Reconsidering Don Carlos, by James Souttar
Reconsidering Don Carlos
by James Souttar
Books frequently play a part in our ‘coming of age’ narratives. For many baby boomers Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye, Kerouac’s On The Road or even Cleary’s Fifteen had been guides through this troubled rite of passage. But for my friend Philip and I, hitting the transition to adulthood as the seventies wound to an end, the voice that supplied the direction we were looking for was that of Carlos Castaneda.
In retrospect Journey to Ixtlan and A Separate Reality made for odd companions to our teenage years. Instead of helping us to come to terms with raging adolescent hormones or deal with a roller-coaster of emotions, we were transported to the chapparal of Northern Mexico, where Don Juan Matus and Don Genaro Flores performed spectacular feats of sorcery. And, by comparison, the things of everyday life seemed mind-numbingly prosaic. Still, in the absence of a reasonable supply of peyote or psilocybe, Don Juan’s lessons in assuming responsibility and behaving impeccably were not unhelpfully formative. (Indeed, to this day, his explanation of what is required of a ‘warrior’ seems to me to be the finest articulation of the attitudes a mystic must cultivate, and the loftiest aspiration for a human being.)
The way Castaneda wrote was immediate and compelling, beautifully crisp and concise, yet sometimes also astonishingly poetic and resonant (we owe to him exquisite phrases like ‘unbending intent’, ‘controlled folly’, ‘dark sea of awareness’ and ‘active side of infinity’). And his mysticism was actual, not theoretical. It involved realising unimaginable possibilities, marshalling extraordinary discipline and finding considerable courage. Above all, it communicated a sense of adventure.
Castaneda’s burgeoning opus fed a fascination with ‘non ordinary reality’ which had begun when my brother opened my eyes to mysticism at the age of eleven. And, yes, I was a rather odd kid. That interest in mysticism later led me off in other directions (which is another story) but I continued to read Don Carlos’ productions as they appeared. However, my wide-eyed teenage adoration slowly turned to scepticism, especially as the debunkings started to appear. The portrait of Castaneda as a capricious, controlling man, inventing his Mexican adventures in his reclusive Westwood home, became the dominant narrative. Nonetheless it was still clear to me that nobody wrote this stuff like he did (and, whatever else, I think he rightly deserves a place in the pantheon of great American writers). The sheer unexpectedness of his revelations made each new book shimmer with possibilities. If he were merely a plagiarist, who the hell was he copying? And as I became familiar with the world’s great spiritual traditions, this question only became more puzzling. So much of what he described was clearly unprecedented.
At the same time, though, Castaneda’s books could be a rough ride. The world he painted was mysterious, beautiful and inspiring, for sure. But it was also relentless and terrifying. Even reading about it could be exhausting. While other mystical traditions tended towards a view of everything turning out for the best, Castaneda’s nagualism was engaged in a life-and-death struggle against a predatory universe. And far more than the doubts and the debunkings, this was the reason I started to keep his writings at arms length through my twenties, thirties and forties. Were I to read more than a little, I would feel overwhelmed by their uncompromising mood. Yet, while I couldn’t wholeheartedly embrace them, I couldn’t quite bring myself to leave them behind either.
And, troublingly, as my experience in mysticism started to grow, Castaneda’s explanations were often the ones that made the most sense. Somehow they managed to be waiting for me ahead of each new experience. Not because I wanted them to be — quite the opposite, in fact. On the other hand, many of the mystical descriptions I was familiar with from other traditions tended to over-sentimentalise inner experiences, insisting on a background of ‘God’s love’, for instance, or ‘compassion for all sentient beings’, which was not my experience, and often seemed gratuitous and mawkish.
This percipience in Castaneda’s work was powerfully reinforced for me in the early 1980s, when The Eagle’s Gift was published. The book contained the astonishing revelation that the most important parts of Don Juan’s teaching had been conveyed to Castaneda in states of heightened awareness. Afterwards, he had been left with no memory of what had happened in these states. In the book he described how, in the wake of Don Juan’s departure, he and another disciple (whom he calls ‘La Gorda’) managed to painstakingly recover memories of these experiences.
Even now, I’ve never heard anything similar described in the literature of mysticism. But at the time I first read it, it brought me up in goosebumps. I had already experienced exactly this — twice in my life. The first time was in my late teens, when I spontaneously remembered dozens of conversations with my friend Philip in exactly such an altered state of consciousness. These experiences flooded back in the most vivid detail, only to slip away again later, leaving the certain knowledge that they had happened but no trace of what they were. And, a few years later, the same thing occurred. Another such moment brought recollections of conversations with an ex-girlfriend that I had retained no conscious recollection of, only for these lucid memories to vanish once more.
