – an exchange of energy for awareness. The mistake comes when they are thought to be something alien. When we are out of step with the spirit – this is when the problems arise. The inorganic beings are impeccable entities and flow within structure of awareness. We can only hope to know the rolling and tumbling force. The spirit is far more intimately acquainted with what is going on. There is always a difficulty in applying lightness and fluidity to all situations. But the spinning of the inorganic being’s is the issue. They twirl the world everything around them – you into the bargain – this is the testing of the spirit. They throw our assemblage points into new strange locations, and unhook us from reality. How do we resolve the dilemma of the Flyer’s mind? And how do we integrate these beings into our lives as a concept and a reality – it is a matter of acceptance. Accept their presence. Like the alchemist we need to transmute fear into love. A movement away from and a rejection of hate. Fear to ▲ Love ▲ Power ▲ Knowledge… The somersault of thought into the inconceivable – ‘mind over matter’ & ‘matter over mind ‘- And rather than there being a predatory flyer with the rejection of the interference pattern, there is instead an ally. When one starts out on the warrior’s path we make an arrangement with these beings whether we are aware of it or not. But forget the fear. The agreement is one of synergy. Rather than being a host and a predatory flyer, there instead becomes a symbiosis – and in this way the rule can be manifested.
The Flyers mind
The Flyers mind is the edge of darkness, the emergence of doubt, the edge of the camp fire light somewhere beyond the circle of the known, where the light protrudes into the darkness.
The Flyer’s Mind is the thing which pins us to the spot. It is the barrier of perception. It is our self-pity, our indulgence, our self-importance. It keeps us in the place of not knowing.
Human form is the illusion, everything which flows forth from human form is as a result of our self-reflection. All rules everything which inhibits or restricts our true nature is an aspect of human form. Once we enter the kingdom of the unknown, the forces we experience there for an instant seem somehow malevolent or benign, but this duality is born of our flyers mind, the thing that brings us back to reason.
There is a thread which runs through our lives. As we emerge into the world from the place of spirit, this link with intent is stretched and strained. We become a reflection of our surroundings; imprinted, embedded, indoctrinated and bound. We learn reason and rationality and everything is separated and divided. The magical world we experienced in our childhood ~ is now gone. We are instead taught to get to grips with that which is known…
The flyers mind is our fear, our continued connection with this known reality, a harking back to a place which may have never existed in the first place – a reliance and reluctance to be free from human form – from the illusion of ourselves – the misguided belief that we are indeed in possession of all the facts…
If we brace ourselves and set out into the darkness, the barriers of our perception; that which ties us to the world, are automatically broken down.
Venturing into the unknown we become aware there are realms even beyond the capability of our understanding, this leaves us with nothing left to cling to, not even our humanity. In the world of energy there is no right or wrong, dark or light, there is only energy – everything an expression of its polar opposite/counterpart.
The flyer mind, our predator is not something to be feared or reviled, the trickster is simply a reflection of our mind. The worthy opponent is our unflinching adversary and our only true guide.
The Flyers
Excerpted from “The Active Side of Infinity”
by Carlos Castenada
pg 217
Don Juan said, “This is the appropriate time of day for doing what I am asking you to do. It takes a moment to engage the necessary attention to do it. Don’t stop until you catch that fleeting black shadow.”
I did see some strange fleeting black shadow projected on the foliage of the trees. It was either a shadow going back and forth or various fleeting shadows moving side-to-side or straight up in the air. They looked lie fat black fish to me, enormous fish. It was as if gigantic swordfish were flying in the air. I was engrossed in the sight. Then, finally, it scared me. It became to dark to see the foliage, yet I could still see the fleeting black shadows.
“What is it, don Juan?” I asked.
“[Long ago, the native sorcerer/shamans of Mexico] discovered that we have a companion for life,” he said, as clearly as he could. “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 was very dark around us, and that seemed to curtail any expression on my part. If it had been daylight, I would have laughed my head off. In the dark, I felt quite inhibited.
“It’s pitch black around us,” don Juan said, “but if you look out of the corner of your eye, you will still see fleeting shadows jumping all around you.”
He was right. I could still see them. Their movement made me dizzy. Don Juan turned on the light, and that seemed to dissipate everything. Don Juan said, “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.”
Why has this predator taken over in the fashion that you’re describing, don Juan?” I asked. “There must be a logical explanation.”
“There is an explanation,” don Juan replied, “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, gallineros, the predators rear us in human coops, humaneros. Therefore, their food is always available to them.”
