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Carlos Castaneda Interviews and Articles
Kindred Spirit - Jun 1995
An interview published in the Summer (June-August) 1995 issue of Kindred Spirit magazine.
INTERVIEW
A New Generation Of Sorcerers
From the sixties until now, Carlos Castaneda has inspired seekers everywhere. Here the three chacmools of his generation, Kylie Lundahl, Reni Murez and Nyei Murez answer our questions in the frank and particular way well known to all those familiar with their tradition.
Carlos Castaneda's Tensegrity
More than twenty-five years ago I wrote my first book: The Teachings of Don Juan, a book about my apprenticeship with Don Juan Matus, a Yaqui Indian sorcerer from the state of Sonora, Mexico. I developed the theme of Don Juan's teachings in eight subsequent books, the latest of which, The Art of Dreaming, was published in 1994. Now there is a new expression of those teachings; I call it TENSEGRITY. TENSEGRITY, a term I borrowed from architecture, refers to the 'property of skeleton structures that employ continuous tension members and discontinuous compression members in such a way that each member operates with the maximum efficiency and economy'.
I have applied this term to a system of movements that don Juan's four disciples, Florinda Donner-Grau, Taisha Abelar, Carol Tiggs and myself, have developed, following the strict patterns of the sorcerers that lived in Mexico in ancient times.
THE HISTORY OF TENSEGRITY
One of the major disadvantages that I encountered in portraying the teachings of don Juan for the reader was the use of the terms sorcerer and sorcery. The negative reaction that these terms evoke in us is something natural; the connotations that they bring to mind are all malignant and terrifying. In order to avoid such a reaction, I have opted for using the terms man of knowledge or seer.
The seers that lived in Mexico in ancient times discovered, by means of their dreaming practices, a series of movements conducive to physical well-being and mental sobriety. Dreaming for those seers meant the use of ordinary dreams as a means to enlarge the scope of their perception. Through such practices they used to enter into states of enhanced awareness, where they experienced a tremendous feeling of physical balance, an indescribable sense of well-being, and a great internal strength. Those men of knowledge longed for such feelings of well-being and internal strength when they were in their normal awareness; their longing was so intense and their efforts to repeat them were so overpowering that they finally discovered, in dreaming, bodily movements that allowed them to replicate at will those states of well-being and internal strength.
They called these movements magical passes, an in order to guard them, they transformed them into something tremendously secretive and mysterious by surrounding them with rituals.
The magical passes of the seers of ancient Mexico have survived to this day. They were handed down with utmost caution and great secrecy from generation to generation. Don Juan Matus and his cohorts taught to us, their four disciples, four different lines of magical passes. All of us kept our individual line of movements secret until ten years ago when we decided to amalgamate them into one single unit.
THE HISTORY OF THE CHACMOOLS
The word Chacmool is applied to some monumental human figures made out of basalt found in the pyramids of Tula and Yucatan in Mexico. They portray human beings in a reclining position holding some sort of flat receptacle on their umbilical region. Scholars have classified the figures as incense burners; the sorcerer's of don Juan's lineage consider them to be the representation of a special class of fierce guardian warriors. For don Juan and other seers like him, the Chacmools were not incense burners, but rather the guardians of the pyramids as sites of power.
In the lifetime of those seers and throughout the ages, the chacmools were and are fierce warriors dedicated to guarding other men of knowledge; they guard their way of life, the places where they live, the spots where they do their dreaming. the chacmools are the custodians of the ideas, visions and possibilities of the seers under their care.
Among the men of ancient Mexico, the male or female entrusted with directing the actions of a whole generation within a given lineage of seers was known as the nagual. The nagual is a being gifted with a very special energy that gives him the quality of a natural guide, a conductor, a director.
Don Juan Matus was the guide of his generation and I am the nagual of the new one. In my generation there are three chacmools: Kylie Lundahl, Renata Murez and Nyei Murez; these three women are entrusted with the care of don Juan's four disciples.
THE CHACMOOLS AND TENSEGRITY
The task of the chacmools, in their role of guardians of the ancient seer's way of life, was to compile the four lines of magical passes. It took them seven years to amalgamate them into a single unit. The chacmools, guided by us, don Juan's four disciples, erased the haze of mystery and enigma that surrounded the magical passes, and they transformed them into something that can be utilised by anyone.
