## Carlos Castaneda Interviews and Articles

### Carlos Castaneda's
The Warriors' Way | Readers of Infinity
Number 3. Volume 1.

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by Carlos Castaneda
"READERS OF INFINITY"
Formerly "THE WARRIORS' WAY"
A Journal of Applied Hermeneutics
Number 3, Volume 1
Los Angeles, March, 1996

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Author's note :

The exclusive goal of this journal is the dissemination of ideas. Due to the fact that the ideas proposed here are, to a considerable degree, foreign to Western man, the format of this journal must be adapted to the nature of those ideas. The ideas I am referring to were proposed to me by don Juan Matus, a Mexican Indian sorcerer or shaman who guided me through a thirteen-year apprenticeship into the cognitive world of sorcerers who lived in Mexico in ancient times. I intend to present these concepts in the same fashion that he did : directly, concisely and using language to the fullest possible extent. This is the manner in which don Juan conducted every facet of his teachings ; it attracted my attention, from the beginning of my association with him, to the extent that I have made clarity and precision in language usage one of the desired goals of my life.

My attempts to publish this journal go back as far as 1971, when I presented this format to some book editors, who promptly turned me down because it did not conform to the preconceived notion of a scholarly journal, nor did it conform to the format of a magazine, or even a newsletter. My argument that the ideas contained in the journal were foreign enough to dictate a format that was an amalgamation of all three of those established genres did not have the sufficient force to convince them to publish it. The title that I had for the journal, at that time, was The Journal of Ethno-Hermeneutics. Years later, I actually found that a publication bearing that name was in circulation.

Now, I find myself in the position of publishing this journal. It is not an attempt at commercializing anything, nor is it a vehicle for apologetics of any sort. I envision it as an attempt to join the Western man's world of philosophical speculation with the seeing-observations of the Indian sorcerers who lived in Mexico in ancient times and whose cultural descendants were don Juan Matus and his cohorts.

I vowed, since entering into don Juan's cognitive world, to remain truthful to what he taught me. I can say, without being boastful, that for thirty-five years, I have kept this promise alive. It now bears on the conception and development of this journal. It conforms to one of don Juan's seeing-observations : he called it reading infinity. He said that when one is empty of thoughts and has acquired something he called "inner silence," the horizon appears to the eye of the seer as a sheet of lavender. On that sheet of lavender, a point of color becomes visible : pomegranate. That point of pomegranate expands suddenly and bursts into an infinity that can be read. It can be said that at this moment in our history, we human beings are readers, regardless of whether we read philosophical themes or instructional manuals. A worthwhile challenge conceived by don Juan for such readers is to become readers of infinity . Thisjournal is congruous, I assure you, in spirit and practice, with that challenge. It stems from inner silence ; it is an invitation to all to become readers of infinity.

In view of these arguments, I have decided, backed by the unanimous agreement of my cohorts, to change the name of this journal from, The Warriors' Way, a term long in use, to something current, which has not been used yet: READERS OF INFINITY

What is Phenomenology?

Phenomenology is a philosophical method, or a philosophical system proposed by a German mathematician and philosopher, Edmund Gustav Husserl (1859-1938) in a monumental work whose title has been translated as Logical Investigations, which he published in three volumes from 1900 to 1913.

The term Phenomenology had already been in use in philosophical circles since the 1700's. It meant, then, abstracting consciousness and experience from their realm of intentional components and describing them in a philosophical frame ; or it meant the historical research into the development of the consciousness of the self from primary sensations to rational thought.

It is, however, Husserl who gave it its modern-day format. He postulated Phenomenology as a philosophical method for the study of essences, or the act of putting those essences into the flux of life experience. He thought of it as a transcendental philosophy dealing only with the residue left after a reduction is performed. He called this reduction epoché, the bracketing of meaning or the suspension of judgment. "Going back to the origins" was Husserl's motto, when it referred to any philosophical-scientific inquiry. To go back to the origins implied such a reduction, which Husserl expected to inject into any given philosophical inquiry, as an integral part, a world that exists before reflection begins. He intended Phenomenology to be a method for approaching living experience as it occurs in time and space ; it is an attempt to describe directly our experience as it happens, without pausing to consider its origins or its causal explanations.

