Been doing a little bit of reading related to Carlos Castaneda, Don Juan and the idea of intentionally erasing your “personal history.” Although I’ve never read the whole book, apparently in Journey To Ixtlan, Don Juan tells Castaneda. (I’m going to trim this down a little for length and emphasis):
“I don’t have any personal history,” he said after a long pause. “One day I found out that personal history was no longer necessary for me and, like drinking, I dropped it.” …
“I don’t have personal history any more,” he said and looked at me probingly. “I dropped it one day when I felt it was no longer necessary.”
I stared at him, trying to detect the hidden meanings of his words.
“How can one drop one’s personal history?” I asked in an argumentative mood.
“One must first have the desire to drop it,” he said. “And then one must proceed harmoniously to chop it off, little by little.” …
“You don’t know what I am, do you?” he said as if he were reading my thoughts. “You will never know, who or what I am, because I don’t have a personal history.” …
Don Juan said that everybody that knew me had an idea about me, and that I kept feeding the idea with everything I did. “Don’t you see?” he asked dramatically. “You must renew your personal history by telling your parents, your relatives, and your friends everything you do. On the other hand, if you have no personal history, no explanations are needed; nobody is angry or disillusioned with your acts. And above all no one pins you down with their thoughts.” …
“It is best to erase all personal history,” he said slowly, as if giving me time to write it down in my clumsy way, “because that would make us free from the encumbering thoughts of other people.” …
“Little by little you must create a fog around yourself; you must erase everything around you until nothing can be taken for granted, until nothing is any longer for sure, or real. Your problem now is that you’re too real. Your endeavors are too real; your moods are too real. Don’t take things so for granted. You must begin to erase yourself.” …
I really recommend reading the whole thing, although you’ll have to sign in to this website to read that excerpt in full (it’s an awesome website though).
Reading around on this subject of “erasing personal history” is rather interesting because a lot of the hits you’ll find for it have to do with web browsers and operating systems and how you have the option to periodically dump your cache and delete the tracks that you are leaving electronically. It seems that very few of us would ever consider making that leap into “real life” though… (Also love this ridiculous advertisement for a software package called “SecureClean” which announces boldly - “Identity Theft steals your life and your dreams.” Hahaha)
I found another website though which builds on this idea from Don Juan and offers some practical tips on how to begin erasing your personal history:
1. Get rid of old photos and memorabilia. They keep you rooted in the past.
2. Change your name and address often, if possible.
3. Stop using the words “I,†“me,†and “myself†as much as possible. This will free up your awareness.
4. Stop talking about your past, age, culture, degrees, job, titles, etc. Don’t reinforce the illusion.
5. Change your appearance periodically (hair, clothes,etc.). This deters having a fixed self image.
6. Stop having pictures taken of you.
7. Avoid getting too enmeshed with other people. Keep your relationships fluid and open.
8. Stop explaining all your comings and goings to others. Their expectations will imprison your energy.
9. Study water. It is how our spirit moves — fluidly.
And from another site, this is someone else’s reaction to the above passage in Journey to Ixtlan which he goes on to compare to NLP and how you can change your personal history through it:
… I was studying with Bandler and Grinder and they taught me to change personal history as an exercise one afternoon. Say you’ve never been to Paris - here’s how you change your personal history so that you have been to Paris. You imagine yourself arriving at De Gaulle airport, taking a taxi to your hotel, walking down the Champs d’Elysee, visiting the American drugstore and listening to a CNN broadcast there in English on the television set. By progressively filling in all the modalities of visual, sound, kinesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory, you build up a personal history that allows you to congruently believe and say, “Yes, I was in Paris once.”
He also goes on to explode the “controversy” surrounding the issue of whether or not Don Juan ever actually “existed.” He points out that people who argue that Don Juan was a fictional invention of Castaneda are missing the point that is being made about erasing your personal history. It only makes sense that if Don Juan did exist and he followed these teachings, then there would be no way to verify that he ever had existed - because he erased traces of his own existence. I love it!