I felt that my head was shaking violently from side to side. I could not express my profound sense of unease and discontentment, but my body moved to bring it to the surface. I shook from head to toe without any volition on my part. I heard myself saying, “No, no, no, no. This is absurd, don Juan. What you’re saying is something monstrous. It simply can’t be true, for sorcerers, or for average men, or for anyone.”
“Why not?” don Juan asked calmly. “Why not? Because it infuriates you?”
“Yes, it infuriates me,” I retorted. “Those claims are monstrous!”
“Well,” he said, “you haven’t heard all the claims 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!”
There was something in me which I felt was a ‘glutton for punishment’. He was right. I wouldn’t have left the house for the world; and yet I didn’t like one bit the inanities he was spouting. Don Juan said, “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. The predators 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.”
“But how can they do this, don Juan?” I asked, somehow angered further by what he was saying. “Do they whisper all that in our ears while we are asleep?”
“No, they don’t do it that way. That’s idiotic!” don Juan said, smiling. “They are infinitely more efficient and organized than that. “In order to keep us obedient, meek and weak, the predators engaged themselves in a stupendous maneuver- 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, and filled with the fear of being discovered any minute now.
“I know that even though you have never suffered hunger,” he went on, “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 its 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. The predators ensure in this manner a degree of security to act as a buffer against their fear.”
“It’s not that I can’t accept all this at face value, don Juan,” I said. “I could, but there’s something so odious about it that it actually repels me. It forces me to take a contradictory stand. “If it’s true that they eat us, how do they do it?”
Don Juan had a broad smile on his face. He was as pleased as punch. He explained that 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. He said that that glowing coat of awareness was what the predators consumed, and that when a human being reached adulthood, all that was left of that glowing coat of awareness was a narrow fringe that went from the ground to the top of the toes. That fringe permitted mankind to continue living, but only barely. As if I were in a dream, I heard don Juan explaining that, to his knowledge, man was the only species that had 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.
He then made the most damaging statement he had made so far. He said that this narrow fringe of awareness was the epicenter of self-reflection where man was 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 for them to be fed with the energetic flare of our pseudo-concerns. There must have been something in what don Juan was saying which was so devastating to me that at that point I actually got sick to my stomach.
After a moment’s pause long enough for me to recover, I asked don Juan, “But why is it that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico and all sorcerers today, although they see the predators, don’t do anything about it?”
“There’s nothing that you and I can do about it,” don Juan said in a grave, sad voice. “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 shit out of you… and not so much because they don’t believe it. Down in the depths of every human being, there is an ancestral, visceral knowledge about the predators’ existence.”
My analytical mind swung back and forth like a yo-yo. It left me and came back, and left me and came back again. Whatever don Juan was proposing was preposterous, incredible. At the same time, it was a most reasonable thing; so simple. It explained every kind of human contradiction I could think of. But how could one have taken all this seriously?
Don Juan was pushing me into the path of an avalanche that would take me down forever. I felt another wave of a threatening sensation. The wave didn’t stem from me, yet it was attached to me. Don Juan was doing something to me, mysteriously positive and terribly negative at the same time. I sensed it as an attempt to cut a thin film that seemed to be glued to me. His eyes were fixed on mine in an unblinking stare. He moved his eyes away, and began to talk without looking at me anymore.
“Whenever doubts plague you to a dangerous point,” he said, “do something pragmatic about it. Turn off the light. Pierce the darkness; find out what you can see.” He got up to turn off the lights. I stopped him. “No, no, don Juan,” I said, “don’t turn off the lights. I’m doing okay.”
What I felt then was a most unusual, for me, fear of the darkness. The mere thought of it made me pant. I definitely knew something viscerally, but I wouldn’t dare touch it, or bring it to the surface, not in a million years!
“You saw the fleeting shadows against the trees,” don Juan said, sitting back against his chair. “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.”
I feared that don Juan would get up anyway and turn off the lights, which he did. Two seconds later, I was screaming my head off. Not only did I catch a glimpse of those fleeting images, I heard them buzzing by my ears. Don Juan doubled up with laughter as he turned on the lights.
“What a temperamental fellow!” he said. “A total disbeliever, on the one hand; and a total pragmatist on the other. You must arrange this internal fight, otherwise you’re going to swell up like a big toad and burst.”
Don Juan kept on pushing his barb deeper and deeper into me. “The sorcerers of ancient Mexico,” he said, “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 and feats of awareness that are mythological legends nowadays. And then everything seems to disappear, and we have now a sedated man.”
