Страница:
1. Carlos Castaneda Bibliography v1.3.3
2. Carlos Castaneda Speaks, An interview
by Keith Thompson.
3. CASTANEDA'S CLAN (An interview with
Florinda, Donner-Grau, Taisha Abelar,
and Carol Tiggs by Keith Nichols.)
Magical Blend Magazine (c) 1994
4. Carlos Castaneda Overview (v0.4uc)
5. Notes on a talk by Taisha Abelar '92.
6. Notes on a talk by Taisha Abelar '94.
Version: 1.3.3
Last-Updated: Wed Jul 6 14:09:51 CDT 1994
The many contributors have my sincerest thanks.
Items marked with | are new or updated since version 1.2.
Abelar, Taisha , "Sorcerer's Crossing". 1992.
Castaneda, Carlos, "The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui
Way of Knowledge". 1968.
Castaneda, Carlos, "A Separate Reality: Further
Conversations with Don Juan". 1971.
Castaneda, Carlos, "Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of
Don Juan". 1972.
Castaneda, Carlos, "Tales of Power". 1974.
Castaneda, Carlos, "The Second Ring of Power". 1977.
Castaneda, Carlos, "The Eagle's Gift". 1981.
Castaneda, Carlos, "The Fire from Within". 1984.
Castaneda, Carlos, "The Power of Silence". 1987.
Castaneda, Carlos, "The Art of Dreaming". 1993.
Castaneda, Carlos, Psychology Today, Dez. 1977, "The Art
of Dreaming". (That's not the book, it's an article from
C.C.; mostly adapted from "Second Ring". but the
introduction is new and contains new information.)
Castaneda, Carlos, "Seis propositiones explicatorias".
Mexico 1985. (In the Mexican version of "Eagle's Gift" -
"El don del Aguila" - there is an appendix, 25 pages
long with a structural analysis by C.C. himself. There
he talks about secrets of the assembledge point and
about how stopping the dialog is connected to the rings
of power. Things that are missing in the rest of his
work...)
Castaneda, Carlos, "Preface to the Mexican edition of
Donner's _Being-in-Dreaming_". (Short but interesting)
Donner, Florinda, "Shabono". 1982.
Donner, Florinda, "The Witch's Dream". 1985.
Donner, Florinda, "Being-in-Dreaming". 1991.
----------
?, Magical Blend #14, "A conversation with the elusive
Carlos Castaneda".
?, Magical Blend #15, "Carlos Castaneda, part II".
?, Magical Blend #35, "Interview with Florinda Donner".
| Blair-Ewart, Alexander, DIMENSIONS, Vol. VII No. 9, 1992
| "The Art of Stalking True Freedom - Taisha Abelar in
| Conversation with Alexander Blair-Ewart".
| This is a pretty good interview with TA. Discussions
| about why all the books are being published, the
| "new configuration", the recapitulation, energy,
| Carol Tiggs' return, etc. More hard information than
| usually appears in interviews.
| Blair-Ewart, Alexander, DIMENSIONS, 1992?
| "The Sorcerer's Crossing - Taisha Abelar in
| Conversation with Alexander Blair-Ewart (Part II)"
| Blair-Ewart, Alexander, DIMENSIONS, February, 1992
| "Being-In-Dreaming - Florinda Donner in Conversation
with Alexander Blair-Ewart"
| Burton, Sandra, Time Magazine, "Magic and Reality".
1973. Interview with C.C. (A horrible thing - quite
awful and really boring...)
| Corvalan, Graciela, "Der Weg der Tolteken - Ein Gesprdch
| mit Carlos Castaneda", Fischer, 1987, ca. 100p., ISBN
| 3-596-23864-1
| An interview with Carlos Castaneda dating from
| 1979/80 in the form of a book; most interesting. The
| original is in Spanish and has been translated into
| German by Joachim A Frank.
Eagle Feather, Ken / Kramer, Carol, Body, Mind & Spirit
#6/1992,
"Being-in-Dreaming". An Interview with Florinda
Donner. (Reveals what happened to La Gorda, the
Genaros and the Little Sisters, Soledad, et.al.)
Fort, Carmina, "Conversationes con Carlos Castaneda".
Madrid (Spain), 1991.
Carmina, Carlos, and Florinda Donner met several
times in 1988.
Carmina wrote this book about the events,
conversations and revelations. Quite good. (about
130 pages.)
Keen, Sam, Psychology Today, "Sorcerer's Apprentice".
1975.
An interview with C.C. (Of some size and quite
interesting. Timeframe: Shortly before nagual Juan
Matus' departure = 1973, perhaps February)
Leviton, Richard, Yoga Journal, March/April 1994 #115,
"The Art of Dreaming". Part book review, part
inquiry on dreaming.
gopher://gopher.internet.com:2100/11/collected/yoga
Nichols, Keith, Magical Blend #40, Oct 1993, "Taisha
Abelar on Sorcery: Sorcery and reality in the Castaneda
clan". Interview. A good introduction to sorcery,
recapitulation, dreaming, the Assemblage Point, and the
energy body.
Nichols, Keith, Magical Blend #42, April 1994,
"Castaneda's Clan".
Interviews with Taisha Abelar, Florinda Donner-Grau,
and Carol Tiggs. gopher://cscns.com/00/
News%20and%20Information/aspen/Magical%20Blend/
Issue%2042/Articles/Castaneda_Clan.doc
Thompson, Keith, New Age Journal, March/April 1994,
"Carlos Castaneda Speaks: Portrait of a Sorcerer".
Interview.
gopher://gopher.internet.com:2100/11/collected/new_age
Wagner, Bruce, Details, March 1994, "The Secret Life of
Carlos Castaneda: You Only Live Twice". A most
interesting interview.
--------
Cox, Murray, "Notes from the New Land: Join the
expedition at the Monroe Institute where researchers use
the science of sound to explore altered states of
consciousness". Omni, Oct 1993.
Magical Blend #5, "A comparison of Aleister Crowley and
Carlos Castaneda".
Magical Blend #40, Oct 1993, "Carlos Castaneda on don
Juan".
This is from a transcript by way of David Christie,
not an interview.
Gnosis #2, Spring/Summer 1986, "Magical
Autobiographies".
The New Thunderbird Chronicle vol 1, no 3, Oct 1989,
"Taking the Fifth" et passim. The threshold of the
Eagle's spiritual Aerie. Drawing of Carlos on the cover
(with sombrero covering head).
--------
de Mille, Richard, "Castaneda's Journey: The Power and
the Allegory". 1976.
de Mille, Richard, "The Don Juan Papers". 1980.
| Fikes, Jay Courtney, "Carlos Castaneda: Academic
| Opportunism and the Psychedelic Sixties", Millenia
| Press, 1993, ISBN 0-9696960-0-0. The gist of this one is
| that CC's works are fabrications, although the DJ
| character is based on a real-life sorcerer. Much info
| about the Huichol Indians.
Noel, Daniel C., "Seeing Castaneda". 1976, ISBN
339-50361-7.
| Williams, Donald Lee, "Border Crossings: A Psychological
| Perspective on Carlos Castaneda's Path of Knowledge",
| Toronto: Inner City Books, 1981, ISBN 0-919123-07-04. A
| Jungian interpretation of Castaneda's books up to The
| Second Ring of Power. Dry and scholarly.
-------------
?, "Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree
of Knowledge: A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and
Human Evolution". 1992, ISBN 0-553-37130-4. Chapter 1
("Shamanism: Setting the Stage").
Blackmore, Susan J., "Beyond the Body: An Investigation
of Out-of-the-Body Experiences". 1992, ISBN
0-89733-344-6. Published on behalf of The Society for
Psychical Research. Chapter 12 ("The Physiology of the
OBE"), et passim.
Capra, Fritjof, "The Turning Point: Science, Society,
and the Rising Culture". 1982, ISBN 0-553-01480-3.
Chapter 11 ("Journeys Beyond Space and Time").
Classen, Norbert, "Das Wissen der Tolteken". Berlin
1992, ISBN 3-9802912-1-9. (My poor little book... about
the Toltec knowledge. A practical and philosophical
guide. It includes a German version of C.C.'s
``propositiones explicatorias'', only published in
Mexico before.)
Coerper, Hellmut, "Der Zugang zum Wissen". Fellbach
1981. ISBN 3-87089-310-9. (C.G. Jung, Psychology and
C.C. Intellectual, but interesting...)
| Corvalan, Graciela N.V., "Conversation de fond avec
| Carlos Castaneda", traduit de l'espagnol et annote par
| Eva Martini, Paris: Editions du cerf, 1992, 128p.
Drury, Nevill, "Don Juan, Mescalito and Modern Magic".
London & New York 1978, ISBN 1-85063-015-1 (Arkana).
(Old, but interesting, too...)
Dubant, Bernard & Marguerie, Michel, "Castaneda - le
saut dans l'inconnu". Paris 1982, ISBN 0-85-707-085-3.
(They wrote further books on C.C.. Something for the
French fans and readers...)
Eagle Feather, Ken, "Traveling with Power". 1992, ISBN
1-878901-28-1. Apprentice to Don Juan talks about
perception.
Fikes, Jay Courtney, "Carlos Castaneda, Academic
Opportunism, and the Psychedelic Sixties". 1992, ISBN
0-8191-8585-X. (The title disqualifies itsself. Somekind
of a weird book in the tradition of de Mille...)
Fox, Oliver, "Astral Projection: A Record of
Out-of-the-Body Experiences". 1962, 1990, ISBN
0-8065-0463-3. Expanded from original articles published
in the "Occult Review" in 1920. Chronologically ordered
accounts of his experiences.
