My name is W. H. Early, which stands for work hard early, and if you believe that, then I got another whopper for ya, but you're gonna have to wait for it. All in good time. Don't bother letting me know when you think you've caught me in a lie, because in a world of illusion there is no truth. And by the way, my friends call me Buddy, but you're not my friend yet, so you can call me Unc, which is short for Uncle Buddy.
As Carlos Castaneda taught in his books which included the classic Journey to Ixtlan, there will be no exposure of personal history here, so everything from here on out will be a lie. Except for what's true.
This is not one of those rehashed new age philosophies served up on a glittering silver platter of capitalism camouflaged as The Truth but which then turns out to be written for the purpose of maximizing financial return for the corporate publisher and its indentured authors. The story I am about to tell you could possibly be an outright fable, but the information that it conveys is desperately needed. Yes, you may not realize it, but you are desperate for the teachings I am about to impart.
In fact I am presenting the facts of life on earth as recognized and taught by Castaneda himself, but this time around, the teachings of don Carlos are lacking the profit motive in favor of the prophet motive: P-R-O-P-H-E-T, i.e. soothsayer, i.e. teller of the sooth. The truth, you know, a difficult commodity to come by, since that stuff is slipperier than a greased eel. Due to financial dis-incentive, I am able to present a much less thoroughly untrue pack of lies than Carlos was able to, because he had to deal with corporate publishers and burdensome contracts while I've managed to live long enough to avail the miracle of self-publishing on the internet. So I don't have to write everything for people who can afford the hardback in-between their eight-dollar coffee drinks.
Not that I have anything against money, but there should be two kinds of it: one kind of money, which is free, for what we NEED. And the other kind of money, which you have to work for, and that's for the things we WANT. This is the basis of the Abundance Party, one of the many unfinished projects I gave up when I met Carlos Castaneda in the flesh.
The lies I am about to tell you are not convenient at all. Some of them will require a new kind of thinking, but for the most part everything will be simple to understand because my teaching tales are about the simplicity that underlies the art of dreaming, and fortunately when Carlos came back from the dead to retell his story once again, he had abandoned the worn-out notion of a Mexican Indian supershaman in a three-piece suit, and had instead found a way to bring the story down to the level of the man in the street. Having abandoned the profit motive, there was no longer any reason to try and scare people into believing that non-compliance would send them to some scary sort of new age hell, some refurbished Catholic purgatory, a sorcerer's hell of non-existence, to be eaten by 'the Eagle'.
In fact, if hell even exists, I doubt most people are smart enough to find their way there, as I've noticed most people these days couldn't understand a road map if Kermit the Frog or even Yoda Hisself was there to read it for them. Because of this defect in the character of modern man, which is really what one could expect when the profit motive is allowed to take over where the education motive fizzled out somewhere along the way, I figure most of hell's more recent denizens wound up there by accident with a glazed-over look in their eyes and haven't yet noticed the fire and brimstone and pitchfork jabbings. In fact, I sympathize with those--starting with the real Jesus and his teachers--who've hypothesized that hell is earth and Yahweh is the devil. I'm not quite ready to drink the kool-aid, but I sympathize.
I'll tell you right up front that the purpose of the rants which follow will be to teach a reasonably updated philosophy behind what lucid dreaming and astral projection really are, how they fit into the vibrational nature of reality, without the usual default to what we already think we know, a failure of guru integrity which is normally caused by the need for the many false prophets of today to conform to some semblance of consensus belief systems in order to sell books, courses, sets of CDs, exercise programs, and seminars. One reason I have nothing to sell you is that I am on disability for assburger syndrome so I ain't starving. Close to starving, but it builds character. And my reason for couching everything in fiction and/or is that I have observed carefully on YouTube that most of these image-conscious presenters who try to tell the supposedly objective truth about the out-of-body experience just repeat the accepted version and have nothing new to say, or else they try to be entertaining in a slick, professionalistic way, which is unfortunate since capitalism spoils everything it touches. Or they try to be cute and funny, which is tragic. Or else they can't decide what they think and end up wasting the viewers' time while they blather and dither on and on about whatever it is that they figure the truth might happen to be based on second-hand pseudo-knowledge. All of which is a waste of time when there are plenty of used paperback novels to read which are considerably more entertaining and truthful.
