What do I know? I’m in a streamlined experience with environments and other conscious agents. There is a connection, a line of communication between my inner and outer world. The feelings I have of others are reflections of how I feel about myself. My emotions are a guiding force within my self-exploration—intense reactions towards others is an outcry to look within and process.
I am never angry at someone else, really. I’m angry in reaction to something else. “Something” within me. I’m looking at people as separate from me, but if I were to believe them to be with me, as me, I might perceive a way to freedom.
Freedom from what? The known. All the data of complex, sensorial experience-blending that turns me into a thinking machine. I make myself believe in anything, and everything. And that belief is power. A power that is always moving me to act and react to the world.
“The known” is ordinary reality, filled with man-made systems and codes that I have woven into my sense of self. The unknown is non-ordinary reality, a layer of experience inaccessible to me while I’m tied-in to the known. The seeking of liberation is the natural process of expanding my awareness to see and engage with more of this reality, to make the unknown known.
And would you look at the times! I am graced with a reality that incessantly nudges me to contemplation and reflection. It seems like so much is on the verge of collapse. Desperation. Confusion. It’s all motivating the growth of my awareness, attracting the dark unknown to the light.
It’s all here for me (us!), at exactly the right time. I seek liberation from what I know so that the unknown can saturate my life. That can only happen when all attachments dissolve into the emptiness of my being. The mysteries hidden in the dark will be revealed when I…
Liberate from the known to attract the unknown.
eso-excerpt
A sample of secret knowledge.
This week we’re jumping into The Second Ring of Power, the fifth of eight books in Carlos Casteneda’s exploration of Toltec knowledge-seeking with Don Juan and other seers.
In Chapter 6, The Second Attention, we hear from La Gorda, another apprentice of Don Juan, as she reminds Castaneda about the seemingly pure but arbitrary nature of “helping others.”
“You behaved like a man in the street. The Nagual [Don Juan] had taught us all to be warriors. He said that a warrior has no compassion for anyone. For him, to have compassion meant that you wished the other person to be like you, to be in your shoes, and you lent a hand just for that purpose. You did that to Pablito. The hardest thing in the world is for a warrior to let others be. When I was fat I worried because Lidia and Josefina did not eat enough. I was afraid that they would get ill and die from not eating. I did my utmost to fatten them and I meant only the best. The impeccability of a warrior is to let them be and to support them in what they are. That means, of course, that you trust them to be impeccable warriors themselves."
“But what if they are not impeccable warriors?” I said.
“Then it’s your duty to be impeccable yourself and not say a word,” she replied. “The Nagual said that only a sorcerer who sees and is formless can afford to help anyone. That’s why he helped us and made us what we are. You don’t think that you can go around picking people up off the street to help them, do you?”
Don Juan had already put me face to face with the dilemma that I could not help my fellow beings in any way. In fact, to his understanding, every effort to help on our part was an arbitrary act guided by our own self-interest alone.
One day when I was with him in the city, I picked up a snail that was in the middle of the sidewalk and tucked it safely under some vines. I was sure that if I had left it in the middle of the sidewalk, people would sooner or later have stepped on it. I thought that by moving it to a safe place I had saved it.
Don Juan pointed out that my assumption was a careless one, because I had not taken into consideration two important possibilities. One was that the snail might have been escaping a sure death by poison under the leaves of the vine, and the other possibility was that the snail had enough personal power to cross the sidewalk. By interfering I had not saved the snail but only made it lose whatever it had so painfully gained.
I wanted, of course, to put the snail back where I had found it, but he did not let me. He said that it was the snail’s fate that an idiot crossed its path and made it lose its momentum. If I left it where I had put it, it might be able to again gather enough power to go wherever it was going.
comment-wise
Strangers sharing wise, heartfelt and relevant words.
substack love
My reading rec for a piece written by another writer on substack
The title of Wunkerful’s substack really says it all. In the above post we get an inside look into a person who is seeking and yearning for truth/understanding/clarity, but is befuddled by the process.
We are all LOST, really, but we still create and express and grok and analyze our way forward. Wunk expresses his sensitive and poetic nature to take readers along with him through “the mess” of living in society while expressing Geoff’s personal journey, his human counterpart’s struggle with the inner challenges of thinking.
Check it out! Wunkerful has been writing for a bit on substack so be sure to peruse One Who Walks the Path to Befuddlement!
Thank you for reading!
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