By David Worrell
A friend recently lent me a book: Black Elk Speaks. It’s about the life of a Sioux Holy Man, and, while parts of it are really good (one chapter is even quite funny), basically, it’s a very sad book.
Anyway, here are a few quotes I’d selected from it, which I had, in fact, chosen to present “in honor” of the recent interviews with various Cleargreen personnel that have been posted.
First off, to the heart of the matter, Black Elk’s simple and quite bitter comment:
“[W]e could not eat lies.”
Second, Black Elk’s summation of his own life as a healer, which concludes the final chapter of the book:
“I did not know then how much was ended . . . I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream. And I, to whom so great a vision was given in my youth–you see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing . . . There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.”
Aye, it was a “beautiful dream.” Rivals “the greatest story ever told” does it not? But a story, a dream. Time to wake up.
Finally, my personal favorite of Black Elk’s comments:
“[N]othing can live well except in a manner that is suited to the way the sacred Power of the World lives and moves.”
The author ends the book with an account of the old Indian who considered his life a failure on a mountain-top praying in tears to somehow still bring new life to his people. Since I have no people to pray for, and no deity to pray to, all I can offer up is my desire for myself and for those my life may directly touch: may I once more find my own way back to “the way the world lives and moves.”
It’s funny. I actually like doing Tensegrity and Recapitulating, but I’m also at the point that, at the same time, I utterly resent liking these things–probably rather similar to the way that Black Elk felt, still loving some of the ways of his life and his people, yet left to “live” in the “little white boxes” of the reservations. I realize now that I need to find something else to do that I like just as much–something that isn’t “tainted” with “the lies I cannot eat.” And gosh, it’s ridiculous to imagine I cannot, for sooo many ancient traditions included both: ways of recalling one’s life, and systems of movements designed for bringing well-being. Castaneda didn’t invent such practices. And as for aware dreaming, lately I’ve found that it was also reported as being part of various disciplines, in various parts of the world, going back many centuries, as one would of course suspect.
I always liked to believe I was too efficient and too sophisticated to spend much time being bitter, yet discover now that I’m not, and once in a while it’s sure fucking me up. I need to make a “clean break” somehow. If I do succeed in “coming back to life” some day, I’ll probably be too damned happy about it to even think about returning and “taking scalps” over this thing. But today, I really feel like saying that I’m keeping it open as an option. . .
Unfortunately, that’s nothing but a bitter feeling, as there is really no one’s scalp to take, exactly–for it seems apparent that the Cleargreen people were basically fooled and manipulated just like I was, and I’d have to guess that their only major flaw is the inability to admit that to themselves. To give them their due, it really is almost impossible to deal with, when tricksters manage to include a few tools which really are quite valuable within such a monumental edifice of half-truths that even a genius would have trouble unraveling it all. When even deceptive hoaxers build a beautiful dream in the midst of a hard world, people dearly want to hang onto the beauty. This only makes sense, and so I really cannot “blame” anyone. I even vacillate between being angry and wanting to applaud it as the most masterful and enjoyable deception ever pulled off. 🙂 And after all, it would be very hard for the Cleargreen folks to just walk away from the fun and lucrative way of making a living–with which the whole enterprise now provides them.
It’s becoming very clear to me how I was fooled, mainly: (1) The amazing experiences of aware dreaming; (2) Personal encounters with something like a “great spirit”; and (3) My body really likes to move
But now I see more clearly that these factors, along with reaching silence, curtailing “ego,” being aware of death–hell, these are all part of many ancient and modern “practices” in one way or another (smacks forehead, says: duh). In other words, it is well-known to millions of people that such “practices” are beneficial. Yeah, I’m being a little repetitive. . .
It also seems really silly to me now that all someone had to do was to include these basic factors in the midst of some big crock of bull, to get me to totally fall for it, hook, line, and sinker. It’s a seductive concatenation: half truths and half lies, because that way you can always find things that validate it, so it keeps you believing in bullshit at the same time you are doing things which are truly good for you.
The really strange part is that one may actually get quite a lot “further” in life by fervently adhering to half-truths than by sadly decaying in bitterness while vainly hoping to find whole ones somewhere. So in a way, I almost disagree with Black Elk, we can and do eat lies (in fairness to him, his situation was different–his people were actually starving, and their life-style was truly being destroyed). Indeed, I’ve just come to find that I’ve been “eating lies” for many years now, fervently following Castaneda, and . . . well . . . probably I’ve been eating them all my life. So it’s clear, people can not only eat lies, they can thrive and prosper on lies. At least, they can at least appear to . . . for a time.
But Black Elk couldn’t or . . . wouldn’t, not knowingly. And right now I feel very much like him–a dreamer with a dead dream–“living” in my own little white box on a big reservation called L.A.–and . . . I won’t willingly “eat lies.” I could, but won’t, for I cannot help but wonder what it’s like not to have to eat lies anymore, and consider it my duty to life itself to find out if I can arrive at such a condition.
