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by Charles Carreon
Carlos Castaneda is a figure wrapped
in mystery, apparently born Christmas Day, 1925 in Peru. He left home
shortly after his mother's death, promising never to return, and kept his
promise. He became an American citizen on June 21, 1957.
His personal history was disguised by
layers of stories he told about himself and allowed others to tell about
him. The enigma was compounded as various impostors began to present
themselves as being Carlos. The tale is told that one day a man introduced
himself to Carlos as himself, and Carlos took it in stride.
His academic credentials were nothing
much -- undergraduate work at downtown Los Angeles Community College, and
virtually no one in the scholarly anthropological community would cite him
as an authority on anything. However, one doesn't need a degree, a
fellowship, or peer approval to become a bestselling author, and at this
he excelled.
In his first book, The Teachings of
Don Juan, A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, Carlos unveiled his hero, Don Juan
Matus, the very epitome of an existential hero. In a series of books that
orbit 'round the relationship between Carlos and Don Juan, readers
worldwide were introduced to a man who had innumerable apparently
contradictory qualities that made him an archetypal hero -- a triumphant
human at the center of a vast universe of forces.
At first, Don Jaun appeared as a "brujo,"
a desert sorcerer with magical powers and vast acquaintance with non-human
and non-animal forces that inhabited the dark vastness of the Sonoran
desert at night. He was a master of plant magic, and guided Carlos in the
use of datura ("devil's weed"), peyote ("mescalito") and an herbal
compound of secret ingredients (the "little smoke"). The stories were
charmingly insane, and did not inspire one to gaily consume a handful of
psychoactive substances, for such foolish conduct would certainly achieve
nothing in Don Juan's world.
To use the devil's weed, one had to
catch two lizards, sew one's eyes shut, and the stitch closed the mouth of
the other, to set up a situation where one lizard could see, the other
could talk, and thus the information known to the first lizard could be
communicated to the initiate. To use mescalito was easier, but still might
result in getting urinated all over by a mexican dog possessed by the
spirit of the psychedelic cactus while your teacher laughed himself sick.
And inhaling the little smoke sounded like about as much fun as
parachuting into the n-th dimension without a compass or a return ticket,
unless your idea of a fun high is being strafed by a horsefly the size of
a house.
Still, becoming extremely stoned in
the Arizona desert became a popular, if somewhat risky pastime. I had a
friend who ate a bunch of datura seeds while camping in Havasu Canyon on
the Colorado, and ended up rampaging through the dark performing feats of
superhuman strength like uprooting small saplings. The park authorities
were on his trail the next morning, and he managed to hike out, still in a
dreamlike trance. My own experience with henbane in Spain a year later was
equally ill-starred. Clearly, Don Juan could swim in waters that would be
a tar pit for the ordinary psychonaut.
So that book caught everyone's
attention, and probably led to the devastation of innumerable peyote
fields as an unfortunate byproduct. There was a polarized but synergistic
effect between Don Juan's peyote stories and the much tamer accounts by
Aldous Huxley of his mescaline experience in The Doors of Perception, and
in his fictional accounts in his utopian novel, Island. While Huxley in
his lab coat and "it's good for you" approach appealed to many people, Don
Juan's approach was a lot closer to what most people were hoping for --
"it will reveal the unknown."
Once his market was established,
Carlos gave us the second book, A Separate Reality. This book upped the
ante for his readers. It had little to do with drugs, and focussed instead
on the display of superhuman powers by Don Juan's friend Don Genaro, a
rotund and ebullient sorcerer who genially took great risks with his own
safety to provoke Carlos into "seeing" the sorcerer's view of the world --
crossing the vertical face a waterfall, for example, by leaping from one
tiny rock outcropping to the next using fibers of light that extended from
his midsection. It didn't work. Carlos couldn't see.
In the second book, Carlos planted the
seed deeper, depicting himself as a failure who could not go further with
his sorcerer's training because he feared losing contact with ordinary
reality. The effect on the reading public was extraordinary -- we cheered
Don Juan, and critiqued Carlos for throwing away the opportunity we would
love to have. Ever the perfect straight man, Carlos would allow us to
"get" what he himself could not comprehend. We projected ourselves into
Don Juan, and shared his desire to impart the path of knowledge to Carlos.
Don Juan also told the story of how he had witnessed his father's murder,
and how he had transcended his hate for the murderers. He explained that
he pitied his parents, not because of their suffering and hardship, but
simply because they never realized that they were not simply Indians, but
more importantly, "were men." Don Juan's nobility and ability to
articulate an impressive spiritual philosophy became apparent.
In the third book, Journey to Ixtlan,
Carlos set down the hard work of accepting his path of knowledge and
working to pursue it. Throughout the books, Carlos models the dedication
of a true aspirant in a wisdom tradition, but this note seems to be hit
most strongly in the third book. It shares techniques for stilling the
internal dialogue, and articulates a philosophy that I personally
experiened as stoic. Don Juan's philosophy emphasized power -- the power
to possess the moment of life we are living, the power to control one's
mind and experience, the power to use danger as a tool to develop skill,
the power to live without bemoaning our fate or demanding assurance that
our future will at least be no worse than today.
In the fourth book, Tales of Power,
Carlos struck a vein of esoteric humor that has rarely been tapped by any
other author. The book will quite simply keep you in stitches. Here Carlos
allows himself to become a full-time buffoon at the service of art. From
start to finish, he is the awestricken observer of cosmic hijinks that fly
back and forth between Don Juan and Don Genaro. Constantly on the outside
of the joke, Carlos narrates one humorous interlude after another in the
stunned voice of one who didn't ask for this and doesn't know what to do
about it. And the reader begins to intuit that he has crossed the border
from that sensible, stoic philosophy that seemed so grounding in book
three, to a freewheeling game of cosmic rollerball in which everyone might
be a winner if only they tried to play.
The works continued, and Carlos
continued to be an enigma. Carlos apparently created a bit of a cult
following, which focusses now on the practices of "dreaming" and
"stalking." Dreamers work with lucid dreaming techniques. Stalkers work
with memory to cleanse themselves of attachment to personal history. Also
available are teachings on "Tensegrity" on videotape. These are
physical-mental exercises that come with a fascinating demonstration and
narration. The exercises seem likely to be beneficial.
In the end, one who tries to adopt the
Carlos path too seriously will probably end in some dead end of
self-delusion. But anyone who allows himself to be entertained by Don Juan
and Don Genaro will wish fervently, that whatever the truth may be, that
they lived, prospered, and that their brand of wisdom shall always be
present on the earth, even if only fully disclosed to a very few. To
Carlos, we are indebted with unending thanks for skillfully revealing what
could not have been displayed in any other way, even if Don Juan had been
as popular as the Dalai Lama or Nelson Mandela, and had presided at
conventions on human awareness. He did it just right.
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