Growing up in the Mojave desert during the 60s and early 70s just minutes from Fossil Falls and the place where Cottonwood Creek pours out of the Sierra into Owen's Valley, it wouldn't have surprised me at all to, perhaps, talk to a desert tortoise or actually feel in touch with some of the powers of the desert the Native American stories tell. The desert seemed full of magic when I was a kid. So, word of the anthropology student heading down to where the peyote grows wild sounded quite interesting, and perhaps quite possible. After all, I had already received as a gift a prime, oh so beautiful living peyote specimen, in a piece of Mexican pottery that would live with me in Humboldt County for several years to come (I would not be the one to eat it).
As soon as I heard about these books I started reading them. I neglected my studies to read these books. The first one can get a little boring since it reads like an anthropology text, like you're reading a graduate student's field notes. But it holds it's own because the content is interesting and sets the stage for a developing story. The books get better one after the next until the incredible Tales of Power. For me, what happens at the end of this book brings the quest to an end. But other books followed. I never read past Tales of Power.
It was about that time, too that it came out the whole thing was faked; just another fabricated dissertation project. Still, the first four books are worth a read, especially for the historical perspective they provide. They give insight into a certain seductive magic of the 1970s drug culture. The books felt both like fiction, a drug induced reality, and something which had always been cool about cultural anthropology -- that you could get grants to go out into the blue yonder wilds to study the strangest things. You could even become a sourcerer's apprentice.
In one sense, Castaneda's books seemed to fit well into the productions of its time (e.g. The Forest People and The Mountain People, both by Colin Turnbull), but in another sense, they were just fantastic stories of and for the imagination.
Oh, and I think they definitely need to be read in order.
Thirty years ago the University of California Press published an unusual manuscript by an anthropology student named Carlos Castaneda. The Teachings of Don Juan initiated a generation of seekers dissatisfied with the limitations of the Western worldview. Castaneda's now classic book remains controversial for the alternative way of seeing that it presents and the revolution in cognition it demands. In a series of fascinating dialogues, Castaneda sets forth his partial initiation with don Juan Matus, a Yaqui Indian shaman from the state of Sonora, Mexico. He describes don Juan's perception and mastery of the "non- ordinary reality" and how peyote along with other plants sacred to the Mexican Indians were used as gateways to the mysteries of "dread," "clarity," and "power." The Teachings of Don Juan is the story of a remarkable journey that has left an indelible impression on the life of more than a million readers around the world. "For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length. And there I travel, looking, looking breathlessly."Don Juan "Carlos Castaneda, under the tutelage of don Juan, takes us through the moment of twilight, through the crack in the universe between daylight and dark into a world not merely other than our own, but of an entirely different order of reality."Walter Goldschmidt, from the Foreword
In this book, Castaneda resumes his apprenticeship, determined to go deeper still into don Juan's world, to learn to see beyond the surface realities of life. He continues his dialogue with don Juan, intuitive, wise, demanding, and fierce in his struggle to see and know beyond the vision of ordinary men; and himself, a man of courage and intelligence who submits himself to don Juan's teaching, to enter into another world as a participant rather than an observer. A Separate Reality is a work that is at once the discovery of a hitherto unrecorded body of wisdom and knowledge and the story of a remarkable and shattering personal experience.
This volume shows the reader the means by which a "man of power" sees, as opposed to merely looking, and how by his concentrated "seeing" he can, indeed must, "stop the world." In it, Carlos Castaneda describes the lessons, the omens, the exercises of the will and body, the arduous trials and tests, the simple yet mysterious demonstrations, the extraordinary visions and experiences by which don Juan, his mentor and friend, prepares him for the task of perceiving things as they are, instead of describing them by the words, conventions and standards of conventional, a priori ideas and language. Here, in the high mountains and in the bright arid desert, Castaneda reaches for power in a series of startling encounters with the unknown--a confrontation with death and the past in the form of an albino falcon, with the twilight wind, with a flesh-and-blood mountain lion, with a mountain fog--and learns the techniques, the concentration, the compassion of the hunter, the man who is "without routines, free, fluid."
In this astonishing work, Carlos Castaneda at last completes the long journey into the world of sorcery that began with his now-legendary meeting with don Juan. Drawn back by the knowledge that the sorcerer's task has not been completed, Castaneda returns to plumb the final, awesome secrets of the sorcerer's explanation of the world-to learn, in don Juan's world and his own, the last lesson of a unique and arduous apprenticeship. For until now don Juan has performed his acts of power in his world, the dry, barren deserts and mesas of his birth, a world in which he seems to exist as naturally as the chaparral and the rocks. Now, in an unexpected encounter, don Juan appears in Castaneda's modern urban world, at ease in a well-tailored suit, demonstrating his lessons of power in the crowded, busy streets, using the city scene, as he uses everything, to unfold the wings of Carlos Castaneda's perception.
