Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan’s Teachings

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Note: I’ve cut out much of my “story” part so you are going to just have to imagine what I’d talked about.

M: It’s oversimplified that “if” you could commit to a firm base of actions, without oscillations and “what if’s,” and make a path that is steady absent the noise of indecision, life would be simpler for you.

M: Spouses can make “really good” petty tyrants to use as a base example for loosing the human form…(so can teenagers).Those with “control issues” are locked in the human form as much as those with submissive issues.

M: Sounds like the “control issue” monster. That monster does not need any form of logic because it attempts to control anything for any excuse at any time. The seeming irrationality could be a closely related component of the “control” tyrant/monster. Because “male logic” usually requires a sequential process and order from which logic and reference are derived, the “controlling entity” often knows this and uses reflexively irrationality of argument to destabilize the order of logic with the result that more control is gained.

M: It would take a major change, a paradigm shift as it were, however if you could deal with her as a petty tyrant and learn to love unconditionally, she would be a very useful prototype to process loosing the human form.

M: If your relationship with her were to remain as volatile as you have reported, it’s wondered if it would be good for the children. The role and actions of all parents are imprints (positive or negative) that eventually have to be recapitulated by the children as adults. Look at the style and sequence of intensity with your son and determine if it is not similar to what was going on with your wife.

M: As for the idea that impeccable entices the spirit to descend, remember that the energetic form required does not literally descend to you. Rather, one can summon the energy by: being wholly open to the impact and the knowledge; and, facilitating this by projection unconditional love “toward” the universe; this, basically informing the energy that ‘one is ready’. In my own experiences, it was questionable if it came to me or if I projected into it, and merged as one with it, although the more profound experiences this was the situation in the third attention. After a time, and after full engagement, a partnership of sorts forms.

———– R: I hate whining, Michael, so when I’m in a whiny mood I don’t like to be around anyone.

M: Then look at “why” you might whine and determine that you’re not going to do it – within yourself! If you whine internally, it’s still a dependency and at that point it doesn’t matter if you whine externally or not.

R: I’m going between concentrating on human form dependencies as a way to still my mind and feeling sorry for myself about the fact that I have nothing I’m driven to do.

M: Ah, being “driven” to do something is an artifact of what society has been telling humans forever: DO SOMETHING!; BE SOMETHING! Usually the “something” is “something” that society finds acceptable and that IT can use for itself! If you can find the motivation to evolve yourself, personally, internally, then you are evolving.

R: Rush Limbaugh said today that, “what makes people successful is not discipline but desire”; that is, that discipline follows desire.

M: DJM/CC often pointed out to the discipline required to be successful in evolving. A university did a study many long years ago to learn why we have people with PhD’s working at menial jobs, and high school dropouts (like Lawrence Welk and Del Webb of Del Webb Construction) who became very economically successful. The answer was only “motivation,” and that is probably true of any human endeavour.

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B: Hello all. It seems, that at first when we start out on the path, in a way, we retreat from the world, because we know that it does not matter as much. But while we were in the world, because we thought it mattered, our acts, were hasty, they were reactionary, because everything that happened was important and a threat. Then after we have retreated, after we have started to learn, we find out that things are not important at all, all that is important is the knowledge of our death. At this point, or soon there after, we start to move back into the world. However then, because we realize that nothing really matters, then we have a clarity we did not have before, then when something happens, when we have a choice to make, we can sit back for a moment, and we can act, and we will be far more efficient ia a world that does not matter ( the world of men) than we did in a world where everything mattered. Bob

M: Bob, just a clarification to be careful in using the “nothing” part of “what matters.” In the context that you intend, it’s obvious that the trivia of the human form and societal events that plague most of humanity do not matter because they are comprised of “just noise,” however much in terms of personal evolution and the factors that drive it, do matter intensely. Although what you have written below is well stated, this piece is only intended to highlight that this little detail in phrasing could be misinterpreted by others not familiar with the context.

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Note: as a prelude to the following section I would like to use this quote from Michael which for me, sums up the whole of the exchange:

There are many intervals “on the way” where activities and approaches tend to overlap. Although it is always preferential to work in processes that occur in efficiency, sometimes “efficiency” moves to shake a candidate and his/her processes in ways that might be disorienting, “but” ultimately when the test or experience is over, it is recognized that it was necessary to cause one to move off the center of the moment.

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M: I have listened to Rush on many occasions, and in general have the same societal and political concepts in mind – all Ayn Rand, at their basis. Rush, though, has been known to become really distorted in his rebuffs, and your example reminds me of a distortion that he ranted on about a few years ago. In one of the best technical journals, “Science,” there was a research study about a person who survived a large metal shaft penetrating his brain: but it warped his personality and a soft person, because of the accident and the brain damage, became a violent person. The piece in “Science” journal was simply a study of how the intrusion of the metal shaft interacted with regions of the brain and caused the tragedy. Rush responded to this piece, a simple explanation of “what went wrong” in various places in the brain, in the same “reflex” that you did – inaccurately and incorrectly – a “Rush rant” that this was yet another attempt to “justify” behaviour where it was not. Any study that has reasonable technical base in human mechanical (as in damage) cause-and-effects and the impact of chemical alterations, are only explanatory in nature, not “justifications.”

M: Rush could not have been more incorrect in his approach to that piece, and having read the original piece in “Science” versus what he said, Rush was a gross distortion. There have been many such pieces in various technical journals over the years that the media takes out of context, the public takes the media reports as what the “real” research said, then “blames science” for either not correctly stating “the truth” or misleading the public – when it was really the media “version” of the research that caused the distortion.

R: As for sex drive reaching a level where it would be called an addiction (Re: reports on Clinton) or as a drug related thing. Calling it that way sounds to me like exactly the kind of excuse making that we are getting more and more of in this society, so that, it’s no longer the “poor” rapist’s fault, no, “it was the drug dependency, poor guy, let’s get treatment for him and give him a big pat on the back.” To which I say, Wrong!

M: Not at all, any more than we allow the felony drunk driver to go unscathed. It’s not an excuse, only a process.

R: That’s why we have laws against natural impulses used in a way that doesn’t work for the benefit of society. That’s why rapist get thirty years in jail instead of two hours of community service. Wouldn’t that be lovely, if we just gave rapist two hours of community service and maybe some drug addiction counseling.

M: Yes. Agreed. Your focus of response is interesting.

R: I imagine that the whole country could keep going to hell morals wise, and that the country could even fail and we lose our freedom, and even with all of that, the way of knowledge remains intact. But I like being on the side that stands for the principles that this country was founded on and your informing me that “sex addiction is a chemical addiction” set me off.