Posts Tagged ‘casteneda’

After I broke up with E. things were somehow seriously going downhill in terms of being isolated. I just didn’t find anyone there interesting, they were all moralistic, political sort of people whom I felt little connection to. The only exception was Paultje. He was a thin, weird looking fellow who was also into Castaneda. One time he ate about 50 mushrooms when he was depressed and he had been having these ‘after flashes’ ever since. Sometimes I would walk with him through the city and he would suddenly stop and just stare confused at his own reflection in a shopping window. Otherwise he was a pretty decent guy though and he got me into On-U-sound music of which he was a fervent collector. I remember one time we went on holiday to Schiermonnikoog together. We stayed at some farm and most of the time we were busy practicing the right way of walking, meditation, etc. He freaked out one time because he got attacked by an owl while he was practicing. There was also another guy there who was into magick he was all the time talking about dream manipulation. Decent fellow, but at night I scared him by moving my sexual energy around the room and in some way I was able to make the girls in the room moan. I was pretty deep into the mind at that time. I remember I could make people say stuff, for example. I would sit at a table and I noticed that one could simply ‘steer’ a conversation by planting thoughts into someone else’s head. That might sound far fetched to some people, but in fact its a rather common phenomenon if anything. People do that sort of stuff all the time. The big error is that they assume that anything they ‘hear’ in their own heads are their own thoughts. The reality is pretty different. Its more like we live in this thought field that interconnects and thoughts are being exchanged all the time. As such ‘clairvoyance’ in the sense of thought reading is a very common phenomenon, all it actually requires is the talent of differentiating between your own thoughts and those of others and some concentration ability to listen well. The majority of fortune tellers consist of people who will simply tell you what you want to hear. Then there are some who have actually developed this differentiation ability and can actually repond to stuff from your head, but it doesn’t mean much that they can do so. Real oracling abilities requires much more than this and those sort of people are quite rare.

Two weeks after I returned from Arnhem some guy walked into my room. He was a croatian guy and Paul told him I had Crowley books. He told me he was a member of OTO and if I was interested in joining it. I said I didn’t know. He did a Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram in my room to show me how its done. It was pretty impressive. It felt like he was controlling invisible winds that were blowing through my room. I was kind of baffled by the whole phenomenon of this guy appearing like this and I never considered the option of ritualistic magick. He asked me to perform a LBRP too but I declined, it felt too weird to do anything like that with him watching. Two weeks later he send me a Liber Al vel Legis in the post, a Croatian-English version. I read it but I didn’t like that book very much. Parts of it were interesting, parts of it irritating. I had the biggest problem with part 2. Chunks of it sounded like social Darwinism and I seriously dislike that sort of philosophies. I was wrong interpreting them that way, but at that time, being 19, I was young and I had some naive hopes for my fellow humans.

Everything now posed a big dilemma: would I join an organization I knew little about? I felt things were connected, the appearance of the Castaneda guy from Aachen, the appearance of the OTO guy in my room. On the other hand I never liked organizations much and I didn’t particularly like that book he had send me. So there was a serious dilemma. Two dreams I had made the situation even worse. In the first dream my future self came to meet me. He had a copy of Liber Al vel legis in his hand and he told me the book was ‘okay’. That’s exactly what the message was. When I woke up I thought about it and thought this must mean I should join. So I got in touch and arranged for a meeting in Germany. At that time there was no Dutch branch, if I am correct I was the first Dutch person to join it.

However, there followed a second dream. In that dream I was in an underground cave complex. There was a room in the middle of the complex where an alien lived, in a room full of manuscripts and books. Whenever I would enter that room he would turn at me an look at me with his completely black eyes. Every time he did that I would feel a boost of terrible fright, since the intelligence that radiated from him was so otherworldlish, so hostile, so alien that it scared the creeps out of me. I ran away every time only to find that I got back to that same underground room.

