The Intent of Infinity …

Carlos Quotes Don Juan Mateus:

“What put you and me together,” he went on, “was the intent of infinity. It is impossible to determine what this intent of infinity is, yet it is there, as palpable as you and I are. Sorcerers say that it is a tremor in the air. The advantage of sorcerers is to know that the tremor in the air exists, and to acquiesce to it without any further ado. For sorcerers, there’s no pondering, wondering, or speculating. They know that all they have is the possibility of merging with the intent of infinity, and they just do it.”

It happens – in the life of a Teacher and Student – that the two meet surreptitiously, sometimes with an omen or foreshadowing, but most often with a magic wind, or a door opening that ushers in a certain, unmistakable fragrance.

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The Loneliness of Eternity

“In the life of a Warrior, it is extremely natural to be sad for no overt reason. It is said that man as a luminous being senses his final destination whenever the boundaries of the known are broken.

A mere glimpse of the eternity outside the cocoon is enough to disrupt the coziness of our inventory. The resulting melancholy is so intense that it can bring about death.”

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“There is nothing more lonely than eternity. And nothing is more cozy for us than to be a human being. This indeed is another contradiction – how can man keep the bonds of his humanness, and still venture gladly and purposefully into the absolute loneliness of eternity? Whenever you resolve this riddle, you’ll be ready for the definitive journey.”

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“Who cares about sadness?  Think only of the mysteries; mystery is all that matters. We are living beings. We have to die and relinquish our awareness. But if we could change just a tinge of that, what mysteries must await us! What mysteries!”

– Don Juan Matus, The Fire From Within

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Seeing

“The difficulty,” says Castaneda, “is to learn to perceive with your whole body, not just with your eyes and reason. The world becomes a stream of tremendously rapid, unique events. So you must trim your body to make it a good receptor.  The body is an awareness, and it must be treated impeccably.”

Seeing is an operation – one of the many steps on the way to knowing the energies that comprise the true self.  In his early apprenticeship, Carlos was inducted into this world by means of hallucinogenic substances.  Later his teachers, Juan Matus and Genaro, beckoned him into this world on his own accord – a exercise in testing his impeccability and his art of “saving energy”, two of the admonishments he was given for the life of a warrior.

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Dreaming

The type of “dreaming” outlined in Castaneda’s teachings, is a step beyond what we normally view as “dreams”. It overlaps with a phenomena often referred to as “lucid dreaming”, where the dreamer is conscious of his dreaming, and learns to take control of the content and direction of dreams. It is akin to “waking up” in dreams, and learning to command your attention in dreams, rather than having the dream proceed in a random, unorganized fashion.

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Inner Silence

Also called “stopping the internal dialogue”, inner silence has been described as the initiation or nexus of elevated human awareness. It is the starting point of seeing, of dreaming, of moving the assemblage point, and of intending any of a range of far-reaching consequences.

Our “internal dialogue” is something that all of us experience. It is a cascading fabric of voices and understandings that plays constantly in the background of our consciousness. It is sometimes referred to as the “monkey mind” or the “ego”. It is a constant barrage of judgments, evaluations, criticisms, fears, memories, anticipations… and on and on. It is a complex overlay of programmings from both internal and external sources that ends up being the driving and guiding force in our lives. It’s also the series of “agreements” that keeps our view of reality locked into the currently approved societal sphere.

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Death as Advisor

In the years he spent with Don Juan Matus, Carlos Castaneda was often reminded about mortality.  This was not introduced on a conceptual basis, but as an experiential glimpse into the reality of death’s presence in our day-to-day existence.   What is essential here is an understanding of who we are at our core, deep beneath the layers of assumption and societal programming that we wear like overcoats around our more fragile centers.

The programming we all have around death is inescapable and often impenetrable.  It’s fused together with many viscous elements, including – but not limited to – religious beliefs, fear, television and media programming, personal and familial trauma and aversion programming, societal and material addictions and distractions. These incessant and ongoing programs fuse us into a living a robotic ‘DisneyLand’ script of unfocused consumerism that becomes our life blood, our purpose, and our hiding place. Unconsciously, we weave a perceptive illusion that marries the denial of mortality with the false assumption of immortality.

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