To achieve this task, Husserl proposed epoché : a total change of attitude where the philosopher moves from things themselves to their meanings ; that is to say, from the realm of objectified meaning - the core of science - to the realm of meaning as it is experienced in the immediate life-world.

Later on, other Western philosophers defined and redefined Phenomenology to suit their particular specifications. Phenomenology as it stands today is a philosophical method that defies definition. It has been said that it is still in the process of defining itself. This fluidity is what holds the interest of sorcerers.

From my association with don Juan Matus and the other practitioners of his line, I came to the conclusion, by directly experiencing their shamanistic practices, that the bracketing of meaning, or the suspension of judgment that Husserl postulated as the essential reduction of every philosophical inquiry, is impossible to accomplish when it is a mere exercise of the philosopher's intellect.

I was told by someone who studied with Martin Heidegger, Husserl's student, that when Husserl was asked for a pragmatic indication of how to accomplish this reduction, he said: "How in the hell should I know? I'm a philosopher." Contemporary philosophers who have reworked and enlarged the parameters of Phenomenology have never actually addressed the subject of practicalities. For them, Phenomenology has remained a purely philosophical theme. In their realm, therefore, this bracketing of meaning is at best merely a philosophical exercise.

In the sorcerers' world, suspending judgment is not the desired beginning of any philosophical-practical inquiry, but the necessity of every shamanistic practice. Sorcerers expand the parameters of what they can perceive to the point that they systematically perceive the unknown. To realize this feat, they have to suspend the effect of their normal interpretation system. This act is accomplished as a matter of survival rather than as a matter of choice. In this sense, the practitioners of don Juan's knowledge go a step beyond the intellectual exercises of philosophers. The proposition in this section of this journal is to follow the statements made by philosophers and correlate them with the practical accomplishments of sorcerers, who have, strangely enough, worked their practices, in many cases, seemingly along the same lines as those proposed by Western philosophers.

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The Warriors' Way Viewed as a Philosophical-Practical Paradigm

The third premise of the warriors' way is: PERCEPTION MUST BE INTENDED IN ITS COMPLETENESS. Don Juan said that perception is perception, and that it is void of goodness or evil. He presented this premise as one of the most important components of the warriors' way, the essential arrangement that all sorcerers have to yield to. He argued that since the basic premise of the warriors' way is that we are perceivers, whatever we perceive has to be catalogued as perception per se, without inflicting any value on it, positive or negative.

My natural inclination was to insist that good and evil had to be inherent conditions of the universe; they had to be essences, not attributes. Whenever I presented my arguments to him, which were unwitting counterstatements, he would point out that my arguments lacked scope, that they were dictated merely by the whims of my intellect and by my affiliation to certain syntactical arrangements.

"Yours are only words," he used to say, "words arranged in a pleasing order ; an order that conforms to the views of your time. What I give you are not merely words, but precise references from my book of navigation."

The first time he mentioned his book of navigation, I was very taken with what I thought was a metaphor, and I wanted to know more about it. Everything don Juan said to me, in those days, I took as a metaphor. I found his metaphors extremely poetic and never missed an opportunity to comment on them.

"A book of navigation! What a beautiful metaphor, don Juan," I said to him on that occasion.

"Metaphor, my eye!" he said. "A sorcerer's book of navigation is not like any of your arrangements of words."

"What is it then, don Juan?"

"It is a log. It is a record of all the things sorcerers perceive on their journeys to infinity."

"Is it a record of what all the sorcerers of your lineage perceived, don Juan?"

"Of course! What else can it be?"

"Do you keep it in your memory alone?"

