CARLOS CASTANEDA

     He described will as a force which was the true link between men and the world. He was very careful to establish that the world was whatever we perceive, in any manner we may choose to perceive. Don Juan maintained that "perceiving" the world entails a process of apprehending whatever presents itself to us. This particular "perceiving" is done with our senses and with our will.

     I asked him if will was a sixth sense. He said it was rather a relation between ourselves and the perceived world.

     "What you yourself call will is character and strong disposition," he said. "What the sorcerer calls will is a force that comes from within and attaches itself to the world out there. It comes out through the belly, right here, where the luminous fibers are." (A Separate Reality by Carlos Castaneda, p. 180.)

     When a warrior has acquired patience he is on his way to will. He knows how to wait. His death sits with him on his mat; they are friends. His death advises him, in mysterious ways, how to choose, how to live strategically. And the warrior waits! I would say that the warrior learns without any hurry because he knows he is waiting for his will; and one day he succeeds in performing something ordinarily quite impossible to accomplish. He may not even notice his extraordinary deed. But as he keeps on performing impossible acts, or as impossible things keep on happening to him, he becomes aware that a sort of power is emerging. A power that comes out of his body as he progresses on the path of knowledge.

     The warrior notices he has strange feelings about things. He notices that he can actually touch anything he wants with a feeling that comes out of his body from a spot right below or right above his navel. That feeling is the will, and when he is capable of grabbing with it, one can rightfully say that the warrior is a sorcerer, and that he has acquired will. (A Separate Reality, p. 185.)

     "One day I was in the mountains," he said, "and I stumbled upon a puma, a female one; she was big and hungry. I ran and she ran after me. I climbed a rock and she stood a few feet away ready to jump. I threw rocks at her. She growled and began to charge me. It was then that my will fully came out, and I stopped her with it before she jumped on me. I caressed her with my will. I actually rubbed her tits with it. She looked at me with sleepy eyes and lay down and I ran like a son of a bitch before she got over it. (A Separate Reality, p. 186.)

     "My benefactor was a sorcerer of great powers," he went on. "He was a warrior through and through. His will was indeed his most magnificent accomplishment. But a man can go still further than that; a man can learn to see. Upon learning to see he no longer needs to live like a warrior, nor be a sorcerer. Upon learning to see a man becomes everything by becoming nothing. He, so to speak, vanishes and yet he's there. I would say that this is the time when a man can be or can get anything he desires. But he desires nothing. (A Separate Reality, p. 186.)



     "I'll tell you what we talk to ourselves about. We talk about our world. In fact we maintain our world with our internal talk."

     "How do we do that?"

     Whenever we finish talking to ourselves the world is always as it should be. We renew it, we kindle it with life, we uphold it with our internal talk. Not only that, but we also choose our paths as we talk to ourselves. Thus we repeat the same choices over and over until the day we die, because we keep on repeating the same internal talk over and over until the day we die.

     "A warrior is aware of this and strives to stop his talking. This is the last point you have to know if you want to live like a warrior."

     "How can I stop talking to myself?"

     "First of all you must use your ears to take some of the burden from your eyes. We have been using our eyes to judge the world since the time we were born. We talk to others and to ourselves mainly about what we see. A warrior is aware of that and listens to the world; he listens to the sounds of the world." (A Separate Reality, p. 263.)

     "Whenever the dialogue stops, the world collapses and extraordinary facets of ourselves surface, as though they had been kept heavily guarded by our words. You are like you are, because you tell yourself that you are that way." (Tales of Power by Carlos Castaneda, p. 40.)



     I must first explain the basic premise of sorcery as don Juan presented it to me. He said that for a sorcerer, the world of everyday life is not real, or out there, as we believe it is, For a sorcerer, reality, or the world we all know, is only a description. (Journey to Ixtlan by Carlos Castaneda, p. 8.)

     We are perceivers. We are an awareness, we are not objects; we have no solidity. We are boundless. The world of objects and solidity is a way of making our passage on earth convenient. It is only a description that was created to help us. We, or rather our reason, forget that the descriptions is only a description and thus we entrap the totality of ourselves in a vicious circle form which we rarely emerge in our lifetime. (Tales of Power by Carlos Castaneda, p. 100.)

     Don Juan stated that in order to arrive at seeing one first had to "stop the world." "Stopping the world" was indeed an appropriate rendition of certain states of awareness in which the reality of everyday life is altered because the flow of interpretation, which ordinarily runs uninterruptedly, has been stopped by a set of circumstances alien to that flow. In my case the set of circumstances alien to my normal flow of interpretations was a sorcery description of the world. Don Juan's precondition for "stopping the world" was that one had to be convinced, in other words, one had to learn the new description in a total sense, for the purpose of pitting it against the old one, and in that way break the dogmatic certainty, which we all share, that the validity of our perceptions, or our reality of the world is not to be questioned. (Journey to Ixtlan by Carlos Castaneda, p. 14.)

