Table of contents
Friday, February 28, 1997
Dance Home, Santa Monica 8 – 9 PM
Comments on Nyei, Reni and Taisha
Castaneda explained that Nyei and Fabricio weren’t going to be there because Nyei had lost part of his manuscript. She was trying to send something somewhere and the modem had crashed. “And she isn’t disciplined enough to have things backed up,” he complained. Fabricio is a computer expert and he was trying to help her. “But I ‘read’ this stuff–I’m not a writer. And if I lose what I’ve ‘read,’ I’m not going to get anymore. I want like anything to finish this.” (I mentioned there were programs for salvaging data, so Reni came over to me at the end to find out what I knew about retrieving lost data on a Mac.)
Castaneda pointed to Reni and said, “This is the weirdest creature. She and Nyei are both very strange. Their energy configurations are very unusual.”
Nury then pointed in front of her, saying, “But what about . . . ” It took us all a minute to realize she was referring to Taisha, who was standing in front of her. “Of course, Taisha’s the weirdest of all,” Castaneda responded.
Castaneda imitated Nyei’s monotone, and told us he was always trying to get her to put some life in her voice. “They’re very alike in their configuration, and it’s very different from what I’ve seen in anyone else.”
Movement Instruction
We did six passes, including the three from earlier in the week and three new ones: grabbing out in front and reaching around to the adrenal area and applying; swinging out to the back and grabbing and then applying it down the opposite side in front; and making a more elegant side parry in front and then cutting down and applying. They were supposed to be six new passes to start the not-doing sequence. He told us these were for leaving the “Onan twilight.”
Losing Fat
“A pound of fat requires 30,000 miles of capillaries to feed it.” Florinda complained, “But you’re too thin. You look sick.” Castaneda responded, “I don’t want any fat. Grant is going to lose it soon. But Grant can’t diet, he needs too much energy. Dieting isn’t any good if you’re very active and need a lot of energy. The thing to do is cut out the sugars, and then it comes off.”
Anthropology Professor Story
“I used to have a friend, Cyril, at UCLA, who had legs up to his neck practically. Very Saxon looking, aquiline nose. I was at UCLA recently, seeing things I hadn’t seen for 20 years. Suddenly the elevator opened and there was Cyril, this huge fat guy. I didn’t say, ‘Hey, Cyril, how’ve you been?’ I made my usual comment: ‘Long time no see. What’s new?'”
“Cyril invited me to his office. ‘What, an office?’ Cyril’s now head of the Department . . . my Department. So he’s still around, but very old. It’s terrible what age does. He thought that I was too scrawny, and reminded him of his grandfather, except his grandfather had no teeth.”
“Cyril and his wife were big alcoholics. Incredible genes. He would chug down a bottle of scotch I gave him like it was nothing. He’d ask me, ‘Why do you give me this stuff. Why don’t you give me something really solid, with substance?’ So I bought him a five gallon bottle of Ron Rico Rum and had it delivered to the guy’s house. I watched from across the street with binoculars. The guy came out of his house and looked around. His wife came out too and they were looking around like strange animals. People didn’t see him for a week or so. They drank the whole thing. And he’s still going. He can’t think anymore, but what does that matter? They’re just Flyers’ thoughts anyway.”
Random Thoughts
“What’s the word for the lining of the roof of the inside of a car?” Castaneda asked us out of the blue. People volunteered things like, “headliner” and “roof lining.” Florinda asked him what’s the word in Spanish. Castaneda responded, “They don’t have one. They don’t have lining in their cars.”
Castaneda asked us, “Who likes Kids in the Hall?” Keith and I both raised our hands, as did the women around Nury. Florinda commented, “Ahh, Richard.” Someone motioned we should go to the other side of the room, to join the women. Keith did and I followed, but a couple of minutes later Castaneda indicated we could return to our places.
