Tensegrity Seminars

Los Angeles (8) - August 1995 [ 1995 Index | Previous | Next ] To:   alt.dreams.castaneda Date:   3 Sep 1995 03:29:37 -0400 My Three Weeks With Carlos Castaneda Keeping in step with the current energy of open communications I have decided to give a personal account of my experiences at the August LA Tensegrity seminar. Unfortunately I do not possess the writing skills necessary to really capture the magic that I felt being in the presence of Carlos Castaneda. It was a real pleasure to be able to spend three weeks with the man whose writings have so profoundly affected my life. Enjoy! When I first received a notice about the LA Tensegrity workshop I felt that something very special was happening. I had not attended any of the other Tensegrity workshops and felt that this was the one for me to attend. My intent was to go there to learn some new tools to help on my path not to meet a bunch of celebrities. I was however intrigued with the possibility of meeting Carlos Castaneda for energetic reasons. At the time there was planned to be three different workshops and because of work issues the first workshop was out of the question. When I called to make reservations for the second secession I was disappointed to find out that the last two secessions were canceled. However, I was informed about a commuter section called the B. Group that was going to be held Thursday through Sunday. I hung up the phone thinking that I would be unable to attend this workshop. Once I started considering my options I realized that I could work Monday through Wednesday each week and fly back and fourth to LA. This was an expensive option but I decided to do it anyway. On the evening of Tuesday, August 1 at about 9:00 PM I turned on my computer and sent out some E-mail. I left my computer on and laid down to do some reading. I read for a while and accidentally fell asleep. The next thing I knew it was 2:00 AM. I got up and decided to read my E-mail and this newsgroup before I turned off my computer. I was pleasantly surprised to read that Carlos had shown up for the first class. I turned off my computer and decided to do the 12 basic Tensegrity passes. At about 3:30 AM I went to bed and immediately fell into a weird dream. I saw Carlos speaking to a group of people and every time he would move his arms with hand gestures people in the audience would convulse and shriek. Towards the end of the dream Carlos started yelling out strange words that sounded like some ancient Toltec language. People in the audience went crazy every time he said one of those words. I woke up thinking that Carlos was going to be talking directly from his energy body to the participant's energy body at the workshop. I did not think that my dream was necessarily an accurate rendition of what actually happened on that energetic plane. I arrived in LA in the afternoon of Thursday, August 3 and quickly made my way to Culver High School. I made it through the registration and waited in the empty cafeteria. I had a funny feeling that Carlos and all the women were going to be there. Promptly at 7:00 PM Carlos, Florinda, Taisha, Carol and the Chacmools entered the cafeteria through a side door. Carlos jumps up on the stage as if he was twenty years old and say's "High I am Carlos Castaneda." I already knew that he was a small guy but I had never pictured him as a Seventy year old. He started talking about the first time he had meet Don Juan. He was very animated and often he would say something funny and slap his right thigh while keeling over laughing. I could not help think that he was just like Don Juan. I was standing on the right side of the stage in a crowd of people. As I listened something strange started to happen to me. I could feel this pressure slowly building up on my body. Then my heart started to pound a little bit. Carlos was talking to the audience while Carol, Taisha and Florinda seemed to be looking over in my area. I am not an amateur to the ways of sorcerers and quickly realized what was happening. A few seconds later my heart was about to beat out of my chest and I began running out of breath. I could feel a bunch of energy welling up on the back side of my cocoon out side of my body. Finally I could not take it any more and I let out a gasp of air. At the same time the energy that was welling up on the back of my cocoon exploded and shot up above my head. Some woman who was standing in front of me turned around and gave me a dirty look. I was doing everything in my power to maintain my cool. Just when I was about to pass out and hit the floor the sorcerers backed off. The test of a lifetime had came and went and I did not pass. Noticing my success with loosening my assemblage point, they were trying to see if I could exist in their world without it tearing me apart. I could not and if they would have pushed anymore I probably would have died. I would have loved to of passed such a test but I have nothing to be ashamed about. They did not pass the first time either but circumstances are a lot different now. Although I had many opportunities during the three weeks to talk to the sorcerers about what happened to me I chose not to. Carlos continued to lecture on the ideas behind the magical passes and I acted like nothing had happened. A little bit later he brought all the women in his group up on the stage and introduced them. For me it was a very magical moment and one that I thought that I would have never gotten to see. Carlos finished lecturing and left the cafeteria along with the other sorcerers. The Chacmools finished the night with teaching Tensegrity. Carlos did not attend the next night's class and that ended up being the only one he would miss for the remainder of the workshop. By Saturdays