Table of contents
Friday, March 28, 1997
Dance Home, Santa Monica 8 – 9 PM
Comments on Heaven’s Gate Suicides
Bruce greeted us with the Star Trek “V” salute, saying “Hale-Bopp” as we arrived.
Castaneda started with a breath with square fists raised in front of the body at either side about shoulder level, then bringing them in so that the knuckles were facing out in front of the body, arms close together, for the inhale. Then exhaling out as you bring them out to the sides and look upward.
“I heard that several of the Heaven’s Gate group had had themselves castrated some months before they ‘left.’ What is this? You need your balls to be able to journey. They were waiting for a spaceship to pick them up and take them to heaven. There is no heaven. Infinity is a constant battle, a struggle. There is no heaven where they’re going to be taken care of, where everything is going to be made nice. This is the Flyers talking.”
Taisha mentioned that they had had quarters and five dollar bills packed near them. Kylie excitedly added that the brother of the actress who played Lt. Uhura on Star Trek was one of them. Castaneda said the same issue of the Los Angeles Times that had so many articles about the cult “had on the cover a big picture of rituals for Easter in which people are acting out the crucifixion of Christ.” Carol pointed out that it was on the cover of the “Life and Style” section. “The newspaper didn’t seem to see any inconsistency in condemning the cultish behavior of this little group and celebrating this accepted cult and its rituals.
“The leader had been in a mental institution. We love that. So they cut off their balls so they didn’t have to think about sex. To be pure. You need your balls. Don’t cut off your balls.
“It’s some weird mixture of awareness and technology, that they think awareness requires this advanced technology of the aliens. This idea that their pure souls, what was left from their bodies, was going to be ‘collected by the mothership’ reminds me of China, when they used to have someone come around each morning collecting the shit. ‘Any shit today?’ People would be paid for their shit, because they’d use it for fertilizer. Here they have the idea that the spacecraft is coming down to collect our shitty souls.
Humans’ Clinging to Idealities
“It’s like the way they killed monkeys where I grew up. They’d build these cement holes and put nuts in them. The holes were just big enough for the monkeys to put their hands in, but not big enough to pull their fists out. I saw it: the next morning you find these monkeys with their hands bloodied. Sometimes they manage to break their fists and pull them out, but they can’t let go of the nuts. We’re like that. We’re not willing to let go of this little thing we see–these little idealities. We grab and hold on and they take us to our deaths, just like the monkeys.
“Travis has changed a lot. He can’t be Memmo. They’ve got Memmo by the balls, his parents and his family and everybody. Memmo works for them all.” Nury piped up, “And now he works for us!”
Eliminating the Distraction of Family
“You’d be happy if your family wasn’t in your life. That would make it easy. So pretend they’re not. If they call you, don’t answer. If they send you a letter, don’t respond. That’s hard for us to do. We’re just trained–what a horrible thing not to respond to a letter. But it’s . . . it’s wonderful, to get a letter and not even read it. Just look and see if there’s a check in it, and throw the rest away. So if you get a letter from your parents, just don’t read it.
“He [Travis] found the sacred lake where the Dalai Lama goes to meditate that the other one [meaning Tony Karam] couldn’t get to. But Travis had no problem. And they don’t like him because he’s not even spiritual. I’m sending him a load of energy. He’s become Travis McGee.
Memmo–I don’t give a shit about Memmo. Memmo’s not going anywhere. But Travis McGee is a big question mark.” He gestured behind himself and said, “We’re not a group. There are weird genetic connections,” then gestured to Nury, “That one. It’s not that I own her. It’s not like your parents who think that they own you. Like Lorenzo’s father Morton, who hasn’t seen him in 30 years but calls when he realizes he’s getting close to dying. Then the great scene the following day when he calls to tell Lorenzo to get some things and to tell him to charge him for them, and he keeps calling him ‘Joshua,’ which is the name of his son by another marriage.”
“Lorenzo had asked me if he should get together with his dad, and I told him, ‘Sure. He’s not your father anymore. You’ve changed. You can be with him and be completely unaffected.’
