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QUESTION: Do you think Carlos was just a scribe? I’ve always felt he was just someone don Juan used to make the knowledge available to a wider audience. And what's with this Tensegrity thing? What does that have to do with being a warrior? * I myself have had a different experience of Castaneda’s works. There is no right and wrong if one lives through duality - only the Realization that one's own personal reality is going to be created by one's own assemblage point. In other words, if I choose to create and engage the reality wherein Carlos is "only a scribe", I can do so, but it is my opinion that this would place me at a disadvantage. By stating that Carlos was "only a scribe" with such conviction, have you closed off all other possibilities? - not that it matters one way or another in this case, but what does matter is that if you intentionally invalidate the messenger, you just might miss out on part of the message. This is one reason Orlando has stressed from the beginning the idea of "duality" in our thinking. Duality allows for two seemingly contradictory ideas to exist side by side without either one threatening the other, whereas stark dualism demands an either/or interpretation of reality. While I might agree with you that Tensegrity is of little real value to the warrior other than a form of exercise and focusing ritual, Joe Blow might not see it that way, and who are we to say he or Carlos is wrong? Their experience might simply be slightly different. Just because Carlos was touting Tensegrity doesn't invalidate all the other messages in all his other books. It's as I've said on my own website: you can invalidate me if that is your Intent, and it's not hard to do, but you would have a hard time invalidating the message. The problem is that it's human nature to try to tangle the two up together to create confusion and distraction, and in reality there's no need to do so in the first place. It's just a diversionary tactic motivated by one's own self-importance. And I can say this with great confidence, because I've been there, done that. When I initially read the first eight Castaneda books, I became firmly convinced that everything that came after TALES OF POWER was a fabrication - "heightened awareness" only an invention of the author as a vehicle through which he would be able to tell more tales of don Juan. Such was my own limited awareness at the time. It has only been as I've moved along the path that I've come to realize no mere scribe could have written those later books (particularly THE EAGLE'S GIFT), for contained therein are so many nuances that a "mere scribe" simply could not comprehend, and certainly would not have the ability to communicate to others even if he did attain a rudimentary comprehension. This is not the realm of the scribe, but of the practitioner. As a reasonably competent writer, I might be able to bumble along and write down certain equations and their explanatory drift if I were coached by a master mathematician such as John Nash (A BEAUTIFUL MIND). But without direct personal understanding of that kind of advanced mathematics (a psychology as much as a science), there is simply no way I could communicate to others the nuances of the processes which create that kind of thinking. I could perhaps talk about the equations themselves, but I could not even begin to hint at the "sorcery" behind the "science". It would take John Nash himself to do that. And it would take a shaman to write THE EAGLE'S GIFT, yet that is a statement I can only make from the assemblage point of Knowledge many, many, many years after first reading that book. From a first attention perspective, it can only be seen as fictionalized ravings of a "mere scribe". But from the point of view of someone who has now experienced much of this first-hand, I can only tell you in words that will ultimately tell you nothing, that every word of it is undeniably true.
The only reason I'm dwelling on this is because I urge caution in dualistic thinking, because there is a tendency for us to become our own worst enemy. For example, when I became convinced Carlos had made up everything after TOP, what I unknowingly did was to place a barrier in my own path - a barrier which eventually had to be dealt with. Walk around it, climb over it, or tear it down. It was a "belief system" - created by my own stark dualism - and the bottom line is that it never needed to be there in the first place. Duality allows the warrior to flow through and around seeming paradoxes, whereas stark dualism will slam the door of perception in our faces every time. In matters of sorcery and evolution, it is seldom a matter of either/or, but almost always a matter of "both and neither". In most cases, I've discovered that stark dualism is fueled and maintained by our own pride and the need to be right even when that means cutting off our nose to spite our face, the inability to realize that we must have the humility to allow our thoughts and ideas to grow and evolve right alongside our higher consciousness. Otherwise, we remain fragmented and earthbound, held in stasis by self-importance.
~2001
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