Sunday, March 16, 1997, at Dance Home in Santa Monica (1 - 3 PM PDT)
by Corey Donovan

book recommended by Castaneda during this session

[All of Cleargreen, except Nury and the Witches, was on hand. And all the usual Sunday class members were there except François.]

"I had a lot planned for today. I had intended to bring Carol, but she couldn't make it. But the invitation is open. She has some important things to say to you. She's been looking into what happens when the cage is gone." He repeated the story of the gorilla from the zoo that was being returned to the wild. He was so used to his cage that when it was opened, he wouldn't come out. Finally they forced him out, and he subsequently fell down a ravine.

"Since I was raised by a Communist [meaning his mother] and had a rather unorthodox childhood, I didn't have that much of a cage. But Carol, being a debutante when she was fifteen, with a father who was a pillar of the community, she had much more of a cage. So she really knows what it's about to lose the cage."

"It's too soon for you. You haven't lost your cages yet. But it's an important topic--what do you do when your cage is gone."

"Have you been doing your assignment. Did you do what I suggested?"

Daniel asked, "You mean, about creating a hook for Carol?"

"No. I'd asked you to sense things, to use your ability to sense things as much as possible."

"We have this great mass. It's a vortex. I bring new people from time to time. They sort of stand on the side at first, but then they get swallowed up in this vortex." He made a swirling motion with his finger. "That's why I have everybody coming now [meaning everyone from Cleargreen]. I think about having even more people come, but that might change it, and tilt it the other direction. Remember Merilyn Tunneshende at that workshop? Everyone went to where she was and Kylie and I had to work like crazy to bring everybody back."

"Do we have a new person here?" Someone motioned to where Tom was standing. "What's your name?"

"Tom Gaul."

"Are you French?"

"No, German."

"I thought you might be French for a moment. That caused 'anthropology to fly out the window.' Remember the anthropologist who was doing field work on independence day when the drums started beating and the natives started shouting, 'Let's kill all the Yankees!' He wrote in his field notes for the day, 'For a moment, anthropology was forgotten!'

"Kylie and Talia, they're just two people and they're very similar. They reinforce each other's good and bad sides. They're both very hysterical. They don't have something to balance that. If there were 30 hysterical people here, that would be too much. But we have a good vortex.

"I used to be able to eat just tiny amounts. I had that down pretty well. Now I've lost it. I have problems now stopping myself from eating the whole thing. I had a stomach flu [the previous Friday Kylie had led most of the movements at the night session]. We were doing hours of movements and I thought for sure the others could see this entity I've been seeing, since it was really clear, but they still don't use their senses that much and nobody else saw it. But when I get knocked out like that, I start seeing everything. I should call all of you at home when I'm in that state. Then I'll get everything out of you, all your secrets.

"Lorenzo brought me this wonderful book, you must read it: The Sex Lives of the Popes. Especially those of you who are Roman Catholics. Did you hear about the new restriction on formerly married people, after divorce, not being allowed to have sex in their new relationships? If you read this book, you can see why they came up with this rule."

Castaneda taught us a new left-side movement. It started with a thrust forward with the left hand, then a stirring motion side to side, then up higher, with a circular motion forward, then pulling back to the left, the hand back toward the side, then crossing over to the right side, with the left hand over on the right side, then spread back, then around to the back, then with the left palm high over the back, you flip the palm (not touching the back).

While we were doing repetitions, Castaneda went up to Madeleine and asked her what she'd seen the previous week, referring back to the question she had asked then about seeing lights and whether that would get resolved later on. He joked that Madeleine was going to give us a lecture on determinism. "She's a physicist, and she's going to wear a T-shirt labeled 'determinism.'"

"The old sorcerers brought the assemblage point all the way to the back, then let it go and it would come back to the front again, resulting in their burning from the fire from within. But we've postulated another way, getting free from all of the shag of the fibers released by the recapitulation. You can have the assemblage point then drop to the floor and bring it back up into the middle. If you have it inside, then you can perceive lots of things, and you're not 'human' anymore. Then you're superhuman. No, then you're really human, with the assemblage point back in the place from which it originated.

"Kylie is pretty much free of shag. She may be an idiot, but she has no shag. From time to time something will come up, but she'll shake it loose."

Kylie then mentioned a cartoon from the Los Angeles Times showing a cat running very fast and losing its fur. The cat complains in one panel, "Oh, now, I'm losing me." The dog informs it, "No, that's not you, you're just shedding. It's natural." Then in the final panel the cat is going around collecting its fur, trying to stuff it back in again.

"There are people who have a lot of 'shag.' You can tell when you say to someone, 'How are you doing today?' and they respond, 'I don't appreciate your attitude. You know what's going on. You know I'm having a period today. I don't appreciate your sarcasm.' What can you do with these people? They're so locked in their shag, in their junk, that they twist everything.

