In my second chapter I mentioned some ways of dissolving the categories that make up our shared world, and spoke disparagingly of any great truths to be gained thereby. An extraordinary and beautiful little volume has recently (1968) been published that at first glance calls my assumption to question. On close examination, however, the volume, entitled The Teachings of don Juan, verities my contention. The author, a young anthropologist named Carlos Castaneda, is probably one of the bravest and most intelligent persons I have ever read about, and I plainly loved don Juan, the Yaqui Indian Sorcerer, of whom Carlos wrote with rightful respect, reverence, and awe. I envied Castaneda his experience, frightful and hazardous as it was, with that vigorous and powerful old magician who, at seventy, still saw life as a great adventure opening ever before him.
For the first year of his growing friendship with don Juan, Carlos tried unsuccessfully to get information about "mescalito," the peyote cactus that is hallucinogenic. He knew that an elaborate ritual and tradition surround the Indian practice, and that the plant itself was of small value. Finally don Juan agreed, not just to tell Carlos about "mescalito," but, surprisingly, to initiate him into the actual "path of knowledge itself," the entire practice of Yaqui magic. Don Juan had seen in Carlos a possible heir of the ancient way itself.
First, though, Carlos must be sure of his own heart. Unbending intent was the prime requisite. Clarity of mind, singleness of devotion, and other qualities must be carefully built up if one were to survive the deadly dangers of the path, perils that could so easily kill a man or rob him of his soul.
Hallucinogens were the gateway, but hardly the path. Ingested by the uneducated and unguided, the plants destroy or produce only horror. A long, detailed instruction and a hard, self-disciplined life were necessary preliminaries and constant requisites. Fear was a major stumbling block and had to be faced, acknowledged, accepted, and gone beyond. Power when it came, and it would come, was a temptation to be spurned if further progress was to be realized. The practice would lead into the right way to live, though there was no goal other than the way itself. Death was the final victor and one's impermanence had to be accepted.
The hallucinogens themselves were used sparingly, and then only after the proper instruction and elaborate, intricate preparations. A full year of acquaintance passed before even the first, introductory hallucinogen was tried. This initiatory move was hardly made by an unprepared mind, although no specific talks about it had taken place. Associative learning is no small force, even if unconscious, and Carlos' background of inquiry into the Southwest Indians, his scientific detachment coupled with an adventurous, inquiring mind, his growing respect for don Juan, his avid desire to learn of the Indian world view, all entered as factors making this a deeply serious undertaking. Carlos was aware of the dangers of his undertaking, and his whole set of mind made him susceptible to many cues that an untrained or uncommitted observer, looking only for personal titillation, would never have brought into the relationship. Thus there was an indeterminable amount of serious, unconscious exchange between the two men.
Two full years of instruction passed before don Juan thought Carlos ready for the really serious business of "introduction to an ally." This ally was a "spirit" that would give assistance in moving in non-ordinary reality, if they were successful in taming the ally, which apparently meant successfully bringing about the necessary state for introduction, surviving the rigors of the hallucinogen used, and coming to grips with the peculiarities of the resulting state. Through the ally the apprentice could gain that unlimited power which could transport a man beyond the "boundaries of himself," and open to the really great fields beyond, traveling freely through different reality states. Each specific drug experience was followed by long periods of evaluation and digestion of the events that had transpired during the experience. Don Juan's techniques of evaluation skilfully guided the course of future expectancies. Certain occurrences were dismissed as unimportant by don Juan, though Carlos could not distinguish the reason for the value of others which were seized upon and heavily emphasized and approved by don Juan. This, note, was the equivalent of those childhood experiences that are dismissed and those that are complimented and rewarded by superiors though the child sees no difference in value himself. Negative and positive reward-reactions are strong, suggestive triggers toward future acceptances and rejections, and we see the way in which Carlos made a transference to don Juan, and underwent a reshaping of conceptual framework.
The actual state of non-ordinary reality, or the state of "special consensus," varied. Often the materials of Carlos' surroundings became the basis of the new state, but increasingly the non-ordinary materials of his previous experiences became the materials for further synthesis in new experiences, as shaped by don Juan's evaluation techniques. At times Carlos' perceptions themselves underwent change in relation to his ordinary reality. Objects glowed with their own light and Carlos could see quite clearly in the darkest night, across the hills, close up, and so on. At times solid objects lost their solidity and Carlos passed through them -- one of his most frightful ordeals.
Each of the hallucinogen families had its special techniques for approach, its particular purpose, and its unique non-ordinary reality reward. Each hallucinogen group was consistent in the kinds of state created, though, of course, each required its own unique period of instruction, preparation, and sets of mind.
