Carlos Castaneda - Don Juan Matus

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 to

persuade don Juan to let me use a tape recorder, but he said

relying on something mechanical only makes us more and more

sterile. "It curtails your magic," he said. "Better to learn with

your whole body so you'll remember with your whole body." I

had no idea what he meant. Consequently I began keeping

voluminous field notes of what he said. He found my

industriousness amusing. As for my books, I dream them. I

gather myself and my field notes -- usually in the afternoon

but not always -- and go through all my notes and translate

them into English. In the evening I sleep and dream what I

want to write. When I wake up, I write in the quiet hours of

the night, drawing upon what has arranged itself coherently in

my head.

 

Do you rewrite?

 

It's not my practice to do so. Regular writing is for me quite

dry and labored. Dreaming is best. Much of my training with

don Juan was in reconditioning perception to sustain dream

images long enough to look at them carefully. Don Juan was

right about the tape recorder -- and in retrospect, right about

the notes. They were my crutch, and I no longer need them. By

the end of my time with don Juan, I learned to listen and watch

and sense and recall in all the cells of my body.

 

Earlier you mentioned reaching the end of the road, and now

you're talking about the end of your time with don Juan. Where

is he now?

 

He's gone. He disappeared.

 

Without a clue?

 

Don Juan told me he was going to fulfill the sorcerer's dream of

leaving this world and entering into "unimaginable

dimensions." He displaced his assemblage point from its

fixation in the conventional human world. We would call it

combusting from the inside. It's an alternative to dying. Either

they bury you six feet deep in the poor flowers or you burn.

Don Juan chose burning.

 

I guess it's one way to erase personal history. Then this

conversation is don Juan's obituary notice?

 

He had come to the end, deliberately. By intent. He wanted to

expand, to join his physical body with his energy body. His

adventure was there, where the tiny personal tide pool joins

the great ocean. He called it the "definitive journey." Such

vastness is incomprehensible to my mind, so I can only give up

explaining. I've found that the explanatory principle will

protect you from fear of the unknown, but I prefer the

unknown.

 

You've traveled far and wide. Give it to me straight: Is reality

ultimately a safe place?

 

I once asked don Juan something quite similar. We were alone

in the desert -- nighttime, billions of stars. He laughed in a

friendly and genuine way. He said, "Sure, the universe is

benign. It may destroy you, but in the process it will teach you

something worth knowing."

 

What's next for Carlos Castaneda?

 

I'll have to let you know. Next time.

 

Will there be a next time?

 

There's always a next time.

 

 

 

Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question . . . Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.

 

We talk to ourselves incessantly

about our world. In fact we maintain our

world with our internal talk. And whenever

we finish talking to ourselves about

ourselves and our world, the world is

always as it should be. We renew it, we

rekindle it with life, we uphold it with our

internal talk. Not only that, but we also

choose our paths as we talk to ourselves.

Thus we repeat the same choices over

and over until the day we die, because we

keep on repeating the same internal talk

over and over until the day we die. A warrior

is aware of this and strives to stop

his internal talk.

 

The self-confidence of the warrior is not the self-confidence of the average man. The average man seeks certainty in the eyes of the onlooker and calls that self-confidence. The warrior seeks impeccability in his own eyes and calls that humbleness. The average man is hooked to his fellow men, while the warrior is hooked only to infinity.

 

Whenever a warrior decides to do

something, he must go all the way, but

he must take responsibility for what he

does. No matter what he does, he must

know first why he is doing it, and then he

must proceed with his actions without

having doubts or remorse about them.

 

The world of daily life consists of two points of reference. We have for example, here and there, in and out, up and down, good and evil, and so on and so forth. So, properly speaking, our perception of our lives is two-dimensional. None of what we perceive ourselves doing has depth.

A sorcerer perceives his actions with depth. His actions are tridimensional for him. They have a third point of reference.

i have this in audio

Edited December 4, 2006 by david

  david said:

i have this in audio

 

i wonder how a man of such intelligence could live his whole life a lie and make up Don Juan like that. I love castanadas books but i wonder why he never tried writing a non-fiction book about what he really experienced. Most researchers have concluded Don Juan never exsisted and most of the drugs he ingests through out the books are fictional.

  On 12/6/2006 at 6:21 PM, John Ehrlichman said:

 

QUOTE (david @ Dec 4 2006, 12:19 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

i have this in audio

 

i wonder how a man of such intelligence could live his whole life a lie and make up Don Juan like that. I love castanadas books but i wonder why he never tried writing a non-fiction book about what he really experienced. Most researchers have concluded Don Juan never exsisted and most of the drugs he ingests through out the books are fictional.

 

 

did you get a chance to read a book of his yet?

no I just parrot shit other people who i don't know have already decided for me, of course I fucking read his books. I rather enjoy them. The Art of dreaming was great too

  On 4/20/2015 at 5:54 AM, John Ehrlichman said:

no I just parrot shit other people who i don't know have already decided for me, of course I fucking read his books. I rather enjoy them. The Art of dreaming was great too

 

hey it was an old thread :) it just seemed like you were left hangin there