The Centrums

The College

Quarter II, 1973­74

CONTEXT

The Ixtlan conversation is designed to appropriate the account of a spirit journey in secular terms. The conversation is designed less to increase one's interior stew than to provide some provocative images and practical insights which focus and order the interior chaos one is in. The methodology has three questions:

1. If you saw a spirit walking down the street, what would he look like? How would you know him?

2. If you had to replace the poetry used here, what other poetry comes to mind?

3. Where have you run across this in your experience? Who comes to mind as someone who embodied to this poetry?

The conversation focuses on the participant's experience of the episode more than the details and images of the book. It draws out the poetic images needed to capture a picture of the secular religious man.

METHODOLOGY

Rational Aim: Use secular imagery to focus and illumine one's

own spirit image.

Existential Objective: Bring to self­consciousness and intensify

one's spirit life.

Enable the basic

question to get raised

What does spirit look

Increase the number

of images for the

depth dimension that

people have.

What substitutes

for the poetry ?

Focus the practical

implication of the dis-

closure.

What experience have

you had?

PREPARATION

Read the passage several times, at least once aloud. Emphasis on smooth flow more than histrionics will enhance the conversation. This conversation helps the mood of nonchalant table talk more than intensified spirit probing. Participants need an opportunity to talk. But values may he held in just the reading, and occasionally the Conversation may be minimum. In any case the conversation will be brief.

It should be noted that this is not a study. The rational analysis of the book may come later, but not now. This conversation is a direct and enabling spirit exercise and should be done by an experienced guru, not a novice.

THE 8-SESSION HOLDING CHART

The World				Two Worlds
To the Veil				Breaking Thru		Eternal Return
Preparation		Exercises		Encounter		Effects
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8
28f 34ff	p. 64ff	237- 239	p. 268- 270	p. 293- 296	p. 298- 301	p. 306- 308	p. 3 11- 313

MAN IS MYSTERY

Passage: pp. 28-29, "I laughed against my desire . . . like drinking, I dropped it."

34-36, "When one does not have a personal history . . . be sure to

come back."

Synopsis: Detachment from the past enables man to be the mystery that he is and frees him to do what is necessary to create the future.

2. RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE WHOLE OF LIFE

Passage: pp. 64­68, "Let's not talk about my father...­...he was not sleeping."

Synopsis: Responsibility means being willing to die for any decision.

3. THE "NOT DOING" BEING

Passage: pp. 237­239, "Don Juan then took the two rocks....­....To arrive at that being is the not­doing of the self."

Synopsis: The dream is the way to non­doing, the state which allows being to emerge.

4. THE STRATEGIC WARRIOR

Passage: pp. 268­270, "Afterwards he asked me to reconstruct the total scene.