Hutchison, Michael, "Mega Brain: New Tools and
Techniques for Brain Growth and Mind Expansion". 1986,
ISBN 0-345-34175-9. Chapter 12 ("Tuning the Brain with
Sound Waves: Hemi-Sync"), et passim.
Leary, Timothy, "Flashbacks: A Personal and Cultural
History of an Era". 1990, ISBN 0-87477-497-7. Chapter
20, short "Biography" of Castaneda, Leary's stay at 'La
Catalina' hotel and run-in with a would-be sorcerer.
L|tge, Lothar R|diger, "C.C. und die Lehren des Don
Juan". Freiburg 1983. (A practical guide. Frugal...)
Monroe, Robert A., "Journeys Out of the Body". 1971,
1977, ISBN 0-385-00861-9. First book: initial
experiences.
Monroe, Robert A., "Far Journeys". 1985, ISBN
0-385-23181-4. Majority of the book is a "tale" of the
OBE journeys of ``AA'', and what he learns.
Monroe, Robert A., "Ultimate Journey". Doubleday, ISBN
0-385-47207-2
M|ller, Burkhard, "Castaneda's Erben. Eurasburg 1991".
ISBN 3-9802912-0-0. (A book about experiences with C.C.
and the Toltec knowledge.)
Pearce, Joseph Chilton, "The Crack in the Cosmic Egg:
Challenging Constructs of Mind and Reality". 1971, 1988,
ISBN 0-517-56661-3. Chapter 9 ("Don Juan and Jesus") et
passim.
Pearce, Joseph Chilton, "Exploring the Crack in the
Cosmic Egg: Split Minds and Meta-realities". 1974, ISBN
0-671-80638-6. Chapters 15 ("Reversibility Thinking") &
16 et passim.
Pearce, Joseph Chilton, "Magical Child Matures". 1985,
ISBN0-553-25881-8. Chapter 18 ("Not Doing") passim.
Rogo, D. Scott, "Leaving the Body: A Complete Guide to
Astral Projection: A step-by-step presentation of eight
different systems of out-of-body travel". 1983, ISBN
0-13-528026-5. Chapter 6 ("The Monroe Techniques"), et
passim.
Rucker, Rudolf, "Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth
Dimension". 1977, ISBN 0-486-23400-2. Chapter 4 ("Time
as a Higher Dimension"), Annotated Bibliography
discussion of "A Separate Reality".
Sanchez, Victor, "Las Ensenenzas de Don Carlos. Mexico
1991". ISBN 968-6565-09-4. (Practical guide. Very good,
but in Spanish. Victor is working on a second book at
the moment. It seems to be very interesting. By the way,
he knows C.C. and studied with him.)
Smith, Adam, "Powers of Mind". 1975, ISBN
0-345-25426-0-195.
Timm, Dennis, "Nagual Junior". Anthologie, 1982, ISBN
3-9800414-2-5. (Anthology with some dubious interviews
and texts...)
Timm, Dennis, "Die Wirklichkeit und der Wissende".
Frankfurt 1989, ISBN 3-596-24290-8. (Philosophical
study, but including some interesting texts from
American anthropologists who studied with C.C. and
comment on his work... mostly positiv!)
Ulrich, Hans E., "Von Meister Eckhard bis C.C.".
Frankfurt 1986, ISBN 3-596-26541-X. (Esoterical
bullshit; boring...)
Watson, Lyall, "Beyond Supernature: A New Natural
History of the Supernatural". 1988, ISBN 0-553-34456-0.
Chapter 8 ("Description: Paranthropology").
Wittman, Ulla, "Leben wie ein Krieger". Interlaken 1988,
ISBN 3-7157-0120-0. (Practical intentions... but
sometimes boring, repeating, repeating, repeating...)
-------------
MT (Michael Topper) Initiates' Class Tapes:
#56 (8/10/91) Assemblage Point,
#90 (4/18/92) Shaman's Path.
NovaDreamer -- Tools For Exploration, (415) 499-9050,
(800) 456-9887. signals when you are dreaming to help
induce lucid dreaming. -- $245
-------
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| You can write to Castaneda and the rest of his clan c/o:
| Toltec Artists
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| Hollywood, CA 90036
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| (213) 463-9062
Author: Keith Thompson
Literary agents are paid to hype their clients, but
when the agent for Carlos Castaneda claimed that he was
offering me "the interview of a lifetime," it was hard to
disagree. After all, Castaneda's nine best-selling books
describing his extraordinary apprenticeship to Yaqui Indian
sorcerer don Juan Matus had inspired countless members of my
generation to explore mysticism, psychedelic drugs, and new
levels of consciousness. Yet even as his reputation grew,
the author had remained a recluse, shrouding himself in
mystery and intrigue. Aside from a few interviews given
seemingly at random over the years, Castaneda never ventured
into the public spotlight. Few people even know what he
looks like. For this interview, his agent told me, there
could be no cameras and no tape recorders. The conversation
would have to be recorded by a stenographer, lest copies of
Castaneda's taped voice fall into the wrong hands.
The interview -- perhaps timed to coincide with the
publication of Castaneda's latest and most esoteric book,
The Art of Dreaming -- took place in the conference room of
a modest office in Los Angeles, after weeks of
back-and-forth negotiations with Castaneda's agent. The
arrangements were complicated, the agent said, by the fact
that he had no way of contacting his client and could only
confirm a meeting after speaking with him "whenever he
decides to call . . . I never know in advance when that may
be."
Upon my arrival at noon, an energetic, enthusiastic, broad-
smiled man walked across the room, extended his hand, and
greeted me unassumingly: "Hello, I am Carlos Castaneda.
Welcome. We can begin our conversation when you are ready.
Would you like coffee, or perhaps a soda? Please make
yourself comfortable."
I had heard that Castaneda blends into the woodwork, or
resembles a Cuban waiter; that his features are both
European and Indian; that his skin is nut-brown or bronze;
that his hair is black, thick, and curly. So much for rumor.
His mane is now white, or largely so, short and mildly
disheveled. If asked to guide a police artist in making a
sketch, I would emphasize the eyes -- large, bright, lucid.
They may have been gray.
I asked Castaneda about his schedule. "The entire afternoon
is available. I should think we'll have all the time we
need. When it's enough, we'll know." Our conversation lasted
four hours, continuing through a meal of deli sandwiches
that arrived midway.
My first exposure to Castaneda's work had been as much
initiation as introduction. It was 1968. Police officers
were clubbing demonstrators in the streets of Chicago.
Assassins had taken Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert
Kennedy. Aretha Franklin's "Chain of Fools" topped the
charts. All of this amidst an ocean of sandals, embroidered
caftans, bell-bottoms, jangling bracelets, beads, and long
hair for men and women alike.
Into all this stepped an enigmatic writer named Carlos
Castaneda, toting a book called The Teachings of Don Juan: A
Yaqui Way of Knowledge. I remember how it transformed me.
The book I began reading was a curiosity; the book I held
when I finished had become a manifesto, the kind of
delirious cause celebre for which my psyche had been
secretly training. What Castaneda seemed to be affirming --
the possibility of awesome personal spiritual experience --
was precisely what the Sunday-morning-only religion of my
childhood had done its best to vaccinate me against.
Believing in Castaneda gave me faith that someday, some way,
I might meet my very own don Juan Matus (don is a Spanish
appellative denoting respect), the old Indian wise
man/sorcerer who implores his protg Carlos to get beyond
looking -- simply perceiving the world in its usually
accepted forms. To be a true "man of knowledge," Carlos has
to learn the art of seeing, so that for the first time he
can truly perceive the startling nature of the everyday
world. "When you see," don Juan says, "there are no longer
familiar features in the world. Everything is new.
Everything has never happened before. The world is
incredible!"
But, really -- who was this Castaneda? Where did he come
from and what was he trying to prove, with his mysterious
account of a realm that seemed to be of an entirely
different order of reality?
Over the years, various answers to that question have been
offered. Take your pick: (a) dissenting anthropologist; (b)
sorcerer's apprentice; (c) psychic visionary; (d) literary
genius; (e) original philosopher; (f) master teacher. For
balance, let's not forget (g) perpetrator of one of the most
spectacular hoaxes in the history of publishing.
Castaneda has responded to the bestowal of these conflicting
ID tags with something like ironic amusement, as though he
were an audience member enjoying the spectacle of a Chekhov
comedy in which he himself may or may not be a character.
The author has consistently declined -- over a span of
nearly three decades -- to engage in the war of words about
whether his books are authentic accounts of real-world
encounters, as he maintains, or (as numerous critics have
argued) fictional allegories in the spirit of Gulliver's
Travels and Alice in Wonderland.
This strategic reticence was learned from don Juan himself.
"To slip in and out of different worlds you have to remain
inconspicuous," says Castaneda, who is rumored (his
preferred status) to divide his time nowadays between Los
Angeles, Arizona, and Mexico. "The more you are identified
by people's ideas of who you are and how you will act, the
greater the constraint on your freedom. Don Juan insisted
upon the importance of erasing personal history. If little
by little you create a fog around yourself, then you will
not be taken for granted, and you will have more room for
change."
Even so, scattered clearings in the fog offer glimpses of
tracks left by the sorcerer's apprentice in the years before
his life faded to myth.
The scholarly consensus, unconfirmed by the author himself,
is that Carlos Cesar Arana Castaneda was born in Peru on
Christmas day 1925 in the historic Andean town of Cajamarca.
Upon graduating from the Colegio Nacional de Nuestra Senora
de Guadalupe, he studied briefly at the National Fine Arts
School of Peru. In 1948 his family moved to Lima and
established a jewelry store. After the death of his mother a
year later, Castaneda moved to San Francisco and soon
enrolled at Los Angeles City College, where he took two
courses in creative writing and one in journalism.
