Daniel C. Noel, Seeing Castaneda: Reactions to the “Don Juan” Writings of Carlos Castaneda. Perigee Books (1976)

Introduction and Cover Art

This book, first published in 1976, is no longer in print. Amazon.com, however, has it listed as an item they’ll do a used bookstore search on and many local libraries probably have it. Other books by Daniel Noel are listed at the end of this installment. The following summary by Randy Stark of Daniel Noel’s Seeing Castaneda provides a very useful overview of all the early book reviews and critiques of Castaneda’s first several books.

Before getting into the summary, there are two things concerning the book in general that I want to comment on – the first being the cover, designed by Joanne Scribner. In the background is an olive colored sky above a darker olive colored mountain (no details, just a line). At the foot of the mountain on the left, lying on a flat, dark gray plain, is a cut mushroom, much like one you’d buy in a grocery store. Its shadow trails off to the left and onto the spine. The foreground and center of the picture is dominated by a black, white and gray eagle facing right with wings spread and talons down, frozen in the act of landing. What it’s about to land on is a large yellow egg by which stands a small lime green praying mantis. The egg’s shadow disappears to the left over the ledge of what is the first of three light gray steps. The first and third steps are broad, the second narrow, rising to the right. The well-defined black shadows of the second and third steps on first glance appear to be the lines of a highway receding back into the distance towards the dark olive mountain.

The second thing I want to point out is something that’s printed at the bottom of the page facing the acknowledgments:

“Because permission to use quoted material has not been forthcoming from the copyright holders of the four Castaneda books, some Castaneda quotations which appeared in the anthology selections as originally published have had to be paraphrased, reduced, or excised here. These changes are indicated by brackets in the text.”

This book covers the tetralogy which was then thought to be the conclusion of Castaneda’s writing on the subject of don Juan, something he himself said was the case. A possible reason for permission to quote material from these first four books being withheld becomes apparent, in my opinion, as cracks start forming in the factual façade of don Juan’s existence.

See the Daniel Noel interview on this website for more background regarding his efforts to publish this and another book dealing with the work of Carlos Castaneda.

Book Summary by Randy Stark

Seeing Castaneda is divided into three parts: Reviews, Correspondence and Controversy, Analysis and Application. Each of these parts is divided into sections. At the beginning of each section is a commentary by Noel concerning the pieces by various authors which comprise the section. Setting the stage for the book is the following overall introduction:

Taking Castaneda Seriously: Paths of Explanation

Alan Watts disarmed his critics by claiming that he was not to be taken seriously, that he was a ‘philosophical entertainer,’ while at the same time “stressing the philosophical importance of his kind of levity.” This modus operandi is compared with Castaneda’s writings in that they are meant to be taken seriously, even though “clowning and trickery” pervade them, and the author’s public persona is more than a little confusing. Still, most reviewers and scholars agree that his books are works of “profound and lasting significance.” The question is, how should they be taken?

Castaneda’s critics were all over the fact that he’d tossed out any form of scientific detachment and was approaching his subject matter in a purely subjective way. His supporters, on the other hand, were praising him for breaking down barriers in established approaches to ethnographic field work. Joseph Chilton Pearce, who we’ll hear from later in the book, is quoted as finding Carlos “the principal psychological, spiritual, and literary genius of recent generations” and don Juan “the most important paradigm since Jesus.”

“As far as published commentary goes, then, the question is not really whether to be serious-minded about Castaneda’s recommendations, but how: How do we best see what his work means? We need,” says Noel, “to explore alternative paths of explanation,” while not “forgetting to laugh at what remains a very funny series of literary escapades.”The paths of explanation that Noel goes on to propose are – Psychedelic Experience, Anthropology, Psychology, and Body Awareness. After discussing the pros and cons of these, Noel concludes that “an interdisciplinary effort at interpretation” is what’s needed. But even further, “the interpretive resources which can most effectively maintain this sense of possibility and pluralistic openness” that Castaneda’s books engender.

