Я на пути

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Nameless
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Re: Я на пути

Сообщение Nameless » Вт мар 21, 2017 9:17 pm

Kovalenko писал(а):
Вт мар 21, 2017 12:43 pm
В русских переводах Кастанеды нам называют "врагов человека знания" таким образом:
Страх, Знание, Сила, Старость.
Но в оригинале они перечислены так:
Fear, Indulgence, Complacency, Old Age.
На мой взгляд, индульгирование или потакание себе это не знание.
А удовлетворенность или самодовольство это не сила.

И возникает вопрос: того ли Кастанеду мы читаем?
В моем электронном экземпляре КК враги: Fear, Clarity, Power, Old Age.
Вроде все правильно. И вообще мне софийский перевод нравится. Оригинал я читала только отрывками, но когда открываешь английский текст, то все очень знакомо, будто на английском и читала. Так, может, по мелочам и есть какая-то лажа, но это не особо существенно.

Natus Vincerus
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Re: Я на пути

Сообщение Natus Vincerus » Вт мар 21, 2017 11:12 pm

Страх. Ясность. Сила. Старость.

Но оригинал то был на Испанском :)

Дон Хуан Матус » передавал Знания Кастанеде » на Испанском,
Карлос Кастанеда » переводил на Английский,
изд. София » переводила на Русский :)

так и Живём :)

узелок
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Re: Я на пути

Сообщение узелок » Ср мар 22, 2017 5:55 pm

Читаю перевод интервью и сравниваю с оригиналом. Пропущены слова, иногда предложения. В некоторых случаях хромает смысл. Термин intensity переводят как энергия, и потому мне кажется, что гугл знает лучше.

Еще интересен момент, что касается концепции "острия", которое якобы дети берут у родителей во время рождения. В оригинале написано "edge". И я теперь прям не знаю, что думать.

P.S.: ищу сканы книг of Carlos Castaneda.

узелок
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Re: Я на пути

Сообщение узелок » Ср мар 22, 2017 5:58 pm

"At birth, I took everything from my father and mother," he said. "They were
all bruised! To them I had to return that edge that I had taken from them.
Now I have to recoup the edge that I lost."
Как бы перевод:
-- Когда я родился, то я все взял у своих родителей.
Они многое потеряли из за этого. Для них было бы очень хорошо,
если бы я вернул им ту остроту, которую я взял у них. Теперь
уже мне нужно вернуть ту остроту, которую я потерял, --
объясняет он.

узелок
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Re: Я на пути

Сообщение узелок » Ср мар 22, 2017 6:03 pm

Natus Vincerus писал(а):
Вт мар 21, 2017 11:12 pm
Но оригинал то был на Испанском :)
Из интервью:
After a short silence I asked him if The Second Ring of Power had been
translated in Spanish. According to Castaneda, a Spanish publishing house had
the right, but he wasn't sure if the book had come out or not.

узелок
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Re: Я на пути

Сообщение узелок » Ср мар 22, 2017 10:35 pm

Для меня слово "созерцать" и однокоренные с ним в контексте учения дон Хуана звучали как-то мистически. Мне почему-то в голову не пришло, что в момент чтения текста я способен постичь, или хотя бы попробовать созерцать предметы.

На английском (в интервью) это оказывается написанно как "watching".

Просто "вочинг", от всем известного "воч". И как-то понятнее стало :-)


Коваленко, может ты подскажешь, что Кастанеда имел в виду, когда говорил "watching"?

узелок
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Re: Я на пути

Сообщение узелок » Чт мар 23, 2017 12:21 am

Ordinary perception doesn't tell us all the truth
-- Обычное восприятие не позволяет нам видеть правду.
Это для тех кто читает интервью на русском.

oldzpace
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Re: Я на пути

Сообщение oldzpace » Чт мар 23, 2017 8:43 am

-- Я лично, -- продолжил говорить он, после небольшой
паузы. -- Работаю над чем-то вроде журнала, это что-то вроде
учебника. Я ответственен за эту работу. Мне хотелось бы найти
серьезного издателя, чтобы опубликовать его и участвовать в его
распространении среди тех, кто им заинтересуется, а также
учебными заведениями.

Он сказал нам, что этот журнал состоит из 18 частей, в
которых он обобщил все учение Тольтеков. Для того, чтобы
сделать эту работу понятной и создать теоретическое
обоснование, он использовал феноменологию Гуссерля.

-- На прошлой неделе я был в Нью Йорке, -- сказал он.
-- Я пришел с этим проектом к Саймону и Шустеру, но получил
отказ. Похоже, что они испугались. Это такое произведение, что
оно вряд ли будет иметь успех.

