Sorcerer's Apprentice: My Life with Carlos Castaneda

by Amy Wallace

Carlos chimed in, “He was in looove with Gina. ‘My darling,’ he would say, ‘you are tiny but you cut like a deadly knife.’ He nicknamed her ‘my little knife.’ ” “I loved to sit on his lap,” said Gina, “and feel his cheek. In spite of all the alcohol, his skin was smooth and soft, like a child’s, a woman’s.”

I was steeped in works of Eastern philosophy and religion—the I Ching, the Tao de Ching, Zen koans, Buddhist sutras, Sufi stories. In none of them was the enlightened master a nervous wreck. This cognitive dissonance made my head spin.

At the same time it had been ten years since I’d last seen my beloved spitfire, Florinda. I took an aspirin and walked the four downhill blocks to the lecture. That act changed the entire course of my life. Carlos had a favorite saying, popularized in his bestsellers—“All of us are given a single cubic centimeter of chance at least once in our lives. It is a gift offered by the Spirit.”

In the interim, Anna-Marie—a.k.a. Taisha Abelar—came to Gaia Books to promote her first publication, The Sorcerers’ Crossing—A Woman’s Journey, an account of her training with don Juan, and then with Castaneda.

These were gifts from my parents: letters by Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, and Charles Baudelaire, all favorite authors of mine.

We should have died together, ten years or so earlier, rather than let it all happen to both of us. It is a good rule. When at last you are really happy, die at once. —Robert Aickman, The Attempted Rescue

During the lecture, I learned, Carlos taught the all-important “recapitulation” meditation, wherein one makes a list of all one’s sexual encounters, followed by a list of each person one could recall having ever met. Making the list alone could take months of steady work. Finally, one began the Herculean task of breathing away the noxious power these human interactions held. This was Carlos’ fundamental practice, barely explained in his books.

It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice. —Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

In essence, my family, for all its well-meaning love and support, provided the groundwork for my staying in the group and fighting to return when kicked out. I was indeed ripe for the picking. I was harshly dumped by a boyfriend as my father died, and I felt desperately alone. When I confided this to Carol she said, “This is the perfect time to get you.”

My own mother couldn’t help being who she was—her childhood had been truly ghastly. Her family lived in poverty in New York City’s Bronx district, at that time a Jewish ghetto. Her mother told her every day as she left for school, “If you aren’t a good girl today, you’ll come home and find me with my head in the oven, the way I found my mother.” My mother was naturally bitter, terrified, desperate. She told me that she “lived to hate,” and she took pride in her taste for revenge and malice. She was incapable of providing consistent love, but she did love me and sometimes, sporadically, felt free to show it.

I was born very premature and dangerously small, addicted to the narcotics in my mother’s system. I used to think that my mother had psychically ejected me; now I wonder if I wasn’t desperate to leave her womb. She was having sex with my father and this horrible man during her pregnancy—if any of Carlos’ theories about awareness in the womb were true, I was indeed energetically damaged.

My mother was fond of quoting a favorite phrase, which she attributed to Freud: “When two people go to bed together, they’re really in bed with six people: each other, and both sets of parents.”

I’d say, “Hello,” and he’d begin his monologue: “I piss on you. You’re shit. You think you’re so wonderful, so important, such problems! Carajo! What makes you special? “And such a Jew! What do think we are: a Mex and a Jew? You were raised with a silver spoon up your culo! You’ve never worked a day in your life. Tell me, do Jews come to this restaurant?”

One reason incest is a betrayal of trust is: what a daughter needs from her father is a sense of self-worth not specifically linked to her sexuality. Sex with a guru is similarly incestuous because a guru ostensibly functions as a spiritual father to whom one’s growth is entrusted. Having sex with a parental figure reinforces using sex for power.

Florinda had the crowning story, a favorite memory of her colorful childhood in Caracas. “I had a toy farm, Ellis, and I made all the dolls mate and breed, not only the cows and pigs. I controlled them all, and I loved it! That was my dream, my delight! I always knew I wanted to grow up and run my own human farm, with living people, who I could pair and mate, and whose lives I could play with just like my toy farm dolls!”

Women have two weapons—cosmetics and tears. —Napoleon I

Castaneda attributed all cancer to tension. Convinced that Tensegrity was the cure, he lamented not having instructed my father; I believe he spoke in all sincerity. Carlos swore that should he ever contract “the Big C” he would blow out his brains. Perhaps he discovered how hard it must be to pull the trigger when a breath of life remains.

I learned long ago that being Lewis Caroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice. —Joyce Carol Oates