by
Carlos Castaneda
12
August, 2016
“’Predators
Mind.’ This is the Castaneda term for that which aligns man with
the thought center of service to self. In “Active Side of
Infinity,” Don Juan tells Castaneda of the Earth being invaded in
the mists of time by creatures of condensed darkness, the so-called
Flyers which use man as food. The key idea as that these cosmic
predators gave man their own mind. This is reasonable in light of
much other material. At the human level, a system based on
exploitation and consuming and control is seen to shape people in its
own image: The slave tends to dream of becoming a master rather than
of abolishing slavery. Any organization based on dominance naturally
takes the form of a pyramid with few at the top and most at the
bottom. For man to be the bottom or in some cases intermediate level
of such a system, man must have the attributes of the dominators,
only at a reduced scale.
Castaneda's writings in large
part deal with ways of claiming one's own in terms of energy and free
will from such a system. The battle is in large part internal. One
must unmask and stand up to one's internal predator first. Otherwise
one's external actions, even if well motivated, take place in the
paradigm and mode of the predator. The internal predator can be
extremely subtle. Still, it has some general recognizable
characteristics: Castaneda puts it as follows:
"The
Predator of Man"
"Ah,
that's the universe at large,' he said, 'incommensurable, nonlinear,
outside the realm of syntax. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were the
first ones to see those fleeting shadows, so they followed them
around. They saw them as you're seeing them, and they saw them as
energy that flows in the universe. And they did discover something
transcendental. They discovered that we have a companion for
life...
We
have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over
the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The predator
is our lord and master. It has rendered us docile, helpless. If we
want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act
independently, it demands that we don't do so. You have arrived, by
your effort alone, to what the shamans of ancient Mexico called the
topic of topics. I have been beating around the bush all this time,
insinuating to you that something is holding us prisoner. Indeed we
are held prisoner! This was an energetic fact for the sorcerers of
ancient Mexico.'
'Why has this predator taken over in the
fashion that you're describing, don Juan?' I asked. 'There must be a
logical explanation.'
'There is an explanation,' don Juan
replied, 'which is the simplest explanation in the world. They took
over because we are food for them, and they squeeze us mercilessly
because we are their sustenance. Just as we rear chickens in chicken
coops, the predators rear us in human coops. Therefore, their food is
always available to them.'
I
felt that my head was shaking violently from side to side. I could
not express my profound sense of unease and discontentment, but my
body moved to bring it to the surface. I shook from head to toe
without any volition on my part. 'No, no, no, no,' I heard myself
saying. 'This is absurd, don Juan. What you're saying is something
monstrous. It simply can't be true, for sorcerers or for average men,
or for anyone.'
'Yes,
it infuriates me,' I retorted. 'Those claims are monstrous!'
'I
want to appeal to your analytical mind, ' Don Juan said. 'Think for a
moment, and tell me how you would explain the contradiction between
the intelligence of man the engineer and the stupidity of his systems
of beliefs, or the stupidity of his contradictory behavior. Sorcerers
believe that the predators have given us our systems of beliefs, our
ideas of good and evil, our social mores. They are the ones who set
up our hopes and expectations and dreams of success or failure. They
have given us covetousness, greed and cowardice. It is the predators
who make us complacent, routinary, and egomaniacal.'
'But
how can they do this, don Juan?' I asked, somehow angered further by
what he was saying. 'Do they whisper all that in our ears while we
are asleep?'
'No, they don't do it that way. That's
idiotic!' don Juan said, smiling. 'They are infinitely more efficient
and organized than that. In order to keep us obedient and meek and
weak, the predators engaged themselves in a stupendous maneuver -
stupendous, of course, from the point of view of a fighting
strategist. A horrendous maneuver from the point of view of those who
suffer it. They gave us their mind! Do you hear me? The predators
give us their mind, which becomes our mind. The predators' mind is
baroque, contradictory, morose, filled with the fear of being
discovered any minute now.'
Don Juan continues: 'I know
that even though you have never suffered hunger... you have food
anxiety, which is none other than the anxiety of the predator who
fears that any moment now its maneuver is going to be uncovered and
food is going to be denied. Through the mind, which, after all, is
their mind, the predators inject into the lives of human beings
whatever is convenient for them. And they ensure, in this manner, a
degree of security to act as a buffer against their fear.
The
sorcerers of ancient Mexico were quite ill at ease with the idea of
when [the predator] made its appearance on Earth. They reasoned that
man must have been a complete being at one point, with stupendous
insights, feats of awareness that are mythological legends nowadays.
And then, everything seems to disappear, and we have now a sedated
man. What I'm saying is that what we have against us is not a simple
predator. It is very smart, and organized. It follows a methodical
system to render us useless. Man, the magical being that he is
destined to be, is no longer magical. He's an average piece of meat.
There are no more dreams for man but the dreams of an animal who is
being raised to become a piece of meat: trite, conventional,
imbecilic."