Now compare that to the controversy over whether or not Jesus ever existed.
See where we’re going with this?
- END -
ASSOCIATED CONTENT @TMBCHR (Auto-Generated)
- Podcast 16: Breaking the Monopoly of Identity
- “Delete Forever”
- Personally-Identifying Marks
- Podcast 19: Crossing Over
- Enabling Web History In Your Google Account
23 Comments
goddamn dude. this and the evil twin thing are EXACTLY what i was doing yesterday. viscerally. i recorded about it but it won’t show up for a least a week on my site.
i think if we’re actually in the same room the floorboards of reality are going to give out…
Yeah thats like last night my friend called me and just BLASTED me with stuff about the brain and reality with no preparation. And I was like, dude, this is exactly the stuff I have been writing about. It’s almost as though I’m beginning to see the threads of one collective mind operating, and each person just acts as an instance, taking that thread in one direction and then together they are woven into a coherent pattern through the interaction
ACK!!! Can you please stop reading my fucking mind, Tim? It’s starting to get creepy (actually, it started a long time ago but once in a while it seems to get really bad).
Or good.
You have no idea how many people who read this site tell me that I posted about something they were just thinking about. It happens close to 3-4 times a week.
I love this Tim, this is the stuff I come here for.
When the subject somehow arises, I will tell people about the time I made out with Owen Wilson in the back of a cab on the way to somewhere. Yes, it was a dream, but I remember it like it was yesterday, and like it was real, more than I remember much of yesterday itself. I often talk about dream experiences this way and only reveal it as a dream if asked.
Erasing personal history / past sense of self is something I can vouch for as a powerfully freeing act. And you can always go back (fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), or re-integrate old threads with new ones. If you want to.
Sorry for cussing. I shouldn’t post when drunk. Try to keep the comments at the same level as the blog…
This is a recipe for disaster.
We only have one life (that we can remember) and living it is a work of art. While the good artist makes well-considered choices about what he or she will leave and what he or she will erase, they never erase the entire canvas.
Many artists do erase their canvas.
Mostly performance artists.
You have to be there to expreience it.
To what degree the actually wish to erase the creative event is unknown.
Their aim is often to avoid their art being turned into a commodity to invest in,
I don’t know if any
I think this erasing personal history is a cool idea.
In reality, it’s difficult to totally erase personal histroy, without indulging in crimial acts (falsfying various official, and leagal documents), but I don’t think that’s your point.
A better goal might be to erase yourself in the eyes of those who will invest emotionally in your history.
Maybe you should look into the concept of personal identity. It seems to be tightly boundto personal history, and many people seem to find it quite important. This is something I don’t quite understand, so I can’t really help you here. Maybe that’s beacuse I’ve always intuitively practiced a little personal history erasure.
P.S. I’ve noticed strange synchronicities with your blog too
Interesting how talk about erasing personal history leads to talk about synchronized minds, as if giving up our individual identity opens us up to the latest broadcast from our overlords…
…or giving up a bit of individual identity opens us up more to each other, as we relax the boundaries of our personality. The overlords thing also could be true though…
ps: I shouldn’t post after drinking either, especially with extreme exhaustion making brain even stupider. That Owen Wilson thing made sense to say last night, but I honestly can’t figure out how I imagined it relating to this thread, reading it now. My humbled apologies.
pps: speaking of synchronized minds, I had a dream about Tim and Zac last night. We were on a quest, for what I don’t know, but it involved a burning swamp, a singing contest, Zac eating a cracker, and Tim finding a magical flower.
You’ve obviously never done any painting. In my experience, this is about 90% of painting
And that’s pretty much exactly the point!
I think most of the hubub over whether or not Jesus existed has to do with the fact that (like Socrates, my personal hero) he never wrote anything down in his own hand. Everything we know about him is written by others.
