From:
david.j.worrell@gmail.com
The Teachings of Don Carlos - Part 4
Mike Sager | Scary Monsters and Super Freaks | Thunder’s Mouth Press | December, 2003 | 85 minutes (21,125 words)
***
At precisely 9 a.m. on Christmas Eve, 1993 — the same time as every morning for the past several months—the phone rang in Melissa Ward’s Santa Monica apartment. She was in bed with a horrible flu; she just wanted to be alone. The
phone rang again,
then again. The shrill noise hurt her head. Finally, she picked it up.
“How’s my baby girl?” sang Carlos.
“Still pretty sick, I’m afraid.”
“You’re coming to the dinner tonight, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know, Carlos,” she said, and then she sighed. “I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck.”
“But you have to be there! The whole dinner is for you!”
She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. They were a startling shade of cornflower blue, with gold flecks that shimmered in the light. “I guess I’ll have to see how I feel.”
["a startling shade of cornflower blue, with gold flecks". ??
“Why don’t I come over and bring you some chicken soup?”
“No no no!” she said quickly. “Don’t bother. Really! I’ll be okay.”
“Well you have to rest,” insisted Carlos. “Don’t go to work, don’t do
anything, just rest. You have to be ready. Tonight, you become one of us!”
“Well, er, um,” said Melissa, pushing her Cleopatra bangs away from her forehead.
[Cleopatra bangs again. Uh, I knew Melissa and usually... no.
So... wtf, Sager?]
He’d been talking about this mysterious dinner for weeks now. Frankly, it gave her the creeps. Become one of us! The way he said it made her shudder. It had the distinct ring of something cult-like; she didn’t like the sound of it, not at all. “I’
m gonna try my best to make it,” she said half-heartedly.
“You must make it!” roared Carlos. “Everything is ready. You are the Electric Warrior! We have been searching for you for all of eternity! We have found you just in the nick of time. You must come!”
[Ladies and gentlemen! The famous 'Electric Warrior'.
Or, at least, the latest one.]
Thirty-eight years old, petite and attractive, Melissa Ward was born beneath the Northern Lights at a secret military base in the Aleutian chain. Though she
was a bit too young to have been a hippie, she grew up with her feet planted firmly in the early
seventies counter-culture, into eastern religions and Credence Clearwater Revival, psychedelics, the writings of Gurdjieff and Huxley. She was 18 when she first read Carlos. She’d just returned from backpacking through Europe; she was severely ill with
colitis, in a lot of pain, trying to cure herself naturally with herbs. Staying
by herself in a friend’s cabin in the woods, lying around naked, trying to fight the sickness, she came upon a copy of Journey to Ixtlan on a shelf. She opened the book at
random, let her eyes drift down the page. “Death is always following you,” she read. In her condition, the words rang very true. She turned to the front of the book and started in.
[There is no such quote in Castaneda: "Death is always following you".
Nope. That isn't there. Several similar quotes. Such as: "He knows his
death is stalking him...". It's funny, because I know Sager is getting
the 'emotional gist' of everything right, but he plays loose with facts.]
Melissa had been reading for an hour or two when she heard some weird scratching noises outside. She struggled out of bed, looked through the window.
There, on the deck, was a giant black bird, the biggest crow she’d ever seen.
It was hopping up and
down, acting very strangely, like it was trying to get her attention. Stranger still was the fact that crows played a significant part in Ixtlan.
In Don Juan’s world, crows were said to be the incarnations of powerful sorcerers and spirits. Under the influence of the devil’s weed, Carlos himself had become a crow — his head had sprouted wings, a bill and feet and had flown off into the
heavens. Over the next few days, as she continued reading the book, the crow became bolder. It tapped on the window with its beak, hopped from place to place on the deck, knocked over little pots of herbs, generally making itself known. By the third day,
her curiosity got the better of her and she ventured out to the deck, sat down with her new companion. The crow hopped up on her chair. She fed it grapes. Though she might have been delirious, she could have sworn the crow had a kind of benevolent
presence. In an odd, unexplainable way, it seemed to be there for her, to help her through this rough time. The crow visited every day for a month, until she was fully recovered. Then it disappeared.
