Table of contents
21st Sunday Session- April 28, 1996
Comments on 2nd Oakland Workshop
“What a seminar, huh? [The second Oakland workshop.] The women were all powerful, although Florinda had the toughest crowd. The people in the Bay Area all imagine themselves to be gurus, or ‘healers.’ They’re following one spiritual path or another. So they bring a heaviness with them, which made the first night difficult. Their focus and heaviness managed even to flip you that first night. But then Kylie put you through seven hours of movement, and the body really knows. Getting the body moving, shaking it up, changed things. Then Nyei with her wild shaking pass. By the end, you flipped them. By the end of this session Castaneda lectured on what it feels like when silence is descending.
“It was the most incredible seminar. I could see what was happening. I was lying in bed looking at the energy, getting all excited.
“It wasn’t just me flapping my gums. I’ve been flapping my gums for years. Clever people take my lexicon and, without doing anything themselves, they take it and use it. One of them is Randy, a sweet guy who has been teaching his own version of Tensegrity. He is the one who asked Florinda how men can verify their energy [as women can do with “the wind”]. She told him to ‘pull out his dick and stick it in the wind.’
Thoughts on Jesus
This is the same guy who asked me to say something about ‘our Lord Jesus Christ.’ This guy wanted to make some kind of amalgam of hallucinogens and fundamentalist Christianity.” Castaneda mimicked someone on drugs asking, “Have you been saved? Have you been saved?”
“What can I say? ‘He’s happy up there [meaning Jesus, on the cross], leave him alone.’ But the guy wanted me to say that ‘Jesus was the most superb shaman.’ I can’t say that. Which Christ? Not the one in the painting by Leonardo. That’s North European man with an elegant profile and these beatific eyes, looking pitiful. Leonardo couldn’t paint a Jew, he had to paint someone of his time. If I said what I think about Jesus, they’d put me in jail.
“Don Juan asked why Jesus allowed himself to be led up the hill? Couldn’t he have taken out a few Romans if he’d hit them with his cross? Did I tell you about the ‘portable cross.'” He had someone ask him how he was. Castaneda’s arms swung out, in crucifixion position, and Castaneda responded ponderously, “Well, I’m not too well really. I’m not feeling good here,” he pointed to his stomach. “I have all these problems.” He also jokingly “hit” people with the end of his imaginary cross.
We’re So Needy
“We think we need sugar, chocolate, ice cream. We need love.” He sang what sounded like a ’50s song about love, and added “boom, boom, boom.” “We’re so needy. I knew this man who took pictures of himself and his daughter having ice cream all over the world. [Ellis and her father, Irving Wallace.] They’re there in Egypt, Iceland, Greenland. They even had ice cream in Beijing. They wrote on the picture, ‘Weird ice cream.’ I don’t know what it was made out of. [Probably red beans.]
Kids Reading with their Toes
“I knew some eight-year-old kids [one of them was a boy named “Paco”] who were taught by a woman named Esperanza to read with their toes. Even with shoes on, they could read with their toes. They got a grant from Penn State or some university to study them. By age twelve, however, they lost this ability.
Carola, the 10-year-old Phenom
“Carola doesn’t yet have the Flyer’s mind attached. The Flyer’s mind is like an octopus. With a dry surface it attaches firmly, and can’t be removed. But we’re letting a little moisture in there, so there’s a little slippage. Carola asks me, ‘How many tentacles do I have loose now?’ ‘Three.’ She says, ‘Well, if I work really hard maybe I can get another one loose.’
“She doesn’t ask for anything. She doesn’t complain, she doesn’t whine. She doesn’t ask for ice cream or chocolate or dolls. She was abandoned as a small child and tells me she knows about loneliness. She says she has enemies, but that’s not my concern–she’ll take care of them.
“Carola looks Chinese, she speaks Chinese, she knows more Chinese than you can imagine. She’s intending Chinese. She also tells me she intends for nothing to happen to her. I tell her she needs to let it out, and that she can tell me, since one can’t keep this stuff in. But she tells me, ‘You said intent is stronger than anything, didn’t you?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, I’m intending that nothing happens to me.’ So she’s got me by my own words.
“Carola doesn’t need a psychiatrist either. I met a guy once who thought he was abused. He was ‘queer,’ he was tending toward being gay, and his father grabbed his cock and shook it and yelled, ‘This is for fucking women!’ So the guy claimed that he’d been abused. So we go to a psychiatrist and pay $100,000 to be told we’re okay, that we know how to do things.