class it was clear that Carlos had seen something from the spirit to tell him to participate more heavily with the workshop. During Saturdays class he pulled small groups to the side and taught the essence of Tensegrity by reducing it down to very basic movements. Carlos ended up giving all three of the Sunday lectures as well as giving an hour to hour and a half lecture each day before we learned new magical passes. I did not take any notes but I will try to highlight some of the concepts that he talked about in another post. For this post I want to highlight a few moments that had special meaning to myself. Carlos warned us that during the next three weeks he was going to say things that might be disturbing to some people. He said that if at the end of the three weeks if anyone wanted to tell him to "go blow his barracks" that it would be fine with him. He laid down the ground rules of no personal questions, no trying to get discovered and no telling him about personal dreams (especially the ones that have him in them). During the second week of the seminar Carlos kept telling us about a 10 year old girl in his life that has to make a decision concerning life and death. The girl that he was talking about was one that he pointed out during his first lecture as a cyclic being. I assumed that she was the blue scout. I did not really understand what he was talking about until the second Sunday lecture. He explained that for some time now the girl was thinking about leaving his group to go live with her grandparents. I guess that this option was presented to her by Carlos to allow her free will. I imagine that the pressures of being in his group were a lot for a little girl. Her biggest complaint was that they would not allow her to eat tamales whenever she wanted. Sometime during the second week of the seminar he discussed the matter with the girl. Carlos told us that when sorcerers look out at the horizon they see an amber glow with many swirls in it. When a hole opens up in that amber glow it means that what ever issue the seer has pending must come to a final decision. The hole of finality opened up while he was discussing the girl's decision. So Carlos was forced to give the girl an ultimatum. She had to decide to either stay with them and live or go live with her grandparents and die. Carlos was associating death with her decision because for him a normal life is a death sentence. When Carlos was talking about this subject to the audience he became very emotional. The girl made the decision to go live with her grandparents just before the lecture. She said that she wanted to stay with them until the end of the summer then go live with her grandparents. Carlos told her no. She could only stay until the end of the seminar. Carlos told the audience "I can not impinge my will on her. I can not believe that she does not know what she is doing. She is going to her death and for what? Tamales!" Carlos said that she requested them to not remember her as the little girl that was too stupid to make the right decision. Carlos confessed that this situation bugs the hell out of part of him but he is quickly turning it into an empty story just like all his other stories. After Carlos told this story I noticed that some people were visibly shaken. The Spirit had timed this situation perfectly so that all the seminar participants could get a first hand view of finality in the sorcerer's world. When I was back at my home between the second and third week, I started experiencing this deep sense of disassociation. It was like nothing in my ordinary life mattered any more. I knew that being around Carlos was causing me to feel this way. At the beginning of the third week Carlos told us that something incredible was happening. He was seeing people's energy body returning. Carlos explained that the energy body gets separated from us at birth because it is driven off by the actions of the Fliers. Don Juan always told Carlos that his energy body was in Japan. It took Don Juan many years to help Carlos bring his energy body in to the point that it was superimposed upon the physical body. Carlos said that who in his lineage would have believed that just in a period of weeks so many people's energy bodies could have returned. He said that the combination of doing the Tensegrity and having his energy body talking directly to our energy bodies caused the reunion. He said that sorcerers teach their students by bypassing the rational mind and talking directly to the energy body. When the energy body unites with the physical body then half the battle is over. Carlos told us that we had become the germination of his lineage. He said that his task was to explode the knowledge of his lineage and it was happening. Carlos said that he was the traveler and as the traveler he is going to extend the same challenge to us that Don Juan hand made to him. That challenge was to meet again out there in the unknown. He had been successful at meeting Don Juan and he is positive that many people in the audience will meet him again. Carlos said, "We will meet again. I am sure of it." The last hour of Carlos' lecture on the 20th of August was simply incredible. He was intentional trying to invoke a very specific mood in the audience. A mood that sorcerers require of longing and quiet desperation. His description of the death defier was awe inspiring and his story of meeting his father was absolutely riveting. Here is approximately how it went. Carlos began to talk about the death defier. He reviewed for us how in 1725 the death defier on his last dying moments cornered the nagual Sebastian and extorted energy from him. Carlos then explained in technical terms how the Death Defier takes energy from the Nagual. Carlos recapped his nine