After some loops I managed to find a way out. I was in a mountain landscape. A voice from the air told me I had to push this giant rock into the abyss. Below the mountain my friends were standing. I did what the voice asked and killed all of them with the rock. Then hundreds of ladders came out of the sky and I started to climb one of them. After climbing for a while I came unto a room in the sky. The room was filled with a blue light. There were entities inside that greeted me and it felt like finally I was coming home. I felt a great peace being there. Then, all of a sudden, the thought came to my mind: I had forgotten to close the door! I saw in a flash that the creature from the cave had followed me up the ladder. That thought was so scary I woke up, bathing in my own sweat. That dream was the most strong and real feeling dream I ever had. It was a prophetic dream, which are quite rare. I was completely at loss as to how to interpret it. What the fuck did this mean? I had no fucking clue. It undid the certainty I gained from the future self dream but I decided to go on with the initiation thing anyway in the hope for some answers. I got an invitation for Minerval initiation from Allala Oasis, they were located next to the Muzel between Koblenz and Triest. I went there by train. A woman named Beatrix told me by letter that she would pick me up from the railway station. The station was rather empty, they lived in this miniature town, but somehow Beatrix managed to miss me and I sneaked up on her when she was about to get into her car disappointed that I didn’t show up. We got into the car and drove to their house.

After the winter cleared it was phenomenal to experience spring. That’s another defect of living in an artificial climate: you do not experience the differences between the seasons much. An old friend from school moved in downstairs together with an ex girlfriend of mine, J. I haven’t written about J. because I didn’t think the relation was very interesting. We went to Turkey together with my parents when I was 16 but the entire holiday she’d just sit on her ass and complain which annoyed the living daylight out of me. Anyway, the strings weren’t any tighter when they started living downstairs. They were too petty and moralistic to my taste, I remember them telling me I couldn’t listen to fats domino for example because he was a ‘capitalist’. They thought I was way weird. One time there was some guy in my room and he had brought acid. I decided to take some but that was a serious mistake. Some time after taking it I began wonder who the hell that guy was. I didn’t know him at all, he was just there by incident. I started having stomach cramps and started to panic. I walked downstairs and I was quickly losing my grip. They managed to put me in bed but I was paralyzed. I felt like I couldn’t move at all. Time was moving at an incredibly slow pace. It was like torture. I must have managed to tell them they should call E. who at that point was still my girlfriend. Her father drove her all the way from Dommelen to Eindhoven to check what was going on with me. All that time, and to me it seemed like weeks, I lay paralyzed on the bed. I saw skeletons riding on horses outside of the window. I wasn’t scared it was beautiful to watch. At some point E. came into the room and she had this incredibly high forehead. She started talking and as soon as she did we were cracking up together, giggling like little kids. She thought I was okay so she left again after 15 minutes. I felt better and got out of bed to ride out the next of the trip.

The next day I was sort of a wrack. For some reason, however, I felt like hitchhiking to E., not because I wanted to see her but because I wanted to break up. I am not sure why, it could have been related to the high forehead thing. I remember thinking I couldn’t possibly have a relationship with someone who looked like that when seen on LSD.

I went to some outskirt road to hitchhike to Arnhem. E. had recently moved there because she was starting at the art academy there. I was looking seriously weird – I had a shaven head, ragged clothes and I was wearing this giant rosary with wooden beads around my neck.

After standing there for 10 minutes a small red car passed me. But after it passed me its driver stepped full on the breaks, put the car in reverse and drove back at me. A dangerous move since it was a busy road. The driver opened the passenger door, looked at me with piercing eyes and asked me if I had lepra or something. I said ‘no’. He asked me if I was a Buddhist or something. ‘No’ I said again. ‘Okay’ he said, ‘come on in!’.

I stepped into the car. The guys energy was incredible. We immediately started talking about Casteneda. He had read all books too and after he went to Mexico to search for don juan. He stayed there for years, did all kinds of peyote sessions, and recently returned. He now lived in Aachen he said where he build his own house and started a healer practice.