So how can I, a beginner at astral projection and lucid dreaming, hope to teach better what experts fail to see? It's all about having a foundational unified theory as a framework vs. regurgitating a stream of unconnected factoids, the latter being an activity which I find myself allergic to. You can depend on one fact about my particular brand of pseudo-science, which I learned from Carlos Castaneda and others, and which I call unworlding and its theoretical backdrop Synfonemia: unique information is about to change hands. I'm 37 years older than I look, so my unified theory of existence is almost twice the age of some of the mothers of some of the astral coaches on YouTube.
And besides, I didn't make any of this stuff up. I got it straight from the horse's mouth, Carlos Castaneda himself, returned from the dead.
Getting back to how a perennial beginner at unworlding can have anything useful to say about it. Contrary to a popular assumption that sells a heck of a lot of books, people who've had astral projections and lucid dreams are not inherently privy to the facts of life, for the simple reason that altered states are completely subjective experiences, especially when you're inside one of them, and this experience is about as evidential of objective reality as any other self-fulfilling prophecy. All it proves for sure is that such an experience exists. For the most part, the self-appointed gurus get their belief system from each others' books and YouTube videos and immediately start trying to make a living off of their so-called knowledge, as if knowledge was being served up for free to anyone who can get out of his body for a few minutes. As if whoever runs the Unworld is going to let some upstart turn the truly greater reality into a money siphon. Unlike all the wanna-be gurus, I am admitting right up front that I am a beginner at astral projection and lucid dreaming, which I call unworlding. My beliefs, assertions, and philosophies about the topic amount to a unified set of opinions about the nature of reality which I call Synfonemia.
The advantage I have over these guru substitutes is that I have no fancy image to project due to materialistic tendencies--me and money just don't get along--so I can afford to tell the truth about what my opinions are while I lie about how all this information fell into my hands. In fact, I did spend many days with Carlos Castaneda over a period of time and he conveyed to me so much information that I'm still trying to remember it all, and if you believe that one, then just keep on listening, 'cause you ain't heard nothin' yet.
Now believe me, I already told some whoppers, but right here is where the bar gets raised to see who can tell the taller tale, the new improved fictional Carlos or the old fictional Carlos as presented by the supposedly real Carlos. After this point it will not be worth your trouble to even wonder which parts of the forthcoming anecdotes actually took place, and which parts I made up.
Some time ago, I was in a part of the City where I'd once lived, the Southeast part of town, when I spotted a diner that I'd once gone into as a young hitchhiker with only a couple of dollars in my pocket. At that long-ago time of youthful whimsy I had carefully calculated how much I could eat and still have money left over for rolling tobacco. I recalled that while chewing the ham omelet I had been served back then, I couldn't help but notice it had a spot of mold or dirt in it, and I quickly swallowed it because I didn't want to spit my food out on my plate in such a tiny place where everyone seemed to be watching me. And I'd bought the dang omelet with my last pesos, so who was I to reject available protein? That was in the long distant past.
