:


---------------------------------------------------------------
 Seeing Castaneda (1976), reprinted from Psychology Today, 1972
 :  , 1999, E-mail: level@aport.ru
---------------------------------------------------------------




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---------------------------------------------------------------
 Source: "Seeing Castaneda" (1976) reprinted from "Psychology Today", 1972.
---------------------------------------------------------------

        SAM KEEN: As I followed don Juan through your three books, I
suspected, at times, that he was the creation of Carlos Castaneda.  He
is almost to good to be true--a wise old Indian whose knowledge of
human nature is superior to almost everybody's.

        CARLOS CASTANEDA: The idea that I concocted a person like don Juan
is inconceivable.  He is hardly the kind of figure my European
intellectual tradition would have led me to invent. The truth is much
stranger.  I wasn't even prepared to make the changes in my life that my
association with don Juan involved.

        KEEN: How and where did you meet don Juan and become his
apprentice?

        CASTANEDA: I was finishing my undergraduate study at UCLA and
was planning to go to graduate school in anthropology.  I was
interested in becoming a professor and thought I might begin in the
proper way by publishing a short paper on medicinal plants.  I
couldn't have cared less about finding a weirdo like don Juan.  I was
in a bus depot in Arizona with a high-school friend of mine.  He
pointed out an old Indian man to me and said he knew about peyote and
medicinal plants.  I put on my best airs and introduced myself to don
Juan and said: "I understand you know a great deal about peyote. I am
one of the experts on peyote (I had read Weston La Barre's __The Peyote
Cult__) and it might be worth your while to have lunch and talk with
me."  Well, he just looked at me and my bravado melted.  I was
absolutely tongue-tied and numb.  I was usually very aggressive and
verbal so it was a momentous affair to be silenced by a look.  After
that I began to visit him and about a year later he told me he had
decided to pass on to me the knowledge of sorcery he had learned from
his teacher.

        KEEN: Then don Juan is not an isolated phenomenon.  Is there a
community of sorcerers that shares a secret knowledge?

        CASTANEDA: Certainly.  I know three sorcerers and seven
apprentices and there are many more.  If you read the history of the
Spanish conquest of Mexico, you will find that the Catholic
inquisitors tried to stamp out sorcery because they considered it the
work of the devil.  It has been around for many hundreds of years.
Most of the techniques don Juan taught me are very old.

        KEEN: Some of the techniques that sorcerers use are in wide
use in other occult groups.  Persons often use dreams to find lost
articles, and they go on out-of-the-body journeys in their sleep.  But
when you told how don Juan and his friend don Genero made your car
disappear in broad daylight I could only scratch my head.  I know that
a hypnotist can create an illusion of the presence or absence of an
object. Do you think you were hypnotized?

        CASTANEDA: Perhaps, something like that.  But we have to begin
by realizing, as don Juan says, that there is much more to the world
than we usually acknowledge.  Our normal expectations about reality
are created by a social consensus.  We are taught how to see and
understand the world.  The trick of socialization is to convince us
that the descriptions we agree upon define the limits of the real
world.  What we call reality is only one way of seeing the world, a
way that is supported by a social consensus.

        KEEN: Then a sorcerer, like a hypnotist, creates an
alternative world by building up different expectations and
manipulating cues to produce a social consensus.

        CASTANEDA: Exactly.  I have come to understand sorcery in
terms of Talcott Parsons' idea of glosses.  A gloss is a total system
of perception and language.  For instance, this room is a gloss.  We
have lumped together a series of isolated perceptions--floor, ceiling,
window, lights, rugs, etc.--to make a totality.  But we had to be
taught to put the world together in this way.  A child reconnoiters
the world with few preconceptions until he is taught to see things in
a way that corresponds to the descriptions everybody agrees on.  The
world is an agreement.  The system of glossing seems to be somewhat
like walking.  We have to learn to walk, but once we learn we are
subject to the syntax of language and the mode of perception it contains.