-- Только я один несу ответственность за то, что
написано в этих 18 частях, и как видите, я потерпел неудачу.
Словно 18 раз я упал и ударился головой. Я согласился с
издателями, что это действительно тяжело читать. Дон Хуан, дон
Хенаро и остальные, они совсем другие чем я. Они так
непостоянны! -- (Позже, в телефонном разговоре Кастанеда
сказал, что Саймон и Шустер в конце концов решили принять
проект журнала, о котором он так беспокоился).

-- Я называю эти части журнала элементами, потому что
каждая из них показывает, как разрушить элементы обыденности.
Наше единственное восприятие может быть нарушено множеством
способов.

1980-1981 год.
О чем идет речь? "Колесо Времени" - рано. Или было что-то еще о чем мы не знаем? В 1981 опубликован только "Дар Орла". Но на журнал или учебник как-то не похоже.

Kovalenko
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Re: Я на пути

Сообщение Kovalenko » Чт мар 23, 2017 11:28 am

А вот интервью с Флориндой Доннер из журнала "Измерение":

Dimensions, February 1992

BEING-IN-DREAMING

FLORINDA DONNER IN CONVERSATION WITH ALEXANDER BLAIR-EWART

Florinda Donner is a longtime colleague and fellow dream-
traveler of Carlos Castaneda and the acclaimed author of The
Witch's Dream and Shabono. Her latest book Being-In-Dreaming: An
Initiation into the Sorcerer's World, an autobiographical account
of her halting, sometimes unwilling, often bewildering initiation
into the works of being-in-dreaming, has recently been released
and will be available in Canada in the Spring. Anthropologist and
sorceress, Florinda Donner lives in Los Angeles, California and
Sonora, Mexico.

ALEXANDER BLAIR-EWART: Now, at the beginning of the book, you
talk about how you become drawn into a living myth. Can you talk
about that mythology?

FLORINDA DONNER: It's a living myth. Well the myth of the Nagual
is a myth, but a myth that is being relived over and over again.
You see, the myth that exists is the myth that there is the
Nagual and that he has his troop of people, apprentices,
sorcerers. Actually I'm not an apprentice of Don Juan. I was an
apprentice of Castaneda who was an apprentice of Don Juan. And I
am one of the 'sisters' who were actually of the women of
Florinda, and she gave me her name. So, in that sense, it is a
myth which exists. They didn't care that I called them witches.
It has no evil connotations for them . From the western point of
view, the idea of a brujo, or a witch, has always a negative
connotation. They couldn't care less, because for these people,
the abstract quality of sorcery voids automotatically [sic] any
positive or negative connotation of the term. We are apes on one
level, but we have this other magical side. In that sense we
relive a myth.

ABE: So the myth of the Nagual is that there is an unbroken
lineage from the ancient Toltecs right down to modern times. I'm
wondering if I can get you to talk about what the pattern of the
myth actually is.

FLORINDA D: Well, there is no pattern of the myth. That's why
the whole thing is so baffling and so difficult. When I first got
involved with these people my main quest, my main aberration,
which I came to call it later, was that I wanted to have some
rules and regulations about what the hell it is I had to do.
There were none. There is no blueprint. Because each new group
has to find their own way to deal with this idea of trying to
break the barriers of perception. The only way we can break the
barriers of perception, according to Don Juan, is that we need
energy. All our energy is already deployed in the world to
present the idea of self- what we are, who we want to be
perceived as, how other people perceive us. So Don Juan says 90%
of our energy is deployed in doing that, and nothing new can come
to us. There's nothing open to us, because no matter how
"egoless" we are, or we pretend to be, or we want to believe we
are, we are not. Even let's say "enlightened" people, or gurus
that I have met- at one time Carlos Castaneda was going around
trying to meet gurus- and the ego of those people was so
gigantic, in how they wanted to be perceived in the world . And
that's, according to Don Juan, exactly what kills us. Nothing
is open to us anymore.

ABE: A real Nagual, a real seer wouldn't care how the world
perceives them, particularly, would they?

FLORINDA D: No, they don't. But they still have to fight it.
Castaneda has been at this for thirty years. I've been at this
for over twenty years, and it's ongoing; it doesn't stop.

ABE: What's the nature of the battle? Because you use the
language of the warrior. What's the nature of the battle? What
are you fighting?

FLORINDA D: The self.

ABE: The self.

FLORINDA D: It's not even the self; it's an idea of the self,
because if we would really get the self below the surface, we
don't really know what it is. And it is possible to curtail this
idea, this bombastic idea we have of the self. Because whether
it's a negative idea or a positive idea doesn't really matter.
The energy employed to sustain that idea is the same.

