Whatever time I have left to live, despite the winds and tides, I want to continue the embroidery dedicated to Carlito, the little giant, the nagual Carlos, the anthropotache and witch doctor Don Carlos Castaneda. Here is a highly anticipated chapter, and one that seems to ask you questions: Benefactor? What is it?
Unsurprised
You owe the world to your parents. It’s a lot. To your benefactor you owe the other world. It is much more. One day in your life before, you met someone you met often in your dreams. A person from elsewhere, who thinks otherwise or who does not think at all. This living, this living takes you two or three steps on the other side of the mirror. It happened the first time you met, or it took many months to happen, it doesn’t matter since it’s here now.
Your previous life has stopped, now you know eternal life. You won your ticket to non-ordinary reality. There are signs that you are stalking out of the corner of your eye. Synchronicities make you procession. Everywhere, without ceasing, happy coincidences roll out the red carpet under your astonished steps. Don’t be surprised at anything anymore. Let stupor give way to thanksgiving. I am not surprised at anything in order to be able to marvel at everything, said Hildegarde von Bingen, a notorious enlightenment, music lover and medieval Christian saint. We don’t visit.
Do not be surprised at anything, not even valves that spring like banana peels. Your astonished step may slip into it. Unsurprise it. Make it vigilant. Ensures its hold. Lock in momentum on the optimal pace. And above all, remain flexible. I do not address myself only to the walker on the solid ground, I also instruct you, skywalkers. For your first steps, I am informing you. Heavenly friend, you have no more legs. Don’t try to walk, run, sit or stand. Run like the wind, since you can fly.
You are a star among a hundred billion stars. A shooting star. You jostle comets to pull their hair out. You deflect asteroids, you rub shoulders with humanoids, you ken droids, you heal hemorrhoids, you juggle worlds and Shiva the Eternal is having tea in your garden. Yes you hold the key to paradise. Neither terrestrial nor celestial, paradise is wherever you are; it takes its source in you, on the borders of the great river Love and its many tributaries.
Fairyland
Don’t wait for a rose garden. Plant the roses. Don’t ask for the scent if you haven’t grown the flower. The benefactor isn’t supposed to talk to you like that. He does, however, because words don’t matter. Words only engage those who believe in them, said wise old man Juan Matus. He was precisely the benefactor of a line of wizards, including Carlos Castaneda. This visionary of the last century abandoned the academic research in anthropology he was pursuing at UCLA to devote his life to the practice of witchcraft that he had come to study.
Seduced by the old herbalist he met in a Mexican market, the young student shows off a little by adorning himself with peacock feathers. Completely unaware of which wizard he is talking to, Carlos introduces himself as an expert in peyote. The herbalist doesn’t care. He never utters that word, he says Mescalito and addresses him as a person. Carlos walks straight into an unimaginable world, a mixture of SF and Native American shamanism, under the sparkling aura of another indescribable reality that the old wizard calls the nagual.
From this day on, the ethnology student becomes a sorcerer’s apprentice. Throughout his books which keep his journal, he is initiated into Indian magic. We see him change, shed his old life and become an infinity warrior. Castaneda shaped me. I have read and re-read his books twenty times since the 1970s, they have become better than bedside books: survival manuals in the other world. What he lived, as crazy as it seems, I lived it too. And all the warriors engaged in conscience on this path will know him like me.
Combing the Giraffe
My benefactor brought me into the other world in 1992. I owe him the meaning and the salt of my new life. I was shivering on the doormat for ages gone out, here I have trod with my sandal the tomb of kings, here I have taken my flight towards skies always blue, here I am called the cheerful chaffinch who chirps so much. They tell me La Jactance. Bat d’la ghoul. Listening speaker. The cutter cuts. By being with vices bones the Emmental. Speaking too fast saturates the mind. Crate you want, dry man that, as the fairy Payesh says.
Not that I spent forty-two years combing the giraffe. My international adventures and my incessant domestic journeys have made me pass through many educated, even initiated, hands. I had approached the threshold many times, without being able to bring myself to cross it. If I am, as I have been told, an awake from birth, it is possible that in my early childhood I experienced states comparable to those I am experiencing today, while attributing these effects to my benefactor. He himself recognized, during the final catharsis of my arcane XIII, that the white light had scorched my hair.
By this formula, he expresses the fact that awakening is an irruption of white light, Gwenwed for the Celts, the Circle of white light. Which means that he recognized the signs of awakening in me when I still had two arcana to draw before I got there. Other facts of the same order, formerly inexplicable, tend to consolidate me in the idea of an awakening at birth. I could be a sort of tulkou, as the Tibetans say. A voluntary reincarnate, a boddhisattva or whatever, except that I have no interest in the rituals, which the Lamas adore. And the Catholics. And the feujs. The ritual is like the prayer wheel: a symbol that replaces inner understanding and the right attitude.
My Ant Master
I have had many guides, without ever loving any of them. I see my faults, I see those of my guides. They are not models but signposts. In this infinity out there, to use a recurring phrase from Don Juan Matus, signposts are more than precious. These terrae incognitae also have a manual, the books of Castaneda, and a card – or rather cards, those of the Tarot of Marseille in the priceless version of Jean-Claude Flornoy.
Nevertheless, without my benefactor, implacable, tenacious to the point of vice, could I have resuscitated my awakening, buried as it was under tons of shit? You can’t imagine the amount of crap that a being of light picks up when it incarnates on this plane, says Juan Matus, the benefactor of Castaneda. Sooner or later each of us has to get down to cleaning our inner temple, and the sooner the better.
Carlos Castaneda was lucky enough to have Juan Matus as a benefactor. And his friend Genaro. Matus, in his younger days, knew the benefactor of his benefactor. All of these examples he talks about show that there is only one way to be a benefactor. the only mandatory common point: to be someone’s benefactor, you have to bring that person to the other side of the mirror of the world.
My benefactor is the Earth, the Sun, my parents, my friends, my boyfriends, my girlfriends, my bosses and my bosses, my teachers, my beautiful encounters, an ant, a spider, a flight of starlings, a twig in a stream … When the apprentice is ready, a master always shows up. Sometimes the apprentice does not know how to recognize it. Sometimes the master refuses the apprentice. Everything that happens is willed. The apprentice takes what is given to him and thanks the gods.