The last four sections of the introduction are – Fact, Fiction, Literary Reality; Language and the Metaphysical; Negative Mysticism and the Postmodern; and The Sorcerers’ Last Trick: Self-Knowledge. The following are single quotes from each in order.”Words are the only psychotropic agents Castaneda gives us, and the black marks on his pages are our eyes’ only path through his desert.”

“The silent power for which don Juan’s pedagogy prepares his apprentice is never far from the narrations the two men exchange, or from the internal dialogue to which Carlos always returns in reflecting upon what has befallen him during its interruption. Clearly what happens to the reader is radically dependent on language. But once having emphasized the indispensable linguistic scaffolding, must we not acknowledge that the structure erected by Castaneda’s words transcends those words in a manner we can call ‘mystical’?”

“If Castaneda’s books lead us to be disillusioned with our modern disillusionments, we may be ready to accept something akin to the sorcerers’ explanation in Tales of Power: a mode of interpretation matching what we found to be the upshot of our explorations into explaining the tetralogy, a mode of interpretation deliberately bordering on the paradoxical, the ineffable, the unknown.”

“Don Juan says it is constantly necessary to remember that any total orientation, even sorcery, is ‘only a path,’ and that the prerequisite for keeping this clearly in mind is a ‘disciplined life.’ The meaning of discipline in one’s life – including the life of the mind – may finally be what is at stake here. For with this discipline, the old sorcerer suggests, one may find among the million paths – including paths of explanation – one’s own path with a heart, the path which goes nowhere and yet makes for ‘a joyful journey.’ Even a glimpse of such a path would be a far from meager reward for a careful and serious-minded look at the writings of Carlos Castaneda. And, following the glimpse, laughter might be our next step.”

PART ONE: Reviews

1. The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge

“Two of the earliest reviews of Carlos Castaneda’s writings,” Noel says in his introduction to this section, “were by prominent scholars in the field in which he was still a graduate student: anthropology.”Edward H. Spicer, professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona, discussed The Teachings of Don Juan in the American Anthropologist. Edmund Leach, a Cambridge University cultural anthropologist, reviewed the book for the New York Review of Books. “Both reviews contributed to the largely affirmative reception Castaneda’s work was to receive over the next six years.”Neither review, however, was entirely favorable. In fact, Leach’s is “couched in caustic phrases which occasionally verge on ridicule,” and Spicer’s declares that it is “wholly gratuitous to emphasize, as the subtitle does, any connection between the subject matter of the book and the cultural traditions of the Yaquis.”

Edward H. Spicer: Early Praise from an Authority on Yaqui Culture

“With the skill of an accomplished novelist,” Spicer writes, “utilizing suspense in character unfoldment and compelling suggestion rather than full exposition of place and situation, the intense relationship developed between the young and groping anthropologist and the richly experienced old teacher engrosses the reader.”Castaneda’s writing, Spicer contends, “ranks with the best accounts by experimental psychologists,” and “represents a remarkable achievement” that teachers preparing students for “significant field relationships” will find “immensely useful.” This enthusiasm over Castaneda’s approach to fieldwork and the explication of his “special consensus” is tempered only by the fact that don Juan shows no sign whatsoever of being a Yaqui.This difficulty Spicer addresses by noting that many people in Mexico and Arizona who are Yaqui in origin “have never participated in Yaqui group life or at best have done so only sporadically.” Still, because of this ambiguity, “the teachings of don Juan exist in a cultural limbo,” which Spicer admits is a “serious limitation.”