        KEEN: So sorcery, like art, teaches a new system of glossing.
When, for instance, van Gogh broke with the artistic tradition and
painted "The Starry Night" he was in effect saying: here is a new way
of looking at things.  Stars are alive and they whirl around in their
energy field.

        CASTANEDA: Partly.  But there is a difference.  An artist
usually just rearranges the old glosses that are proper to his
membership.  Membership consists of being an expert in the innuendoes
of meaning that are contained within a culture.  For instance, my
primary membership like most educated Western men was in the European
intellectual world.  You can't break out of one membership without
being introduced into another.  You can only rearrange the glosses.

        KEEN: Was don Juan resocializing you or desocializing you?
Was he teaching you a new system of meanings or only a method of
stripping off the old system so that you might see the world as a
wondering child?

        CASTANEDA: Don Juan and I disagree about this.  I say he was
reglossing me and he says he was deglossing me.  By teaching me
sorcery he gave me a new set of glosses, a new language and a new way
of seeing the world.  Once I read a bit of the linguistic philosophy
of Ludwig Wittgenstein to don Juan and he laughed and said: "Your
friend Wittgenstein tied the noose too tight around his neck so he
can't go anywhere."

        KEEN: Wittgenstein is one of the few philosophers who would
have understood don Juan.  His notion that there are many different
language games--science, politics, poetry, religion, metaphysics, each
with its own syntax and rules--would have allowed him to understand
sorcery as an alternative system of perception and meaning.

        CASTANEDA: But don Juan thinks that what he calls seeing is
apprehending the world without any interpretation; it is pure wondering
perception.  Sorcery is a means to this end.  To break the certainty
that the world is the way you have always been taught you must learn a
new description of the world--sorcery--and then hold the old and the
new together.  Then you will see that neither description is final.
At that moment you slip between the descriptions; you stop the world
and see.  You are left with wonder; the true wonder of seeing the
world without interpretation.

        KEEN: Do you think it is possible to get beyond interpretation
by using psychedelic drugs?

        CASTANEDA: I don't think so.  That is my quarrel with people
like Timothy Leary.  I think he was improvising from within the
European membership and merely rearranging old glosses.  I have never
taken LSD, but what I gather from don Juan's teachings is that
psychotropics are used to stop the flow of ordinary interpretations,
to enhance the contradictions within the glosses, and to shatter
certainty.  But the drugs alone do not allow you to stop the world.
To do that you need an alternative description of the world.  That is
why don Juan had to teach me sorcery.

        KEEN: There is an ordinary reality that we Western people are
certain is 'the' only world, and then there is is the separate reality
of the sorcerer.  What are the essential differences between them?

        Castaneda: In European membership the world is built largely
from what the eyes report to the mind.  In sorcery the total body is
used as a perceptor.  As Europeans we see a world out there and talk
to ourselves about it.  We are here and the world is there.  Our eyes
feed our reason and we have no direct knowledge of things.  According
to sorcery this burden on the eyes in unnecessary.  We know with the
total body.

        KEEN: Western man begins with the assumption that subject and
object are separated.  We're isolated from the world and have to cross
some gap to get to it.  For don Juan and the tradition of sorcery, the
body is already in the world.  We are united with the world, not
alienated from it.

        Castaneda: That's right.  Sorcery has a different theory of
embodiment.  The problem in sorcery is to tune and trim your body to
make it a good receptor.  Europeans deal with their bodies as if they
were objects.  We fill them with alcohol, Bad food, and anxiety.  When
something goes wrong we think germs have invaded the body from outside
and so we import some medicine to cure it.  The disease is not a part
of us.  Don Juan doesn't believe that.  For him disease is a
disharmony between a man and his world.  The body is an awareness and
it must be treated impeccably.

        KEEN: This sounds similar to Norman O. Brown's idea that
children, schizophrenics, and those with the divine madness of the
Dionysian consciousness are aware of things and of other persons as
extensions of their bodies.  Don Juan suggests something of the kind
when he says the man of knowledge has fibers of light that connect his
solar plexus to the world.