ABE: So there's tremendous emphasis in this tradition on
overcoming what is called self-importance.

FLORINDA D: Self-importance, exactly. That's the main battle.
To shut off our internal dialogue. Because even if we're isolated
someplace, we are still constantly talking to ourselves. That
internal dialogue never stops. And what does the internal
dialogue do? It always justifies itself, no matter what. We
replay things, events, what we could have said or could have
done, what we feel or don't feel. The emphasis is always on me.
We're constantly spouting this mantra- me...me...me, silently
or verbally.

ABE So, an opening emerges when...

FLORINDA D: ...when that dialogue shuts off. Automatically. We
don't have to do anything. And the reason people reject Castaneda
as not true is because it's too simple. But its sheer simplicity
makes it the hardest thing there is to do for us. There are about
six people in our world engaged in the same pursuit. And the
difficulty we all have is totally shutting off that internal
dialogue. It's fine if we're not threatened. But when certain
buttons arc pushed, our reactions arc so ingrained in us that
it's so easy to go back on automatic pilot. You see, there's one
great exercise that Don Juan prescribes- the idea of
recapitulation. The idea is that you recapitulate your life,
basically. And it's not a psychological recapitulation. You
want to bring back that energy you left in all the interactions
you've had with people throughout your life, and you start of
course from the present moment and you go backwards in lime. But
if you really do a good recapitulation, you discover, by the
time you are three or four years old, you have learned all your
reactions already. Then we become more sophisticated, we can hide
them better, but basically the pattern has already been
established, how we're going to interact with the world and with
our fellow human beings.

ABE: So here is the image, then, or the awareness of a kind human
being who is travelling a parallel path to the world of the
Tonal, or the world of the person, the social person. This other
world, his other opening, is something that has apparently always
been there.

FLORINDA D: Yes, it's always there. It's available to all of us.
Nobody wants to tap into it, or people think they want to tap
into it, but as Don Juan pointed out, the seeker is involved in
something else, because a person who seeks already knows what
he's seeking.

ABE: Yes, that's clear.

FLORINDA D: The disappointment that so many people who are
"seekers" have with Castaneda is because, when he talks to them,
well, they have already made up their mind how things should be.
And they are not open. Even if they're listening, they're not
open to anything anymore, because they already know how it should
be, what it is they're seeking.

ABE: My version of that is that I am not interested in
self-improvement. I'm interested in self-realization, but not im-
provement, and I'm not concerned with whether or not what I turn
out to be in the process of recapitulation is something nice and
spiritual and acceptable, because it's going to contain elements
of madness as well as everything else.

FLORINDA D: Exactly.

ABE: But this is a very deeply disturbing idea for most people.

FLORINDA D: It is, yes, definitely. You see, we believe in this
idea that we are basically energetic beings. Don Juan said
everything hinges on how much energy we have. Our energy to
fight, even to fight the idea of the self, requires an enormous
amount of energy. And we go always to the easiest path. We go
back to what we know, even us who have been involved in this for
so long. It would be a lot easier just to say, oh, to hell with
it, you know, I' m just going to indulge a little bit. But the
thing is, that little bit of indulging would plunge you right
back to point zero again.

ABE: Except for one thing that we both know, Florinda, which is
this: that once you pass a certain point within yourself, if you
have reached that silence, I believe, even for one moment, if
its real...

FLORINDA D: ...you can't stop it. Exactly. But to reach this
moment of silence you need the energy. You can stop it, what Juan
calls this momentary pause, this cubic centimetre of chance, and
you can stop it immediately.

ABE: And once it's happened, you'll never be the same again.

FLORINDA D: Absolutely.

ABE: And you might want to go back to your old ways and indulge,
but you can 't get any satisfaction out of it.

FLORINDA D: Exactly. No, you can't. There's no satisfaction.
That's totally correct. I think, if we would really
arrive...let's say a critical mass would arrive at that feeling
or at that knowledge, we could change things in the world. The
reason nothing can change is because we're not willing to change
ourselves, whether it's political dogma, economic or social
issues, it doesn't really matter. What the hell is the whole
thing with the rainforest and the environment at the moment? How
can we expect someone to change if we're not willing to change
ourselves? Thc change is phony; the change is restructuring or
replaying the pieces, but there's no change. Basically we are
predatory beings, you see. That hasn't changed in us. We could
use that predatory energy to change our course, but we're not
willing to change ourselves.

ABE: Now, in the myth, the individual seer and/or Nagual is
selected by providence, the unknown, the ineffable.

