The teachings of Don Juan

Ah, Naga... so you remember us.
http://www.serpentsofwisdom.com/books.htm#serp

 

Hari

ignorance alone also wants to ascribe a gender to God bahahaha

 

God is male or otherwise you'd say Goddess.
ha ha.

 

Its true that in 'Tales of Power' Don Juan tells Carlos that the nagual is a kind of indefinable something - an energy perhaps. In the very next book though, it turns out that Don Juan was the nagual. A further development and carlos is the new nagual - but the wrong sort! He is a three pronged nagual, whilst the party Don Juan has left him to lead to feedom need a four pronged nagual like Don Juan. Inconvenient that, But the whole thing undergoes so many twists and turns - all the mark of great fiction.

 

How does so many people imbued with spirit, change what spirit is?
This statement is like saying spirit appearing as Mother Meera, Yeshua, Krishna, Mohammed, Don Juan, Carlos... we could go on, devalues the oneness of spirit.

Form and gender apply to words but not to essence or spirit.
The formless all must contain the elements of all manifestation.

I see your logic. Do you see mine?

 

I do. I agree with what you say and it's exactly as I believe although I know you asked the person that denies the existence of Don Juan.
This is for him and others that think in that manner:

There's no trying to find contradictions in the words of a great sage, and not finding them. You can find them endelssly and that's why so few follow. In the case of Jesus when he talked about 'you have to eat my flesh and drink my blood', many left, and only a few remained.

Don Juan never went looking for disciples, and Carlos was not looking for a teacher. There are those who say they have read Carlos Castaneda,
but they haven't, and if they did, they did it after they had heard the wholle controversy about the reality of Don Juan. Right now there are two other forums I frequent that are bringing undeniable proof that Jesus didn't exist.

Why would you believe Krishna existed and not Don Juan? Right now in this planet there are not just one, but 100,000 like Don Juan. That you haven't heard about it, is not gonna make them dissapear... unless they want to.

 

A poem was once here ~*

 

What do you mean by this exactly?

 

I mean... like there's an analogy about feeding milk to a snake.

If a serpent touches milk it poisons it, so it's like the doubting Thomases pseudo intelectuals who's only mission is to disprove the existence of any wonderfulful mysterious or magical thing, or even worse, that only their religion is real, and only the prophets of that particular religion are real, when even the prophets of any religion themselves would not make that kind of arbitray division.

If by disfortune one hears about some great sage
from the mouth (like the snake) of them, then one will not look at that purely again, but more from the perpective of doubt and even scorn.

Somewhere I read that Don Juan and Carlos were brought together by the spirit for the new age that soon would be eclipsed by the modern age of
technology.

What was brought by that meeting was those books that contain so much substance even in one page.

Don Juan's words are living waters , like Jesus's, like Krishna's, like Budha's; like any great person inspired by spirit. "behold the sheep hear my voice" "man does not live by bread alone, but every word than proceeds from the mouth of God".
Could Carlos come up with those words? Could Arjuna come up with the Bhagavad gita, or some pope with the words of Jesus? could you write stuff even like let's say Emerson or shakespeare?

It is the words that have weight, and if we can recognise knowledge and power, is because we have it to some extent, but if we listen to the snake and agree then it's because we have that dobt inside too,(or desire) and soon we're taken by the wayside, like Eve in the garden.

This is what I meant by what I said before using less words.

"There are those who say they have read Carlos Castaneda, but they haven't, and if they did, they did it after they had heard the wholle controversy about the reality of Don Juan."

 

~*

 

I will take my time reading that and let you know...
although poetry is never wrong.

 

It is all real, it all exists.

 

I don't think the Nagual is equivalent to spirit. There are many places where CC makes this clear - it is said in ch 16 of 'the fire from within' that these mystics and so on are simply deluding themselves - Krishna, Jesus etc... all were wholly deluded by 'the mould of man'.
The biggest difference however is that these beings actually existed, whilst I believe that Don Juan is a figment of CC's imagination.

 

He does not mention Krishna or Jesus. The 'mould of man' resembles the concept of Isvara. You should read "The Power of Silence" for insights provided into spirit.

"Once again Carlos Castaneda accounts, with even more clarity, the workings of the sorcerers' world. In Power of Silence, Castaneda outlines the abstract cores of sorcery: The Manifestations of the Spirit--the energetic fact that everyone is a conduit for the spirit but that we are too busy with the affairs of everyday life to notice; The Knock of the Spirit--the attempts the spirit takes to get each of us to notice it; The Trickery of the Spirit--the gyrations through which the spirit moves to hold our interest; and The Descent of the Spirit--when the spirit cuts the chains of our self-reflection. Through Don Juan's masterful stories, Castaneda realizes the importance of inner silence: the position of the assemblage point away from self-reflection, the point where the universe makes itself known to man."

