Storm, Part Two
I acknowledge that I can be a difficult person, but I do not think I am entirely unreasonable. It just seemed to me that I was being asked to surrender to something I could neither see nor understand nor even really visualize. Surrender.
Orlando just sat there in the mirror while I ranted, watching me the way a scientist might observe some quaint new species of bug. I couldn't help remembering when he was in manifestation, when he had sat with us in his living room one rainy evening and changed the course of my life forever. This seemed every bit as intense and potentially every bit as life-altering. I realized I was on the verge of deteriorating into a gale of tears despite the fact that I don't cry easily and could not have said what had really brought me to that state.
"Don Juan didn't teach Carlos a thing," Orlando said without pity for my plight. "What the old man did, he did for himself. There's no altruism on the warrior's path, so if you're expecting to make a difference in someone else's life, you're deluding yourself with self-importance on a canvas of folly."
Yes, I already knew that. But having it laid out for me in black and white by my own ruthless double seemed to bring it into sharper focus. A new clarity seemed to insert itself inside my mind, and I actually felt a strange calm come over me. In all the years I have done my forums, in all the writing of my books and essays and journals... not one bit of it has been done with any idea of "helping others". It's about my own assimilation - helping myself to better grasp the cohesion of my own foundation. Creating the self through the machinations of the double Dreaming me. And yet, when I tried to picture how this new level of teaching/learning might look, I felt an uncharacteristic sinking in the pit of my stomach.
"Guess I'm just not a people person, Orlando," I said truthfully, watching the windows starting to fog from the warmth of my breath. "The problem with people is that they want their illusions. They want to be coddled. They want my knowledge, but they want me to water it down and make it compatible with their indulgences and their dependencies. They want me to tell them it's okay to live like a fragmented asshole and yet call themselves a warrior." I thought of an old friend and why that friendship had finally ended. And then I suddenly knew what was really stopping me. The words came out of my mouth almost as a whisper. "They want me to validate their weaknesses, and when I can't do that, they usually just want to crucify me."
"And...?" Orlando prompted.
"It has to be real," I replied. "I mean - if don Juan had told Carlos it would be perfectly okay to go back to Los Angeles and go right on living the same life he always had, it would have been a case of one lie substantiating and facilitating an entire life of lies. It would have made don Juan himself nothing more than a yes-man to Carlos's dependencies."
But then Orlando turned the puzzle upside down and somehow brought all the tumblers into a new and previously unrecognized alignment. "Do you think that was a lesson Carlos had to learn, or was it a test of impeccability don Juan himself needed to experience?"
In the void between the worlds, I suddenly found myself standing face to face with Orlando, as if we had both been transported there by some magical means impossible to describe. Second attention. The bridge between the here and the hereafter. The nagual man and the nagual woman, the sorcerer and her double... the dreamer and the dreamed. It is a world beyond all words. It is a space-time beyond all space, outside of time. It is the one place where self and double can come together in defiance of don Juan's admonition that the sorcerer who finds herself face to face with her double is a dead sorcerer. Here, such rules have no meaning.
"Truth comes in many forms," Orlando said, though his lips never moved and his words were experienced directly in my heart, like some vibration on a level beyond language. "There are universal truths. There are personal truths within each individual. And there are the transient truths of the corporeal world."
I looked at Orlando and simply Knew one of those universal truths. The warrior creates the double and the double creates the warrior. At times, it may be beautiful, and at other times it may be downright ugly. I have come to believe after years of study & experience that don Juan is Carlos's double, whether Carlos himself ever knew it or not. And I suspect strongly that he did. It gave me a new empathy for Orlando's position in all of this vast equation, for I have no doubt that I am every bit as much of a pill to him as Carlos ever was to don Juan.
He laughed as if hearing my thoughts out loud. "This is what you created me to do," he reminded me - a familiar & oft-repeated phrase usually dragged out of storage for times when he has leaned on me and I have resisted the weight of his demands. "You placed me outside of time, beyond the ability of myself to undo, so that together we might embrace the totality of the singularity of consciousness." He paused, then added softly, "I have lived a thousand lifetimes or more, but you are the source of them all."
It wasn't just some sentimental clap-trap, but seemed to underscore what I have seen with regard to the double for years. Though the double may appear almost omnipotent at times, the source of its power comes directly from the Intent and the Will of the mortal warrior. In our fragile, humanform existence, we are still the most powerful beings in the universe.
The feelings that came over me as I pondered those words are indescribable. It all seemed to make some kind of cosmic sense, even if it was all but incomprehensible in the world of ordinary awareness.
"Only when the apprentice asks a question does the teacher have reason to consider the answer, which only leads to the next question for the teacher," Orlando said, while entire galaxies and vast oceans of awareness played out on the canvas of possibility spread out all around us. "Carlos gave purpose to don Juan just as don Juan gave purpose to Carlos. That is simply how the lineage of Knowledge functions. You will learn far more through teaching than you will ever learn as an apprentice."