FLORINDA D: ...actually selected. Carlos has been "tapped"
energetically. Let's look at our energetic configuration....some
people are basically energetically different. They call Carlos a
three-pronged Nagual; Don Juan was a four-pronged Nagual. So what
does that really entail? Basically, they have more energy than
the rest of the group, and that's something very curious. Why the
hell him, or why, for instance, are always the men Naguals? We
have women Naguals in the lineage, but the men have more energy,
the one's that have been selected so far. They're not better.
There were people in Don Juan's world who were infinitely more
spiritual, better prepared, bigger men of knowledge in the sense
that they knew more, and it didn't make any difference. It is not
that he is more or less than somebody else. It's just that he has
that energy to lead.

ABE: And he can give some of that energy to somebody, too, and
give them a boost.

FLORINDA D: We draw from that energy, yes. It is not that you
get that energy, but he has that energy, if nothing else, not to
become whatever the world presents. For instance, in that sense,
being with Castaneda for so long, the worldly goodies that have
been presented to him are unbelievable. He has never wavered
from his path. And I, personally, could say now, that if I had
been put in that position for that many years, I could not
honestly say that I would have been so impeccable. And you see, I
have to acknowledge that, because the worst thing, of course,
we can do is to try to hide certain things. And for me to have
witnessed Castaneda's journey, I mean, there were incredible
worldly things presented to him which he never took. And you see,
for that you need energy. That's where energy comes in; that's
when you need whoever is then the leader of the group to point
out that way. Because if somebody else would have been the Nagual
that doesn't have the energy, he would have succumbed.

ABE: Can a Nagual succumb and then recover?

FLORINDA D: No. There is no chance.

ABE: How come?

FLORINDA D: Go back to the myth. The eagle flies in a straight
line. It doesn't turn around. You might be able to say okay, you
have to run harder after it. But what does that mean? It's a
metaphor.

ABE: So, the Nagual works in different ways to fulfill the
unfolding of the myth.

FLORINDA D: Don Juan had more people behind him. Energetically he
had a larger mass, so he could practically pluck you in and put
you some place. Carlos will not do that. For him, whatever the
people he is working with- and there are six of us- it's a matter
of decision. That's all. Our decision is all that counts, nothing
else. He will not cajole us; he will not beg; he will not tell us
what to do. We have to know. Having been exposed to this for so
long, having been with Don Juan, any way we can try to walk on
this path, that has to be enough for him. There was nothing he
would do forcefully to make sure that we stayed on this path.

ABE: Different Naguals work in different ways. Is it true of
Carlos Castaneda, I've heard him described as the Nagual of
stalkers?

FLORINDA D: Yes, but I would say...I don't know. He's a dreamer.

ABE: Yeah, that emerges, too.

FLORINDA D: And then, what is this idea of dreaming, dreaming and
being awake? It's a different state. It's not that you're zonked
out. No, you are totally normal and coherent, but something in
you plays energetically on a different level.

ABE: There's something in your eyes, too.

FLORINDA D: Yes.

ABE: Something in your eyes that is too to learn to look at two
worlds simultaneously.

FLORINDA D: Exactly. And again this idea is that you have
collapsed the barrier perception in terms of what we see;
whatever we perceive has been defined us by the social order, no
matter what. Intellectually we are willing to accept at
perception is culturally defined, but we will not accept it on
any other level. But it's absurd, because it exists on another
level. And I can only say, because we been involved with these
people- and certainly I'm also in the world- that is possible to
see on those two levels and to be totally coherent in both, and
impeccable on both levels.

BE: Talk about impeccability. What is impeccability?

FLORINDA D: You know exactly what you have to do. Especially for
women, we are reared to be very petty beings. Women are so petty,
it's unbelievable. And I'm not saying that men are not, but with
men, no matter how we want to express it, men always are on the
winning side. Whether they are losers or not, it's still male.
Our world is a male world, regardless how well off they are or
not, regardless whether or not they believe in any kind of
feminist ideology, it doesn't really matter. But the men are the
winners in our society.

ABE: In the book you talk about how women are actually enslaved
by their attachment to the sexuality of men. Can you talk about
that?

FLORINDA D: Definitely. First of all, to me, one of the most
shocking things which I denied and refused to believe for quite
some time, was this idea of the fog created by sexual
intercourse. They went even further to explain that basically
what really goes on is that, when we have sexual intercourse,
when the male ejaculates, not only do we get the semen, but in
that moment of energetic outburst, what really happens is that
they are what Don Juan calls 'energetic worms', filaments. And
those filaments stay in the body for. From a biological point of
view, those filaments ensure that the male returns to the same
female and takes care of the offspring. Thc male will recognize
that it is his offspring by the filaments at a total energetic
level.

