Encounters with the Nagual

[宁]

Hi there, i thought id give it a shot... since i saw there are a couple of CC fans on this forum.

Has anyone read this book, im sure we can find it somewhere free on the web, there are a lot of valuable information in it about cultivation, that can apply to a lot of different paths.

The story goes that CC left a legacy to one of his hidden students, to publish a book on the workshop notes he attended in the early years of CC's teaching, even before the tensegrity was made public. This mission was accorded to Armando Torres, for CC forseen that his followers and detractors would make his teachings loose their edge and direction. It is a refreshment, and also a zip/archive type of a book that has in it all the dramatism, wisdom, genius and insight of the previous books of CC.

 

this being said, i hope we can make something out of this one

 

thanx

 

 

L1

 

http://www.thenagualbook.com/ here is the piece of jewel

 

The Survival of the Assemblage Point

 

 

 

"Carlos," I asked him, "what happens to us when we die?"

 

"It depends," he answered. "Death touches us all, but it is not the same for all. Everything depends on one's energy level."

 

He assured me that the death of an ordinary person is the end of his journey, the moment when he has to return to the Eagle all the awareness he obtained while alive.

 

"If we don't have anything else than our life force to offer it, we will be finished. That kind of death erases any feeling of unity."

 

I asked him if that was his particular opinion, or part of the traditional knowledge of seers.

 

He answered:

 

"It is not an opinion; I have been on the other side and I know. I have seen children and adults wandering over there and I have observed their efforts to remember themselves. For those who dissipated their energy, death is like a fleeting dream, filled with bubbles of steadily fading memories, and then nothing."

 

"Do you mean that when we dream, we approach the state of the dead?"

 

 

 

"We don't just approach it, we are there! But since the vitality of our body remains intact, we can return. To die is literally a dream.

 

"You see, when an ordinary person dreams, he is not able to focus his attention on anything; he doesn't have anything but his fragmented memories, fed with experiences he has accumulated in the course of his life. If that person dies, the difference is that his dream lengthens and he doesn't wake up again. It is the dream of death.

 

"The journey of death can take him to a virtual world of appearances, where he will contemplate the materialization of his beliefs, of his heavens and private hells, but nothing else. Such visions start disappearing in time, as the impulses of memory wear out."

 

"And what happens to the souls of those who die?"

 

"The soul doesn't exist, what exists is energy. Once the physical body disappears, the only thing left is an energy entity fed by memory.

 

"Some individuals are so oblivious of themselves that they die almost without realizing it. They are like people with amnesia, people who have a blockage of the assemblage point and can no longer align memories, they don't have any continuity; as such , they feel permanently on the brink of oblivion. When they die, those people disintegrate almost instantaneously; the impulse of their lives only lasts for a few years at the most.

 

"However, most people take a little longer disintegrating, between one hundred and two hundred years. The ones who had lives full of meaning can resist for half a millennium. The range expands even more for those who were able to create bonds with masses of people; they can retain their awareness during entire millennia."

[Procurator]

 

"However, most people take a little longer disintegrating, between one hundred and two hundred years. The ones who had lives full of meaning can resist for half a millennium. The range expands even more for those who were able to create bonds with masses of people; they can retain their awareness during entire millennia."

Its a hobby of mine to analyse modern fads and try to guess where the ideas were stolen from. This one seems to be lifted from writings on Shingon sect that were made available in translation in the same period that the book was written - 1990s.

[宁]

allow me to disagree this time. this idea is part of my country's folk lore also. as with many of other ideas presented there... this is a mere taste of it. if you want, i can sent it to you by mail. i might be wrong, but i think this one is the kind of stuff you would fit well into, not specifically, but generally speaking.

 

CC and his followers are very controversial figures, but let's not judge teachers, let's judge the teachings instead.

 

 

as always open to suggestions,

 

L1

 

edit: as for the lifted and unlifted issue... there is a saying: a stolen bell has the same sound as a bought one. so for me the criteria would be if it works out or not.

 

Edited April 24, 2008 by Little1

[宁]

yet another taste of it.

 

disclaimer: "The information has an aura, anf only fiew know the right position for the eye to see it. Only those will understand that there is a secret order within the information. Without it, the information is not informative any more" I.P. Culianu - "Mircea Eliade"

 

- which means this kind of information can be taken many ways, besides the correct way...