Time passed and she went on with her life, forgot all about Carlos. After bouncing around from job to job, she enrolled as an undergraduate at UCLA. By her junior year, in the winter of 1993, her life was full and hectic, more gratifying than ever. She
was working part time as a nutrition consultant, writing for the college newspaper, doing an internship at the actress Jessica Lange’s film company, taking a full load of classes — looking forward, meanwhile, to graduation and
the promise of a job in
either journalism or entertainment. And then one day she got a phone call from her mom. She was dying of cancer.
The next nine months were a living hell. Melissa nursed her mom to the end, held her hand as she took her last breath, sat alone with the body for three hours until the man from the funeral home came to take her. Melissa handled all
of the arrangements,
served as executor of the will. By the end of the summer she’d taken to her bed in a deep depression. Lying beneath the covers with the shades drawn, she repeated to herself a manta of despair: “Nobody cares. I’ve given up hope. Life sucks.”
Then one day in September, she ran into a friend at the health food store. He said he was going to another friend’s apartment to hear Carlos Castaneda speak to a small group. The session had been arranged primarily through the efforts of a German woman
named Gabi Geuther, a New Age enthusiast and veteran of primal scream therapy who’d befriended Florinda Donner-Grau and other members of the inner circle after a reading at a women’s bookstore in Santa Monica. For the first time in
many years,
Melissa thought of the weird and friendly crow who’d helped her through hard times. She decided to come along.
Though Melissa didn’t realize it just then, the fact that Carlos had begun to
appear in public after a 20-year absence signaled a stunning change in direction for the Nagual and his party. Over the last few years, they’d slowly begun taking on select
students for a weekly private class, held in a rented room in a dance studio. Now, apparently, they’d decided to rev things up, to actively promote the ideas and practices of Don Juan on a larger scale, to make them available for public consumption. To
this end, Carlos and the Witches had hired a lawyer and formed several corporations, with the stated intent of establishing “a magical relationship between the endeavors of a corporate unit in our modern world and the purpose and will of a bygone era.
Toltec Artists was a management agency — run by inner-circle member Tracy Kramer, a well-known Hollywood agent—set up to handle the literary careers of
Carlos, the three Witches, and assorted other connected artists. Laugan Productions was a
company that sold instructional videos and other saleable products. Most important was Cleargreen, which acted as both a publishing house and as the sponsor of seminars and workshops for something they were now billing as Carlos
Castaneda’s Tensegrity.
[Toltec Artists existed in 1993, but Cleargreen wasn't incorporated
until June of 1995. So this is all true but the chronology's a bit off.]
Derived from the words tension and integrity, Tensegrity was said to be a modernized version of the “magical passes” that were developed by ancient Indian shamans and passed down secretly through 27 generations to Don Juan and then to Carlos and the
Witches. By practicing these exercises, Carlos said, Toltec sorcerers had attained an increased level of awareness which allowed them to perform “indescribable feats of perception” and experience “unequaled states of physical prowess and well being.
” Through the use of the Tensegrity exercises — a sort of combination of martial arts, meditation, yoga and aerobics — modern practitioners could achieve a new level of vigor, health and clarity. And they could gain the kind of energy needed to
displace the Assemblage Point and actively engage in the Art of Dreaming, traveling at will to other worlds. While it was earlier believed that the Sorcerer’s Way was a solitary pursuit, Carlos now said that the “mass” created by a group of people
practicing together caused quicker and more powerful results.
[Sure it did. That's why miracles were popping up everywhere (sarcasm).]