day ordeal with the Death Defier that he had written about in The Art of Dreaming. Carlos explained how the Death Defier is just a man, a human just like us, and his struggle to survive is one of human possibilities. Very emotionally, Carlos explained how whenever he talks about the Death Defier he is nearly brought to tears. The Death Defier has been fighting for his life every moment for over 7000 years and he is human. He first escaped death by becoming a sorcerer but he got trapped by the inorganic beings. After thousands of years of being trapped by the inorganic beings he figured away out, thereby escaping death for a second time. Then for thousands of years he survived by manipulating his assemblage point. Then in 1725 he was near death because he had used up all his energy reserves. He then cheated death for a third time by extorting energy from the Naguals in his lineage. Now that Carlos is the last of his line the Death Defier has devised a method beyond comprehension to cheat death for a fourth time. An emotionally moved Carlos explained to us how the Death Defier's story is a part of all of us and it has meaning to our own fight for freedom. How many of us want to live so desperately that we could fight every moment for over 7000 years, grabbing and searching for any little piece of knowledge capable of carrying us onward? After he finished his discussion about the Death Defier he began to tell us about his real father. Carlos' father and mother were very young when they had him. His mother was around 14 and his father was about 16. For some unexplained reason Carlos was raised by his grandfather. Carlos only saw his father a hand full of times when he was a child. His father would come to the farm with a bunch of guns and screw around with them. According to Carlos his father could not hit anything. Carlos held a lot of resentment towards his father for abandoning him. This resentment was compounded by the fact that Carlos' grandfather taught him to go around trying to get people to feel sorry for him because he was an orphan. After many years of working with Don Juan, Carlos realized that the only was for him to completely recapitulate his resentment towards his father was to go see him and bury the hatchet. Carlos said that his real last name was Ovalle (I am not quite sure of this). He went to his father's house who had a family of his own by then. Carlos became very quiet and sullen when he began to tell this next part of the story. Carlos went to the front door and knocked. A woman answered the door and Carlos said that he was an old friend of Mr. Ovalle's. Carlos' father came to the door and greeted him. His father very courteously invited him in and they sat down. Carlos was awestruck with how warmly his father had received him. His father told the woman to bring them some tea. His father said "Please you must tell me who you are and where we had met." Carlos said "Well if I tell you who I am then I will not have to tell you where we met." Carlos then told his father that he was his son. Carlos then went on to get to know his father for the first time in his life. All the years that Carlos had hated his father he assumed that his father hated him back. He quickly learned that his resentment of his father was a unilateral one because his father barely remembered him. Carlos said that his father was an exquisite man who was very well read. His father even had Carlos Castaneda books on his bookshelf. He never told his father that he was Carlos Castaneda. His father invited him to stay for dinner and Carlos accepted on the grounds that he did not tell his family that he was his son. Carlos had dinner with them and later on it became time for him to say good bye. At this point Carlos was pouring all the emotion that he could into this story and the audience was completely captivated by him. Carlos hugged his father and held him by the forearms shaking them in great affection while saying good bye.. His father's wife remarked that of all his friends she had never seen any of them treat him so much compassion. She said that they must have been very good friends. Carlos' father had a little girl and Carlos hugged her to say good bye. Carlos knelt down and held her by the shoulders and said, "I wish that I would have had a father as nice as the one that you have." Carlos then stopped himself and left. He told the audience that is what sorcerers do. They go just far enough then they stop. Carlos then held the palms of his hand towards the audience and said "During the last 3 weeks I have given you my best." Then the greatest man that I had ever met in my life turned and walked off the stage and out the door in total silence just like he had entered three weeks ago. The audience continued to applaud for several minutes after he had left. I left there in silence also. I do not think that I could have talked to anyone even if I had to. During the three weeks Carlos was everything a nagual should be. He gave us lots of practical knowledge. He ruthlessly attacked a lot of the participants cherished beliefs. He refused to tolerate any bull shit questions. He never catered to anyone or sought anybody's approval. He was extremely animated when he was imitating people. He tried to instill a sense of quite desperation in us with his touching stories. He refused to become a guru or to take responsibility for us in any way. He was often funny and very witty. He was always detached and at ease. He sincerely wanted us all to succeed and believed that we could. Practical Actions Carlos wanted to really sink in the concept of Practical Actions. The way that we navigate through our daily world is through Practical Actions such as tying our shoes or putting gas in our cars. Each one of these