 

"To open up to power is a natural process. No man can tell another: 'You are already open!' - unless he is a charlatan. Nor are there any shortcuts that will automatically bring us to freedom. The secrets of initiation are symbols of the arrogance of the ancients, keys without a door, they will get you nowhere. You can spend your life pursuing them and when you finally obtain them, you'll discover you have nothing.

 

"You believe that what differentiates knowledge is the way it is transmitted, whether by books or by oral tradition. It has not occurred to you that both methods are the same, because both belong to our everyday agreements. What is important about the way you receive information? What matters is that you become convinced to act!

 

"The method of sorcerers is the systematic saving of energy. They state that what separates men is not what they know, but how much energy they possess; therefore, the true way to transmit

 

knowledge is in increased states of awareness. The appointment of sorcerers is not with a book or a ceremony, but with dreaming. When a warrior learns how to capture experience through his dreams, it doesn't matter under which label the teachings are presented, since his perception is pure and he can corroborate it with his seeing."

 

i dont think i will be able to post other parts of the text any more, due to the laws that protect books and publications. i hope this has at least build some curiosity.

 

L1

[Procurator]

allow me to disagree this time. this idea is part of my country's folk lore also.

that is my point exactly. It has been lifted from somewhere, crudely whrought into a marketing vehicle and profited upon.

 

Reality of aztec gods: they all have multisyllabic name, complex mythology, established archeological artifacts. Real.

 

http://www.crystalinks.com/aztecgods.html

 

In CC there is this Eagle. Just Eagle, you know, good enough for the target market, they are not picky or educated. Fake.

 

 

 

If you stole a bell, and ring it, the owner will know where to find you, that is about all what one can do with a stolen bell.

Edited April 25, 2008 by Procurator

[Xienkula1]

.............................................

Edited June 8, 2008 by Xienkula1

[宁]

Ok, let's put it another way... what are the things that definately convinced you that CC was a fraud.

I can tell you my experience. In ten years time i have heard every conceivable argument in favour or against this idea, and all of them were good and solid. If you dont belive it, we can start one, you give me the DONT's and i will give you the DO's. It will take a while, and we will probably get nowhere.

So here's the thing, what decided for me if they are authentical or not was not on a mental debatable plane.

The were alive to me, and made me more alive.

Whether tensegrity movements were stolen from someone else or not, or the ideas, i would live that to theproper authorities to investigate, but up until now, even thow a lot of money is in the issue, no one came with a definate proof. This is not to say i belive them because of it, it's just one fact. If i put my mind into it im sure i would have came up with a more attractive set of movements to rock the market, i wouldnt have to steal it from someone.

As for the bell issue, if we are to continue it... the master of the bell couldnt know, because all the good bells ring the same way, ring for awakening. By the way, the real master of such bells is only Infinity, which seems to have a definite interest of multiplying and fabricating such bells, im not sure to what means IT does that, and IT doesnt care about our sense of property, knowledge of this kind is universal, it springs out from many and all the traditions. The worst detractors of CC agreed on a couple of thingst though: one of them is that he didnt do it for the money.

 

I promised i wouldnt copy/paste no more, but i just cant help it. Somebody stop me

 

I commented that, according to what I had read, divulging secret knowledge is characteristic of 'black' sorcerers; on the other hand,

'white' sorcerers transmit what they know with restraint, because they are aware that knowledge involves a certain danger to those who are not prepared to receive it.

 

Carlos shook his head with incredulity.

 

"But what is going on with you?" he asked. "What destroys us is ignorance, not knowledge! There is nothing in the profundities of knowledge that can put man's authentic interests at risk!

 

Carlos demanded that I define the term 'initiated'. This got me in trouble, since in fact I didn't have a very clear idea about this. Making an effort, I explained to him that initiates are people who, thanks to their merits, become recipients of a particular traditional knowledge the rest of their fellow men do not share.

 

While I spoke, Carlos agreed gravely. When. I finished, he commented: "That definition is a portrait of the importance you grant yourself".

 

He maintained that classifying human beings for what they know is a mere arrangement of the collective inventory, something like making distinctions among a line of ants because some are slightly darker than others.

 

"The ironic thing is that we human beings do in fact divide ourselves into two groups: Those who dissipate their energy, and those who conserve it. You can call the last ones whatever you want, sorcerers, Toltecs, initiated; and it's the same whether they have a teacher or not. Their luminous reality is such that they are a step away from freedom.

[宁]

i think Xienkula1 is right: we are not only debating the authenticity of some teaching, but the way the human mind itself functions

 

I think what CC is trying to say is that knowledge by itself cannot ultimately make any distinction amoung men. but the power to act upon it, and make it a living thing. now THIS, IS debatable...