Something in those words held a note of almost ominous, unspoken finality...
***
Though the conversation with Orlando continued for quite some time beyond what I have described above, it had moved into a trans-linguistic realm that can only be called a "download" of information directly from the Source. I have some sense of it - swirling phrases attempting to bring the experience forward into ordinary awareness - but as of this writing, I am left with a sense of Knowing at the deepest levels of awareness that it is time for me to make some major changes in my life, and perhaps even in my path. "Take it to the next level." That's one of those phrases, but only one of them. "Just do it." (So he STILL sounds like a Nike commercial sometimes). "Don't overcomplicate the process." "Spirit will guide, intent will provide."
Putting the pieces of the puzzle together may take awhile, or maybe each piece is precisely the same as all the others and requires no assembly. Just do it.
I returned to the faire site about an hour later, and though the sun had come out, it was a mixed blessing, since now the snow was melting and the water & mud inside the booth were up to our ankles in spots. How or why customers braved such conditions is entirely beyond me, but many didn't seem to notice. Others seemed to think they were being helpful in pointing to the river and saying, "Did you know there's water in your booth?"
The remainder of that day passed in a rather painful state of numbness. The sky had cleared for awhile, but by the time we closed for the evening around 8 p.m., a new cell of the storm was moving in from the west. It snowed most of the night, though I had surrendered to at least one aspect of it all. If the booth collapsed and the business was forfeit, I was beyond caring. Not defeat or depression, but a sense of real detachment. It had become oddly amusing, yet also undeniably, darkly sinister as well. It was no coincidence.
Throughout the day on Sunday, it rained or snowed intermittently, but still people came. Strangely amazing. During the pack-down, the rain actually stopped, at least long enough to get the majority of stuff back in the trailer. Literally every cloth or canvas item was soaked through and drenched in mud, so that by the time I leaned my full weight on the trailer door to shut it, a steady drip-drip-drip was leaking through the floorboards to form a testament to the weekend on the cracked asphalt.
That's when it abruptly began to sleet. Before we could get back inside the motorhome, we were once again soaked through to the bone, and out of dry clothes. The finicky heater wasn't working, nor was the microwave, so it was cold sandwiches and tea, while we wrapped ourselves in blankets. But at least we were inside and I was grateful for that much. It could have been worse - a LOT worse. Knowing that somehow made it just a bit easier to bear.
We hadn't made the amount of money we needed to make at the show due to the ungodly weather, but at least the worst was over. Or at least that's what I was hoping. We remained in the parking lot that night while the storm continued to pound at the roof. By morning, the sky had finally started to clear and at last we could begin the long journey home.
***
I drove while Wendy slept, and the time alone on the road gave me an opportunity to think, to assimilate the events of the weekend. There is a lot I haven't said. Hard to imagine, I know, after the length of this missive. Other little foibles that all added to the general sense of futility I had begun to feel despite the revelations Orlando had facilitated. Things like... just when we finally got to sleep Saturday evening, the carbon monoxide detector in the bedroom went off like a shrill, angry faerie, even though nothing whatsoever is wrong with the unit. Other little things... like a rude customer who intentionally threw a skirt in the mud for the sake of the drama... and didn't bother to pay for it.
I tried to find the "good" in it and frankly couldn't see much of it at that moment, even though it was all around me. Perhaps the greatest good of it all is Orlando himself - the relationship I have with my double which no one and nothing can take from me. Reading other forums at times, it occurs to me that many so-called self-proclaimed "advanced" warriors have very little real experience with their double, yet they will be the first to criticize or even ridicule my website, this forum, or even myself personally. That always makes me smile - the peculiar manifestations of personal insecurity. And there's been a lot of it lately - downright hateful emails from total strangers, posts in the pre-moderation folder here at TSR telling me how wrong I am or how the forum is boring or I'm not a good leader blah blah blah.
I'm not a good leader, nor would I want to be. Leading implies that there are those who are following, and anyone who would follow me is not walking their own path. So again I came back to the idea of folly - and how the entire idea of teaching is a double-edged sword that must be handled with utmost caution & respect. What I am capable of doing as a nagual woman is not leading, but simply offering guidance, sharing tales of power and tales of dis-empowerment, and letting other warriors decide what is helpful to them and what isn't. Ultimately, it all goes back to what I was saying at the beginning of this tome: don Juan could only give Carlos the truths don Juan had learned. It was then up to Carlos to see how those puzzle pieces would fit in the context of his own life.
