Word: castaneda
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...account, the first phase of Castaneda's apprenticeship lasted from 1961 to 1965, when, terrified that he was losing his sense of reality-and by now possessing thousands of pages
...notes?he broke away from Don Juan. In 1968, when The Teachings appeared, he went down to Mexico again to give the old man a copy. A second cycle of instruction then began. Gradually Castaneda realized that Don Juan's use of psychotropic plants was not an end in itself, and that the sorcerer's way could be traversed without drugs...
...performs impeccably " This existential stoicism is a key idea in the books. The warrior's aim in becoming a "man of knowledge and thus gaining membership as a sorcerer, is to "see." "Seeing," in Don Juan's system, means experiencing the work directly, grasping its essence, without interpreting it. Castaneda's second book, A Separate Reality, describes Don Juan's efforts to induce him to "see" with the aid of mushroom smoke. Journey to Ixtlan, though many of the desert experiences it recounts predate Castaneda's introduction to peyote, datura and mushrooms, deals with the second stage: "seeing" without drugs...
...difficulty," says Castaneda, is to learn to perceive with your whole body not just with your eyes and reason The world becomes a stream of tremendously rapid, unique events. So you must trim your body to make it a good receptor: the body is an awareness, and it must be treated impeccably." Easier said than done. Part of the training involved minutely, even piously attuning the senses to the desert, its animals and birds its sounds and shadows, the shifts in its' wind, and the places in which a shaman might confront its spirit entities-spots of power, holes...
Sages. Not everybody can, does or will But in some quarters Castaneda s works are extravagantly admired as a revival of a mode of cognition that has been largely neglected in the West, buried by materialism and Pascal's despair, since the Renaissance. Says Mike Murphy a founder of the Esalen Institute: "The essential lessons Don Juan has to teach are the timeless ones that have been taught by the great sages of India and the spiritual masters of modern times " Author Alan Watts argues that Castaneda's books offer an alternative to both the guilt-ridden Judaeo-Chns-tian...