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Journey to Ixtlan
2005.05.28. 19:27
 The sorcerers’ world is not an immutable world
like the world of everyday life,
where they tell you that once you reach a goal,
you remain a winner forever.
In the sorcerers’ world, to arrive at a certain goal means that
you have simply acquired the most efficient tools to continue your fight, <
which, by the way, will never end.
Don Juan Matus, The Active Side of Infinity
Acryl on canvas /
pattern was the book of Castaneda:
A Journey to Ixtlan
" A warrior chooses a path with heart,
any path with heart, and follows it; and
then he rejoices and laughs. He knows
because he sees that his life will be over
altogether too soon. He sees that nothing
is more important than anything else.
The most effective way to live is as a warrior.
A warrior may worry and think before making
any decision, but once he makes it, he goes on
his way, free from worries or thoughts; there will
be a million other decisions still awaiting him.
That´s the warriors way."
Carlos Castaneda - The Wheel of Time
Carlos Castañeda
The life and works of Carlos Castañeda are wrapped in mystery.
The thing to remember about Carlos Castañeda is that he was an anthropologist. He indeed accomplished what Margaret Mead had once attempted (and failed) to do, which is to embed themselves in a native culture, becoming a member of that culture, and then reporting the internal workings, the seeming strangeness to the Western academic community. For that is what Carlos did: He trained for and became a Yaqui shaman or sorcerer or brujo, one of the practitioners of the perhaps dying nagual tradition.
His reportage, though often mis-represented in popular media, opens up the notion that there are unknown worlds on this planet that you and I would not otherwise access.
"The basic premise of sorcery for a sorcerer is that the world of everyday life is not real, or out there, as we believe it is. For a sorcerer, reality, or the world we all know, is only a description.
For the sake of validating this premise I will concentrate the best of my efforts into leading you into a genuine conviction that what you hold in mind as the world at hand is merely a description of the world; a description that has been pounded into you from the moment you were born.
Everyone who comes into contact with a child is a teacher who incessantly describes the world to him, until the moment when the child is capable of perceiving the world as it is described. We have no memory of that portentous moment, simply because none of us could possibly have had any point of reference to compare it to anything else. From that moment on, however, the child is a member . He knows the description of the world; and his membership becomes full-fledged, perhaps, when he is capable of making all the proper perceptual interpretations which, by conforming to that description, validate it.
The reality of our day-to-day life, then, consists of an endless flow of perceptual interpretations which we, the individuals who share a specific membership, have learned to make in common.
The idea that the perceptual interpretations that make up the world have a flow is congruous with the fact that they run uninterruptedly and are rarely, if ever, open to question. In fact the reality of the world we know is so taken for granted that the basic premise of sorcery, that our reality is merely one of many descriptions, can hardly be taken as a serious proposition.
Fortunately for you, I'm not concerned at all with whether or not you can take my proposition seriously, and thus I will proceed to elucidate my points, in spite of your opposition, your disbelief, and your inability to understand what I am saying. Thus, as a teacher of sorcery, my endeavor is to describe the world to you. Your difficulty in grasping my concepts and methods will stem from the fact that the units of my description are alien and incompatible with those of your own.
I am teaching you how to see as opposed to merely looking , and stopping the world is the first step to seeing .
Stopping the world is not a cryptic metaphor that really doesn't mean anything. And its scope and importance as one of the main propositions of my knowledge should not be misjudged.
I am teaching you how to stop the world . Nothing will work, however, if you are very stubborn. Be less stubborn, and you will probably stop the world with any of the techniques I teach you. Everything I will tell you to do is a technique for stopping the world .
The sorcerer's description of the world is perceivable. But our insistence on holding on to our standard version of reality renders us almost deaf and blind to it. I'm going to give you what I call "techniques for stopping the world."
When you begin this teaching, there is another reality, that is to say, there is a sorcery description of the world, which you do not know. As a sorcerer and a teacher, I am teaching you that description. What I am doing with you consists, therefore, in setting up that unknown reality by unfolding its description, adding increasingly more complex parts as you go along.
In order to arrive at seeing one first has to stop the world . Stopping the world is indeed an appropriate rendition of certain states of awareness in which the reality of everyday life is altered because the flow of interpretation, which ordinarily runs uninterruptedly, has been stopped by a set of circumstances alien to that flow. In this case the set of circumstances alien to our normal flow of interpretations is the sorcery description of the world. The precondition for stopping the world is that one has to be convinced; in other words, one has to learn the new description in a total sense, for the purpose of pitting it against the old one, and in that way break the dogmatic certainty, which we all share, that the validity of our perceptions, or our reality of the world, is not to be questioned.
After stopping the world the next step is seeing . By that I mean what could be categorized as responding to the perceptual solicitations of a world outside the description we have learned to call reality.
All these steps can only be understood in terms of the description to which they belong; a description that I'm endeavoring to give you. Let, then, this teaching be the source of entrance into that description.
"Nothing in the world is a gift. Whatever there is to learn has to be learned the hard way.