The Blue Scout
“It’s because the Blue Scout is a horrendous being, because she moves so fast. It’s not just because of the genetic connection. If that’s all there was, go fuck yourself. I don’t care about that. It’s the fact that she’s such a fighter and moves so fast. That’s what has me delighted, and gives me no end of pleasure.
Mexican Curios
“Travis found some Mexican curios, made of orange peels, that spell out ‘Tensegrity.’ They look like something that belong on a Mexican shrine, for the Virgin of Guadalupe. Hey, we should sell a Virgin of Guadalupe that says ‘Tensegrity’ on it! The Germans would love it. They’d buy them. And since French won’t be allowed to the workshop, we’ll have Germans and Dutch. They’ll buy all these little trinkets.” Zaia said she would buy one. Someone wanted to see it, so Talia said they’d bring it in the next day. Nury suggested he find some cheap shoes they could sell, and that they call them “Travis T’s.” Castaneda joked they could be pointy on top, to keep off the Flyers, and someone suggested “steel pointed tips.”
Joke About Selling Indulgences
“As Pope Carlos the first, I should sell indulgences. Wouldn’t you like to buy an indulgence,” he spoke toward Nury and Zaia. “For an indulgence, you could eat anything. Anything!” Lorenzo piped up, “Indulgences for indulgence, huh?”
“Memmo is this fat creature, and Travis isn’t. But there’s still this fat other creature.”
“Nyei, when we’re on the phone, has this computer that starts quacking.” Fabricio started laughing, guiltily, since he must have been the one who selected quacks as the error signal. “But she’s really malicious. I’ll ask her, ‘Nyei, is that you?’ and I’ll hear her quack too, but she does it in a lower voice, it’s not the nice, pleasant quack of the computer. It’s the voice of ‘Frank.'”
For about 10 minutes we were practicing on our own and chatting. I talked to Greg and Keith, and then chatted with Carol, because Castaneda was talking with Nury, after he gave her a kiss.
Movement Instruction
In the last 15 minutes, he had us practicing the long form, which had had some modifications since we saw him do it two weeks earlier. I couldn’t do the jumping parts of it very well.
Inviting Us to Go with Him
“I’m going that way, and I’m not asking you to follow, but how great it would be if you could go there too. But it requires remaking yourselves.”
[All of Cleargreen, including Travis from Mexico, with the exception of Florinda, Barbara (the Moon Child) and Karina, were on hand, along with 13 of us from the Sunday class: Daniel, Larry, Paul, Greg, Marcos, Thorton, Virginia, Nina, Darby, Keith, Pablo, Kathleen Seligman and me.]
Saturday, March 29, 1997
Dance Home, Santa Monica 6:15 – 8:15 PM
Movement Instruction
We started with shoulder rolls forward and backward, with our hands clenched in fists. Then we did the breathing with the fists, expanding the lungs while bringing the fists together in front, then looking up to the heavens as you exhale and bring the fists out to the sides.
Barred from a Movie; Steve Reeves & Jack LaLanne
“I just realized that this movie that I wasn’t allowed into when I was using my girlfriend’s father’s, Mr. Tucker’s, movie passes–he was a big insurance executive who wouldn’t be caught dead using free movie passes. She and I would go together and use them, and I’d sign as Mr. Tucker. But this one movie, I came in and the usher said, ‘You’re Mr. Tucker, huh? You’re Mr. Turd!’ And he wouldn’t let me in. I just realized that the movie I missed out on was Hercules Unchained, with Steve Reeves. I thought of renting it again to break the curse. I used to think it was Morgan’s Pirates, but that movie was too recent. It had to be Hercules Unchained.
“I used to go to the gym that Steve Reeves went to when I was 15.” He imitated Reeves’ preternaturally deep voice. “He’d ask me to stand on his back. And Jack LaLanne was there too.” Jack LaLanne was the one who used to be able to vomit separately the milk, the crackers or the banana that his manager would give him. He acted out this story again. Nury commented that that was something she couldn’t imagine anyone doing in a roomful of women.
