Carol Tiggs first meeting with don Juan: 3 versions

Carol Tiggs, back row far left, with her August 2015 certification class as a Sound Yoga instructor

David Worrell noted and summarized in 2020 for Sustained Reaction these three very different versions of the story of Carol Tiggs supposed first meeting with don Juan.

In reverse chronological order, the first is from from Carol’s first public appearance in 17 years, at the September 2015 Cleargreen Tensegrity workshop in Sochi, Russia; the second from Carol (undoubtedly scripted by Castaneda) at the 1995 Longmont, Colorado, workshop; and the third from Carlos Castaneda in The Eagle’s Gift (1981). None of them could possibly be true given where she actually was and what she was actually doing during the time periods these stories allegedly took place (see Carol Tiggs Chronology). The most recent version, at the September 2015 Sochi event, was clearly invented to justify her passing off as an ancient sorcery technique a “straw phonation” practice she had just been trained in as part of her certification as a Heather Lyle Vocal Yoga instructor (a certification she received on August 15, 2015).

by David Worrell

The First Meeting Of Carol Tiggs and Don Juan – Three Different Stories

Sep 01, 2020

I want to make sure we preserve the three different stories of how Carol Tiggs met don Juan all in one post.

There is a text account of Carol’s appearance at the 2015 Sochi workshop here on the “Trapped In The Tremendous” site:
https://atrapadoenlotremendo.blogspot.com
https://atrapadoenlotremendo.blogspot.c … acion.html

So in Sochi, the latest story Tiggs has told of how she first met don Juan goes like this…

***

“Carol recounted her first meeting with Don Juan Matus in Mexico City, visiting the art museum, and was attracted by a painting with the representation of a caterpillar metamorphosed into a butterfly.

An older gentleman appeared behind her and asked Carol what she thought of the painting. She was an art student, and she began to repeat what she had learned in textbooks. The old man seemed interested in her every word, and she felt like the smartest person in the world. The conversation progressed and she asked her admirer if the painting was about life and death? The old man was absorbed in himself, half-closed his eyes, seemed contemplative, rocked on his feet from front to back, muttered something unintelligible, smacked his lips, opened his eyes again, and asked her: “Excuse me … what was the question?”  She thought the old man was endearing and posed no threat.  She repeated the question, and he was interested in it, and suggested that since he was tired, perhaps in a nearby cafe, sitting down, they could continue the conversation. 

He begged her a couple more times and they went. They ordered two colas and discussed how Carol had come to Mexico, and Carol provided much of her personal story. 

Carol noticed that Juan Matus knew something else about life and death from the caterpillar painting. 

Don Juan Matus took the straw from the drink to his lips, placed his thumbs over his ears, and then the fingers of both hands above and below his eyes, to finish blowing the straw, making a buzz. He told Carol she should do the same until she feels the vibration throughout her body.  Once that act was over, Juan Matus asked Carol: “Tell me how you feel about that painting now.” Carol was speechless and all the knowledge learned from the books that she had displayed moments before was of no use to her, she only felt vibrations. She looked at Don Juan, whose eyes were brighter than ever. They burst out laughing, and Don Juan Matus told her “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

In Sochi, Carol taught the straw technique to the room, the first energetic body technique that she learned from Don Juan Matus.”

***

Now let’s go back in time 20 years further to a 1995 workshop held in Longmont, Colorado.  There, Carol Tiggs told a completely different story to workshop attendees of how she met don Juan Matus.

From the Sustained Action website:
Carol Tiggs Chronology

Carol recounted her first encounter with Castaneda and don Juan, when she was 19. She said she had been in Mexico City studying art history. She described herself as a spoiled girl who spoke with a pronounced lisp she thought made her adorable. One night, when walking alone in Alameda Park, she noticed an old man and a young, short, stocky man both staring at her from a short distance away. They looked like “coarse Mexicans” to her. She started to walk fast in order to distance herself from them, but they kept approaching. The young man came up close to her and she heard the old man say, “Don’t let her get away. Grab her by the leg if you can.” The young man was at a loss as to what to do. He said, “Are you an American? What’s your name? How old are you? Do you have a boyfriend?” Carol was truly panicking at this point and threatening to scream for the police, when the old man let out a tremendous belch. She found herself frozen to the spot and announced, “My name is Carol Tiggs. I’m 19 years old and I don’t have a boyfriend.” The young man (Carlos) “was revolted by my lisp,” she said. She told them where she was staying and they visited her while she was in Mexico. By the time she returned home, “a fog had closed in around the memory of those two men.”  Upon her return, she told her parents about her vague half memories of being accosted by two Mexicans and her inability to remember what happened after that. Her parents thought she had been drugged and molested. They sent her to a psychiatrist. She proceeded with her life as an art history student in college. 

