Don Juan warned about sorcery. He made it clear he was not on that path, and further, that sorcery was a dead end road.
Not that anyone practices sorcery today, except in the old traditions. What we mostly see today are earnest seekers of meaning, or meaningfulness in life. That is a very different thing to sorcery. However, as soon as we don cloaks of glamour - impressing others with your feathers, then a door is opened back into the past.
If you play at posturing with cardboard cut-outs of the doomed Toltecs, you will draw them. But it’s not like you think. You can’t look them in the eye - direct inquiry is futile. They will reflect back to you a subtle twist of mood. The old sorcerers were morbid, pompous, secretive, conniving, manipulative, and they set a level of self-esteem that makes the pyramids blush.
The modern recipients of the mood of the old sorcerers are into extreme preciousness about their ‘bone-fides’. But there’s no way to look directly into the mood of the sorcerers and disarm it. It reflects something in us, that is why. It has a way of ‘consuming’ our consciousness, with dramatisations of grandeur. We lend ourselves airs in other words. Give ourselves fancy titles and posture in front of others.
Instead, we try to catch glimpses of it. This way we look for the spirit instead of it’s facade. You have to feel this spirit to know what I am talking about. And in order to feel it correctly, you need to have balanced your spiritual world with more than Castaneda’s legacy. I recommend everyone study another spiritual path besides Castaned’s Toltec, to provide balance and stability.
How can you tell if some place has been influenced by those old sorcerers? They are morbid.
You don’t have time to stop and consider, you need to question what are you doing? Why have you been pulled into such a depressing attention venue? Don’t you know what’s out there on offer?
The main issue here is whether you are serious about revealing the mysterious depths of being. The path to this inner revelation requires you be not a dabbler, but ready for the most unpredictable journey. It is no good hanging around spirit-cafes yarning. What is required is to stop, consider the real inner nature of what you have surrounded yourself with, and make a decision to take the hard road.
The material legacied via Castaneda is very questionably laced with this glamorous trap. There are three issues to grasp in order to discern the path and friends you should adopt: sorcery, spirits and alien energy.
Sorcery.
The religious spirituality on offer from the many traditions are basically spiritual mysticism. They are very good at describing the subjective experiences, but poor on structure and steps. Sorcery bypasses all the fumbling of spiritual mysticism. It sets out a clear path of tasks and steps, and wastes little time on wandering around in states of superlatives.
Unfortunately sorcery has a trap. It teaches how to pass the Lion’s Portal before the Portal of Death. You can’t blame sorcery for this - it is all there, you only have to follow the injunctions sincerely. But alas, it is all to easy to skip a few crucial steps, and that is what you see in many online forums around the Toltec tradition today. And that is what happened to the old Toltecs. They redefined the word sorcerer, as did many in other lands, to mean someone to be feared. To be feared is right, because these sorcerers developed powers to gain personal benefit.
The very word ‘sorcery’ now acts as a conduit back to the dark past. By playing with this word in a glamorous way, certain people have set up traps for unwitting seekers in some forums. There is a path that leads to profound knowledge, beyond our flattering self-image, but there are many paths which diverge, and usher the follower into a swamp.
There is only one course of action - avoid anyone who claims or exclaims of sorcery. Not only is it bullshit, it is dangerous to the soul. You will take in elements which can be almost impossible to expel. This is a soul sickness, and it is very contagious. It is not the true path.
The trap is the same as was for the old Toltecs - egoism. The normal religious mystical path deals with the problem of ego right from the start - explaining in no uncertain terms that the quest is hindered by clinging to ego. I use the word ‘ego’ here specifically in the concept of our ‘sense of self’, our identity that we have taken up residence in by the time we discover the spiritual world. The Portal of Death is to destroy this ‘ego’. The Toltecs had ‘red’ egos, and the last thing they wanted was to destroy their fabulous selves. They devised ways to bypass the Death Portal and ride the Lion. Unfortunately the Lion rode them.
Sorcery became a way to have the mystical without giving up the ego. That is why they became dark, morbid and obsessive, as well as ruthlessly carnivorous. That was not the path don Juan taught, and is not the path I walk. Make up your mind quickly, as there is little time once you open the door to sorcery - your soul will be infected by the claws of the old Toltecs, and there is no way you will escape.
Spirits.
Castaneda called them Inorganic Beings, and he touted about meeting them in dreams. This was the consequence for the old Toltecs of having dodged the hard road through the Portal of Death. The spirits which approach you in dreaming are there for a reason. They offer you gifts, for a price. All the old Toltec sorcerers became captives of these spirits. They escaped the First Attention to become imprisoned in the Second. The same will happen to you if you allow these spirits to befriend and visit you in dreaming.
There are many other kinds of spirits who are not interested in taking humans captive, and they are far more worthwhile to know. You can’t blame these ‘loitering’ spirits either - they are simply being who they are. Unfortunately for us, they again represent a divergence of the true path. And again there is little time to choose. Once these spirits align with you in dreaming, they have changed your energy body indelibly.
There is a rule of thumb - anyone who easily makes themselves available in dream or physical life, is most likely out to get something from you. The spirits you need to seek out are those who don’t make themselves easily available. You have to exert considerable effort, and control of your own direction, to reach these spirits.