Now the chacmools have prepared for use the first unit of the magical passes adapted to the new ideology that well-being and internal strength are the heritage of every human being. They have entitled the first unit TWELVE BASIC MOVEMENTS TO GATHER ENERGY AND PROMOTE WELL-BEING.
This first unit is the theme of their videotape-- which is already being sold in the United States and will soon be available all over the world-- and it is also the theme that they are going to develop in a series of workshops that they will conduct this year.
The seers of ancient Mexico believed that human beings are the beholders of a most peculiar dualism. They were not referring to traditional dualisms such as body and mind or matter and spirit, but to the dualism between the self and something they called the energy body. They considered the energy body to be a particular conglomerate of energy fields belonging to each of us individually.
The goal of those men of knowledge was to forge the energy body and transform it into a replica of the self, and vice versa, to forge the self and transform it into a replica of the energy body: a conglomerate of energy fields.
The necessary energy to accomplish the indescribable results of this dual transformation was obtained by those seers through their magical passes.
The TWELVE BASIC MOVEMENT TO GATHER ENERGY AND PROMOTE WELL-BEING were selected by us, don Juan's four disciples, in unanimous agreement, in order to serve as the basis to gather and store the necessary energy to give definition and scope to the energy body.
-- Carlos Castaneda
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Question:
Can you tell us how you first came into contact with Carlos Castaneda and the sorcery tradition, and what impact this made on each of you?
Answer:
This question is impossible for us to answer on the basis that the sorcery tradition that Carlos Castaneda described in his books is a state of being. We cannot say in sincerity that there was a time when we came into contact with it.
This is no exaggeration on our part, nor is it a desire to give you a cynical, obscure, or cute answer. The truth of the matter is that we are barely coming into contact with it now. We began working with Carlos Castaneda about ten years ago, but our working with him had nothing to do with his world. We did research for gigantic upcoming book that he plans to publish some day, the title of which has changed through the years; it began as Ethno-hereneutics, but one of his best friends appropriated the name for his own research.
Then it changed to A New View of Interpretation; at present it's called Phenomenological-Anthropology. This work reveals Carlos Castaneda's deep interest in the social sciences that he has kept alive throughout all his life as an inheritor of don Juan Matus' sorcery tradition.
We cannot say, then, that when we came into contact with Carlos Castaneda we also came into contact with his world. The latter was a matter of gradual assimilation; we don't know when it took place. We feel, however, that it is taking place now.
Question:
In the books by Carlos Castaneda, humans are described as luminous beings who generally have a fixed assemblage point which locks then into 'normal reality' which is perceived as the external world. A movement of this assemblage point enables the adept to perceive and move into other equally 'real worlds'. Can you give us any examples of the experiences that might occur as a result of such a movement which might be more accessible to those unfamiliar with the sorcerer's path; would near death experiences be such an example?
Answer:
The assemblage point is displaced from its normal position during sleep. Sorcerers say that the farther away it is from its normal position, the more bizarre the experiences of that dream. This is the simplest example of the displacement of the assemblage point which occurs to all of us at all times.
Another example could be the displacement created by the intake of hallucinogenic plants or substances. Fatigue, hunger, fever, disease, dehydration and many other abnormal situations also produce a displacement of the assemblage point. The idea of sorcerers is that any displacement of the assemblage point produces a view of another world, but it is also their idea that we are incapable, under any conditions, of maintaining the fixation of the assemblage point on the place to which it is displaced. This incapacity results in a mere fleeting view of other worlds.
Near death experiences are certainly, we would say, the leading examples of a more sustained view of other worlds. Sorcerers maintain that the impact of death is so gigantic that it freezes everything in one place; therefore, the fixation of the assemblage point at the place where the impact of death displaces it must give the most sustained view of another reality to those who are not necessarily on the warrior's path.
Question:
We understand that, like his teacher don Juan Matus before him, Carlos Castaneda is now the nagual. What does this term mean?
Answer:
The term nagual refers to a man or woman who is the possessor of a special charge of energy which makes him or her appear to the eye of the sorcerers, who are viewing the world solely in terms of energy and energy flow, as a being double, meaning that what appears normally as a luminous egg or ball of energy appears in a nagual as one luminous ball of energy superimposed on another.
Sorcerers maintain that such beings are capable of guiding, directing and advising other sorcerers in a most natural way. Sorcerers define the nagual as the being who is best capable, due to his charge of energy, to express and to interpret the commands of the spirit. For Carlos Castaneda to be the new nagual means that he has assumed the responsibility of guiding us to freedom.