ABE: What is the exchange of energy in sexual intercourse?

FLORINDA D: She feeds the man energetically. Don Juan believes
that the women are the cornerstone for perpetuating the human
species, and the bulk of that energy comes from women, not only
to gestate, to give birth and nourish their offspring, but also
to ensure the male's place in the whole process.

ABE: So, the woman is enslaved, then, by this fog. How does she
release herself?
Последний раз редактировалось Kovalenko Чт мар 23, 2017 11:31 am, всего редактировалось 1 раз.

Kovalenko
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Re: Я на пути

Сообщение Kovalenko » Чт мар 23, 2017 11:28 am

продолжение:

FLORINDA D: If we talk about it from a biological point of view,
is she enslaved? The sorcerers say yes, in the sense that she
always views herself through the male. She has no option. I used
to be excruciatingly mad about this whole discussion; I used to
go over and over it with them, and go back to this whole idea,
especially because this was in the early seventies when the
women's movement was at its peak. And I said "No, women have come
a long way. Look at what they have accomplished.", and they said,
"No, they haven't accomplished anything." To them, the sexual
revolution- and they were not prudes- they were not interested
in morality, they were only interested in energy- so they said,
that for women to be liberated sexually, in a way enslaved them
even more, because suddenly they were feeding energetically not
just one male, but many males.

ABE: That's interesting.

FLORINDA D: So for them it was absurd, and whatever's happening
at the moment, he foresaw that in the seventies. He said they're
going to dive down on their noses. They're going to be weakened.
And they are. The few women I've talked to- I've given
certain lectures, and the books- and when I've talked about this,
it's very interesting that the women do agree. And I first
thought I would have a great deal of difficulty with this
subject, but especially women who have gone through the process
of having multiple lovers said they were exhausted, and they
don't know why.

ABE: So we are talking about something beyond the sexual.

FLORINDA D: Originally, beyond the the sexual aspect, the female,
the womb ensures that the woman is the one that's closest to
the spirit in this process of approaching knowledge as being-in-
dreaming. The man cones upward, and by the sheer definition of
the cone, it comes to a finite end. It's an energetic force. He
strives because he is not close to the spirit, or whatever we
want to call that great energetic force out there. According to
the sorcerers, the woman is exactly the opposite. The cone is
upside down. They have a direct link with it, because the womb
for the sorcerer is not just an organ of reproduction; it is an
organ for dreams, a second brain.

ABE: Or heart.

FLORINDA D: Or heart, and they do apprehend knowledge directly.
Yet we have never been allowed to define what knowledge is in our
society or in any society. And the women who do create or help to
formulate the body of knowledge, it has to be done in male terms.
Let's say a woman does research. If they do not abide by the
rules already established by the male consensus, they won't be
published. They can deviate slightly, but always within that
same matrix. It is not allowed for women to do anything else.

ABE: So the sorceress is removed from the hypnotism of all that.

FLORINDA D: Of the social, yes. It's very interesting that you
mention the idea of hypnotism, because Don Juan always said at
the time when psychology produced Freud, we were too passive. We
would have followed either Mesmer or Freud. We are mesmeric
beings. We never really developed that other path...

ABE: Yes. The path of energy.

FLORINDA D: ...and this would never have happened to us if Freud
wouldn't have had the upper hand.

ABE: Well, he's lost it now.

FLORINDA D: No, not really, because with all we do, who knows how
many generations it takes? Let say he has been discredited
intellectually, but our whole cultural baggage...We still talk in
those terms, even people who don't even know who Freud is. It's
part of our language, our culture.

ABE: Yes, I know. It's very frustrating, dealing with people who
approach the whole of reality from this hackneyed psychological
viewpoint.

FLORINDA D: Yes. And they don't even know where it comes from.
It's part of our cultural baggage.

ABE.: So the sorceress is freed from this condition.

FLORINDA D: Well, free in the sense that once you see what the
social order really is- it's an agreement- at least you are more
cautious in accepting that. People say, "Oh but look how
different life is from your grandmother's or mother's time." I
say, it's not. It's only different in degree. But nothing is dif-
ferent. If I would have lived my life the way it had been
established for me...yes, I was more educated, I had a better
chance. But that's all. I still would have ended up the same way
they had ended up. Married, frustrated, with children that by
now I probably would hate, or they would hate me.

