Castaneda, Carlos

I recalled that there is an instance in The Teachings of Don Juan where the Peyote entity, Mescalito, holds up his hand, and in its palm Carlos Castaneda sees a past incident in his life. 

For example, let s say you choose Tales ofPowerhy Carlos Castaneda and open to a random page. You read the following The conditions of a solitary bird are five First, that it flies to the highest point. Second, that it does not suffer for company, not even of its own kind. Third, that it aims its beak to the sky. Fourth, that it does not have a definite color. Fifth, that it sings very softly. For the rest of the day, think about how this relates to your current questions about life. 

Both in operation and in terms of study, this route is complicated by our predominant cultural bias of not really paying much attention to our bodies. Our bodies are too seldom thought of as sources of information. Researchers in humanistic and transpersonal psychology are just beginning to find out that the body has a wisdom of its own—a brain of its own, as it were—that can provide us with information about ourselves and external reality and process that information. Carlos Castaneda, for example, has told me that in Don Juan s system, a sorcerer considers his body a major source of information about the world around him the sensations in his body will tell him a great deal about events that otherwise would not be perceived through ordinary sensory channels. 

Psychologically, loading means keeping a person s consciousness busy with desired types of activities so that too little (attention/awareness) energy is left over to allow disruption of the system s operation. As Don Juan told Carlos Castaneda 10, people s ordinary, repeated, day-to-day activities keep their energies so bound within a certain pattern that they do not become aware of nonordinary reali ti es. 

Don Juan, the Yaqui shaman-teacher in the books by Carlos Castaneda, described Datura and mushrooms as powers or allies, as opposed to peyote, which he described as a teacher. Indians have generally been quite clear in maintaining that peyote provides them with their songs. Peyotists often "hear where they should look for this cactus. Some Indians even complain that they can t sleep near peyote because there was so much noise at night ... 

Other people have strong expectations about what your identity should be. They reinforce identity states of yours that meet their expectations, thus stabilizing those states. When the Yaqui man of knowledge Don Juan advises Carlos Castaneda to erase his personal history, he is giving sound technical advice on a method to reduce the pressures from others so you can discover your inner self. This technical procedure may not work very well for most of us, however. 

As Don Juan told Carlos Castaneda 10, people s ordinary, repeated, day-to-day activities keep their energies so bound within a certain pattern that they do not become aware of nonordinary realities. 

This was totally non-verbal, unrelated to his overt behavior (which by then was quite civil), and was experienced by me as a palpable force which attacked my solar plexus -- sort of like psychically having the wind kicked out of me. Any Shamanic warrior" would have understood how to protect himself from this, but I was wide open and totally ignorant that such forces actually existed outside of Carlos Castaneda books. 

In 1968 Carlos Castaneda published The Teachings of Don Juan A Yaqui [sic] Wiy of Knowledge, which referred to p od use, and must have stimulated interest in mescaline, since Castaneda imputed to Don Juan, supposedly a Mexican shaman, the belief that Mescalito was the spirit ofpeyotl (Castaneda 1968), This is certainly spurious. As I have shown, European scientists in the last century confused peyotl with mezeal, a word originally referring to a completely different plant, and mescaline as the active principle of pfyotlis decidedly a misnomer. Are we to believe that a Afedcan shaman is party to this confusion. ... 

---