Question:
Has a successor to Carlos Castaneda been found?
Answer:
No. There is no successor to Carlos Castaneda - he is the last of his lineage.
Question:
For a tradition that is so secretive, enigmatic and mysterious, what has prompted the decision to undertake work in public at this time?
Answer:
The sorcerers' tradition is in no way secretive or enigmatic per se. The problem here is the reluctance on our part, as members of the Western world, to be serious about anything that does not stem from ourselves. In the case of the sorcery tradition of the Mexican Indians, ethnocentrism seems to be our cup of tea.
The other part of your question we can answer by saying that the nagual woman, Carol Tiggs, who came back from a most mysterious journey ten years ago, opened the door for a revolutionary attempt on the part of don Juan Matus' disciples-- Carlos Castaneda, Florinda Donner-Grau, Taisha Abelar, and herself-- to disseminate the seed of an extraordinary idea: freedom.
Question:
How can someone who is not in contact with yourselves participate in the tradition.
Answer:
Carlos Castaneda has given in his nine books all the necessary clues to follow the warrior's path. He has presented those clues in the same fashion in which they were presented to him. Underlying this procedure is the sorcerer's conviction that the intellect has to be pricked first; once the intellect is curious about something, persistence can open energetic doors that will make direct participation possible. This answer seems mysterious and enigmatic but that is only a superficial appearance. The sorcerers in don Juan's tradition said that it is impossible for the linear mind to fathom the intricacy of the universe.
Energy, as a bona fide affair that rules our lives, is not part of our understanding of the world. Another way to answer the question would be to say that if we persist in following the warrior's path, energy itself will make it possible for us to continue.
Question:
Could you briefly comment on the sorcerers' understanding of the earth energy lines and sacred power places.
Answer:
Sorcerers believe that the earth is a conscious being, but conscious at a level that is more incomprehensible to our minds. Being alive and conscious, the earth generates energy which sorcerers perceive as luminescent lines.
A sacred power place is a description given to a nucleus of energy lines, that is to say, a centre where energy emanates naturally from the earth, like water flowing from a hidden well.
Question:
Can you tell us something about the secondary function of the womb, according to the teachings, the primary function being childbirth?
Answer:
We have been taught that the secondary functions of the womb are very much like the function of the brain as we know them. The sorcerers have told us that we can think with our wombs. However, whatever they call 'thinking with the womb' is not at all the kind of thinking we are accustomed to. What a woman gets are not actual linear thoughts but tremendously clear and powerful thought-feelings that we have to later interpret linearly. There seems to be a natural progression in the life of a sorceress to quiet down the linear thoughts and allow the feeling thoughts to rise until there is an equal amount of both.
Question:
Does the tradition recommend celibacy and if so, for what reasons?
Answer:
No. The tradition does not recommend us to be celibate or to be libertines. Celibacy is an issue related exclusively to what the sorcerers call 'the way in which we were conceived.' They say that if we were conceived in the midst of tremendous physical and emotional passion, our natural level of energy would be so high that we could do whatever we wanted without any detriment to ourselves; we could be libertines to our hearts' content. On the other hand, if we were conceived in what sorcerers call 'a super-civilised environment', our level of energy is the exact replica of the physical and emotional state of our parents at the moment of conception.
Sorcerers call the product of that conception a 'bored fuck'. In a joking manner we call them 'B.F.'s.' Of the three of us here, two of us are B.F.'s for sure; one of us seems to have escaped that fate. For us B.F.'s, sorcerers recommend that we save our energy any way we can because we don't have any. Celibacy in this instance is not recommended, it is demanded as our only way of being on par with the best non-B.F.'s.
Question:
Don Juan Matus describes the world as being predatory in nature, which is at variance to perhaps all other mystical, shamanic and esoteric traditions. Can you comment on this?
Answer:
In the tradition of the sorcerers to which don Juan belongs, it is maintained that the universe is predatorial in nature. For sorcerers, this is not a matter of speculation or of metaphorical predilection-- they know for a fact that it is predatorial. Throughout the ages they have described the condition of man, which is about the bleakest description we know. As time goes by, this description gains more and more ground. Sorcerers say that just as we keep chickens, or gallinas in Spanish, in a coop, or a gallinero, some entities that come from a universe of awareness keep us in human coops. Sorcerers make a joke and say that those entities, which they call flyers, or voladores, keep us human beings, or seres humanos, cooped up in humaneros.
