From:
david.j.worrell@gmail.com
The Teachings of Don Carlos (Part 3)
Mike Sager | Scary Monsters and Super Freaks | Thunder’s Mouth Press | December, 2003 | 85 minutes (21,125 words)
***
Fast asleep on a futon in his modest apartment, late one night in the spring of
1985, a 32-year-old computer technician named Jeremy Davidson found himself on a mountain top, wearing nothing but his underwear.
[I was 30 in 1985, actually.]
He was standing on a rocky ridge, at the edge of a sheer cliff. Eagles soared, riding the updrafts. Clouds floated past; wispy fingers of moisture caressed his face. Beneath him, hundreds of feet below, was a gorgeous clear lake. He turned slowly in all
directions, inhaling the crisp air, taking in the view, trying to form a clear and lasting image of the whole place, performing a systematic intake, the way Don Juan recommended.
It was a wondrous alpine setting, with craggy escarpments and evergreen trees, snowcaps on the distant peaks. Though it was cold and windy, he was comfortable
and warm, filled with a buoyant sense of well-being despite his precarious barefoot perch. A
feeling of giddiness overcame him and he took off running—hopping and skipping from boulder to boulder like an astronaut bounding across the surface of the moon. Changing direction, he plunged straight down the cliff face, pausing here and there to
flip and spin and twirl, throwing tricks like a free-style ski-jumper, making his way toward the languid blue waters of the lake.
The scene changed and he was standing in a small cove, his toes buried in fine,
gritty sand. Thinking it might help to cement the dream, to make it last longer, he decided to look at his hands for a bit. He sat down in the sand, concentrated on his palms,
his fingers, his nails. Just then, a big wave rose up and washed over him, enveloping him in bubbles and blue, sending him sprawling.
Rising to his feet, Jeremy moved toward the back of the cove, toward a trail. He walked for a while through the dense woods, then came upon a building in a clearing, a huge Hansel and Gretel type affair, a gingerbread house with fancy trim. He got the
feeling it was an abandoned resort hotel. He decided to explore.
The scene changed again and he was inside, in the lobby, a room with a fireplace and overstuffed chairs, a gift shop off to one side, cobwebs and dust
everywhere. As he looked around, performing a systematic intake, things seemed to become more and more
solid, as if he was watching an image download from the web onto a computer screen. He walked into the gift shop, helped himself to a dry T-shirt that was hanging conveniently on a rack. Off to one side, behind the cash register, he saw an opening, like
a door, leading into a blue-green world.
[Here, Sager clipped off this dreaming experience and tacked on the
beginning of another one. These were two different LD experiences.]
He stood a moment, regarding the opening, trying to decide what to do next. Then he spoke aloud: “I intend to go to where the sorcerers are. Take me to the sorcerers….”
Shy and highly intelligent, a bit at odds with the world, Jeremy Davidson had first discovered the writings of Carlos Castaneda in the late seventies, while studying physics as a college junior.
[Close. It was the mid-70's. And that was the first time I went to
college, in Oklahoma, so I was not yet a physics major.]
He’d always been a seeker, a skeptic, a bit of an outsider, the kind of person for whom the normal order and the normal answers never seemed to ring true. He’d experimented with psychedelic drugs, read extensively on eastern and western philosophy.
He’d been a Buddhist and a Scientologist, an atheist and an orthodox Jew.
[He's getting my chronology wrong. :) Back in the mid-70's I hadn't done Buddhism or Scientology yet, and I was never an orthodox Jew (rather,
my family was Protestant growing up (Methodist) - rejected at age 13.]
More recently, during a bad period in his life he’d re-discovered Carlos. Starting with The Teachings, he’d worked his way through the series, which had grown by now to eight books.
[Nope. It wasn't a "bad period". It was a good period, actually.
I'd moved to New Mexico, and had gone back to college, this time
as a physics major. And while it is true that I re-read Carlos
then, I started with 'The Fire From Within', and then went back.
