When you want to discover the nagualism of Carlos Castaneda, the first book to read is A Separate Reality. On the path that leads from the seeker of light to the man of knowledge, seeing is the first accomplishment, but not the first trial. Experience these stages from within, as I have experienced them.
In the system of knowledge of Juan Matus and Castaneda, “see” and “look” express two distinct ways of perceiving. Looking concerns the ordinary way of perceiving the world, while seeing evokes a complex process by which the man of knowledge perceives the essence of beings and things.
We cannot evoke the sorcerers’ view without addressing many challenges that the warrior of light encounters on his path of awakening. Seeing cannot be obtained without accepting what makes it possible: humility must overcome the arrogance of the ignorant and the sufficiency of modern man. It is the only really effective protection against the dominant ego and its derivatives that are selfishness, egotism, egocentricity, etc.
Knowledge begins with self-knowledge. To achieve seeing, one must first see oneself. And to see yourself as you are, a mirror is not enough. Humility is the right mirror. The mirror of the soul. Thus can be accomplished as a sacred act.
The darkness of the day is the best time to see. (source)Carlos Castaneda, A Separate Reality See, when the third eye pierces the appearances. Comes the vision of auras, and not the “gift of double sight” that allows Madame Irma to predict your future. In the best case, Ms Irma perceives visions by flash that come to her without warning. And when the flash stays off, Ms Irma improvises according to the unwritten rules of street psychology. And it works! Ms. Irma cannot see. If she saw, she would not do what she does. Seeing is a sacred act.
We must not reveal anything to the consultant about his future, it is an unforgivable crime. Ms. Irma does it all the time… Because seeing is not a gift, but the result of working on oneself, which is always long and painful. While methods once existed to electrically accelerate these processes, these extreme techniques are no longer used by the New Seers.
They are trained in the hard way, in the school of fear, to overcome the visceral fear of the unknown, to acquire the fluidity and inner rapidity that only allow to assemble other worlds.
Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.
Inner speed makes you fluid. Thus the energy can irrigate all the chakras in a homogeneous and regular manner. No fluidity is possible until his fear has been overcome. This is a key point of Nagualism, which considers fear to be the warrior’s first enemy.
Unfortunately, when this moment of truth comes, Castaneda stalls. And his fear wins. His benefactor Juan Matus speaks. “You were frightened and you ran away because you believed that you were damn important. Believing that you are important weighs you down, makes you clumsy and vain. To become a man of knowledge, you absolutely must be light and fluid.” (source)Carlos Castaneda, A Separate Reality
And to become light and fluid, you have to track down sufficiency. Killing the feeling of our own importance. Complacency is one of the daughters of the ego, probably the stupidest. The ego has many daughters, thought is one of them. It comes from the rational mind. The bad part of the mind. He has a good one, just one: the intuitive mind. Intuition.
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
Our time is of a complacency that nothing justifies. The current human being, as represented by our elites, has reached a truly stratospheric degree of sufficiency.
It is the fixed position of the assemblage point which has made modern man a homicidal egoist exclusively concerned with his own image. Sufficiency is the strength generated by the image that man has of himself. It’s self-pity in disguise, but we recognize it in its disguise. And we unmask him. By tracking yourself.
Coming out of complacency means breaking the mirror of self-contemplation. Children succeed easily, but after a certain age, it is impossible to free someone who has sat on a broomstick. Age crystallizes and petrifies what is flexible. The old people go off the rails, the young people mess up. Only ripe ones can be eaten.
With its girls and boys in cohort, greed, envy, pride, conceit, contempt, hatred, rape, murder, hypocrisy, lies, vanity and all the others, the ego does not lead us towards the best part of ourselves, but towards the worst. In a perfect world, the ego would be seen as a danger from its first manifestation. However, in this perverse world where everything works in reverse, the ego is useful at the beginning, when we are too fragile to survive without hatred. When we are small and we feel miserable, defenseless in this harsh world, we have no choice but to turn to him. The ego is the best tool for cultivating one’s own glory and the hatred of others.
The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.
How do you want to see if you don’t even see who you are? Only humility leads to powers, the fruits of awakening. A being full of ego is the opposite of enlightenment. He will never be able to see the invisible. Without seeing it, you cannot know.
At the cost of terrible efforts, the warrior of light manages to get rid of his chains. He has conquered his fear, he has mastered his ego, before him the door to the Self opens wide. It is a magnificent achievement. Yet the journey, however difficult it may have been, has only just begun. The conquest of seeing requires a firm and constant desire, a constant struggle.
Seeing is therefore a very enviable knowledge? Not that much. Until we see it, we know neither who we are nor who those we meet are. We walk blindly in a hostile, dangerous, hateful, irreducible world. We don’t have the slightest key to open our drawers, our writing desks and our cupboards. Nothing is accessible to us, and our ignorance can lead us straight to death.
The warrior without seeing does not know himself, any more than he understands others. The warrior who sees immediately understands, perceives the unsaid, uncovers hiding places. Knowing who he is, he knows where he is going. Knowing where he comes from, he knows what he fought for until then. With seeing, rage and war end. Knowledge is the only way for a warrior to achieve serenity.
When you see, men look different, like fibers of light. Like white cobwebs. Very fine threads that go from head to navel. The man then resembles an egg of living fibers. His arms and legs become luminous threads of silk glittering in all directions. Every man is in contact with everything else thanks to a bundle of long fibers gushed from the center of his belly. These fibers connect man to his entire environment, they preserve his balance, they give him stability. (source)Carlos Castaneda, A Separate Reality
In my reiki practice, I work in harmony with these fibers. On the subtle level, we are all made the same. Man or woman, old man or child, we all have the appearance of a luminous egg made of living fibers.