The states of special consensus had three common characteristics. They were stable. Carlos could not distinguish any difference between the non-ordinary reality components, the things, materials, physical objects, of his special states. The materials of those states remained stationary for minute and repeated examination. They could be returned to as ordinary reality objects. They did not shift and flow as in a dream sequence, Secondly, they possessed singularity. Every detail of the components was a single, individual item, existing of itself, isolated from other details. The non-ordinary reality was composed of solid, stable objects, as in ordinary reality. The experiences contained an inner coherency, the overall reality was cohesive and indistinguishable from any ordinary state. There was no flux of detail, no blurring of the guidelines, as in LSD or mescalin experiences, for instance. Carlos was aware of being in a special state; the occurrences followed unusual sequences and cause-effect patterns, but there was no dream quality to distinguish the special reality from the ordinary. Except, that is, the third characteristic: lack of ordinary consensus. The perceptions of the non-ordinary states were in complete solitude.
Consider, now, that the guide in this long procedure was an intelligent, pragmatic Mexican Indian with many centuries of tradition behind him. He taught Carlos "exactly as his own benefactor had taught him." The complex system had been handed down by just such relationships since time immemorial.
The capacity for unconscious exchange between hypnotist and subject has been mentioned before. Cohen spoke, you recall, of a Freudian analyst's patient immediately reflecting Freudian symbolism when under LSD, verifying the assumptions of the analyst, (the same holding, of course, for Jungians). The effects of unconscious exchange can be safely assumed for the Australian aboriginal initiation rites. P. W. Martin mentioned in his Experiment in Depth that one's unconscious immediately reflected and responded to all the attention given it, greatly increasing the flow of unconscious material. (I found this to be very much the case.)
Anthropologists keep finding more and more evidence of great civilizations in the early Americas. Those civilizations are now seen to extend many thousands of years further into the past than previously suspected. Evidence indicates that the Indians of our continent were remnants of very advanced and complex civilizations. The achievements of the mound-builders in our own Midwest put to shame our original notions of our innate superiority, and the "Concept of the primitive" is undergoing profound, if belated, change.
Not to be discounted, then, is the full extent of the "archetypal" heritage don Juan possessed. And Carlos, a true anthropologist
(that is, free of that obnoxious chauvinism that destroys), opened to and entered into don Juan's frame of reference to learn. He was susceptible, by cast of personality and profession, to the drama, rich historical atmosphere, and emotional investments of a once-powerful race.
All this entered into those long months of instructions from don Juan, as he and Carlos would sit on the dirt porch, in their particular "places of strength," where one did not tire but was renewed from the earth. Twilight, don Juan told Carlos, was the crack between the two worlds. Little by little don Juan prepared Carlos to find that crack. When the crack appeared, Carlos did not enter ignorant or empty-handed.
So we find that what Carlos experienced under "mescalito," the peyote cactus, the sacred mushroom, or the Jimson weed, was vastly different from that which the marginally-adjusted sensation-seeker could possibly discover. Recall Jesus' admonition to the man gathering grain on the Sabbath: "If you know what you are doing, you are blest. If you know not what you are doing, you are accurst and a transgressor of the Law."
Don Juan left very little to chance, or not-knowing. The system was thorough; centuries had gone into its perfection, and it produced exactly according to its precepts and intent.
Ingesting or smoking the hallucinatory plants dissolved the ordinary categories of reality for Carlos, just as the initiation shocks of the aborigine dissolved the natural world view of the young man, and just as the person under hypnosis voluntarily leaves his structured world to play at fantasy. Dr. Meares carried over into his actual operation a certain set of assumptions which altered the reality of that procedure so that blood, pain and aftereffects did not enter as parts of that reality. The Ceylonese Hindu fire-walker also comes to mind.
In the same way, Carlos carried into his non-ordinary states the long instruction period's products. Don Juan had so thoroughly traversed the paths for certain portions of the system, he himself no longer needed the threshold-lowering hallucinogens. He stepped from one world to the other at will, and led his protégé carefully and well. It was, in fact, the onslaught of this phenomenon of spontaneous threshold dissolution that horrified Carlos and terminated his apprenticeship, after six years.
Critics have complained that Castaneda's dry analyses in the back of his book were in effect a "sellout" to the mechanistic gods of the time. This is unfair and misses the point. Had don Juan been completely successful, no one would ever have known. That Carlos did sustain his sharp, trained intellect throughout these traumatic, often dreadful experiences, and retain his analytical perspective, is in itself a remarkable display of strength of mind. His analysis is not only logical, it is far more awesome than some cultic enthusiasm might have produced.
Surely Castaneda in no way disbelieved that other world. Perhaps it was its all-too-frightful reality from which he had to retreat finally in order to hope to stay in this one. In no way does Carlos denigrate or diminish the authenticity of the states of mind so created. In no way does he call into question the possibility that those states might exist, somehow, within their own right, as self-sufficient possibilities of organization within the discipline. The creative element was clearly recognizable to him as was the archetypal potential. He recognized the two-way interaction between the drugs, the relation with don Juan which shaped the expectancies, and the necessity of unquestioned following of instructions. In spite of his remarkable objectivity and his final analysis, Carlos never retreated to scientific dodge or psychological cliché. He accepted his experiences for what they were: non-ordinary reality states created by a complex interplay of carefully-controlled events, a definition which might fit ordinary reality except for the element of control itself.
