Version 2007.05.28

## "Journey to Ixtlan" - ©1972 by Carlos Castaneda

### Introduction

On Saturday, 1971 May 22, I went to Sonora, Mexico, to see don Juan Matus, a Yaqui Indian sorcerer, with whom I had been associated since 1960. I thought that my visit on that day was going to be in no way different from the scores of times I had gone to see him in the ten years I had been his apprentice. The events that took place on that day and on the following days, however, were momentous to me. On that occasion my apprenticeship came to an end. This was not an arbitrary withdrawal on my part but a bona fide termination.

HTML EDITOR:

Carlos is mistaken in believing that the apprenticeship is over at the end of this book.

What he doesn't know now is that he will be the beneficiary of an additional year and a half of don Juan before his apprenticeship is truly terminated.

The final year and a half is covered in Carlos' fourth book, "Tales of Power".

END HTML EDITOR

I have already presented the case of my apprenticeship in two previous works: "The Teachings of Don Juan" and "A Separate Reality".

My basic assumption in both books has been that the articulation [* articulation- the shape or manner in which things come together and a connection is made] points in learning to be a sorcerer were the states of nonordinary reality produced by the ingestion of psychotropic plants.

In this respect don Juan was an expert in the use of three such plants: Datura inoxia, commonly known as jimpson weed; Lophorphora williamsii, known as peyote; and a hallucinogenic mushroom of the genus Psilocybe.

My perception of the world through the effects of those psychotropics had been so bizarre and impressive that I was forced to assume that such states were the only avenue to communicating and learning what don Juan was attempting to teach me.

That assumption was erroneous. [* erroneous- incorrect or based on an incorrect assumption; containing or characterized by error; innacurate]

For the purposes of avoiding any misunderstandings about my work with don Juan I would like to clarify the following issues at this point.

So far I have made no attempt whatsoever to place don Juan in a cultural milieu. [* milieu- the environmental condition] The fact that he considers himself to be a Yaqui Indian does not mean that his knowledge of sorcery is known to or practised by the Yaqui Indians in general.

All the conversations that don Juan and I have had throughout the apprenticeship were conducted in Spanish, and only because of his thorough command of that language was I capable of obtaining complex explanations of his system of beliefs.

I have maintained the practice of referring to that system as sorcery; and I have also maintained the practice of referring to don Juan as a sorcerer because these were categories he himself used.

Since I was capable of writing down most of what was said in the beginning of my apprenticeship, and everything that was said in the later phases of it, I gathered voluminous field notes. In order to render those notes readable and still preserve the dramatic unity of don Juan's teachings, I have had to edit them. But what I have deleted is, I believe, immaterial to the points I want to raise.

In the case of my work with don Juan, I have limited my efforts solely to viewing him as a sorcerer, and to acquiring membership in his knowledge.

For the purpose of presenting my argument, I must first explain the basic premise of sorcery as don Juan presented it to me. He said that for a sorcerer, the world of everyday life is not as real, or out there, as we believe it is. For a sorcerer, reality, or the world we all know, is only a description.

For the sake of validating this premise, don Juan concentrated the best of his efforts into leading me to a genuine conviction that what I held in mind as 'the world at hand' was merely a description of the world; a description that had been pounded into me from the moment I was born.

He pointed out that everyone who comes into contact with a child is a teacher who incessantly describes the world to that child, until the moment when the child is capable of perceiving the world as it is described.

According to don Juan, we have no memory of that portentous [* portentous- of momentous or ominous significance] moment, simply because none of us could possibly have had any point of reference to compare it to anything else.

From that moment on, however, the child is a member. He or she knows the description of the world. Their membership becomes full-fledged, I suppose, when they are capable of making all the proper perceptual interpretations which, by conforming to that description, validate it.

For don Juan, then, the reality of our day-to-day life consists of an endless flow of perceptual interpretations which we, the individuals who share a specific membership, have learned to make in common.

The idea that the perceptual interpretations that make up our world have a flow is congruous with the fact that they run uninterruptedly; and they are rarely, if ever, open to question.

In fact, the reality of the world we know is so taken for granted that the basic premise of sorcery- that our reality is merely one of many descriptions- could hardly be taken as a serious proposition.

Fortunately, in the case of my apprenticeship, don Juan was not concerned at all with whether or not I could take his proposition seriously.

He proceeded to elucidate his points, in spite of my opposition, my disbelief, and my inability to understand what he was saying. Thus, as a teacher of sorcery, don Juan endeavoured to describe the world to me from the very first time we talked. My difficulty in grasping his concepts and methods stemmed from the fact that the units of his description were alien and incompatible with those of my own.

His contention was that he was teaching me how to 'see' as opposed to merely 'looking', and that 'stopping the world' was the first step to 'seeing'.

For years I had treated the idea of 'stopping the world' as a cryptic metaphor that really did not mean anything. It was only during an informal conversation that took place towards the end of my apprenticeship that I came fully to realize its scope and importance as one of the main propositions of don Juan's knowledge.

Don Juan and I had been talking about different things in a relaxed and unstructured manner. I told him about a friend of mine and his dilemma with his nine year old son. The child, who had been living with the mother for the past four years, was then living with my friend; and the problem was what to do with him?

According to my friend, the child was a misfit in school. He lacked concentration and was not interested in anything. He was given to tantrums, disruptive behaviour, and to running away from home.

"Your friend certainly does have a problem," don Juan said, laughing.

I wanted to keep on telling him all the 'terrible' things the child had done, but he interrupted me.

"There is no need to say any more about that poor little boy," he said. "There is no need for you or for me to regard his actions in our thoughts one way or another."

His manner was abrupt and his tone was firm, but then he smiled.

"What can my friend do?" I asked.