***

But wait, there’s more.  Now we go 14 more years into the past, and from Carlos Castaneda’s 1981 book The Eagle’s Gift once again read the story of how Carol Tiggs first met don Juan.  Those passages have already been copied to this site from The Eagle’s Gift, by Senor Wenceslao: 

viewtopic.php?p=160964#p160964

But I am going to copy those passages again, so that all of the three different stories are right here in this one post.  Carlos wrote:

“Almost immediately after finding me, don Juan encountered a double woman.”

“He told me that one day when he was living in Arizona, he had gone to a government office to fill out an application. The lady at the desk told him to take it to an employee in the adjacent section, and without looking she pointed to her left.

Don Juan followed the direction of her outstretched arm and saw a double woman sitting at a desk. When he took his application to her he realized that she was just a young girl. She told him that she had nothing to do with applications. Nevertheless, out of sympathy for a poor old Indian, she took the time to help him process it.

Some legal documents were needed, documents which don Juan had in his pocket, but he pretended total ignorance and helplessness. He made it seem that the bureaucratic organization was an enigma to him. It was not difficult at all to portray total mindlessness, don Juan said. All he had to do was revert to what had once been his normal state of awareness.

It was to his purpose to prolong his interaction with the girl for as long as he could. His mentor had told him, and he himself had verified it in his search, that double women are quite rare. His mentor had also warned him that they have inner resources that make them highly volatile. Don Juan was afraid that if he did not play his cards expertly she would leave.

He played on her sympathy to gain time. He created further delay by pretending that the legal documents were lost. Nearly every day he would bring in a different one to her. She would read it and regretfully tell him that it was not the right one. The girl was so moved by his sorry condition that she even volunteered to pay for a lawyer to draw him up an affidavit in lieu of the papers.

After three months of this, don Juan thought it was time to produce the documents. By then she had gotten used to him and almost expected to see him every day. Don Juan came one last time to express his thanks and say goodbye. He told her that he would have liked to bring her a gift to show his appreciation, but he did not have money even to eat.

She was moved by his candor and took him to lunch. As they were eating he mused that a gift does not necessarily have to be an object that one buys. It could be something that is only for the eyes of the beholder. Something to remember rather than to possess.

She was intrigued by his words. Don Juan reminded her that she had expressed compassion for the Indians and their condition as paupers. He asked her if she would like to see the Indians in a different light- not as paupers but as artists. He told her that he knew an old man who was the last of his line of power dancers. He assured her that the man would dance for her at his request; and furthermore, he promised her that never in her life had she seen anything like it, nor would she ever again. It was something that only Indians witnessed.

She was delighted at the idea. She picked him up after her work, and they headed for the hills where he told her the Indian lived. Don Juan took her to his own house. He made her stop the car quite a distance away, and they began to walk the rest of the way. Before they reached the house he stopped and drew a line with his foot in the sandy, dried dirt. He told her that the line was a boundary and coaxed her to step across.

The Nagual woman herself told me that up to that point she had been very intrigued with the possibility of witnessing a genuine Indian dancer, but when the old Indian drew a line on the dirt and called it a boundary, she began to hesitate. Then she became outright alarmed when he told her that the boundary was for her alone, and that once she stepped over it there was no way of returning.

The Indian apparently saw her consternation and tried to put her at ease. He politely patted her on the arm and gave her his guarantee that no harm would come to her while he was around. The boundary could be explained, he told her, as a form of symbolic payment to the dancer because he did not want money. Ritual was in lieu of money, and ritual required that she step over the boundary of her own accord.

The old Indian gleefully stepped over the line and told her that to him all of it was sheer Indian nonsense, but that the dancer, who was watching them from inside the house, had to be humored if she wanted to see him dance.

The Nagual woman said that she suddenly became so afraid that she could not move to cross the line. The old Indian made an effort to persuade her, saying that stepping over that boundary was beneficial to the entire body. Crossing it had not only made him feel younger, it had actually made him younger, such power did that boundary have. To demonstrate his point, he crossed back again and immediately his shoulders slouched, the corners of his mouth drooped, his eyes lost their shine. The Nagual woman could not deny the differences the crossings had made.

Don Juan recrossed the line a third time. He breathed deeply, expanding his chest, his movements brisk and bold. The Nagual woman said that the thought crossed her mind that he might even make sexual advances. Her car was too far away to make a run for it. The only thing she could do was to tell herself that it was stupid to fear that old Indian.

