Did he ‘dream it all up’ or did it all ‘actually’ happen, i.e. were the
accounts in Carlos’s Castaneda’s books of the extraordinary encounters and
events he experiences pure ‘fiction’ or ‘verifiable’ fact? The problem is that
in the entire history of this so-called ‘controversy’ it does not seem to have
occurred to any would be Castaneda critic or debunker – or even most Castaneda
fans or followers - that the question
itself runs directly counter to
what is perhaps the most essential
and important message of the teachings he imparts. This message is that
so-called ordinary ‘objective’, ‘factual’ or ‘waking life’ events, which I
will term here ‘outer events’, are - just like dream events themselves -
nothing but surface expressions and
symbols of what can be called ‘inner events’, i.e. events occurring at a
deeper level of awareness than either
the waking or dream state.
Just as dream events may soon fade in our recollection without our ever
having recalled them in full – let alone learned from all their inner dimensions of meaning –
so too can waking life events. Indeed a principal reason why we dream at all is precisely to gain a deeper awareness of the
inner meaning of even the most apparently mundane or insignificant elements of waking life events. In other words, it
is precisely through dreaming that we gain access to those inner events, experiences and dimensions of reality of which
so-called ‘real life’ waking events are
also an expression – albeit a far more superficial and perceptually restricted
one.
The most important ‘fact’ pointed to by the teachings communicated by
Carlos Castaneda therefore, is that except in states of what he calls
“heightened awareness” we are for the most part not awake at all but rather
entirely asleep to the inner dimensions
of meaning and reality expressed in so-called ‘real life’ or ‘waking life’
events.
That is why we need great
philosophers and mystics, great sorcerers or ‘seers’ – and not least great
artists, musicians and writers – in short, great ‘men of wisdom’ (‘Toltecs’)
who perceive and conceive from a state of heightened awareness. They are needed
precisely to help us to more fully recollect
the true nature of reality and the true meaning of everyday encounters, events
and experiences.
That is also why ‘recollection’ becomes such a central word, concept -
and practice - in the Castaneda books. For in his books themselves, Castaneda
admits to it having taken him years just to fully recollect the enormous and mysterious inner dimensions of his first brief and seemingly casual
bus-station encounter with the Yacqui-Indian-Toltec ‘sorcerer’ called ‘Don
Juan’ or ‘Juan Matus’.
From this perspective it makes not
a whit of difference whether Castaneda can or cannot be ‘proved’, for
example, to not ‘actually’ have ‘been’ in Mexico at the time of some of his
reported meetings with the shaman or ‘nagual’ Juan Matus and those belonging to
his party of apprentice sorcerers. For as Castaneda himself writes in the
preface to his book ‘The Fire Within’:
“…an inherent quality of
heightened awareness is that it is not susceptible to normal recall. What
transpires in such a state becomes part of the sorcerer’s everyday awareness
only through a staggering effort of recovery.”
“My interaction with the
nagual’s party was an example of this difficulty of recall. With the exception
of don Genaro, I had contact with them only when I was in a state of heightened
awareness; hence in my normal everyday life I could not remember them, not even
as vague characters in dreams.”
He goes on to write that:
“The manner in which I met
with them every time was almost a ritual. I would drive to don Genaro’s house
in a small town in the southern part of Mexico. Don Juan would join us
immediately … make me change levels of awareness and then we would drive to a
larger nearby town where he and the other fifteen seers were living.”
If there is a deep and genuine
question left to us by the legacy of Castaneda’s literature and lineage it has
the nature of a fundamental and seemingly insurmountable paradox which not even
Castaneda himself is able to entirely escape from in his writings. The paradox
is that if waking life events are no more essentially ‘real’ than dream events,
but merely a specific type of ‘dream within a dream’, then even the seemingly everyday
side of Castaneda’s accounts (for example driving to don Genaro’s house in
southern Mexico at certain times) can no more be ‘factually’ proven or
disproven than can a dream – or any experienced or recalled event. For all
experiencing is, by its nature, essentially subjective - and therefore not
subject to proof or disproof by another individual’s experiencing. Thus even
Castaneda’s own apparent distinction between everyday events and those
occurring in states of “heightened awareness” serves essentially and
principally to distinguish two basic modes or states of awareness - only one of
which however (everyday waking consciousness) is taken as the standard or
measure (Latin ratio) for what
constitutes reality as such or per se
(this being seen, for example as more fundamentally ‘real’ than dreaming
consciousness). All the more
interesting then, that in Castaneda’s definition of ‘sorcery’ as “the mastery
of awareness”, a key practice is called “the art of dreaming” or “dreaming
awake”. This is what is generally referred to as ‘lucid dreaming’ – the aim of
which is to come awake within one’s dreams in the sense of coming to a full awareness that one is dreaming - and
thus also far greater freedom to influence the course of one’s dreams. And yet
what most essentially characterises the ‘lucidity’ of a ‘dream’ is not only its
vivid intensity or even the freedom of action it facilitates but something that
this ‘art of dreaming’ shares with our experience of all that we call ‘art’. For whether we choose to view a painting or
sculpture in the space of a gallery, to listen to music in the space of a concert
hall, to participate in a religious ritual in a sacred space - or simply and
consciously take time - even in the
space of our own rooms or houses, to immerse ourselves in any form of aesthetic
experiencing – one thing is shared in common by all these forms of intentional
activity and experiencing. This is that we do not simply ‘lose ourselves’ in
whatever we may choose to experience, as we may lose ourselves in more mundane
activities. Instead, and by virtue of allotting the experience a specific time
and space, we remain both strongly aware of
experiencing and at the same time able to more consciously and deeply immerse ourselves in whatever
it is we choose to turn into a fixation point of awareness.
I would suggest that this combination of experiencing something on the
one hand and, on the other hand, being in a state of heightened awareness of experiencing it - is
central to what we call ‘art’ or ‘aesthetic’ experiencing in general. It is like the difference between anything
going on or present within a given space and that space as such. For just as space
is both absolutely inseparable from everything within it and the same time
absolutely distinct from it, so also
is awareness per se both absolutely
inseparable and absolutely distinct from everything we experience or are aware
‘of’. Indeed we experience awareness per
se or ‘as such’ as space – which is
essentially nothing ‘objective’ and no ‘thing’ but a spacious field of awareness, of subjectivity,
surrounding and pervading everything we experience within it. That is why, in
the course of lucid or ‘aware’ dreaming, space as such attains a heightened
significance – whether through broad and often stunning spatial vistas and the
lucid visions beheld within them, or through the experience of flying
dreams.
Note: Awareness, as emphasised in Castaneda’s
books, embraces many worlds and dimensions beyond what we take as ‘the’ world.
It is in these other dimensions of awareness that he now dwells. Long after his
‘death’ however I myself used methods uniquely my own to attune to and enter the dimension of awareness in which he continues his journey and engage in trance communication with his living soul. In the course of this wordless communication
he revealed to me that the very ‘controversy’ around his books, which continued
after his death, was - even before his birth – anticipated and even pre- intended to offer a riddle to his
readers, one which actually held the key to the inner message and inner truth
of his life and works.
No comments:
Post a Comment