Castaneda received a B.A. in anthropology in 1962 from the
University of California at Los Angeles. In 1968, five years
before Castaneda received his Ph.D. in anthropology, the
University of California Press published The Teachings of
Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, which became a national
best seller following an enthusiastic notice by Roger
Jellinek in the New York Times Book Review:
"One can't exaggerate the significance of what Castaneda has
done. He is describing a shamanistic tradition, a
pre-logical cultural form that is no-one-knows how old. It
has been described often. . . . But it seems that no other
outsider, and certainly not a 'Westerner,' has ever
participated in its mysteries from within; nor has anyone
described them so well."
The fuse was lit. The Teachings sold 300,000 copies in a
1969 Ballantine mass edition. A Separate Reality and Journey
to Ixtlan followed from Simon & Schuster in 1971 and 1972.
The saga continued in Tales of Power (1974), The Second Ring
of Power (1977), The Eagle's Gift (1981), The Fire from
Within (1984), The Power of Silence (1987), and The Art of
Dreaming (1993). (Bibliophiles may be interested to learn
that Castaneda says he actually wrote a book about don Juan
before The Teachings, titled The Crack Between Worlds, but
lost the manuscript in a movie theater.)
In assessing the impact of his work, Castaneda's admirers
credit him with introducing to popular culture the rich and
varied traditions of shamanism, with their emphasis on
entering nonordinary realms and confronting strange and
sometimes hostile spirit-powers, in order to restore balance
and harmony to body, soul, and society. Inspired by don
Juan's use of peyote, jimsonweed, and other power plants to
teach Castaneda the "art of dreaming," untold numbers of
pioneers extended their own inner horizons through
psychedelic inquiry -- with decidedly mixed results.
For their part, critics of Castaneda's "path of knowledge"
dismiss his work as an ongoing pseudo-anthropological
shenanigan, complete with fabricated shamans and
sensationalized Native American religious practices. The
writings, they claim, have netted an unscrupulous author
tremendous wealth at the cost of denigrating the sacred
lifeways of indigenous peoples through commercial
exploitation. Castaneda's presentation, writes Richard de
Mille in Castaneda's Journey, "appeals to the reader's
hunger for myth, magic, ancient wisdom, true reality,
self-improvement, other worlds, or imaginary playmates."
Appropriately, the Castaneda I encountered was a study in
contrasts. His presence was informal, spontaneous, warmly
animated, and at times contagiously mirthful. At the same
time, his still heavily accented (Peruvian? Chilean?
Spanish?) diction conveyed the patrician formality of an
ambassador at court: deliberate and well-composed, serious
and poised, earnest and resolute. Practiced.
The contradiction, like so much about the man, may strike
some as a bothersome inconsistency. But it shouldn't. To
reread Carlos Castaneda's books (as I did, astonishingly,
all nine of them) is to see clearly -- perhaps for the first
time -- that contradiction is the force that ties his
literary Gordian knot. As the author had told me, intently,
during our lunch break: "Only by pitting two views against
each other can one weasel between them to arrive at the real
world."
I had the sense he was letting me know his fortress was well
guarded -- and daring me to storm it anyway.
Keith Thompson: As your books have made a character named
Carlos world-famous, the author called Castaneda has
retreated further and further from public view. There have
been more confirmed sightings of Elvis than of Carlos
Castaneda in recent years. Legend has you committing suicide
on at least three occasions; there's the persistent story of
your death in a Mexican bus crash two decades ago; and my
search for a confirmed photo and audio tapes was fruitless.
How can I be sure that you're truly Castaneda and not a
Carlos impersonator from Vegas? Have you got any
distinguishing birthmarks?
Carlos Castaneda: None! Just my agent vouches for me. That's
his job. But you are free to ask me your questions and shine
a bright light in my eyes and keep me here all night -- like
in the old movies.
You're known for being unknown. Why have you agreed to talk
now, after declining interviews for so many years?
Because I'm at the end of the trail that started over thirty
years ago. As a young anthropologist, I went to the
Southwest to collect information, to do fieldwork on the
medicinal plants used by the Indians of the area. I intended
to write an article, go on to graduate school, become a
professional in my field. I hadn't the slightest interest in
meeting a weird man like don Juan.
How exactly did your paths cross?
I was waiting for the bus at the Greyhound station in
Nogales, Arizona, talking with an anthropologist who had
been my guide and helper in my survey. My colleague leaned
over and pointed to a white-haired old Indian across the
room -- "Psst, over there, don't let him see you looking" --
and said he was an expert about peyote and medicinal plants.
That was all I needed to hear. I put on my best airs and
sauntered over to this man, who was known as don Juan, and
told him I myself was an authority about peyote. I said that
it might be worth his while to have lunch and talk with me
-- or something unbearably arrogant to that effect.
The old power-lunch ploy. But you weren't really much of an
authority, were you?
I knew next to nothing about peyote! But I continued
rattling on -- boasting about my knowledge, intending to
impress him. I remember that he just looked at me and nodded
occasionally, without saying a word. My pretensions melted
in the heat of that day. I was stunned at being silenced.
There I stood in the abyss, until don Juan saw that his bus
had come. He said good- bye, with the slightest wave of his
hand. I felt like an arrogant imbecile, and that was the
end.
Also the beginning.
Yes, that's when everything started. I learned that don Juan
was known as a brujo, which means, in English, medicine man,
curer, sorcerer. It became my task to discover where he
lived. You know, I was very good at doing that, and I did. I
found out, and I came to see him one day. We took a liking
to each other and soon became good friends.
You felt like a moron in this man's presence, but you were
eager to seek him out?
The way don Juan had looked at me there in the bus station
was exceptional -- an unprecedented event in my life. There
was something remarkable about his eyes, which seemed to
shine with a light all their own. You see, we are --
unfortunately we don't want to accept this, but we are apes,
anthropoids, simians. There's a primary knowledge that we
all carry, directly connected with the two-million-year-old
person at the root of our brain. And we do our best to
suppress it, which makes us obese, cardiac, cancer-prone. It
was on that archaic level that I was tackled by don Juan's
gaze, despite my annoyance and irritation that he had seen
through my pretense to expertise in the bus station.
Eventually you became don Juan's apprentice, and he your
mentor. What was the transition?
A year passed before he took me into his confidence. We had
gotten to know each other quite well, when one day don Juan
turned to me and said he held a certain knowledge that he
had learned from an unnamed benefactor, who had led him
through a kind of training. He used this word "knowledge"
more often than "sorcery," but for him they were one and the
same. Don Juan said he had chosen me to serve as his
apprentice, but that I must be prepared for a long and
difficult road. I had no idea how astonishingly strange the
road would be.
That's a consistent thread of your books -- your struggle to
make sense of a "separate reality" where gnats stand a
hundred feet tall, where human heads turn into crows, where
the same leaf falls four times, where sorcerers conjure cars
to disappear in broad daylight. A good stage hypnotist can
produce astonishing effects. Is it possible that's what don
Juan was up to? Did he trick you?
It's possible. What he did was teach me that there's much
more to the world than we usually acknowledge -- that our
normal expectations about reality are created by social
consensus, which is itself a trick. We're taught to see and
understand the world through a socialization process that,
when working correctly, convinces us that the
interpretations we agree upon define the limits of the real
world. Don Juan interrupted this process in my life by
demonstrating that we have the capacity to enter into other
worlds that are constant and independent of our highly
conditioned awareness. Sorcery involves reprogramming our
capacities to perceive realms as real, unique, absolute, and
engulfing as our daily so-called mundane world.
Don Juan is always trying to get you to put your
explanations of reality and your assumptions about what's
possible inside brackets, so you can see how arbitrary they
are. Contemporary philosophers would call this
"deconstructing" reality.
Don Juan had a visceral understanding of the way language
works as a system unto itself -- the way it generates
pictures of reality that we believe, mistakenly, to reveal
the "true" nature of things. His teachings were like a club
beating my thick head until I saw that my precious view was
actually a construction, woven of all kinds of fixated
interpretations, which I used to defend myself against pure
wondering perception.
There's a contradiction in there, somewhere. On the one
hand, don Juan desocialized you, by teaching you to see
without preconceptions. Yet it sounds like he then
resocialized you by enrolling you in a new set of meanings,
simply giving you a different interpretation, a new spin on
reality -- albeit a "magical" one.
That's something don Juan and I argued about all the time.
He said in effect that he was despinning me and I maintained
he was respinning me. By teaching me sorcery he presented a
new lens, a new language, and a new way of seeing and being
in the world. I was caught between my previous certainty
about the world and a new description, sorcery, and forced
to hold the old and the new together. I felt completely
stalled, like a car slipping its transmission. Don Juan was
delighted. He said this meant I was slipping between
descriptions of reality -- between my old and new views.
Eventually I saw that all my prior assumptions were based on
viewing the world as something from which I was essentially
alienated. That day when I encountered don Juan in the bus
station, I was the ideal academic, triumphantly estranged,
conniving to prove my nonexistent expertise concerning
psychotropic plants.
Ironically, it was don Juan who later introduced you to
"Mescalito," the green-skinned spirit of peyote.
Don Juan introduced me to psychotropic plants in the middle
period of my apprenticeship, because I was so stupid and so
cocky, which of course I considered evidence of
sophistication. I held to my conventional description of the
world with incredible vengeance, convinced it was the only
truth. Peyote served to exaggerate the subtle contradictions
within my interpretative gloss, and this helped me cut
through the typical Western stance of seeing a world out
there and talking to myself about it. But the psychotropic
approach had its costs -- physical and emotional exhaustion.
