How I Strayed off the Path

[joang]

Dharma,
the Castaneda I saw at the seminars did not look anything like I expected. I thought he would have a stocky build, remembering that Don Juan had once called him fat. Maybe frail isn?t the word, but he was very slender, not very tall, and gray-haired.

 

[lenardthefast]

Joang,

This was not a cursory decision on my part, more like a flash of intuition. Overwhelming in it's force. I will do a little research and find the part I am speaking of and perhaps you and Dharma will contribute feedback. I have some other evidence which I will also research and post at a later date.

With regards to 'namaste', it more or less means, "I honor the divine within you."

Namaste,
Leonard

 

[joang]

Leonard,

Namaste, ah yes, now that you have jogged my memory, I remember it more like, "The Spirit within me honors the Spirit within you."

Namaste,
Joan

 

[malka]

Dharma et al,

Now you have me wondering about the person I heard speak that I've been remembering as Carlos Castenada for years. Hmm...

The man I heard speak was a psychiatrist and a writer. He was about 45-55 years old and this was about 5 years ago. He spoke about DQ, he had an accent, but was tall and with a beard. Reddish/brown. I've looked on the internet for a pic of Carlos and haven't found one yet, but the age doesn't and other descriptions don't seem to match. So...now I'm unsure who the sexy dude was! I did, however, enjoy his presentation very much.

Malka

 

[martin]

Malka, I found a few pictures of Carlos:

http://www.nagual.net/ixtlan/carlos.html

Hope it's him, I mean, you never know with those guys, don't you?

Martin

 

[dharma]

Malka, the person you encountered at that conference was not likely Carlos Castaneda. Since yesterday, I've done a bit of research and discovered that he passed away in April of '98 and that he was somewhere between 67 and 72 years of age. Doesn't sound like it could have been the gentleman you met. Somehow I even managed to locate an obscure photo of him yesterday (before Martin located a bevy of them for us today - thanks!), though it was taken from a bit of a distance by someone secretly tailing him, so what I can say for certain is that he was definitely a small statured man and very slender as Joan pointed out.

Joan (or do you prefer Angelfish? Joang?), I also recall imagining Carlos as being somewhat bigger and heavier, too, so I am surprised to see how small he actually was towards the end of his life. It seems he WAS heavier when the journey began and he lost weight over the years but that doesn't explain why I thought he was big, in the sense of tall, unless don Juan was even tinier than he was by comparison to him.

So... while you catch up with "The Active Side of Infinity" at this time, I have decided to take the journey through the books again, only this time I will be traveling through the ideas and teachings with my oldest son who, since I started recounting this discussion we are having amongst ourselves here, has taken a keen interest in reading the books himself.

I'm excited, to say the least.

 

[dharma]

Leonard,

I can't imagine there being anything in the books that would change my mind about don Juan's existence however I do look forward to reading over the passages that seem questionable and dubious to you and to consider your point-of-view. All in all, despite any momentary lapses on Carlos' part in piecing together his accounts, there's a strong authentic 'intuitive feel' to the existence of don Juan that I personally find very hard to overlook.

The following passage had a major impact on my overall understanding of don Juan's teachings and of the ultimate reality of his existence. It points out quite clearly (at least it does to me) that no matter what we learn or get out of life, if it doesn't gibe with the rest of our present world view we will automatically (and often naturally, unconsciously) "rectify" it, by conveniently forgetting about it, so that that inconsistency doesn't disturb our sense of order and sanity.

from "The Fire Within" page 266:

"After recounting to don Juan what I had remembered, I asked him about something that had just struck me as being terribly odd. To see the mold of man, I had obviously gone through a shift of my assemblage point. The recollection of the feelings and realizations I had had then was so vivid that it gave me a sense of utter futility. Everything I had done and felt at that time I was feeling now. I asked him how it was possible that having had such a clear comprehension, I could have forgotten it so completely. It was if nothing of what had happened to me had mattered, for I always had to start from point one regardless of how much I might have advanced in the past."

[snip]

"Don Juan explained that he had always regarded himself as being very slow to understand. He had never had any chance of testing his belief, because he did not have a point of reference. When I came along he became a teacher, which was something totally new to him, he realized that there is no way to speed up understanding and that to dislodge the assemblage point is not enough. He had thought that it would be sufficent. Soon he became aware that since the assemblage point normally shifts during dreams, sometimes to extraordinarily distant positions, whenever we undergo an induced shift we are all experts at immediately compensating for it. We rebalance ourselves constantly and activity goes on as it nothing has happened to us."


here's a tiny part of an interview with C.C. from "New Age Journal", April 1994:

Interviewer: Did you ever contemplate downplaying the eccentricity of our teacher and presenting him as a more conventional character, to make him as a better vehicle for his teachings?