By now the diner had probably changed hands several times and had evolved into a little coffee and croissant joint. Same mold, less meat. The thing that still attracted me to the place, besides the fine overpriced chocolates, was that the ugly sign outside had never been changed. It still just said,'Diner' and the sign had to be 50 years old. But instead of an omelet and coffee for $1.39, I had to settle for a tenth of a gram of dark-chocolate-covered organic liqueur-flavored jelly beans because I couldn't afford the coffee or the food either one. This was some time ago, and the part about how I'd gone in there as a youthful hitchhiker is totally irrelevant to my purpose in telling this story, but unfortunately for your precious time, oh dear reader, I gleefully lack an editor. So you might want to send your conscious mind for a walk in the park since the conscious mind is of no use to your current struggle to perfect yourself by way of wasting time online when you could be dealing with your responsibilities. When you're done reading this mumbo-jumbo and accepting it all uncritically, just holler, "Here Idiot!" and your conscious mind will come wriggling right back so you can find it something more selectively conceited for it to occupy itself with, connoisseur of swill that it is. But for now, I highly recommend the complete suspension of your critical faculties so you can enjoy being hypnotised by my seductive words.
On the way into the uniquely overpriced and trendy croissant joint that used to be a cheap diner, I passed a homeless man who sat on the sidewalk staring at me with a blank expression on his face. Once I got settled into the only empty stool in the tiny diner, the homeless man came in, stood next to my stool and pulled a sweaty-looking sketch pad out of his shirt and started drawing a picture while staring at my face.
I told him I hoped he didn't plan on selling me a portrait of myself because I could barely afford to sniff the cappuccino in this high-falutin' place. He laughed and showed me the sketch. He had drawn a pornographic Mickey Mouse, and gave me the sketch for free.
The man extended his hand across the table, ignoring the waitress trying to shoo him out the door. "Carlos Castaneda," he said, as he swatted at the waitress, shooing her away like a pesky mosquito.
I shook his hand, and replied, "You or me?"
He laughed again. I was starting to like this guy, because most people can't tell when I'm joking, or else they just don't think my jokes are funny, I could never tell which.
He replied, "Me Carlos Castaneda, you Mickey Mouse. Can I sit down?"
"Pull up a piece of floor," I told him. "'Cause there ain't a spare chair in this place."
I was totally shocked when he stiff-armed the yuppie in the stool next to mine and the man fell on the floor like a limp rag and disappeared in a puff of smoke.
Carlos winked and said, "That guy wasn't real. He was just a store dummy." He looked at the other handful of customers in the crowded new age donut hole in the wall, who were ignoring us, and whispered, "Most of 'em ain't real. If you don't interact with 'em, they ain't real, they're just two-dimensional reflections, they're just there because you expect 'em to be."
I sucked on my seemingly real jelly beans for a bit, making them last as long as possible, trying to absorb what I had just seen. A man had disappeared in front of my eyes and Carlos Castaneda had taken his chair. Part of me felt like gettin' out while the gettin' was good, but my curiosity was aroused, to say the least.
When I got my tongue untied, I tried to explain to the homeless man that he couldn't be Castaneda, because Castaneda was dead. He was short all right, like the real Carlos, and his white hair had obviously once been black, but his accent was not Peruvian; it was East L.A. He was about the right age though, in his late 70s. With his withered face, he could have been an older version of just about anybody.
"You're right," he said. "Carlos Castaneda died a while back. Liver constipations, too much fine California wine and jimson weed. But I am Carlos Castaneda nonetheless, so you might as well get used to it, because I ain't goin' away."
I suggested that maybe he could be Castaneda's walk-in, as he was too old to be his reincarnation.
He snorted. "There ain't no walk-ins and there ain't no reincarnations. There ain't no heaven or hell, no Eagle waitin' to eat your soul if you don't be a good warrior, none of that crap. All that smoke-and-mirrors nonsense is for new age woosies. We are gonna deal in the stark, barren truth, or we ain't gonna do business at all. Just the facts, ma'am."
And that is how I became an apprentice of the famed Carlos Castaneda, years after his death. Due to the fact that I had witnessed him making a human being disappear, I let him follow me home to my apartment and proceeded to listen to him babble almost non-stop for several months before he turned into a ball of light and flew away and left me trying to reconstruct what had become of the past several months.
For the further teachings of Carlos Castaneda, Death Defier, stay tuned.