Edmund Leach: High School

“The general tone is Coleridge-de Quincey by Rousseau out of eighteenth-century Gothik.” With this Leach launches into a comparison of passages from The Teachings of Don Juan and The Ancient Mariner which to him illustrate the fact that what Castaneda has written “is more likely to emerge as poetry rather than science,” and “is a work of art rather than scholarship.” He goes on to say that, “Assessed on this basis the book is not of superlative quality perhaps, but very good indeed.”The relationship between Carlos and don Juan “is a relationship which is at once intimate yet tense, as between Moby Dick and Ahab, God and Job, or any psychoanalyst and his patient.” But, “how far Castaneda himself came to believe in don Juan’s fantasies is left carefully obscure. And the undoubted fascination of the book lies precisely in this: the uncertainty of the author’s own attitude. It is don Juan, not Castaneda, who has the dominant voice.”Leach, like Spicer, also notes the lack of any connection between don Juan and Yaqui culture, and further speculates that the parallels between don Juan’s teachings and those of Taoism, Yoga, Vedanta, and Zen – parallels also mentioned on the dustjacket of the book – are “too much alike to be true.” Leach cites T. Lobsang Rampa’s The Third Eye (1956) as an instructive example. “The book purported to be an autobiographical account by an emigré Tibetan Lama of metaphysical goings on in pre-communist Lhasa. It seemed convincing because it fitted with the reader’s expectations. ‘Rampa’ is actually an Englishman, and I doubt if he has ever been within a 1000 miles of the Himalayas.””Castaneda’s book is certainly not a complete spoof in this sense, but if it had been spoof, it might not have been very different.”

2. A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan

The first review in this section is by Duke University professor Weston La Barre, author of The Peyote Cult, “one of the works,” Noel notes, “to which Carlos refers.” Like Spicer and Leach, La Barre is an internationally prominent anthropologist. His review was paid for by the New York Times Book Review, but never published. In it La Barre goes beyond Leach in his criticism of Castaneda’s work, seeing it, in Noel’s words, “as an ego trip only.”

“Contrasting sharply with La Barre’s negative reaction is the review by Robert Buckout, a psychologist at City University of New York. A comparison of the two pieces clearly reveals a basic difference of criteria in the reviewers.” Namely that Buckout allows for the fact that “Castaneda violates the rules of the game of science” by “getting ‘too close’ to his subject in a very successful effort to enlighten his audience.”

Weston La Barre: Stinging Criticism from the Author of The Peyote Cult

“One can be sympathetic with other world-views and yet ask the question: Is not the endless quest for a guru in fact diagnostic of the authoritarian personality, a sign of eternal adolescence in the seeker?” La Barre makes very clear at the outset that when it comes to “comparative culture studies” he has no time for “individual daisy-picking over the problem of ‘what can a man believe,’” or the search for cosmic truth “with the aid of drugs,” maintaining that “this epistemology is too noodleheaded and naïve to merit comment.”

Noting, as in previous reviews, the lack of any contribution to Yaqui ethnography in the first book, La Barre goes on to say that, “The long disquisition of don Juan and the detailing of each confused emotional reaction of the author, in the present volume, imply either total recall, novelistic talent, or a tape recorder.” And further, “the nourishment of it all hardly matches that in Jello.” La Barre laments the public’s taste for such “plastic flowers of science-writing” and states that “both books together advance our knowledge of peyotism not one whit.”

“But perhaps it is unfair to expect this of an ego trip. Everything is smarmy with self-important and really quite trivial feelings and narcissistic self-preoccupation.” Furthermore, La Barre asks, “is a toxic state of the brain any earnest for the existence of another ‘reality’?” And finally, “The book is pseudo-profound, sophomoric and deeply vulgar. To one reader at least, for decades interested in Amerindian hallucinogens, the book is frustratingly and tiresomely dull, posturing pseudo-ethnography and, intellectually, kitsch.”

Robert Buckout: On Being Chained to Reason

“The psychologist who has overlearned logical positivism,” Buckout begins, “will be both frustrated and enlightened by taking this voyage into the personalized ethnography of a sorcerer. The voyage involves the conscious suspension of a social scientist’s well-developed standards for credibility of evidence and a period of participative education that is usually only theorized upon.”

“These books,” Buckout concludes, “will disturb the psychologist, the philosopher of science, and any ‘rational man.’ They must be read and experienced; I cannot convey their impact in a review . . . I can only urge that you catch up with some of your students and ponder, if you will, the words of don Juan, Sorcerer: ‘A phony sorcerer tries to explain everything in the world with explanations he is not sure about . . . and so everything is witchcraft. But then you’re no better . . . you’re not sure of your explanations either.’”

3. Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan

Paul Riesman, a Carleton College anthropologist writing for the New York Times Book Review, and Don Strachan, writing for Rolling Stone Magazine, contribute the reviews in this section. Riesman, Noel says, “goes a long way toward explaining the challenge of the teachings pointed out by Buckout. In dramatizing some of the shibboleths and shortcomings of the conventional anthropological understanding of alien cultures, Castaneda’s work is for Riesman ‘among the best that the science of anthropology has produced.’”

Strachan takes a different approach. “In his view,” says Noel, “the don Juan writings are primarily books of practical exercises for the reader.” Strachan represents those “who have grown tired of merely intellectual responses to revelatory texts.” Strachan, however, “goes on to imply that he doubts the existence of don Juan, and perhaps the true reason it doesn’t matter to him whether don Juan is real or illusory is that as long as the effectiveness of recipes is the main issue, the correct identity of the chef counts for little.”

Paul Riesman: A Comprehensive Anthropological Assessment

Riesman begins by asserting that up to that point anthropology had served only to confirm what was already known about “the nature of man, society, the human condition” and that cultural differences were “merely something like different mental images of the same basic reality.” Castaneda, on the other hand, in the teachings of don Juan “has conveyed these teachings with great artistry so that they affect us at many levels . . . he shows us the conditions under which the teachings were transmitted to him, and not only makes us feel the relation he had with his teacher, but also reveals something of his personal struggle with standard Western reality whose thrall kept preventing him from accepting don Juan’s lessons on their own terms.”

Cultures, then, as illustrated by the teachings of don Juan, have their own separate realities, ones that can only be entered into and understood subjectively. “It is not the object we are trying to know,” Riesman says, “that makes knowledge scientific, nor is it the kind of knowledge we have about it (e.g. intuitive, quantifiable, dream, etc.) but rather the fact that the person knowing has done the best he could to show others exactly how he came by that knowledge.” Riesman concedes that Castaneda should do this more than he has, but goes on to say that Castaneda’s truths “enable us to see that our image of man is just that – an image – and that suggests entirely other ways of perceiving man and the world.”

“Castaneda makes it clear,” says Riesman, “that the teachings of don Juan do tell us something of how the world really is, and I feel that this is knowledge of great value.”

Don Strachan: The Word from Rolling Stone

Strachan’s humorous review begins with himself at age 12 trying to fly off the end of his bed after seeing Peter Pan and progresses on to a mouse appearing at his feet while he’s reading about Carlos finding that spot on don Juan’s porch. “Being now a culture-bound 29, had not Mescalito’s little brother been floating through my frontal lobe, and had I not heard a voice in the dark after finishing A Separate Reality, I might not have recognized this rodent as an ally. Forewarned by don Juan not to look him head on, I crossed my eyes at him. After about 15 minutes, a balloon exploded behind my eyes. I looked for the writing but it was blank. The ally minced off toward the kitchen and my frontal lobe ached.”

Concerning Journey to Ixtlan, Strachan says, “Juan rocks with the laughter of superiority from cover to cover, at one point has Carlos walk three paces behind him, and regularly scares the shit out of his apprentice to prepare him for his cryptic gems of resonant wisdom.” Strachan ticks off several of the gems then says, “Juan is a master of yin-yang, or what Carlos calls the paradoxical unity of opposites,” and asks the question: “Is don Juan a real live Peter Pan who grew up or just a literary flight in the Never-Never Land of Castaneda’s imagination?”

“Not that it matters,” Strachan concludes, “the books convincingly erase the line each of us draws to separate ‘reality’ from ‘illusion’ – but I’ll believe don Juan is a breathing entity when I see him on The Dick Cavett Show. (All right, I’m over 30.)

4. Tales of Power

“The publication of Tales of Power, the fourth volume of the tetralogy, late in 1974, prompted another extremely favorable reaction in the New York Times Book Review.

