Hauntingly-close parallels with Castaneda's accounts of don Juan's worldview. Carlos's two helpers - Archived Message
Posted by Rhisiart Gwilym on January 23, 2020, 6:36 pm, in reply to "How To Be A Mentally Sovereign Human"
his teacher don Juan and his benefactor don Genaro, demonstrated to him repeatedly, with both verbal explanation and direct paranormal experiences, that reality is in fact much more strange, exotic - and malleable - than we learn from our standard Western, orthodox-science-commanded social conditioning; unless, that is, we choose to go into some degree of the autism spectrum, and refuse to buy into the efforts which our elders make. Don Juan speaks of all the adults around any new-born making a "prolonged, fierce effort" to get it to "join their consensus". It's this early-life conditioning against which the self-liberation process of which Caitlin speaks must struggle: the extra-ordinary, almost masochistic effort one must undertake to escape from the enforced socio-political consensus. And they're right. It's damned hard. In fact don Juan explains to Carlos that he has both a teacher and a benefactor as two separate people, because the non-ordinary incidents which don Genaro demonstrates to Carlos are so shit-scared (literally!) terrifying that Carlos can't bear to be in don Genaro's presence for long at any one time, affable and cheery though he is. That terror of unmoderated reality, as it's evoked remorselessly by close encounters with the paranormal, is indeed deeply perturbing. I can testify to the truth of that myself. Facing and accepting the unvarnished realities of human society is scarcely any less demanding, it seems. Cait is dead right. OTOH, once you've undertaken the liberation effort facing the apprentice nagual, you become capable, as Carlos says, of "leaping into an abyss" without being doomed to crash to the rocks below and die; base-jumping without a chute! Levitation is indeed one of the siddhis, of which the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali spoke centuries ago. These liberations are possible, for those with enough will - and the right benefactors... PS: I leave unaddressed the question whether Carlos's works are non-fiction, or unadmitted novels. Either way, the teachings which they contain are sound. As are Cait's.
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