Castaneda told us Lorenzo was supposed to read us another story that night, but he couldn’t be there. The story was about a Nobel prize winner living in New Guinea who had adopted eight or so boys, and had them masturbating him. He claimed it was the tradition in the culture in New Guinea for the little boys to masturbate older men. “This is the Flyer. All over the world there’s this kinky atmosphere. Beings who are going to live forever. Beat your meats.”
Mexican Mafia Stories
Florinda mentioned there was a shootout that day, and I, who had heard the news on the way in, told them it was in North Hollywood. People were asking if they had caught them, and people were asking “Who were they? What nationality?” Castaneda volunteered, “They must be Mexican, because they can’t shoot straight. Sure they’re going to botch the robbery.”
He referred to the Mexican chief narcotics officer who was so dumb he was living in an apartment owned by a drug lord. He also told a story about the head of a zoo in Mexico, who was going to expand the place when they had an influx of petrol dollars. “He needed a gorilla, but it’s illegal to buy them because they are endangered. He went up to Miami where someone had three gorillas. The guy there told him ‘You can take one if you want; I’m not going to be responsible.’ The Mexican picked one and was leading it away when the gorilla pulls out a gun and tells him he’s under arrest. The guy claimed, when he went down in flames, that he’d picked that one because of the eyes.”
Gargoyles in a River of Shit
“Don Juan used to tell me that we’re all gargoyles in this river of shit. We climb on each other and piss and shit all over each other. Some grapple each other and climb to the top, and others sink in the river. They don’t fight, and you just occasionally see bubbles coming up, they hardly even breathe.
“Occasionally one gets pushed to the shore, to the side. That’s when sorcerers try to hose them down. But it’s too uncomfortable, a lot of people can’t take it, it’s too cold outside, and they jump back in. But if they can get hosed off they can find that it’s infinitely more interesting to be out, and they can then go wherever they want.
“This was a horrendous image for me. I went back to UCLA and saw the Anthropology Department as being full of gargoyles. Some are serious about what they are doing, real academics, but nothing they talked about was going to change anything. It didn’t change *them*.”
His Doctor, Angelica
“We’ve got to tighten up,” he indicated around the belly, “and maybe then we can help somebody. My doctor disappeared. She appears to have been swallowed up. She’s a great doctor. I’d like to help her–I owe her my life. But she’s infantile. She helped François to her detriment. And François doesn’t need any help. He’s doing fine on his own. He speaks French,” he smiled, ruefully. “And she hurt her health–made herself sick. She told us what we wanted to hear–her version of what we wanted to hear. Fantastic things.”
He apologized at the end again for assuming that we had two hours, when they were only booked for one.
[The usual Cleargreen gang was on hand, minus Nyei, Fabricio, Carol, Talia, Gavin and Lorenzo. The usual five of us from the Sunday group were there–Paul, Greg, Marcos, Darby and me– plus Kathleen Seligman, Keith and Pablo.]
Monday, March 3, 1997
Dance Home, Santa Monica 8 – 9 PM
‘Don’t Get Sick’
“Don’t get sick. Don’t eat strange things that change your composition or interfere with your balance. Carola is sick. I can’t get out of her what she ate, what she bought at school. She won’t admit it. She’ll die rather than confess.” He mimicked asking her about various items, and her stonewall response, “All I ate was vegetables and meat and chicken.”
“Nyei got sick too. With her it was a mental thing. She was stressed by something yesterday. I do it to her.” He mimicked her responding in a deep monotone when he suggested that create a new document to move something. “Then I asked her to read something back to me and she said it was going to take awhile since she had to open another document. Then she restated the steps involved. I asked her if she had created a new document and she said, ‘No, I just marked it.’ ‘Well why didn’t you create another document?'” He mimicked her crying, “It takes too long. I have to open this and do this.” “Why doesn’t she just say, ‘Whoa, slow down! Give me time.’ Then I’ll stop. But she doesn’t. She acts like it’s all taken care of and then she breaks down.”