[Procurator]

The worst detractors of CC agreed on a couple of thingst though: one of them is that he didnt do it for the money.

yeah, uh-huh.

 

"Many consider "Ixtlan," which served as Castaneda's Ph.D. thesis at UCLA, his most beautiful book. It also made him a millionaire."

 

" Seminars cost up to $1,200, and as many as 800 would attend."

 

http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=6429

Edited April 25, 2008 by Procurator

[Procurator]

 

So here's the thing, what decided for me if they are authentical or not was not on a mental debatable plane.

The were alive to me, and made me more alive.

of course they did. they made more alive everybody who is a fad junky. People pay to become more alive, they crave it, and that makes them to go from a fad to a fad to another fad. That is why this kunlun guy is a grand lama, an egyptian initiate, bushmen shaman, swedish masseur, kungfu grandmaster etc. You need fads - he has fads. Ridiculous - but the junkies pay.

[宁]

Well, everybody is entitled to an oppinion, thank you

 

L1

[宁]

Edited April 25, 2008 by Little1

[dao zhen]

Tales From the Jungle

 

Documentary of the life of Carlos Castenada

by BBC

 

Volume 1

 

Volume 2

 

Volume 3

 

Volume 4

 

Volume 5

 

Volume 6

[sheng zhen]

Tales From the Jungle

 

Documentary of the life of Carlos Castenada

by BBC

 

oooh...thats sad. He was a disillutional drug addict enjoying girls looking like boys.

[宁]

i've watched it, and even reccomend it, together with other masterpieces like "Enigma of a Sorcerer". i used to have a BIG file on it, i really ment it when i said i heard all the AGAINST, and PRO castaneda debates.

 

i have friends that are so into it, they dont want to hear about anything else. and did i mention im not any more in this system?

the reason i post all the above material is for a simple reason: their philosophy, the way of the warrior, is just great, and was very functional to me, when i encountered it, a long time ago.

the principles i addopted from it were eye-openers. there are a lot of unanswered questions that i still have on the subject, and i feel someday i will find the answer to then. but i dont throw the baby with the water, no sir. it's not my game. plain and simple: you can find the great light within everything, so try to learn from anything life puts on your path.

 

shikin haramitsu daykomio.

Edited April 27, 2008 by Little1

[宁]

"Most people feel empty when they don't have love or friends, because they have built their life on a superficial base of relationships and they don't have any time left to ponder their destiny. Unfortunately, friendship is generally based on an exchange of intimacies, while a basic premise of mundane relationships is that everything we say some day will be used

 

 

against us. It's a sad fact that the ones we care about the most, are also our worst headaches!

 

"Sorcerers maintain that talking about ourselves makes us accessible and weak, while learning how to be quiet fills us with power. A principle of the path of knowledge is to turn your own life into something so unpredictable that not even you yourself knows what's going to happen.

[Taomeow]

I watched it and got a very good feel for who the detractors were, what they were. Anyone studied NLP, mind control, Ericksonian, or any other psychophysiological observation tricks for telling when someone is lying?.. I did. The detractors were lying. That's not the only things that's wrong with them, but it's a start.

 

The whole presentation too... what a trip. Castaneda "really meant" some other tribe, the one his jealous colleague said he did, the one he himself never once mentioned for any purposes?.. on top of never doing any field work anywhere, just reading books and plagiarizing, according to another detractor?.. So which one is it -- he didn't do any work, or he did it but with some tribe which he never, ever mentioned... or maybe he did it with a Yaqui teacher, not with the Yaqui tribe, just like he said he did?.. Don Juan wasn't a tribal man, and a friend of mine who is a full-blooded Yaqui Indian soon to run for mayor in an Oregon town, who does refer to himself as a "tribal man" out of sheer pride, didn't grow up in a tribal culture either -- instead he had to work in the fields since he was five years old, his parents were migrant farm workers and whose fault is that -- Castaneda's? That Native American lives were derailed and seldom look like what they were "supposed" to be like, or "expected" to be like based on Hollywood movies, the source of the bulk of many an anthropologist's ideation, is Castaneda's fault, according to this program. The authorities wouldn't bust Indians if it wasn't for the hippies, their impeccably logical construct goes, and there wouldn't be any hippies if it wasn't for Castaneda. Brilliant.

