060507

                                                                                                                                   Arcata, CA

Tuesday June 5, 2007

                   Mike and I just woke up underneath the bridge close to my tree. We would've slept by the tree, but I wasn't sure if it was going to rain anymore. I don't think it did. There is a big mist this morning. It's all cloudy. We're walking into town. We're going to go to the Safeway and take a shit.

     8:29am  Brent walked by and offered me some food. I appreciate it, brother. Everybody gets credit, thanks.

     9:33am  I had a great presentation with this beautiful girl named Eleanor. Hell yeah. The whole Odyssey and everything. Beautiful girl. Beautiful girl. Her eyes were locked on mine the whole time. She wasn't too reactive through it, but she listened to the whole thing.

                   Mikes email is themagicherb@yahoo.com

     10:30am  Mike and I went to the Endeavor to see if we could volunteer, but we couldn't. I never got the mail from Kali. I decided I'd just come to the plaza and read my book here. Carlos Castaneda's A Separate Reality.

     1:08pm  I just woke up not too long ago from my nap in the plaza. I got a couple hours.

     1:54pm  I walked all the way to my spanging alley. This other kid, this other homebum smoked me out over by the green wall behind The Humbolt Machine Shop. I just walked to the Endeavor to check my mail one last time. I am giving up on that mail from Kali. I am going to walk to the library and check my email. I'll write Kali.

                   Page 79, what it says about controlled folly. It's what I am doing.  Let me transcribe:

