Word: juan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...this entailed a perfect honing of the will. A man of knowledge, Don Juan insisted, could only develop by first becoming a "warrior"?not literally a professional soldier, but a man wholly at one with his environment, agile, unencumbered by sentiment or "personal history " The warrior knows that each act may be his last. He is alone. Death is the root of his life, and in its constant presence he always 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...
...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 of rabbits, the narrative is absorbing Don Juan and the desert enable him, sporadically and without drugs to "see" or, as the Yaqui puts it "to stop the world." But such a state of interpretation-free experience eludes description?even for those who believe in Castaneda wholeheartedly...
...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 and the blindly mechanistic views of man-"Don Juan...
...they are anthropology, a specific and truthful account of an aspect of Mexican Indian culture as shown by the speech and actions of one person, a shaman named Juan Matus. That proof hinges on the credibility of Don Juan as a being and Carlos Castaneda as a witness. Yet there is no corroboration?beyond Castaneda's writings-that Don Juan did what he is said to have done, and very little that he exists...
Ever since The Teachings appeared, would-be disciples and counterculture tourists have been combing Mexico for the old man. One awaits the first Don Juan Prospectors' Convention in the Bruio Bar-B-Q of the Mescalito Motel Young Mexicans are excited to the point where the authorities may not even allow Castaneda's books to be released there in Spanish translation. Said one Mexican student who is himself pursuing Don Juan: "If the books do appear, the search for him could easily turn'into a gold-rush stampede...