        CASTANEDA: My conversation with the coyote is a good
illustration of the different theories of embodiment.  When he came up
to me I said: "Hi, little coyote.  How are you doing?"  And he
answered back: "I am doing fine.  How about you?"  Now, I didn't hear
the words in the normal way.  But my body knew the coyote was saying
something and I translated it into dialogue.  As an intellectual my
relationship to dialogue is so profound that my body automatically
translated into words the feeling that the animal was communicating
with me.  We always see the unknown in terms of the known.

        KEEN: When you are in that magical mode of consciousness in
which coyotes speak and everything is fitting and luminous it seems as
if the whole world is alive and that human beings are in a communion
that includes animals and plants.  If we drop our arrogant assumptions
that we are the only comprehending and communicating form of life we
might find all kinds of things talking to us.
        John Lilly talked talked to dolphins.  Perhaps we would feel
less alienated if we could believe we were not the only intelligent life.

        CASTANEDA: We might be able to talk to any animal.  For don
Juan and the other sorcerers there wasn't anything unusual about my
conversation with the coyote.  As a matter of fact they said I should
have gotten a more reliable animal for a friend.  Coyotes are
tricksters and are not to be trusted.

        KEEN: What animals make better friends?

        CASTANEDA: Snakes make stupendous friends?

        KEEN: I once had a conversation with a snake.  One night I
dreamt there was a snake in the attic of a house where I lived when I
was a child.  I took a stick and tried to kill it.  In the morning I
told the dream to a friend and she reminded me that it was not good to
kill snakes, even if they were in the attic in a dream.  She suggested
that the next time a snake appeared in a dream I should feed it or do
something to befriend it.  About an hour later I was driving my motor
scooter on a little-used road and there it was waiting for me--a four
foot snake, stretched out sunning itself.  I drove alongside it and it
didn't move.  After we had looked at each other for a while I decided
I should make some gesture to let him know I repented for killing his
brother in my dream.  I reached over and touched his tail.  He coiled
up and indicated that I had rushed our intimacy.  So I backed off and
just looked.  After about five minutes he went off into the bushes.

        CASTANEDA: You didn't pick it up?

        KEEN: No.

        CASTANEDA: It was a very good friend.  A man can learn to call
snakes.  But you have to be in very good shape, calm, collected--in a
friendly mood, with no doubts or pending affairs.

        KEEN: My snake taught me that I had always had paranoid
feelings about nature.  I considered animals and snakes dangerous.
After my meeting I could never kill another snake and it began to be
more plausible to me that we might be in some kind of living nexus.
        Our ecosystem might well include communication between
different forms of life.

        CASTANEDA: Don Juan has a very interesting theory about this.
Plants, like animals, always affect you.  He says that if you don't
apologize to plants for picking them you are likely to get sick or
have an accident.

        KEEN: The American Indians had similar beliefs about animals
they killed.  If you don't thank the animal for giving up his life so
you may live, his spirit may cause you trouble.

        CASTANEDA: We have a commonality with all life.  Something is
altered every time we deliberately injure plant life or animal life.
We take life in order to live but we must be willing to give up our
lives without resentment when it is our time.  We are so important and
take ourselves so seriously that we forget that the world is a great
mystery that will teach us if we listen.

        KEEN: Perhaps psychotropic drugs momentarily wipe out the
isolated ego and allow a mystical fusion with nature.  Most cultures
that have retained a sense of communion between man and nature also
have made ceremonial use of psychedelic drugs.  Were you using peyote
when you talked with the coyote?

        CASTANEDA: No.  Nothing at all.

        KEEN: Was this experience more intense than similar
experiences you had when don Juan gave you psychotropic plants?

