This is the title of Castaneda’s first book. Actually the second, since he wrote a first book, quite different and not very useful for a warrior of light. The second book : A separate reality. Oh yes. Time has come to restore the pre-eminence of this key concept of Nagualism, the separate reality in which Nagual warriors live. Separate from ordinary reality, just as the life of the warrior of light is separate from the rest of the world.
It’s as if two worlds coexist. The real world, which nagualists deem unreal; and the other world, the separate reality, which ordinary people regard as imaginary. Who’s right? My choice is made. In addition to my personal sources, this article is based on Lucien Renart’s book Castaneda, La voie nagualiste and Jamake Highwater’s The Primal Mind. Native American Highwater provides a valuable perspective on Castaneda’s writings.
I rarely agree with books written about Castaneda. Most of them testify to a total lack of experience about living according to these principles. The authors have obviously read all his books. They may have been struck by certain striking formulas, and certain novel concepts may have appealed to their need for novelty, but have they practised Nagualism? If they did, they did it backwards. I can’t tolerate people daring to talk about what they’ve read while pretending to have lived it. Forty years of nagualist practice have made me demanding in this area as in many others.
Some commentators boast of having met Castaneda. Now he’s dead, there are doubts about his true identity, and no one can contradict them. I didn’t have the immense privilege of meeting the Nagual Don Carlos, as he’s known today.
My benefactor found the Nagual’s living teaching in the Akashic Annals. He shifted his assemblage point to align his luminous fibers with those of Juan Matus, or whatever Castaneda’s initiator was called. This feat dates back to the 1980s. Since then, he has awakened many people, created emulators, trained apprentices, hardened warriors, guided clairvoyants and frequented many sorcerers.
In 1992, I tracked him down. Jean-Claude Flornoy is a childhood friend, first in the Scouts de France, which we nicknamed trance scouts, given the atmosphere. But twenty-five years later, the new Jean-Claude saw me off. Without regard or hesitation, he plunged me headfirst into his high magic. I walked straight away. I’d read the whole of Castaneda and loved him. To find an old friend so connected, so resolutely committed to this other path, I couldn’t be happier.
I can say that the next five years saw the birth in Mayenne of a French lineage of Nagualism. While Castaneda was a constant source of inspiration, Master Flornoy’s teaching was never bookish. He always shared his own experience with us, performing miracles for us in the manner of Genaro or the other sorcerers of the Juan Matus clan.
This lineage is resolutely Nagualist, but it owes as much to Celticism, the Old Religion, the Knights Templar and their sacred builders, Sufism, Nietzsche, the mystery cults of Antiquity (1) (2) (3) (4), and many other inspirations that the reader will find on this site. One thing is our influences, another is our reality. It is, resolutely, separate. Resolutely, absolutely, I feel more and more alienated from the bored world. I need more.
And this extra reality I have found in the world of Dreaming, in the art of tracker, in the unwritten Rule, in the Middle Way, in my responsibility as a nagual on the path that has heart.
Since that time, my point of view has changed several times. But not my way of life. I have remained faithful to my practice as a nagual sorcerer. Master Flornoy is no more; he had appointed me to take over from him, but I declined. I’m not a guru, neither a life coach nor a showman. Yet I am the new Nagual in the Celtic line initiated by Flornoy. A Nagual with no clan, but with many readers.
All the miracles performed by wizards boil down to a single mastery: control of the assemblage point. Its position can vary within our luminosity. In Nagualism, this is what we call the aura. Depending on this position, the warrior will assemble the ordinary world or an infinite number of other possible worlds.
In the past, human lineages and their cultures were separated from one another. As a result, the position of the assembly point could vary greatly from one culture to another. Now, fixing the assemblage point in the same place for all humanity means eliminating socio-cultural environments other than the dominant Western, Judeo-Christian model.