When I asked that question, I was thinking, naturally, about oral history, or the ability of people to keep accounts in the form of stories, especially people who lived in times prior to written language, or people who live on the margins of civilization in modern times. In don Juan's case, I thought that a record of that nature had to be of monumental length.

Don Juan seemed to be aware of my reasoning. He chuckled before he answered me. "It is not an encyclopedia!" he said. "It is a log that is precise and short. I will acquaint you with all its points, and you will see that there is little that you or anyone else could add, if anything at all."

"I cannot conceive how it could be short, don Juan, if it is the accumulation of the knowledge of all your lineage," I insisted.

"In infinity, sorcerers find few essential points. The permutations of those essential points are infinite, but as I hope you will find out someday, those permutations are not important. Energy is extremely precise."

"But how can sorcerers differentiate the permutations from the essential points, don Juan ?"

"Sorcerers don't focus on the permutations. By the time they are ready to travel into infinity, they are also ready to perceive energy as it flows in the universe, and more important than anything else yet, they are capable of reinterpreting the flow of energy without the intervention of the mind."

When don Juan voiced, for the first time, the possibility of interpreting sensory data without the aid of the mind, I found it impossible to conceive. Don Juan was definitely aware of my train of thought.

"You are trying to understand all this in terms of your reason," he said, "and that's an impossible task. Accept the simple premise that perception is perception, void of complexities and contradictions. The book of navigation I am telling you about consists of what sorcerers perceive when they are in a state of total internal silence."

"What sorcerers perceive in a state of total silence is seeing , isn't it ?" I asked.

"No," he said firmly, looking me right in the eyes. "Seeing is perceiving energy as it flows in the universe, and it certainly is the beginning of sorcery, but what sorcerers are concerned with to the point of exhaustion is perceiving. As I have already told you, perceiving, for a sorcerer, is interpreting the direct flow of energy without the influence of the mind. This is why the book of navigation is so sparse."

Don Juan then outlined a complete sorcery scheme, even though I didn't understand a word of it. It took me a lifetime to come around to handling what he said to me at that time :

"When one is free from the mind," he said - something that was more than incomprehensible to me - "the interpretation of sensory data is no longer an affair taken for granted. One's total body contributes to it ; the body as a conglomerate of energy fields. The most important part of this interpretation is the contribution of the energy body, the body's twin in terms of energy ; an energy configuration that is the mirror image of the body as a luminous sphere. The interplay between the two bodies results in interpretation which cannot be good or bad, right or wrong, but an indivisible unit that has value only for those who journey into infinity."

"Why couldn't it have value in our daily life, don Juan ?" I asked.

"Because when the two sides of man, his body and his energy body, are joined together, the miracle of freedom happens. Sorcerers say that at that moment, we realize that for reasons extraneous to us, we have been detained in our journey of awareness. This interrupted journey begins again at that moment of joining.

"An essential premise of the warriors' way is, therefore, that perception ought to be intended in its completeness ; that is to say, the reinterpretation of direct energy as it flows in the universe must be made by man in possession of his two essential parts : body and energy body. This reinterpretation, for sorcerers, is completeness and, as you will understand someday, it must be intended."

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Queries About the Warriors' Way

What is the point of doing Tensegrity, recapitulating, doing all the things that you propose? What is the gain? I am a middle-aged woman with three children of college age; my marriage is not that stable ; my weight is too high. I don't know what to do.

Again, just as in other cases I have related before, this is not a new question to me. I have voiced my own version of it countless times to don Juan Matus. There were two levels of abstraction to which he referred every time he answered a question like this posed by me or any other of his disciples - I know that all of them asked the same question at one time or another, in the same mood of despair, dejection, and uselessness.

On the first level, the level of practicalities, don Juan would point out that the execution of the magical passes, by itself, led the practitioner to an incomparable state of wellbeing.

