Version 2006.05.20

## "The Wheel of Time: The Shamans of Ancient Mexico, Their Thoughts about Life, Death and the Universe" - ©1998 by Carlos Castaneda

### Commentary on "Tales of Power"

Tales of Power is the mark of my ultimate downfall. At the time that the events narrated in that book took place, I suffered a profound emotional upheaval; a warrior's breakdown. Don Juan Matus left this world, and left his four apprentices in it. Each of those apprentices was approached personally by don Juan, and assigned a specific task. I considered the task given to me to be a placebo that had no significance whatsoever in comparison to the loss.

Not to see don Juan anymore could not be soothed by pseudo-tasks. My first plea with don Juan had been, naturally, to tell him that I wanted to go with him.

"You are not ready, yet," he said. "Let's be realistic."

"But I could make myself ready in the blink of an eye," I assured him.

"I don't doubt that. You'll be ready, but not for me. I demand perfect efficiency. I demand an impeccable intent, an impeccable discipline. You don't have that yet. You will. You're coming to it, but you're not there yet.

"You have the power to take me, don Juan. Raw and imperfect."

"I suppose I do, but I won't, because it would be a shameful waste for you. You stand to lose everything, take my word. Don't insist. Insisting is not in the realm of warriors."

That statement was sufficient to stop me. Internally, however, I yearned to go with him; to venture beyond the boundaries of everything that I knew as normal and real.

When the moment came in which don Juan actually left the world, he turned into some colored, vaporous luminosity. He was pure energy, flowing freely in the universe. My sensation of loss was so immense at that moment that I wanted to die. I disregarded everything don Juan had said, and without any hesitation, I proceeded to throw myself off a precipice. I reasoned that if I did that, in death, don Juan would have been obliged to take me with him, and save whatever bit of awareness was left in me.

But for reasons that are inexplicable when viewed from the premises of my normal cognition, though explicable from the cognition of the shamans' world, I didn't die. I was left alone in the world of everyday life with my three cohorts; something which made my loneliness more poignant than ever.

I saw myself as an agent provocateur, [* provocateur- a secret agent who incites suspected persons to commit illegal acts] a spy of sorts, that don Juan had left behind for some obscure reasons. The quotations drawn from the corpus [* corpus- a collection of writings] of Tales of Power show the unknown quality of the world, not the world of shamans, but the world of everyday life, which, according to don Juan, is as mysterious and rich as anything can be. All we need to pluck the wonders of this world of everyday life is enough detachment. But more than detachment, we need enough affection and abandon.

"A warrior must love this world," don Juan had warned me, "in order for this world that seems so commonplace to open up and show its wonders."

We were, at the time that he voiced this statement, in the desert of Sonora.

"It is a sublime feeling," he said, "to be in this marvelous desert; to see those ragged peaks of pseudo-mountains that were really made by the flow of lava of long-gone volcanoes. It is a glorious feeling to find that some of those nuggets of obsidian were created at such high temperatures that they still retain the mark of their origin. They have power galore.

"To wander aimlessly in those ragged peaks and actually find a piece of quartz that picks up radio waves is extraordinary. The only drawback to this marvelous picture is that to enter into the marvels of this world, or into the marvels of another world, a man needs to be a warrior: calm, collected, indifferent, seasoned by the onslaughts of the unknown. You are not seasoned that way yet. Therefore, it is your duty to seek that fulfillment before you could talk about venturing into the infinite."

I have spent thirty-five years of my life seeking the maturity of a warrior. I have gone to places that defy description seeking that sensation of being seasoned by the onslaughts of the unknown. I went unobtrusively, unannounced, and I came back in the same fashion. The works of warriors are silent and solitary, and when warriors go, or come back, they do it so inconspicuously that nobody is the wiser. To seek a warrior's maturity in any other fashion would be ostentatious, [* ostentatious- intended to attract notice and impress others] and therefore, inadmissible.

The quotations from Tales of Power were the most poignant reminder to me that the intent of the shamans who lived in Mexico in ancient times was still impeccably at work. The wheel of time was moving inexorably around me, forcing me to look into grooves which one cannot talk about and still remain coherent.

"Suffice it to say," don Juan said to me once, "that the immensity of this world, be it the shamans' world or the average man's, is so conspicuous that only an aberration could keep us from noticing it. Trying to explain to aberrant beings what it is like to be lost in the grooves of the wheel of time is the most absurd thing that a warrior can undertake. Therefore, he makes sure that his journeys are only the property of his condition of being a warrior."