Practical Actions that we do is designed to achieve a desired out come. Well, the same concept holds true when a person is trying to become aware of realms outside the daily world. That person needs a set of Practical Actions that yield desired out comes in realms that may follow very different rules. The magical passes are a perfect example of Practical Actions that yields results in dreaming. Meaty Worlds A person needs to build up dreaming attention before they can really do dreaming. Lucid dreaming is not what sorcerer's call dreaming. To build up dreaming attention a person must begin to isolate objects in their normal dreams and hold them as long as possible. Once a person can hold a threshold number of object they will be automatically whisked away into another world. There are millions of worlds within the reach of man that are Phantom worlds. Phantom worlds are worlds that lack any kind of solid structure. Also with in the reach of man are Meaty worlds that have a solidity equal to our daily worlds. The ancient sorcerers painstakingly mapped out every meaty world that they could assemble. They concluded that there were only about 6000 Meaty worlds within the reach of man. Prefacing Energy The goal of a sorcerer is to perceive energy as it flows in the universe. There were a lot of questions directed at Carlos about Auras, Chakras and spirits. He answered them by saying that sorcerers try to see energy as it flows in the universe. When sorcerers first start to SEE they preface what they SEE with attributes of the physical world. Due to the practices that sorcerers engage in to develop their ability to handle the abstract and they lose their prefaces. Other traditions develop their prefaces and never learn to get rid of them. This topic was discussed because of the picture of the Flyer jumping over the pyramid at Teotihuacan. Carlos took the picture seriously because the image on the photo looks exactly like a Flyer when a sorcerer first starts to SEE them. As the sorcerer develops and loses their prefaces they learn to SEE the Flyers as just energy. I studied the picture of the Flyer intensely for at least a half hour. I even asked Carlos how long did the Flyer materialized wondering if people saw it. Carlos claimed that the photo was one of a series of photos take milliseconds apart and the image appeared on only one frame. The image of the Flyer looked like an opaque side view of a man jumping forward in a belly flop position. The image was so clear that Carlos made fun of how big the Flyer's gut was from feasting on 90,000 people. I have to admit that the picture was pretty convincing. Carlos claimed that the picture was an omen to start talking about the Flyers. The reason that he never discussed them before was that Don Juan told him that the issue was so provocative that it would undermine his efforts to present sorcery to the world. Here is something tangential to prefacing energy. Carlos said that Carol Tiggs has been bouncing an idea off him for years concerning the socialization of humans. Carol claims that of all the worlds available to sorcerers this one has the highest degree of socialization. She also claims that the socialization of humans is so intense that when sorcerers travel to other worlds it exerts tremendous forces on that world to conform to ours. She claims that the beings of those worlds are forced to take on human characteristics in their presence. Beings That Are Going To Die One of the most powerful concepts that a warrior has to fully realize is that he/she is a being that is going to die. This realization has to be translated into an intense sense of desperation. If a sorcerer fails to invoke this sense of desperation inside an apprentice then that sorcerer has accomplished nothing. Carlos said that during his last year with Don Juan, Don Juan became very concerned about the fact that he had not invoked in Carlos the desperation of a being that is going to die. Don Juan decided that the problem was that Carlos socialized with other people too much. He requested that Carlos move into a place far away from everybody he knew and to not make any friends. Carlos did and it took him three months to actualize that sense of desperation. Carlos said that he realized that the only thing that gave his life meaning was Don Juan. He had become addicted to Don Juan's intense sense of meaning and purpose, which he lacked in his own life. The notion of Don Juan leaving him became unbearable. When the time came for Don Juan to leave the world, Carlos was in such despair that he wanted to either leave the world with Don Juan or die. Carlos claimed that when he stood at the edge of that 800 foot precipice with Don Juan's party he didn't even care that he could be jumping to his death. Finality Carlos was talking about the 10 year old girl that is in his group. He said for some time now the girl was thinking about leaving his group to go live with her grandparents. I guess that this option was presented to her by Carlos to allow her free will. I imagine that the pressures of being in his group were a lot for a little girl. Sometime during the second week of the seminar he discussed the matter with the girl. Carlos told us that when sorcerers look out at the horizon they see an amber glow with many swirls in it. When a hole opens up in that amber glow it means that what ever issue the seer has pending must come to a final decision. The hole of finality opened up while he was discussing the girl's decision. So Carlos was forced to give the girl an ultimatum. The girl chose to go live with her grandparents. Appointments With Infinity Carlos caught wind of some of the criticism leveled against him for holding the seminar. Carlos said, "There are people out there saying