“Don’t get sick. It’s a weird time. Don’t let something in. We need to change.”
Eating Small Amounts
“Don Juan said you could eat anything, but just small amounts.” Castaneda imitated the Moon Child out at dinner, with a booming voice saying, “Wow, this is good food, huh? Cheap prices. Good food!”
“We do that and then stuff ourselves and have to burp. Don’t go to a Mexican restaurant when you’re really hungry and load up. At Versailles, I had the pork once with all the beans and rice and onions they bring and got sick. Eating all the beans will kill you. If you eat just a small amount, according to don Juan, the body will become accustomed to anything. That’s all he did–he was an extraordinary picker–just picking at things. Don’t go to a restaurant hungry or you’ll eat too much and start burping.”
Awareness vs. The Sea of Awareness
“There are two forces in the universe. There is awareness and the sea of awareness. Awareness is like the ego that comes up and sees everything with a cold eye. Intent is this other force that we are connected to through the assemblage point–who knows how?–which can take us wherever we want to go. One force is light and the other is dark.” [He didn’t specify which was which.]
We worked on the long form, but minimally, because Castaneda talked a lot.
This Weird Indifference
“I need more time. I’m at the place where don Juan was when I met him. I extended don Juan’s life. Don Juan had this weird indifference, and that’s where I am now. Sometimes it scares me to death.”
Seeing His Own Shadow
“Yesterday I saw my shadow. I left the window open and the light through it when I got up created a shadow I’m not used to seeing. At first I thought it might be an entity and stepped on its foot. It didn’t move. Finally I reached back and turned on the light and saw it was my shadow. When I was younger I would have shrieked bloody murder at something like that.”
Entity at the Foot of the Bed
“Once there was an entity at the foot of my bed that had one eye, and looked very menacing. It wasn’t my imagination. I turned on the TV and there was a guy doing a commercial for used cars with a weird voice, saying ‘I’m going to give away this little doggy,’ and it saved me. It brought me back enough that this entity faded. But I’d already shrieked and awakened the neighborhood, practically causing the police to arrive.”
Working Around Things You Can’t Change
After he took off the light brown sweater he was wearing over a long sleeved red shirt, he realized his zipper was undone. He went over to show Nury, and then he came over to our group of men. He told us he always had this problem zipping up his zipper, so he often didn’t do it. “I once got my pincho stuck in it when I was young. Since then, I often seem to leave it unzipped. Don Juan said there are certain things about us that are difficult to change. It’s too much trouble, and you shouldn’t waste energy in that direction. Just work around them. In the case of leaving my zipper open, he told me maybe just to open it wider and forget about it.”
Zipper Issues
“I almost got a girl pregnant once. Her parents were never home and there was this big hammock in the backyard that used to creak when it moved. I would come over and we’d lie on it and have sex. One time the father came home and thought it was the servants messing around out there. He came out and found me with his daughter and that’s when I got my pincho stuck in my zipper. He was beating on me too, but my pincho hurt so much I couldn’t even feel the beating. The doctor told me he advised people to use buttons instead of zippers. They take longer, but this doesn’t happen.” Keith pointed out to us that he himself had buttons.
“The secretary to a consular official tried forever to get my attention once at a dinner that my zipper was unzipped, but he was so subtle with his movements and glances and curled lips that I had no idea what he was getting at. It just made me nervous.”
Margarita Nieto
“Margarita is also a professional eater. But she’s a gourmand and eats really well. But you can tell she’s a professional eater the way she licks her lips and her eyes light up. Also a drinker.” He mimicked this by bringing his fist with the thumb on top up to his lips with his head tilted back. “She was an alcoholic. But she wouldn’t drink just anything. It had to be good stuff. When Florinda and I first knew her, she was really fat and out of it. She would have eyeliner on, and thought it was around her eyes, but it would be on the top of her forehead or down on her cheeks. She didn’t know what she was doing.” Florinda laughed and confirmed this. “She’s got this strand but she stopped it. That’s why she’s still fat, but she brought it to a stop.”