     "Yesterday you stopped the world and you might have even seen. A magical being told you something and your body was capable of understanding it because the world had collapsed."

     The world was like it is today, don Juan."

     No, it wasn't. Today the coyotes do not tell you anything, and you cannot see the lines of the world. Yesterday you did all that simply because something had stopped in you."

     "What was the thing that stopped in me?"

     "What stopped inside you yesterday was what people have been telling you the world is like. You see, people tell us from the time we are born that the world is such and such and so and so, and naturally, we have no choice but to see the world the way people have been telling us it is." (Journey to Ixtlan by Carlos Castaneda, p. 299.)

STEPHEN GASKIN

     At that moment, all the animals and all the birds, all the bugs and rabbits and critters on the whole mountainside, all made their noise at the same time. Not loud, but a giant, huge sound, coming up from acres and acres and acres at once. Every creature there made its sound. And we all heard those creatures make that sound to us and tell us that we were all truly one. We were one with them and we were one with the hill. We were all really One.

     I heard years later that the Indians say that God's name is the cry of all the animals at once.

     We felt like something as strong as that was a new beginning of some kind. We came down the hill, and the creek bed which had been almost dry when we went up, was running bank-full of clear water as we came back down. (Amazing Dope Tales by Stephen Gaskin, p. 228-9.)



     First thing we gotta get into is like what attention really is, and how it really works. Each of us is a fountain of energy, each one of us is like a valve from which universal life energy is metered into the world, and each one of us can point our self at whatever we want to.

     But the best thing is to notice that whatever you put your attention on you get more of in the universe. You know, whatever you put your attention on is what you get the most of. (Monday Night Class by Stephen Gaskin, chapter 2, p. 1 and p. 3.)



     Is it possible to drag a demon out of hell? Ah. One of the powers of the bodhisattva is the power to go into hell and bring out a soul. Well, if you've ever seen somebody on a bummer and got to them and helped them out you were a bodhisattva and they were in hell and you brought them out.

     How to get out of hell? You have to plug up the holes in your bucket, then you get higher. Most people who are in hell are complaining. They think they're complaining because they're in hell... uh, uh. They're in hell because they are complaining. (Monday Night Class, chapter 5, p. 13-4.)



     I do various different kinds of things - I chant some, and I do some hatha yoga, and I do some raja yoga, and a few things like that, and I also do a little grass and a little peyote . . . and I find out as I go along, the more I go along, that sometimes I can smoke some grass and not get high. But I find that if I tell truth it gets me high . . . every time. So, if you find yourself to a place where you think you're as high as you're going to get, then back in behind a little truth, and start climbing up the ladder by hand. Because you can get as high as you want on truth, just by telling it as it comes. (Monday Night Class, chapter 7, p. 1-2.)

     I think what I spent the most time doing, of all the time I was high, other than the time that was spent grooving and digging it, was working in small groups of people trying to figure it out . . . where was it at? You know, how come you look that way? What's happenin'? Hey, what are the vibes like? Anyone else feel this way? What goin' on? Working together in small groups of people is that, tellin' the truth, you can get high. You can smoke grass and not get high, then you can tell some truth and the weed'll come on. And you can get high without the grass, just on the truth. (Monday Night Class, chapter 8, p. 4.)



     The contact high is a phenomenon by which someone who has not ingested a psychedelic substance but who is in contact with someone who has, will also get high.

     That ran pass my carefully ordered cosmology, and I said, "What!? You said what!? Does Dr. Rhine know this? What is this thing that passes between these people?" It implied that there is some kind of medium that exists between people, and that the very phenomenon of stonedness can be sent as a telepathic message.

     I explored this thing for months and months with my friends. We checked it out for a couple of years. We would say, "Did you feel what I felt when I felt that, or was I just having a subjective experience that you weren't in on?" If you were going to check out something like that, wouldn't you want to be careful? Wouldn't you want to be sure you weren't only fooling yourself?

     Then we got the idea that it was really there, and we began to feel like we were at the beginning of the discovery of a new territory - like the people who put the Constitution together for this country, saying "Here's a whole new territory. We have to find some ground rules," We started thinking, What are the ground rules? What is the etiquette of a telepathic society? How does one order one's mind when you live in a Universe where there is not a wall around your head, where your skull is not the limit of your consciousness, but that you actually share space with other people - that you interpenetrate. What is the etiquette? (This Season's People, p. 21-23.)