“They didn’t have steroids in those days. They used to take this muscle building powder. Everybody was on it, and people would burp this very metallic kind of burp.”
Indian Guru Routine
Castaneda did his Indian guru routine, “‘God did not give birth to woman. Woman was created by a lesser deity. It was Rana, a demi–god. And when Rana meets Prana, it gives birth to the most horrible creature: Rana-Prana!'”
Some of the women started grumbling during this routine. Castaneda put his arm around Lorenzo, saying, “It’s a good thing we were created by the real creator and not by a lesser deity.”
“These women are so strong, they’re so fierce. They’re difficult. When the rana-pranas, created by a lesser deity, take over, that’s when Fabricio and I will have to commit suicide.” Fabricio said, “Not that cult.”
Zaia’s Cancer Cure
Nury announced that while falling asleep the previous night, Zaia had come up with the cure for cancer. There was applause. Zaia explained, “Get the person in the room and have them stung by bees. And then they’re cured.” Carola said, “No, that’s the cure for rheumatism.” Nury continued, “And we cured someone. We already have a track record. This woman we didn’t like, we made a voodoo doll out of her and burned it. She’d had cancer, but after we burned the doll she was cured. Now she’s in remission. We should start up a clinic.” Miles volunteered to be the clinic’s first doctor.
His Doctor Wanted to Study Tensegrity’s Effects
Castaneda commented, “My doctor, the one who’s lost, had wanted to set up a clinic to study the effects of Tensegrity. She didn’t want to do any Tensegrity, but she wanted to be the one to measure things. Who needs that? This is the laboratory, this is what we need to work on,” pointing to his torso. “We need to be working the stomach.” He looked toward me, “So we can take care of our hernias.” Then he walked over to Greg and Thorton and claimed, “I can ‘see’ a hernia developing.”
Then we all crowded over on the side by the pillar near the entrance. Castaneda held forth there for at least 45 minutes.
We’re ‘Coning’
“You’re all coning, and it’s getting to a sharper and sharper point on some people, like they’re using pencil sharpeners. It’s definitely pressing on some area at the top of the luminous egg. Florinda and Carol, who weren’t there, seem to be catching up.”
“Carola is really inarticulate these days. But she’s being forced to cone, even though she wasn’t there” [at the Long Beach workshop in the pyramid building].
More on Heaven’s Gate and Other Cults
“You should get the newspaper that has all the articles about the Heaven’s Gate cult, as well as the cover story on the flagellation ritual. And the article about the head of the Japanese Aum cult,” apparently in the business section, “that he sells an ounce of his ‘bodily fluids,’ his piss and blood, for $8,000. Collect those things. I wish I’d started collecting them earlier. I should have started with Jonestown.” Florinda jumped in, “Yeah, there were 900 killed then.” Castaneda responded, “Ugh, don’t say that! You don’t know the number.” Then he turned in my direction and asked, “What was the number?” I responded, “Over 900,” so Florinda made a gesture to him, as if to say “pay me the bet.”
“Have a collection of these newspaper articles, and when people ask you what you’re doing or what’s your problem with the social order, you can show them. ‘These are artifacts of the Flyers.'”
Burning Our Pictures
“You’re changing. This is what’s exciting. There were some people who were with us for a long time who weren’t changing at all. That’s disgusting. They shouldn’t be looking to me.” Then he pointed out Nina and Darby as having manifested the “cone shape” at the tope of their head. “They’ve changed a lot. They burned a lot of their pictures recently. Maybe that helps. Do that. Burn your pictures. Burn your history. We have too many shields. That’s a problem some of the people in the Sunday class have–too many shields. Darby and Nina have gotten rid of their shields.”
