Living Turned Inside Out
The Transcendent, the Mundane, & the Sorcerer’s Art of Lying
“The word of a Magus is always a falsehood. For it is a creative word; there would be no object in uttering it if it merely stated an existing fact in nature. The task of a Magus is to make his word, the expression of his will, come true. It is the most formidable labour that the mind can conceive.” Aleister Crowley, Confessions
Don Juan Matus is real! The fact there is no photographic or auditory evidence of him is only proof of his magical reality! Ditto with NHI & UAPs—advanced nonhuman intelligence obviously knows how to avoid being photographed! Any evidence we obtain of such things is only what they have allowed us to get.
Right? Well, not exactly. But this is complicated. As Oscar Wilde quipped, the truth is rarely pure and never simple.
Look at Jesus Christ. His life, we are told, was a spiritual life with a historical basis. The historical basis is necessary, just as it is in the accounts of Castaneda. It is needed to ground the transcendental reality in our own experience, for it to be something we can conceive of and think about, that we can connect to and believe in, in a literal fashion.
Physical, ordinary, historical reality is the frame which contains images of the transcendental. The transcendental image then becomes a doorway—or at least a window—onto the transcendental itself. But it’s not, and can never be, the “thing” it is framing.
The UFO cannot ever land on the White House lawn, and the occupants cannot walk among us, without the otherworldly becoming worldly. An earthbound ET is no longer an ET.
“Did I Really Fly?” (Changing Images of God)
What people dream of and long for is to see the element of the transcendental enter into their mundane reality and transform it. The problem is that mundane reality is the dominant reality; it is the means of construction of reality. Better said, the reality that is dominant (established) determines the means by which we construct reality.
Our current dominant reality is the mundane (materialist) one that requires physical proof, evidence, and firm historical basis, for all claims of the transcendental. That bias is what keeps the mundane dominant, and the dominant mundane. Elements that are anomalies within a mundane worldview provide windows, openings, onto an imagined, imaginary, or imaginal transcendental realm. But they do so only insofar as they are not subject to the laws of ordinary mundane reality-construction.
Paradox and conundrum and double-bind.
By pointing to a separate reality, the anomalous and potentially transcendental image promises to provide the means by which we hope to construct a separate reality. In the first two Castaneda books, “power plants” were the way; as such, they provided a mundane object with transcendental properties, a literal kind of gateway from the physical, to the supposedly spiritual realms.
“Did I really fly, don Juan?” It depends on what your criteria are based.
But drugs had only a limited appeal; it was the end of the sixties, and subtler promises had to be imagined, conjured. The drugs were only a tool to break the hold of the spell of consensus, mundane reality. When the world maintained by our internal dialogue stopped, Castaneda’s third book promised, a whole new world emerged into perception. Coyotes talked to us.
The promise is this: “Believe in Jesus’ name, and you will be saved,” only now it is done up inside a psychedelic dreamcoat for the post-Nietzsche, post-Christian world. If we believe in the sorcerer’s stories enough, and if there are enough of them to believe in, we (believe we) can come up with a new interpretation-construction of reality. We can then either end up in the sorcerers’ “dead-end” that Castaneda writes about, or weasel between the two worlds, to the space he doesn’t (because he can’t, because no one can) describe.
Jesus of Nazareth only becomes Jesus Christ via the process of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. Jesus of Nazareth becomes transcendental through the Crucifixion—which is the ultimate submission to mundane reality—and the subsequent belief of his followers in the Resurrection which the Crucifixion made necessary (theologically, ontologically, and/or merely psychologically). It is surely no coincidence that almost the only thing all of the historians—Christian and secular—are sure about, regarding Jesus of Nazareth, is that he was crucified.
Through the Crucifixion, Jesus becomes a Holy Spirit, a Son of God, and finally God the Son. But by the same token, the transcendental Christ is rendered as a criminal on a cross (becomes sin)—a mundane reality that, within history, is otherwise relatively unremarkable. His death is only recorded at all because of the subsequent belief in the transcendental element of the Resurrection.
Christianity came into existence as a means to maintain a historical reference point for a transcendental reality—one that is literalized and rendered as an element of mundane reality, as a means to transcend it. This can never “work,” however, because, the closer we get to the transcendental, the further we get from the historical, and from the mundane.
The way to Christ, and to the transcendental, is, in fact, the very opposite trajectory. We must take the transcendental away from the transcendental image-object (since it never really possessed it) and back into ourselves, where it is sourced. The kingdom of God is within.
Insofar as we feel trapped inside the mundane (hopeless sinners, fallen humanity), to recognize ourselves as transcendental is the only possible exit strategy. By seeing Christ, or don Juan Matus, as a projection of our inner transcendental, the Holy Spirit, we reclaim that aspect of our being.
At the same time, through the same “act” (which is not really an act but a “not-doing”), the object that we have looked toward as transcendental becomes mundane. Either it starts to appear unreal, or it becomes too real to serve the purposes we have assigned it. There is no third option.
The Art of Lying
“No single reality contains more of the truth than any other. On this view, common-sense reality and scientific theorizing are not to be preferred to shared fantasies, even by social scientists. All are constructed moment-to-moment by what people say to each other.” Hugh Mehan and Houston Wood, quoted by Richard de Mille, The Don Juan Papers
Castaneda set out to make magical possibilities real. That was his aim with his books. It is explicit in the writings themselves, though the idea that he was fabricating or confabulating is only implicit. My response to them at twenty-one was “It’s all true!” That was what I wanted, or needed—to believe in magic, a magic that could transform my mundane life into an epic journey, a sorcerer’s story.
Castaneda set out—just like any good fantasy writer—to make the fantastic believable, which requires anchoring it in seemingly mundane reality. Dates, times, places. Castaneda was never the Carlos of the books. He was more like the thief described in the first book (The Teachings of Don Juan), as seen by “Carlos” in a ritually-induced vision, the thief who steals books from the library, defaces them, sticks their pages together and stores them in a crate, for unfathomable reasons.
At a certain point in my journey out of Ixtlan, it comes time for me to wonder, not what kind of a genius could create such meta-fictions, but what kind of determination to deceive, what commitment to the cause of confabulation, would be required to pull it off? In its own way, it seems as unthinkable as a man turning into a crow is unthinkable. In a certain sense, it is more so, because we have the context of fantasy for Castaneda’s tales of power, and the corresponding desire to believe them, as seeded in childhood.
The other story is of a master manipulator exploiting our desire to transcend, and it is one for which we have little to no context, not since Santa Claus anyway (actually, it is in The Wizard of Oz, but the Wizard turns out to be a benign deceiver, by some twist of doublethink). This is not a reality that we want to believe but that we wish to deny, the reality of boldfaced lies being used to manipulate us and cast spells upon us.
Unlike Castaneda’s tales of power, the possibility of a writer using literary hypnosis to turn lies into millions of people’s hallucinated reality does not defy ordinary reality, not really. It mostly just challenges our ideas about what human ingenuity, combined with ruthless ambition, creative or otherwise, might set out to accomplish, when divorced from all normal ethical considerations.
It is scarier even than diabolic forces; not that there is really much difference.