Carlos Castaneda / Карлос Кастанеда - First 12 books / Первые 12 книг. (1968-1998) скачать торрент

Journey To Ixtlan
"You are quite cracked, " he said, shaking his head in a gesture of disbelief. "You have an insidious tendency. You persist in trying to explain everything to your satisfaction. There is nothing in the meat except power. The power was not put there by me or by any other man but by power itself. It is the dry meat of a deer and that deer was a gift to me in the same way a certain rabbit was a gift to you not too long ago. Neither you nor I put anything in the rabbit. I didn't ask you to dry the rabbit's meat, because that act required more power than you had. However, I did tell you to eat the meat. You didn't eat much of it, because of your own stupidity.
"What happened to you last night was neither a joke nor a prank. You had an encounter with power. The fog, the darkness, the lightning, the thunder and the rain were all part of a great battle of power. You had the luck of a fool. A warrior would give anything to have such a battle."

The "gait of power" was similar to finding a place to rest. Both entailed a sense of abandon, and a sense of trust. The "gait of power" required that one keep the eyes on the ground directly in front, because even a glance to either side would produce an alteration in the flow of movement. He explained that bending the trunk forward was necessary in order to lower the eyes, and the reason for lifting the knees up to the chest was because the steps had to be very short and safe. He warned me that I was going to stumble a great deal at first but he assured me that with practice I could run as swiftly and as safely as I could in the daytime.

He said that running in the darkness did not have to be spurred by fear but could be a very natural reaction of a jubilant body that knew how "to not do." He repeated over and over in a whisper in my right ear that "to not do what I knew how to do" was the key to power. In the case of looking at a tree, what I knew how to do was to focus immediately on the foliage. The shadows of the leaves or the spaces in between the leaves were never my concern. His last admonitions were to start focusing on the shadows of the leaves on one single branch and then eventually work my way to the whole tree, and not to let my eyes go back to the leaves, because the first deliberate step to storing personal power was to allow the body to "not-do.
Tales of power
"What is the totality of oneself, don Juan?"
"I said that I was only going to mention it. There are still a lot of loose ends in your life that you must tie together before we can talk about the totality of oneself."
He ended our conversation there. He made a gesture with his hands to signal that he wanted me to stop talking. Apparently there was something or somebody nearby. He tilted his head to the left, as if to listen. I could see the whites of his eyes as he focused on the bushes beyond the house to his left. He listened attentively for a few moments and then stood up. He came to me and whispered in my ear that we had to leave the house and go for a walk.
"Is there something wrong?" I asked, also in a whisper.
"No. Nothing is wrong, " he said. "Everything is rather right."
He led me into the desert chaparral. We walked for perhaps half an hour, and then came to a small circular area free from vegetation; a spot about twelve feet in diameter where the reddish dirt was packed and perfectly flat. There were no signs, however, that machinery had cleared and flattened the area. Don Juan sat down in the center of it, facing the southeast. He pointed to a place about five feet away from him and asked me to sit there, facing him.
"What are we going to do here?" I asked.
"We have an appointment here tonight, " he replied.
He scanned the surroundings with a quick glance, turning around on his seat until he was again facing the southeast.
His movements had alarmed me. I asked him who we had the appointment with.
"With knowledge, " he said. "Let's say that knowledge is prowling around here."
He did not let me hook on to that cryptic answer. He quickly changed the subject. In a jovial tone he urged me to be natural; that is to take notes, and talk as we would have done at his house.
What was most pressing on my mind at that time was the vivid sensation I had had six months before of 'talking' to a coyote. That event meant to me that for the first time I had been capable of visualizing, or apprehending through my senses and in sober consciousness, the sorcerers' description of the world; a description in which communicating with animals through speech was a matter of course.
"We're not going to engage ourselves in dwelling on any experience of that nature, " don Juan said upon hearing my question. "It is not advisable for you to indulge in focusing your attention on past events. We may touch on them, but only in reference."

Don Juan's praxis [* praxis- translating an idea into action] of 'dreaming' was an exercise that consisted of finding one's hands in a dream. In other words, one had to deliberately dream that one was looking for and could find one's hands in a dream by simply dreaming that one lifted one's hands to the level of the eyes.
After years of unsuccessful attempts, I had finally accomplished the task. Looking at it in retrospect, it had become evident to me that I had succeeded only after I had gained a degree of control over the world of my everyday life.
Don Juan wanted to know the salient points. I began telling him that the difficulty of setting up the command to look at my hands seemed to be, quite often, insurmountable. He had warned me that the early stage of the preparatory facet, which he called 'setting up dreaming', consisted of a deadly game that one's mind played with itself; and that some part of myself was going to do everything it could to prevent the fulfillment of my task. That could include, don Juan had said, plunging me into a loss of meaning, melancholy, or even a suicidal depression.
I did not go that far, however. My experience was rather on the light, comical side. Nonetheless, the result was equally frustrating. Every time I was about to look at my hands in a dream something extraordinary would happen. I would begin to fly; or my dream would turn into a nightmare; or it would simply become a very pleasant experience of bodily excitation. Everything in the dream would extend far beyond the 'normal' in matters of vividness, and therefore be terribly absorbing. My original intention of observing my hands was always forgotten in light of the new situation.
One night, quite unexpectedly, I found my hands in my dreams. I dreamt that I was walking on an unknown street in a foreign city, and suddenly I lifted up my hands and placed them in front of my face. It was as if something within myself had given up, and had permitted me to watch the backs of my hands.
Don Juan's instructions had been that as soon as the sight of my hands would begin to dissolve or change into something else, I had to shift my view from my hands to any other element in the surroundings of my dream. In that particular dream I shifted my view to a building at the end of the street. When the sight of the building began to dissipate I focused my attention on the other elements of the surroundings in my dream. The end result was an incredibly clear composite picture of a deserted street in some unknown foreign city.
The actibe side of infinity
"You saw the fleeting shadows against the trees, " don Juan said, sitting back against his chair. "That's pretty good. I'd like you to see them inside this room. You're not seeing anything. You're just merely catching fleeting images. You have enough energy for that.
I feared that don Juan would get up anyway and turn off the lights, which he did. Two seconds later, I was screaming my head off. Not only did I catch a glimpse of those fleeting images, I heard them buzzing by my ears. Don Juan doubled up with laughter as he turned on the lights.
"What a temperamental fellow!" he said. "A total disbeliever, on the one hand, and a total pragmatist on the other. You must arrange this internal fight. Otherwise, you're going to swell up like a big toad and burst."
Don Juan kept on pushing his barb deeper and deeper into me. "The sorcerers of ancient Mexico, " he said, "saw; the predator. They called it the flyer because it leaps through the air. It is not a pretty sight. It is a big shadow, impenetrably dark, a black shadow that jumps through the air. Then, it lands flat on the ground. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were quite ill at ease with the idea of when it made its appearance on Earth. They reasoned that man must have been a complete being at one point, with stupendous insights, feats of awareness that are mythological legends nowadays. And then everything seems to disappear, and we have now a sedated man."
I wanted to get angry, call him a paranoiac, but somehow the righteousness that was usually just underneath the surface of my being wasn't there. Something in me was beyond the point of asking myself my favorite question: What if all that he said is true? At the moment he was talking to me that night, in my heart of hearts, I felt that all of what he was saying was true, but at the same time, and with equal force, all that he was saying was absurdity itself.