20.

This blog is three books in the process of being written, in the form of initial drafts of the sections, posted in the intended order, a project for which the overall name is Explorations. The three books are a continuation from Hidden Valleys: Haunted by the Future (Zero Books - 2015), and also from On Vanishing Land, an audio-essay made by myself and Mark Fisher (released by Hyperdub/Flatlines on 26th July, 2019 - https://hyperdub.net).

Explorations: Zone Horizon  (1 - 18)

Explorations: The Second Sphere of Action   (19 - 30)

Explorations: Through the Forest, the River  (31 - 50) 

   And - in turn - what might be the transcendental terrain of lucidity?

It is evidently the “place” where the elements or “lines” of a life are straightened out, and where it becomes apparent that there are elements that appeared to be you, but which are not, such that they will have to be detached from you (the waking of lucidity is a "warrior" or "combat" issue). It is also the case that what comes implacably into the foreground here is the immanently inter-related world of intent, energy, love, libido and becomings.

It should also be said at this point that this is not a terrain of the consideration of concepts, but is instead a place of encounters with the tremendum that is the world, where these incursions-becomings-engagements have a greater depth or intensity, in that they are encounters with a level of the world that is beyond ordinary reality.

A first element of this terrain is that within it there is a force that can be called brightness - which consists of love, delight, freedom from dogma, openness and courage -, and another force which can be called gravity or the control mind, where something that is specific to these two forces is that both sexuality and reason have been pre-eminently subordinated to gravity, even though in different ways they are both inseparable from brightness. 

Secondly, this place of encounters is a tremendum of energy, intent and feeling which has a dimension in the form of the transcendentally unknown which is knowable (forming the outer zone of the world or “island” of the knowable, along with what is known within ordinary reality) and another dimension or attribute in the form of the transcendentally unknown whose elements in each case can only be sensed-or-glimpsed, or faintly ‘figured’ in thought as one kind of outline, but where the awareness of this dimension is functional, or consistently valuable, even though the semi-known here can never be brought into focus, or into full knowledge. 

Thirdly it is the place where it is seen that energy and all issues of the body and embodiment are pragmatically primary, and that this in one aspect concerns processes of seeing the nature of the world by means of perception and thought, and in another aspect is about the fundamental need on the part of an individual - for the purposes of travelling into wider realities  -  to maintain and heighten energy in every way that is possible.

*




It is possible now to tell the story of two emergences that took place in the twentieth century - the story of Gilles Deleuze and Carlos Castaneda, a conjoined account of productions of maps and diagrams (for the purposes of escape to the outside) that will also be about three other writers, Feliz Guattari, Florinda Donner and Taisha Abelar.

Deleuze and Castaneda were both born in 1925. And they both cross a threshold around 1968, in that this is the year of the publication of Difference and Repetition, Spinoza and the Problem of Expression, and The Teachings of Don Juan (Castaneda's first book). 

Castaneda's book is pre-eminently a dreaming (in other words, a narrative), although it is also fundamentally a work which is written from the terrain of lucidity. Deleuze is also writing primarily from the terrain of lucidity (which is to say that the system of reason-revelation has almost entirely been overcome), although he has for the most part not reached dreaming. 

Placing the line of east and west side-to side in front of you, and taking it as also the chronological line, with east on the left as the future, then what has happened is that two people have been drawn outward, south, into the Future. But in that Castaneda has fully actualised an engagement with the transcendental terrain of dreaming he has been swept further into the outside.

It is not possible to say anything about the details of Castaneda's apprenticeship in metamorphics (whether or not Don Juan existed, etc): only that in some sense an apprenticeship occured: as evidenced by what is finding expression in the writing. It is also possible to say that one place in particular is profoundly involved in the production of the work - Mexico.

    This account of the first phase of the two emergences - the account of the work of Deleuze and Castaneda - will revolve around questions the planet and the abstract.  But it will also be valuable to consider the dreamings and philosophy that appeared in the preceding decades in the two areas of the planet that were most involved - Mexico and France.

    In Castaneda’s books (and those of Donner and Abelar) the focus of attention is on lives taking place within terrains, and on the crossing of thresholds of intensity, as opposed to the focus being texts, or the history of philosophy. Concepts appear in order to give outsights of specific kinds – in order to elucidate thresholds of intensity, the nature of a human individual, the nature of the world, and the nature of the relationship between humans and the world; instead of concepts appearing in order to interpret a text (it is worthwhile at this stage to hold in mind Deleuze’s perception that philosophy is the invention of concepts). Here everything starts from lives within terrains - perception is fundamental, and what is most fundamental of all are the places which are encountered.

    A second point is that all of these books have a profound but simultaneously tangential relationship to the emergence of anthropology, in the sense that they embody a practical anthropology which consists of learning from and entering into becoming with indigenous worlds, and specifically – in this context – entering into becoming to the point where it is possible to create dreamings which are  also direct, explicit expressions of lucidity. A form of production of outsights which is at a fundamentally higher level in relation to the abstract than the creation of texts which consist only of blocks of abstractions.

   A last issue concerns the roles of the female and the planetary in the first three books by Castaneda. It seems highly likely that Castaneda underwent some kind of actual (as opposed to virtual-real) apprenticeship at the time of writing these books (which is to say that in some sense the teacher modality of 'Don Juan' probably did exist, even if he is a synthesis or composite of separate individuals), but the main point here, in any case, is that what is being set out within the books is a male apprenticeship, a process of a man being taught about thresholds and relationships by another male. This explains why it is that in the first three books (out of twelve) the question of women is very much in the background, and the question of the planet is heavily foregrounded, but only in an implicit way, through emphasis on terrains (this is evidently important - and would stand as an enigma without the tendency having been counter-acted -because in reaching dreaming both the planet and women come very emphatically into the foreground).

     It is after the third book that everything changes, in relation in particular to women - as if a barrier that was initially necessary has now of necessity been removed. The reason for this barrier is obvious in relation to women: a man who loves women will recurrently lose all focus if he encounters the idea of female practitioners of metamorphics, simply because of the power of attraction of the idea of a beautiful “sorceress.” Women need here to be kept out of the picture to the maximum extent because a man has to learn how to wake up, and does not need to be given anything to feed his amorous and sexual self-indulgence (which in part of course is to say that he needs to enter into becoming with the brightness of women, as opposed to, in effect, being obsessed with having amorous relationships with them). And in relation to the planet the situation (which is less gender-specific) is that, because men tend to be angrily stubborn in connection with their views about ‘mere mattter’ it is better to bring the individual face to face with terrains than to make any contentions about the planet as a Spinozist body/world that is not different in kind from the body/world that is a human individual.

     At the end of Castaneda's fourth book, Tales of Power (“power” here is primarily a way of referring to impersonal intent or Love-and-Freedom), a crucial point is made about our relationship with the planet, one which has a direct parallel in the work of Delueze:

‘Only if one loves this earth with unbending passion can one release one’s sadness,’ don Jaun said. 'A warrior is always joyful because his love is unalterable, and his beloved, the earth, embraces him and bestows upon him inconceivable gifts. The sadness belongs only to those who hate the very thing that gives shelter to their beings.’

(The parallel in Deleuze's writing is where he refers to the tendency of supposedly highly-cultured and intellectual human beings to have a ‘contempt for the earth.').

    But what is this conjoined world into which we have moved? 

    In relation to the oneirosphere we are in Mexico and France, and also to a certain extent in the United States. But there is more that should be said - a process of starting from the terrains involved. A difficult process, in that in relation to dreamings and philosophy it is to a great extent a question of pointing out what has been ignored or left behind, and even when - as with the past philosophical works drawn upon by Deleuze and Guattari - it has not been left behind, it is necessary to make these other works visible not as enshrined elements in historical lineages, but as zones or modalities of engagement that exist within an archipelago of current forces. 

    An impression is easily acquired that what took place in Mexico was a series of precursor events, or “pre-shocks” in the oneirosphere (and not just in the oneirosphere). And this is not misleading, even though the culmination in the work of Castaneda, Donner and Abelar should be regarded as a contingent breakthrough, and as emphatically not a synthesis in relation to the earlier events (or, indeed, a reaction against them).

   The eyes of the world had been turned toward Mexico because of the 1910-1920 revolution, but from the very beginning the focus had been on a place which had non-western, indigenous traditions still profoundly in effect, in particular in its vast mountainous expanses. As the grip of a new post-revolution establishment (social domination system) was progressively tightened this focus on the indigenous traditions would be assisted, but at the same time the overall country would be attractive in the sense that it was a terrain of relative freedom. The establishment became progressively locked to non-democratic domination, but this did not express itself as micro-control on the part of the state.