        CASTANEDA: Much more intense.  Every time I took psychotropic
plants I knew I had taken something and I could always question the
validity of my experience.  But when the coyote talked to me I had no
defenses.  I couldn't explain it away.  I had really stopped the world
and, for a short time, got completely outside my European system of glossing.

        KEEN: Do you think don Juan lives in this state of awareness
most of the time?

        CASTANEDA: Yes.  He lives in magical time and occasionally
comes into ordinary time.  I live in ordinary time and occasionally
dip into magical time.

        KEEN: Anyone who travels so far from the beaten paths of
consensus must be very lonely.

        CASTANEDA: I think so.  Don Juan lives in an awesome world and
he has left routine people far behind.  Once when I was with don Juan
and his friend don Genaro I saw the loneliness they shared and their
sadness at leaving behind the trappings and points of reference of
ordinary society.  I think don Juan turns his loneliness into art.  He
contains and controls his power, the wonder and the loneliness, and
turns them into art.
        His art is the metaphorical way in which he lives.  This is
why his teachings have such a dramatic flavor and unity.  He
deliberately constructs his life and his manner of teaching.

        KEEN: For instance, when don Juan took you out into the hills
to hunt animals was he consciously staging an allegory?

        CASTANEDA: Yes.  He had no interest in hunting for sport or to
get meat.  In the 10 years I have known him don Juan has killed only
four animals to my knowledge, and these only at times when he saw that
their death was a gift to him in the same way his death would one day
be a gift to something.  Once we caught a rabbit in a trap we had set
and don Juan thought I should kill it because its time was up.  I was
desperate because I had the sensation that I was the rabbit.  I tried
to free him but couldn't open the trap.  So I stomped on the trap and
accidentally broke the rabbit's neck.  Don Juan had been trying to
teach me that I must assume responsibility for being in this marvelous
world.  He leaned over and whispered in my ear: "I told you this
rabbit had no more time to roam in this beautiful desert."  He
consciously set up the metaphor to teach me about the ways of a
warrior.  The warrior is a man who hunts and accumulates personal
power.  To do this he must develop patience and will and move
deliberately through the world.  Don Juan used the dramatic situation
of actual hunting to teach me because he was addressing himself to my
body.

        KEEN: In your most recent book, __Journey to Ixtlan__, you
reverse the impression given in your first books that the use of
psychotropic plants was the main method don Juan intended to use in
teaching you about sorcery.  How do you now understand the place of
psychotropics in his teachings?

        CASTANEDA: Don Juan used psychotropic plants only in the
middle period of my apprenticeship because I was so stupid,
sophisticated and cocky.  I held on to my description of the world as
if it were the only truth.  Psychotropics created a gap in my system
of glosses.  They destroyed my dogmatic certainty.  But I paid a
tremendous price.  When the glue that held my world together was
dissolved, my body was weakened and it took months to recuperate.  I
was anxious and functioned at a very low level.

        KEEN: Does don Juan regularly use psychotropic drugs to stop
the world?

        CASTANEDA: No.  He can now stop it at will.  He told me that
for me to try to see without the aid of psychotropic plants would be
useless.  But if I behaved like a warrior and assumed responsibility I
would not need them; they would only weaken my body.

        KEEN: This must come as quite a shock to many of your
admirers.  You are something of a patron saint to the psychedelic revolution.

        CASTANEDA: I do have a following and they have some strange
ideas about me.  I was walking to a lecture I was giving at California
State, Long Beach the other day and a guy who knew me pointed me out to
a girl and said: "Hey, that is Castaneda."  She didn't believe him
because she had the idea that I must be very mystical.  A friend has
collected some of the stories that circulate about me.  The consensus
is that I have mystical feet.

        KEEN: Mystical feet?

        CASTANEDA: Yes, that I walk barefooted like Jesus and have no
callouses.  I am supposed to be stoned most of the time.  I have also
committed suicide and died in several different places.
        A college class of mine almost freaked out when I began to
talk about phenomenology and membership and to explore perception and
socialization.  They wanted to be told too relax, turn on and blow
their minds.  But to me understanding is important.