 

My Yaqui friend, when he wasn't doing back-breaking work as a child, was being raised by his grandmother who was a bruja, not a "shaman" but a sorceress (just like Don Juan wasn't a shaman, now they say Castaneda made him up because a "normal shaman" doesn't behave like that, well, it's very true that a shaman's activities are quite a bit -- quite a lot -- different, but haven't they noticed Castaneda never asserted Don Juan was a "shaman" to begin with? He asserted Don Juan was a "sorcerer," a brujo. Quite a different occupation.) So, OK, I asked my friend about Castaneda and he said Castaneda had a rich imagination. I asked, so, do you mean he lied? He said, I don't know one way or the other, all I know is, that's not what my grandmother was like. And proceeded to describe his grandmother. And, honest to god, I thought he was talking about an incarnation of Don Juan all over again. A female Don Juan under five feet tall, with fourteen children and countless grandchildren, who died at the age of 107 -- that's where differences ended and uncanny similarities began. But my friend doesn't like being marginalized as a figment of someone's imagination raised by a person who is not supposed to exist, he's an ambitious politically minded guy into mainstream functioning, and from him I got yet another perspective of how and why a Yaqui might be not terribly happy about people yapping about what remains of his culture demolished by the same characters with whom they are now trying to be on an even keel... accepting "mainstream values" for lack of a chance in hell to have theirs validated, or left unmolested, or allowed to survive the second there's the slightest exposure.

 

So... was Castaneda telling the truth? The detractors are such incredibly disgusting, fubar people that it's really hard to tell. The motivation behind discrediting him is so rife with ulterior motives that it adds zero credibility to the nay sayers' cause. The very fact the opposition is what it is constitutes a credibility vote in his favor I think. As Jonathan Swift (who could spin a tale like nobody's business) said a long time ago (I'm quoting from memory), "you can tell that a great man has appeared in your midst by the fact that all the dunces are in conspiracy against him."

[Smile]

In CC there is this Eagle. Just Eagle, you know, good enough for the target market, they are not picky or educated. Fake.

I believe there is also a description of what they meant by "eagle". I've had direct experience of this and other things he described (like waves of energy force/balls constantly "hitting" on you,etc). I was 9 y.o. when it started, 7 years before I found out about CC's books.

 

It's hard to describe the unknown, especially to people that can't relate to the experiences. So you have to present it in a way they can relate to. If it was so easy, there wouldn't be so many books explaining "What is Enlightenment?"

[Taomeow]

I believe there is also a description of what they meant by "eagle". I've had direct experience of this and other things he described (like waves of energy force/balls constantly "hitting" on you,etc). I was 9 y.o. when it started, 7 years before I found out about CC's books.

 

It's hard to describe the unknown, especially to people that can't relate to the experiences. So you have to present it in a way they can relate to. If it was so easy, there wouldn't be so many books explaining "What is Enlightenment?"

That's how I first came to taoism -- by discovering that it just happened to provide "names that can be named" for things I experienced way before, and completely independently, of knowing any of those "names." I didn't know anyone else in the world had ever been "hit" by any similar phenomena till I found out there's a whole world unbeknown to the cultures I've been steeped in that did get "hit," big time -- thousands of years of recorded history of such "hits" --

 

and provided not just "names" -- good usable names like ganying, qi, wuxing -- but also a coherent, non-contradictory, self-congruent (ziran) structure for exploring these phenomena. Which, well, you can damn well choose to call something if you're going to communicate with other people experiencing, or working with, or towards, similar ones or the same ones. And what you're gonna call it only matters when you communicate with other "users" -- as a taoist physicist who formulated a dynamic version of Newton's laws some 1,200 years before Newton put it, "an object in motion will remain in motion unless hindered, and it's as true as that a horse is not an ox." A different way to express the process of cognition -- a different tradition of "how" to say things -- but what he said is every bit as true as those much more "reputable" formulas that I so hated memorizing in seventh grade, and really don't remember at all by now, unlike the "horse is not an ox" bit which is impossible to forget --

 

and which essentially constitutes what in "our" scientific language we would have to call some impressively non-colloquial name (e.g., an "axiom") --

 

well, the taoist physicist just chooses to call it something colloquial and not contemptuous of common sense. Thus summarily ditching "our" scientific jargon's obligation to be conceited, self-important at all times, flaunting a superiority complex (to cover up the scientist's real feelings of profound inadequacy for the task) and boring to tears in order to sound respectable...