The guy was amazing. He had the most supernatural sort of energy. Every time he laughed he throw his head to the back and made this hyena like sound. All the way to Arnhem he hardly looked at the road at all. He kept telling me all sorts of things about the warriors way. He even got a sign about me because his car radio refused to work. After we arrived in Arnhem he put me off somewhere and I turned around, grabbed his hand and made the spirit thank him. That took him by surprise. I did so because I felt that it was a great gift to meet such a person. I had been calling out with my will to meet someone ever since I read the casteneda books and this was the manifestation of the spirit.

I went to see E. and told her I wanted to break up. We laughed and made love. I went back home this time using the train. My encounter with a sorcerer would get a tail, soon.

As I’ve written before my interest in the occult started when I was about 14 and my prime interests was science fiction, fantasy, advanced physics and the occult. Summarized: anything that was filled with the promise of the fantastic. I read a few hundred science fiction and fantasy books, a few dozen occult and physics works. Not of the more speculative kind like ‘godel escher bach’ but genuine works of Einstein, Bohr and others. I think part of my motivation for that was to irritate my dad, because he was a physics teacher but his knowledge was limited to simple newton mechanics. I was proud I knew more than him about the subject at the age of 13 and kept bothering him with discussions he didn’t give a shit about.

At the age of 16 I bought some Crowley books, the first book I bought of him was ‘The book of Lies’ which is a collection of cryptical, kabbalistic writings ordered by numbers. The book starts with the observation that all thoughts, even this one, are lies because they are pictures of reality, subtracts rather than the real thing. That book rather fascinated me. It is not exactly an easy work but on the whole probably one of Crowley’s better attempts. What’s interesting about it is that he attempts to express truths as compact and abstract as possible without any rational makeup.

At 17 I began reading Carlos Casteneda. His works had an even deeper effect on me. Crowley was sort of interesting but I always felt he was somehow seriously lacking direction and oversight, partly because he had to build a system from scratch and partly because he had this rather irritating Libra personality which tends to wander off in any direction without much spine to see something through. Its beyond me how the guy could write such insane volumes of mediocre poetry without even once questioning his sources, methodologies or even the intent to ‘become the greatest poet in the world’ – I have noticed this allergy to criticism in many Libra people: they are in fact severely upset by even the most minute sort of critique. I find that mode of existence mindbogglingly dull but maybe its some sort of natural phase in natures grand cycle.

The yaqui system seemed far more subtle and advanced to me and I was completely fascinated by these works. I read all the casteneda books, 7 of them in that time, in a few months. Here I saw a vision of a reality completely different than the one we are brought up to believe in and it was a reality with a working system and sound philosophies behind it. I started to practice some of the techniques described in the books. The first one was the ‘right way of walking’.

By that time I had moved to a squatted school. I had a classroom as a room. It was a giant room and at first I was at loss as to what I should do with it. The previous guy had build a little room inside the classroom with foam bricks. I decided to make a forest in the room with that little room as some sort of oasis in the back. I carried shit loads of yellow sand upstairs in buckets and covered the whole floor with it. Then, it was just after Christmas time, I started collecting the Christmas trees people had put as garbage next to the street. At the end there it was: I had a forest of Christmas trees in my room and an shiny oasis in the back! It was magnificent. It was great to live in a room in the middle of the forest. Some people also thought it was way cool and some others thought I was seriously bonkers. The school was right in front of the Evoluon so when I looked outside of the window there was this giant UFO in front of it. My parents came to visit for the 2nd time since I had moved out but the forest was way to weird for them they thought I was even more nuts than they did already and moved in and out like they’d have seen the devil in person. Well I didn’t care. I had a great time in my forest. E. and me used to walk naked through it and she looked like an elf already. The room also had the only access to the roof and we used to sleep there in summer under the stars.

The school consisted of two buildings. Ours was the home of the group that came from the willemstraat squat. By now we were sort of a family, living together for 15 months and we were more creative sort of folks. The folks in the other building were more political. They used to have these board meetings that bore the shit out of me so I never went. At some point later a building came free in the tonglresestraat and 3 people would be able to move there. It was a real cool place and they offered me a room but at this time I was tired of moving and I told paul he could have my room so all the guys moved leaving me behind alone. This was the starting signal of a somewhat more darker time for me.