    Lawrence goes to Mexico and writes the 1925 novel The Plumed Serpent (the intended title of which was Quetzalcoatl). Artaud visits Mexico in 1936 and writes The Tarahumaras, about his visit to the Tarahumara Indians. Malcolm Lowry lives in Cuernavaca for two years from 1937 to 1938, and later writes Under the Volcano. In 1960 there is The Magnificent Seven, taken from the Japanese original, in which the central protagonist is a figure of freedom (and perhaps the first Hollywood hero played by an actor who is not caucasian) who says he is "drifting south," and where the film's final shot is of two people riding into a spectacular terrain of Mexican volcanoes. In 1949 William Burroughs starts visiting Mexico: this passage is from Naked Lunch:

“Something falls off you when you cross the border into Mexico, and suddenly the landscape hits you straight with nothing between you and it, deserts and mountains and vultures; little wheeling specks and others so close you can hear their wings cut the air”

And in the early 60s the artist/film-maker Bruce Conner makes Looking for Mushrooms, a film that uses footage of searches in the Mexican countryside for psychedelic mushrooms in 1960 and 1961. 

    Artaud's writing about peyote in the world of the Tarahumara indians is part of a wider process - including the book from the same time about indigenous traditions in the U.S. by Weston La Barre, The Peyote Cult - , a wider process that ended up being linked to Aldous Huxley taking mescaline and writing The Doors of Perception. And alongside an association with psychotropic visions Mexico also at this time became perhaps the most intense point on the planet in relation to painting. This is because of the unprecedented work of Frida Kahlo, and because Leonora Carrington flees from Europe and settles permanently in Mexico City. It is also because of Diego Riviera, and because in the late 40s Roberto Matta visits Mexico and is deeply influenced by its terrains. And as a result of the presence of Trotsky and other intellectuals it would be right to say that briefly Mexico City and the surrounding area had become a kind of capital not just of visionary art but of "molecular" or individual freedom (as opposed, of course, to structural and democratic freedom at the level of the state).

    Seeing the issue from the perspective of the U.S. it would be right to say that in the 50s and early 60s the west turns south. Only the new west - the place where there is freedom and adventure, and sublime planetary expanses - is now also a place of transcendental visions, and of the use of psychotropic substances. (this southward version of the west will of course turn back, and for a while permeate deep into the U.S., suffusing in particular the cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco). 

     Insofar as individuals are the focus for the problem, the idea here is not at all that someone - Castaneda, or whoever was teaching him - decided to take advantage of a global interest in Mexico and its indigenous traditions, or that some feeling emerged that after all the deeply flawed attempts it was necessary to start again, and do it properly. Instead it is mainly that anyone beginning to do work in this area would have a following wind to propel them forward - the existence of a fascinated listening on the part of the planet would mean that the work at each stage would be taken up by those receiving it as a response to an urgent requirement.

     And at the deepest level - one that to a great extent concerns the oneirosphere - the feeling is that in relation to previous literature there was a series of precursor events in which a lightning-charge was having an impact (and which were 'dark precursors' in that a - deleterious - direction other than the southward outside was also involved, partially or systemically), and that the lightning at last went into effect in the work of Castaneda, and then also in the work of Donner and Abelar.

    In relation to philosophy Deleuze should be perceived as having been profoundly alone during the 50s and early 60s, and as having been in a position where he was receiving sustained help from only two main philosophical sources, both of which were, at the same time, highly problematic, and neither of which were in any way connected to the France of the preceding decades. It is best to imagine him in the morning in the early 60s, surrounded by thought emergent from fiction, and listening to an eerie philosophical silence - while simultaneously aware of the fact that across the rooftops of the city the southward wall of the future was now far more visible.

    And all of this is despite the fact that one of the few emergence-events comparable to what had just taken place in the oneirosphere of Mexico was what had just happened in France – and despite the fact that the French equivalent had pre-eminently involved the sphere of philosophy (although it should be added that it had also very much included events in the oneirosphere).

    The explosion of French philosophy from around 1900 onwards is nothing if not spectacular. At the beginning there is Bergson, but also Bachelard.  Then there is Sartre, De Beauvoir, Bataille, Merleau-Ponty, Simondon, Artaud, Blanchot and Cioran (who came to Paris from Roumania, and wrote most of his books in French) . To this should be added that in anthropology there is Levy-Strauss, who published The Elementary Structures of Kinship in 1949. And lastly (and setting the worst kind of example for philosophy) there was the populariser of Hegel, Kojeve.

    Deleuze has become aware that people show very little tendency to love thinking, and that instead they tend to think by means of  some system of conformity (a composite of conventional familial, national, sexual, “rational” and religious values masquerading as “common sense”) – and that, even more disturbingly, when they start to do what is perceived within the establishment-world as philosophy they do the same thing: only now they think by means of some system that has emerged from conformist, or “state” philosophy.  He is also aware that this is not in any sense definitive of people, but is instead the result of something endemically wrong within the human social world. He is setting out to walk, on his own, toward Love-and-Freedom, and therefore toward wider realities. He will soon have company, but it remains the case that he has not reached far enough into the terrain of dreaming, and being held largely within the space of the problematic of thought (a space haunted by – although not defined by – a terrible, control-fixated maleness) he is in a bad position for acquiring a collaboration-alliance not with a man, but with a woman (an alliance with a woman for the purposes of travelling into the transcendentally unknown).

    There is evidently a shocking tumult around him. France is massively over-determined to have an explosive development within the Marxist/Hegelian zone of the system of reason-revelation (because of its valorising of revolution). Which is to say, in this context, that the other aspect of the French emergence-event is a whole generation growing up in the 60s with a profound tendency to dream an imminent, post-revolution socialist or communist future, and with an equally profound tendency to see a revolution as an inevitable result of the contradictions intrinsic to capitalism, such that, according to this view, the bourgeois world was about to be refuted by history.

    In the midst of the bleak conservatism of the 50s Paris had been another refuge for artists and intellectuals, along with Mexico City (and in a way that was similar to the situation with Mexico City this was in spite of the fact that the national government had no significant libertarian tendencies, but was right-wing throughout the decade). Becket was another figure who came to Paris and ended up writing in a second language.

   And as the new decade begins the storm of French philosophy is showing no signs of abating (in 1960 Sartre publishes The Critique of Dialectical Reason). But in the midst of all this tumultuous activity, it is still necessary to imagine Deleuze as experiencing a lonely, disturbing silence. It is clear to him that the only philosophical figures who can help him are Nietszche and Spinoza, and that Nietzsche, despite in many ways having got furthest, is a terrible mess, and that there is something fundamental that is missing from Spinoza. It also clear that although Nietzsche was an initial and very influential guest at the modernist party (along with Darwin, and early anthropologists like Theodor Waitz) it has since been gatecrashed and to a great extent taken over by Nietzsche’s deeply and damagingly confused step-son, Sigmund Freud. And finally it is apparent that what is also brutally suppressing any sustained awareness of the Future is a combination of Hegelianism and of entrapment of attention on the denuded areas engaged  with by dogmatic ‘scientificity’  (as opposed - putting this outsight into the correct terms - to the zones and wider realities discerned by perception, lucidity, and dreaming).

     Deleuze sets out to write about the world and about the human individual with its faculties and affects, and to write with reference to past texts - and does not decide to write in a way that has an over-arching narrative relationship to a place or places. He has therefore loaded himself up with a vast weight of conceptual systems that need to be partially or comprehensively critiqued, simultaneously cutting himself off from a relationship to a terrain in which - along with the delineation of this terrain - carefully tightened or newly invented concepts can be employed as and when necessary (and where, conversely, there is no need to get embroiled in often deeply misleading and muddled conceptual fields of previous writers).

     It is only when he starts to work with Felix Guattari that he begins to break free - partially - from this profoundly encumbered way of working. Guattari is coming from out of a sister-discipline of anthropology (psychology/psychoanalyis), but in leaving behind psychoanalysis for "schizoanalysis" he converges, along with Deleuze, on a form of philosophical engagement that is profoundly anthropological. Which in this context is to say that both he and Deleuze start to write about the terrain that is the-planet-with-the-human-world-within-it, and to tell the story of the human world over the last 12,000 years. In this way they reach a first form of philosophical dreaming - an initial simultaneous expression of dreaming and lucidity in the form of outsights and diagrams which in both cases are for travelling into the Outside. 



      It is during the culmination of this process – the writing of A Thousand Plateaus – that Deleuze and Guattari find that they are alongside the work of Castaneda. And it can be seen how it would be wrong here to emphasise either the time of narrative or the question of institutional anthropology in describing this encounter, as if what was important was styles of writing, or was a shared, conventional interest in indigenous societies. What is preeminent in this encounter is space (the question of its dimensions or attributes), and is philosophy (the question of a more encompassing way of understanding the world).