It took months for me to come fully around.
If you could do it over again, would you "just say no"?
My path has been my path. Don Juan always told me, "Make a
gesture." A gesture is nothing more than a deliberate act
undertaken for the power that comes from making a decision.
Ultimately, the value of entering a nonordinary state, as
you do with peyote or other psychotropic plants, is to exact
what you need in order to embrace the stupendous character
of ordinary reality. You see, the path of the heart is not a
road of incessant introspection or mystical flight, but a
way of engaging the joys and sorrows of the world. This
world, where each one of us is related at molecular levels
to every other wondrous and dynamic manifestation of being
-- this world is the warrior's true hunting ground.
Your friend don Juan teaches what is, how to know what is,
and how to live in accord with what is -- ontology,
epistemology, and ethics. Which leads many to say he's too
good to be true, that you created him from scratch as an
allegorical instrument of wise instruction.
The notion that I concocted a person like don Juan is
preposterous. I'm a product of a European intellectual
tradition to which a character like don Juan is alien. The
actual facts are stranger: I'm a reporter. My books are
accounts of an outlandish phenomenon that forced me to make
fundamental changes in my life in order to meet the
phenomenon on its own terms.
Some of your critics grow quite livid in their contention
that Juan Matus sometimes speaks more like an Oxford don
than a don Indian. Then there's the fact that he traveled
widely and acquired his knowledge from sources not limited
to his Yaqui roots.
Permit me to make a confession: I take much delight in the
idea that don Juan may not be the "best" don Juan. It's
probably true that I'm not the best Carlos Castaneda,
either. Years ago I met the perfect Castaneda at a party in
Sausalito, quite by accident. There, in the middle of the
patio, was the most handsome man, tall, blond, blue-eyed,
beautiful, barefoot. It was the early '70s. He was signing
books, and the owner of the house said to me, "I'd like you
to meet Carlos Castaneda." He was impersonating Carlos
Castaneda, with an impressive coterie of beautiful women all
around him. I said, "I am very pleased to meet you, Mister
Castaneda." He responded, "Doctor Castaneda." He was doing a
very good job. I thought, He presents a good way to be
Castaneda, the ideal Castaneda, with all the benefits that
go with the position. But time passes, and I'm still the
Castaneda that I am, not very well suited to play the
Hollywood version. Nor is don Juan.
Speaking of confessions: Did you ever contemplate
downplaying the eccentricity of your teacher and presenting
him as a more conventional character, to make him a better
vehicle for his teachings?
I never considered such an approach. Smoothing rough edges
to advance an agreeable plot is the luxury of the novelist.
I'm not unfamiliar with the spoken and unspoken canon of
science: "Be objective." Sometimes don Juan spoke in goofy
slang -- the equivalent of "By golly!" and "Don't lose your
marbles!" are two of his favorites. On other occasions he
showed a superb command of Spanish, which permitted me to
obtain detailed explanations of the intricate meanings of
his system of beliefs and its underlying logic. To
deliberately alter don Juan in my books so he would appear
consistent and meet the expectations of this or that
audience would bring "subjectivity" to my work, a demon
that, according to my best critics, has no place in
ethnographic writing.
Skeptics have challenged you to exorcise that demon once and
for all, by presenting for public inspection the field notes
based on your encounters with don Juan. Wouldn't that
alleviate doubts about whether your writings are genuine
ethnography or disguised fiction?
Whose doubts?
Fellow anthropologists, for starters.
The Senate Watergate Committee. Geraldo Rivera . . .
There was a time when requests to see my field notes seemed
unencumbered by hidden ideological agendas. After The
Teachings of Don Juan appeared I received a thoughtful
letter from Gordon Wasson, the founder of the science of
ethnomycology, the study of human uses of mushrooms and
other fungi. Gordon and Valentina Wasson had discovered the
existence of still-active shamanic mushroom cults in the
mountains near Oaxaca, Mexico. Dr. Wasson asked me to
clarify certain aspects of don Juan's use of psychotropic
mushrooms. I gladly sent him several pages of field notes
relevant to his area of interest, and met with him twice.
Subsequently he referred to me as an "honest and serious
young man," or words to that effect.
Even so, some critics proceeded to assert that any field
notes produced by Castaneda must be assumed to be forgeries
created after the fact. At that point I realized there was
no way I could satisfy people whose minds were made up
without recourse to whatever documentation I might provide.
Actually, it was liberating to abandon the enterprise of
public relations -- intrinsically a violation of my nature
-- and return to my fieldwork with don Juan.
You must be familiar with the claim that your work has
fostered the trivialization of indigenous spiritual
traditions. The argument goes like this: A despicable cadre
of non-Indian wannabees, commercial profiteers, and
self-styled shamans has read your books and found them
inspiring. How do you plead?
I didn't set out to write an exhaustive account of
indigenous spirituality, so it's a fallacy to judge my work
by that criterion. My books are instead a chronicle of
specific experiences and observations in a particular
context, reported to the best of my ability. But I do plead
guilty to knowingly committing willful acts of ethnography,
which is none other than translating cultural experience
into writing. Ethnography is always writing. That's what I
do. What happens when spoken words become written words, and
written words become published words, and published words
get ingested through acts of reading by persons unknown to
the author? Let's agree to call it complex. I've been
extremely fortunate to have a wide and diverse readership
throughout much of the world. The entry requirement is the
same everywhere: literacy. Beyond this, I'm responsible for
the virtues and vices of my anonymous audience in the same
way that every writer of any time and place is so
responsible. The main thing is, I stand by my work.
What does don Juan think of your global notoriety?
Nada. Not a thing. I learned this definitively when I took
him a copy of The Teachings of Don Juan. I said, "It's about
you, don Juan." He surveyed the book -- up and down, back
and front, flipped through the pages like a deck of cards --
then handed it back. I was crestfallen and told him I wanted
him to have it as a gift. Don Juan said he had better not
accept it, "because you know what we do with paper in
Mexico." He added, "Tell your publisher to print your next
book on softer stock."
Earlier you mentioned that don Juan deliberately made his
teaching dramatic. Your writings reflect that. Much
anthropological writing gives the impression of striving for
dullness, as if banality were a mark of truth.
To have made my astonishing adventures with don Juan boring
would have been to lie. It has taken me many years to
appreciate the fact that don Juan is a master of using
frustration, digression, and partial disclosure as methods
of instruction. He strategically blended revelation and
concealment in the oddest combinations. It was his style to
assert that ordinary and nonordinary reality aren't
separate, but instead are encompassed in a larger circle --
and then to reverse himself the next day by insisting that
the line between different realities must be respected at
all costs. I asked him why this must be so. He answered,
"Because nothing is more important to you than keeping your
personal world intact."
He was right. That was my top priority in the early days of
the apprenticeship. Eventually I saw -- I saw -- that the
path of the heart requires a full gesture, a degree of
abandon that can be terrifying. Only then is it possible to
achieve a sparkling metamorphosis.
I also realized the extent to which the teachings of don
Juan could and would be dismissed as "mere allegory" by
certain specialists whose sacramental mission is to
reinforce the limits that culture and language place on
perception.
This approaches the question of who gets to define "correct"
cultural description. Nowadays some of Margaret Mead's
critics declare she was "wrong" about Samoa. But why not
say, less dogmatically, that her writings present a partial
picture based on a unique encounter with an exotic culture?
Obviously her discoveries mirrored the concerns of her time,
including her own biases. Who has the authority to cordon
off art from science?
The assumption that art, magic, and science can't exist in
the same space at the same time is an obsolete remnant of
Aristotelian philosophical categories. We've got to get
beyond this kind of nostalgia in the social science of the
twenty-first century. Even the term ethnography is too
monolithic, because it implies that writing about other
cultures is an activity specific to anthropology, whereas in
fact ethnography cuts across various disciplines and genres.
Furthermore, even the ethnographer isn't monolithic -- he or
she must be reflexive and multifaceted, just like the
cultural phenomena that are encountered as "other."
So the observer, the observed phenomenon, and the process of
observation form an inseparable totality. From that
perspective, reality isn't simply received, it's actively
captured and rendered in different ways by different
observers with different ways of seeing.
Just so. What sorcery comes down to is the act of embodying
some specialized theoretical and practical premises about
the nature of perception in molding the universe around us.
It took me a long time to understand, intuitively, that
there were three Castanedas: one who observed don Juan, the
man and teacher; another who was the active subject of don
Juan's training -- the apprentice; and still another who
chronicled the adventures. "Three" is a metaphor to describe
the sensation of endlessly changing boundaries. Likewise,
don Juan himself was constantly shifting positions. Together
we were traversing the crack between the natural world of
everyday life and an unseen world, which don Juan called
"the second attention," a term he preferred to
"supernatural."
What you're describing isn't what comes to mind for most
anthropologists when they think about their line of work,
you know.
Oh, I'm certain you're right about that! Someone recently
asked me, What does mainstream anthropology think of Carlos
Castaneda? I don't suppose most of them think about me at
all. A few may be a little bit annoyed, but they're sure
that whatever I'm doing is not scientific and they don't
trouble themselves. For most of the field, "anthropological
possibility" means that you go to an exotic land, arrive at
a hotel, drink your highball while a flock of indigenous
people come and talk to you about the culture. They tell you
all kinds of things, and you write down the various words
for father and mother. More highballs, then you go home and
put it all in your computer and tabulate for correlations
and differences. That to them is scientific anthropology.
For me, that would be living hell.
How do you actually write?
My conversations with don Juan throughout the apprenticeship
were conducted primarily in Spanish. From the outset I tried
2. Carlos Castaneda Speaks, An interview
by Keith Thompson.
