To:  alt.dreams.castaneda
Date: 95-09-26 09:19:35 EDT

LOS ANGELES - September 1996

Carlos entered the room, and went around the room, making a point to shake hands with every single person in the room. When he was done, he said, "there, now we've met!".

Once again, he told us the story of Joe Cortez in some detail. He ended the story by saying that he liked being Joe Cortez, and that Carlos Castaneda was really gone---didn't exist any more. He was somebody else now.

Then he said we were going to move. He told us that we were going to move the left arm, and began to tell us how the left arm is underused. In fact, he said the entire left side of the body is underused, and becomes atrophied if we are not careful. He went into joking about how the left side of his hair turned grey faster, and stuff like that.

Of course, this is indicative of our general imbalance toward the "right side". He reiterated how the left side is powerful, particularly if consciously developed, and we were off into the movements for the left arm (2 passes in particular), which I won't describe.

At one point during the movements, he talked about how moving the left arm and hand so much had kept the Chacmools up all night, and had energized them to the extreme.

After a while he said that we were going to have to move the right hand some too, because it was "the king", and if we didn't give it some attention, it would become angry and wreak havoc within our system somehow. So, we did one series of movements with the right hand.

Then he had us do a lengthy series of foot and leg movements, while keeping our hands on our hips. We only did this rather complex sequence once, and the Chacmools never repeated it. I remember parts of it, but...

Then we spent some time learning a new way of doing the passes: Pushing the Right Body to the Left and the Left Body to the Right, and Realigning the Left and Right Bodies.

At the end, Carlos told a few anecdotes (I'm beginning to feel Bt's a bit pointless to chronicle his every anecdote), talked about the flyers some more, hit on some of the usual themes like the madness of people, and encouraged us to continue practicing the passes regularly.

One anecdote was his story of how he knew an older statistician who great expressed sadness to him, saying that Carlos had a 39% chance of reaching the year 2000, while he himself had only a .06% of reaching it. Carlos said he used to think that was really absurd, but that sometimes now that is exactly how he feels, looking at this room full of young, strong people (only more like with regard to the year 2050 or something).

I felt highly energized after this session for the rest of the day, and had a dreaming experience that night. I really like the passes we learned quite a bit.

- David