However, I will make the counter point, that anything not coming from the mouth of a living connection to source, is fiction.

 

Dear SL,


I have read all of CC's books with the exception of 'Magical Passes'.And a number of works by other so-called Toltecs. I don't dispute that Don Juan talks about the 'spirit', but I don't think he means by that what I understand by it. It simply cannot be that the nagual is equivalent to the spirit, because in 'Tales of Power' when DJ first mentions the nagual, he says that its opposite, the tonal is like a table, and anything we can concieve of or name is an item on this table. Hence the spirit is just another part of the tonal.

My main objection to Toltequity is that it is pretty much a closed book as regards the overwhelming majority of people. It is made clear that the path is only for a very few, and that it is quite impossible without the actual presence of a nagual being of the correct confiruration, and so on.
But above all, there is no place in any of this for Divine Love. That is something you won't find mentioned, other than in derisory terms.
The eagle is not God - it has no compassion whatsoever for human beings. The spirit is not God - the way it is described makes it seem to me like some aspect of the life-force in nature.
Also - those with children are excluded unless they turn their back on those children and sever all connection.
Those who wish a sex life will also find little here - 'keep it for pissing through' is Genaro's advice, if memory serves me! So this is no good to those who fancy themselves to be 'Tantrics' etc.

I first read CC many years ago, back in the 70's, and I too wanted to believe in DJ - but it is really something that is out on its own - I find very little resonnance with other systems,very little with my own experiences, and over time, I have come to see it as simply great creative writing. Where other so called Toltec writers are concerned, they all deviate quite a bit from what CC says, and are quite likely even more spurious than CC himself, who at least thought the thing up.

If you think that the existence of Jesus or Krishna or Divine Mother can be reconciled with these 'teachings' I'd be very interested to hear how this is possible.

 

"All paths lead nowhere...
so it is important to choose
a path with heart..." Don Juan

All teachings are unique, as are all teachers... I enjoy dancing, with words, and never mean harm... seeing how a key may be found in the strangest of places.

In an earlier poem, written about these writtings, I stated
"God is an indestructible Nucleus." By this I refer to my faith.
My faith is based on the solid foundation of experience.
Meditation and silence are profound keys to reaching this center, within.

I would greatly value words from Meagain on any aspect of this thread.

Much love.

 

It's of the greatest absolute importance to not only remember what one reads but, also remember it correctly.

According to my memory the example of the table
refers only to the tonal, and also if I remember well, DJ say that the nawal is what we cannot put on the table.

Before he begins telling Carlos anything, he says that this will be the most important thing he will ever tell him; he makes the basic introduction of the two parts of man, and Carlos goes into a long elucidation about western psychology and the conscious and unconcious.; Don Juan says that Carlos doesn't really know, and that this is very far removed from what he has to say. At this point I dared to disagree with Don Juan a bit, thinking that concious-unconcious is a pretty good conclusion, yet he explains that if a man 'knew' this, his actions would be different.
It is not intelectual knowledge or a subject for mere thought and discussion.

What is more admirable about the lineage of toltecs, is that their practices were not centered
around intelectualism, which seems to be what all the western philosphers are all about, and about
writing essays and books and giving lectures, when their path (toltects) was all about hunting for power obtaining it and maintaining it.

Don Juan never wrote a book, but it was the arrangement of power to unite both the master and the student at that time; wether in the Sonora desert or the mountains of Peru, not any differently with than Krishna and Arjuna on a battlefield in India.

From the former we have the Carlos legacy and from the later the Bagavad-gita; and both writing traditions are good for doctrine, councel, instruction, and reproof. Power which can be traslated to courage and virtue, cannot be divorced from a spiritual path.

In the west we are more used to people like Joseph Cambell and Allan Watts tell us that knowledge doesn't have to come with great character. That one doen't have to have austerity
or abstenance, and that one can live a 'normal' life, but experience will always tell us the opposite.

 

I quote from 'tales of power' -'the island of the tonal'

'The nagual is that part of us for which there is no description - no words, no names, no feelings, no knowledge'
'Would you say the nagual is the mind?'
'No, the mind is an item on the table'...........
...'Is the Nagual the soul?'
'No, the soul is also on the table'.............
..........'Is it a state of grace?'
'No, not that either'...........
.......'Is the nagual the supreme being, the almighty, God?'
'No, God is also on the table'

This seems clear enough. One doesn't need to be either a philosopher or a rationalist to see that. So it seems spurious to me to identify the nagual as anything.
But of course in the next book, the term is used differently to describe a type of being of a specific energy configuration.

 

Also Hari - you speak of 'mere thought and discussion' - but what else could you hope for in a discussion forum? If you think this is too farout to talk about, think about or discuss, why post the thread?

 

Aren't we discussing?