        KEEN: Rumors flourish in an information vacuum.  We know
something about don Juan but too little about Castaneda.

        CASTANEDA: That is a deliberate part of the life of a warrior,
To weasel in and out of different worlds you have to remain
inconspicuous.  The more you are known and identified, the more your
freedom is curtailed.  When people have definite ideas about who you
are and how you will act, then you can't move.  One of the earliest
things don Juan taught me was that I must erase my personal history.
If little by little you create a fog around yourself then you will not
be taken for granted and you will have more room for change.  That is
the reason I avoid tape recordings when I lecture, and photographs.

        KEEN: Maybe we can be personal without being historical.  You
now minimize the importance of the psychedelic experience connected
with your apprenticeship.  And you don't seem to go around doing the
kind of tricks you describe as the sorcerer's stock-in-trade.  What
are the elements of don Juan's teachings that are important for you?
Have you been changed by them?

        CASTANEDA: For me the ideas of being a warrior and a man of
knowledge, with the eventual hope of being able to stop the world and
see, have been the most applicable.  They have given me peace and
confidence in my ability to control my life.  At the time I met don
Juan I had very little personal power.  My life had been very erratic.
 I had come a long way from my birthplace in Brazil.  Outwardly I was
aggressive and cocky, but within I was indecisive and unsure of
myself.  I was always making excuses for myself.  Don Juan once
accused me of being a professional child because I was so full of
self-pity.  I felt like a leaf in the wind.  Like most intellectuals,
my back was against the wall.  I had no place to go.  I couldn't see
any way of life that really excited me.  I thought all I could do was
make a mature adjustment to a life of boredom or find ever more
complex forms of entertainment such as the use of psychedelics and pot
and sexual adventures.  All of this was exaggerated by my habit of
introspection.  I was always looking within and talking to myself.
The inner dialogue seldom stopped.  Don Juan turned my eyes outward
and taught me to accumulate personal power.
        I don't think there is any other way to live if one wants to
be exuberant.

        KEEN: He seems to have hooked you with the old philosopher's
trick of holding death before your eyes.  I was struck with how
classical don Juan's approach was.  I heard echoes of Plato's idea
that a philosopher must study death before he can gain any access to
the real world and of Martin Heidegger's definition of man as
being-toward-death.

        CASTANEDA: Yes, but don Juan's approach has a strange twist
because it comes from the tradition in sorcery that death is physical
presence that can be felt and seen.  One of the glosses in sorcery is:
death stands to your left.  Death is an impartial judge who will speak
truth to you and give you accurate advice.  After all, death is in no
hurry.  He will get you tomorrow or the next week or in 50 years.  It
makes no difference to him.  The moment you remember you must
eventually die you are cut down to the right size.
        I think I haven't made this idea vivid enough.  The
gloss--"death to your left"--isn't an intellectual matter in sorcery;
it is perception.  When your body is properly tuned to the world and
you turn your eyes to your left, you can witness an extraordinary
event, the shadowlike presence of death.

        KEEN: In the existential tradition, discussions of
responsibility usually follow discussion of death.

        CASTANEDA: Then don Juan is a good existentialist.  When there
is no way of knowing whether I have one more minute of life.  I must
live as if this is my last moment.  Each act is the warrior's last
battle.  So everything must be done impeccably.  Nothing can be left
pending.  This idea has been very freeing for me.  I am here talking
to you and I may never return to Los Angeles.  But that wouldn't matter
because I took care of everything before I came.

        KEEN: This world of death and decisiveness is a long way from
psychedelic utopias in which the vision of endless time destroys the
tragic quality of choice.

        CASTANEDA: When death stands to your left you must create your
world by a series of decisions.  There are no large or small
decisions, only decisions that must be made now.
        And there is no time for doubts or remorse.  If I spend my
time regretting what I did yesterday I avoid the decisions I need to
make today.

        KEEN: How did don Juan teach you to be decisive?