At that time there were seven CC books, not eight. :)]
Carlos himself had long since disappeared from the public eye. Smarting, no doubt, from the effects of his exposure in the early seventies, he lived in quiet anonymity in the Pandora compound with the Witches, traveling around the country and to Mexico,
churning out books all the while, honing the message and the method, taking it further with each new publication. Though Carlos said that Don Juan left the world in 1973, dying “the immaculate death” of the Warrior, each subsequent
book continued to
expound upon Don Juan’s teachings. Diligent readers noted that the anthropological references seemed to grow fewer as the series progressed, and that the books increasingly bore the traces of other influences, such as phenomenology, Eastern mysticism
and existentialism. With Don Juan having left the world, Carlos himself became the heir to the sorcerer’s lineage, the Nagual. No longer a disciple, he had become the prophet. As the books evolved, his focus turned more and more toward
the Art of
Dreaming.
According to Carlos, Don Juan was an intermediary between the natural world of everyday life and an unseen universe called the Second Attention. Though Western minds are conditioned to believe that the world we live in is unique and absolute, it is, in
truth, only one in a cluster of consecutive worlds, arranged like the layers of
an onion. Don Juan said that even though humans have been energetically conditioned to perceive only their own world, they still have the capability to
enter those other
realms — worlds as palpable, unique, absolute and engulfing as the ordinary reality that we live in every day.
Don Juan said that in order for people to visit those other realms — the existence of which are constant and independent of our awareness — they had to first recondition their energetic capacity to perceive. To this end, he prescribed a series of
techniques designed to displace the Assemblage Point, a place of intense luminosity, located about an arm’s length behind the shoulder blades, where perception occurs, where we receive the signals that tell us what we see, feel,
hear and understand.
Furthermore, said Don Juan, once a person became adept at traveling to the Second Attention, he or she could ultimately remain there as a luminous egg for
all of eternity, in a wonderful universe too vast and beautiful and complex and
fulfilling to
render in conventional language or ideas.
Reading all of this, Jeremy felt invigorated and alive, perhaps more so than he’d ever been in his whole life. Here, at last, was a belief system that felt right to him. It was a system that stressed living every moment to the fullest, as a Warrior and
a Man of Knowledge, rising to every trial as a challenge, taking responsibility
for everything you have a part in, living impeccably every single day. And, it was a system that explained the place of man in the universe, and the nature of
that universe
itself. Added to all of this was the promise of other worlds, not just worlds you could visit in an afterlife, but worlds you could visit right now, today. In sum, the Sorcerer’s Way was a mode of thinking as well as a mode of acting
— a world view
that offered its adherents not only ideas and guidelines but also procedures and results. You didn’t just sit around believing. You could act.
Jeremy thus embarked on the path of the impeccable warrior. He sought to live each day as a challenge, as a discipline. He strove to eliminate self-importance, to use death as an advisor, to erase personal history, to disrupt the routines of his life. He
tried to have a romance with knowledge, and to write people he cared about a blank check of affection. He practiced gazing and not doing, stalking and the right way of walking.
[All true, except... while I did indeed have a romance with knowledge,
this was still years before Carlos had recommended it. CC first wrote
about that in the 1993 book The Art Of Dreaming.]
He tried to stop the world and to see. He watched for omens and read infinity, a specific gazing technique where he focused on a fixed point until a violet field appeared, then continued to focus until a little blotch of pomegranate exploded into either
written words or visual scenes.
[Notice, this is actually just another way of focusing on hypnagogia.]
He spent hours recapitulating his life — a laborious process in which he reviewed each and every contact he’d ever had with another human being since his first memories after birth, an effort to regain wasted energy. Slowly but surely, he began to
become aware in his dreams — he began traveling to the Second Attention.
[He's story-telling again. Becoming aware in dreaming didn't happen
"slowly but surely". It happened fairly quickly, in just the first
few months of trying, and then it continued for many years.]
Now Jeremy found himself in a gift shop somewhere in the mountains, having entered the Second Attention from his futon one night in the spring of 1985. He
walked through a doorway into a blue green world, intending to go to the Sorcerers.