In Castaneda’s language, we say that the mind has devoured the spirit. There are two realities for nagualism, the nagual or otherworldly, and the tonal. Culture and lifestyle are tonal, as are all things in this world. There is only one tonal in the world. This is a great loss. “Spanish domination was a nightmare for the Amerindians. The Christians indulged in their usual depredations, plunging the natives into despair. Suicides were rife, as the Indians had lost their tone.” (source)Jamake Highwater, The Primal Mind
“There’s nothing to ‘do’. The key is ‘do-not-doing’, deconstruction, destructuring, because structure is the function of the mind. The Middle Way is the way of emptiness, of recognizing the insubstantiality of things.” (source)Lucien Renart, Castaneda, La voie nagualiste, p.15 Structure being a function of the mind, it is driven by the Archons, thus you better keep away. The unsubstantiality of things is how nagualism fits in with physics. For physics, there is no matter, only a denser bundle of waves.
What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.
But what physics can only observe through the microscope, the sorcerer perceives through second sight. “In the representation of men and women of knowledge, the world is a bundle of elements assembled by an energy, an attention. Our world, the merely human world, is assembled by the first attention, the tonal.” (source)Lucien Renart, Castaneda, La voie nagualiste, p. 24
Similarly, Castaneda rejects the notion of the person. “The personal self is reflexive, not natural. This is how Castaneda speaks of the impersonal self, which is not a captive reflection in a world, but power itself” (source)Lucien Renart, Castaneda, La voie nagualiste, p. 17
“Make everything abstract,” says Don Juan to Castaneda. This abstract is the power of silence, which awakens when the power of words is extinguished.” (source)Lucien Renart, Castaneda, La voie nagualiste, p. 19 Power comes from the Eagle, not to be confused with God. “The Eagle, power, has nothing to do with God, who is merely the patron saint of the Isle of Tonal. (source)Lucien Renart, Castaneda, La voie nagualiste, p. 20
“The Indians do not speak of God, nor of the Great Spirit Wakan Tanka. If they want to trace their origins, they’ll speak of Tonatiuh. “Tonatiuh is the Sun, and the Aztecs (like the Incas and all very ancient peoples) called themselves Sons of the Sun.” (source)Lucien Renart, Castaneda, La voie nagualiste, p. 22
What both Don Juan and Castaneda didn’t know, and what the most ancient peoples didn’t know, is that the Sun is something other than our commonplace sun. The Sun is an artefact planet, a crystal globe that radiates light a hundred times brighter than that of the day star, because it is so close to the Earth. Some 200km above the North Pole.
This planet is the origin of all the former gods. But the dominant planetary culture has erased the last memories of these wonders. My task is to refresh sleeping memories. So I must remind you that the gods of old who created us in their genetic labs, then educated, trained, exploited us too, these gods or better said these supermen were Reptilians, giant snakes or dragons. “Among Mexicans, as among Hindus, the Serpent is the origin and the totality, and also the guardian of the infraworld.” (source)Lucien Renart, Castaneda, La voie nagualiste, p.28
In biblical Genesis, the Serpent is Eve’s teacher, and she listens to him. In Gnosis, the serpent people are called the Archons, the administrators of Terra. And Gnosis specifies that the Archons have taken up residence beneath our feet, in the earth’s core. They are therefore the guardians of the underworld.
Erik Hornung quotes this inscription from the Karnak temple in Egypt, which clarifies this identity. “There is no god, there is no goddess, who turns into another snake.” (source)Lucien Renart, Castaneda, La voie nagualiste, p.19 Troubling confirmation. The former gods are evolved reptiles, hostile and dangerous. The Torah presents the God of Moses as a violent dragon. Too many legends, too many mythologies agree on these facts: Dragons have existed, Reptilians are not inventions.
We’ve forgotten that the Dragons have created us. They were once our masters, and no doubt they still are, unbeknownst to us. They read our most secret thoughts. They exert their detestable influence on us through hypnosis, while we sleep. Every night, they implant new engrams that act like diktats in our unconscious.
The archons are the cause of many dysfunctions in the physical body, as well as of the profound dysfunction of our twilight civilization. Under their growing pressure, this decaying society goes ever further in the worship of matter and money, which is the domain of the archon Mammon. No one can serve two masters, God and Mammon, says the Bible. We seem to have chosen the wrong one.
Recovering our lost memory is a necessity of survival. This world has begun its great seesaw, and everyone knows how it will end. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Let us pity the Christian sheep who will suffer! “Feed my lambs, feed my sheep“, says the unlikely Jesus. A singular only son of God who had not foreseen the inevitable! Could he too be a victim of the law of forgetting?
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