“The fourth book [by Castaneda], Tales of Power, is about the living distinction between the “Tonal” and the “Nagual.” The tonal seems to cover many disparate things: It is the organism, and also all that is organised and organising; but it is also significance, and all that is signifying or signified, all that is susceptible to interpretation, explanation, all that is memorisable in the form of something recalling something else; finally it is the Self (Moi), the subject, the historical, social or individual person, and the corresponding feelings. In short, the tonal is everything, including God, the judgement of God, since it “makes up the rules by which it apprehends the world. So, in a manner of speaking, it creates the world.” Yet the tonal is only an island. For the nagual is also everything. And it is the same everything, but under such conditions that the body without organs has replaced the organism and experimentation has replaced all interpretation, for which it no longer has any use. Flows of intensity, their fluids, their fibres, their continuums and conjunctions of affects, the wind, fine segmentation, microperceptions, have replaced the world of the subject. [A Thousand Plateaus, Athlone, p.162].

The main passage to which Deleuze and Guattari are responding is an account of a meeting which takes place in a restaurant in Mexico, where don Juan describes the “tonal” by taking the example of the table at which they are sitting. Castaneda asks “If the tonal is everything we know about ourselves and the world, what, then, is the nagual?

“ ‘The nagual is the part of us which we do not deal with at all.  […]

‘Would you say that the nagual is the mind?’

‘No, the mind is an item on the table. The mind is part of the tonal. Let’s say that the mind is the chilli sauce.’ […]

I went on giving possible ways of describing what he was alluding to: pure intellect, psyche, vital force, immortality, life principle. For each thing I named he found an item on the table to serve as a counterpart and shoved it in front of me, until he had all the objects on the table stashed in one pile. […]

‘Is the nagual the Supreme Being, the Almighty, God?’ I asked.

‘No. God is also on the table. Let’s say that God is the tablecloth.’

He made a joking gesture of pulling the tablecloth in order to stack it up with the rest of the items he had put in front of me. […]

‘In my understanding, don Juan, God is everything. Aren’t we talking about the same thing?’

‘No. God is only everything you can think of, therefore, properly speaking, he is only another item on the island. God cannot be witnessed at will, he can only be talked about. The nagual, on the other hand, is at the service of the warrior. It can be witnessed, but it cannot be talked about.’

‘If the nagual is not any of the things I have mentioned,’ I said, ‘perhaps you can tell me about its location. Where is it?’

     Don Juan made a sweeping gesture and pointed to the area beyond the boundaries of the table. He swept his hand, as if with the back of it he were cleaning an imaginary area that went beyond the edges of the table.

    ‘The nagual is there,’ he said. ‘There, surrounding the island. The nagual is there, where power hovers.’

    ‘We sense, from the moment we are born, that there are two parts to us. At the time of birth, and for a while after, we are all nagual. We sense, then, that in order to function we need a counterpart to what we have. The tonal is missing, and that gives us, from the very beginning, a feeling of incompleteness. Then the tonal starts to develop and it becomes utterly important to our functioning, so important that it opaques the shine of the nagual, it overwhelms it. From the moment we become all tonal we do nothing else but to increment that old feeling of incompleteness which accompanies us from the moment of our birth, and which tells us constantly that there is another part to give us completeness.’  [Tales of Power, Penguin, 1974, pp. 122-124]

      It does not make sense at this stage to go into a detailed process of explicating  and comparing these two passages. Instead, the way forward is through the issues of exteriority and of the "impersonal," and through a response to one specific element in the passage from Castaneda's book - the idea expressed by  "the nagual is there, where power hovers." 

     This phrase, in the context, creates a horizon of exteriority that is both utterly close, in that it is also being stated that the nagual is a part of the entirety of ourselves (a way or form of being), and metaphysically distant, in that this horizon is not just beyond the ordinarily knowable, but is the outer edge of the transcendentally unknown that is knowable. And simultaneously it creates a horizon that is fundamentally impersonal, in that power is a term which, like force, does not take the mind toward the personal, and in that the intent of beings that hover is also not thought of along personal lines. Lastly, it is entirely indeterminate in terms of the range of different beings and forces in this outer zone of the exteriority, and in terms therefore of the intent involved in the possible specific instances of this collective instance of power hovering. The force concerned in any particular case could be entirely uninterested in you, or it could be a predator, or its intent could be in the direction of some kind of energy-alliance.

   And – in turn – these points lead to what is perhaps the fundamental aspect of the metaphysics and pragmatics of Castaneda’s books. This is that it is always a question of starting from energy, from bodies, and from embodiment ("axiom 3," from the start of this section). And this in fact is to reach not just the momentous worlds that bodies are, but also to reach all of the zones of the abstract, from the most accessible to the most recondite. Bodies all along are the fundamental road to the abstract (and to the most important zone of the abstract, intent). They are doorways to the abstract. And this in turn splits up into two issues – one of which is the issue of the planet, and the other of which is the issue of human bodies, and, very much in particular, the question of women (the importance of the female body lies in its extraordinary power, and also in the devastating ways in which it has been suppressed).

    In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari structure a part of a section on micropolitics (the issue of groups) by drawing on an account from Castaneda’s first book of four “dangers” or “enemies” (corresponding to four thresholds, or potentials) that are encountered in the process of waking up as a perceiver of the world –  these three “enemy” instances are fear, clarity, power, and old age. And the issue here is evidently that Castaneda has gone out of his way to critique “power” from the very beginning, and yet at the same time has gone on to employ the term – in another sense – as a name for the current that leads toward wider levels of reality (oneiro-axiom 5, from the preceding section). Later he will settle on the term “intent” as his primary name, and will cease to use the term “power,” but given that he explicitly describes intent as a force within the universe, he has not left behind the language of the impersonal (‘impersonal’ is in fact a key descriptive term in the writing for this force), and nor has any described aspect in the earlier books been negated – it is more that a point is made with emphasis in the course of the initial writing. This passage is from the third book, Journey to Ixtlan, and is an important counterpart to the sequence about fear, clarity, power and old age:

     “ ‘This is a place of power, and here we can talk only about power.’

    ‘I really don’t know what power is,’ I said.

    ‘Power is something a warrior deals with,’ he said. ‘At first it’s an incredible, far-fetched affair; it is hard to even think about it. This is what’s happening to you now. Then power becomes a serious matter; one may not have it, or one may not even fully realise that it exists, yet one knows that something is there, something which was not noticeable before. Next power is manifested as something uncontrollable that comes to oneself. It is not possible for me to say how it comes or what it really is. It is nothing and yet it makes marvels appear before your very eyes. And finally power is something in oneself, something that controls one’s acts and yet obeys one’s command.’

   There was a short pause. Don Juan asked me if I had understood. I felt ludicrous saying I did. He seemed to have noticed my dismay and chuckled.

    ‘I am going to teach you right here the first step to power,’ he said as if he were dictating a letter to me. ‘I am going to teach you how to set up dreaming.’  (Journey to Ixtlan, Penguin, 1973, p.113)

  

     It is possible to see the crucial work that is being done here by using the term “power.” In relation to the transcendental (that which comes from outside, and transforms, or wakes) human beings have been induced to see both themselves and the transcendental as belonging to a world that is beyond nature – as belonging  to a domain whose beings are both non-physical (or non-energetic) and eternal. Not only that, they have been inculcated or instilled with a suppressive, damaging system of moods, one of which is the mood that is named “piety.” Everything therefore needs to be done to describe the transcendental in a way that cuts the ‘lines’ of these delusory, suppressive forms of thought and feeling, and that takes attention toward the tremendum that is the world of nature, or of formations of energy. In the above passage this need is at its very greatest, and the term power is precisely the most effective available, with this term being assisted by the name ‘warrior’ as the description for the person who follows the described escape-path. The warrior is the person who combats natural damaging forces which have battened upon her or him (forces that can best be described as the control mind, or the interiority) and does this through attention being turned primarily toward the southward-transcendental, with this last instance being understood as natural and impersonal – as a force within the cosmos which can be engaged with and to an extent embodied through a pragmatic process.

    Power is evidently in part a term that can be used to replace energy (although it is a term  that takes the idea of energy to its maximal extension – as in “the power of dreaming” or “dreams are the most powerful things we know”).  But what about bodies, and embodiment?  It would be understandable if someone in reading the above passage was to wonder for a moment about the idea that bodies are part of the fundamental starting-point, given that it consists almost entirely of abstractions, and given that it culminates in the idea of dreaming. Of course, it is likely to be seen immediately that dreaming has an intrinsic relationship with spaces, and that spaces, taken as a whole, are in a profound sense inseparable from bodies. However, although this is entirely correct, the key issue here concerns perception, rather than dreaming.