There is only one way to handle spirits with impunity - pass through the Portal of Death first. Then they can’t trap you because you offer nothing to be trapped by. Spirits also offer inflammation of the ego. They offer excitement, entertainment, pleasure, sense of being special. These are all things you have to forgo if you desire the ultimate.
Once spirits have given you a taste of their Second Attention, it is like heroin in the veins: forever offering what never satisfies. Once these spirits get a hold of your dreaming, there is only one way to rid yourself of their influence: give up dreaming. There are many paths, and dreaming is only one. But if your dreaming has been captured by these spirits, that road is forever closed. It is that serious.
The other spirits that are available for dreaming are of immense benefit - it is these from whom we gain the right alien energy for our task.
Alien energy
There is a misconception around the meaning of alien energy. When we speak of alien, we mean foreign, of extreme difference - something outside our total framework. Nothing we have done in our entire lives can prepare us for what we don’t know, except be it an inner resolve and alertness. Alien comes out of the blue - we have no way to place this experience in our world-view and self-view.
That is the principle, and why acquiring this is so paramount. We are trapped in a mould constructed around us since conception. Everything we know belongs inside that mould. It is our entire ‘view’. Thus nothing deployed inside that mould can be used to break the mould. It is a self-fulfilling prophesy. It’s self is it’s trap, and its trap is itself. This is the task we face - we can’t untie the bag from the inside.
Alien energy comes in with a sent of something totally unfamiliar, and thus becomes a seed in our being. A seed of, ultimately, destruction. The destruction of our mould, which is ourself - all we know. Alien functions as a jemmy, levering open the back window in the darkest night. From the unknown comes an energetic seed, which for our purposes, acts to crack open the mould. So long as we are ready, and we haven’t damaged the inner in the process, we transform into something quite different. This is the beauty of alien energy.
We do really have to go looking for this substance, but I have to warn and implore: choose the right alien energy. It is not true that any alien energy will suffice. We are constructing something of tremendous beauty and power, so we aren’t going to throw mud in the engine unless we are imbeciles. Choose with power. This is the subtext of don Juan’s story of the man in the market meeting a ‘man of knowledge’. He eventually destroyed the food, and don Juan intimated he could have discovered that food also had power. Why? Because if you ‘know’ and you pick food, you pick with power - every apple is different. ‘Power’ is not just force, it is also the vibration emanating from an alignment between our actions and our deepest spirit. That means love.
People confuse love for another, with the love of a 'person with wisdom'. Love, for the wise, is something we build carefully. By choice on tiny choice we form a new mould, both in astral and in physical. Choose the right food, and the right alien energy. Never, ever, chose on the basis of posturing. You have to know your heart, and then you know many touts are selling horse manure. You learn about your inner being in love, and you learn your inner being is not inside you.
The trick is to taste, and then quickly make the right decision.
The alien energy we need is not that which comes from those spirits which play with our sentience in dreaming - they are bitter apparitions. The whole trick of acquiring alien energy is to know about spirits and which ones hold the most beautiful energy, the most transforming energy for our journey. We are self creating, and it is up to us to choose what goes into our permanence. But we fool ourselves, and choose badly. Over and over in life we choose badly, because we don’t accept responsibility for this task of building our own reality. We put up dodgy walls, and use inferior cement, then to add insult to self-injury, we hire the local Mafia to give us our kicks. Truly, we are stupid people. Once we realise this, we can do something about it, but so long as we believe ourselves to be fine, while inside we know we are fumbling, then we haven’t earned the right to be a sorcerer of the clear mirror - meaning ‘looking in the eye’.
Do what shamans have done since the beginning: go into the wilderness. Go to the spirits of creeks, cliffs, groves, mountain tops, or caves. Go and meet the spirits of that layer which we have forgotten in our urban world. Then meet the spirits of music, words, temples, ideas, humanity, images and so on. Go ‘out’ in your body or perception and find spirits, then ‘capture’ them. Don’t pretend these phantoms in your dreams are what we mean by alien energy. ‘Alien’ has to be set up - it is like mountain climbing: you prepare, then proceed in an adventure to merge with the spirit of the place you have chosen.
The best alien energy to really catch us under our pants, is to visit another very different culture. It is surprising how effective at getting under our skin is another culture. That is also alien energy. But you can do more - do the Gurdjieff trick of quickly penetrating to the core of any culture he came across. He didn’t just pass through like a tourist in day-glow clothes and gaga joggers. He dived for the essence, and soaked it up faster than you could drink your morning tea. He had eagle’s talons. That is how we should be. Diving to the essence is meeting the spirit directly, and seeing the world through its eye. There is so much!
Don’t spend your life in a smelly armpit - get out into the sun and use the body to access alien energy. Become a lover of novelty. Just remember, it’s task is to break the moulds from which we are seeking freedom. In the end, we have to carry that evaporated energy away from the path of adventure, to the critical task of transformation. We can’t keep chasing excitement and drama - we have to give up on entertainment. To follow in the footsteps of those who put aside their fascinations, and took the road to infinity.
“Arise, awake, and learn by approaching the exalted ones, for that path is sharp as a razor’s edge, impassable, and hard to go by, say the wise.” [Katha Upanishad]
