Castaneda's Tales of Power
In the early 1960's Carlos Castaneda was an anthropology graduate student at UCLA doing field work on medicinal plants used by the Native American of the South West. A friend introduced him to Juan Matus as a man knowledgeable in plant medicine.
This chance meeting began 14 years of difficult training in an ancient spiritual path. Carlos had to abandon his academic preconceptions as the training progressed, each assumption of his science and culture was blasted by the sheer magnitude of the world view exposed to him by this shaman, addressed by Carlos as Don Juan, and his small group of practitioners.
The understanding of the world taught by Don Juan forces a reassessment of the entire experience of one's life. We are potentially immensely powerful magical beings. Our true nature is restricted and held in ignorance by the habits of our daily life which dissipate our energy and by our mind which defines the world based on what we already believe it to be.
We construct the world as we know it by placing words on everything, according to Don Juan. By creating words we can manipulate the things in our lives, but words also hide the full nature of those things, giving us a false sense that we know more than we do.
"Don Juan explained that the passageway to the world of sorcerers opens up after the warrior has learned to shut off the internal dialog" "Tales of Power" page 22. This, of course is similar to many forms of meditation, but Don Juan went further, defining a second, greater, center of perception that becomes available to consciousness once the mind is silent. He named this second center will and said that through the will, the adept could experience the unimaginable universe directly. This possibility is the true birthright of all humans but is accomplished by only a very few.
Once we can see beyond words, beyond what the mind imagines the world to be, we are confronted with awesome power and mystery. The potential of each of us becomes far greater than we can now imagine.
The raindrop cannot comprehend the ocean, but it can experience it. The value of Castaneda's work is the detailed structure of this ocean of power, Shakti, that he provides, building on the work of sorcerers of his lineage. It is clearly an incomplete picture - reading the entire series of books will leave many more questions than answers, but the base upon which those questions are drawn will be far more vast.
Carlos Castaneda wrote twelve books detailing his apprenticeship to the world of sorcery. All of them press the limits of consciousness. I would recommend the reader begin with his third book, "Journey to Ixtlan". In the first two books Carlos had his anthropologist hat on too tightly to understand much of what Don Juan was saying. Most of the later books would best be read after becoming familiar with the first three.
"Magical Passes" is a book of simple exercises taught by the shamans of Don Juan's lineage. It is these exercises, along with simple, conscious living, that enable the redeployment of one's personal energy, allowing access to the shaman's world. I am not aware of anything more powerfully healing than the Magical Passes.
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Labels: American Indian Shamans, Shaman teachings
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