Lesson 1: Mining the Past

One of the first things don Juan teaches Carlos Castaneda in Journey to Ixtlan is to erase his personal history. The reason for this is to begin breaking the chains that bind us. Our personal history can imprison us because we believe certain things about ourselves and those beliefs imprison us. This is the symbolism of the 8 of Swords card in the tarot.

Sometimes, even worse, can be what other people believe about us. They may want to imprison us in continuity, the belief that, if this is who we were yesterday, then this is who we are today. They may have expectations and not allow for anything else. So their beliefs about who we are and our own beliefs about who we are may not allow us to become who we want to be.

That really bites!

Well, erasing personal history means to shed all of that. The imprisoning swords vanish, the bindings dissolve. The Fool is the epitome of the unbounded spirit, living in freedom in every moment.

It's a great ideal, but walking away from your personal history and jumping off a cliff into the unknown is not necessarily easy, or always beneficial. What I'm saying is that if others are holding us back from being who we are truly meant to be, we are not free.

Deep within our psyches, we store our past. Sometimes, if you have occasion to look back, not just a passing glance, but a deep immersion, you see immense reservoirs of energy compressed and waiting to be tapped. I'm currently having a first-hand experience with that. Restoring that energy from the past is called recapitulation.

So I've been reading Castaneda's books again for the fourth or fifth time, and talking with a friend about how don Juan says warrior-sorcerers use everything in life as a challenge. If they don't have a challenge, they look for one. That way, they're always in training and never become complacent.

For a few days I asked, what's my challenge? Then suddenly intense memories from the past came flooding back and I had the whetstone on which to sharpen my blade. So I dived in head first.

I'm still immersed in it, but am also digging out my journals from last summer. I want to see what I wrote in the hope that with each passing year I grow wiser and closer to freedom.

Or perhaps I grow ever more deluded, but hey, it's a happy delusion. :D