Mini-interview with the Apprentices
of Carlos Castaneda

1. The Navigators' Log is still a mysterious issue for many practitioners. We don’t know exactly the meaning of saying that it is a tool. Many practitioners have said that they notice they may write the same things in their log that they wrote many months before, and they find it hard to face. Can you talk about this topic?

The Navigators’ Log, Carlos Castaneda told us, is indeed a mystery --it is a record, he said, of something very rare: the energetic facts that seers perceive on their journeys in infinity; facts derived from the perception of the physical body and the energy body together. For this reason, he said, it is a log that is very concise, because, as Don Juan Matus told him, energy is very precise.

By having their apprentices record their perceptions, as he asked us to do, seers endeavor to lead those apprentices to hone the ability to perceive energy directly --to make their first steps toward enticing the perception of the physical body and the energy body together.

Recording one’s perceptions brings one very quickly to the recognition that we repeat ourselves, perhaps because we repeat given phrases to ourselves. Some practitioners said they found these in their inventory of unexamined syntactic commands: praising or deprecatory formulas built into language:

“I can’t do it!” “This is not going to work!” “What do they take me for? A fool?” “It’s really cool!” “Wow! Great!” “The more things change, the more they remain the same,” etc.

Seeing our repetition can be disappointing at first. Carlos Castaneda said that we can only be disappointed if we have great expectations of the self. He recommended a more sober view of the self, one in which we suspend judgment.

Don Juan told him:
“A warrior knows that he cannot change, and yet he makes it his business to try to change, nevertheless. The warrior is never disappointed when he fails to change. That’s the only advantage a warrior has over the average man.” The Wheel of Time
Carlos Castaneda suggested that from this standpoint, we could acknowledge our limitations, and yet, we could nevertheless begin to direct our attention to what is essential for seers, and the real subject of the Navigators’ Log: What are our perceptions? What did we witness this day in infinity?

2. Many practitioners have felt that, ever since they started practicing the mapping of the energy body in the mornings and evenings, they experience dreams where they are about to cross a threshold in dreaming, it is frightening and they want to wake up. What can you say about this?

If we have hidden fears in our waking hours, seers believe, those fears appear as barriers in dreaming. Recapitulating our lives is essential to relinquishing those fears so that we can act.

Don Juan’s students said that what brings us the confidence to act in dreaming is the energy body, the energetic twin of the physical body, and that we tune and hone the energy body during our waking hours. They urged us, as an integral part of our dreaming practices, to entice the energy body by carrying out the simplest actions with the precision and efficiency that comes from abstract affection --the detached affection of the energy body itself.

The dreamer’s discipline, Carlos Castaneda said, is to sustain his affection for what he is doing --to intend by his actions, that his wonder is greater than his fear.

© Copyright Fractalum Magazine
Publication Date: October 2000

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