From Castaneda's 'Magical Passes'

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>From Castaneda's 'Magical Passes'

 

 

One of the stories that don Juan told about the ancient sorcerers was that

they were

capable of dissolving their physical mass by merely placing their full

consciousness and

intent on that force.

Don Juan stated that, although they were capable of actually going through a

pinhole if

they

deemed it necessary, they were never quite satisfied with the result of this

maneuver of

dissolving

their mass. The reason for their discontent was that once their mass was

dissolved, their

capacity

to act vanished. They were left with the alternative of only witnessing events

in which they

were

incapable of participating. Their ensuring frustration, the result of being

incapacitated to

act,

turned, according to don Juan, into their damning flaw: their obsession with

uncovering the

nature

of that vibratory force, an obsession driven by their concreteness, which made

them want to

hold

and control that force. Their fervent desire was to strike from the ghostlike

condition of

masslessness, something which don Juan said could not ever be accomplished.

Modern-day practitioners, cultural heirs of those sorcerers of antiquity,

having found

out that

it is not possible to be concrete and utilitarian about that vibratory force,

have opted for

the

only rational alternative: to become conscious of that force with no other

purpose in sight

except the elegance and well-being brought about by knowledge.

"The only permissible time," don Juan said to me once, "when modern-day

sorcerers use

the power of this vibratory, agglutinating force, is when they burn from within,

when the

time

comes for them to leave this world. It is simplicity itself for sorcerers to

place their

absolute

and total consciousness on the binding force with the intent to burn, and off

they go, like

a

puff of air."