I wanted to get angry and call him a paranoiac, but somehow the righteousness that was usually just underneath the surface of my being wasn’t there. Something in me was beyond the point of asking myself my favorite question: What if all that he said is true? At the moment he was talking to me that night, in my heart of hearts, I felt that all of what he was saying was true, but at the same time and with equal force, I felt that all that he was saying was absurdity itself.
“What are you saying, don Juan?” I asked feebly. My throat was constricted. I could hardly breathe.
“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.”
Don Juan’s words were eliciting a strange, bodily reaction in me comparable to the sensation of nausea. It was as if I were going to get sick to my stomach again. But the nausea was coming from the bottom of my being, from the marrow of my bones. I convulsed involuntarily. Don Juan shook me by the shoulders forcefully. I felt my neck wobbling back and forth under the impact of his grip. The maneuver calmed me down at once. I felt more in control.
“This predator,” don Juan said, “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, but we 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 sorcerers, 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.”
“In what way would the sorcerers’ discipline be a deterrent to the flyers?” I asked.
Don Juan scrutinized my face as if to discover any signs of my disbelief. He said,”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 will keep on growing.
“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. Sorcerers found out that if they taxed the flyers’ mind with inner silence, the foreign installation would flee, and give any one of the practitioners involved in this maneuver the total certainty of the mind’s foreign origin. The [alien mind control of these creatures] 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.
“That’s the day when you have to rely on your own devices which are nearly zero. A sad day indeed! 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.”
I became genuinely agitated. I wanted to know more, and yet a strange feeling in me clamored for me to stop. It alluded to dark results and punishment, something like the wrath of God descending on me for tampering with something veiled by God himself. I made a supreme effort to allow my curiosity to win. I heard myself say, “What-what-what do you mean, by taxing the flyers’ mind?”
“Discipline taxes the foreign mind no end,” he replied. “So, through their discipline, sorcerers vanquish the foreign installation.”
I was overwhelmed by his statements. I believed that don Juan was either certifiably insane or that he was telling me something so awesome that it froze everything in me. I noticed, however how quickly I rallied my energy to deny everything he had said. After an instant of panic, I began to laugh, as if don Juan had told me a joke. I even heard myself saying, “Don Juan, don Juan, you’re incorrigible!”
Don Juan seemed to understand everything I was experiencing. He shook his head from side to side, and raised his eyes to the heavens in a gesture of mock despair. He said, “I am so incorrigible, that 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.”
He looked at me, smiled maliciously, and said, “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.”
I had the most inexplicable reaction I could have imagined. Something in me actually shook, as if it had received a jolt. I entered into a state of unwarranted fear, which I immediately associated with my religious background.
Don Juan looked at me from head to toe. “You are fearing the wrath of God, aren’t you?” he said. “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.”
His words did not calm me at all. I felt worse. I was actually convulsing involuntarily, and I had no means to stop it.
“Don’t worry,” don Juan said calmly. “I know for a fact that those attacks wear off very quickly. The flyer’s mind has no concentration whatsoever.”
After a moment, everything stopped as don Juan had predicted. To say again that I was bewildered is a euphemism. This was the first time in my life ever, with don Juan or alone, that I didn’t know whether I was coming or going. I wanted to get out of the chair and walk around, but I was deathly afraid. I was filled with rational assertions, and at the same time I was filled with an infantile fear. I began to breathe deeply as a cold perspiration covered my entire body. I had somehow unleashed on myself a most godawful sight: black, fleeting shadows jumping all around me wherever I turned. I closed my eyes and rested my head on the arm of the stuffed chair.
“I don’t know which way to turn, don Juan,” I said.
“Tonight, you have really succeeded in getting me lost.” Don Juan said, “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 being 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.”
Don Juan stood up from his chair and stretched his arms and legs. “We have been sitting here for hours. It’s time to go into the house. I’m going to eat. Do you want to eat with me?”
I declined. My stomach was in an uproar.
“I think you’d better go to sleep,” he said. “The blitz has devastated you.”
I didn’t need any further coaxing. I collapsed onto my bed, and fell asleep like the dead.
[When I arrived] home, as time went by, the idea of the flyers became one of the main fixations of my life. I got to the point where I felt that don Juan was absolutely right about them. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t discard his logic. The more I thought about it, and the more I talked to and observed myself, and my fellow men, the more intense the conviction that something was rendering us incapable of any activity or any interaction or any thought that didn’t have the self as its focal point.
My concern, as well as the concern of everyone I knew or talked to, was the self. Since I couldn’t find any explanation for such universal homogeneity, I believed that don Juan’s line of thought was the most appropriate way of elucidating the phenomenon. I went as deeply as I could into readings about myths and legends. In reading, I experienced something I had never felt before: Each of the books I read was an interpretation of myths and legends. In each one of those books, a homogeneous mind was palpable. The styles differed, but the drive behind the words was homogeneously the same: Even though the theme was something as abstract as myths and legends, the authors always managed to insert statements about themselves.