that Carlos Castaneda is exploiting you." He exclaimed, "I am not exploiting you I am bringing you the sorcerer's revolution." He explained that the sorcerer's revolution is real revolution and is not like the revolutions of the past that really only changed who was on top. Carlos went on "I have daily appointments with infinity and I cannot make my appointments with crap hanging on me." "Why would I do anything that would keep me from making my appointments?" Carlos made these statements with such utter conviction and sincerity that I wish his critics could have been there to hear it. Bored Fucks Probably the most asked topic at the seminar was concerning sex. Sorcerers do not have any kind of ideology went it comes to sex. If a person is viral enough to have sex without it draining their energy then sex is OK. Carlos said that sorcerers believe that the amount of energy the person's parents expel when they were conceived is critical in determining whether or not they can have sex. Sorcerers perceive that most people are the result of a Bored Fuck. Carlos gave examples of a Bored Fuck as a woman requesting her husband to not mess up her hair during sex or a man telling his wife to not bother waking up during sex. Once Carlos asked Don Juan if he could be with women or not. Don Juan stated that given the lack of confidence in Carlos' voice when he asked the question, hell no. Don Juan then made fun of Carlos by spitting a small amount of saliva and saying that it represented the most Carlos could ejaculate. Seeing Animals And Plants Carlos fielded a lot of questions concerning what sorcerers see when they look at plants and animals. Carlos claimed that the only thing sorcerers can see on plants and animals are a cocoon and an assemblage point They can't even see if their awareness is eaten by the flyers just like humans. Carlos theorized that if enough people on Earth started SEEING there might be enough mass to allow sorcerers to see things that are blocked from them right now. He also said that the assemblage point of plants is located underground near the roots. He claimed that eucalyptus trees have the weirdest assemblage point that he had ever seen. Their assemblage point has spikes coming out of it. Religions During one of the question and answer periods someone asked Carlos what he thought about Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha and their religions. Carlos said from a sorcerer's standpoint that they are all a bunch of egomaniacs. He defined the Bible as a book of endless assertions written by egomaniacs. Carlos said "The first time Don Juan told me that it was like he took a stiletto and stuck into my side. And I bled! Just like many of you in the audience are bleeding right now but I challenge you to go back and read the Bible for yourself. See if you don't come to the same conclusion now that I have brought it to your attention." Carlos also defined the concept of Heaven as the deification of all that is human. According to sorcerers religions simply place mankind up on a pedestal that he doesn't belong. Carlos also said that the concept of reincarnation was too egotistical for sorcerers. For them the notion that we are so wonderful that some deity is going to guarantee us that we are going to get to keep coming back life time after life time is just too arrogant. Shamanism Carlos told us that one time after he gave a lecture a man came up to him and said, "I am a shaman and I can kill people with my eyes." Carlos cowers and acts like he is afraid. Then the man said, "It's good to know that in real life you are not as stupid as you portray yourself in your books." Carlos told him thank you. The man then said, "Because of that I am going to allow you to share Tumock with me" (I am not sure what the actual word was but I assume that it was some kind of pipe ceremony). I think Carlos just walked away from the guy. As the seminar went on it became clear that Carlos did not think much of Shamans. One day he started dancing on the stage imitating a shaman shaking a rattle saying, "Hay aah hay aah I'm talking to the spirits hay aah hay aah." I guess some neo-shaman in the seminar was offended and told somebody connected to Carlos. So the next day Carlos daintily walked on the stage saying, "It has been brought to my attention that some people here are offended by me attacking their cherished beliefs." He said that when he was in Mexico he had to be real careful when he said anything about Catholicism because people were so easily offended. Now here in the US if you say anything about Native Americans people act the same way. Carlos asked us what was so wonderful about Native Americans. He said that they had some bad environmental practices too. Then for the people who feel sorry for them because they had been conquered, he said "Just as you came and took this land away from them believe me some day somebody's going to come along and take it from you." There Will Be No Limelight For Carlos Castaneda He told the story about how his agent nearly died of a heart attack. He went to see his agent in the 1970's and his agent happily reported that he had worked out a million dollar deal with American Express. He wanted Carlos to do a commercial holding an American Express card and saying "Hi I am Carlos Castaneda and I use American Express." When Carlos turned the offer down flat his agent got all sweaty and started shaking. He eventually had to unbutton his shirt and Carlos thought for sure that he was going to have a heart attack. Carlos said that Don Juan made him promise to never be in the limelight. John [ 1995 Index | Previous | Next ]

Unauthorized use, copying, or re-posting of this page without permission from the author is prohibited. Links are acceptable.