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 "The Teachings of Don Juan"

The essence of whatever don Juan said at the beginning of my apprenticeship is encapsulated in the abstract nature of the quotations selected from the first book, The Teachings of Don Juan. At the time of the events described in that book, don Juan spoke a great deal about allies, power plants, Mescalito, the little smoke, the wind, the spirits of rivers and mountains, the spirit of the chaparral, etc., etc. Later on when I questioned him about his emphasis on those elements, and why he wasn't using them anymore, he admitted unabashedly that at the beginning of my apprenticeship, he had gone into all that pseudo-Indian shaman rigmarole for my benefit.

I was flabbergasted. I wondered how he could make such a statement which I felt was obviously not true. Yet he had really meant what he said about those elements of his world, and I was certainly the man who could attest to the veracity [* veracity- unwillingness to tell lies] of his words and moods.

"Don't take it so seriously," he said, laughing. "It was very enjoyable for me to get into all that crap, and it was even more enjoyable because I knew that I was doing it for your benefit."

"For my benefit, don Juan? What kind of aberration [* aberration- a state or condition markedly different from the norm] is this?"

"Yes, for your benefit. I tricked you by holding your attention on items of your world which held a profound fascination for you, and you swallowed it hook, line and sinker.

"All I needed was to get your undivided attention. But how could I have done that when you had such an undisciplined spirit? You yourself told me time and time again that you stayed with me because you found what I said about the world fascinating.

"What you didn't know how to express was that the fascination that you felt was based on the fact that you vaguely recognized every element I was talking about. You thought that the vagueness was, of course, shamanism, and you went for it, meaning you stayed."

"Do you do this to everybody, don Juan?"

"Not to everybody because not everybody comes to me, and above all, I'm not interested in everybody. I was and I am interested in you; you alone.

"My teacher, the nagual Julian, tricked me in a similar way. He tricked me with my sensuality and greed. He promised to get me all the beautiful women who surrounded him, and he promised to cover me with gold. He promised me a fortune, and I fell for it.

"All the shamans of my lineage had been tricked that way since time immemorial. The shamans of my lineage are not teachers or gurus. They don't give a fig about teaching their knowledge. They want heirs to their knowledge, not people vaguely interested in their knowledge for intellectual reasons."

Don Juan was right when he said that I had fallen for his maneuver fully. I had believed that I had found the perfect shaman anthropological informant.

This was the time when under don Juan's auspices, and due to his influence, I wrote diaries and collected old maps that showed the locations of the Yaqui Indian towns throughout the centuries beginning with the chronicles of the Jesuits in the late 1700's. I recorded all those locations and I identified the most subtle changes, and began to ponder and wonder why the towns were shifted to other locales, and why they were arranged in slightly different patterns every time they were relocated. Pseudo-speculations about the reasons, and reasonable doubts overwhelmed me. I collected thousands of sheets of abbreviated notes and possibilities, drawn from books and chronicles. I was a perfect student of anthropology. Don Juan spurred my fancy in every way he possibly could.

There are no volunteers on the warriors' path," don Juan said to me under the guise of an explanation. "A man has to be forced into the warriors' path against his will."

"What do I do, don Juan, with the thousands of notes that you tricked me into collecting?" I asked him at the time.

His answer was a direct shock to me. "Write a book about them!" he said. "I am sure that if you begin to write it, you'll never make use of those notes, anyway. They are useless, but who am I to tell you that? Find out for yourself. But don't endeavor to write a book as a writer. Endeavor to do it as a warrior; as a shaman-warrior."

"What do you mean by that, don Juan?"

"I don't know," he said. "Find it out for yourself."

He was absolutely right. I never used those notes. Instead I found myself writing unwittingly about the inconceivable possibilities of the existence of another system of cognition.