I’ve never really read any Carlos Castaneda, but this quote I just found from The Active Side of Infinity sounds an awful lot like some of the Gnostic archon stuff we’ve been talking about lately.

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.

I happened to have found that on that creepy Cassiopean website though, which I don’t especially recommend. But anyway, I sort of like the idea this offers about the “predators” or archons. Namely that they don’t so much intrude into our minds as they do share in them. It’s sort of like the dark side of what Jung termed as the collective unconscious. With that, we can draw upon each other’s knowledge, or perhaps even race memory - but what if that pure well is tainted by subtle occult entities who go swimming in it, and then like leeches crawl up our noses? I’m not saying I necessarily literally believe this, but it’s an interesting angle on the whole idea.