Though Carlos had never before mentioned the “magical passes” in his writings; though other anthropologists insisted that there was no such tradition of body movements among pre-Hispanic Indians; and though Carlos had always eschewed the notion of
selling his techniques through expensive seminars, it was Cleargreen’s express purpose to disseminate the teachings of Don Juan to a large audience at
a high price. What had caused the change of heart was not exactly clear. Perhaps, some suggested,
Carlos saw fertile ground in the national obsessions with physical fitness and New Age philosophy—theirs was one heck of a product, a time-saving two-fer, designed to benefit both the mind and the body. Perhaps, some suggested, Carlos
was becoming
infirm and out of touch and the Witches had begun to call the shots.
Carlos himself acknowledged that Don Juan had always said that the magical passes should be kept secret. This new path, Carlos explained, had been spurred
by an extraordinary event. According to Carlos, while following Don Juan’s techniques, Carol
Tiggs, one of the three Witches, had disappeared from a hotel room in Mexico City into the Second Attention. She had vanished for ten years, Carlos said, in
order to act as a beacon from the other side, guiding initiates through the “dark sea of
awareness.” In 1985, however, Tiggs made a surprising reappearance at a California bookshop where Carlos was giving a talk. Her return had convinced Carlos that the “message of freedom” enshrined in the magical passes should
now be passed onto the
world at large.
Others had a more cynical view: “Castaneda had built himself up as a prophet through the Don Juan books,” said anthropologist Courtney Jay Fikes. “The bible, so to speak, was written; but there was no ritual, so it was necessary to invent one.”
Over the next several years, dozens of seminars — some lasting a weekend, some as long as three weeks — would be attended by thousands of Carlos enthusiasts in the U.S., Mexico and Europe. The seminars cost from $200 to $1,000. Tables were set up to
sell Tensegrity T-shirts (The Magic is in the Movement) and Tensegrity videos, which had been directed by the well-known novelist and screenwriter Bruce Wagner. Also on sale were Tensegrity tools, for use in concert with the magical
passes. “The Device
to Enhance Centers of Awareness,” was two balls made of Teflon reinforced by a ceramic compound. “The Device for Inner Silence” was a round, weighted leather-covered object for placement on the stomach. “The Wheel of Time” was invented by the
Blue Scout; it was a flat disk made of compact foam rubber, extremely pliable, but durable enough to withstand pushing, pulling and twisting. Carlos himself appeared at all the early seminars; both he and the Witches gave long, amusing,
passionate
speeches. Interspersed with the lectures were Tensegrity demonstrations by the Chacmools, dressed in matching black workout uniforms.
Also over the next several years, serious questions would be raised about the origins of Tensegrity. Some alleged that Carlos’s magical passes were nothing
more than the appropriated teachings of a kung fu instructor and “energy master” named
Howard Lee, with whom Carlos had studied for many years, and to whom Ixtlan had
been dedicated. Though there were allegations that Carlos paid a substantial sum of money and the phallus of a puma to deter the Santa Monica-based Lee from
taking legal
action against Cleargreen, Lee denied this. Smiling inscrutably, he refuses to speculate upon the actual origins of Tensegrity. He does acknowledge, however, that once Carlos began teaching Tensegrity, the formerly close relations between the two wise
men become chilly.
And so, on a balmy night in September 1993, Melissa found herself among a group
of 40 people, jammed into an apartment in Santa Monica, listening to the great man speak. Though she’d brought a notebook and had started out taking notes, she quickly gave
up. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to what Carlos was saying, no outline
to his talk, just a torrential downpour of ideas and stories and jokes. Though she was frustrated at first, she found herself settling into her seat on the plush pile carpet
and letting his words rush over her, concentrating not so much on what he was saying as on his energy. He had about him a really nice emanation, she felt, a nice kind of presence that was warm and fluid, almost like floating around in a
Jacuzzi with all
the jets on. Whatever this was, it was cool. She felt better than she had for months.
Carlos rambled for two hours, and when he finished he received a standing ovation. Melissa just sat there, kind of stunned. Before she knew what was happening, Carlos was standing over her. He leaned down, whispered in her ear: “You have very good
energy,” he said. Then he was gone.
[This is Carlos speak for: "you're a sexy girl."]
[continued in next message]
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)