     More than anything else the first books by Castaneda are about the need to become perception. They are about the need to acquire the default ability to stop thinking (which under most circumstances is not really thinking at all) and become an unbroken, fully focused perception of the surrounding world, or of some zone or area of zones within it. This is described as “stopping the internal dialogue”. And it needs to seen that the body which is pre-eminently in question here is the planet on which we live. In setting out to stop the internal dialogue, for instance, in a wilderness terrain of the mountains of Mexico (but in fact in any planetary terrain) the body with which we are in an encompassing perceptual relationship is the planet we name the Earth. Sitting on a high hill in Mexico, if you see with your whole body (with all of your senses) you are seeing the movements of the sky through feeling the breeze, you are feeling the deep-base points where there is the sensation of being pressed against the ground, you are seeing the sky and the mountains (with their trees and other plants), and you are hearing the wind, and the cries of birds and insects: despite the birds, plants and insects being separable entities, in fact everything you are encountering (with the key exception of the sun, encountered through touch, and sight) is one spheroambient body, a body which is more than spheroambient, in that we are continually breathing in and consuming substance which belongs to one of its surrounding zones, the sky.

   But this is to point out the way in which the starting point is bodies.The task is not to set out to see the planet, but is to become perception, to become a sustained relationship with the outside. This can be done by concentrating on an area of trees, or on the movement of the water of a river, or on the sounds of a day, and everything concerns letting go and deliberately perceiving in a sustained way, for minutes on end, as opposed to having a predetermined goal of seeing the planet, or of seeing any particular thing in some pre-conceived new way. A question of simply perceiving, without presuppositions about where you are going.

       Success here therefore concerns a sustained, focused encounter with bodies, and this successful encounter is a process of - rupturally -  coming to see the world around you as a world of energy formations, a space of formations which are forces or “wills” (zones of intent), co-emplaced with each other, and co-emplaced with you. The process of learning to sustain perception of bodies in the space around you leads eventually to something that is described as “stopping the world.” The bodies percieved are the doorway – the doorway to the abstract.

    Deleuze and Guattari take up this idea of stopping the world in the fifth section of A Thousand Plateaus:

One of the things of profound interest in Castaneda’s books, under the influence of drugs, or other things, is that they show how… [it is possible for the person who teaches] …to combat the mechanisms of interpretation […]. Experiment, don’t signify and interpret! Find your own places, territorialities, deterritorializations, regime, lines of flight! [stop] rooting around in your prefab childhood and Western semiology. “Don Juan stated that in order to arrive at ‘seeing’ one first had to ‘stop the world.’ ‘Stopping the world was indeed an appropriate rendition of certain states of awareness in which the reality of everyday life is altered because the flow of interpretation, which ordinarily runs uninterruptedly, has been stopped by a set of circumstances alien to the flow.’ “ {A Thousand Plateaus, pp138-139].

    The issue of starting from power/energy and from bodies is not at all just one of critique, although there is a fundamental critical component. The idea of the supplementary dimension of the the non-physical and eternal is a system of delusion pertaining to the control mind, and as such, to leave it behind is to go into a deeper relationship with reality. But we are not left confronted only with a space of “things” as a result: on the contrary, in focusing attention on bodies we are now at last in a position to get a clear view of intent, one that is unencumbered by the blocking modalities of the delusory supplementary dimension.

   And what starts in perception then transforms thought, or abstract-perception. To start from bodies is here to start from dreaming (for instance, dreaming up what all along could be going on), and also - crucially – is to follow the lines of the encountered world (the planet, the cosmos) as a sublime-and-eerie expanse of Spaces with a depth-world of past formations, as opposed to following the lines of words, or of pre-existing systems of concepts. A true “hauntology” begins here (the study of places or “haunts,” and the study across space and dimensions of reality - and also across time – of the natural forces by which the human is sublimely and darkly “haunted”),  as does a genuine study of the human body, with its faculties, potentials and transformational becomings. However, nothing should be done to give support to gothic-attuned thinkers for whom the gothic is critique and vague, success-generating excitement (and who not understand the nature of the transcendental). A process of following the lines of the world in these different ways  – which is always a travelling into the unknown in the direction of the south of the outside – is in fact a bringing into effect of metamorphics.




We can ask again – where are we? And the first answer is France, Mexico, and the United States to a certain extent (and also, in a way that goes deeply back into time, we are tangentially in China).

    The more fundamental answer of course is that we are in a terrain of intensity definable as the place where there is a distant view of the Future - of the south of the transcendental. And as we have seen, the primary elements that insist when looking in this direction are the planet, the abstract, and women – which in part is to say that it is necessary to return very soon to the issue of women.

    But to start with France and Mexico, it is important to point out that there is one figure who appears on both sides of the account of the antecedents of the double emergence that is being delineated in this section – and this figure is Antonin Artaud. There is even a kind of urgency about this, in that in the initial passage quoted here from A Thousand Plateaus is explicitly drawing upon Artaud, both through the idea of the body without organs, and through referencing Artaud’s critique of the destructive gravity of processes of being metaphysically judgemental/censorious/outraged etc. (both of these elements in fact have sources in “To Have Done with the Judgements of God,” the 1947 work for radio whose “outside” is primarily the world of the Tarahumara Indians).

    However, in the four initial books (including the book which Deleuze and Guattari are explicating in this passage in which they also reference their French predecessor) Castaneda shows no signs at all of having been influenced by Artaud. So it is not that a key to Castaneda has been overlooked: it is more that the source of a key element within the work of Deleuze and Guattari has not been indicated, which on one level means that here everything points to the indigenous worlds of Mexico, though in two separate ways.

     But the main issue here is the idea of the body without organs. The writing of Deleuze and Guattari is profoundly assisted by the concept that has arrived from Artaud – Artaud helps them to reach the stage where they are following the lines of the world (as opposed to the futile map-comparison processes of those who are fixated on texts and systems of concepts). Though it is very much not the case that there are no other effective ways of breaking open the outsights that are involved. The work of Donner, Abelar and Castaneda provides exceptionally effective views toward the body without organs – the abstract – without ever employing the concept.

It is necessary to consider this passage from the Tao Te Ching:

“Return is the movement of Way,

And yielding the method of Way.

All beneath heaven, the ten thousand things: it’s all born of being,

and being is born of non-being."

The use of the term ‘non-being’ for the body without organs (or, most specifically, for that part of the body without organs that can be called the nagual) is what is important: without any indication of an influence from ancient Chinese thought, in the initial books of Castaneda a primary strategy for breaking open a view to the abstract is to use what is effectively the same means, in its variant linguistic forms (and often in a way which can be described as “quiet” in its effectiveness, or the opposite of bombastic assertion). It is this strategy which is used in the passage above about “power:”  - “It is nothing and yet it makes marvels appear…”

   The idea of the body without organs is a relative of the idea of non-being, but it is evidently not just a variant – it embodies a critique of a habituated, deadening functioning of the organs as such (or more correctly, the organs-for-themselves), which, instead of becoming elements within an overall intent to go toward Love-and-Freedom, can become zones of chronic indulgence (in the case of over-eating the stomach as an organ in this sense does nothing at all to prevent the expansion of its activity at the expense of the activity of other organs). There is also, in following this ‘plane of organisation’ into the human social world, a critique involved of the deadening functionings of states and religious institutions (though it needs to be remembered that at a deeper level these are not equivalents of zones of organs in the initial sense, but merely to a great extent 'pose' as equivalents). But the fundamental point (and starting-point), in fact is the one that connects the concept to ‘non-being:’ a human individual is a world of organs, and is also a world of intent, energy, dreams, awareness, feeling, memory, thought, etc.

    There is therefore a body without organs which exists from the beginning, and a focused form of this body that is what it is necessary to reach, as with learning to focus the eyes. It is this second state which Artaud is describing:

When you will have made him a body without organs

Then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions

And restored him to his true freedom.

Deleuze and Guattari start from here, creating a concept from this outsight. They create a concept which in fact is fundamentally wider in its application than the phrase of the starting-point, but at the same time Artaud has become a prominent aspect of their work.

    And Artaud’s trip to the Tarahumara Indians is in effect explicitly and in a sustained way in “To Have Done with the Judgements of God.” (the above quotation is from the final few lines of this work).  As a result, in writing a section of A Thousand Plateaus which starts from this work Deleuze and Guattari have been drawn into an additional proximity to the work of Castaneda. Artaud’s writing is a precursor of the two-sided emergence in question, though it is a precursor which goes into direct effect in France, but not in Mexico.

    There is a need here for a kind of overarching, lucid sobriety – to invoke someone’s work is to create a doorway. Deleuze and Guattari take the idea of a body without organs, and create the concept, but they do not hold up Artaud’s writing as a crucial exemplar, or write whole books about him. And although Castaneda draws substantially on the work of poets from across the world – and sets out an account of the way in which poets have an awareness of an additional, generally unperceived factor that operates within human existence – he does not include a passage from Artaud, or make any reference to him.