In his Foreword to "don Juan," Walter Goldschmidt clearly points up the real importance of anthropology to "this entering into other worlds than our own." This leads us, he writes, to realize that our own world is "also a cultural construct." This has been the whole thrust of this first part of my own book, to claim that no other world could ever be for us except through the very creative technique found underlying these dramatically differing pursuits; that this process has happened to us, but can be consciously controlled.
Goldschmidt realizes the intriguing riddle to lie in don Juan's 'twilight' -- that crack between the worlds. Goldschmidt concludes, however, that through this crack we can then see, fleetingly, what the "real world, the one between our own cultural constructs and those other worlds, must in fact be like." Here, I do believe, we have an example of the perpetual error at one remove. The "crack between the worlds" is neither a "real world" nor an opening into such -- for there is no such thing as a "real world" other than that one from which one makes such a statement. The crack is only a capacity, an ontological function, a possibility for processing an infinite number of worlds -- none of which is absolute. To leave one you can only structure another one or face dissolution.
I was particularly struck with the frustrations Carlos and don Juan faced in trying to reach a consensus of what was actually achieved during the non-ordinary states. Carlos tried to elicit from don Juan a description of what he, Carlos, looked like to don Juan when he, Carlos, was to himself a crow, flying in beautiful skies with other beautiful crows. Don Juan insisted he had been a crow. Carlos asked, though, about his body: it had not changed had it?; surely it was the same body as it ordinarily was? Don Juan said of course it was not the same body at all. Carlos countered that surely only his mind had been a crow; surely his body had not flown? Of course your body flew, was don Juan's retort, that's what the devil's weed is for. So Carlos asked whether, if friends of his had been there to see him, they would have seen him as a crow. That, don Juan answered, depended on his friends. If they understood about the 'devil's weed' they would certainly have done so. Finally, Carlos asked don Juan what would happen, say, if he tied himself to a large rock by a heavy chain before flying? Don Juan looked at him incredulously and replied that he would certainly have to fly holding the rock with its heavy chain.
Reading this brought back memories of my equally frustrated evenings with my mathematical neighbor and those topological eggs he could remove from the shell without damage to the shell, through his mathematical four-spaces, and my trying so desperately to link it up with a tangible concreteness that I could grasp. The situation between don Juan and Carlos was surely analogous to that of the nonbeliever who asked Jesus for a sign, a miracle, that he might then believe in him. And of course the dilemma was that the sign could only be given through belief -- the two in agreement -- suspending the ordinary for the non-ordinary.
Mathematical magic has built magical machines now quite in the ascendancy. Don Juan's magic created magical places to go, but they are almost extinct. I sensed some of don Juan's sadness that his great adventure was fading from this earth as a meaningful mark of a "warrior" -- the reward for bravery and skill. His enormous powers were of no use anymore. Surely he could clip the tops of the tallest trees in his great leaps -- but it only scared his own Indians, who no longer understood, while the white man only saw something blurry and dismissible in the treetops.
The path of knowledge was no longer important maybe, but to have a path of knowledge, a path with a heart, made for a joyful journey, and was the only conceivable way to live. Don Juan had spent his life traversing his path, and intended going to its fullest and final length "looking, looking, breathlessly."
Don Juan advised us to think carefully about our paths before we set out on them. For by the time a man discovers that his path "has no heart," the path is ready to kill him. At that point, he cautions, very few men can stop to deliberate, and leave that path. Surely the nuclear Pentagon madness of our day bears out his analysis.
So now my book leads, as did my search, to its final goal -- another kind of path, strangely similar to don Juan's, as unique, as difficult in vastly different ways, with an even more daring goal. I believe it is a path with a heart -- though I must recognize that it is only one of an infinite number of possible paths, and that no heave
nly hierarchy sanctions it or gives it a final edge. This path hinges on analyzing the process by which paths function, and, as don Juan would say, by exercising the self-confidence to claim knowledge as power, seizing the tiller by which realities are made.
8 mythos and logos
The discoveries we make at the edge of our "clearing in the forest" are given shape by the nature of our looking. There is no way of looking at the forest except by the light of our own reason, and this light determines the particular kind of forest then seen.
The kind of looking we can do is itself determined by and limited to previous interactions between forest and clearing. We stand on ground that is the whole human venture. Having become subservient to our own technology, however, we see ourselves split off from our continuity leading to this technology. We misinterpret the nature of both clearing and forest and think our current ground newly discovered terrain having no relation to past clearings, rather than recognizing where we stand to be a metaphoric mutation of that ground. We interpret our mutations of this inherited web of concepts as discoveries of fixed absolutes "out there." Looking at our past only through our mutation of it, we seem isolated from it. On the other hand, we recognize the baggage we have had to bring with us to be the same old trunk. So we interpret ourselves as clever animals who, having found a hole in the zoo's fence, have wandered into alien territory. Unable to deny our physical inheritance from the past we have become overly fascinated with it, while denying and ignoring our psychological heritage which has been the real formative agent.
The Crack in the Cosmic Egg Page 16