The flyers of the sorcerers' tradition are black shadows that we sometimes detect and explain away as floaters in the retina. Sorcerers know for a fact, by means of their capacity to see energy directly, that those shadows are predatorial and that they keep us alive in order to devour our awareness.
Sorcerers say that our awareness is like a sheen around our total field of energy that looks to them like a luminous ball. To them, this sheen of awareness is like a plastic cover that would make the luminous ball shine even more if it were not for the fact that it has been eaten away down to the level of our heels.
Here is where the sorcerers description gets very disturbing to us; sorcerers say that the only sheen of awareness left in us by our eaters is the awareness of self-reflection. Therefore, all we are left with is the concern with me, myself and I. In our personal lives we have corroborated that the only force left in the immediate world around us is the force of self-importance, which comes disguised in the form of humility, compassion, altruism, kindness, you name it.
This sorcerer's description is of course our ultimate nemesis; we don't want to believe that we are being raised for food. In this sense, naturally, the sorcerers' tradition is at total variance with any other kind of spiritual tradition.
Sorcerers say, and believe me, not out of cynicism, that every ideal we deal with in terms of spiritual traditions, religions, etc, is a device concocted by the flyers to keep us in a lull. Imagine our disquietude upon examining, weighing and pondering this proposition.
Question:
What is the 'jump for freedom' and what is 'death' to those people who have not made this 'jump'?
Answer:
We understand that the jump to freedom is equivalent to evolving in a premeditated way. For sorcerers, the natural reason for our lives, aside from being eaten by the flyers, is to fend off our attackers in order to allow our awareness to grow to its full capacity. To complete this task is an evolutionary step which sorcerers call the jump to freedom. We haven't reached that state so we truly don't know what it means.
Your question of what death is to people who have not made this jump can be answered by sorcerers very simply by telling you that people who do not allow the regrowth of awareness die by being eaten by the flyers.
Question:
Could you please explain why you do not allow any photographs of yourselves or tape recordings of your voices.
Answer:
In doing this, we are directly following the tradition of the sorcerers of ancient Mexico. Obeying their request is our only palpable link with them since our way of life and our situation, as the last members of this line of sorcerers, has made us reach areas that were never entered by preceding practitioners. We are immensely far away from the actual tradition that gives us sustenance. Sometimes what we have to do is in total opposition to that tradition. Our token adherence to it is our blind obeyance of this rule: no pictures and no recordings of our voices.
Question:
You are all now placing a great emphasis on 'the recapitulation'. Can you describe the method and purpose of this technique and tell us of its origins and explain why it has come to the forefront of the teachings at this time?
Answer:
No, it is not only now that we are placing a great emphasis on the recapitulation; Carlos Castaneda has been talking about it for years. The method of the recapitulation is to make a careful list of all the persons we have come in contact with in our lives; this is a formidable task.
Personally, we have found it staggering to remember every person we have met in our lives! When we were asked to do this we believed it was impossible. We were told then that once this list was made, if ever, we had to take the first person on the list, which goes from the present to the day we were born, and examine all the interactions we had and everything related to that interaction. In other words, we were told that we had to relive every experience, and that our list was a device to aid our recollection.
The reason for the recapitulation, we were told, was manifold. The first reason was explained as the certainty that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico had-- and they were the inventors of the recapitulation-- that an incredible force which they called the eagle, and which we call awareness at large, lends every newborn being, from a virus to a human being, a certain amount of awareness which they are to enhance by means of their life experiences. At the end of their lives, that force reclaims the awareness that was lent.
Those sorcerers maintained that this reclaiming of awareness is linked to our death only by contact, and that the force that lends us awareness is not interested in taking our lives-- that is a different process. They also maintained that by means of the recapitulation we can give that force what it wants, and in the end it will let us go through it without taking our lives away. This is what sorcerers understand as being consumed by the fire from within. Sorcerers don't really die the way the rest of our fellow men do.
The other function of the recapitulation is to give us fluidity. Upon reliving all our experiences, sorcerers say that we acquire a pliability that will facilitate our entrance into areas of perception veiled to normal human beings.
The last function, which sounds to us like the most important of them all, is that through recapitulating we can acquire a hard discipline which is the only means by which we can make ourselves unpalatable to the flyers. Sorcerers assert that the only awareness which cannot be eaten is the awareness produced by iron-handed discipline. The recapitulation seems to create a condition of fluidity and determination which is the discipline that sorcerers talk about, not the discipline of compulsive, routinary behavior.