Same goes with Don Juan. But isn’t it interesting that there are doubts about the personal history of Castaneda, known primarily as a writer? He became a recluse after a while. When died, the newspaper didn’t have a stock photo to use for his obituary.
Loss of the self, yes.
But the Paris exercize sounds alarming. This relates to research for a novel…
‘I always imagined Paris would smell of garlic,’ said Jane.
One has to be very careful /who is thinking what/ in a novel. If you haven’t been to Paris you can have your protagonist express any prejudice you like as long as it’s obvious who the thoughts are ascribed to. On the other hand, if you have /actually/ been to Paris, long stretches of exposition describing the street layout are out of the question. I’m slogging my way through Dan Brown’s ‘Angels and Demons’ at the moment, and I have to say his grasp of this who-is-thinking-what thing seems decidedly lax. If his writing made it clear who had thought what about what, it’d (a) be easier to buy the story and (b) tell me something more about the characters.
()
The real experience of a place tends to surprise, in my experience.
(Of course, this raises the whole issue of things like astral projection…)
Oh, and this makes me think of a thing the renowned Ansel Adams said about photography (though it’s relevant to many other things, I think): loosely, ‘The photographic negative is like the musical score; the print is like the performance’.
Completely off topic:
I was surprised to learn that there are historical reports of Jesus writing, contrary to everything I had ever heard in my life until a year or two ago. One can be found in Eusebius’ History of the Church. Doesn’t clinch the issue, but interesting.
Ah, it’s beginning to sink in…
You mean losing all those false representations of identity that we carry round with us?
Yes, but it may be that ALL representations of us are false and that taken to the extreme, even “us” is a representation and a false one
Hehehe… self is a process, not an object.
Hi,
I visit your site about once every 3 months. I spent most of the afternnon reading and thinking about earsing my history. Took a break from all that “mystical” stuff and Surfed the net “randomly”…ended up with this article of yours!
> … ALL representations of us are false …
Yes, I think I meant that, I just didn’t write it very well.
Taken to the extreme, this is iconoclasm, the destruction of ALL representations. I’m not so sure about that. I think that the important thing is to be aware of what is and isn’t a representation.
I was always suspicious, by the way, when computers started having icons…
Sort of halfway between this stuff and the Shadow/Doppelganger topic:
It was said (by one of those wise old dead dudes, in response to a Jewish mystical cliche,) that if every blade of grass has an angel over it whispering, “grow, grow…” then surely each also has another over it whispering, “die, die…” These are the opposing angels, and it is their God-given task to lead astray and destroy all who seek enlightenment or spiritual power. Whether taken literally or merely as a metaphor of the neurological stresses resulting from mystical practice, does not matter.
For this reason, among others, I prefer spiritual “invisibility” (banishing?) exercises and a modular systems approach to self-modification, rather than attempts to contact and conquer or destroy the dark side. The first, because once disassociated from all influence, one is free to contact those influences one finds beneficial, unencumbered by negative and unknown influences. The second, because taken as a monolithic force, one’s Shadow is nearly always a greater power than can be handled at one’s current developmental level. It is much safer and easier to analyze, chip away at and modify negative traits one unit at a time. Also, in some systems, the Astral Double is a primary tool for performing sorcery, so projecting the incarnation of your dark side onto it seems a doubly bad idea.
An interesting thing about these methods is they seem to lead toward a personality construct similar to what you’re talking about in this article. It seems, to me, though, more of a side effect of other processes rather than something one should necessarily strive for directly.
Now, I think Casteneda is a scam artist and his Don Juan character was totally made up BS, but this stuff of his you picked out has some merit, so I guess if someone writes enough crap some of it might hit close to home.
When I had my own little Gnosis “event” I was contemplating why I was born (or experiencing the current moment as) a white middle-class young male in 20th century America rather than an elderly Mongolian woman out on the dry steppes 1,000s of years ago. My indentity melted away right about then…