Getting Castaneda Quotes

“memories of our luminosity”
― Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda

“to be real means to be agreed on with someone.”
― Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda

“The only way for the first attention to remember items from the second attention is through dreaming.”
― Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda

“The third attention is not described in Castaneda’s work;”
― Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda

“Our life in the first attention is composed of challenges that are meant to lead us to the second attention.”
― Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda

“Consciousness is unevenly divided into three parts.”
― Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda

“The second attention, also known as the other self, the left side or the unknown, is aware of the first attention, which is the normal self, the right side or the known. But the first attention, the right side, is not aware of the left side. The task for us is to make the first attention accept the existence of the second attention, to remember the totality of one’s self.”
― Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda

“But memory isn’t what we think it is. Our normal memory is more like a denial of memory; it’s only a small selective recollection of a few items that our rationality and identity have chosen as their flag to rally around.”
― Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda

“his sixth book, The Eagle’s Gift, first published in 1981,”
― Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda

“It is ‘a realm of indescribable features: a realm impossible to contain in words’.”
― Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda

“We hooked ourselves into the ‘ring of power’ that engaged us fully with that world. All our energy and complete sense of self were assigned to that ring of power.”
― Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda

“we think about it and talk about it over and over,”
― Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda

“As Castaneda said, he was ‘too lazy to remember what I had seen; therefore I only bothered with what I had looked at ... It is hard to believe that I can remember now something I didn't remember at all a while ago.’ He concluded that all of us look and see at the same time, but ‘we choose not to remember what we see’. In the two-step process of perception, we always see first, but immediately ignore what we see to focus only on what we look at instead. This act of perception is ‘the core of our being’. As we grow up, we develop our attention. Attention is the ability to ‘hold the images of the world’. Once we can perceive the agreed world and hold it in place, our perception becomes a constantly repeating two-step process which always produces the same being in the same world.”
― Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda

“The unknown can only emerge safely if it’s used to boost the known. When this is achieved, it’s called personal power. Without long and careful training any encounter with the unknown results in the known ‘crapping out’, creating a fatal shock. Without training, the known prefers to die rather than give up control.”
― Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda

“Reason rescued us from earlier times when larger, darker powers dominated human life.”
― Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda

“When reason connects with talking, we call that understanding.”
― Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda

“Don Juan drew a diagram in the dust, a geometrical shape with eight points. The eight points, organized from small to large, were called reason, talking, dreaming, seeing, feeling, will, the known, and the unknown.”
― Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda

“He embraces a certain mood, and holds himself accountable for every experience and outcome. He takes everything seriously, while laughing at all of it.”
― Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda

“He showed him a way of living that allowed perceivers to expand their awareness while protecting themselves from the unrelenting and inexplicable forces that attack any emerging awareness.”
― Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda

“The cocoon is a temporary feature, starting at birth and ending at death.”
― Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda

“The intention that makes the assemblage point assemble perception comes from the universe outside the cocoon.”
― Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda

“Humans have an orb of bright energy about the size of a tennis ball located on the surface of the cocoon, about an arm’s length behind the right shoulder. This ball of energy is the agent which selects emanations passing through our cocoons to use for perception. It’s called the assemblage point because it’s the point where perception is assembled.”
― Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda

“inorganic entities which have awareness but no bodies.”
― Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda

“Sentient beings are lent awareness, and the purpose of life is to enrich that awareness and then return it to the endower in an enhanced form.”
― Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda

“This energy is aware and conscious of itself, sizzling, alive and moving with the universe’s momentum and purpose.”
― Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda

“life and awareness are inherently intertwined, pre-existing and eternal. At its most basic level, and from and to eternity, the universe consists of strands of luminous energy that are already alive and aware. Life with awareness does not evolve from a lifeless condition. It exists everywhere and manifests repeatedly in a multitude of different forms. It’s nearly impossible to describe these strands of aware energy because we are made of them.”
― Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda

“Storytelling may be the highest form of sorcery, connecting our everyday consciousness with a deeper, ancient awareness.”
― Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda

“vivid description of the flyer”
― Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda

“The ‘flyers’ are creatures from the unknown depths of the universe that live with us on earth, unseen. There are millions of them, resembling giant, primitive ‘mud shadows’ that fly and hop around us all the time. Their constant malevolent presence terrorizes us. Whenever our consciousness rises to a better level they smother us, consuming our emerging awareness, which is their food. The flyers deprive us of our human birthright of magic. They reduce us to our petty, powerless and self-absorbed state.”
― Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda

“But Castaneda actually said the self should be curtailed and erased, not repaired and improved. To him, too much concern with self-pity and self-presentation was the main characteristic of modern man, and the crucial challenge for mankind to face in order to survive and go forward.”
― Peter Luce, Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda