Word: castaneda
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...Journey to Ixtlan, Castaneda...
...elusive Castaneda confounds one's expectations: he is no hairy freak, but a voluble Brazilian-Italian given to white shirts, gray suits and highly polished black shoes. He rarely touches coffee-let alone grass-and confesses that he would be "terrified" to take peyote except under Don Juan's guidance. The phrase "drug culture" is ceaselessly bandied about in America. It is a swollen cliché, and not very descriptive either. Culture, as Castaneda would say, is consensus. Instead we have abundant drug use, which is a different matter...
...Juan, as he speaks from Castaneda's account, the getting of knowledge is more lonely; the sorcerer who "sees"-in other words, who can transcend the conventional descriptions of the world shutting off his unconscious flow of interpretations-inhabits a frightening place, full of omens and nameless entities, some hostile, others benevolent. His posture, Don Juan insists, must be that of "a warrior"-agile, perfectly disciplined, capable of acting with "controlled abandon." In the Yaqui sorcerer's system, drugs help in approaching this state by breaking the crust of ordinary perception and revealing the baffling dimensions of experience...
Mind Wrenching. Yet neither the peyote spirit Mescalito nor psilocybe mushrooms can guarantee the sorcerer's survival. That depends on his "impeccable will"; and Castaneda's third and finest book, Journey to Ixtlan, describes the forging of that will, as Don Juan-without drugs -communicates the lessons of the warrior's power to his obstinately Cartesian student in the bright burnt mountains and lava gorges of Mexico...
...Castaneda is a brilliant, self-mocking and-one assumes, despite the weirdness of the narrative-truthful storyteller. The account of his apprenticeship to Don Juan, with grueling desert marches and arduous disciplines, apparitions and struggles in fog and bright sunlight, as well as some mind-wrenching magic tricks, makes hypnotic reading. Don Juan and his friend, a fiercely mischievous old Mazatec Indian brujo named Don Genaro, are credited with making Castaneda's parked, locked car vanish and then materialize again from, of all things...