“BIN PICKER!” Ah the fun we used to have throwing someone’s shoes, bag or lunch box into the huge plastic dustbins that littered our school and then ascribing them said moniker in gusty exclamations of bombastic disgust. The sudden and unprovoked bestowment of pariah status on the unsuspecting victim, their only crime that of inattention to their own property. Now in the rubbish bin.
“Get away from us you BIN PICKER!” These words returned to my mind only last week as, reaching down into a pile of discarded junk at our local refuse dump, I scooped a tattered paperback from the pile. As if in response to these taunting ghosts my mind instinctively fired off a swift and conclusive reply:
It’s a classic. It’s in relatively good condition. And there’s nobody looking. So shut it.
The book was The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda, a work with which I had some familiarity and yet whose words I had yet to absorb. The book had come up in conversation with some friends of mine a good few years back, during my time in London. This tale of a young anthropologist’s drug-induced hallucinatory experiences whilst under the tutelage of a Yaqui Indian (laughably presented as justification for the vast amounts of Ketamin they were at that time consuming) sounded rather far-fetched to me, too arcane to be worthy of my interest. I had yet to discover remote viewing back then, had never even heard of an OBE, let alone experienced one; this kind of stuff was nonsense at best, as was Don Johnson and his castanet playing tyro. Whatever.
Now, however, my eyes flicked across the faded rainbow images of the cover with interest. The story of a man led ‘into a world of beauty and terror, ruled by concepts far beyond those of Western civilization’ held a certain personal appeal. Pocketing the book (and a few more besides, including one on past lives and the Bardo Thodol…I had clearly been preceded by a rather esoteric dumper!) I jettisoned the (distinctly non-Narnian) wardrobe that had brought me to the dump in the first place and, rather pleased with the swap, climbed back into my car.
****
Two weeks later and I’ve made a start on Don Juan’s Teachings. Already Castaneda has had his first experience with peyote, wrestling with the Mescalito-entity in the form of a dog and, under the evasive Don Juan’s Yoda-like tutelage, tripping hard in the desert; now he’s moving on experimentation with the Datura plant or (’devil’s weed’) which, according to Don Juan, is used for ’seeing’. With it (he says) ‘a man can soar through the air to see what is going on at any place he chooses.’
Now this is when the remote viewer in me gets interested, especially so when Don Juan informs Casteneda that under the influence of this drug he will be able to ‘find out about persons [he] did not see ordinarily, or about objects that were lost, or about places [he] had not seen.’
Don Juan presses Castaneda to set his intent quickly, to think ‘fast and clearly because there would be no way of reversing [his] thoughts’. Rather comically a pressured Castaneda can think of nothing he wishes to know (TKR weren’t running weekly Missions back then) but eventually comes up with the notion of discovering the culprit responsible for the theft of some books from his college reading room some time earlier. This becomes the object of his ‘divination’ (as he labels it); his ‘target’ as would we.
The culmination of Casteneda’s experience whilst under the influence of the devil’s weed (administered via a paste smeared over his skin) is a vision of a young woman with wild eyes taking flight down a set of stairs followed by a young man removing some books from a hall and packaging them up inside a crate. Casteneda is roused from his vision from Don Juan; he has been out of it for three hours, though the vision itself feels to have lasted only ten minutes.
Now what are we of viewers to make of this vision? Is it a success? Has he hit target? The presence of the books in his vision would certainly suggest that he was to some degree ‘on’, though with no clear feedback we cannot be sure whether Castaneda has accurately witnessed the culprit at work or merely succumbed to an AOL occasioned by the very fact of his knowing the nature of the target beforehand. As a scientific experiment in early remote viewing it’s a flop, in other words. Move along please; nothing to see here.
And yet. Listen to Don Juan’s admonitions as he explains about the wide eyed girl in Castaneda’s vision, the fact that the lizards are never wrong, that he can’t have asked the right question in the first place, ponder on the…er…um….
Sorry? What’s that you ask? Yes, lizards. Did I not mention the lizards?
Oh. Well….
Aside from the application of narcotic pastes, Don Juan’s divinatory methodology differs from that of your average mil-style viewer in that it employs two lizards, un-named in the book, though most probably not answering to the monikers of ‘Chuckles’ or ‘Lucky.’
Don’t worry; no lizards were actually harmed in the process of this ceremony. And that’s a lie; because for some reason it is deemed necessary to sew Chuckles’ eyelids together, with Lucky receiving a similar treatment to his lips. Quite.
A question being asked to the recently muted Lucky and the Datura paste being applied to its skin, off it scurries to go seek the answer, returning only to pass on the news to a shoulder-mounted Chuckles, who in turn passes on his impressions to a spaced-out Castenda, who gratefully receives them in the form of his reported vision.
Despite his glimpse of the man with the books, Castenda is less than happy with the results. Chiefly he cannot understand or explain the vision of the fleeing woman with the wide eyes. Don Juan points out that he ‘must have had that girl in mind when [he] asked the question about the books’. He goes on:
‘The lizards are never wrong; they take every thought as a question. The lizard came back and told you things about [the girl] no one will ever be able to understand, because not even you know what your thoughts were.’
‘How about the other vision I had?’ (Of the man with the books.)
‘Your thoughts must have been steady when you asked that question. And that is the way this sorcery should be conducted, with clarity.’
‘Do you mean the vision of the girl is not to be taken seriously?’
‘How can it be taken seriously if you don’t know what questions the little lizards were answering?’
It would seem that even LRV (Lizard Remote Viewing) is not immune from the perils of an unspecific tasking. Casteneda’s intention was unclear from the offset and thus the data provided him by the lizards was skewed. This ’sorcery’ is to be attempted with pure intent and focussed mind if clear answers are to be received, much as a CRV cue must be watertight if we are to trust the data that returns.
What are we to make of Don Juan’s methodology? Certainly it raises questions about the entire ’signal band’ theory of remote viewing, suggesting instead that the information is simply ‘there’ for the grasping once we have initiated Stage One or set our lizards scurrying.
How would LRV hold up in the current on-line climate? Not too well, I suspect. Casteneda would no doubt be flamed from even the most liberal of boards were he to make such a proposition.
Imagine:
Hi all. New to these boards but thought I’d say hello and ask for your opinion on a problem I am having with my viewing. Keep getting unwanted and irrelevant data in my sessions. I’m wondering whether its due to the coarseness of the thread with which I sew together the lips and eyes of my reptiles before beginning my sesh. What do you guys use? Thanks in advance, CC.
I suspect that he would be forced to evolve LRV in an attempt to break free of the influence of Don Juan and create a separate, more marketable product. Lizards are fairly hard to come by in modern western life but insects are everywhere; IRV would thus be born, the sewing of eyes and lips replaced with a few sprays of deodorant can to induce a hallucinogenic state in the flies or beetles before sending them off to gather one’s data from the matrix. I can picture the demonstrations on Youtube already….
Still, whatever the method, I’m sure Casteneda would be insistent that the words of Don Juan be heeded throughout, regrdless of how one chooses to view. Unless one sets out with utter clarity to answer the exact question being asked, one is doomed to provide shoddy or at worst completely irrelevant information.
The matrix never lies…and neither do the lizards.
- Marv
November 14th, 2008 |
