"The Predator of Man"

"The Predator of Man"

 by Carlos Castaneda

“’Predators Mind.’ This is the Castaneda term for that which aligns man with the thought center of service to self. In “Active Side of Infinity,” Don Juan tells Castaneda of the Earth being invaded in the mists of time by creatures of condensed darkness, the so-called Flyers which use man as food. The key idea as that these cosmic predators gave man their own mind. This is reasonable in light of much other material. At the human level, a system based on exploitation and consuming and control is seen to shape people in its own image: The slave tends to dream of becoming a master rather than of abolishing slavery. Any organization based on dominance naturally takes the form of a pyramid with few at the top and most at the bottom. For man to be the bottom or in some cases intermediate level of such a system, man must have the attributes of the dominators, only at a reduced scale.

Castaneda's writings in large part deal with ways of claiming one's own in terms of energy and free will from such a system. The battle is in large part internal. One must unmask and stand up to one's internal predator first. Otherwise one's external actions, even if well motivated, take place in the paradigm and mode of the predator. The internal predator can be extremely subtle. Still, it has some general recognizable characteristics: Castaneda puts it as follows:

"The Predator of Man"

"Ah, that's the universe at large,' he said, 'incommensurable, nonlinear, outside the realm of syntax. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were the first ones to see those fleeting shadows, so they followed them around. They saw them as you're seeing them, and they saw them as energy that flows in the universe. And they did discover something transcendental. They discovered that we have a companion for life...
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We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The predator is our lord and master. It has rendered us docile, helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it demands that we don't do so. You have arrived, by your effort alone, to what the shamans of ancient Mexico called the topic of topics. I have been beating around the bush all this time, insinuating to you that something is holding us prisoner. Indeed we are held prisoner! This was an energetic fact for the sorcerers of ancient Mexico.'

'Why has this predator taken over in the fashion that you're describing, don Juan?' I asked. 'There must be a logical explanation.'

'There is an explanation,' don Juan replied, 'which is the simplest explanation in the world. They took over because we are food for them, and they squeeze us mercilessly because we are their sustenance. Just as we rear chickens in chicken coops, the predators rear us in human coops. Therefore, their food is always available to them.'
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I felt that my head was shaking violently from side to side. I could not express my profound sense of unease and discontentment, but my body moved to bring it to the surface. I shook from head to toe without any volition on my part. 'No, no, no, no,' I heard myself saying. 'This is absurd, don Juan. What you're saying is something monstrous. It simply can't be true, for sorcerers or for average men, or for anyone.'

'Why not?' don Juan asked calmly. 'Why not? Because it infuriates you?'

'Yes, it infuriates me,' I retorted. 'Those claims are monstrous!'

'I want to appeal to your analytical mind, ' don Juan said. 'Think for a moment, and tell me how you would explain the contradiction between the intelligence of man the engineer and the stupidity of his systems of beliefs, or the stupidity of his contradictory behavior. Sorcerers believe that the predators have given us our systems of beliefs, our ideas of good and evil, our social mores. They are the ones who set up our hopes and expectations and dreams of success or failure. They have given us covetousness, greed and cowardice. It is the predators who make us complacent, routinary, and egomaniacal.'

'But how can they do this, don Juan?' I asked, somehow angered further by what he was saying. 'Do they whisper all that in our ears while we are asleep?'

'No, they don't do it that way. That's idiotic!' don Juan said, smiling. 'They are infinitely more efficient and organized than that. In order to keep us obedient and meek and weak, the predators engaged themselves in a stupendous maneuver - stupendous, of course, from the point of view of a fighting strategist. A horrendous maneuver from the point of view of those who suffer it. They gave us their mind! Do you hear me? The predators give us their mind, which becomes our mind. The predators' mind is baroque, contradictory, morose, filled with the fear of being discovered any minute now.'

Don Juan continues: 'I know that even though you have never suffered hunger... you have food anxiety, which is none other than the anxiety of the predator who fears that any moment now its maneuver is going to be uncovered and food is going to be denied. Through the mind, which, after all, is their mind, the predators inject into the lives of human beings whatever is convenient for them. And they ensure, in this manner, a degree of security to act as a buffer against their fear.

The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were quite ill at ease with the idea of when [the predator] made its appearance on Earth. They reasoned that man must have been a complete being at one point, with stupendous insights, feats of awareness that are mythological legends nowadays. And then, everything seems to disappear, and we have now a sedated man. What I'm saying is that what we have against us is not a simple predator. It is very smart, and organized. It follows a methodical system to render us useless. Man, the magical being that he is destined to be, is no longer magical. He's an average piece of meat. There are no more dreams for man but the dreams of an animal who is being raised to become a piece of meat: trite, conventional, imbecilic."

- http://www.aloha.net/~ruth/Cassio.html

http://www.cassiopedia.org/glossary/Predator%27s_Mind

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