    Artaud was affected by the receding of the Future in the 1930s in a calamitous way. His collapse into a Christian schizo-delusion in 1937 put delerial, damaging threads into his body of work. But it is necessary to see that overall, in his heroin-addicted state he was never quite as free from Christianity as might be imagined, in that a last trap of the system of reason-revelation is a kind of scatological rage against the conventional world and conventional philosophy: in saying “shit to the spirit” he was inveighing against thinkers who have been influenced by Hegel (no country is more fixated upon Hegel than France) and therefore by an intrinsically Christian philosophy - and at the same time he was railing against other influences of Christianity that do not involve Hegelianism. This is not so much visionary, as a flailing implicit granting of an importance that should never be given: instead, it is necessary to turn away, and walk soberly toward Love-and-Freedom. The visionary power of the best passages in Artaud is at an extremely high level (it is not for nothing that Deleuze and Guattari say he “may not have succeeded for himself, but he succeeded for all of us”), but as the Future receded this sober walk towards it did not take place: instead there was the collapse.The statement made by Don Juan in The Second Ring of Power can be quoted here:

“The world of people goes up and down, and people go up and down with their world: warriors have no business following the ups and downs of their fellow men”

    French philosophy in the time immediately after Artaud was caught in a kind of doubly dysfunctional counterpoint between frenzied scatological forays (Bataille’s fiction, as well as aspects of Artaud) and timidly sober, semi-lucid excursions which were far too embroiled in compromised fields of existing concepts, as opposed to being results of processes of following the lines of the world (lines of terrains, lines of becomings, lines of faculties, lines/sequences of thresholds, lines of levels or spheres of reality) and - arising from this - of generating and adjusting concepts to describe what has been encountered.

    It falls to Deleuze in “The Image of Thought” section of Difference and Repetition to do three things that need to be mentioned in this context. It falls to him to make a genuine, intense homage to Artaud (and in fact here it is the Artaud from before the schizo-delerial breakdown); to point toward the extreme lucidity that is recurrently threaded into some forms of schizophrenic experience (he takes Schreber as the example); and to get on with the process of pointing out not just that what is ordinarily called thought is not generally thought at all, but that it is a dogma that these processes are “upright” or “healthy” as opposed to being diseases or disasters which afflict the human mind. 

     As if he is writing another side of the book that Castaneda is writing at this time, (The Teachings of Don Juan) he indicates the way in which the distinctness and focus of outsights is something  very different – in relation to its charge of multiplicitousness – from the banal “clarity” of processes of recognition. Castaneda’s point in saying that clarity is the second danger or ‘enemy’ on the path to knowledge is wider but complementary, in that what is being diagnosed is a delusory clarity (as opposed to the clarity or focus that can in fact be reached) in the form of a collapse into a state of mis-perceiving that takes place through the application of an inclusive system of inappropriate models (as with – to take just one component – the modelling of thought on recognition and language).

    In relation to thought the path forward from here is found in the subsequent books by Castaneda, and it is a process whose moments are very measured and precise. They are precise in that a new account of faculties is being created, with lucidity (or ‘seeing’) being brought into focus alongside reason, and also because however else the control mind needs to be construed (in relation to it being a socially endemic instance toward which people are impelled almost from birth) it is very definitely also on one level something which human individuals do to themselves:

  “We are perceivers, […] The world that we perceive though, is an illusion. It was created by a description that was told to us since the moment we were born.

   We […] are born with two rings of power, but we use only one to create the world. That ring, which is hooked very soon after we are born, is reason, and its companion is talking. Between the two they concoct and maintain the world.

    So, in essence, the world that your reason wants to sustain is the world created by a description and its dogmatic and inviolable rules, which the reason learns to accept and defend.

   The ‘tonal’ is the system of everything that is used for engagement with the ordinary world (as opposed to engagement with the transcendentally unknown but knowable, or semi-knowable), a system that has reason and language as two central aspects of its functioning. And the tonal, if lucidity and dreaming and intent have not fully woken, can be induced into becoming a ‘prison-guard’ which keeps the individual trapped within a first, deeply denuded zone of reality:

   “…the tonal is a guardian that protects something priceless, our very being. Therefore, an inherent quality of the tonal is to be cagey and jealous of its doings. And […] it eventually changes, in every one of us, from a guardian into a guard.

[…]

    “A guardian is broad-minded and understanding […]. A guard on the other hand, is a vigilante, narrow-minded and most of the time despotic. […] …the tonal in all of us has been made into a petty and despotic guard when it should be a broad-minded guardian.”

    There is a something wrong, therefore, within the human mind, in that thought is being prevented from taking place. And what is necessary is a pre-eminent focus on bodies and bodies without organs (specific zones or bodies of intent), and simultaneously a re-envisaging of the world as a place in which women and men can transform themselves into deliberate explorers of the transcendentally unknown.  

  The primary aim here is not to elucidate the concepts of the ‘tonal’ and the ‘nagual.’ This is partly because the later books, after Tales of Power, will move toward a slightly different zone of outsights, a zone that is still very much at the outer-edge of what can be communicated, but whose concepts are a slightly better place for starting an elucidation (Castaneda will say of these later ideas that they were brought into focus under the tutelage of a female practitioner of metamorphics, as opposed to the tutelage of Don Juan). It is also because in reading Tales of Power a feeling emerges that what is really fundamental (and what is in fact crucial for the transmission of an understanding  of the tonal and the nagual) is all along the metamorphosed account of faculties, and the introduction of the idea that women are in the deepest sense a primary part of the horizon of those struggling toward the south of the outside. At one point Castaneda gives an account of a meeting in Mexico City with don Juan where he is instructed, while sitting on a park bench, to perceive and assess the ‘tonal’ of the people who go past them: he is told at the end of this process that the last task is to look for a ‘proper tonal,’ and after waiting for some time a young woman appears, walking towards them:

I could not clearly distinguish the young woman’s features, although there was still enough light. She came within a couple of feet but went by without looking at us. Don Juan ordered me in a whisper to get up and go talk to her.

I ran after her and asked for directions. […] She was young, perhaps in her mid-twenties, of medium height, very attractive and well-groomed. Her eyes were clear and peaceful. She smiled at me as I spoke. There was something winning about her. […]

I went back to the bench and sat down.

‘Is she a warrior?’ I asked.

‘Not quite’ don Juan said. ‘But she’s a just right tonal. One that could turn into a proper tonal. Warriors come from that stock.’

His statements aroused my curiosity. I asked him if women could be warriors. He looked at me, apparently baffled by me question.

‘Of course they can,’ he said, ‘and they are even better equipped for the path of knowledge than men.’  [pp.141 – 142]

    For it can be asked of both sides of the double-emergence to this point – the year 1974 – what exactly is the extent of the presence of women? On both sides the situation is about to be very fundamentally transformed (this is particularly true on the side of Castaneda, where it is not just the case that women and women teachers will suddenly be central to his writing, but where the emergence transforms itself such that Castaneda will become just one part of a group consisting of one male and two female writers), but until this stage – in two very different ways – women have been distant, or 'horizon' presences within the works. Deleuze has been in an all-too-male philosophical labyrinth, struggling to get out of it toward women: which in part is is to say that to a great extent he has been failing to arrive at a process of following the lines of the world (and failing therefore to wake the faculty of dreaming), and that he has been embroiled in engagements employing  the conceptual fields of other male writers who were also trying to reach the brightness – the delight, the lack of gravity-that, for whatever reason, has recurrently been more accessible to women. And in Castaneda the issue of female equivalents of the figures of Castaneda and don Juan (respectively the figures of student and teacher of metamorphics) has simply been primarily postponed until half way through the fourth book.

    From 1974 onwards everything is swept upward toward female figures (actual and virtual) who are explorers of the transcendentally unknown (the dedication of Taisha Abelar's book is "with affection for all who journey into the unknown"), and toward accounts and narratives in relation to the crucial metamorphic instance that is 'becoming-woman.' The impression that is given is that for the emergence to reach a fully-realised, effective form it could only proceed by the appearance of female writers (and not only Taisha Abelar, and Florinda Donner, but also Carol Tiggs, who, along with the two other women, co-authors a written interview in 1997). Furthermore, Being-in-Dreaming (Donner's third book) impels you to the conclusion that the way of breaking open outsights - the abstract machine - in effect in Castaneda's work, has not only undergone a subtle modification through a different writer being involved, but has in fact reached a higher level of philosophical and oneiro-abstract intensity.

    In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari draw upon Castaneda to a substantial extent when generating their concept of 'becomings,' (pp. 248 - 249) and in the process they point out the fundamental importance of becoming-woman. And Castaneda at this time has definitively embarked on an extensive account of processes and events that in the most profound sense involve an entering into becoming with women. 