        CASTANEDA: He spoke to my body with his acts.  My old way was
to leave everything pending and never to decide anything.  To me
decisions were ugly.  It seemed unfair for a sensitive man to have to
decide.  One day don Juan asked me: "Do you think you and I are
equals?" I was a university student and an intellectual and he was an
old Indian but I condescended and said: "Of course we are equals." He
said: "I don't think we are.  I am a hunter and a warrior and you are
a pimp.  I am ready to sum up my life at any moment.  Your feeble
world of indecision and sadness is not equal to mine."  Well, I was
very insulted and would have left but we were in the middle of the
wilderness.  So I sat down and got trapped in my own ego involvement.
I was going to wait until he decided to go home.  After many hours I
saw that don Juan would stay there forever if he had to.  Why not? For
a man with no pending business that is his power.  I finally realized
that this man was not like my father who would make 20 New Year's
resolutions and cancel them all out.  Don Juan's decisions were
irrevocable as far as he was concerned.  They could be canceled out
only by other decisions.  So I went over and touched him and he got up
and we went home.  The impact of that act was tremendous.  It
convinced me that the way of the warrior is an exuberant and powerful
way to live.

        KEEN: It isn't the content of decision that is important so
much as the act of being decisive.

        CASTANEDA: That is what don Juan means by having a gesture.  A
gesture is a deliberate act which is undertaken for the power that
comes from making a decision.  For instance, if a warrior found a
snake that was numb and cold, he might struggle to invent a way to
take the snake to a warm place without being bitten.  The warrior
would make the gesture just for the hell of it.  But he would perform
it perfectly.

        KEEN: There seem to be many parallels between existential
philosophy and don Juan's teachings.  What you have said about
decision and gesture suggests that don Juan, like Nietzsche or Sartre,
believes that will rather than reason is the most fundamental faculty
of man.

        CASTANEDA: I think that is right.  Let me speak for myself.
What I want to do, and maybe I can accomplish it, is to take the
control away from my reason.  My mind has been in control all of my
life and it would kill me rather than relinquish control.  At one point
in my apprenticeship I became profoundly depressed. I was overwhelmed
with terror and gloom and thoughts about suicide.  Then don Juan
warned me this was one of reason's tricks to retain control.  He said
my reason was making my body feel that there was no meaning in life.
Once my mind waged this last battle and lost, reason began to assume
its proper place as a tool of the body.

        KEEN: "The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of"
and so does the rest of the body.

        CASTANEDA: That is the point.  The body has a will of its own.
 Or rather, the will is the voice of the body.  That is why don Juan
consistently put his teachings in dramatic form.  My intellect could
easily dismiss his world of sorcery as nonsense.  But my body was
attracted to his world and his way of life.  And once the body took
over, a new and healthier reign was established.

        KEEN: Don Juan's techniques for dealing with dreams engaged me
became they suggest the possibility of voluntary control of dream
images.  It is as though he proposes to establish a permanent, stable
observatory within inner space.  Tell me about don Juan's dream training.

        CASTANEDA: The trick in dreaming is to sustain dream images
long enough to look at them carefully.  To gain this kind of control
you need to pick one thing in advance and learn to find it in your
dreams.  Don Juan suggested that I use my hands as a steady point and
go back and forth between them and the images.  After some months I
learned to find my hands and to stop the dream.  I became so
fascinated with the technique that I could hardly wait to go to sleep.

        KEEN: Is stopping the images in dreams anything like stopping
the world?

        CASTANEDA: It is similar.  But there are differences.  Once
you are capable of finding your hands at will, you realize that it is
only a technique.  What you are after is control.  A man of knowledge
must accumulate personal power.  But that is not enough to stop the
world.  Some abandon also is necessary.  You must silence the chatter
that is going on inside your mind and surrender yourself to the
outside world.

        KEEN: Of the many techniques that don Juan taught you for
stopping the world, which do you still practice?