Turn my concepts into a viable way of life by a process of repetition. Everything new in our lives, such as the sorcerers' concepts I am teaching you, must be repeated to us to the point of exhaustion before we open ourselves to it."
DON JUAN MATUS
"A warrior is on permanent guard against the roughness of human behavior. A warrior is magical and ruthless, a maverick with the most refined taste and manners, whose worldly task is to sharpen, yet disguise, his cutting edges so that no one would be able to suspect his ruthlessness.
Sorcerers constantly stalk themselves. The sensation of being bottled up is experienced by every human being. It is a reminder of our existing connection with intent . For sorcerers this sensation is even more acute, precisely because their goal is to sensitize their connecting link until they can make it function at will.
When the pressure of their connecting link is too great, sorcerers relieve it by stalking themselves. Stalking is a procedure, a very simple one. Stalking is special behavior that follows certain principles. It is secretive, furtive, deceptive behavior designed to deliver a jolt. And, when you stalk yourself you jolt yourself, using your own behavior in a ruthless, cunning way.
When a sorcerer's awareness becomes bogged down with the weight of his perceptual input, the best, or even perhaps the only, remedy is to use the idea of death to deliver that stalking jolt.
The idea of death therefore is of monumental importance in the life of a sorcerer. I have shown you innumerable things about death to convince you that the knowledge of our impending and unavoidable end is what gives us sobriety. Our most costly mistake as average men is indulging in a sense of immortality. It is as though we believe that if we don't think about death we can protect ourselves from it.
Akroma - Art by Brom
Not thinking about death protects us from worrying about it. But that purpose is an unworthy one for average men and a travesty for sorcerers. Without a clear view of death, there is no order, no sobriety, no beauty. Sorcerers struggle to gain this crucial insight in order to help them realize at the deepest possible level that they have no assurance whatsoever their lives will continue beyond the moment. That realization gives sorcerers the courage to be patient and yet take action, courage to be acquiescent without being stupid.
The idea of death is the only thing that can give sorcerers courage. Strange, isn't it? It gives sorcerers the courage to be cunning without being conceited, and above all it gives them courage to be ruthless without being self-important.
Sorcerers stalk themselves in order to break the power of their obsessions. There are many ways of stalking oneself. If you don't want to use the idea of your death, you can use poems to stalk yourself.
I stalk myself with them. I deliver a jolt to myself with them. I listen, and shut off my internal dialogue and let my inner silence gain momentum. Then the combination of the poem and the silence delivers the jolt.
See if you can feel what I'm talking about with this poem by José Gorostiza.
...this incessant stubborn dying,
this living death,
that slays you, oh God,
in your rigorous handiwork,
in the roses, in the stones,
in the indomitable stars
and in the flesh that burns out,
like a bonfire lit by a song,
a dream,
a hue that hits the eye.
...and you, yourself,
perhaps have died eternities of ages out there,
without us knowing about it,
we dregs, crumbs, ashes of you;
you that still are present,
like a star faked by its very light,
an empty light without star
that reaches us,
hiding
its infinite catastrophe.
The Snail - water colour on paper
As I hear the words, I feel that that man is seeing the essence of things and I can see with him. I care only about the feeling the poets longing brings me. I borrow his longing, and with it I borrow the beauty. And marvel at the fact that he, like a true warrior, lavishes it on the recipients, the beholders, retaining for himself only his longing. This jolt, this shock of beauty, is stalking .
Death is not an enemy, although it appears to be. Death is not our destroyer, although we think it is.
Sorcerers say death is the only worthy opponent we have. Death is our challenger. We are born to take that challenge, average men or sorcerers. Sorcerers know about it; average men do not.
Life is the process by means of which death challenges us. Death is the active force. Life is the arena. And in that arena there are only two contenders at any time: oneself and death.
We are passive. Think about it. If we move, it's only when we feel the pressure of death. Death sets the pace for our actions and feelings and pushes us relentlessly until it breaks us and wins the bout, or else we rise about all possibilities and defeat death.
Sorcerers defeat death and death acknowledges the defeat by letting the sorcerers go free, never to be challenged again. Death stops challenging them. It means thought has taken a somersault into the inconceivable.
A somersault of thought into the inconceivable is the descent of the spirit; the act of breaking our perceptual barriers. It is the moment in which man's perception reaches its limits.
Sorcerers practice the art of sending scouts, advance runners, to probe our perceptual limits. This is another reason I like poems. I take them as advance runners. But poets don't know as exactly as sorcerers what those advance runners can accomplish."
Detail of the book.
   
   
1968--The Teachings of don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge
1971--A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with don Juan
1972--Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of don Juan
1974--Tales Of Power
1977--The Second Ring of Power
1981--The Eagle's Gift
1984--The Fire From Within
1987--The Power of Silence: Further lessons of don Juan
1993--The Art of Dreaming
1999--The Active Side of Infinity.
" The world is all that is encased here:
life, death, people, and everything else that
surrounds us. The world is incomprehensible.
We won´t ever unravel its secrets. Thus we
must treat the world as it is: a sheer mystery."
The Wheel Of Time |
AJÁNLOM AZ OLDALT
