INTRODUCTION
My name is Armando Torres. I have written
this book in order to complete a task that was assigned to me years ago.
In October 1984, I met Carlos Castaneda, a controversial anthropologist
and a writer on the subject of sorcery. At the time I was still quite young.
In my quest for answers, I had looked into various spiritual traditions and
I wanted to find a teacher. But, from the very beginning, Carlos was very
clear in this respect:
"I don't promise anything,” he said; “I am not a guru. Freedom is an individual
choice, and each one of us must assume the responsibility of fighting for
it."
In one of the first talks that I attended, he severely criticized the kind
of human idolatry that induces us to follow others, and to expect ready-made
answers from them. He said that this attitude is a remnant of our herd mentality.
"Whoever sincerely wants to penetrate the teachings of sorcerers does not
need guides. It is sufficient to have a genuine interest - and guts of steel.
He will, by himself, find everything he needs through an unbending intent."
It was on these premises that our relationship evolved. Therefore, I want
to state very clearly that I am not Carlos' apprentice, in any formal sense
of the word. All I did was talk with him from time to time. Yet that was enough
to convince me that the true path consists of our determination to be impeccable.
The main motivation for publishing some of the experiences I had by his
side, is gratitude. Carlos was magnificent with everyone who had the good
fortune of knowing him, since it is the nature of a nagual to bestow gifts
of power. To be near him was to receive an abundance of inspiration and a
wealth of stories, advice, and teachings of all kinds. It would be selfish
then for one who has received such gifts to keep them hidden, when Carlos
himself, as a true warrior of total freedom, shared absolutely everything
with those who surrounded him.
One time, he told me that he used to sit every night and write down fragments
of what he had learned from the nagual Juan Matus, an old sorcerer from the
Yaqui tribe of northern Mexico, and from his benefactor Don Genaro Flores,
a powerful Mazatec Indian who was a member of the men of knowledge led by
Don Juan. He added that writing was an important aspect of his personal recapitulation
and that I should do the same with everything I heard during his talks.
"What if I forget?” I asked him.
"In that case, the knowledge wasn’t for you. Concentrate on what you remember."
He explained that the purpose of this advice was not only to help me retain
information that might be valuable in the future. The important thing was
that I acquire an initial degree of discipline so that I could undertake real
exercises of sorcery later on.
He described the purpose of sorcerers as “a supreme enterprise: To take
a human being out of his perceptual limitations, in order to restore to him
the control of his senses, and enable him to enter a path of saving energy."
Carlos insisted that everything a warrior does should be imbued with an
urgent sense of the practical. Expressed in other terms, he should have an
unbending focus on the real purpose of human beings: Freedom.
"A warrior has no time to lose, because the challenge of awareness is total,
and it demands maximum alertness twenty-four hours a day."
In my dealings with him and with other men of knowledge, I witnessed events
that from a rational point of view could only be called extraordinary. For
sorcerers, however, things like remote vision, knowledge of events before
they happen, or journeying to parallel worlds, are normal experiences in the
execution of their tasks. As long as we are incapable of verifying them for
ourselves, we will inevitably take them to be fantasies, or, at best, to
be metaphors.
This is the nature of sorcerers’ knowledge; take it or leave it. You cannot
reason it out; it is not possible to “verify it” intellectually. The only
thing we can do with it is to put it into practice, exploring the extraordinary
possibilities within our being.
Armando Torres
