Carlos Castaneda

The teaching

Taught from the books Castaneda presented as his fieldwork, now read as fiction, above all Journey to Ixtlan (1972).

The claim and the fact

Carlos Castaneda's books present themselves as the record of an apprenticeship to a Yaqui sorcerer, Don Juan Matus. They are now read as fiction: no one else met Don Juan, and nothing in the teaching is Yaqui. What follows is the teaching the books give in Don Juan's voice, taught as the books' own claim.

The four enemies

A man of knowledge, Don Juan teaches in the first book, must defeat four natural enemies in turn. The first is fear: it comes as soon as learning begins, and is beaten only by going on in spite of it, never by running. The second is clarity, which follows the defeat of fear and gives a false certainty; it must be defied, used to see and not taken for the end. The third is power, the strongest, which tempts its holder to cruelty and whim and must be kept in hand. The fourth is old age, which cannot be beaten, only fought off for a while.

A path with heart

All paths are the same, Don Juan says: they lead nowhere. The only question is whether a path has a heart. A path with heart is joyful to travel and makes the traveller strong; a path without one makes them curse their life. A warrior chooses only a path with heart, and leaves without shame any path that has none.

The warrior's disciplines

Journey to Ixtlan sets out a warrior's disciplines one by one. Erase personal history, so that the expectations of others do not fix who one is. Lose self-importance, which wastes the strength that could be spent on living. Take death as an adviser: it stands always at one's left, an arm's length away, and consulting it puts every petty worry in its place. Assume responsibility for every act, and act as though each were one's last battle on earth. Become a hunter, who learns the routines of what is hunted and keeps none of their own; be inaccessible, not hiding but not at the beck and call of the world; and disrupt the routines of life, which make a person predictable prey.

Stopping the world

The world as we know it, Don Juan teaches, is a description held together by an inner talk that never stops. To see otherwise a warrior must stop the internal dialogue, and the books give practices of not-doing to loosen it: looking at the shadows of leaves rather than the leaves, at the spaces between things rather than the things, walking with the eyes unfocused so as to take in the whole field of sight. When the inner talk stops, the world stops, and seeing begins: Don Juan sees people as luminous eggs, made of fibres of light.

The tonal and the nagual

Tales of Power gives the books' fullest picture. The tonal is everything that can be known and named, the whole island of the ordinary world, the self included; the nagual is what lies beyond it, which cannot be spoken of, only witnessed. A warrior does not abandon the tonal but keeps it clean and in order, so that it can bear the meeting with the nagual without breaking.

Dreaming

The books' dreaming begins with one instruction: in a dream, find your hands and look at them. Each time the dream begins to shift, glance back at the hands to hold it steady, and from them look at other things. The later books build on this an art of dreaming with gates and stages, and teach that perception is assembled at a point on a person's luminous shell, which a sorcerer learns to move so as to perceive other worlds. Those claims rest on nothing outside the books. Looking for the hands is a harmless form of the lucid dreamer's practice, and the cautions of the branch When to pause apply to it.

The plants

The first books give a large place to plants: peyote, which they call Mescalito, a datura they call the devil's weed, and mushrooms smoked as the little smoke. The later books say that Don Juan used them only because his apprentice was so stubborn, to break his fixed view, and that they are not needed. The house is plain here: datura is a dangerous poison, peyote is protected and unlawful in most places outside the rites of the peoples who keep it, and nothing in these books is to be imitated.