ABE: I keep trying to get you now to cross that line, and talk
about what occurs now that you've realized that there is that
thralldom and you begin to free yourself from it. What is it that
opens up to perception?

FLORINDA D: Everything.

ABE: Everything. Good.

FLORINDA D: First of all, in your dreams you can see. For
instance, my work is done in dreaming. Not that I don't have to
do the work, but it comes in dreaming.

ABE: Now you're using the word dreaming in this very specific
sense, which is in this tradition. Can you talk about what
dreaming actually is?

FLORINDA D: In the traditional sense, when we fall asleep, as
soon as we start entering a dream, in that moment when we're half
awake and half asleep, and still conscious, you know from Casta-
neda's work that the assemblage point flutters, it starts
shifting, and what the sorcerer wants to do is that he wants to
use that natural (that happens to every one of us) shift to move
into other realms. And for that you need an exquisite energy.
Again it comes down to energy. We need an extraordinary amount of
energy because you want to be conscious of that moment and use it
without waking up.

ABE: Yes, a very high accomplishment.

FLORINDA D: For me, it's very easy to enter, to use it. The thing
is, I had no control at that time- although I have now- over when
it was going to happen. But I could center into this state of
what they call...I mean, the women were not interested in calling
it the 'second attention'; they were interested in calling it
'dreaming awake', because it is the same thing. And you'd reach
different levels, and what you do is that in that dreaming state
eventually you have the same control you have in your daily life.
And that's exactly what the sorcerers do. It's the same thing;
there's no difference anymore.

ABE: So you are now able to exist in another reality?

FLORINDA D: Well, I don't really know. You see, we don't have the
language to talk about it, except to talk about it in known
terms. So in a weird way, when I ask myself, "Do I exist in
another reality?", yes and no. It's not quite right to really
say that, because it is one reality.
There is no difference. Let's say there are different layers,
like an onion. But it's all the same. And it becomes very
bizarre. How am I going to talk about it? In metaphors? Our
metaphors are already so defined by what we already know.

ABE: Yes, the problem of language.

FLORINDA D: You see we don't have the language to really talk
about what then really happens when you are in the 'second
attention', or when we 'dream awake' . Bul it is as real as any
other reality. What is reality? It is, again, a consensus. And
you see, the thing is, we only want to agree about this
intellectually on one level. But it's more than just an
intellectual agreement. Let's say, it can be more. And for
that, again, we go back to that same thing- it all hinges on
energy.

ABE: That's right. But it also hinges on something called 'intent'.

FLORINDA D: Exactly. But in order to hook yourself to
'intent'...See, 'intent' is out there, it's this force- Don
Juan was not interested in religion- but, in a weird way maybe it
is exactly what we call God, the supreme being, the one force,
the spirit. You see, each culture knows what it is. And the thing
is, Don Juan, again, said you don't beg for it. You ask, and in
order to ask for it, you need energy. Because not only do you
need energy to hook yourself onto it, but you want to stay
hooked.

ABE: Ycs. So, this thing of intent, I mean it's an easy word to
say, but it's actually a quite complex operation.

FLORINDA D: Yes, exactly, very complex. For Don Juan and his
people, to talk about sorcery and witchcraft, with all those
negative connotations, they couldn't care less what we called the
practices. For them it was very very abstract. To them sorcery is
an abstraction, and it was this idea of expanding the limits of
perception. Because, for them, our choices in life are limited by
the social order. We have boundless options, but by accepting
these choices, of course, we set a limit to our limitless
possibilities.

ABE: And yet the human being seems...

FLORINDA D: ...constantly searching for that which has been...

ARE: ... lost...

FLORINDA D: ....lost or caged in by the social order. They put
blinds on us the moment we are born. Look at the way we coerce
the child to perceive the way we perceive.

ABE: Yes, the transmission of culture.

FLORINDA D: It's the most perfect example. Children truly
perceive more, obviously, a great deal more. But they have to
make some order out of that chaos, and we, of course, are the
perennial teachers of what is proper to perceive within our
group. And if they don't abide by that, my god, we shoot them
with drugs, or lock them up in therapy with psychiatrists.

ABE: There have been these traditions, which have existed for a
long, long time, and now in the last, say, twenty or thirty years
in particular, we start to hear about them. Why did Castaneda
write his books?