3. CASTANEDA'S CLAN (An interview with
Florinda, Donner-Grau, Taisha Abelar,
and Carol Tiggs by Keith Nichols.)
Magical Blend Magazine (c) 1994
4. Carlos Castaneda Overview (v0.4uc)
5. Notes on a talk by Taisha Abelar '92.
6. Notes on a talk by Taisha Abelar '94.
Version: 1.3.3
Last-Updated: Wed Jul 6 14:09:51 CDT 1994
The many contributors have my sincerest thanks.
Items marked with | are new or updated since version 1.2.
Abelar, Taisha , "Sorcerer's Crossing". 1992.
Castaneda, Carlos, "The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui
Way of Knowledge". 1968.
Castaneda, Carlos, "A Separate Reality: Further
Conversations with Don Juan". 1971.
Castaneda, Carlos, "Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of
Don Juan". 1972.
Castaneda, Carlos, "Tales of Power". 1974.
Castaneda, Carlos, "The Second Ring of Power". 1977.
Castaneda, Carlos, "The Eagle's Gift". 1981.
Castaneda, Carlos, "The Fire from Within". 1984.
Castaneda, Carlos, "The Power of Silence". 1987.
Castaneda, Carlos, "The Art of Dreaming". 1993.
Castaneda, Carlos, Psychology Today, Dez. 1977, "The Art
of Dreaming". (That's not the book, it's an article from
C.C.; mostly adapted from "Second Ring". but the
introduction is new and contains new information.)
Castaneda, Carlos, "Seis propositiones explicatorias".
Mexico 1985. (In the Mexican version of "Eagle's Gift" -
"El don del Aguila" - there is an appendix, 25 pages
long with a structural analysis by C.C. himself. There
he talks about secrets of the assembledge point and
about how stopping the dialog is connected to the rings
of power. Things that are missing in the rest of his
work...)
Castaneda, Carlos, "Preface to the Mexican edition of
Donner's _Being-in-Dreaming_". (Short but interesting)
Donner, Florinda, "Shabono". 1982.
Donner, Florinda, "The Witch's Dream". 1985.
Donner, Florinda, "Being-in-Dreaming". 1991.
----------
?, Magical Blend #14, "A conversation with the elusive
Carlos Castaneda".
?, Magical Blend #15, "Carlos Castaneda, part II".
?, Magical Blend #35, "Interview with Florinda Donner".
| Blair-Ewart, Alexander, DIMENSIONS, Vol. VII No. 9, 1992
| "The Art of Stalking True Freedom - Taisha Abelar in
| Conversation with Alexander Blair-Ewart".
| This is a pretty good interview with TA. Discussions
| about why all the books are being published, the
| "new configuration", the recapitulation, energy,
| Carol Tiggs' return, etc. More hard information than
| usually appears in interviews.
| Blair-Ewart, Alexander, DIMENSIONS, 1992?
| "The Sorcerer's Crossing - Taisha Abelar in
| Conversation with Alexander Blair-Ewart (Part II)"
| Blair-Ewart, Alexander, DIMENSIONS, February, 1992
| "Being-In-Dreaming - Florinda Donner in Conversation
with Alexander Blair-Ewart"
| Burton, Sandra, Time Magazine, "Magic and Reality".
1973. Interview with C.C. (A horrible thing - quite
awful and really boring...)
| Corvalan, Graciela, "Der Weg der Tolteken - Ein Gesprdch
| mit Carlos Castaneda", Fischer, 1987, ca. 100p., ISBN
| 3-596-23864-1
| An interview with Carlos Castaneda dating from
| 1979/80 in the form of a book; most interesting. The
| original is in Spanish and has been translated into
| German by Joachim A Frank.
Eagle Feather, Ken / Kramer, Carol, Body, Mind & Spirit
#6/1992,
"Being-in-Dreaming". An Interview with Florinda
Donner. (Reveals what happened to La Gorda, the
Genaros and the Little Sisters, Soledad, et.al.)
Fort, Carmina, "Conversationes con Carlos Castaneda".
Madrid (Spain), 1991.
Carmina, Carlos, and Florinda Donner met several
times in 1988.
Carmina wrote this book about the events,
conversations and revelations. Quite good. (about
130 pages.)
Keen, Sam, Psychology Today, "Sorcerer's Apprentice".
1975.
An interview with C.C. (Of some size and quite
interesting. Timeframe: Shortly before nagual Juan
Matus' departure = 1973, perhaps February)
Leviton, Richard, Yoga Journal, March/April 1994 #115,
"The Art of Dreaming". Part book review, part
inquiry on dreaming.
gopher://gopher.internet.com:2100/11/collected/yoga
Nichols, Keith, Magical Blend #40, Oct 1993, "Taisha
Abelar on Sorcery: Sorcery and reality in the Castaneda
clan". Interview. A good introduction to sorcery,
recapitulation, dreaming, the Assemblage Point, and the
energy body.
Nichols, Keith, Magical Blend #42, April 1994,
"Castaneda's Clan".
Interviews with Taisha Abelar, Florinda Donner-Grau,
and Carol Tiggs. gopher://cscns.com/00/
News%20and%20Information/aspen/Magical%20Blend/
Issue%2042/Articles/Castaneda_Clan.doc
Thompson, Keith, New Age Journal, March/April 1994,
"Carlos Castaneda Speaks: Portrait of a Sorcerer".
Interview.
gopher://gopher.internet.com:2100/11/collected/new_age
Wagner, Bruce, Details, March 1994, "The Secret Life of
Carlos Castaneda: You Only Live Twice". A most
interesting interview.
--------
Cox, Murray, "Notes from the New Land: Join the
expedition at the Monroe Institute where researchers use
the science of sound to explore altered states of
consciousness". Omni, Oct 1993.
Magical Blend #5, "A comparison of Aleister Crowley and
Carlos Castaneda".
Magical Blend #40, Oct 1993, "Carlos Castaneda on don
Juan".
This is from a transcript by way of David Christie,
not an interview.
Gnosis #2, Spring/Summer 1986, "Magical
Autobiographies".
The New Thunderbird Chronicle vol 1, no 3, Oct 1989,
"Taking the Fifth" et passim. The threshold of the
Eagle's spiritual Aerie. Drawing of Carlos on the cover
(with sombrero covering head).
--------
de Mille, Richard, "Castaneda's Journey: The Power and
the Allegory". 1976.
de Mille, Richard, "The Don Juan Papers". 1980.
| Fikes, Jay Courtney, "Carlos Castaneda: Academic
| Opportunism and the Psychedelic Sixties", Millenia
| Press, 1993, ISBN 0-9696960-0-0. The gist of this one is
| that CC's works are fabrications, although the DJ
| character is based on a real-life sorcerer. Much info
| about the Huichol Indians.
Noel, Daniel C., "Seeing Castaneda". 1976, ISBN
339-50361-7.
| Williams, Donald Lee, "Border Crossings: A Psychological
| Perspective on Carlos Castaneda's Path of Knowledge",
| Toronto: Inner City Books, 1981, ISBN 0-919123-07-04. A
| Jungian interpretation of Castaneda's books up to The
| Second Ring of Power. Dry and scholarly.
-------------
?, "Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree
of Knowledge: A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and
Human Evolution". 1992, ISBN 0-553-37130-4. Chapter 1
("Shamanism: Setting the Stage").
Blackmore, Susan J., "Beyond the Body: An Investigation
of Out-of-the-Body Experiences". 1992, ISBN
0-89733-344-6. Published on behalf of The Society for
Psychical Research. Chapter 12 ("The Physiology of the
OBE"), et passim.
Capra, Fritjof, "The Turning Point: Science, Society,
and the Rising Culture". 1982, ISBN 0-553-01480-3.
Chapter 11 ("Journeys Beyond Space and Time").
Classen, Norbert, "Das Wissen der Tolteken". Berlin
1992, ISBN 3-9802912-1-9. (My poor little book... about
the Toltec knowledge. A practical and philosophical
guide. It includes a German version of C.C.'s
``propositiones explicatorias'', only published in
Mexico before.)
Coerper, Hellmut, "Der Zugang zum Wissen". Fellbach
1981. ISBN 3-87089-310-9. (C.G. Jung, Psychology and
C.C. Intellectual, but interesting...)
| Corvalan, Graciela N.V., "Conversation de fond avec
| Carlos Castaneda", traduit de l'espagnol et annote par
| Eva Martini, Paris: Editions du cerf, 1992, 128p.
Drury, Nevill, "Don Juan, Mescalito and Modern Magic".
London & New York 1978, ISBN 1-85063-015-1 (Arkana).
(Old, but interesting, too...)
Dubant, Bernard & Marguerie, Michel, "Castaneda - le
saut dans l'inconnu". Paris 1982, ISBN 0-85-707-085-3.
(They wrote further books on C.C.. Something for the
French fans and readers...)
Eagle Feather, Ken, "Traveling with Power". 1992, ISBN
1-878901-28-1. Apprentice to Don Juan talks about
perception.
Fikes, Jay Courtney, "Carlos Castaneda, Academic
Opportunism, and the Psychedelic Sixties". 1992, ISBN
0-8191-8585-X. (The title disqualifies itsself. Somekind
of a weird book in the tradition of de Mille...)
Fox, Oliver, "Astral Projection: A Record of
Out-of-the-Body Experiences". 1962, 1990, ISBN
0-8065-0463-3. Expanded from original articles published
in the "Occult Review" in 1920. Chronologically ordered
accounts of his experiences.