"The physical and mental prowess that results from a systematic performance of the magical passes," he used to say, "is so evident that any discussion about their effects is irrelevant. All one needs to do is to practice without stopping to consider the possible gain or uselessness of it all."

I was in no way different than the rest of don Juan's disciples, or the person who posed this question to me. I felt and believed that I was not qualified for the warriors' way because my flaws were exorbitant. When don Juan would ask me what my flaws were, I would find myself mumbling, incapable of describing those flaws that afflicted me so deeply. I settled it all by saying to him that I had a sensation of defeat that seemed to be the mark of my entire life. I saw myself as a champion of performing to perfection idiotic things that never took me anywhere. This feeling was expressed in doubts and tribulations, and in an endless necessity to justify everything I did. I knew that I was weak and undisciplined in areas that don Juan counted as essential. On the other hand, I was very disciplined in areas that held no interest for him. My sense of defeatism was a most natural consequence of this contradiction. When I asserted and reasserted my doubts to him, he pointed out that obsessive thinking about oneself was one of the most tiring things he knew.

"To think only about oneself," he said to me once, "produces a strange fatigue; a most overwhelming, drowning fatigue."

As years went by, I came to understand and fully accept don Juan's assertion. My conclusion, as well as the conclusion of all his disciples, is that the first thing one has to do is to become aware of the obsessive concern with the self. Another of our conclusions has been that the only means to have enough energy to draw away from this concern - something that cannot be attained intellectually - is by practicing the magical passes. Such a practice generates energy, and energy accomplishes wonders.

If the performance of the magical passes is coupled with what sorcerers call the recapitulation, which is the systematic viewing and reviewing of one's life experiences, one's chances of getting out from the underpinnings of self-reflection are increased manyfold.

All this is on the level of practicalities. The other level that don Juan referred to, he called the magical realm : the sorcerers' conviction that we are indeed magical beings ; that the fact that we are going to die makes us powerful and decisive. Sorcerers indeed believe that if we strictly follow the warriors' path, we could use our death as a guiding force in order to become beings that are going to die. It is their belief that beings that are going to die are magical by definition and that they do not die the death brought about by fatigue, and wear and tear, but that they continue on a journey of awareness. The force of the awareness that they are going to die of fatigue and wear and tear if they do not reclaim their magical nature makes them unique and resourceful.

"At a given moment in our lives, if we so desire," don Juan said to me once, "that magical uniqueness and power comes to our lives ever so gently, as if it were shy."

The Blue Scout wrote a poem once that has seemed to me always the most appropriate depiction of recovering our magical aspect:

Angels' Flight

by the Blue Scout

There are angels who are destined

to fly downward into the dark mists.

Often, they get caught there,

and for a time, they lose their wings,

and they are lost,

sometimes for nearly a lifetime.

It doesn't really matter, they are still angels;

angels never die.

They know that the mist will clear someday,

if only for a moment.

And they know that they will be reclaimed then,

at last,

by a golden sky.

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Tensegrity Log
The Force that Holds Us Together as Fields of Energy

The sorcerers of ancient Mexico, who discovered and developed the magical passes on which Tensegrity is based, maintained, according to what don Juan explained, that the performance of those passes prepares and leads the body to a transcendental realization : the realization that as conglomerates of energy fields, human beings are held together by a vibratory, agglutinating force that joins those individual energy fields into one concise, cohesive unit.

Don Juan Matus, in acquainting me with the propositions of those sorcerers of ancient times, emphasized to no end the fact that the performance of the magical passes was, to the best of his knowledge, the only means to lay the foundation for becoming fully conscious of that vibratory binding force ; something that happens when all the premises of the warriors' way are internalized and put into practice.

It was his ability as a teacher to make those premises a subject for embodiment ; in other words, he handled the premises of the warriors' way in such a fashion that it was feasible for me and his other disciples to transform them into units of our daily lives.