“I’m surprised. I mean, Darby’s very friendly, but Nina–I glare, and she’ll eat something bad and she’ll bite your head off. I thought it was going to be really hard for her, but she did it too.” [Later I chatted with Darby, asking her about the pictures they’d burned. She said that Nina had gotten rid of quite a lot, but that she’d just “gotten rid of some.” She said she hangs onto hers for recapping. “We went to a campsite and used the barbecue pit there. And I put in some clothes too that I had that were kind of heavy with attachments.”]
Shaking Things Up
“We need to do something to shake it up. Maybe a jig.” Darby performed an impromptu jig. “Yeah, Rich Jennings should do it. A serious lawyer should jump and jig.” Thorton was pushing me forward. I begged off, saying the legs weren’t working. “Yeah. Get in front of the judge and say, ‘Just a minute your honor,’ and do a jig. Completely lose your authority.
Crying Tears
“The woman who was a producer for Fellini, when I told him I wasn’t going to let him film the book–because he didn’t want to do the book he wanted to do his own stuff–she started weeping uncontrollably. I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to do anything to get her to stop. She said, ‘No. It’s okay. This is just a technique I use to get rid of the pressure. I learned it in Switzerland.’
“I can cry like that. Men can’t cry anymore. Their tear ducts dry up and they’re incapable of crying anymore because they’re criticized, they’re told that they can’t cry.” (Carol kept shaking her head no, that the tear ducts don’t “dry up.”)
“Lorenzo cries all the time, but I can’t imagine Julius ever crying.” Bruce piped up, “I cry enough for the two of us.” Castaneda continued, “That could be another way to break the shield.’
When He Didn’t Laugh
“I didn’t laugh for years. When I finally started laughing again, I had to be hospitalized twice, because I would get all choked up and turn purple. I’d sit during a movie on a long plane flight and be just stock still, never make an expression, never laugh or do anything. And don’t you interrupt or bother me with something silly or foolish. It was just very morbid nonsense that started making me laugh. I was with my sidekick, CJ, and I was very serious but he’d do things to get me laughing.
“I’ve got to do something about my eyes. But I have to do it very indifferently. Whether I have surgery, or whether I do it some other way. That’s what I’m looking for right now–how to make that leap.
“It’s not that I have to drive. Talia and Kylie take me places. But I do much better when I’m driving myself.
What Problems Do We Really Have?
“What problems do we really have. What problems does Brandon Scott have really? Just that he’s an angel.” Brandon responded, referring to his performance in sorcery theater, where he played a very nervous angel, “Yes, and my halo is shaking.
Sorcery Theater
“We’ll start doing the ‘best of’ sorcery theater for the Sunday group. We’ll start practicing next week. We’ll rent a special auditorium and do the ‘best skits of.'”
Nury mentioned a skit where Julius played the shepherd, Lorenzo was Joseph and Kylie was the Virgin Mary. The secret was that Joseph was gay, and the Virgin was a whore. Castaneda said that on the evening of the gay pride parade, when they went to Figaro’s in West Hollywood for dinner, “there was a guy who was just extremely gay, who was happy as could be, dancing around in clogs.” The very next day Kylie was in this skit, “clog hopping around in just the very same way. So Kylie will do her dance.”
Florinda interjected, “Yeah, it was the next day that I met Zorro at the party” [meaning the first time she met Keith Fisher]. Castaneda responed, “Eck, you’re wrong. You don’t know what you’re talking about. This was much earlier.” Then Carol and others confirmed his view. Castaneda continued, “Fausto was with us at the restaurant seven years ago.”
A cell phone started ringing. Kylie grabbed it and listened to it behind the door to the hallway. Castaneda remarked, “Kylie has secrets. Who could it be?” Kylie came back and got Florinda. Carol also left for awhile, although she came back by the end.
Yogi Bhajan
“Yogi Bhajan was brought in to replace Fred at Esalen over 20 years ago. I first saw him there. I went with some of my anthropology cohorts to a lecture. Someone at the airport talked to Yogi Bhajan, who was just working at the airport, asking him if he knew a yogi. Yogi Bhajan said, ‘You don’t need to go to a yogi. I can teach you.’ So that’s how he was ‘found.’ His first class at Esalen was so filled with these Third World barbarities, people were howling with laughter. Then I didn’t see him again. Twenty years later, he’s ‘Yogi Bhajan,’ with 250,000 followers who pay 20 bucks a month just for fees.