    Deleuze and Guattari also make their own culminating statement in relation to energy, bodies and embodiment by showing that it is necessary to see everything in terms of 'machines' (machines here most crucially are becomings) - the last sentence of A Thousand Plateaus is the single word 'mechanosphere'. This is an equivalent of Castaneda saying that the vital aim of practitioners of metamorphics is to reach the point where they can see specific 'energetic facts' about the nature of the world, facts which include the existence of the current or force within the world that he calls 'intent.' All of which is in effect re-iterating the point that bodies are doorways to the abstract - because at depth machines in the form of becomings are abstract machines - they do not pertain at this level to the sphere of the concrete.

    The focusing of the emergence involves Taisha Abelar's work, as well as Donner's, and also involves Castaneda's later books. A new way of breaking open a view to the outside has appeared, either for that part of the outside that is intent, or for the entire expanse of the outside: this goes alongside the other impersonal modalities - 'power,' 'nagual,' 'body without organs,' 'warrior,' 'non-being' etc. As the last quotation of his summarising collection of outsights, The Wheel of Time, Castaneda says that those who follow the path he is describing act in a way where "they bring out the best of themselves and silently offer it up to the abstract" (this is the end of the concluding quotation). The phrase Taisha Abelar uses for the southward journey into the unknown is 'the abstract flight'. And, as well as pointing out that love is as fundamental to intent as freedom, it is Florinda Donner, in Being-and-Dreaming, who states that  the abstract is what is fundamental, with seeing - or lucidity, - as that which perceives it, and with a liberated form of reason as an assisting faculty (as opposed to the dominant, trapped form embedded as a primary element of ordinary reality). 

   *

  What is being delineated here is the emergence into written philosophy of a system of cognition which is more encompassing than the one which obtains endemically within the western world. Two of its primary features (which help to show its distinctness) are, firstly, the principle that it is necessary to learn how to become perception, and therefore to learn how to stop the internal verbalising processes that we have been accustomed to regard as thought; and, secondly, the principle that it is necessary to embody knowledge (for instance it is not enough to have opinions about the faculties of the human body, it is a question of waking these faculties). A third principle is that dreaming is all along both a form of perception of the world (that needs to be woken), and is a fundamental form of creation (as in the case of an active dreaming up the future, where the dream precedes and to a great extent generates the dreamed-of situation). It can be seen therefore that properly speaking this is a system of existence, or of intent – it is not just a modality of cognition, but of is also inseparably a modality of perception and action.

   Where does this system come from? There is no straightforward answer to this question, and yet, nonetheless, it is correct to say that it pre-eminently comes from the areas that we call Central and South America. Deleuze and Guattari are right to suggest that Castaneda’s work might be a syncretism across the world’s philosophy (and although Shabono is very closely connected to the specific world of the Yanomami, the situation is no different with the works of Donner and Abelar) but the primary inspiration – as evidenced by key terms such as nagual and tonal – is beyond doubt the overall area of indigenous social worlds that stretches from Mexico to Peru, Venezuela, and Brazil. The worlds of this continuum (the Mexican sierras to the high Andes and the overall terrains of the northern expanse of South America) have decisively and very powerfully spoken back - they have spoken into western thought in the form of the provision of the outsights and pragmatic principles of another more extraordinary form of thought, a liberatory form of thought.

     The role of Deleuze and Guattari is either simply that their work is a kind of para-emergence that provides a doorway to the main development for those working their way outward through western philosophy, or that it is this, and simultaneously was that of assistance, by anthropologist-philosophers, in the form of the creation of concepts.

    It is not that the emergent system of cognition does not make reference to its primary sources of inspiration at the level of abstractions. It is just that these sources are indigenous Central and South America, and also – to a small extent - ancient China. It can be seen how it is necessary to be very precise and emphatic in relation to these issues: to make such a reference is to open a doorway and to recommend going though it, and you do not open such a doorway in the direction of a morass of confusion which it might take a lifetime to escape, or which might never be escaped. And this would remain true even if some terminological/conceptual assistance had come from those at the outer edge of the other tradition. The emphasis is pre-emintently achieved through there being no citations of any kind in relation to the work of western philosophers, but also through the references to western philosophical concepts (which together probably make up about three lines of prose across 15 books) being entirely there for the purposes of pointing out that what is being described at that point in the book is not equivalent to what is being pointed toward by the western concepts. 

. This is a one-way bridge, in terms of the pragmatics and metaphysics of travelling toward wider realities – in terms of the exigencies of the escape from denuded, collapsed forms of existence. There is a doorway that leads from A Thousand Plateaus to what can accurately be called metamorphics (and Deleuze and Guattari not only make the doorway, they go out of their way to point out that it is there). But having arrived, from any direction, in the world of Donner, Abelar and Castaneda there is no equivalent doorway that leads back – from this point of the view of the pragmatics of the Escape – to A Thousand Plateaus and western philosophy, simply because this would be a retrograde step.

    The references to the ancient China of the Tao Te Ching are mostly in Taisha Abelar’s book The Sorcerers’ Crossing: A Woman’s Journey. In this book Abelar describes how she is taught by a woman called Clara, who is an expert in Chinese martial arts, and who tells her, at one point about the views of “Chinese sages of ancient times” in relation to what Abelar calls “the abstract flight” and to the point where the doorway or entrance to the Outside becomes discernible (to go into the Outside is to embark on the abstract flight):

“ ’The truth of the matter is that the entrance is in front of us all the time,” Clara said, “but only those whose minds are still and whose hearts are at ease can see or feel its presence.’

    [she added that] it actually appears sometimes as a plain door, a black cavern, a dazzling light or anything conceivable, even a dragon’s eye. She said that, in this respect, the metaphors of early Chinese sages were not farfetched at all.” (pp. 66-67, Penguin, 1992).

A few years later Castaneda echoes this reference to a source of knowledge outside of Central and South America: this is in connection with physical practices – forms of movement - that are aimed at waking the overall body, as opposed to its specific faculties. He states that several generations back one of the leading figures in his described central American lineage of knowledge (the lineage which his accounts describe, even if this account is figurative rather than literal) was a man who had come over from China, and had brought with him a knowledge of Chinese physical disciplines.

(And a concluding point is that in The Sorcerers’ Crossing there is also a reference at one point to the fact that at a particular time almost all of don Juan’s group were away visiting India – it is perhaps to be remembered that obscured beneath the northern Indian world of Hinduism there is the world of anomalous, sustained becomings that has Shakti-ism as a powerful, though religionised indicator of its existence).

     But as well as pointing minimally toward China (minimally in that very little is said, and no specific texts are mentioned – which seems in fact to be a fair reflection of the degree of influence) and very faintly toward India, there is one other direction that is pointed out in relation to the planetary domain of writing. This is the oneiric and simultaneously abstract domain of a certain zone within poetry where the writing shows an awareness of the south- transcendental - as with the start of this poem, Hora Inmensa, by Jimenez (quoted in The Eagle’s Gift):

Only a bell and a bird break the stillness...

It seems that the two talk with the setting sun.

Golden coloured silence, the afternoon is made of crystals.

A roving purity sways the cool trees, 

and beyond all that

A transparent river dreams that trampling over pearls

It breaks loose 

and flows into infinity.

Along with very occasionally including poems in this way, to break open outsights, Castaneda makes the overarching point that poets recurrently sense an “additional factor” in the world –an aspect of the world that is beyond objects and physical processes, on the one hand, and emotions and personal mental states, on the other, and that is within the world, rather than acting on it from a posited absolute beyond, as with the elements discoursed about by religions.

     Five out of the six poems he quotes are in Spanish, with two of them coming from South/Central America (a poem by Cesar Valejo, who is a Peruvian writer, and one by Jose Gorostiza, who is Mexican). Three of the others are from Spain, and the sixth poem, and the only one in English, is by Dylan Thomas:

I have longed to move away

From the hissing of the spent lie

And the old terrors' continual cry

Growing more terrible as the day

Goes over the hill into the deep sea. 

[...]

I have longed to move away but am afraid

Some life, yet unspent, might explode

Out of the old lie burning on the ground

And, crackling into the air, leave me half-blind.

A link is therefore made within Castaneda's work to the moments of lucidity that are found within poetry, and, to an extent, to Europe. But no link is made to western philosophy.

    Metamorphics has a kind of serene, charged intensity: everything concerns travelling forward into the unknown - as opposed to obsessively comparing and augmenting maps, and never getting round to travelling. As Castaneda says

 "After arranging the world in a most beautiful and enlightened manner, the scholar goes back home at 5 o'clock in the afternoon in order to forget his beautiful arrangement."