        CASTANEDA: My major discipline now is to disrupt my routines.
I was always a very routinary person.  I ate and slept on schedule.
In 1965 I began to change my habits.  I wrote in the quiet hours of
the night and slept and ate when I felt the neeed.  Now I have
dismantled so many of my habitual ways of acting that before long I
may become unpredictable and surprising even to myself.

        KEEN: Your discipline reminds me of the Zen story of two
disciples bragging about miraculous powers.  One disciple claimed the
founder of the sect to which he belonged could stand on one side of a
river and write the name of Buddha on a piece of paper held by his
assistant on the opposite shore.  The second disciple replied that
such a miracle was unimpressive. "My miracle," he said, "is that when
I feel hungry I eat, and when I feel thirsty I drink"

        CASTANEDA: It has been this element of engagement in the world
that has kept me following the path which don Juan showed me.  There
is no need to transcend the world.  Everything we need to know is
right in front of us, if we pay attention.  If you enter a state of
nonordinary reality, as you do when you use psychotropic plants, it is
only to draw back from it what you need in order to see the miraculous
character of ordinary reality.  For me the way to live--the path with
heart--is not introspection or mystical transcendence but presence in
the world.  This world is the warrior's hunting ground.

        KEEN: The world you and don Juan have pictured is full of
magical coyotes, enchanted crows and a beautiful sorceress.  It's easy
to see how it could engage you.  But what about the world of the
modern urban person?  Where is the magic there?  If we could all live
in the mountains we might keep wonder alive.  But how is it possible
when we are half a zoom from the freeway?

        CASTANEDA: I once asked don Juan the same question.  We were
sitting in a cafe in Yuma and I suggested that I might be able to stop
the world and to see, if I could come and live in the wilderness with
him.  He looked out the window at the passing cars and said: "That,
out there, is your world." I live in Los Angeles now and I find I can
use that world to accommodate my needs.  It is a challenge to live with
no set routines in a routinary world.  But it can be done.

        KEEN: The noise level and the constant pressure of the masses
of people seem to destroy the silence and solitude that would be
essential for stopping the world.

        CASTANEDA: Not at all.  In fact, the noise can be used.  You
can use the buzzing of the freeway to teach yourself to listen to the
outside world.  When we stop the world the world we stop is the one we
usually maintain by our continual inner dialogue.  Once you can stop
the internal babble you stop maintaining your old world.  The
descriptions collapse.  That is when personality change begins.  When
you concentrate on sounds you realize it is difficult for the brain to
categories all the sounds, and in a short while you stop trying.  This
is unlike visual perception which keeps us forming categories and
thinking.  It is so restful when you can turn off the talking,
categorizing, and judging.

        KEEN: The internal world changes but what about the external
one?  We can revolutionize individual consciousness but still not
touch the social structures that create our alienation.  Is there any
place for social or political reform in your thinking?

        CASTANEDA: I came from Latin America where intellectuals were
always talking about political and social revolution and where a lot
of bombs were thrown.  But revolution hasn't changed much.  It takes
little daring to bomb a building, but in order to give up cigarettes
or to stop being anxious or to stop internal chattering, you have to
remake yourself.  This is where real reform begins.
        Don Juan and I were in Tucson not long ago when they were
having Earth Week.  Some man was lecturing on ecology and the evils of
war in Vietnam.  All the while he was smoking.  Don Juan said, "I
cannot imagine that he is concerned with other people's bodies when he
doesn't like his own." Our first concern should be with ourselves.  I
can like my fellow men only when I am at my peak of vigor and am not
depressed.  To be in this condition I must keep my body trimmed.  Any
revolution must begin here in this body.  I can alter my culture but
only from within a body that is impeccably tuned-in to this weird
world.  For me, the real accomplishment is the art of being a warrior,
which, as don Juan says, is the only way to balance the terror of
being a man with the wonder of being a man.


Last-modified: Sat, 25 Dec 1999 16:35:42 GMT

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