In later books, Castaneda explained this phenomenon in terms of movements of a ‘assemblage point’, a novel idea which is arguably the most important and useful of all the concepts he introduced.
Indeed, his contention was that the nature of our perception is governed by a position of a point of brightness in ‘the luminous body of man’— a point that is perceptible to seers. We learn, from our earliest years, a description of the world which fixes this ‘assemblage point’ (so called because it assembles our experience of the world) in a place that is broadly similar for the majority of human beings. This learning enables us to have a consensual view of what we consider to be reality. But, as small children, this point’s position is still relatively fluid. It is only as we get older that it becomes fixed. Nonetheless it continues to move freely in dreams, as well as under the influence of drugs and in moments of extreme sickness, fear or confusion. And, of course, it can be made to do so, intentionally, when someone has been through a discipline such as Castaneda describes.
Small differences in the position of the assemblage points of different people account for differences in the way they see the world. To some extent, this is recognised in our everyday idioms (for instance, when we talk about people being ‘stuck in a victim position’, or when life coaches attempt to inculcate the ‘mindset’ of an entrepreneur). And these small displacements of the assemblage point, which Castaneda described as shifts, account for the different personalities we manifest in everyday life. On the other hand, larger movements, which he called grand shifts, result in the experience of complete, immersive alternative realities.
Don Juan’s view, which he tried to impress upon Castaneda, is that the position of the assemblage point determines how we see the world, and not vice-versa. If the assemblage point moves, the way the world comes to be for us will change. (We can see this very clearly in the case of depression — in the grip of a depressive state, someone might interpret their life as if ‘bad things always happen to me’ while, outside of that state, they will experience their life in much less miserably determinist ways). As Castaneda tells it, Don Juan and his cohorts were able to adopt radically different personalities, even changing the way they looked and moved, through deliberate shifts of the assemblage point. It afforded them an astonishing facility for what he called ‘controlled folly’: playing a social role to perfection, without becoming identified with it.
“Don Juan said that perception is the hinge for everything man is or does, and that perception is ruled by the location of the assemblage point. Therefore, if that point changes positions, man’s perception of the world changes accordingly. The sorcerer who knew exactly where to place his assemblage point could become anything he wanted.
“‘The nagual Julian’s proficiency in moving his assemblage point was so magnificent that he could elicit the subtlest transformations,’ don Juan continued. ‘When a sorcerer becomes a crow, for instance, it is definitely a great accomplishment. But it entails a vast and therefore a gross shift of the assemblage point. However, moving it to the position of a fat man, or an old man, requires the minutest shift and the keenest knowledge of human nature.’”
[Carlos Castaneda, The Power of Silence, 1987.]
In the Sufi tradition, with which I’m most familiar, the experience of non ordinary reality is described in terms of ‘states’ and ‘stations’. States are fugitive, and tend to be artefacts of the spiritual journey rather than essential components of it. Stations, on the other hand, represent more permanent changes of consciousness, generally as part of a progression. In all of these cases, though — as in other mystical traditions—non-ordinary experiences are seen as things that happen to our basic, everyday consciousness, rather than changes in that consciousness itself. From Castaneda’s perspective, on the other hand, such experiences are all movements of the assemblage point, temporary or permanent. And this perspective makes ‘inner experience’ seem far less capricious, or dependent on graces. States are locations in an inner landscape that are every bit as real and present as our current state of perception, and do not depend in any way upon our belief system.
It was Don Juan’s contention, so Castaneda tells us, that profound memories are laid down in positions of the ‘assemblage point’. They are stored in the ‘places’ our assemblage point had moved to when the events happened. And when it moves elsewhere they become inaccessible to our new state of consciousness (or, at least, accessible only with the greatest difficulty). This view makes sense of the experience that events happening in ‘heightened awareness’ cannot be recalled in our everyday consciousness (or, at least, cannot easily be recalled in everyday consciousness). But it also helps us understand that feeling we all seem to have that there is an elusive, indefinable something we seem to have forgotten. And it explains why the memory of so much early childhood experience is now unavailable to us. It’s not that it is not there, just that the ‘places’ we inhabited in our pre-verbal awareness remain unvisited by our adult consciousness.
