The Magic of the Cities.

Zen promotes the rediscovery of the obvious, which is so often lost in its familiarity and simplicity. It sees the miraculous in the common and magic in our everyday surroundings. When we are not rushed, and our minds are unclouded by conceptualizations, a veil will sometimes drop, introducing the viewer to a world unseen since childhood. ~ John Greer

Showing posts with label The Teachings of Don Juan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Teachings of Don Juan. Show all posts

Saturday, September 12, 2015

The Magician


THE Mexican border is a great divide. Below it, the accumulated structures of Western "rationality" waver and plunge. The familiar shapes of society - landlord and peasant, priest and politician - are laid over a stranger ground, the occult Mexico, with its brujos and carismaticos, its sorcerers and diviners. Some of their practices go back 2,000 and 3,000 years to the peyote and mushroom and morning glory cults of the ancient Aztecs and Toltecs. Four centuries of Catholic repression in the name of faith and reason have reduced the old ways to a subculture, ridiculed and persecuted. Yet in a country of 53 million, where many village marketplaces have their sellers of curative herbs, peyote buttons or dried hummingbirds, the sorcerer's world is still tenacious. Its cults have long been a matter of interest to anthropologists. But five years ago, it could hardly have been guessed that a master's thesis on this recondite subject, published under the conservative imprint of the University of California Press, would become one of the bestselling books of the early '70s.
Time Magazine. March 5th, 1973.


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Saturday, March 22, 2014

Light Moments

Empire State Building From The School of Visual Arts. New York City
Rome
Seine. Paris
Roma Borough. Mexico City
Javier Marin, sculpture.
Condesa Borough. Mexico City

Self-portrait
Guanajuato
Central Park. NYC
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. NYC
NYC Streets

The world around us is very mysterious.
It doesn't yield its secrets easily.
Now we are concerned with losing self-importance.
As long as you feel that you are the most important thing in the world,
You cannot really appreciate the world around you.
You are like a horse with blinders,
All you see is yourself apart from everything else.
Don Juan


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Thursday, April 4, 2013

Cuernavaca Duo


Borda Gardens
Brady Museum

In the Art of Dreaming Don Juan tells Carlos,
"… most of our energy goes into upholding our importance…
If we were capable of losing some of that importance, two extraordinary things would happen to us. 
One, we would free our energy from trying to maintain the illusory idea of our grandeur; and two
we would provide ourselves with enough energy to ...
Catch a glimpse of the actual grandeur of the Universe."
Carlos Castaneda


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Saturday, October 8, 2011

Waves of Love

From Carlos Castaneda's Journey to Ixtlan

People tell us from the time we are born that the world is such and such
and so and so, and naturally we have no choice but to see the world
the way people have been telling us it is.

Seeing happens only when one sneaks between the worlds;
The world of ordinary people and The world of sorcerers.
The real thing is when the body realizes that it can see.

Only then is one capable of knowing that the world we look at every day
is only a description.
My intent has been to show you that.

Only as a warrior can one survive the path of knowledge,
Because the art of a warrior
is to balance, the terror of being a man with the wonder of being a man.


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Thursday, November 13, 2008

Nagual


Nagual (pronounced nah-wa'hl) is a term used in the books by Carlos Castaneda to describe a person who is able to lead people to new areas of consciousness. Carlos Castaneda's guide, Don Juan Matus, often referred to himself as the Nagual for his "party of warriors". Nagual is considered by Castaneda's followers to be related to Eastern concepts of Tao, meditation, or infinity. In Castaneda's books, one reference to the meaning of nagual is: "... Turn everything into what it really is: the abstract, the spirit, the nagual."

In the works of Carlos Castaneda reality is seen as multi-dimensional or multi-faceted. Usually it is said that a person is only able to see a certain limited aspect of the multi-faceted reality during any given experience. The Nagual is considered an alternate "unknown" side or dimension of reality, as opposed to the Tonal, which can be considered the everyday "known" dimension of reality. It has also been said that the Nagual is all that is, and that it condenses to form what is called the Tonal. The Nagual and the Tonal as dual aspects of reality and being are perceived either through the First Attention, where we experience the Tonal, or the Second Attention where we experience the Nagual. To Castaneda the Tonal is often associated with the masculine aspect of the universe and the Nagual to the feminine. The Tonal can roughly be linked to the concept of Ego, the conscious mind, and subconscious minds.

Inner silence is a key technique for Nagualism as noted in The Active Side Of Infinity, by Castaneda: "Inner silence works from the moment you begin to accrue it. The desired result is what the old sorcerers called stopping the world, the moment when everything around us ceases to be what it's been. It is this moment when man the slave becomes man the free being, capable of feats of perception that defy our linear imagination." Energetically speaking: The goal is to dislodge one's assemblage point from where this reality is perceived. One's incessant internal dialogue is what keeps the assemblage point stuck there. Once Inner Silence is achieved and mastered, one can assemble different realities by moving one's assemblage point.

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