We have corroborated in our lives that our awareness is different; we are certainly aware of things now that were inconceivable to us before.
Question:
What is the attitude towards using psychotropic teacher plants, such as datura and peyote, and others which were advocated by don Juan Matus in the early Castaneda books?
Answer:
We understand that the reason don Juan gave Carlos Castaneda a profusion of psychotropic plants was because Castaneda was a very difficult subject. The stiffness of his personality was so overwhelming that don Juan used to call him 'Mr Oldmann' and 'Mr Nightmare' and also 'Mr Bacon' because he was quite chubby. He himself says that being short, brown, chubby and homely made him an impossible subject, and that change was not his middle name. Castaneda's case was quite individualistic-- the rest of don Juan's disciples never took any psychotropic plants. Don Juan pushed them in the opposite direction to the point that they don't even drink tea.
Question:
We have heard that the nagual woman Carol Tiggs, who was introduced to the world in Carlos Castaneda's most recent book The Art of Dreaming, spent ten years in the second attention and then reappeared in a book shop in California.
Is this true and can you explain what it means?
Answer:
Yes, it is true. Carol Tiggs went to the Phoenix Bookstore in Santa Monica because she found out that Carlos Castaneda was giving a lecture there. He, Florinda Donner-Grau, and Taisha Abelar believed that Carol Tiggs was gone for the rest of their natural lives and was waiting for them somewhere in what the sorcerers call the second attention, where she would guide all of them some day. Carol Tiggs had returned from a ten-year journey two months prior to that encounter; she was still groggy from that experience; she couldn't conceive a way to get in touch with Carlos and the other two.
It is very difficult for us to explain what this means; the sorcerers would explain it by saying that don Juan's four disciples have not been eaten by the flyers for thirty years, so their level of awareness allows them extravagant play with perception and awareness. To try to make this into a linear explanation is impossible, unless we want to sound like three idiots babbling inanities. We hope we never get to that point.
Question:
What exactly is the 'second attention'?
Answer:
We have been taught that the second attention is the consciousness of human beings who have not been devoured by the flyers down to their heels. If a natural regrowth of awareness is allowed, the level of consciousness of that awareness that rises up allows the person who has it to enter into something indescribable. Since it has been impossible for us to get an idea of what this awareness is from a great number of people, all we have is our four wards; Florinda Donner-Grau, Taisha Abelar, Carol Tiggs and Carlos Castaneda. We haven't been able to really deal with this subject.
From our own personal experience we draw a near blank. We have changed, yes, but our consciousness cannot verbalise what we experience; it seems like the world we used to know but we know that it isn't.
We hope that a moment will come when it will be possible for us to verbalise what the second attention is beyond saying that it is a consciousness of heightened awareness. As we have already told you, by heightened awareness we mean awareness that has not been eaten by the flyers.
Our insistence on this point may be very displeasing to you, it is to us, but we are convinced that there is no other way to explain bona fide change in human beings. Consider this point: in the world of everyday life, no matter what we do, we never change. So what are we going to do? Remain the same while we talk and talk about unrealistic idealities? This is the point where the sorcerers squashed us. They said to us, if you really want to change and be different you must fend off the flyers. If you do not do this, forget about change-- all you will do throughout your lives is talk about how wonderful you are.
Question:
Are you working for the collective jump for freedom and are we in a race against time to complete the jump?
Answer:
The three of us are in perfect agreement with the four of don Juan's disciples; we would like to bring the idea of change and freedom and purposeful evolution to whoever wants to listen. We are not in a race against time; if we are, it is subliminal-- we are not aware of it. But now that you ask the question, you have us wondering.
Question:
We understand that don Juan is no longer in the world. Where is he now and do you have any contact with him still?
Answer:
We came years and years after don Juan left the world. We don't know where he is-- neither do his disciples; he apparently died a sorcerer's death, which means he took his body with him and kept his life force. Sorcerers describe this as burning from a fire from within and turning every bit of oneself into awareness-energy. If that is the case with don Juan, he and his people vanished into infinity without leaving a trace.
Acknowledgment: Our thanks to Simon Bridgewater for his help with this interview.
Editor's Note: In order to publish this interview, we agreed to the chacmool's condition of not editing any published replies to questions. We apologise to those with failing eyesight for the small print at the beginning of the article.
Copyright 1995 Chacmool Center for Enhanced Perception