“I went to see him with Claude [another name for Nury]. He wanted Claude to join them. He farted during his lecture, so he started preaching about how wonderful and healthful for the system farts were. The entire ashram smelled of oniony farts, because they were onion eaters. Because Yogi Bhajan was doing it, everyone was copying.
“We went to a restaurant on Fairfax that was run by Yogi Bhajan’s son. The guy must have been wearing $100,000 worth of gold–gold necklaces and armbands. I guess if there was a crisis or something came up, he thought he’d be able to barter his way out.” He mimicked him holding up a chain and saying, “Gold! Gold! Let me go!” “But there was something wrong with the guy.” Ellis spoke up, “He had a mental breakdown and had to be institutionalized.” Castaneda continued, “Yeah, there was something missing about him. He wasn’t like his Dad, who was this monster.”
Long Form Movement Instruction
When we broke from being gathered around him, he said, “Let’s do the long form.” We did the first long section–the first 17 movements–crouching and jumping forward. Then he had Kylie lead us in the Preparing for Intent passes. She “turned on,” and he corrected her, “No, no, no. Don’t ‘turn on’ then. That’s just getting the legs moving. You can’t be turning on all the time.” He finally indicated that the place to turn on is after the ‘Steps of Nature,’ the one involving the arm rolls and scratching forward, you turn on right before that. There was also a change in the ‘Opening the Doors’ pass–the hand in the back now faced in toward the body instead of outward. Kylie acted very uncertain as to what came next, and it seemed that they hadn’t done it for awhile.
Castaneda started sniffing the air and complained, “Somebody needs some more antiperspirant.” He sniffed Talia and Kylie. Then he sniffed himself and said, “Ah, it’s me. And my breath is bad too. I’ve been burping metal. I did too much weight lifting and I still have the residue of the powder in my system.”
Nyei made a weak joke, in French, about sweat. Zaia brought up that in her medieval sexuality class, there was mention of farting being an important aspect of sex. That prompted Castaneda to remark, “In Switzerland the men do this dance with their handkerchief tucked under their armpit. They sweat on it and then they hold it in front of the woman and she gets all excited.
Incident with Nury and a Latch
“Claude was over last night. We were talking about some material she gave me in a big envelope that was pertinent to us. I was going to let her out, and I moved the latch back. As we were watching it, the latch, all by itself, slid slowly back into the latching position. We were both stunned. I walked her outside and on the way back I was trying to calculate the probability of that. It was a foolish question, because the probability of it was zero. It’s a hard latch to move anyway, and it just moves itself back?
“Claude has this strange ability where she is to bend things. When she came back at age 17 from wherever she was, she was at the house and I had a compass on the table. The compass just started moving around and around. To break the polarity like that, that’s a major disturbance, but that sort of thing tends to happen around Claude.”
The phone had rung again, and it was Nyei calling to say she had his manuscript ready and was going to bring it by. After six minutes, he started getting worried, because he thought she was just downstairs. He thought the entity that had moved the latch might have “taken her.”
New Option of Erasing Boundaries of the Luminous Egg
“That’s what’s interesting. That’s something to witness. These kinds of incidents. We’re lost already. I’m lost too, but I’m lost in a different way. I’m lost forever. That’s exciting, to be forever wandering and lost, and different things happen and I get different clues. What’s terrible is to do the same thing day after day, and to think that you’ll do that until the day you die.”
“There’s a new option for us of erasing the boundaries of the luminous egg. That might be a way to make ourselves unattractive to Bobby.”
[The Cleargreen group was all on hand, but not the Moon Child or Karina. From the Sunday class were Daniel, Larry, Paul, Greg, Marcos, Thorton, Virginia, Nina, Darby, Keith, Pablo, Kathleen and me.]
©️ 2024 by Richard Jennings, all rights reserved
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