“She’s learned the names of everyone who attends the workshops. You can ask her ‘Who’s that man over there,’ and she’ll tell you, ‘That’s Joe Higgins, from Alabamy. He went to the University of Texas. But only for two years. He has pretensions of being an academic, but he’s not at all.’ ‘Who’s that?’ ‘That’s Virginia so-and-so. She did go to school. She completed four years at Berkeley.’ ‘Who’s that, they do Tensegrity really well?’ ‘Oh, that’s nobody. He didn’t finish high school.’ ‘Oh, never mind.'”
“Florinda and I were eating Japanese food before you were born. We were eating at Benihana’s and Bonsai and Taipan, downtown. One of us would say, ‘I want shukyiaki,’ and the guy would correct us and say, ‘That’s sukyiaki.'” He imitated a deep, male Japanese voice. “She would say, ‘No, I want shukyiaki.’ There was another [Taisha?] who would ask, ‘What’s that?’ ‘Bento.’ ‘Oh, Bento.’ ‘What’s that?’ endlessly repeating every word the man said.”
Sunday Group Potentially Keeping Him Around
“The Sunday group may be a force that can keep me here, the same way I kept don Juan. It’ll just take one usher. But François may not make it, because he’s gotten stuck in his language.”
French Slurs
Florinda interrupted, “You’re picking on the French again.” Castaneda responded, “No, I can ‘see’ it. He’s trapped in his language. It’s a heavy burden. It’s much easier for Germans. There’s something about the German language and Germans that’s much more mystically oriented. But the French have a very hard time.”
Lorenzo interrupted to say that three sets of lions were trained for a movie the previous year. Two of the sets of lions were from France, and the French trainer of the French lions spoke to the lions only in German, not French. Florinda interjected, “Yeah. You can’t train animals in French.”
Perfect Beings
“We’re going to have a party at Cleargreen in the next couple of weeks. Things have gotten too heavy and we need to lighten up. We’re going to meet there and have some impromptu performances. Everybody here will be invited. I’d like to have my doctor there, but she’s been swallowed up. She’s too infantile. She’s frigid, but she claimed her flaw was being too passionate. Like many Mexican women, she’s Doña Perfecta. She has to be the perfect lady, has to have the answer to everything, has to know how to cure you, how to kill you, give you advice on anything.”
He pointed to Ellis, “This is another ‘perfect being.’ Just like her mother. She has to be perfect, and if she’s not, then she apologizes. So that takes care of it. I wonder how many other perfect beings we have here. Julius is another perfect being. But he’s been really good lately and hasn’t been in his ‘Mr. Perfect’ mode. Lorenzo’s another one who is quasi-almost perfect.”
Janet Yang and Oliver Stone
“When I first met Lorenzo, it was at a party at Janet Yang’s with Oliver Stone. Janet was busy making salad, and Oliver Stone came up behind her and put his hand down her pants to fondle her butt. From one asshole to another.” Florinda offered to stand next to Castaneda to allow him to demonstrate, but Castaneda didn’t. “And Janet just continued smiling and working on the salad. That reminds me of Anna Marie Bennstrom, the guru who fondled her masseur’s balls.” [I believe he is referring to Dr. Anne Marie Bennstrom Prescott, who. co-founded The Ashram in the Santa Monica Mountains above Malibu. Here’s her obituary.]
“When I met Lorenzo, it was the most amazing thing. His fibers had been at his feet–he was stepping on them–and he pulled himself up. Lorenzo’s not going to crap out. He’s strong.”
[Sparsely attended session. Some showed up late. Carola, Talia, Nyei, and the Moon Child were missing. From the Sunday class were Greg, Paul, Marcos, Darby, Keith, Pablo and me.]
©️ 2024 by Richard Jennings, all rights reserved
Related Links:
