Carlos Castaneda

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The Active Side of Infinity – The Measurements of Cognition

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Active side of Infinity / By / 20 minutes of reading

In this chapter, Castaneda explores the clash between two cognitive worlds: the academic world of Professor Lorca and the sorcerers’ world of don Juan. He becomes an admirer of Professor Lorca, a brilliant academic who lectures on the insular nature of different cognitive systems. Don Juan cautions him against admiring from afar and urges him to “test” the professor to see if he lives as a “being who is going to die,” arguing that this acceptance is the only way to have a true grip on the world. Professor Lorca, though intellectually brilliant, proposes a scientific study to measure and quantify the cognition of shamans. Don Juan finds this laughable, explaining that sorcerers’ cognition—based on perceiving energy directly—is experiential and cannot be measured by the tools of the everyday world. He concludes that the professor is an “immortal scientist” who, by not truly accepting his own mortality, cannot grasp the sorcerers’ path. Don Juan uses the metaphor of a Roman slave whispering “all glory is fleeting” to a victorious general, stating that for a sorcerer, death is that infallible advisor.

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The Active Side of Infinity – Saying Thank You

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Active side of Infinity / By / 19 minutes of reading

In this chapter, don Juan assigns Castaneda a final task before he can be “swallowed by infinity”: to atone for his personal indebtedness, he must find two women from his past, Patricia Turner and Sandra Flanagan, and give each a gift that will leave him penniless. Castaneda recounts his chaotic and emotionally devastating three-way relationship with them, which ended with all three fleeing from each other. After hiring a private investigator, he finds them both in New York. He meets with each woman, and in emotional reunions, he fulfills his task by buying Patricia a mink coat and Sandra a station wagon. However, instead of feeling liberated, he is overwhelmed by a renewed sense of loss and self-pity. When he reports this to don Juan, he is told to vanquish his self-pity. Castaneda then has a final realization: the true purpose of the task was not for his personal feelings, but to perform an act of magic in the spirit of a warrior-traveler—saying thank you and good-bye by storing the memory of what he loved in his silence.

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The Active Side of Infinity – Beyond Syntax: The Usher

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Active side of Infinity / By / 31 minutes of reading

In this chapter, don Juan introduces Castaneda to the sorcery technique of “the recapitulation”—a formal, meticulous recounting of one’s entire life in order to create a “space” for new knowledge. He explains the sorcerers’ view of the universe, where perception is assembled at the “assemblage point” as energy filaments from the “dark sea of awareness” are interpreted. The goal of the recapitulation is to offer one’s life experiences back to this cosmic awareness at the moment of death, thus saving one’s life force. To begin this process, don Juan tells Castaneda he must first find an “usher,” a single, powerfully clear memory that will illuminate all others. Left to the task, Castaneda vividly recalls a formative event from his childhood: being a billiards prodigy secretly employed by a notorious gambler, Falelo Quiroga. This arrangement culminates in Quiroga threateningly demanding that Castaneda throw a high-stakes game. Before Castaneda is forced to choose, his family moves away, leaving the dilemma unresolved. Don Juan explains this memory is the perfect usher, as it encapsulates the central, unresolved conflict of Castaneda’s life: being trapped between the desire to embrace infinity and the simultaneous urge to run away from it.

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The Active Side of Infinity – The Interplay of Energy On The Horizon

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Active side of Infinity / By / 28 minutes of reading

In this final chapter, Castaneda describes the culmination of his recapitulation. The initial “usher” memory has unlocked an unstoppable and maddeningly clear flow of recollections, each one relived with an intensity greater than the original experience. He recounts traumatic memories of a near-fatal fall from a scaffold and a terrifying encounter with a dog, realizing he was literally re-experiencing them and “jumping” through time. Don Juan explains this is his “true mind” emerging and that a “foreign installation” is collapsing, a process that pulls sorcerers “out of their syntax.” Later, a series of vivid recollections reveals Castaneda’s deeply ingrained, lifelong need to control everyone around him. One night, this process climaxes as he experiences the “interplay of energy on the horizon” that don Juan had described: a pomegranate-red dot explodes into unreadable text and garbled voices. Don Juan confirms this was infinity’s “takeover” and tells him he must now learn to “read energy” directly, a perception that is an event “beyond the syntax of our language.”