The homogeneous drive behind every one of those books was not the stated theme of the book. Instead, it was self-service. I had never felt this before. I attributed my reaction to don Juan’s influence. The unavoidable question that I posed to myself was: Is he influencing me to see this, or is there really a foreign mind dictating everything we do? I lapsed, perforce, into denial again, and I went insanely from denial to acceptance to denial. Something in me knew that whatever don Juan was driving at was an energetic fact; but something equally important in me knew that all of that was guff.
The end result of my internal struggle was a sense of foreboding; the sense of something imminently dangerous coming at me. I made extensive anthropological inquiries into the subject of the flyers in other cultures, but I couldn’t find any references to them anywhere. Don Juan seemed to be the only source of information about this matter.
The next time I saw him, I instantly jumped to talk about the flyers. I said, “I have tried my best to be rational about this subject matter, but I can’t. There are moments when I fully agree with you about the predators.”
“Focus your attention on the fleeting shadows that you actually see,” don Juan said with a smile. I told don Juan that those fleeting shadows were going to be the end of my rational life. I saw them everywhere. Since I had left his house, I was incapable of going to sleep in the dark. To sleep with the lights on did not bother me at all. The moment I turned the lights off, however, everything around me began to jump. I never saw complete figures or shapes. All I saw were fleeting black shadows.
“The flyers’ mind has not left you,” don Juan said. “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 proposes 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; awesome, monstrous. They are the means by which the universe tests us. We are energetic probes created by the universe,” he continued as if he were oblivious to my presence, “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.”
http://taicarmen.wordpress.com/category/technology-of-the-gods/
The Inorganic Beings
THE INORGANIC BEINGS ~
“The old shamans discovered that the entire universe is composed of twin forces, forces that are at the same time opposed and complementary to each other. It is inescapable that our world is a twin world. Its opposite and complementary world is one populated by beings that have awareness, but not an organism. For this reason, the old shamans called them inorganic beings.
I told you that it’s our twin world, so it’s intimately related to us. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico didn’t think like most do in terms of space and time. They thought exclusively in terms of awareness. Two types of awareness coexist without ever impinging on each other, because each type is entirely different from the other. The old shamans faced this problem of coexistence without concerning themselves with time and space. They reasoned that the degree of awareness of organic beings and the degree of awareness of inorganic beings were so different that both could coexist with the most minimal interference. ”
“The inorganic beings who populate our twin world are considered, by the sorcerers of our lineage, to be our relatives. Those shamans believed that it was futile to make friends with our family members because the demands levied on us for such friendships are always exorbitant. That type of inorganic being, who are our first cousins, communicate with us incessantly, but their communication with us is not at the level of conscious awareness. In other words, we know all about them in a subliminal way, while they know all about us in a deliberate, conscious manner.
The energy from our first cousins is a drag! They are as messed up as we are. Let’s say that the organic and inorganic beings of our twin worlds are the children of two sisters who live next door to each other. They are exactly alike although they look different. They cannot help us, and we cannot help them. Perhaps we could join together, and make a fabulous family business corporation, but that hasn’t happened. Both branches of the family are extremely touchy and take offence over nothing, a typical relationship between touchy first cousins. The crux of the matter, the sorcerers of ancient Mexico believed, is that both human beings and inorganic beings from the twin worlds are profound egomaniacs.
Another classification that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico made of the inorganic beings was that of scouts, or explorers; that is, the inorganic beings that come from the depths of the universe, and which are possessors of awareness infinitely sharper and faster than that of human beings. The old sorcerers spent generations polishing their classification schemes, and their conclusions were that certain types of inorganic beings from the category of scouts or explorers, because of their vivaciousness, were akin to man. They could make liaisons and establish a symbiotic relation with men. The old sorcerers called these kinds of inorganic beings the allies.”
“The crucial mistake of those shamans with reference to this type of inorganic being was to attribute human characteristics to that impersonal energy and to believe that they could harness it. They thought of those blocks of energy as their helpers, and they relied on them without comprehending that, being pure energy, they didn’t have the power to sustain any effort.
I’ve told you all there is to know about inorganic beings. The only way you can put this to the test is by means of direct experience.”
Extract from “The Active Side of Infinity” by Carlos Castaneda
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- Carlos Castaneda: What is Fake? (talesfromthelou.wordpress.com)