Hutchison, Michael, "Mega Brain: New Tools and
Techniques for Brain Growth and Mind Expansion". 1986,
ISBN 0-345-34175-9. Chapter 12 ("Tuning the Brain with
Sound Waves: Hemi-Sync"), et passim.
Leary, Timothy, "Flashbacks: A Personal and Cultural
History of an Era". 1990, ISBN 0-87477-497-7. Chapter
20, short "Biography" of Castaneda, Leary's stay at 'La
Catalina' hotel and run-in with a would-be sorcerer.
L|tge, Lothar R|diger, "C.C. und die Lehren des Don
Juan". Freiburg 1983. (A practical guide. Frugal...)
Monroe, Robert A., "Journeys Out of the Body". 1971,
1977, ISBN 0-385-00861-9. First book: initial
experiences.
Monroe, Robert A., "Far Journeys". 1985, ISBN
0-385-23181-4. Majority of the book is a "tale" of the
OBE journeys of ``AA'', and what he learns.
Monroe, Robert A., "Ultimate Journey". Doubleday, ISBN
0-385-47207-2
M|ller, Burkhard, "Castaneda's Erben. Eurasburg 1991".
ISBN 3-9802912-0-0. (A book about experiences with C.C.
and the Toltec knowledge.)
Pearce, Joseph Chilton, "The Crack in the Cosmic Egg:
Challenging Constructs of Mind and Reality". 1971, 1988,
ISBN 0-517-56661-3. Chapter 9 ("Don Juan and Jesus") et
passim.
Pearce, Joseph Chilton, "Exploring the Crack in the
Cosmic Egg: Split Minds and Meta-realities". 1974, ISBN
0-671-80638-6. Chapters 15 ("Reversibility Thinking") &
16 et passim.
Pearce, Joseph Chilton, "Magical Child Matures". 1985,
ISBN0-553-25881-8. Chapter 18 ("Not Doing") passim.
Rogo, D. Scott, "Leaving the Body: A Complete Guide to
Astral Projection: A step-by-step presentation of eight
different systems of out-of-body travel". 1983, ISBN
0-13-528026-5. Chapter 6 ("The Monroe Techniques"), et
passim.
Rucker, Rudolf, "Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth
Dimension". 1977, ISBN 0-486-23400-2. Chapter 4 ("Time
as a Higher Dimension"), Annotated Bibliography
discussion of "A Separate Reality".
Sanchez, Victor, "Las Ensenenzas de Don Carlos. Mexico
1991". ISBN 968-6565-09-4. (Practical guide. Very good,
but in Spanish. Victor is working on a second book at
the moment. It seems to be very interesting. By the way,
he knows C.C. and studied with him.)
Smith, Adam, "Powers of Mind". 1975, ISBN
0-345-25426-0-195.
Timm, Dennis, "Nagual Junior". Anthologie, 1982, ISBN
3-9800414-2-5. (Anthology with some dubious interviews
and texts...)
Timm, Dennis, "Die Wirklichkeit und der Wissende".
Frankfurt 1989, ISBN 3-596-24290-8. (Philosophical
study, but including some interesting texts from
American anthropologists who studied with C.C. and
comment on his work... mostly positiv!)
Ulrich, Hans E., "Von Meister Eckhard bis C.C.".
Frankfurt 1986, ISBN 3-596-26541-X. (Esoterical
bullshit; boring...)
Watson, Lyall, "Beyond Supernature: A New Natural
History of the Supernatural". 1988, ISBN 0-553-34456-0.
Chapter 8 ("Description: Paranthropology").
Wittman, Ulla, "Leben wie ein Krieger". Interlaken 1988,
ISBN 3-7157-0120-0. (Practical intentions... but
sometimes boring, repeating, repeating, repeating...)
-------------
MT (Michael Topper) Initiates' Class Tapes:
#56 (8/10/91) Assemblage Point,
#90 (4/18/92) Shaman's Path.
NovaDreamer -- Tools For Exploration, (415) 499-9050,
(800) 456-9887. signals when you are dreaming to help
induce lucid dreaming. -- $245
-------
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Chico, CA 94927-0600 USA
[Back issues must be paid in advance, call for pricing]
| [may be defunct--ed]
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| Voice (416) 928-6730
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| You can write to Castaneda and the rest of his clan c/o:
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| Hollywood, CA 90036
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| (213) 463-9062
Author: Keith Thompson
Literary agents are paid to hype their clients, but
when the agent for Carlos Castaneda claimed that he was
offering me "the interview of a lifetime," it was hard to
disagree. After all, Castaneda's nine best-selling books
describing his extraordinary apprenticeship to Yaqui Indian
sorcerer don Juan Matus had inspired countless members of my
generation to explore mysticism, psychedelic drugs, and new
levels of consciousness. Yet even as his reputation grew,
the author had remained a recluse, shrouding himself in
mystery and intrigue. Aside from a few interviews given
seemingly at random over the years, Castaneda never ventured
into the public spotlight. Few people even know what he
looks like. For this interview, his agent told me, there
could be no cameras and no tape recorders. The conversation
would have to be recorded by a stenographer, lest copies of
Castaneda's taped voice fall into the wrong hands.
The interview -- perhaps timed to coincide with the
publication of Castaneda's latest and most esoteric book,
The Art of Dreaming -- took place in the conference room of
a modest office in Los Angeles, after weeks of
back-and-forth negotiations with Castaneda's agent. The
arrangements were complicated, the agent said, by the fact
that he had no way of contacting his client and could only
confirm a meeting after speaking with him "whenever he
decides to call . . . I never know in advance when that may
be."
Upon my arrival at noon, an energetic, enthusiastic, broad-
smiled man walked across the room, extended his hand, and
greeted me unassumingly: "Hello, I am Carlos Castaneda.
Welcome. We can begin our conversation when you are ready.
Would you like coffee, or perhaps a soda? Please make
yourself comfortable."
I had heard that Castaneda blends into the woodwork, or
resembles a Cuban waiter; that his features are both
European and Indian; that his skin is nut-brown or bronze;
that his hair is black, thick, and curly. So much for rumor.
His mane is now white, or largely so, short and mildly
disheveled. If asked to guide a police artist in making a
sketch, I would emphasize the eyes -- large, bright, lucid.
They may have been gray.
I asked Castaneda about his schedule. "The entire afternoon
is available. I should think we'll have all the time we
need. When it's enough, we'll know." Our conversation lasted
four hours, continuing through a meal of deli sandwiches
that arrived midway.
My first exposure to Castaneda's work had been as much
initiation as introduction. It was 1968. Police officers
were clubbing demonstrators in the streets of Chicago.
Assassins had taken Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert
Kennedy. Aretha Franklin's "Chain of Fools" topped the
charts. All of this amidst an ocean of sandals, embroidered
caftans, bell-bottoms, jangling bracelets, beads, and long
hair for men and women alike.
Into all this stepped an enigmatic writer named Carlos
Castaneda, toting a book called The Teachings of Don Juan: A
Yaqui Way of Knowledge. I remember how it transformed me.
The book I began reading was a curiosity; the book I held
when I finished had become a manifesto, the kind of
delirious cause celebre for which my psyche had been
secretly training. What Castaneda seemed to be affirming --
the possibility of awesome personal spiritual experience --
was precisely what the Sunday-morning-only religion of my
childhood had done its best to vaccinate me against.
Believing in Castaneda gave me faith that someday, some way,
I might meet my very own don Juan Matus (don is a Spanish
appellative denoting respect), the old Indian wise
man/sorcerer who implores his protg Carlos to get beyond
looking -- simply perceiving the world in its usually
accepted forms. To be a true "man of knowledge," Carlos has
to learn the art of seeing, so that for the first time he
can truly perceive the startling nature of the everyday
world. "When you see," don Juan says, "there are no longer
familiar features in the world. Everything is new.
Everything has never happened before. The world is
incredible!"
But, really -- who was this Castaneda? Where did he come
from and what was he trying to prove, with his mysterious
account of a realm that seemed to be of an entirely
different order of reality?
Over the years, various answers to that question have been
offered. Take your pick: (a) dissenting anthropologist; (b)
sorcerer's apprentice; (c) psychic visionary; (d) literary
genius; (e) original philosopher; (f) master teacher. For
balance, let's not forget (g) perpetrator of one of the most
spectacular hoaxes in the history of publishing.
Castaneda has responded to the bestowal of these conflicting
ID tags with something like ironic amusement, as though he
were an audience member enjoying the spectacle of a Chekhov
comedy in which he himself may or may not be a character.
The author has consistently declined -- over a span of
nearly three decades -- to engage in the war of words about
whether his books are authentic accounts of real-world
encounters, as he maintains, or (as numerous critics have
argued) fictional allegories in the spirit of Gulliver's
Travels and Alice in Wonderland.
This strategic reticence was learned from don Juan himself.
"To slip in and out of different worlds you have to remain
inconspicuous," says Castaneda, who is rumored (his
preferred status) to divide his time nowadays between Los
Angeles, Arizona, and Mexico. "The more you are identified
by people's ideas of who you are and how you will act, the
greater the constraint on your freedom. Don Juan insisted
upon the importance of erasing personal history. If little
by little you create a fog around yourself, then you will
not be taken for granted, and you will have more room for
change."
Even so, scattered clearings in the fog offer glimpses of
tracks left by the sorcerer's apprentice in the years before
his life faded to myth.
The scholarly consensus, unconfirmed by the author himself,
is that Carlos Cesar Arana Castaneda was born in Peru on
Christmas day 1925 in the historic Andean town of Cajamarca.
Upon graduating from the Colegio Nacional de Nuestra Senora
de Guadalupe, he studied briefly at the National Fine Arts
School of Peru. In 1948 his family moved to Lima and
established a jewelry store. After the death of his mother a
year later, Castaneda moved to San Francisco and soon
enrolled at Los Angeles City College, where he took two
courses in creative writing and one in journalism.
