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Oh no, uncle Rex is giving us homework. At least I finally found a picture of the sensory homunculus, I went crazy looking for one because I wanted to put it in a thread at the head shop I think about kissing, pitty there is no mention of what the colors mean.
Rex, since you like neurosciences, if you read any book by Oliver Sacks I guarantee your brain will be blown to the stars, unless you already have and you are typing from Orion.
Don Juan was a lonely being, yes, as Rex also mentions, and in this sense the warrior does embody the premise that human individuals indeed live in separate islands of perception and are shouting at each other through entire oceans, but for us and Carlos it is not possible to conceive Don Juan, or any sorcerer if thats the case, alone. The path of the warrior involves bonding with pairs, even if they perceive they are being used as staircase steps, and form the position of their AP, sometimes they are. The warrior's art of stalking itself is unconceivable in solitude, no matter how much you try to stalk yourself, a warrior has to stalk pairs. You can even think of Carlos as Don Juan's own petty tirant, if thats the case.
Don Juan was intensely charismatic, he had to draw and seduce Carlos to his company and to his world, he had to make the world of sorcerers appealing and at the same time always inconclusive, like a TV serial promising more excitment in the next chapter, just as he appeared himself to Carlos, to ensure the "apprentice" would bounce back and again, drooling, towards it. This was part of the "effect" the teachings delivered day by day have, and by no mean I claim this was self-conscious or not from the side of Don Juan, it was simply like that, the seducer and the seduced. If you read anyhting about Milton Erickson, another famous "sorcerer", you'll find some parallels in the impressions people had about him and those impressions the apprentices had about the nagual.
A significant scene in the books, an aspect of which is somewhat overlooked, occurs in Journey to Ixtlan, when a bridge appears out of nothing in front of Carlos in the middle of a storm. When he is about to walk through it and literally enter and merge in the "vision", Don Juan holds him by the arm and explains later that he was not ready to go through it, and of course Carlos - and the reader- agree... without ever checking it for themselves. This single gesture creates and sets by itself a powerful -and invisible- context for the relation between master and apprentice, and is much more powerful and compounding than just informally saying during lunch "I'll be your master, you don't know anyhting, I'll tell what is time for you to do and what you can't do". In fact, Don Juan never had to say anyhting like this, and insisted that he had nothing to teach to Carlos. No matter how much warriors genuinely care for other beings allowing them to follow their own premises and doings, in this scene Don Juan simply can not let Carlos go through the portal that has opened to him leading to other realms of perception.
Don Juan has an agenda, and is embedded in it, the agenda of a millenial tradition, but a tradition in the end. He will let Carlos go through the doors only him, Don Juan, will open for his apprentice, otherwise there would be no such master-apprentice binding, no tradition, no Sancho and Quixote, and no sorcerers party.
Carlos, of course, torn between his own legitimate door to the Unknown, his own unique springboard to the nagual, and the charismatic, loving and nurturing figure which has come to be Don Juan, springs back to safety, to the lesser unknown. Of course, we think, Carlos had to learn a lot before going through that portal, but, can we so assuredly judge that his personal power would not have eventually led him through?
I usually think that had Carlos gone through that bridge, he would have find another Master, another nagual, another guide through the stars, and another tradition of star-journeyers. He was looking for one, self-consciously or not, his personal power was somehow set that way, but he still had to make a no-way-back decision, internal or not, and thus it was set quite evidently. It was Carlos' very own personal power that gave him the choice, you either go through this bridge or you stick with Don Juan, Carlos had to decide where he would place his power, and, most importantly, it was also Don Juan's personal power that made his apprentice chose him instead of the Other Unknown, thus fulfilling the need of the tradition and its lineage.
So far to summarise why, at least for myself, Don Juan could not even breath without Carlos. |
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