Book Reviews
Cleargreen sponsors and organizes seminars and workshops on Carlos Castaneda's Tensegrity, and other disciplines and is a publishing house.
What this system and its teachers offer followers of Gotama is something that is currently missing in the methods of the teachers of Buddhism today: Teachers with real experience in educating students in effective techniques for attaining higher mental states. The courses offered by this group are a tool which can be put to the service of crossing the gap between book-learning and learning to manipulate the mind in the real world. Study their techniques, take what works and put it to use in attaining the Buddhist goal, put the rest away. We need to make use of what is available to us today.
"The unknown is forever present," don Juan told Carlos Castaneda, "but it is outside the possibility of our normal awareness. The unknown is the superfluous part of the average man. And it is superfluous because the average man doesn't have enough free energy to grasp it." That free energy can be found, he said, in the area of the known — by paying systematic attention to our behavior. The seers of don Juan's lineage called this practice the art of stalking — making an inventory of what we do.
Relate this to the minding of the Satipaṭṭhana technique.
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"The world is the world because you know the doing involved in making it so ... if you didn't know its doing, the world would be different."
— Don Juan Matus in Journey to Ixtlan
"What do you see?" the nagual Carlos Castaneda asked one of his apprentices on a walk through a city park. "What do you see?" he asked again as he motioned to a specific garden area before them both.
"Well," mumbled the apprentice. "I see daisies and a bed of roses, white roses with dark green leaves."
"Anything else?" the nagual asked again.
"Why, should I?" questioned the apprentice. "Maybe some brown dirt, a few gnats. That's all," said the apprentice, shrugging his shoulders.
"Oh, oh, oh," laughed the nagual, slapping his left thigh in glee before bending nearly in half to sit down on a park bench. "I see!"
Stretching his arms wide, resting them on the back of the bench, he continued:
"We are caught in a flux, a singular current, a stream of association, from which many of us never return. We see a configuration of color upon a stalk, we call it 'flower,' it reminds us of a Japanese watercolor print we once saw in a museum which in turn reminds us of a great uncle who once gave a plant we loved to our brother instead of us, and suddenly we lose our taste for 'flower' ... forever. Don Juan told me that this is how we construct our world, and ourselves. He called it doing. Take for instance what you believe to be true about your identity.
"You believe yourself to be smart," he continued. "At the age of three, you were taught how to read; because of this, in primary school, you excelled in phonics, spelling and language; later, still advanced beyond your educated years, you wrote term papers, essays that won awards; by the time you reached adulthood, you were untouchable, unimpeachable. Nobody could tell you otherwise."
The apprentice was at a loss for words. "Is there something else?"
"There certainly is — but not for this by itself!" The nagual tapped him on the forehead. "There are worlds of vibration, of feeling, worlds where it doesn't make any difference if we think we are smart, or dumb."
"How can we access them?"
"Through not-doing. Through putting a halt on our otherwise endless stream of associations."
"I don't understand."
"It doesn't really matter. There's really no way to talk about not-doing, because its the body that does it. If we halt the rhythm and momentum of our stream of associations, seers maintain, we stop the world. And its done with the whole body — the whole being."
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Stalking the Known, the Unknown, and the Unknowable
This is the third principle of the art of stalking. A warrior must be willing and ready to make his last stand here and now. But not in a helter-skelter way.
— Florinda Matus, The Wheel of Time
"What time is it?" Florinda Donner-Grau asked one afternoon, as she was tending some trees in her garden. A student, who had just arrived, out of breath, began fumbling in her bag to find a watch.
The nagual Carlos Castaneda appeared, looked carefully at his wristwatch, and exuberantly announced, "Its now! Let's go! We have an appointment — an appointment with infinity!"
The student hurried to cross the garden and stumbled over a root.
"What's your hurry?" Florinda asked.
"Well, I'm always running behind ..."
"Helter-skelter," the nagual said softly, shaking his head. "We human beings have a funny way of looking at time. We are mesmerized by the past, always looking at time as it recedes from us. Its like standing at the back of the train, watching the tracks as we move away from them. Why not go to the front of the train, to face the oncoming time?"
"So we should look to the future, then?" the student asked.
"No, no, not the future — Here! Now! The oncoming time!"
The student looked down at the root, and followed it with her eyes to see how it met the trunk of an enormous tree.
She noticed that Florinda and the nagual were looking upward at the tree. She moved toward them.
"Trees have a different speed," the nagual said. "You can sense it, if you slow down."
He paused.
"The trees know an energetic fact," he went on.
"What is that energetic fact?" the student asked quietly.
"That there is no past or future in the universe — there's only energy. And energy has only here and now. An endless and ever-present here and now."
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An Appointment with Inner Silence
"Whenever the internal dialogue stops, the world collapses, and extraordinary facets of ourselves surface, as though they had been kept heavily guarded by our words."
- The Wheel of Time
"You are dreaming all the time," Carlos Castaneda told his apprentices. "Your energy body is active, perceiving, exploring worlds upon worlds, of which we are little aware. The door to this awareness is inner silence."
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Losing the human form is like a spiral. It gives a warrior the freedom to remember himself as straight fields of energy and this in turn makes him even freer.
- Carlos Castaneda
The human form, according to don Juan Matus, is but one aspect of what it is to be a human being — a single position of the assemblage point among the many available, a narrow furrow within the much broader scope of what seers call the band of man — the full range of human perceptual possibilities.
One way to embark upon the fullness of human potential, don Juan maintained, is through the recapitulation — the stalker's practice of making a detailed examination of the interactions of our lives, coupled with the magical element of the breath. Reviewing our interactions in this way, he asserted, allows us to uncover the deepest effects of socialization, effects that, the seers of his lineage believed, are stored in the body itself.
Those seers were convinced that taking this inventory detaches us from the binding force of our habits, straightens out our otherwise entangled energetic lines, and returns us to the perceptual possibilities that are our birthright.