I work not only on the seven chakras that irrigate the physical body, but also on the secondary chakras and the root and foliar chakras. Then the knowledge of fibers is necessary. But subtle vision is not indispensable.
To see with the third eye, most clairvoyants are content to know. When I ask one of them the color of an aura, he tells me it without being mistaken and can even describe the nuances. If I ask him if he sees it, he protests and denies. He does not see it, but what does it matter? He knows.
The first knowledge is the knowledge of my ignorance: it is the beginning of intelligence.
Seeing is a revolutionary act. A libertarian impulse. Welcoming true freedom with open arms. Only then begins the reign of free will. His medal won with great struggle. Like any medal, see its reverse. “Once man learns to see, he finds himself alone in the world with nothing but madness.” (source)Carlos Castaneda, A Separate Reality
Folly of the wise, wisdom of the foolish. In order not to be alone, man can choose to be defeated. Serenely join the camp of fools, his minor brothers. Being defeated is inevitable. We are either victorious or defeated, so executioner or victim. Sometimes – most often – we are both.
“See chase away the illusion of victory, defeat, suffering.” (source)Carlos Castaneda, A Separate Reality See kicks mayaillusion out, would say Tibetans. One day, Castaneda asks his benefactor: “Do you think the Tibetans see? – I doubt it, answers Don Juan. When a man learns to see, not one thing predominates among all the things he knows. Not one. If the Tibetans could see, they would see it right away.” (source)Carlos Castaneda, A Separate Reality
Implacability is the opposite of sufficiency. Do not see cruelty, but sobriety. This is the arcane XIV of the initiatory Tarot: Temperance… By moderating his mood, by moderating his reactions, the warrior completely comes out of self-pity. It is a great freedom for the mind and the a severe defeat for the ego.
It takes a good dose of implacability to render to anyone the only real service that can be offered, to open his eyes to himself. Play the painful role of the little tyrant to make him suddenly see himself as he is, until the inevitable moment when the mirror falls to pieces. “The only concrete help you can give someone is to help them break their mirror of self-contemplation.” (source)
Let me tell you that it is frowned upon, and often badly experienced. But are we here to butter our asses by singing the praises of our inmates and the quality of the conditions of detention? Or to find our truth? In your opinion? I chose.
The human has this choice: let the light in or keep the shutters closed.
“Witchcraft is a return journey. We return victorious to the spirit after descending into hell. And from hell we bring back trophies. Understanding is one of them.” (source)
Religion is for those who are afraid of going to hell, spirituality is for those who have already been there.
“Every warrior on the path of knowledge believes, one day or another, that he is learning witchcraft, but he only lets himself be convinced of the power in his being, and of the fact that he can access it.” (source)
You don’t learn witchcraft. It reveals itself to us. It smiles at us one morning, and we know we’ve always known it. The life of the warrior and sorcerer is the way of life that our ancestors have known for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years. Only the advent of kali yuga deprived us.
To live as a warrior is certainly the best thing for man. Our contemporaries are convinced on the contrary by their sufficiency. They believe that their degenerate and dependent way of life is superior, whereas it is enough to open their eyes to misery, sadness and exclusion to be sure of the opposite.
Don Juan Matus often evokes the danger of seeing without being a warrior. (source)Carlos Castaneda, A Separate Reality Seeing requires iron discipline.
The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.
He explains to Carlos what his belief system is. Carlos Castaneda calls “witchcraft” this complex and highly organized body of knowledge, and designates Don Juan as “sorcerer” because his benefactor used these two words during their familiar conversations. However, when it came to clarifying more serious points, he used the term “knowledge” to mean witchcraft, and that “man of knowledge” or “the one-who-knows” to designate the sorcerer.
I imitated it in all my articles devoted to nagualism. And the one who engages in this path of knowledge, as I have done myself, I call him warrior of light, or simply warrior.
We see that the sorcerer is not this evil being that our legends and fairy tales convey. The witches and sorcerers that the Holy Inquisition burned at the stake were not evil people, quite the contrary. But they had a sacred knowledge from the old religion of the Druids, it was the worst crime for the executioners of the new religion.
Among the Indians the notion of sorcerer differs totally from ours, people of western civilization. This is also the meaning given to this word by Don Juan.
To be hungry or to suffer means that man has let himself go and that he is no longer a warrior. The forces of his hunger and suffering will destroy him.
A warrior does not give in to anything, not even when he dies. A warrior is never a volunteer partner. A warrior is not available.
A sorcerer does not need to see to be a sorcerer. He only needs to know how to use his will.
Compared to the one who sees, the sorcerer is only a poor guy.
A sorcerer is hardly better off than the average man. Witchcraft embarrasses him, it makes him vulnerable. The inexplicable and inflexible forces that surround us all constitute for the sorcerer an even greater risk.
A sorcerer, opening himself to knowledge, becomes the prey of these forces and has only one thing to oppose them: his will. So he must perceive and act like a warrior. On the path of knowledge, one can only survive by being a warrior.
In the life of the man of knowledge, there is no emptiness. Everything is filled to the brim. To become a man of knowledge, be a warrior, not a whining kid.
Strive, without giving up, without bending, until you can see, and realize that nothing is important.
All our actions are useless, and yet we must act as if we do not know. This is the controlled madness of sorcerers. (all quotes)Carlos Castaneda, A Separate Reality
What can a man have apart of his life and his death?
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