FLORINDA D.: Bccause it was a task; it was a sorceric task. That
Don Juan impressed upon him. Castaneda is the last of his
line. There is no one else. There's a group of Indians that we
work with. You see, Don Juan, in a weird way made almost a
mistake with Castaneda, when he first was put in touch, whatever
the design or power of the spirit was which put Don Juan face to
face with Castaneda. And he rallied right away. His circle of
apprentices- and I think it's in Tales of Power and The Second
Ring of Power, when he talks about the people in Oaxaca and the
Little Sisters and all those people. And then, years later, Don
Juan realizes that that's not the way Castaneda is going.
Castaneda was even more abstract than Don Juan was. His path
was a totally different path. And then when he gathered these
other people, because the people that are with Castaneda, we all
met Don Juan before we met Castaneda. Actually there was only
five of us before- four of us and Castaneda.

ABE: So, there was the sorcerer's task of writing the books. What
I'm trying to get at is, that this knowledge, just as knowl-
edge, becomes available now and is available to millions of
people in this form. What is the purpose of that?

FLORINDA D: Well, somebody has to get hooked by it. And people
do. For us, for our mentality as the westem ape, as Don Juan
always called us, you see, we have to be hooked first
intellectually, because obviously that's how our whole being
works. When I was in school, I was just a step away from going
into graduate school, and l had been in this world for two or
three years, and I said, "What am I doing by continuing school?
Why should I get a PhD.? It's absolutely redundant." And Don Juan
and all the women said it's absolutely not redundant, because in
order to reject something you have to understand it at its most
sophisticated. Because for you to say you're not interested in
philosophy, or you're not interested in anthropology, it's
meaningless. You can only say it after you have at least have
made some attempt to understand it. There's no reason to reject
it, and when plunging into this world of the 'second attention'
and 'dreaming awake', your mind has to be so well trained for you
to emerge again, to come out with the knowledge. Because if you
have not the brain or the mind to do it, you might as well just
go throw stones in the desert; because it's meaningless. And for
them it was extremely important that all of us are very well
trained. Everyone working within this little group has a degree.
There are historians, anthropologists, librarians.

ABE: So, the knowledge is made available to millions of people,
and people become hooked by it.

FLORINDA D: On one level, they will, yes.

ABE: And does that mean that the tradition has now begun to
proliferate itself in that way, also?

FLORINDA D: I don't know. If I go by Castaneda's mail, which he
doesn't read, I would say yes. But then, most of the stuff... I
mean I open letters from time to time, and they're mad, they're
crackpots most of them. Some of them are very, very serious
enquiries, and most of them are just truly cracked people.
(laughter) I mean they're cracked. Like, "I am the new Nagual."
or "I have been visited by you in dreams." I mean truly bizarre
things.

ABE: Well, there are many levels to that, as you know. But I
think that you women, you sorcerers there, and the whole Casta-
nedan reality has actually affected the mass collective
consciousness of, particularly, North America.

FLORINDA D: It is as you say; the work is out there. There's a
great many people reading it. And some people are truly very
serious about it.

ABE: And some of them are people who are non-Natives who have
become involved in Native spirituality. In a way, the work that
has come from your group has had a tremendous quickening effect
on Native spiritualities all over this continent, who have
found a track back into their traditions.

FLORINDA D.: You see, the whole point of Don Juan was that you
don't go back, because we are caught again in the myth and the
rituals. And for Don Juan, myth and rituals...myth in the sense
that yes, that you're part of this matrix, but not in the sense
that you're going to live it by invoking certain rituals, certain
powers that were, let's say, successful in the l9th century.
Because, he said, that's exactly the fallacy, because originally
a ritual is only to hook your attention. Once your attention is
hooked, you drop it. As the apes that we are, we of course are
very comforted by the ritual. People that truly transcend a
certain knowledge do it by exactly getting out of it. Yet the
rest of the mass is mesmerized by the ritual.

ABE: Seeing the truth of that and the fact that Castaneda
describes you as the new seers, how does that emerge?

FLORINDA D: The new seers? For the women it is very important,
this idea that the womb is not just an organ of reproduction.
In order to activate this, our intent has to be different. In
order to change our intent we go back again to energy. You see,
we don' t really know what it means to use the womb as an organ
for being, an organ of light, of intuition. For us, intuition
really is something that has already been defined. There is no
real intuition anymore, because we intuit with our brains. Don
Juan was interested in women, and people always ask, "Well, how
come there's always so many women? Do you have orgies? Is there
all kinds of stuff going on?" He said, "No, it's because the male
doesn't have the womb. He needs that magical 'womb power'
(laughter). " It's very important, you see.

ABE: Let me ask some technical questions there, if I may, on
behalf of my female readers. Does the womb have to be fully
functioning? I mean, if a woman had her tubes tied, would her
womb still work?

FLORINDA D: Yes, as long as she doesn't have a hysterectomy.

ABE: So long as the womb isn't removed...

FLORINDA D: ...if the womb is there, yes.