Elsa First, a New York psychoanalyst interested in the relation between Freudian and Buddhist therapies, feels that Castaneda’s unique contribution is to have ‘placed us inside the shaman’s consciousness.’” Noel comments that, “Even more than Robert Buckout, Elsa First appeals to the experience of ‘altered states’ to explain what happens to Carlos.””Reviewers who do more than merely quote from Castaneda’s tetralogy,” Noel says, “are hard pressed to accept the unwonted in it at face value. But in the five and a half years between Spicer’s article and Elsa First’s, they helped see to it that the don Juan writings were accepted as serious works worthy of attention by even the most sophisticated reader.”

Elsa First: Don Juan is to Carlos as Carlos Is to Us

First begins by pointing out that “the scientific study of altered states of consciousness has given us a new perspective on the history of religion and in particular on shamanism.” No longer do anthropologists see shamanism as “a socially sanctioned form of schizophrenia. We can now see that shamanism is not just magic but metaphysics: it maintains that this world – the world of everyday appearances – is not more real than the other world – the world of powers, energies, demons and gods – because this world is only the ‘lie’ which our minds construct in one particular state: ordinary waking consciousness.”

The four books Castaneda has published, First says, “have been widely acclaimed for their vividness, and increasingly widely suspected for the evident art Castaneda uses to shape his picture of shamanism from the inside.” For First, however, “Castaneda has devised a powerful literary strategy” wherein ‘non-ordinary’ experiences are related subjectively as they occur, then sorted out rationally afterwards through dialogues with don Juan. In these dialogues, “the terms of the discussion are those of don Juan’s world, not ours.”

First’s answer to questions concerning the similarity of don Juan’s teachings to many aspects of the world’s great religions is – ‘natural mind.’ “At this point,” she says, “all we can say is that Castaneda’s reported experiences closely resemble much cross-cultural data – and this could well be explained by the fact that the ‘natural mind’ everywhere perceives similarly.”

Regarding Tales of Power, First marvels that, “Never has Carlos shivered, puked, lost control of his bowels or fainted so often in terror. The systematic derangement of Carlos’s senses goes farther than ever. Tales of Power could well be read as a farcical picaresque epic of altered states of consciousness.” Don Juan appears in a business suit. Don Juan whirls Carlos through an office to a market a mile and a half away. Don Genaro sends forth a double of himself. He and don Juan split Carlos’s consciousness by whispering in his ears. Carlos jumps off a cliff and his awareness shatters, making him realize he’s a “cluster.” Carlos and don Juan engage “in some simple and elusively concrete conversations” over restaurant tables and sitting on Mexico City park benches.

“What happened? Where?” First asks. “Inside, outside, it really doesn’t matter. In the course of Tales of Power, Carlos learns how to accept the unwonted ‘at its face value.’ Confronted with the inexplicable, a warrior simply responds, don Juan explains, without either pretending that nothing has happened or pretending that he understands.” Eventually Carlos learns “the warrior’s stance of ‘believing without believing,’ a kind of metaphysical aplomb.”

“Castaneda,” First concludes, “is doing to his audience exactly what don Juan and don Genaro do to Carlos from the moment they begin rambunctiously teasing him out of his wits with the possibility that he is seeing their ‘doubles.’ In teaching his readers to ‘believe without believing,’ Castaneda enlarges his achievement as the chronicler of ancient methods for restructuring the sense of reality. He has brought us closer to understanding the teaching behind all the magic. In don Juan’s words, ‘Life in itself is sufficient, self-explanatory, and complete.’”

PART TWO – Correspondence and Controversy

5. Anthropology – or Fiction? Two Letters

This short section concerns two letters from the novelist Joyce Carol Oates; one to the New York Times Book Review and one to Daniel Noel. The one to the New York Times Book Review expresses bewilderment over Paul Riesman’s review of Journey to Ixtlan. To her, Castaneda’s books are obviously fiction and she wonders aloud if any other readers or professionals in the field share her bewilderment at them being treated as nonfiction. Noel wrote back to her: “My letter expressed the opinion that the Castaneda volumes could well be nonfiction, but that in any case their ambiguity in this regard might be an important part of their impact.”