[Ian]

 

"While observing the quirks of self-importance, and the homogeneous way it contaminates absolutely everybody, the seers have divided human beings into three categories, which Don Juan gave the most ridiculous names he could think of: the urines, the farts, and the vomits. We all fit into one of them.

 

"The urines are characterized by their servility; they are toady, sticky, and cloying. They are the people who always want to do you a favor; they take care of you, they hold you back, they pamper you; they have so much compassion! In that way they hide the underlying reality: They are incapable of taking an initiative, and can never do anything by themselves. They need another person's command to feel that they are doing something. And, unfortunately for them, they assume that others are as kind as they are; and because of that they are always hurt, disappointed, and tearful.

 

"The farts, on the other hand, are the opposite. Irritating, mean and self-sufficient, they constantly impose themselves and interfere. Once they get hold of you, they won't leave you alone. They are the most unpleasant people you'll ever meet. If you are calm, the fart will arrive and wind you up and pull you in, and use you as much as possible. They have a natural gift as teachers and humanity's leaders. They are the kind who will kill to stay in power.

 

"The vomits are in-between these two categories. As neutrals, they are neither imposing nor will they be led. They are show-offs, ostentatious, and exhibitionistic. They give you the impression that they are something great, but in actual fact they are nothing. It's all boast. They are caricatures of people who believe too much in themselves, but, if you don't pay any attention to them, they are undone by their insignificance."

 

Damn. This is really annoyingly accurate. I'm a urine. Nailed.

[宁]

thanks also for the positive input, Meow, Smile

 

there is an immensity of astounding things that can be found in his work, both as principle and as praxis. but one of the most candid insights i ever picked out of it was: the training and the peculiar qualities a warrior can develop arent by far sufficient for the acheivement of the goals of the path. they only insure the luck of having a small chanse at it.

seen this way, the training and study begins to look different, for me at least turns into a relationship with life, an act of increasing awareness of life, of all that life is and can be. i strife to be the best witness that i can be to this miracle world, and this miracle life.

it can have so much meaning... it can awake the yuan shen.

 

L1

[gendao]

Proof is in the pudding.

 

So, could CC actually perform any siddhis, healings, psychic powers, etc? Was there any actual hard "proof" behind all his claims?

[宁]

Not that i know of, no. There is no hard proof of it. He didnt even want much proof of his mere own existance There are but a fiew pictures that could be taken of him. It does not work with proof, neither with belief. It seems to work with the personal checking of the affirmations in the book. As you gradually gain more energy, you can check even more farfetched allegations... I had the energy of checking a couple of them, and for me they worked out pretty good...

 

 

L1

[Taomeow]

The proof of the pudding...

 

Years ago I did adopt one practice from the guy's repertoire and followed it on a daily basis for a while. Namely, his way of looking in a certain specific manner so as to "shut off the inner dialog" while walking. This is supposed, according to DJ/CC, to "flood the tonal" with so much information at any given moment that it will be overwhelmed and have no choice but to shut up -- and that's when the nagual will surface. Well, it is absolutely correct, and I don't know of any other "meditation technique" whose efficiency is instant like that. I can switch to that mode in seconds and maintain it indefinitely, it is beyond effortless. Among other things, my physical eyesight improved considerably due to the practice. How can I "prove" this? There's no way to prove this. DO it and see. Don't do it and there's no way you (the generic you) can ever know. You can have an "opinion," e.g. that "it needs to be proved" or any other opinion for that matter. It's like the rest of the pudding -- you either eat it or you eat its shadows for all eternity and form endless opinions about the pudding, which are shadows of shadows of the pudding. Logical proof is not nutritious, and nutritious puddings are not logical.

[doc benway]

Irrespective of whether CC was "telling the truth" or not, his work had a valuable effect on millions of readers, including me. I'd say he was my first exposure to a real spiritual search. I don't practice the methods that have evolved from his books like Tensegrity but I've also adopted some more mundane methods from reading his books and have had some interesting experiences with shutting off the internal dialog, power walking, lookinf for power places and the like.

 

Recently, after a 20 year hiatus, I revisited his works. Read all the books back to back. What a wonderful ouvre! Whether fact, fiction, or a little of each, I don't care.

 

Curiously, while re-reading his works, it occured to me to try dreaming one night. I simply decided to do so and had the longest, most detailed, completely lucid dream of my life. It was a blast.

 

Sadly, it appears that some negative stuff developed around his circle towards the end. Many visionairies come to bitter ends but his vision lives on much like others of our times.