There is a moment in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian where "the Judge" - the leader of a group of killers who are travelling across the north of Mexico and the south of the USA slaughtering indians (the novel is based on a real event in the mid-nineteenth century) finds an indigenous painting on the wall of a mountain cave. He makes a drawing of it, and then destroys it, and says that it is only if you also make a representation that you have really destroyed it. The metamorphics of Donner, Abelar and Castaneda is the complete opposite of this process. Everybody thinks they have a sense of what "shamanism" is (they have seen the drawings), and instead of simply producing another image of the views of indigenous American peoples the writers of the far side of the double emergence in fact produce something which is faithful to the precision found within these views in a way that runs deeper, and in the only way that in fact is effective as an account of them - they produce a new instantiation of metamorphics (one that inevitably casts a revealing light on the worlds that have inspired it).

    It is obvious that what is being said is that metamorphics is like a river. But it is immediately necessary to say that people don't get swept away because they have started excitedly agreeing with viewpoints found in a book: instead, to step into the river is to learn to become perception, to learn to overcome self-indulgence, self-importance and the overall tyranny of moods, and is to learn to conserve energy in a process of waking the other faculties of the body - that is, as well as perception - and in particular the faculty of dreaming (to speak of myself for a moment, I have not got very far with this challenge, but I can say nonetheless that I have some experience of the river - it is just that, as yet, I am only moving forward extremely slowly).

    But what of the tributary that is the western philosophical side of the double emergence? To describe everything in another way, there is the main path, and then there is this other, convergent route, which is primarily - but not entirely - the works of Deleuze and Guattari. The answer is that if this is the path you are on, then it will lead in the right direction, but that in the strongest sense it would be more effective to go straight to the main path (it is always there, right in front of you). The situation here is exactly the same as with taking drugs: if for some reason studying Deleuze and Guattari  - together with the Spinoza and Nietzsche that is inseparably part of this zone - is a way forward to which you have become attached, then, as with taking psychotropic substances, if you are sufficiently focused and fortunate the path will take you where you are going (toward love, freedom and wider realities, and in fact toward the blissful sobriety of a woken metamorphics), but this path will be extremely arduous and time-consuming. 

    However, the path that leads directly toward metamorphics is in fact a path which includes a close connection to the "lineages" of dreaming, as opposed to those of philosophy. It is valuable to remember that closely alongside Spinoza/Nietzsche/Deleuze-Guattari there is another lineage that stretches from Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf and Joan Lindsay, and that has a deep connection back to Sophocles. But this should be remembered only as part of a process that is about creating an openness to anomalous tales from all the tribes of the world (with no primacy given to the tribes of the Delphic world of ancient Greece), and that most fundamentally is about moving toward the Future - by waking both the ability to see wider and deeper aspects of the world through dreamings (those of others, and your own) and simultaneously the ability to dream a radically new, more advantageous situation into existence.

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To change the terms for a moment, it is possible to say that this all concerns a continuum of  lucid, 'hard-edged' philosophy that extends from Donner, Abelar and Castaneda into the Tao Te Ching and A Thousand Plateaus.  But “hard-edged” is only an appropriate term in that, as Castaneda says, it is necessary to have “unbending intent” in relation to the overall process of travelling toward wider realities. In other senses it is very misleading: even with the idea of unbending intent the immediate correlate is that in relation to other aims (as opposed to the overall process of Escape) what is fundamentally needed is an ability to let go. The principle is stated by Castaneda as “I will cling to nothing, so I will have nothing to defend,” and by the Tao Te Ching as “In yielding is completion.” In a certain sense there is nothing more hardcore than the ability to let go (and this evidently very much includes the ability to let go of internal verbalising and perceive). Which is not separable from the fact that in the same sense there is also nothing more hard-edged and transformative than becoming-woman (the brightness of women includes a greater strength in terms of letting go and not self-indulgently contending – the greater weakness of men is a larger tendency to egotistically contend).

     The term “hard” is evidently also inappropriate for a domain that primarily concerns the body without organs. But furthermore – and more importantly –  it is also misleading in relation to the tonality of the intent of those who set out to travel South, into the unknown. Such a journey is a joy, but it also involves an attunement in relation to  the intense sadness that exists within the world, and a heightening of awareness in relation to affection (love), where this heightening has longing as an aspect, and where these aspects induce toward kindness, and a more focused state:

“There is no completeness without sadness and longing, for without them there is no sobriety, no kindness. Wisdom without kindness and knowledge without sobriety are useless.” (The Wheel of Time, p.221).

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There is a kind of walkway that can be found, that goes from A Thousand Plateaus to the works which are more fully developed, focused expressions of metamorphics. This walkway can be talked about in terms of deterritorialisation and of becomings, and no phrase is more crucial here than 'Becoming-woman is the key to all the other becomings.'

  On the far side of the walkway what is found is a valid, viable modality of waking a life - of waking the faculties, of becoming-active - in the form of a definitively asymmetrical focus on becoming-woman, in relation to becomings in connection with maleness.

   The key issue here is an effective pragmatics - where this is effective no matter what position you find convincing in relation to the generative sources of masculine and feminine or male and female modalities, and where it needs to be added to this that everything indicates that ultimately there is no limit to what is possible in terms of gender metamorphosis. However, it is also true that it is necessary to go beyond the dogmatic image of the body. 

   The first side of this is simply that the female side of the human world is a domain which is more on the side of brightness, and less on the side of gravity - and brightness, with its first-aspect, lucid focus on immediacy and perception simply needs to be taken across a threshold so that the singularities and singular modalities of the worlds beyond immediacy also become the focus of lucidity.

This explains why it is that Donner says that male practitioners of metamorphics 'are no longer males'. It also why it is that specific forms of becoming-woman become fundamental in Castaneda's books (they state that living as a woman can be a way for male practitioners to cross the fundamental threshold from the first, suppressed level of reality) and in a way there is very little in the books that could be described in terms of entering into becoming with maleness. The key elements here are brightness, lucidity, immediacy, perception and abstract-perception (where all of this is in opposition to the system of gravity and irony that is inseparable from the suppressed, suppressive form of reason), and everything consists of a valid pragmatics of waking a life. But along with this there is a leaving-behind of the dogmatic image of the human body.

   For Spinoza all of the body is thought. But the body is not undifferentiated. Castaneda's view is that the organs of the body attempt to function as separate nations, with dominant points (as with overeating, for instance) whereas they need to be brought together, as separate, and yet as parts of one world of intent, perception and thought. This is the same space of thought as Deleuze and Guattari saying that there is nothing wrong with organs, but that there is a problem with the organism (which is the system of dominant, hypertrophied points). But again, a body without organs is not undifferentiated: it consists of the organs in their deterritorialised, co-functioning form. Whatever is the view taken in relation to this idea, it is important to see that Donner's and Castaneda's view that the womb has a secondary function in the form of perception, and that this gives women an advantage, is a line of thought that fits with Spinoza's view about bodies and thought. Castaneda's books contain a line of thought which indicates that this frequency of perception of the abstract could eventually in the fullest sense become available, by crossing a further threshold of metamorphics, but in the end none of these issue are what matters: brightness in its first-phase and second-phase forms exists as the space of the pragmatics, and accounts of this kind of a source of the difference need to be seen as, if nothing else, a fundamental block on the functioning of the corporeal dogmatic image (and, for this account, there is the advantage at the outset on the part of women, but it remains the case that men can cross the key, initial threshold toward fully/widely focused brightness, toward lucidity).

   In all of this the crucial element is the asymmetry in relation to becoming-woman and becoming-man. There is a kind of struggle-to-escape 'warrior' quality about this which has to do with the fact that if women and men go toward men they are more in danger of being trapped by the suppressed form of reason. It can be argued of course that this is simply a contingent cultural difference but in terms of the entrapment modalities of a denuded form of reason, and of control tendencies, the problem remains in effect whatever the cause.

   It is important to point out that the problematising of gender here involves transformation not identity, and that it concerns a depth-level domain of the faculties and of overall existence, as opposed to sexual orientation, so that, for instance, for males being heterosexual is not altered by becoming-woman but instead is liberated from its indulgent and foolishly hedonistic tendencies. And the vital issue is that what is involved is the ur-radicalism of escape from the interestablishment. 

   Lastly, although the terms are new the idea is simply one that you would always arrive at, if you set out along the Futural path that leads from ordinary reality: Tao Te Ching says it is a question of 'knowing the masculine', but of 'nurturing the feminine', and it describes the female mode of being as the fundamental force within the human world.