But you know, on second thought–it may not be that tough. You just have to realize that you don’t know the answers, and live your life looking for all you can find, instead of spending all your energy trying to “live up to” and/or defend some big collection of phony answers. The gurus, like Castaneda, that’s how you recognize them, you see: they always provide some big collection of phony answers alleged to be THE truth about the whole universe. And maybe that’s the key at last: just realize that such people never have any such thing. 🙂
One more thing: I think Castaneda even felt he’d done wrong by misleading everyone. He used to tell us, “Carlos Castaneda was an asshole.” What I now feel he meant was: “sorry I concocted all those stories. At least these movements and inner silence are really good for you. At least reviewing the events of your life can really be helpful to you. At least aware dreaming can be a real adventure. Take these gifts from an old trickster who is ‘gone’.” And I think the reason Castaneda always said he was “gone” is that he knew he was going to die. He had done his best to make a “great collection of truths” after roping himself into it by creating one of the coolest hoaxes of the millennia, but he also knew that much of his own “teachings” were a pipe dream, and that he was dead. He knew it all along. This is what my intuition tells me. It’s what my intuition told me at the time too–but I didn’t listen.
Just a suggestion: Stop parroting the “nagual” and “witches.” I can make that suggestion, because I spent way too much time doing it myself. Stop chanting slogans. Think for yourself. Some guru (who said he wasn’t a guru), some special man (who said he wasn’t special) told you that you don’t have a mind of your own, and you believed him and now act like he was right. But that man “navigated” himself into a Culver City Crematorium.
There is almost certainly no “assemblage point,” and now it’s beginning to seem most likely that there was not even a “don Juan Matus”–not as described. The people who created those constructs, like many well-educated people, were well-aware of many of the strange phenomena of life, and were quite intelligent, artistic, and cunning, but they did not, and do not, know much more about what the hell is really going on in this place than anyone else does.
(farts) And that’s the truth. 🙂
It’s ironic really, they spent so much time talking about curtailing the ego, but they have created a “path” where no one cares about anyone at all but themselves, in spite of all the vacant talk about “affection.” It’s all about saving your own ass. In fact, I’m tempted to call them: the SaveYourOwnAssers of Ancient Mexico. 🙂
Save your own ass in our little mass. 🙂 (they’ll never go beyond a couple of thousand people. . .)
Of course, while people will benefit from some of the beneficial methods, no one will really be “saved,” and it’s possible that many people won’t figure that out until they are old, and their lives are gone.
And I must level with you now. I have just the opposite problem from the “big ego” so often lamented, for I have no remaining self-esteem whatsoever, and feel like a total idiot who wasted his life on nothing. Nor do I have any remaining desire at all to get close to those people. You “apprentices” are the “elite”; you are the only “club” around. I’m a solitary bird who will not eat lies, and probably the perfect man for the job here. Even if they hadn’t made everyone terrified to love and concerned only with themselves, there is still no way I’d ever get really close to anyone in the SaveYourOwnAss club, for a god-fearing practitioner will quickly make the sign of the cross and back away from a man with a young child. That’s death-trap-city in a culture of “personal freedom worship,” and simply doesn’t fit well at all with the ancient practices of SaveYourOwnAssing.
Thus, I find I’m a man veritably starving for genuine intimacy–and since I’ve always sought after that as well as after truth, and many times have found it in one form or another–I can truly say that, aside from my relationship with my son, these have been some of the most “affectionless” years of my entire life, and not because I easily knuckled under to their arduous efforts to rub out intimacy, because I did not. 🙂 And as I’ve said before, that state of affairs is totally unacceptable to me, and it’s leaving me no choice but to bail. It looks very much like they’ve managed to convince people that real intimacy–really getting to know each other, revealing intricate details of one’s life, and in a fully open fashion sharing one’s ambitions, problems, failures, fantasies– bullshitting–arguing–being romantic, utterly silly–whatever . . . is “indulgent,” and is all to be largely foregone solely so that one might one day escape death. And in place of intimate interaction is now some kind of perpetually self-conscious self-screened “simulation of impeccability” which is . . . vacuous. Don’t lose any energy now, don’t reveal anything to anyone, don’t play any games . . . you might not get to defeat death.
But it’s right there on video tape–the man is all shriveled up, too sick to walk around the block by himself–and yet they’re still proclaiming, in all the new interviews, in humble and reverent tones, that he left the world just like don Juan did. Well, it’s probably true, because “don Juan” was most likely largely a creation of Carlos Castaneda, and so . . . naturally, he “left the world” the same way Castaneda did–dead. And I can’t stand to hear them lie about that any more. . .
And I have a question now: just how many lies have to be uncovered before people stop parroting all the words of Castaneda and company as if they are the “holy way” or something? Now I myself did the same thing for a long time, so I understand–however, when I started seeing all the lies, I had to change my tune.
The Tiggs story was a lie. The Blue Scout story was a lie. The Orange Scout was a lie (fortunately, there were no more flavors of scout). They lied about Tunneshende. They lied about Castaneda’s very death. His self-proclaimed “purity” was a lie. He often talked about real “abstract” love and how he would not “cut the head off” his love and replace it with another, but now it comes to light that apparently he did that over and over again in his life. So what is true? Ask yourself, what are you acting on right now, as if it is “gospel,” that may just not be true at all? The seven-year luminous worm thing? Allies? Flyers? What?
And make sure you understand–one of the reasons this “game” worked so well, is because of the well-known reality of dreaming. If you believe that flyers exist, your brain can create them in dreaming, and they will seem totally real. If you believe that “inorganic beings” can appear and take you to other worlds in dreaming, well. . . then it can easily be made to happen.
In fact, a rather daring speculation (with a nudge from Nietzsche) is that it may one day be understood that our brain’s capacity for dreaming and/or entering dreaming awake is what has given rise to most of the religious mythologies, metaphysical systems, and “anomalous incidents” on this planet since the beginning of recorded history.
©️ 2000 by David Worrell or other author, as indicated, all rights reserved
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