"The worst thing he could do is to force that child to agree with him," don Juan said.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that that child shouldn't be spanked or scared by his father when he doesn't behave the way he wants him to."

"How can he teach him anything if he isn't firm with him?"

"Your friend should let someone else spank the child."

"He can't let anyone else touch his little boy!" I said, surprised at his suggestion.

Don Juan seemed to enjoy my reaction and giggled.

"Your friend is not a warrior," he said. "If he were, he would know that the worst thing one can do is to confront human beings bluntly."

"What does a warrior do, don Juan?"

"A warrior proceeds strategically."

"I still don't understand what you mean."

"I mean that if your friend were a warrior he would help his child to 'stop the world'."

"How can my friend do that?"

"He would need personal power. He would need to be a sorcerer."

"But he isn't."

"In that case he must use ordinary means to help his son to change his idea of the world. It is not 'stopping the world', but it will work just the same."

I asked him to explain his statements.

"If I were your friend," don Juan said, "I would start by hiring someone to spank the little guy. I would go to skid row and hire the worst-looking man I could find."

"To scare a little boy?"

"Not just to scare a little boy, you fool. That little fellow must be stopped, and being beaten by his father won't do it.

"If one wants to stop our fellow men one must always be outside the circle that presses them. That way one can always direct the pressure."

The idea was preposterous, but somehow it was appealing to me.

Don Juan was resting his chin on his left palm. His left arm was propped against his chest on a wooden box that served as a low table. His eyes were closed but his eyeballs moved. I felt he was looking at me through his closed eyelids. The thought scared me.

"Tell me more about what my friend should do with his little boy," I said.

"Tell him to go to skid row and very carefully select an ugly-looking derelict," he went on. "Tell him to get a young one; one who still has some strength left in him."

Don Juan then delineated a strange strategy. I was to instruct my friend to have the man follow him or wait for him at a place where my friend would go with his son. The man, in response to a prearranged cue to be given after any objectionable behaviour on the part of the child, was supposed to leap from a hiding place, pick the child up, and spank the living daylights out of him.

"After the man scares him, your friend must help the little boy regain his confidence, in any way he can. If he follows this procedure three or four times, I assure you that that child will feel differently towards everything. He will change his idea of the world."

"What if the fright injures him?"

"Fright never injures anyone. What injures the spirit is having someone always on your back, beating you, telling you what to do and what not to do.

"When that boy is more contained you must tell your friend to do one last thing for him. He must find some way to get to a dead child, perhaps in a hospital, or at the office of a doctor. He must take his son there and show the dead child to him. He must let him touch the corpse once with his left hand, on any place except the corpse's belly. After the boy does that he will be renewed. The world will never be the same for him."

I realized then that throughout the years of our association don Juan had been employing with me, although on a different scale, the same tactics he was suggesting my friend should use with his son. I asked him about it. He said that he had been trying all along to teach me how to 'stop the world'.

"You haven't yet," he said, smiling. "Nothing seems to work, because you are very stubborn. If you were less stubborn, however, by now you would probably have stopped the world with any of the techniques I have taught you."

"What techniques, don Juan?"

"Everything I have told you to do was a technique for stopping the world."

A few months after that conversation don Juan accomplished what he had set out to do. I stopped the world.

HTML EDITOR:

The events surrounding this accomplishment are described in Chapter 19, "Stopping the World".

END HTML EDITOR

That monumental event in my life compelled me to re-examine in detail my work of ten years. It became evident to me that my original assumption about the role of psychotropic plants was erroneous. They were not the essential feature of the sorcerer's description of the world, but were only an aid to cement, so to speak, parts of the description which I had been incapable of perceiving otherwise. My insistence on holding on to my standard version of reality rendered me almost deaf and blind to don Juan's aims. Therefore, it was simply my lack of sensitivity which had fostered their use.

In reviewing the totality of my field notes I became aware that don Juan had given me the bulk of the new description at the very beginning of our association in what he called 'techniques for stopping the world'. I had discarded those parts of my field notes in my earlier works because they did not pertain to the use of psychotropic plants. I have now rightfully reinstated them in the total scope of don Juan's teachings and they comprise the first seventeen chapters of this work. The last three chapters are the field notes covering the events that culminated in my 'stopping the world'.

In summing up, I can say that when I began the apprenticeship there was another reality, that is to say, there was a sorcery description of the world which I did not know.

Don Juan, as a sorcerer and a teacher, taught me that description. The ten year apprenticeship I have undergone consisted, therefore, in setting up that unknown reality by unfolding its description; adding increasingly more complex parts as I went along.

The termination of the apprenticeship meant that I had learned a new description of the world in a convincing and authentic manner; and thus I had become capable of eliciting a new perception of the world, which matched its new description. In other words, I had gained membership.

Don Juan had stated that in order to arrive at seeing, one first had to stop the world. Stopping the world was indeed an appropriate rendition of certain states of awareness in which the reality of everyday life is altered because the flow of interpretation, which ordinarily runs uninterruptedly, has been stopped by a set of circumstances alien to that flow.

In my case the set of circumstances alien to my normal flow of interpretations was the sorcery description of the world. Don Juan's precondition for stopping the world was that one had to be convinced.

In other words, one had to learn the new description in a total sense for the purpose of pitting it against the old one, and in that way break the dogmatic certainty which we all share; the certainty that the validity of our perceptions, or our 'reality of the world' is not to be questioned.

After stopping the world, the next step was seeing.

Seeing, according to don Juan, meant what I would like to categorize as responding to the perceptual solicitations of the world outside the description we have learned to call reality.

My contention is that all these steps can only be understood in terms of the description to which they belong: And since it was a description that don Juan endeavoured to give me from the beginning, I must then let his teachings be the only source of entrance into it. Thus, I have left don Juan's words to speak for themselves.