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     A further danger must be addressed, but this time it is one that pertains to the overall process of giving an account of metamorphics. This danger takes the form of an un-intended implication or impression that all that is fundamentally needed is to read the works in question and to experience an intellectual and heartfelt affirmation of the direction being pointed out by them. This idea of “ease” comes from the religious wing of the system of reason-and-revelation, and is the counterpart of the idea that thought can be modelled on processes such as working out that 7 + 5 is 12. And in fact, to travel into the unknown, and bring about a transformation of both your body without organs and your body with organs, at depth is a question of intent  (it also involves the intellect and the faculty of feeling, but these are not enough on their own).

     What makes the situation complex (and in fact, far more encouraging) is that there is a certain sense in which the necessary state of intent is easy to reach. However, this is a state of intent concerning the physical and the abstract, and concerning a journey into the simultaneous glare and darkness of the transcendentally unknown (it is not just an affirmation in the mind of some set of notions about the world being wonderful all along), and is one which in fact, again and again, seems to happen – or partially happen - only as a result of some profound shock that puts everything into perspective. The point is that mustering all of your impeccability and courage could all along be done very rapidly, but the process is recurrently slow: people fail to round up the best of themselves (even though at any stage they could) and everything changes only very slowly.

   Along with the danger of giving a false impression concerning ‘ease’ there is the associated danger of the writer unintendedly giving the impression of being at a more advanced stage than the one that has actually been reached. It is possible to reach the point where it is clear that metamorphics exists, and yet to have travelled only a very short distance within intensive space.

     I have not got very far. Where you are “lodged” within a social field (whether for instance it has high or low kudos) does not prove anything, but the amount of active freedom you have reached is fundamental, and I have not even partially reached the point where I am free from the necessity to sell my labour.

   For some time I have worked in a college, in auxiliary roles (working on an enquiries desk, and more recently in the library), and this work has the advantage that I do not have to be pre-occupied with it outside of work hours. So I have a relatively ‘contained’ relationship with paid labour, and work in a place for which I feel an affinity (although it is also the case that the job has consistently involved a greater amount of work).

    It is true that I have explored some relatively obscured potentials of a human life (as with, for instance, my experience of spending two years where I had a job in the centre of London, and lived in a tent in different areas of the city’s periphery, taking the tent down every night, and living therefore as a city nomad). More importantly, it is also true that I have had a very small, but striking degree of success with learning how to become perception.

    However, Castaneda’s books suggest explicitly that all human beings – unless they are somehow jolted awake – are victims of a kind of “Stockholm Syndrome” such that they have all agreed to set out toward de-intensification (which means that in fact they are “struggling to die”), even if this capitulatory process takes the form of a long shallow glide-path downward.

    So it feels as if I may only have had the degree of success which fits with maintaining this overall slow collapse – the intensification being continually cancelled out by the effects of ageing (I am substantially fitter and more physically fluent and “awake” than I was when I was twenty, but nonetheless). Which would mean that from a fundamental perspective there has been no success at all. It is clear now that the River exists, and I have explored a few semi-hidden potentials of human existence (albeit ones which in many cases I was very much “set up” to explore, because of having started out unconventionally, through not going to school as a child), but how much exactly do these achievements mean if I have failed to rescind the agreement to de-intensify?

     There is a quality of persistence about my life, but looked at carefully, this again seems like the product of having been brought up outside the customary systems of education – I was always going to be comfortable with an ‘academic wilderness,’ and on encountering one would continue the process of learning with a feeling of being at home, rather than one of desolation.

    In 1987 I was between  two phases of being at university – one that had lasted two terms, and another  that would last ten years. After two years – from ‘84 to ‘86 - at an adult education college called Coleg Harlech, in North Wales, which gave me a diploma that was a university entrance qualification (compensating for my not having had any school education, formal or informal, since the age of 8) I  had managed to get a place at Oxford University. I had nowhere to live during the long Oxford holidays because my mother did not have a home at this time (during these holidays I badly needed to study, rather than staying with friends), and it was both the case that I was not particularly disciplined (and had only the two years of formal educational experience behind me) and that I felt a little distant from the traditionalist way of studying literature: after two terms I began to feel that it was not working out, and two weeks into the summer term I left the university.

    The months after this departure were very unsettled – which is not to say that this phase was bad, although it was often quite challenging.  I had a job in a restaurant kitchen for two months, and I ended up doing a lot of travelling around – often hitchhiking –with many of these journeys being between Cambridge, where my girlfriend lived, and South Wales: initially Cardiff, and then Swansea (where I settled for two years, before starting the Philosophy and Literature degree at Warwick).

     It was during this summer that I first read something by Deleuze – an essay called “The Schizophrenic and Language” in an anthology, Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism. At this time I was in fact experiencing a shift in relation to the abstract, in that a process of engagement with dreamings (which had been taking place since I was eight, rather than just for the three years of academic study) was to an extent being supplanted by engagement with literary theory and philosophy. The main starting point (in terms of quantity of reading, at least) was accounts of literature and of language, but this situation could not last long, because the wider questions of philosophy started to become insistent.

    I remember being on a train reading the Deleuze essay, and being aware that Deleuze was trying to talk about a deep level of human bodies – and of the world – in a way that made the essay stand out strikingly from the others in the collection (which included pieces by Foucault, Derrida and Said). And around this time I also met up at one point in Cardiff with Niall Jinks, the bass player from Scritti Politti – who I knew because previously he had been living in Harlech – and he suggested I read Deleuze. I liked Niall - he was very intelligent, enjoyable company, although his slightly pained way-of-being was something for which I did not feel any real degree of affinity (in Harlech he once defined his philosophy as “I want to hurt less”, which, given its double meaning, I respected as a mantra – and yet, there was  a tinge of gravity in this, a something not quite right). These were difficult times for radicals (and they were to a great extent a bleak time for pop-rock – the most visionary new singer in 1987 was Suzanne Vega, and her songs, although genuinely full of outsights, were also to a great extent suffused with sadness): Niall was in the Communist Party, and his ways of thinking were centred on issues connected to the dispiriting Thatcherite political landscape. And yet, what is possibly my last memory of him is nothing to do with his slightly gravity-shadowed demeanour (it should be added that he also had a great sense of humor) or with a focus on issues connected with the politics of class struggle. The memory is of being at his flat in Cardiff, and of him picking up his copy of Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy and suggesting that this line of thought could be the way forward.

   Deleuze’s writing was part of what convinced me I should be studying philosophy as well as literature. But it should be added that Nietzsche at the beginning was more important. In the same summer – in July or August – I went to visit my sister in a rural area of north Lancashire where she was working for a few weeks at a hotel-and-restaurant (called “The Hark to Bounty”), and she had with her a copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra which had been leant to her by a college tutor. This was my first encounter with Nietzsche’s work: and shortly after this I bought Hollingdale's A Nietzsche Reader from a Swansea second-hand bookshop. Nietzsche was accessible in a way that Deleuze was not, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra would increasingly come into focus as an extraordinary abstract-oneiric achievement (it is a partial but sustained 'seeing' of the transcendental terrain of dreaming, which in part is to say that the book has an obscured but powerful becoming-woman, a planetary focus, and an ending involving the idea of a heightened, woken relationship with the other animals of the planet).

    In fact, what happened was that in the course of the first four years at Warwick Nietzsche faded into the background and was replaced by Deleuze, to a great extent simply because – (despite Nietzsche’s oneiric-abstract ability and recurrent extreme perceptiveness) Deleuze in the end could take me further in terms of waking  lucidity - in terms of philosophically expressed outsights. Despite Deleuze being hard to read, I was in fact propelled toward reading his work. This was because of the centrality of Deleuze at Warwick University, where Nick Land had arrived a year before I started my degree, and also because I inevitably started reading Deleuze’s books about Nietzsche. The two paths that had opened up in 1987 were not really separable from each other  – Nietzsche led to Deleuze.

  

    My feeling at the end of the degree at Warwick University, in 1992, was that in a fundamental sense I had got nowhere. I had very much enjoyed the degree, but I had been looking for a way of reaching a fundamentally deeper understanding of the world, and it was clear, in fact, that I had felt closer to such an understanding at the beginning than I did at the end. In my MA – in Continental Philosophy – the situation changed a little, but this was more because I was starting to read A Thousand Plateaus, than because of the philosophers I studied (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Derrida, and the Lyotard of Libidinal Economy), and this year therefore felt to an extent like a preparation for the main process. I have a very strong impression of a kind of ‘click’ that took place around 1993. The trail which had gone cold had been found again, only it now looked far more promising than it had before: I had been turned toward transcendental south, and had started walking.

    To get the wider view, it is important to point out that from 1993 there were five years during which I was reading A Thousand Plateaus, and during which I was simultaneously unaware of the other zones of the metamorphics continuum. The events that took place during these years – which were recurrently extremely intense – become interesting in part because they provide another point of reference for metamorphics. I was looking in the same direction as the one which is pointed out by the other zones in the continuum, but from a substantially different angle.

   

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