Word: desertion
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...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 of refuge. When Castaneda describes his education as a hunter and plant-gatherer, learning about the virtues of herbs, the trapping...
...Juan's apprentice has taken the lesson very much to heart. After The Teachings became an underground bestseller, it was widely supposed that its author was El Freako the Acid Academic, all buckskin fringe and pinball eye, his brain a charred labyrinth lit by mysterious alkaloids, tripping through the desert with a crow on his hat. But castaneda means chestnut grove, and the man looks a bit like a chestnut: a stocky, affable Latin American, 5 ft. 5 in., 150 Ibs. and apparently bursting with vitamins. The dark curly hair is clipped short, and the eyes glisten with moist alertness...
...visits to the Southwest and the Mexican desert gradually became the spine of Castaneda's life. Impressed by his work, the U.C.L.A. staff offered him encouragement. Recalls Professor Meighan: "Carlos was the type of student a teacher waits for." Sociology Professor Harold Garfinkel, one of the fathers of ethnomethodology, gave Castaneda constant stimulus and harsh criticism. After his first peyote experience (August 1961), Castaneda presented Garfinkel with a long "analysis" of his visions. "Garfinkel said, 'Don't explain to me. You are a nobody. Just give it to me straight and in detail, the way it happened. The richness...
...that he has an incredible sense of abstract design and (in his later years) a total freedom from meticulous realistic detail. If one can judge from this show, Ernst has recovered in old age the ebullience that can make him imagine an abstract sun setting over an abstract Arizona desert, re-create from memory a fine old image of Adam and Eve, or reduce a bird to one aggressive beak above a red colored square. He may not be getting better but it is clear that, even past 80, he is still inventing...