The following part of Joyce Carol Oates’ reply to Noel ends this section: “. . . I only read Carlos’ first two books about 3 weeks ago – enjoyed them immensely. But now that it’s a ‘hoax’ I doubt I’ll read the third; for me Borges has done this sort of thing so beautifully, and I must confess a temperamental preference for the ‘seeing’ of – let’s say – a Dr. Suzuki, if one desires a guru. Or Dr. Laing . . .”

6. An Interview, An Exposé, A Story About Stories

“At about the time Joyce Carol Oates’ note to me arrived,” writes Noel, “the December, 1972, Psychology Today carried an article by Sam Keen in which he interviewed Castaneda himself and tried to get to the bottom of the controversy.” Keen’s interview, though “a serious conversation about some of the most esoteric concepts of don Juan’s teaching,” failed to resolve the controversy. “The fact is,” says Noel, “after the interview we still do not know the truth in the anthropology vs. fiction dispute, but Castaneda’s careful responses to all the philosophical parallels Keen proposes are instructive.”

“A few months after the Keen interview-article came out,” Noel continues, “the importance and impact of Castaneda’s trilogy in American popular culture were certified by a Time magazine cover story. If the Psychology Today piece at all supported Castaneda’s protestations of anthropological accuracy, Time’s attempt at an exposé certainly rekindled the controversy.”

This section contains Keen’s interview-article, the Time magazine piece, and a piece written by Ronald Sukenick for the Village Voice which was published in between the first two. Sukenick is “the author of a critical study of Wallace Stevens . . . and several books of experimental fiction.” With regard to the ‘controversy’, Sukenick writes, “These are works of art, Ms. Oates, to answer your questions directly, but works of art don’t have to be novels.” In Sukenick’s “storyteller’s judgment,” Noel comments, “the crucial thing for Castaneda’s account is not that it be ‘true’ rather than ‘false’, but that it be ‘persuasive.’”

Sam Keen: Sorcerer’s Apprentice

“Sorcerers are not fond of statistics, verifiable knowledge or established identities,” Keen begins his article. He goes on to comment on the ancient tradition and esoteric knowledge of sorcerers, and the strangeness of their way of life. After meeting don Juan, Castaneda went from anthropologist to disciple, and in the process became more and more elusive. “Carlos Castaneda,” Keen says, “erases his personal history and deliberately withholds information that would destroy the anonymity he needs so that he can wander freely in whatever worlds there are or may be.”

The above is from the first part of the article, Prologue. Subsequent parts are –
 Cool, Crow, Coyote, Consensus, Condition, Change and Charisma.

‘Cool’ takes a brief stab at establishing some of Castaneda’s personal history. ‘Crow’ discusses Castaneda’s experiences as a crow and the worthy attributes of crows. “Their wisdom,” says Keen, “consists in the ability to tell when things are moving too fast, too slow and just right.” ‘Coyote’ covers a few of Castaneda’s “looking glass” encounters –
 the hundred foot gnat, la Catalina, Mescalito.

‘Consensus’ posits that the tricks in ‘Coyote’ are minor compared to the overall effort of don Juan “to develop in Carlos the ability to see the everyday world with wondering eyes.” Don Juan “knows that the world of common-sense reality is a product of social consensus.” In guiding Carlos to ‘bracket’ normal ways of perceiving, don Juan takes him beyond that social consensus.

‘Condition’ develops the theme of ‘Consensus’ further by introducing the story of the piece of ebony that once sat on Edmund Husserl’s desk which a student of his later gave to Castaneda, who subsequently gave it to don Juan. Don Juan, as the story goes, fondled it, as Husserl had done a generation before, and “gave it an honored place in his treasury of power objects that are used for conjuring.” Keen considers this “wholly appropriate” because Husserl “sought to escape from the subjectivity and solipsism that was the legacy of Descartes’ definition of man as a rational being enclosed within the certainties of his own mind.”