His contention was that this vibratory, agglutinating force that holds together the conglomerate of energy fields that we are is apparently similar to what modern-day astronomers believe must happen at the core of all the galaxies that exist in the cosmos. They believe that there, at their cores, a force of incalculable strength holds the [.…rs or …rs] of galaxies in place. This force, called a black hole, is a theoretical construct which seems to be the most reasonable explanation as to why stars do not fly away, driven by their own rotational speeds.

Modern man has found out, through the research of scientists, that there is a binding force that holds together the component elements of an atom. By the same token, the component elements of cells are held together by a similar force that seems to compel them to combine into concrete and particular tissues and organs. Don Juan said that those sorcerers who lived in Mexico in ancient times knew that human beings, taken as conglomerates of energy fields, are held together not by energetic wrappings or energetic ligaments, but by some sort of vibration that renders everything at once alive and in place ; some energy, some vibratory force, some power that cements those energy fields into one single energetic unit.

Don Juan explained that those sorcerers, by means of their practices and their discipline, became capable of handling that vibratory force, once they were fully conscious of it. Their expertise in dealing with it became so extraordinary that their actions were transformed into legends, mythological events that exist only as fables. For instance, one of the stories that don Juan told about the ancient sorcerers was that they were capable of dissolving their physical mass by merely placing their full consciousness and intent on that force.

Don Juan stated that, although they were capable of actually going through a pinhole if they deemed it necessary, they were never quite satisfied with the result of this maneuver of dissolving their mass. The reason for their discontent was that once their mass was dissolved, so was their capacity to act. They were left with the alternative of only witnessing events in which they were incapable of participating. Their ensuing frustration, the result of being incapacitated to act, turned, according to don Juan, into their damning flaw : their obsession with uncovering the nature of that vibratory force, an obsession driven by their concreteness, which made them want to hold and control that force. Their fervent desire was to strike from the ghostlike condition of masslessness, something which don Juan said cannot ever be accomplished.

Modern-day practitioners, cultural heirs of those sorcerers of antiquity, having found out that it is not possible to be concrete and utilitarian about that vibratory force, have opted for the only rational alternative : to become conscious of that force with no other purpose in sight except the elegance and well-being brought about by knowledge.

The only permissible instance which don Juan gave for the utilization of the power of this vibratory agglutinating force, was its capacity to make sorcerers burn from within, when the time comes for them to leave this world. Don Juan said that it is simplicity itself for sorcerers to place their absolutely total consciousness on the binding force with the intent to burn, and off they go, like a puff of air.

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ANNOUNCEMENTS

Cleargreen, Incorporated announces a seminar and workshop that will take place in Oakland, California on April 19th, 20th and 21st. The seminar and workshop will be entitled Warriors on the Run : The Intentionality of Magical Passes. This seminar and workshop will consist in the review and refinement of passes taught in previous workshops as well as in a series of new movements pertinent to the theme of the seminar : the idea that warriors in motion do not present a steady target to the onslaughts and the wear and tear of life in general.

Renewal and revitalization by a new deployment of energy already existing within us is the general goal of Tensegrity. To restate this intent in terms of movement is the aim of this seminar and workshop.

Register by calling Cleargreen, Incorporated at (310) 264-6126; 11901 Santa Monica Blvd., Suite 599, Los Angeles, CA 90025

Cleargreen has opened a new Web Page. The address is http://www.webb.com/Castaneda.

On April 19th of this year, Cleargreen will issue its third videocassette on Tensegrity: Energetically Crossing from One Phylum to Another. The movements recorded on this videocassette are complete magical passes which have been altered only minimally from their original form. They are an orderly sample of attempts made by seers of ancient times to catch a glimpse, from a different angle, of the force that binds us together.

All articles in the journal were written by Carlos Castaneda and edited by Nyei Murez. The poem was written by the Blue Scout. Journal design is by Elaby Gaethen.

Published by Cleargreen, Incorporated

© 1996, Laugan Productions, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part of this text cannot be done without permission of the publishers.