Castaneda received a B.A. in anthropology in 1962 from the
University of California at Los Angeles. In 1968, five years
before Castaneda received his Ph.D. in anthropology, the
University of California Press published The Teachings of
Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, which became a national
best seller following an enthusiastic notice by Roger
Jellinek in the New York Times Book Review:
"One can't exaggerate the significance of what Castaneda has
done. He is describing a shamanistic tradition, a
pre-logical cultural form that is no-one-knows how old. It
has been described often. . . . But it seems that no other
outsider, and certainly not a 'Westerner,' has ever
participated in its mysteries from within; nor has anyone
described them so well."
The fuse was lit. The Teachings sold 300,000 copies in a
1969 Ballantine mass edition. A Separate Reality and Journey
to Ixtlan followed from Simon & Schuster in 1971 and 1972.
The saga continued in Tales of Power (1974), The Second Ring
of Power (1977), The Eagle's Gift (1981), The Fire from
Within (1984), The Power of Silence (1987), and The Art of
Dreaming (1993). (Bibliophiles may be interested to learn
that Castaneda says he actually wrote a book about don Juan
before The Teachings, titled The Crack Between Worlds, but
lost the manuscript in a movie theater.)
In assessing the impact of his work, Castaneda's admirers
credit him with introducing to popular culture the rich and
varied traditions of shamanism, with their emphasis on
entering nonordinary realms and confronting strange and
sometimes hostile spirit-powers, in order to restore balance
and harmony to body, soul, and society. Inspired by don
Juan's use of peyote, jimsonweed, and other power plants to
teach Castaneda the "art of dreaming," untold numbers of
pioneers extended their own inner horizons through
psychedelic inquiry -- with decidedly mixed results.
For their part, critics of Castaneda's "path of knowledge"
dismiss his work as an ongoing pseudo-anthropological
shenanigan, complete with fabricated shamans and
sensationalized Native American religious practices. The
writings, they claim, have netted an unscrupulous author
tremendous wealth at the cost of denigrating the sacred
lifeways of indigenous peoples through commercial
exploitation. Castaneda's presentation, writes Richard de
Mille in Castaneda's Journey, "appeals to the reader's
hunger for myth, magic, ancient wisdom, true reality,
self-improvement, other worlds, or imaginary playmates."
Appropriately, the Castaneda I encountered was a study in
contrasts. His presence was informal, spontaneous, warmly
animated, and at times contagiously mirthful. At the same
time, his still heavily accented (Peruvian? Chilean?
Spanish?) diction conveyed the patrician formality of an
ambassador at court: deliberate and well-composed, serious
and poised, earnest and resolute. Practiced.
The contradiction, like so much about the man, may strike
some as a bothersome inconsistency. But it shouldn't. To
reread Carlos Castaneda's books (as I did, astonishingly,
all nine of them) is to see clearly -- perhaps for the first
time -- that contradiction is the force that ties his
literary Gordian knot. As the author had told me, intently,
during our lunch break: "Only by pitting two views against
each other can one weasel between them to arrive at the real
world."
I had the sense he was letting me know his fortress was well
guarded -- and daring me to storm it anyway.
Keith Thompson: As your books have made a character named
Carlos world-famous, the author called Castaneda has
retreated further and further from public view. There have
been more confirmed sightings of Elvis than of Carlos
Castaneda in recent years. Legend has you committing suicide
on at least three occasions; there's the persistent story of
your death in a Mexican bus crash two decades ago; and my
search for a confirmed photo and audio tapes was fruitless.
How can I be sure that you're truly Castaneda and not a
Carlos impersonator from Vegas? Have you got any
distinguishing birthmarks?
Carlos Castaneda: None! Just my agent vouches for me. That's
his job. But you are free to ask me your questions and shine
a bright light in my eyes and keep me here all night -- like
in the old movies.
You're known for being unknown. Why have you agreed to talk
now, after declining interviews for so many years?
Because I'm at the end of the trail that started over thirty
years ago. As a young anthropologist, I went to the
Southwest to collect information, to do fieldwork on the
medicinal plants used by the Indians of the area. I intended
to write an article, go on to graduate school, become a
professional in my field. I hadn't the slightest interest in
meeting a weird man like don Juan.
How exactly did your paths cross?
I was waiting for the bus at the Greyhound station in
Nogales, Arizona, talking with an anthropologist who had
been my guide and helper in my survey. My colleague leaned
over and pointed to a white-haired old Indian across the
room -- "Psst, over there, don't let him see you looking" --
and said he was an expert about peyote and medicinal plants.
That was all I needed to hear. I put on my best airs and
sauntered over to this man, who was known as don Juan, and
told him I myself was an authority about peyote. I said that
it might be worth his while to have lunch and talk with me
-- or something unbearably arrogant to that effect.
The old power-lunch ploy. But you weren't really much of an
authority, were you?
I knew next to nothing about peyote! But I continued
rattling on -- boasting about my knowledge, intending to
impress him. I remember that he just looked at me and nodded
occasionally, without saying a word. My pretensions melted
in the heat of that day. I was stunned at being silenced.
There I stood in the abyss, until don Juan saw that his bus
had come. He said good- bye, with the slightest wave of his
hand. I felt like an arrogant imbecile, and that was the
end.
Also the beginning.
Yes, that's when everything started. I learned that don Juan
was known as a brujo, which means, in English, medicine man,
curer, sorcerer. It became my task to discover where he
lived. You know, I was very good at doing that, and I did. I
found out, and I came to see him one day. We took a liking
to each other and soon became good friends.
You felt like a moron in this man's presence, but you were
eager to seek him out?
The way don Juan had looked at me there in the bus station
was exceptional -- an unprecedented event in my life. There
was something remarkable about his eyes, which seemed to
shine with a light all their own. You see, we are --
unfortunately we don't want to accept this, but we are apes,
anthropoids, simians. There's a primary knowledge that we
all carry, directly connected with the two-million-year-old
person at the root of our brain. And we do our best to
suppress it, which makes us obese, cardiac, cancer-prone. It
was on that archaic level that I was tackled by don Juan's
gaze, despite my annoyance and irritation that he had seen
through my pretense to expertise in the bus station.
Eventually you became don Juan's apprentice, and he your
mentor. What was the transition?
A year passed before he took me into his confidence. We had
gotten to know each other quite well, when one day don Juan
turned to me and said he held a certain knowledge that he
had learned from an unnamed benefactor, who had led him
through a kind of training. He used this word "knowledge"
more often than "sorcery," but for him they were one and the
same. Don Juan said he had chosen me to serve as his
apprentice, but that I must be prepared for a long and
difficult road. I had no idea how astonishingly strange the
road would be.
That's a consistent thread of your books -- your struggle to
make sense of a "separate reality" where gnats stand a
hundred feet tall, where human heads turn into crows, where
the same leaf falls four times, where sorcerers conjure cars
to disappear in broad daylight. A good stage hypnotist can
produce astonishing effects. Is it possible that's what don
Juan was up to? Did he trick you?
It's possible. What he did was teach me that there's much
more to the world than we usually acknowledge -- that our
normal expectations about reality are created by social
consensus, which is itself a trick. We're taught to see and
understand the world through a socialization process that,
when working correctly, convinces us that the
interpretations we agree upon define the limits of the real
world. Don Juan interrupted this process in my life by
demonstrating that we have the capacity to enter into other
worlds that are constant and independent of our highly
conditioned awareness. Sorcery involves reprogramming our
capacities to perceive realms as real, unique, absolute, and
engulfing as our daily so-called mundane world.
Don Juan is always trying to get you to put your
explanations of reality and your assumptions about what's
possible inside brackets, so you can see how arbitrary they
are. Contemporary philosophers would call this
"deconstructing" reality.
Don Juan had a visceral understanding of the way language
works as a system unto itself -- the way it generates
pictures of reality that we believe, mistakenly, to reveal
the "true" nature of things. His teachings were like a club
beating my thick head until I saw that my precious view was
actually a construction, woven of all kinds of fixated
interpretations, which I used to defend myself against pure
wondering perception.
There's a contradiction in there, somewhere. On the one
hand, don Juan desocialized you, by teaching you to see
without preconceptions. Yet it sounds like he then
resocialized you by enrolling you in a new set of meanings,
simply giving you a different interpretation, a new spin on
reality -- albeit a "magical" one.
That's something don Juan and I argued about all the time.
He said in effect that he was despinning me and I maintained
he was respinning me. By teaching me sorcery he presented a
new lens, a new language, and a new way of seeing and being
in the world. I was caught between my previous certainty
about the world and a new description, sorcery, and forced
to hold the old and the new together. I felt completely
stalled, like a car slipping its transmission. Don Juan was
delighted. He said this meant I was slipping between
descriptions of reality -- between my old and new views.
Eventually I saw that all my prior assumptions were based on
viewing the world as something from which I was essentially
alienated. That day when I encountered don Juan in the bus
station, I was the ideal academic, triumphantly estranged,
conniving to prove my nonexistent expertise concerning
psychotropic plants.
Ironically, it was don Juan who later introduced you to
"Mescalito," the green-skinned spirit of peyote.
Don Juan introduced me to psychotropic plants in the middle
period of my apprenticeship, because I was so stupid and so
cocky, which of course I considered evidence of
sophistication. I held to my conventional description of the
world with incredible vengeance, convinced it was the only
truth. Peyote served to exaggerate the subtle contradictions
within my interpretative gloss, and this helped me cut
through the typical Western stance of seeing a world out
there and talking to myself about it. But the psychotropic
approach had its costs -- physical and emotional exhaustion.