Then the old man made another appeal to her reason and to her sense of humor. In a conspiratorial tone, as if he were revealing a secret with some reluctance, he told her that he was just pretending to be young to please the dancer, and that if she did not help him by crossing the line, he was going to faint at any moment from the stress of walking without slouching. He walked back and forth across the line to show her the immense strain involved in his pantomime.

The Nagual woman said that his pleading eyes revealed the pain his old body was going through to mimic youth. She crossed the line to help him, and be done with it. She wanted to go home.

The moment she crossed the line, don Juan took a prodigious jump and glided over the roof of the house. The Nagual woman said that he flew like a huge boomerang. When he landed next to her she fell on her back. Her fright was beyond anything she had ever experienced, but so was her excitement at having witnessed such a marvel. She did not even ask how he had accomplished such a magnificent feat. She wanted to run back to her car and head for home.

The old man helped her up and apologized for having tricked her. In fact, he said, he himself was the dancer and his flight over the house had been his dance. He asked her if she had paid attention to the direction of his flight. The Nagual woman circled her hand counterclockwise.

He patted her head paternally and told her that it was very auspicious that she had been attentive. Then he said that she may have injured her back in her fall, and that he could not just let her go without making sure she was all right. Boldly, he straightened her shoulders, and lifted her chin and the back of her head, as if he were directing her to extend her spine. He then gave her a sound smack between her shoulder blades, literally knocking all the air out of her lungs. For a moment she was unable to breathe and she fainted.

When she regained consciousness, she was inside his house. Her nose was bleeding, her ears were buzzing, her breathing was accelerated, and she could not focus her eyes. He instructed her to take deep breaths to a count of eight. The more she breathed, the clearer everything became. At one point, she told me, the whole room became incandescent. Everything glowed with an amber light.

She became stupefied and could not breathe deeply any more. The amber light by then was so thick it resembled fog. Then the fog turned into amber cobwebs. It finally dissipated, but the world remained uniformly amber for a while longer.

Don Juan began to talk to her then. He took her outside the house and showed her that the world was divided into two halves. The left side was clear but the right side was veiled in amber fog. He told her that it is monstrous to think that the world is understandable or that we ourselves are understandable. He said that what she was perceiving was an enigma; a mystery that one could only accept in humbleness and awe.

He then revealed the rule to her. Her clarity of mind was so intense that she understood everything he said. The rule seemed to her appropriate and self-evident.

He explained to her that the two sides of a human being are totally separate and that it takes great discipline and determination to break that seal and go from one side to the other. A double being has a great advantage. The condition of being double permits relatively easy movement between the compartments on the right side. The great disadvantage of double beings is that by virtue of having two compartments they are sedentary, conservative, afraid of change.

Don Juan said to her that his intention had been to make her shift from her extreme right compartment to her more lucid, sharper left-right side; but instead, through some inexplicable quirk, his blow had sent her all across her doubleness, from her everyday extreme-right side to her extreme-left side.

He tried four times to make her revert back to a normal state of awareness, but to no avail. His blows helped her, however, to turn her perception of the wall of fog on and off at will. Although he had not intended it, don Juan had been right in saying that the line was a one-way boundary for her. Once she crossed it, just like Silvio Manuel, she never returned.”

Isn’t it amazing how Carol Tiggs met don Juan in three completely different ways?

Another amazing thing has been written above, if you would care to take notice.  According to Carlos, soon after Carol first interacted with don Juan, Carol Tiggs “never returned” to “a normal state of awareness.”  Can you imagine that?  Carol never returned.

So then… when exactly did this meeting happen, again?  In both the Sochi and Longmont stories, Carol is a 19-year-old art student visiting Mexico City. Since Carol was born in November 1947, that places these two stories in 1966 or or 1967. But in the story Carlos told in The Eagle’s Gift, Carol met don Juan in a government office in Arizona, and after three months of playing paper chase one day followed don Juan a short distance to his house.  According to Carlos, don Juan only lived in Arizona a short while, back when Carlos first met him. Carlos also wrote that don Juan found Carol  “almost immediately after finding me…”.  Oh?  Well, don Juan found Carlos in the summer of 1960, so this third story from The Eagle’s Gift is happening in 1960 or 1961.

That’s very odd, isn’t it?  Carol first met don Juan in 1960 or 1961 in Arizona at age 13.  But Carol also first met don Juan in 1966 or 1967 in Mexico City at age 19.  

I know!  Carol must have been a powerful sorceress even before she ever met don Juan, because not only can she be in two places at once, she can also exist in two TIMES at once!

Wowser Mowser!  The Nagual Woman is indeed incredible.