As he entered the doorway, a force that he had come to think of as the spirit picked him up and flew him over a vast area like a huge town square, filled with thousands of people. From his vantage point high in the sky, he could look
down and see their
faces. Most of them, he could see, were in some state of fear, degradation, agony. Some of them looked up as he soared past. Again he voiced his intent: “I intend to go to where the Sorcerers are.”
The scene changed and he found himself on the ground in a dark, smoky gray area. There were small, dark beings surrounding him, and when he focused on them, they turned to face him. They were ghoul-like creatures, with yellowish eyes and a single
protuberance extending out from their faces, terminating in creepy little mouths. They began advancing.
Retreating, he entered another area, inhabited by a different sort of beings, tall blocks of dark shadows, like huge sentient rectangles. They too began to surround him, and he found himself standing on something that looked like a gray tombstone lying
flat on the ground. Scared of the beings, wishing to leave, he knelt down and clenched his fist, placed it upon the stone. “I want to go where the Chacmols
are,” he said out loud, but nothing happened. He was about to repeat his demand, using the
name of one of the Witches, Taisha Abelar, when a voice told him not to do that, but rather to restate his intention. This time he said firmly: “ I INTEND to go to where the Chacmols are.”
[That's all pretty accurate, except... that I wasn't really "scared"
of the weird beings. I am almost never scared of anything in LD.
I just considered the weird creatures a bit of a distraction.]
With that, the scene changed and he was in a cave, with rock floors and walls and boulders strewn everywhere. Though there was no source of light apparent, it was bright as day. He walked around the cave, exploring. Suddenly a man jumped out from behind
a rock. He was primitive, vigorous, wild looking, wearing fur clothes. He ran towards Jeremy; Jeremy turned and fled. The caveman chased him through a vast system of tunnels and caverns, gaining with every step, getting closer and closer. Just as the
caveman was about to overtake him, Jeremy spotted a hole. It seemed to lead into another chamber. He dove through.
[Once again, after leaving out a minor part of the LD experience above,
Sager tacks a different LD experience onto the end of it. These were
some my experiences, but he's sticking two of them together.]
The scene changed and he was flying again, in a prone position with his arms extended like Superman. He felt his mood lighten; up up up he sailed, high into
the sky, toward the moon, bright and full. He made a smooth banking turn and headed back toward
earth, toward a shopping mall. In his mind, he considered leaving this place, flying out toward the countryside somewhere, but the voice inside his head overruled his thoughts and the spirit took control of his flight, as it sometimes did, and he began
to descend. He flew into the mall, around the atrium, past a fountain and an escalator.
[It was much more of a big deal to me than he's making it sound when
I thought the spirit took control. That was distinctly noticeable
and always a bit shocking on occasions when that seemed to happen.]
The scene changed. He was inside of a store, a sex shop. There was racy lingerie hanging on the racks, all kinds of toys on the shelves. Drawn to the toys, he was about to pick one up when he noticed a bunch of people in a back room, men and women in
various states of undress, an orgy in progress. He stood for a few minutes and watched. A man came over with his attractive girlfriend. He offered her to Jeremy. Though his inner voice clearly told him “No!”, Jeremy ignored the voice and took the
girl in his arms, began pulling off the remainder of her clothes. She seemed a bit reluctant. Jeremy got the strong impression that she’d never done this sort of thing before, that she was only doing it to please her boyfriend. It bothered him a bit
that maybe she wasn’t totally into the whole scene, but she was beautiful; it
had been a long time since he’d been with a woman. The voice told him No! He reached for her breast….
He awoke on his futon. He sat up, feeling a bit ashamed. He had not acted like a warrior. He shouldn’t have crossed the wishes of the inner voice. He shouldn’t have defied the spirit. It was months before he dreamed again.
[That's all Sager used from me. He just portrayed my believer self,
and didn't include any aspects of my subsequent transition to skepticism.]
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)