                   "I wonder if you would tell me more about your controlled folly," I said.
                   "What do you want to know about it?"
                   "Please tell me, don Juan, what exactly is controlled folly?"
                   Don Juan laughed loudly and made a smacking sound by slapping his thigh with the hollow of his hand.
                   "This is controlled folly!" he said, and laughed and slapped his thigh again.
                   "What do you mean . . . . ?"
                   "I am happy that you finally asked me about my controlled folly after so many years, and yet it wouldn't have mattered to me in the least if you had never asked.  Yet I have chosen to feel happy, as if I cared, that you asked, as if it would matter that I care.  That is controlled folly!"
                   We both laughed very loudly.  I hugged him.  I found his explanation delightful although I did not quite understand it. 
                   We were sitting, as usual, in the area right in front of the door to his house.  It was mid-morning.  Don Juan had a pile of seeds in front of him and was picking the debris from them.  I had offered to help him but he had turned me down; he said the seeds were a gift for one of his friends in central Mexico and I did not have enough power to touch them.
                   "With whom do you exercise controlled folly, don Juan?" I asked after a long silence.
                   He chuckled.
                   "With everybody!" he exclaimed, smiling.
                   "When do you choose to exercise it, then?"
                   "Every single time I act."
                   I felt I needed to recapitulate at that point and I asked him if controlled folly meant that his acts were never sincere but wee only the acts of an actor.
                   "My acts are sincere," he said, "but they are only the acts of an actor."
                   "Then everything you do must be controlled folly!" I said truly surprised.
                   "Yes, everything," he said.
                   "But it can't be true," I protested, "that every one of your acts is only controlled folly."
                   "Why not?" he replied with a mysterious look.
                   "That would mean that nothing matters to you and you don't really care about anything or anybody.  Take me, for example.  Do you mean that you don't care whether or not I become a man of knowledge, or whether I live, or die, or do anything?"
                   "True!  I don't.  You are like Lucio, or everybody else in my life, my controlled folly."
                   I experienced a peculiar feeling of emptiness.  Obviously there was no reason in the world why don Juan had to care about me, but on the other hand I had almost the certainty that he cared about me personally; I thought it could not be otherwise, since he had always given me his undivided attention during every moment I had spent with him.  It occurred to me that perhaps don Juan was just saying that because he was annoyed with me.  After all, I had quit his teachings. 
                   "I have the feeling we are not talking about the same thing," I said.  "I shouldn't have used myself as an example.  What I meant to say was that there must be something in this world you care about in a way that is not controlled folly.  I don't think it is possible to go on living if nothing really matters to us."
                   "That applies to you," he said.  "Things matter to you.  You asked me about my controlled folly and I told you that everything I do in regard to myself and my fellow men is folly, because nothing matters."
                   "My point is, don Juan, that if nothing matters to you, how can you go on living?"
                   He laughed and after a moment's pause ,  in which he seemed to deliberate whether or not to answer, he got up and went to the back of the house.  I followed him.
                   "Wait, wait, don Juan."  I said.  "I really want to know; you must explain to me what you mean."
                   "Perhaps it's not possible to explain," he said.  "Certain things in your life matter to you because they're important; your acts are certainly important to you, but for me, not a single thing is important any longer, neither my acts nor the acts of any of my fellow men.  I go on living, though, because I have my will.  Because I have tempered my will throughout my life until it's neat and wholesome and now it doesn't matter to me that nothing matters.  My will controls the folly of my life."
                   He squatted and ran his fingers on some herbs that he had put to dry in the sun on a big piece of burlap.
                   I was bewildered.  Never would I have anticipated the direction that my query had taken.  After a long pause I thought of a good point.  I told him that in my opinion some of the acts of my fellow men were of supreme importance.  I pointed out that a nuclear war was definitely the most dramatic example of such an act.  I said that for me destroying life on the face of the earth was an act of staggering enormity.
                   "You believe that because you're thinking.  You're thinking about life," don Juan said with a glint in his eyes.  "You're not seeing."
                   "Would I feel differently if I could see?"
                   "Once a man learns to see he finds himself alone in the world with nothing but folly," don Juan said cryptically.
                   He paused for a moment and looked at me as if he wanted to judge the effects of his words.
                   "Your acts, as well as the acts of your fellow men in general, appear to be important to you because you have learned to think they are important."
                   He used the word "learned" with a peculiar inflection that it forced me to ask what he meant by it.
                   He stopped handling his plants and looked at me.
                   "We learn to think about everything," he said, "and then we train our eyes to look as we think about the things we look at.  We look at ourselves already thinking we are important.  And therefore we've got to feel important!  But then when a man learns to see, he realizes that he can no longer think about the things he looks at, and if he cannot think about what he looks at everything becomes unimportant."
                   [skipping a bit]
                   I asked him if he was in the mood to answer some questions.
                   "What do you want to know?" he replied.
                   "What you told me this afternoon about controlled folly has disturbed me very much," I said.  "I really cannot understand what you meant."
                   "Of course you cannot understand it," he said.  "You are trying to think about it, and what I said does not fit your thoughts."
                   "I'm trying to think about it," I said, "because that's the only way I personally can understand anything.  For example, don Juan, do you mean that once a man learns to see, everything in the whole world is worthless?"
                   "I didn't say worthless.  I said unimportant.  Everything is equal and therefore unimportant.  For example, there is no way for me to say that my acts are more important than yours, or that one thing is more essential than another, therefore all things are equal and by being equal they are unimportant."
                   I asked him if his statements were a pronouncement that what he had called "seeing" was in effect a "better way" than merely "looking at things."  He said that the eyes of man could perform both functions, but neither of them was better than the other; however, to train the eyes only to look was, in his opinion, an unnecessary loss.
                   "For instance, we need to look with our eyes to laugh." he said, "because only when we look at things can we catch the funny edge of the world.  On the other hand, when our eyes see, everything is so equal that nothing is funny."
                   "Do you mean, don Juan, that a man who sees cannot ever laugh?"
                   He remained silent for some time.
                   "Perhaps there are men of knowledge who never laugh," he said.  "I don't know any of them, though.  Those I know see and also look, so they laugh.
                   "Would a man of knowledge cry as well?
                   "I suppose so.  Our eyes look so we may laugh, or cry, or rejoice, or be sad, or be happy.  I personally don't like to be sad, so whenever I witness something that would ordinarily make me sad, I simply shift my eyes and see it instead of looking at it.  But when I encounter something funny I look and laugh."
                   "But then, don Juan, your laughter is real and not controlled folly."
                   Don Juan stared at me for a moment.
                   "My laughter, as well as everything I do, is real," he said, "but it is also controlled folly because it is useless; it changes nothing and yet I still do it."
                   "But as I understand it, don Juan, your laughter is not useless.  It makes you happy."
                   "No!  I am happy because I choose to look at things that make me happy and then my eyes catch their funny edge and I laugh.  I have said this to you countless times.  One must always choose the path with heart in order to be at one's best, perhaps so one can always laugh."
 

[Okay, that's enough for now.  It's such a great book.  A Separate Reality by Carlos Castaneda.]

Next day..