Watch the Witches
“Watch the witches, they’re very practical. They grab for lines of energy. Taisha’s the most obvious about it. It’s embarrassing going to the store with her. She’ll forget to fill in her telephone number on a form, and they’ll point it out to her. She’ll acknowledge the question.” He imitated her with a hesitant voice asking, “My phone number?” “Then she’ll reach up in the air and grab and bring her hand down, look in it and give them her number. Don Juan was extremely precise in passing on his 27 generations of sorcerers’ knowledge to the three witches.
“Watch Carola too, because she doesn’t have the Flyer’s mind. The Blue Scout also is very weird, but she’s too strange to get anything from. She will fly into an anxiety fit instantly. And she can take me or pull me anywhere, because she’s so strong. But her humanness is paper thin.”
Changing the Order of the Movements Just Taught
He changed the order of the movements from Oakland II: he moved the fifth to fourth place; he took out Grabbing Energy in a Circle, explaining that it needed “major revision”; he moved Fusing the Left and Right Sides to ninth; and added a new one, which started with the hands pointing straight up above the head, then sweeping the arms down to the left and making a small sweeping motion five times near floor level with the hands while exhaling. Then we inhaled “from the floor,” and held the breath while swinging the arms around to the right side and exhaling as we made five more small sweeping motions with the palms down near floor level. Then we breathed up again from the floor and again raised the arms above the head, and then brought the palms down, as in the way we ended the passes at Oakland I. He also gave us new warm-ups.
On the last few of the Oakland passes, like when breathing from the position of having the two fingers of each hand just below the ankle knobs, it was a shallow breath, that came from just the top of the lungs. “This is a very important breath for sorcerers.” He emphasized that, for the next month, we were only to do these passes.
The Decision Point
“The decision point is at the base of the neck. Twisting to the side helps activate it. We worry about a decision we made back in 1975, like we haven’t made a decision since. Or some mistake we made last year. Who remembers? We can’t make decisions. So this point is important.
Merilyn Tunneshende
“Merilyn Tunneshende claimed on the ‘Net that she has AIDS. That’s terrible. She’s so fixated, there is nothing I can do to help her. She writes letters, and faxes them, all the time. But what can I say to her? The beam she has is so fixated, there’s nothing I can do.
Changing Grooves
“In changing grooves, you can jump into a younger version of yourself, or an earlier time. So even with a genetic health problem, it won’t show up until much later if you’ve jumped to an earlier time. Like in my case, with my glucose problem, by jumping back to 1975, I won’t have the problem again for 20 years.
Taisha World
“Taisha says there is a peel of the onion that is very close to us. They know her there and are very happy to see her. She arrives like some deity. But they’re really fixated there. If she could bring a couple of them here, she would, but they’re just so fixated. She calls them ‘Islamic,’ like Palestinian terrorists who think nothing of their own lives when on a suicide bomb mission, because they are so convinced that it will lead them to heaven. They have too little genetic diversity. It’s like a being dropping in before us right there. Taisha arrives and they’re all excited to see her.
“Taisha thought Nixon was still in office, she didn’t know he died. She also thought that Alexander Haig was elected president. That’s the kind of thing she gets out of this other world.
“Some of you might like a world that was so close. Ralph might be ‘St. Ralph’ there. I would prefer to go further down the street. I don’t want to be that close.
“I was talking to Taisha about how I imagined the Nagual Julian, who left in ’34. Taisha told me there was a picture of the Nagual Julian in this other world–a hand-drawn picture, very detailed. I went to Florinda and told her, ‘Taisha thinks there’s a picture of Nagual Julian in this other world,’ and Florinda said, ‘Yeah, there is.’ I’ve now seen it too.
Dreaming with Carol Tiggs
“Carol is not fully here, there’s only a percentage of her.
“Carol and I went to this other world together. I perceived us as arriving there in a car and that there were a lot of people and houses. But she knows better. She says that we were in a pod in a swamp, which made it feel very dense, and that the houses were other pods.
Racist German Doctor Story
“I once had this infection by my coccyx. I went to this homeopathic doctor in New Mexico, ‘the Grupenführer.’ He had been in the Gestapo, and was a doctor. They had shot him in the back of the legs; one bullet through both legs. He was a big, tall guy. He told me that my problem was too much sex. ‘You’re licentious, it’s your race.’ The guy was a real racist. I said, ‘No, I’m celibate.'” Castaneda mimicked the doctor responding suspiciously, “‘How did you learn that word?'” He said he would cure me, but first I had to admit that I was licentious. So I said ‘Yes, I have sex three times a day. I’m licentious! You got me.’
