Para mi solo recorrer los caminos que tienen
corazón, cualquier camino que tenga corazón
(For me there is only the traveling on paths, that have heart, on any path that may have heart.)—Don Juan
I am writing about Carlos Castaneda out of nostalgia for a period long gone.
A week ago, a book sale from Savage Mind, a bookshop and cultural hub in Naga City, yielded for me a bundle worth P200. On top of the haul was the book The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, on its cover the drawing of a crow, its back of deep blue and its beak seemingly indicating two small human figures in the distance. The surreal art is by Roger Hane, a popular illustrator of paperback books.
Upon its release, the work of Castaneda became a hit. It was hailed as a spiritual journey. The period where it saw its beginning of popularity was in the late ’60s and ’70s. Early on the Age of Aquarius was declared and as with any proclamations, it breached calendrical boundaries. That “Age” went on and on, it seemed, with the appearance of a comet, an augury and a new sense of living that began and ended with the cosmic.
There were other books spawned by an age where planets and the stars aligned, like Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Little Prince, and Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, and authors like Erich Fromm and J. R. R. Tolkien.
There were other schools of thought that were resurrected: Existentialism and Theatre of the Absurd whose purveyors became interchangeable—Sartre and his No Exit, Albert Camus and The State of Siege, Beckett and his waiting, Brecht and his dramatic bracketing of the real/political, even Ionesco’s multiplication of chairs and unseen guests. Kurt Vonnegut and Philip Roth inserted themselves somewhere.
I do not know how the readers that cut across several generations did it, but freedom, a reflection of the self in relation to the world, which always stretched into the universe, and grand ideas regarding Life were the navigable spaces in which these works and their ideas thrived. And one book, The Teachings of Don Juan, was our prayer book, the document against which our youthful sorrows and dreams not only made sense but also proved to be assuredly transcendental.
The book by Castaneda began as a fieldwork for his course on Anthropology. Reading the book at present made me realize how I (and, I assume the other fans of the books) negated the presence of the mundane and practical about the author. Something mesmerized me about this young man in search of a new reality that he was getting from a brujo. A male witch, a sorcerer. While I grew up accepting the “aswang,” the validity of witches and witchcraft, it was the first time for me to encounter a White Man (his ethnicity was not clear then) not only on his road to studying them but really in the process of becoming them.
It was scary, and exciting. This was not a seagull—“Jonathan,” if you care—trying to learn how to fly and finding the self. This was unreal real.
Castaneda would go on to write two more books, A Separate Reality and Journey to Ixtlan, creating a triumvirate of altered perceptions. There would, in fact, be more books, but The Teachings grabbed me at the jugular and never let me go.
Who can forget Castaneda’s first encounter with the peyote, a tiny cactus that contains psychoactive alkaloids, which affects the brain and induces hallucination. In a session, he ingested seven peyote buttons and then it happened: “I turned around to look for Don Juan, but I could not distinguish anything or anyone. All I was capable of seeing was the dog becoming iridescent, an intense light radiated from his body. I saw again the water flowing through him, kindling him like a bonfire. I got to the water, sank my face in the pan and drank with him…I drank more and more. I drank until I was all afire; I was all aglow.”
Within that state, Castaneda became the dog: “I looked at the dog and his mane was like mine. A supreme happiness filled my whole body, and we ran together toward a sort of yellow warmth that came from some indefinite place. And there we played. We played and wrestled until I knew his wishes and he knew mine.”
Then, he was back to reality: “The passage from my normal state had taken place almost without my realizing it: I was aware; my thoughts and feelings were a corollary of that awareness; and the passing was smooth and clear. But this second change, the awakening to serious, sober consciousness, was genuinely shocking. I had forgotten I was a man!” Castaneda would close this long passage with the most singular experience: “The sadness of such an irreconcilable situation was so intense that I wept.”
Many readers of that period cried over Erich Segal’s A Love Story (“Love means never having to say you’re sorry”). I, all of seventeen years of age, wept at that moment with Castaneda without a hallucinogenic drug.
Castaneda was first an anthropologist doing fieldwork. The foreword to The Teachings was written by Walter Goldschmidt who would later be famous for his work on anthropology and public policies. Academics, particularly anthropologists, would doubt the veracity of the data presented by Castaneda but the foreword was clear: “This book is both ethnography and allegory.” Goldschmidt praises the author for demonstrating “the essential skill of good ethnography—the capacity to enter into an alien world.” In a social-scientific society that still prized value-free research then, there was no way mysticism could be accepted as methodology. Castaneda would be awarded later a doctorate degree, with many anthropologists demanding that the honor be withdrawn.
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com
Image credits: Jimbo Albano