It took months for me to come fully around.
If you could do it over again, would you "just say no"?
My path has been my path. Don Juan always told me, "Make a
gesture." A gesture is nothing more than a deliberate act
undertaken for the power that comes from making a decision.
Ultimately, the value of entering a nonordinary state, as
you do with peyote or other psychotropic plants, is to exact
what you need in order to embrace the stupendous character
of ordinary reality. You see, the path of the heart is not a
road of incessant introspection or mystical flight, but a
way of engaging the joys and sorrows of the world. This
world, where each one of us is related at molecular levels
to every other wondrous and dynamic manifestation of being
-- this world is the warrior's true hunting ground.
Your friend don Juan teaches what is, how to know what is,
and how to live in accord with what is -- ontology,
epistemology, and ethics. Which leads many to say he's too
good to be true, that you created him from scratch as an
allegorical instrument of wise instruction.
The notion that I concocted a person like don Juan is
preposterous. I'm a product of a European intellectual
tradition to which a character like don Juan is alien. The
actual facts are stranger: I'm a reporter. My books are
accounts of an outlandish phenomenon that forced me to make
fundamental changes in my life in order to meet the
phenomenon on its own terms.
Some of your critics grow quite livid in their contention
that Juan Matus sometimes speaks more like an Oxford don
than a don Indian. Then there's the fact that he traveled
widely and acquired his knowledge from sources not limited
to his Yaqui roots.
Permit me to make a confession: I take much delight in the
idea that don Juan may not be the "best" don Juan. It's
probably true that I'm not the best Carlos Castaneda,
either. Years ago I met the perfect Castaneda at a party in
Sausalito, quite by accident. There, in the middle of the
patio, was the most handsome man, tall, blond, blue-eyed,
beautiful, barefoot. It was the early '70s. He was signing
books, and the owner of the house said to me, "I'd like you
to meet Carlos Castaneda." He was impersonating Carlos
Castaneda, with an impressive coterie of beautiful women all
around him. I said, "I am very pleased to meet you, Mister
Castaneda." He responded, "Doctor Castaneda." He was doing a
very good job. I thought, He presents a good way to be
Castaneda, the ideal Castaneda, with all the benefits that
go with the position. But time passes, and I'm still the
Castaneda that I am, not very well suited to play the
Hollywood version. Nor is don Juan.
Speaking of confessions: Did you ever contemplate
downplaying the eccentricity of your teacher and presenting
him as a more conventional character, to make him a better
vehicle for his teachings?
I never considered such an approach. Smoothing rough edges
to advance an agreeable plot is the luxury of the novelist.
I'm not unfamiliar with the spoken and unspoken canon of
science: "Be objective." Sometimes don Juan spoke in goofy
slang -- the equivalent of "By golly!" and "Don't lose your
marbles!" are two of his favorites. On other occasions he
showed a superb command of Spanish, which permitted me to
obtain detailed explanations of the intricate meanings of
his system of beliefs and its underlying logic. To
deliberately alter don Juan in my books so he would appear
consistent and meet the expectations of this or that
audience would bring "subjectivity" to my work, a demon
that, according to my best critics, has no place in
ethnographic writing.
Skeptics have challenged you to exorcise that demon once and
for all, by presenting for public inspection the field notes
based on your encounters with don Juan. Wouldn't that
alleviate doubts about whether your writings are genuine
ethnography or disguised fiction?
Whose doubts?
Fellow anthropologists, for starters.
The Senate Watergate Committee. Geraldo Rivera . . .
There was a time when requests to see my field notes seemed
unencumbered by hidden ideological agendas. After The
Teachings of Don Juan appeared I received a thoughtful
letter from Gordon Wasson, the founder of the science of
ethnomycology, the study of human uses of mushrooms and
other fungi. Gordon and Valentina Wasson had discovered the
existence of still-active shamanic mushroom cults in the
mountains near Oaxaca, Mexico. Dr. Wasson asked me to
clarify certain aspects of don Juan's use of psychotropic
mushrooms. I gladly sent him several pages of field notes
relevant to his area of interest, and met with him twice.
Subsequently he referred to me as an "honest and serious
young man," or words to that effect.
Even so, some critics proceeded to assert that any field
notes produced by Castaneda must be assumed to be forgeries
created after the fact. At that point I realized there was
no way I could satisfy people whose minds were made up
without recourse to whatever documentation I might provide.
Actually, it was liberating to abandon the enterprise of
public relations -- intrinsically a violation of my nature
-- and return to my fieldwork with don Juan.
You must be familiar with the claim that your work has
fostered the trivialization of indigenous spiritual
traditions. The argument goes like this: A despicable cadre
of non-Indian wannabees, commercial profiteers, and
self-styled shamans has read your books and found them
inspiring. How do you plead?
I didn't set out to write an exhaustive account of
indigenous spirituality, so it's a fallacy to judge my work
by that criterion. My books are instead a chronicle of
specific experiences and observations in a particular
context, reported to the best of my ability. But I do plead
guilty to knowingly committing willful acts of ethnography,
which is none other than translating cultural experience
into writing. Ethnography is always writing. That's what I
do. What happens when spoken words become written words, and
written words become published words, and published words
get ingested through acts of reading by persons unknown to
the author? Let's agree to call it complex. I've been
extremely fortunate to have a wide and diverse readership
throughout much of the world. The entry requirement is the
same everywhere: literacy. Beyond this, I'm responsible for
the virtues and vices of my anonymous audience in the same
way that every writer of any time and place is so
responsible. The main thing is, I stand by my work.
What does don Juan think of your global notoriety?
Nada. Not a thing. I learned this definitively when I took
him a copy of The Teachings of Don Juan. I said, "It's about
you, don Juan." He surveyed the book -- up and down, back
and front, flipped through the pages like a deck of cards --
then handed it back. I was crestfallen and told him I wanted
him to have it as a gift. Don Juan said he had better not
accept it, "because you know what we do with paper in
Mexico." He added, "Tell your publisher to print your next
book on softer stock."
Earlier you mentioned that don Juan deliberately made his
teaching dramatic. Your writings reflect that. Much
anthropological writing gives the impression of striving for
dullness, as if banality were a mark of truth.
To have made my astonishing adventures with don Juan boring
would have been to lie. It has taken me many years to
appreciate the fact that don Juan is a master of using
frustration, digression, and partial disclosure as methods
of instruction. He strategically blended revelation and
concealment in the oddest combinations. It was his style to
assert that ordinary and nonordinary reality aren't
separate, but instead are encompassed in a larger circle --
and then to reverse himself the next day by insisting that
the line between different realities must be respected at
all costs. I asked him why this must be so. He answered,
"Because nothing is more important to you than keeping your
personal world intact."
He was right. That was my top priority in the early days of
the apprenticeship. Eventually I saw -- I saw -- that the
path of the heart requires a full gesture, a degree of
abandon that can be terrifying. Only then is it possible to
achieve a sparkling metamorphosis.
I also realized the extent to which the teachings of don
Juan could and would be dismissed as "mere allegory" by
certain specialists whose sacramental mission is to
reinforce the limits that culture and language place on
perception.
This approaches the question of who gets to define "correct"
cultural description. Nowadays some of Margaret Mead's
critics declare she was "wrong" about Samoa. But why not
say, less dogmatically, that her writings present a partial
picture based on a unique encounter with an exotic culture?
Obviously her discoveries mirrored the concerns of her time,
including her own biases. Who has the authority to cordon
off art from science?
The assumption that art, magic, and science can't exist in
the same space at the same time is an obsolete remnant of
Aristotelian philosophical categories. We've got to get
beyond this kind of nostalgia in the social science of the
twenty-first century. Even the term ethnography is too
monolithic, because it implies that writing about other
cultures is an activity specific to anthropology, whereas in
fact ethnography cuts across various disciplines and genres.
Furthermore, even the ethnographer isn't monolithic -- he or
she must be reflexive and multifaceted, just like the
cultural phenomena that are encountered as "other."
So the observer, the observed phenomenon, and the process of
observation form an inseparable totality. From that
perspective, reality isn't simply received, it's actively
captured and rendered in different ways by different
observers with different ways of seeing.
Just so. What sorcery comes down to is the act of embodying
some specialized theoretical and practical premises about
the nature of perception in molding the universe around us.
It took me a long time to understand, intuitively, that
there were three Castanedas: one who observed don Juan, the
man and teacher; another who was the active subject of don
Juan's training -- the apprentice; and still another who
chronicled the adventures. "Three" is a metaphor to describe
the sensation of endlessly changing boundaries. Likewise,
don Juan himself was constantly shifting positions. Together
we were traversing the crack between the natural world of
everyday life and an unseen world, which don Juan called
"the second attention," a term he preferred to
"supernatural."
What you're describing isn't what comes to mind for most
anthropologists when they think about their line of work,
you know.
Oh, I'm certain you're right about that! Someone recently
asked me, What does mainstream anthropology think of Carlos
Castaneda? I don't suppose most of them think about me at
all. A few may be a little bit annoyed, but they're sure
that whatever I'm doing is not scientific and they don't
trouble themselves. For most of the field, "anthropological
possibility" means that you go to an exotic land, arrive at
a hotel, drink your highball while a flock of indigenous
people come and talk to you about the culture. They tell you
all kinds of things, and you write down the various words
for father and mother. More highballs, then you go home and
put it all in your computer and tabulate for correlations
and differences. That to them is scientific anthropology.
For me, that would be living hell.
How do you actually write?
My conversations with don Juan throughout the apprenticeship
were conducted primarily in Spanish. From the outset I tried