ABE: Then it can work.

FLORINDA D: Oh, absolutely. But the only thing is you need to
summon that intent. Like certain of the Goddess cults- "When God
Was A Woman"- and I was talking to some women a month ago, and
they were all in goddess groups. And every month they go into the
forest; they go someplace up to Sequoia and they groove in the
forest, in the trees, and oh, they have a great time hanging out,
debating, making rituals in the river. And I said, "But what the
fuck are you doing? You go back home, and then you are the same
assholes you were always. You open your legs whenever the master
says "I need you"" And they were shocked. I mean, they quite dis-
liked me, because they don't like to hear that. They said, "But
we felt so good for three days." And I said, "But what's the
point of feeling good for three days if your life continues the
same way?" What are we resting from? Because our life is going to
continue. Why don't we change? This idea of the rituals and even
going back to the Native beliefs, it didn't even work back then,
on one level. We were conquered.

ABE: So it's something that has to live now in a completely
authentic way.

FLORINDA D.: It has to be fluid, and the practitioner has to be
fluid to accept these changes. Even within us, things are
changing constantly, and we're so comfortable in a certain
groove, until something blasts us out of it. And we resent it,
but we have to be fluid. Only energy will give us that fluidity.

ABE: How do you accummulate energy?

FLORINDA D: To start off with, at least at the beginning, it was
Don Juan's idea that the best energy that we have is our sexual
energy. It's the only energy that we really have, and most of our
sexual energy is squandered.

ABE: Now, is it the same for men and women?

FLORINDA D: Of course it's the same for men and women. The only
thing is with women you see that energetically the woman takes on
the burden of feeding the man through their energetic fila-
ments. So, in that sense, it's worse for women. And for the man
too, because the man is hooked. Energetically he is hooked, no
matter what. And we have all kinds of psychological explanations.
People who we've had affairs with, and we can't get her out of
our minds, whatever. You see, we have this gray barrage of
description, but what really is going on is on a totally
different level that we don't want to talk about because it's not
part of our cultural kit.

ABE: So the primary way of accumulating energy, then, is to be celibate?

FLORINDA D: Well, it's very difficult, but it would be a good
try, at least to start out with.

ABE: If a woman was called to this way, if she got hooked, or
a man got hooked by this tradition, how would they know? How
would they know that they had been hooked by a tradition and
not just by some damn obsession?

FLORINDA D: For instance, Castaneda's books spell out very
clearly...if you read Castaneda's books carefully, they're al-
most manuals.

ABE: Yes, I know. And you read them again and again, and you
finally understand what they're talking about

FLORINDA D: You will know that something has changed, because you
will feel it energetically. And then there's this whole idea that
you can abandon this idea of the self. It's not that you're going
to laugh at others. But you find them despicable, and yet you
don't want to judge them, either, because who the hell are we to
judge anybody anyway? But you know that you are not part of it,
in the sense of the social agreement, and it's almost like a
phony part of you that is clinging to you, because you do have to
function in the world. You have to present a coherent idea Of the
self. You know, Don Juan always said if some truthful change has
taken place there is no way to be rejected, whatever it means to
be rejected. I don' t know. By intent coming in contact with us?
I don't really know. There have been two people that have come in
contact with us, and they are there. I mean, we're never together
anyway; each person lives on their own, and just from time to
time we do get together. Originally we had this little class
when Castaneda was here. He teaches certain very interesting
movements, basically to store up energy. So, these people have
been there for two years, and they're changing little by
little. And it's amazing. You see, if you let something go, some-
thing in you will know.

ABE: You have published this book, for instance, and I read it.
Now I don't have a physical image of you, but my feelings form a
sense of who you might be, or what you might be like. Now, does
that energy field affect you, now that there's this book out
there?

FLORINDA D: One of the things that Don Juan made very clear to
Castaneda...see, once the book is out, the book is out. It has
nothing to do with you anymore. For you to be wondering, living
in hope- is the book doing well or not doing well?- see, that's a
very, very difficult thing to divorce yourself from. Because
somehow you are involved. To truly let go is very very
difficult. I had two other books- The Shabono and The Witches
Dream- and it was very easy. With this one, because it's the first
time I talk about my involvement with Don Juan, it's very
difficult. And maybe because for the first time I'm talking more
openly-- with the other ones I did absolutely nothing. With this
one I am more involved. I have given lectures in bookstores to
groups of people, which is very interesting, because, as you
said before, there are a great many people who are truly very
seriously interested, but intellectually, again.

ABE: Oh, I think I know a know people who've gone a little beyond
intellect with it.

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