Shaman: The Mysterious Life and Impeccable Death of Carlos Castaneda by Mike Sager

Author:Mike Sager [Sager , Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781950154203
Publisher: The Sager Group LLC/NeoText
Published: 2020-09-03T04:00:00+00:00

Shy and highly intelligent, a bit at odds with the world, Jeremy Davidson had first discovered the writings of Carlos Castaneda in the late seventies, while studying physics as a college junior.

He’d always been a seeker, a skeptic, a bit of an outsider, the kind of person for whom the normal order and the normal answers never seemed to ring true. He’d experimented with psychedelic drugs, read extensively on Eastern and Western philosophy. He’d been a Buddhist, a Scientologist, an atheist, an orthodox Jew. More recently, during a bad period in his life, he’d rediscovered Castaneda. Starting with The Teachings, he’d worked his way through the series, which had grown by now to eight books.

Castaneda himself had long since disappeared from the public eye. Smarting, no doubt, from the effects of his exposure in the early seventies, he lived in quiet anonymity in the Pandora compound with the Witches, traveling around the country and to Mexico, churning out books all the while, honing the message and the method, taking it further with each new publication.

Though Castaneda said Don Juan left the world in 1973, dying “the immaculate death” of the Warrior, each subsequent book continued to expound upon Don Juan’s teachings. Diligent readers noted the anthropological references seemed to grow fewer as the series progressed, and that the books increasingly bore the traces of other influences, such as phenomenology, Eastern mysticism, and existentialism. With Don Juan having left the world, Castaneda himself became the heir to the sorcerer’s lineage; he was now himself the Nagual. No longer a disciple, he had become the prophet. As the books evolved, his focus turned more and more toward the Art of Dreaming.

According to Castaneda, Don Juan was an intermediary between the natural world of everyday life and an unseen universe called the Second Attention. Though Western minds are conditioned to believe the world in which we live is unique and absolute, it is, Don Juan taught, only one in a cluster of consecutive worlds, arranged like the layers of an onion. Don Juan said that even though humans have been energetically conditioned to perceive only their own world, they still have the capability to enter those other realms—worlds as palpable, unique, absolute, and engulfing as the ordinary reality in which we live every day.

Don Juan said that in order for people to visit those other realms—the existence of which are constant and independent of our awareness—they had to first recondition their energetic capacity to perceive. To this end, he prescribed a series of techniques designed to displace the Assemblage Point, a place of intense luminosity located about an arm’s length behind the shoulder blades, where perception occurs—where we receive the signals that tell us what we see, feel, hear, and understand. Furthermore, Don Juan said, once a person becomes adept at traveling to the Second Attention, he or she can ultimately remain there as a luminous egg for all of eternity, in a wonderful universe too vast and beautiful and complex and fulfilling to render in conventional language or ideas.

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