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The Active Side of Infinity – Journeys Through the Dark Sea Of Awareness

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Active side of Infinity / By / 19 minutes of reading

In this chapter, don Juan clarifies that Castaneda’s previous “dream-fantasy” of meeting him in town was, in sorcery terms, a real “journey through the dark sea of awareness,” made possible by his accrued inner silence. He distinguishes this from “dreaming,” which he redefines as the art of deliberately displacing the assemblage point to perceive other worlds. After Castaneda recounts a memory of “seeing” a sleeping person’s assemblage point shift, don Juan prompts him to undertake a deliberate journey. From a state of inner silence, Castaneda finds himself transported with don Juan to a hostile Yaqui town where he can suddenly understand their language, not word by word, but in patterns of thought. He then finds himself in another town, where he perceives people not as luminous eggs, but as strange, insectlike cores of geometric shapes with a stringlike filament on top. After these inexplicable journeys, don Juan explains that this is what inner silence does: it breaks the continuity of time and allows one to travel through the dark sea of awareness, guided by the force of intent.

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The Tenant – The Art of Dreaming

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Art of Dreaming / By / 32 minutes of reading

In this chapter, don Juan Matus informs Carlos Castaneda that his formal instruction in dreaming is over, but he must outline the fourth gate of dreaming. He takes Castaneda to a town in southern Mexico for a final lesson, which is to be delivered by a mysterious visitor. This visitor is revealed to be the “tenant,” an ancient sorcerer also known as the death defier. Castaneda is overcome with panic and revulsion when he discovers the tenant, who he had previously met as a man, is now a woman. Don Juan explains that for such a powerful sorcerer, gender is a matter of choice, achieved by shifting the assemblage point. Castaneda must now face the tenant alone to make a decision about accepting or rejecting the tenant’s “gifts of power,” a choice that every nagual in their lineage has had to make.

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The Woman in the Church – The Art of Dreaming

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Art of Dreaming / By / 33 minutes of reading

After being left by don Juan, Carlos Castaneda kneels in the church next to the death defier, an ancient sorcerer who appears as a woman. Initially terrified, he is mesmerized by her voice and presence. He offers her his energy freely but refuses her obligatory “gifts of power.” The woman then pulls him into the second attention, revealing the church and town as they existed in a different time, a product of her own intent. She explains the sorcerers’ art of creating veritable realms in dreaming through visualization and the technique of “twin positions.” Castaneda explores this tangible dream world with her, learning that only she generates energy within it. The experience culminates in a terrifying realization that their current reality might also be a shared dream, causing him to lose consciousness in a spinning descent into blackness.

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Flying on the Wings of Intent – The Art of Dreaming

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Art of Dreaming / By / 31 minutes of reading

After a prolonged encounter with the death defier, Carlos Castaneda awakens to find his fellow apprentice, Carol Tiggs, caring for him. Disoriented and partially paralyzed, he learns from her that he is in a hotel after being found naked near the church. Carol, displaying a new lucidity, explains that they are both intending in the second attention, a gift from the death defier that allows them to dream themselves into another time. Castaneda is consumed by affection for her but is soon pulled into a vortex. He later awakens alone and discovers from a distraught don Juan that he has been missing for nine days and that the real Carol Tiggs was never there. Don Juan deduces that the death defier used her own energy and Castaneda’s to create a “dream Carol” of pure intent, and that both the real Carol and the death defier have now merged and escaped this world, flying on the “wings of intent”—an abstract gift and a fate now shared with Castaneda.

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Author’s Note – The Art of Dreaming

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Art of Dreaming / By / 8 minutes of reading

In this introductory note, Carlos Castaneda clarifies his use of the term “sorcery” to describe the teachings of his mentor, don Juan Matus, distinguishing it from conventional definitions. He explains that for don Juan, sorcery is about manipulating perception to access other real worlds, a practice called “the art of dreaming.” Castaneda recounts his own experiences learning this art, his interactions with two distinct groups of apprentices, and the challenges of reconciling his experiences in the “second attention” with everyday reality. He states that the purpose of this book is to rearrange and present don Juan’s lessons on dreaming in a linear fashion, made possible by years of dedicated practice, and to ultimately explain the legacy don Juan left to his final students as an act of gratitude.

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Sorcerers of antiquity: an introduction – The Art of Dreaming

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Art of Dreaming / By / 28 minutes of reading

In this chapter, Carlos Castaneda recounts don Juan’s explanation of the foundational principles of sorcery, established by brilliant but obsessive “sorcerers of antiquity.” Don Juan contrasts their focus on concrete power with modern sorcerers’ search for abstract freedom. The core discovery of the ancients was the ability to perceive energy directly, which they called “seeing.” This led to the identification of the human energy form as a “luminous egg” and its crucial feature: the “assemblage point,” a spot of brilliance that assembles filaments of universal energy into our perception of the world. Castaneda learns that displacing this point—either as a “shift” within the luminous egg or a “movement” outside of it—is the key to perceiving other worlds and is the basis for the “second attention” and the art of “dreaming,” which is defined as the willful displacement of the assemblage point during sleep.

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