"I used to go to Hollywood High School, and for awhile, for a brief time I lived in a boarding house. The guy who ran the boarding house was friends with Ramon Navarro, Gilbert Roland and Anthony Quinn. They all came over and would drink and cry. But they didn't have accents. Gilbert Roland, who had this heavy accent in the movies, didn't really have an accent at all in person. These were accents they adopted for their film personas. Another one, who used to play a Mexican in Zorro movies, didn't have an accent at all. And he made a living saying, 'Where did Zorro go?'" which Castaneda imitated with a heavy "Bandito-style" accent.

"When I was becoming famous I felt like I had to meet everybody. That's when I met Timothy Leary and Baba Ram Dass, who, because he was gay--or as Timothy Leary used to say, "a faggot"--they made fun of his name: 'Baba Ram De-Ass.' I met Janis Joplin. She was, wow, she was full of energy. Then the next night, she was nothing. She was on drugs, of course, and when she got the cocaine she was all energized again. And I met the heavy metal guy." We jumped in with our guess as to who that might be. It turned out he meant Frank Zappa. "And they all thought I was one of them. They had big bricks of marijuana. Oh, and there were these guys they called 'the waterboys.' It was a group that had these gigantic water containers. People wondered how they could drink that much water. They would take them up to the top of a mountain. What was in them was pot, and they would go up and smoke it all up there. Those were my followers. But then they were young. You should see my followers now, they're these scary old people."

He had us do warm up leg movements, going back and forth, from side to side, and twisting all the way around. Kylie then showed us the right side passes at length--we must have done them ten times. Then Castaneda added a bit more to the long form.

"You know how some people get acne. Some get pimples on their face, some on their buttocks. You're lucky if you get them on the buttocks." He mimicked God saying, "You, on the buttocks," and the person responding, "Oh thank you, thank you." "Then they're not visible. If you've got them on your face, then you stick white lead on it. Then there are people who get them on their face, back and buttocks. Bottom line is we shouldn't care about those physical appearances. We don't have to look at it, and we can't get hung up by things like that, taking them in as parts of ourselves. Some people who have acne won't have any mirrors, because they don't want to see it. But they'll glance at their knife and see it reflected there." He mimicked someone holding their knife up to see their acne and getting distraught.

"You must recap. Even a 'talented recap' would be okay. Better than nothing. I don't have time to be doing everything from scratch. Just get in there and get it going. Do it all the time; sneak it in here and there."

"People kill mosquitoes. You don't have hard feelings against the mosquito for sucking on you--that's just what mosquitoes do. Buddhists worry about it, or if you're not a Buddhist but you just feel guilty about killing one. Then you don't know what to do with your guilt, so you become a social worker, and you go teach black kids in the ghetto. You teach them to do what? You teach them to be middle class. Leave them alone.

"Once you're free of the shag, these other issues don't mean much to you. Why do you care about NAFTA if you're empty?

"I saw the 'Seven Year Old Itch' with Marilyn Monroe recently. I couldn't believe it. Why was she so popular? She's such a stiff version of a woman. It's the Flyer at work."

Talia and Kylie asked, "How about Charro? She was Xavier Cugat's wife." Darby pointed out that Charro had gotten her 10-year marriage to Xavier Cugat annulled, and then asked to have the 10 years removed from her age on the grounds that those ten years didn't exist and so shouldn't be added to her age. Someone else said that she's still going, that she's a very good flamenco dancer.

"Tiny Tim, for thirty years, has been doing his 'Tiptoe throught the Tulips' song. He's stuck, a creation of the Flyer's Mind. It's the Flyer's Mind that tells us what's going to be popular.

"Tom Cruise is someone who has no presence." He imitated him talking to Gene Hackman, with a lisp, devoid of personality. "Gene Hackman has presence. Somebody who really has presence is Powers Booth, but he did the T.V. movie about Jim Jones, and he's dropped out of sight." Someone mentioned that he had also recently appeared as a villain, and was very good, in another movie no one had seen.

"I saw the filming of . . ." Lorenzo interrupted him and told him it had been on T.V. the night before-- "A Walk in the Spring Rain," with Ingrid Bergman and Anthony Quinn playing middle aged lovers. Castaneda had seen the filming, or people leaving, saying it was the best thing they'd ever seen.

"I thought it was going to be something special but it turned out to be a joke. Anthony Quinn? What were they thinking? The producer, fortunately, was no dummy and he tested it out in the Valley--showed it at a sneak preview in Tarzana or something. He wasn't dumb enough to show it in Westwood. And people were laughing at Anthony Quinn in these love scenes. So they never released the film.

"Ingrid Bergman was this huge, huge Swedish actress. Of course, anyone bigger than me is large in my opinion. She and Anthony Quinn are both these solid, massive characters. 'Love Story,' that silly movie by that Harvard professor," (Darby interjected "Erich Segal"), "that was shlocky, but at least people could like the characters in it, they were young. Here were these old, massive farts. How could you care about them?"

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