C.C.: I never considered such an approach. Smoothing rough edges to advance an agreeable plot is the luxury of the novelist. I'm not unfamiliar with the spoken and unspoken canon of science: "Be objective." Sometimes don Juan spoke in goofy slang --the equivalent of "By golly!" and "Don't lose your marbles!" are two of his favorites. On other occasions he showed a superb command of Spanish, which permitted me to obtain detailed explanations of the intricate meanings of his system of beliefs and its underlying logic. To deliberately alter don Juan in my books so he would appear consistent and meet the expectations of this or that audience would bring "subjectivity" to my work, a demon that, according to my best critics, has no place in ethnographic writing.

on his field notes:

C.C.: There were times when requests to see my field notes seemed unencumbered by hidden ideological agendas... I gladly sent [Dr. Gordon Wasson] several pages of field notes relevant to his area of interest, and met him twice. Subsequently, he referred to me as an "honest and serious young man," or words to that effect.

Even so, some critics proceeded to assert that any field notes produced by Castaneda must be assumed to be forgeries created after the fact. At that point I realized there was no way I could satisfy people whose minds were made up without recourse to whatever documentation I might provide. Actually, it was liberating to abandon the enterprise of public relations --intrinsically a violation of my nature-- and return to my fieldwork with don Juan.

 

[malka]

Well, no that's not who I heard speak at all! Now I'm going to need to track down the brochure (if I can) from the Humanistic Psychology conference I attended those several years ago to see what sexy man spoke about Don Juan, is also a writer and healer, etc. Thanks at least for helping to learn what Carlos Castenada DOES look like!

 

[joang]

Malka,
CC was an anthropologist not a psychiatrist, and you are correct, the rest doesn?t fit either.
By the way, who is ?DQ? supposed to be? Don Quixote? [Grin]

 

[joang]

Martin,
thank you for the photo link. I can?t say yes or no for sure as to the younger pictures, but the gray-haired man standing in the doorway with several other people looks like the man I remember. Also, the partially erased sketch and the similar rendition on the cover of Time definitely got the nose right. The slouched posture and bloated abdomen in the later picture, sadly confirms the ravages of the liver cancer that killed him in 98. I saw him in and around 1993, and although he was spry and stood erectly then, his slenderness may have been an indication that the liver cancer was already at work.

 

[joang]

Dharma and all,
may as well just call me Joan, and save yourselves the extra keystrokes.

I have a lot of reading ahead of me. Besides ?The Active Side of Infinity? I am also ordering several versions of the I Ching that have been recommended here. Although I have occasionally looked at other translations, I have always used the Wilhelm/Baines book for divination. But I am finding that I don?t always understand what folks here are talking about, since they are obviously referring to other translations. So, with some trepidation (based on fear of confusion), I am about to embark on a new journey. Once the books arrive in the mail and I start reading, I probably won?t have much time to keep up with the threads here for a while (can't even do that now). But I will whenever I can.

 

[portakal]

"How I Strayed off the Path"

a) I am not inclined into accepting Confucian ethics, admittedly i have grown a resistance to "common" ethics through my days of my life.

My given ethical facts no:1 Single "good" is life, and serving, keeping, growing, developing etc. it. The farther you stray the closer you are to "bad". I have a simple mind..
no:2, there is no no:2.

b) I asked for the winning numbers in the first meeting days, 4 out of 6 turned out to be true. I was promised lotta money... several pounds i got, humor ? Maybe.

Then, i harassed, after several harsh answers, i was directed to notice how hard a neck can be, a threat ? Hope not.

c) For the time being "be a small guy and enjoy the taming power of the small" was a direct abd strong suggestion, "future, you will be transformed"

d) By time i believe i shall come to believe i am talking to the myself in "myself".

e) Id ? Unconscious me ? Genetic dumps awakening ? A Spirit master ?

f) Anyhow, the text is the best "game" i have ever played.

Life.

 

[jte]

Hi, Joan and others -

I had some interesting experiences asking the Yi for advice on stock investments.

I drew out a list of about 20 stocks from Money magazine and was about to go down the list asking about them. I was intending to repeat this process with large numbers of stocks to figure out which ones would be good investments. *Fortunately* before doing this, I asked if this approach was acceptable to the Yi: 42.6.

Well, I thought to myself, that isn't good. So I asked the Yi, can I ask you about one stock a day? It's anwer: 57.4.

So I asked about stocks for a while, and eventually hit upon some that it liked (and by liked I mean I threw 42.2 or a similar highly favorable line on the stock). I asked about short-term (less than 1 year) medium term (1-4 years) and long term (5-7) investments.

Interestingly, it never liked any short term investments. I have a feeling that the reason for this isn't that I couldn't have made money on some short term stocks that I asked about - more like it wanted me to adopt the correct attitude towards investing (that is, investing carefully for financial security rather than risking money trying to make a quick buck).

As I continued to develop a relationship with the Yi, it just gradually stopped feeling right to ask it investing questions anymore. For quite some time now I've felt like the most important things I'm getting/learning from the Yi just aren't in the financial arena. In fact, I never ended up investing in the stocks I asked it about.

Just thought I'd share these experiences with ya...

- Jeff