“I used to sit and listen to the guy for hours. One day I stayed there till 7 AM. I was his one big fan. I’d sit and listen to him tell stories about Germany. He claimed there was a Persian who had come to Germany in 1915 and taught him and Hitler and others ‘the 12 breaths of the Mazadan.’ With that technique, Hitler was able to read people’s minds. Then he was able to seduce a bunch of the elite of Germany, by reading their minds. The Grupenführer flew over, shining a flashlight on the ones they wanted to select. He claimed, ‘Hitler could have won, but Hitler was such a fool!’
“He had this major who was his adjutant, who had been with him all these years. The man would sit and play the piano very dramatically. Very German. But one day, the doctor did the 12 breaths and that made him see something in me that caused him to throw me out, yelling ‘Raus! Raus!’ I protested, ‘I’m your only fan, you can’t get rid of me. I listen to you till 7 in the morning,’ but he wouldn’t listen.
“I learned a lot from him, but he wasn’t the guy who cured me. Ultimately Florinda and I fell on our backs from a height of five or six feet, and that squeezed out the infection, so it oozed out, and that was the end of it. To get to that point, though, I had collected information for It, which then took care of the problem.
Yogi Bhajan Story
“I also met a Sikh doctor, who took me to see this great man he was raving about, who turned out to be Yogi Bhajan. I had known the guy twenty years earlier at Esalen, but now he had great powers. He came into the room and let out a big fart. He then talked about how wonderful it is to fart, because it would be so horrible to hold this stuff inside. Then he proceeded to give a whole lecture about the fart. The Sikh doctor asked me, ‘Isn’t it wonderful, incredible, how he uses everything?’ I really couldn’t answer him. Yogi Bhajan was like this Third World petty tyrant. He would tell a woman to marry some man, and order people what to do with their lives, who to marry.
His Current Doctor
“The doctor who found my glucose problem figures that I must be taking something: ‘You must be drinking a special bark, or something’ to have brought down my levels so dramatically. He [Castaneda often switched pronouns when he was trying to hide identities–he was referring to Angelica Duenas] insists that I tell him: ‘Why don’t you tell us what it is. A lot of people could benefit from it. You should share it with other people.’ I tried to tell him about jumping grooves, but he didn’t want to hear about that. So finally I admitted, ‘Yes, yes, I’m taking something.’
Crack of Energy in Florinda’s Bedroom
“Florinda has this big bed in the corner of her bedroom. She has this big bed because she reads all the time. She doesn’t remember anything she reads, but she reads all the time. There’s a crack by the bed, a crack of energy that can take you directly into the Second Attention. On the other side of it is the kitchen. She brings people into her bedroom, but because they don’t have the internal silence they can’t see it.
An Usher
“It’s going to take an usher. A single person will find silence, and the rest will follow, just like Merilyn Tunneshende with her heavy fixation brought down the energy of the whole group” [at the second October workshop]. “Her heaviness, her ‘me, me, me’ fixation infected the room. It’s going to take an usher to take you to silence. Silence is the door.
“In leaving the cage, don’t try to take your mementos with you. Leave everything in the cage. Dolls, toys. Leave it all behind. Go naked. We’ll find something out there. We’ll find a towel,” he joked.
When Silence Descends
“When the silence is descending, we feel an itchiness or antsiness, and a great anxiety or anguish, which is created by the feeling of the Flyer’s mind lifting off of us. Then you can enter silence. Don’t believe it, just do it. You have to give it your whole body, because what else do we have?
“You heard about the six-year-old boy who beat this other little boy to death? Where do we get this? The boy saw his father beating on his mother or something like that. This is learned behavior.
“I have this cough, and have to make an obscene gesture [arms horizontal, elbows pumping back, as is sometimes used to simulate fucking] to get rid of it. I wonder what trick Spirit is playing on me.
Cat Being Pissed on by a Skunk
“The worse thing I ever saw was this cat being pissed by a skunk. The cat didn’t know what to do. I don’t even like cats, but this cat looked so woeful and helpless,” he imitated it’s crestfallen look, “I couldn’t just leave it there. It looked so pitiful. You have to use vinegar to remove the skunk’s scent.” Ellis corrected him by saying “tomato juice.” Castaneda questioned that for a moment, then said, “Vinegar and tomato juice, fifty/fifty.”
“Ellis was pissed by a skunk too.” Ellis started to explain that she had had cats, but suggested that they needn’t go into that story.
“To use the mass of everybody doing these movements takes real delicacy. Piano, piano.
“We’ll be back next week, and we’ll go into these movements in more detail, and maybe get to some conclusion.” Ellis said she needed to call us, since we were to meet at another place.
[From Cleargreen, Kylie, Talia, Ellis, Grant, Bruce and Heiko (later Gavin) were on hand. Castaneda sported a new haircut.]
©️ 2024 by Richard Jennings, all rights reserved
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