On the other hand, I can't help seeing that most people - even most warriors - don't really want to change. They just want the comforting succor of their existing belief systems. Granted, that is a broad generalization, and it is up to each of us to look at our own heart and decide to what extent it applies in our own lives. I am far from perfect, and have my own comfort zones that I've been protecting for awhile - comfort zones which have more or less been shattered over the course of the past few weeks. That, too, is a function of the double - though, again, most warriors choose not to see that, or choose to attribute it to "random chance", when I have truly come to see that we can't have it both ways. We create our own reality, and the double is often if not always the enforcer and manifestor of our creations.
***
So at long last, we are back at home, and though I am STILL doing massive loads of laundry in the clean-up effort, at least I can say it was an interesting and enlightening journey - albeit a dark enlightenment in most regards.
What have I learned? What have I concluded? Nothing definitive, just some passing thoughts as the puzzle continues to assimilate. As I was writing the previous installment to this tome, I found myself gazing out toward the mountains in the distance, heavily-laden with snow in the aftermath of a storm that covered the entire state of California. I was told by the house sitter that we had nearly 6" here in Yucca Valley - rare, at the very least. At any rate, I found myself sitting here at my desk in a light state of gnosis, pondering the strange & hateful emails & troll posts of late (none of which ever made it onto the forum, and with good reason), and one of those wise little voices from the ether said something that seems to make a great deal of sense.
"There's a big difference between a leader and a teacher."
Along with the statement came another download of images & accompanying data which left me gazing at a mass of data which is more like word pictures. A "leader" is like a dictator in a lot of ways - particularly if one is a bad leader. I have never aspired to lead anyone anywhere, because ultimately I then become responsible for them on some level, and that is a state potentially debilitating to both parties. Debilitating to the leader for having to carry another's weight. Debilitating to the follower for being enabled to remain passive. Leaders tend to look over their shoulder all too often to see who is following, and in doing so, often end up tripping over their own feet by paying more attention to their followers than to the path ahead of them.
No, I have never wanted to be a leader.
A good teacher, on the other hand, is someone who offers the benefit of her experience in the hopes that someone else might be able to assimilate that experience into the foundation of their own knowledge. Teachers teach us how to read, but spirit guides us in what we create with the words. Teachers give us the tools, but what we build with them is entirely up to us - whether an outhouse or a mansion, and with full understanding that both are entirely necessary, depending on where one is standing.
Perhaps one of the things that has been troubling me as I prepare for this new phase of my own journey is the Knowledge that too many people are too comfortable being followers, and there are not nearly enough good teachers with the ability to actually facilitate someone turning the corner from "follower" to self-reliant seeker. In our culture, it is simply easier for most folks to call themselves by some label (Christian, Pagan, Buddhist, Toltec) than it is to take all the pieces of all the little puzzles and bring them together in a mosaic that is uniquely Oneself. One. Self. But that's what a good teacher can show us. Eventually the student becomes the master (not of others but of herself), and the lineage continues like climbing a rope hand over hand.
All I know is that I keepcoming back to Orlando's transformative words spoken in the midst of the storm. "Don Juan didn't teach Carlos a thing. What the old man did, he did for himself. There's no altruism on the warrior's path, so if you're expecting to make a difference in someone else's life, you're deluding yourself with self-importance on a canvas of folly." And, most of all: "Do you think that was a lesson Carlos had to learn, or was it a test of impeccability don Juan himself needed to experience?"
In the strange little puzzle that is my life, I have come to see that what I do next with this path has to be for myself and myself alone. It. Has. To. Be. Real. And even though it always has been since the moment I committed to it almost 14 years ago, I find that I am now in the position of needing to surrender yet again to the nagual - to the unknowable force that moves through a warrior's life like a dark, cold wind - entirely impersonal, yet at the same time luring the warrior toward her own appointment with Destiny.
I do not know yet precisely what I will Intend for the future, and yet that Intent is already moving forward in ways that are clearly affecting me even when I cannot see the eventual outcome. That, also, is a function of the double working outside of Time. For now, I am planning to offer my first workshop/seminar later this year, most likely in the Palm Springs area, or perhaps even here in the high desert. Details will appear on the website as they become available. If you think you might want to attend, please let me know early on so I can reserve space for you, since it is most likely going to be limited to no more than 10-20 participants
So for now, I am still sorting through the strange series of events, attempting to move forward in an assertive manner rather than waiting for some elusive answer to manifest. As Orlando also reminded me - we can never really find the meaning of our lives, but we can create it. Here at The Shaman's Rattle, we tend to look at the Toltec path and marvel at the wonders don Juan facilitated in the life of Carlos Castaneda. But after this weekend, I find myself considering it from a slightly different angle. Would don Juan have been all that he was if Carlos had never come along?
We do it for ourselves, but sometimes others may be profound catalysts for change and growth on our own solitary journey.
Time will tell.
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