“Don Juan, with extreme patience, pointed out that reason is only a by-product of the habitual position of the assemblage point; therefore, knowing what is going on, being of sound mind, having our feet on the ground — sources of great pride to us and assumed to be a natural consequence of our worth — are merely the result of the fixation of the assemblage point on its habitual place. The more rigid and stationary it is, the greater our confidence in ourselves, the greater our feeling of knowing the world, of being able to predict.
“He added that what dreaming does is give us the fluidity to enter into other worlds by destroying our sense of knowing this world. He called dreaming a journey of unthinkable dimensions, a journey that, after making us perceive everything we can humanly perceive, makes the assemblage point jump outside the human domain and perceive the inconceivable.”
[Carlos Castaneda, The Art of Dreaming, 1993.]
What fixes the assemblage point, Castaneda tells us (again using one of his characteristically poetic phrases) is ‘the mirror of self-reflection’. Each position of the assemblage point constellates the experience of pure energy as a particular description of the world. As we gaze at the world thus constellated — and, most particularly, tell ourselves what our perceptions mean — we solidify that particular description of the world. It is the way we use this description to reinforce our sense of self-importance and self-pity which fixates our awareness on that particular constellation, and makes us feel it is the only reality.
There, in a nutshell, is the reason — poorly understood today— for every mystical tradition’s deprecation of ‘the ego’. What takes on a quasi-moral character in other forms of spirituality is revealed, in Castaneda’s spare and unsentimental descriptions, as a functional impediment to the development of consciousness. Address the problem of self-reflection and we can recover the fluidity of movement of the assemblage point.
And there are a myriad places the assemblage point can move to. One of the biggest implications of this is that the person we consider ourselves to be is merely one out of many possible versions of ourselves (each of which is equally ‘authentically us’). Not just that, but the person we have settled upon being, with our ‘values’ and preferences, is arbitrary and accidental—hardly an intentional work of art; more a chaotic bricolage.
If our assemblage points had landed differently, we would have assembled our lives completely differently. We would have a different outlook, different priorities, different ways of presenting ourselves to the world. Perhaps not even human ways (Castaneda famously suggests that a human being with a knowledge of how to move, and hold, the assemblage point in different places can transform into a crow, an owl, an eagle — or even something unimaginable—a most improbable suggestion to our modern sensibilities that is, nonetheless, believed by almost every traditional culture.)
There are indications of such experiences in the literature of other cultures, but they are often couched in religious idioms which make it difficult for us to understand them in any other way.
Castaneda describes how the followers of his ‘lineage’ had been shown particular positions of the assemblage point, along with the specific requirements for benefiting from each:
“‘Every grand shift has different inner workings,’ he continued, “which modern sorcerers could learn if they knew how to fixate the assemblage point long enough at any grand shift. Only the sorcerers of ancient times had the specific knowledge required to do this.’”
[Carlos Castaneda, The Art of Dreaming, 1993.]
The aim of all his teachers’ teaching, Castaneda tells us, is the conscious movement and consolidation of the assemblage point in different locations.
After so many years my own experiences promted me to revisit Castaneda’s works, which for the first time I’ve read through successively in the order in which they were written. And this has been a most extraordinary experience. Indeed, despite thinking I was familiar with these books (some of which, like Journey to Ixtlan, I have read many times) during this re-reading I frequently felt I was encountering them for the first time. It was as if they weren’t the same books. And what comes across from them now, more than anything else, is the clarity, power and magnificence of Don Juan‘s teaching. Against the dreary versions of modern ‘identity’ — liberal, conservative, religious, secular, corporate or New Age — it posits a way of living without excuses and justifications, without blame and buck-passing, without sentimentality and wishful-thinking. It’s a way of living which brings us face-to-face with the sheer exhilaration of being alive in a mysterious, infinite, splendorous existence.
In words that Castaneda ascribes to Doña Florinda, one of Don Juan’s female cohorts, in The Eagle’s Gift:
“The first precept of the rule is that everything that surrounds us is an unfathomable mystery.
“The second precept of the rule is that we must try to unravel these mysteries, but without ever hoping to accomplish this.
“The third, that a warrior, aware of the unfathomable mystery that surrounds him and aware of his duty to try to unravel it, takes his rightful place among mysteries and regards himself as one. Consequently, for a warrior there is no end to the mystery of being, whether being means being a pebble, or an ant, or oneself. That is a warrior’s humbleness. One is equal to everything.”