‘Change’ relates how Journey to Ixtlan “shows that it was more the realistic than the fantastic aspects of don Juan’s teachings that convinced [Castaneda] that there was no other way to live an exuberant life.” When the knowledge that he had to die became a reality for Castaneda “he was able to change, to become more decisive, and to be less governed by the expectations of others and by ordinary social routines. He accepted the ideal of the life of the warrior who must discipline his body and accumulate personal power. By experiment with living impeccably Carlos discovered the paradoxical unity of opposites. Discipline and abandon, realism and fantasy, secondary- and primary-process thinking go hand in hand. There need be no enmity between sanity and ecstasy.”

‘Charisma’ is the longest part but can be summed up by its first two sentences. “Every age discovers or creates the heroes it needs. Ours has a strange bunch.” The article ends with Castaneda coming back from being a crow. “For a time he did not know whether he was a professor pretending to be a crow or a crow pretending to be a professor. Then he laughed and knew that literal truth and poetry can never be separated. What is important is to fly high and return to earth.”

Here begins the interview with Castaneda, whose first reply is strikingly similar to one he would give 22 years later in an interview with Keith Thompson (New Age Journal, April 1994). The 1972 and 1994 questions and answers are reproduced below.

Sam Keen: As I followed don Juan through your three books, I suspected, at times, that he was the creation of Carlos Castaneda. He is almost too good to be true – a wise old Indian whose knowledge of human nature is superior to almost everybody’s.

Carlos Castaneda: The idea that I concocted a person like don Juan is inconceivable. He is hardly the kind of figure my European intellectual tradition would have led me to invent. The truth is much stranger. I didn’t create anything. I am only a reporter. I wasn’t even prepared to make the changes in my life that my association with don Juan involved.

Keith Thompson: Your friend don Juan teaches what is, how to know what is, and how to live in accord with what is – ontology, epistemology, and ethics. Which leads many to say he’s too good to be true, that you created him from scratch as an allegorical instrument of wise instruction.

Carlos Castaneda: The notion that I concocted a person like don Juan is preposterous. I’m a product of a European intellectual tradition to which a character like don Juan is alien. The actual facts are stranger: I’m a reporter. My books are accounts of an outlandish phenomenon that forced me to make fundamental changes in my life in order to meet the phenomenon on its own terms.

The Keen interview goes on to cover questions concerning Castaneda meeting and becoming an apprentice of don Juan; don Juan not being an isolated phenomenon; whether don Juan hypnotized Carlos; sorcerers ‘building up different expectations and manipulating cues to produce a social consensus’; sorcery teaching a new system of glossing; ‘seeing the world as a wondering child’; Wittgenstein and don Juan; whether one can get beyond interpretation using psychedelic drugs; the difference between the ordinary world of Western people and that of sorcerers; being ‘united with the world, not alienated from it’; Norman Brown’s idea that some people are ‘aware of things and of other people as extensions of their bodies’ compared with don Juan’s ‘fibers of light that connect’ the solar plexus to the world; dropping ‘arrogant assumptions’ about being ‘the only comprehending and communicating form of life’; talking to animals . . .

Sam Keen: What animals make better friends?

Carlos Castaneda: Snakes make stupendous friends.
[T]hanking animals that one kills; whether Carlos was on peyote when talking to the coyote (“No”); was the experience more intense than ones induced by psychotropics (“Much more intense”); does don Juan live in this state of awareness [that of stopping the world] most of the time (“Yes”); is it lonely (“I think so”); did don Juan consciously stage allegories (“Yes”); how does Carlos place psychotropics in the teachings now; does don Juan regularly use them (“No”); did the fact that they weaken the body come as a shock; people saying Carlos has mystical feet like Jesus, is stoned all the time, committed suicide and died in several places; people knowing too little about Carlos; what the important elements of don Juan’s teachings are to Carlos and how they’ve changed him; ‘Heidegger’s definition of man as being-toward-death’; existential discussions of responsibility usually following discussions of death; the sorceric view of death being a long way from psychedelic utopias; how don Juan taught Carlos to be decisive; just the act of deciding being important; parallels with existential philosophy; Nietzsche and Sartre; the heart and body having reasons that reason knows not; don Juan’s dream training; whether stopping dream images is like stopping the world (“It is similar”) . . .

Sam Keen: Of the many techniques that don Juan taught you for stopping the world, which do you still practice?

Carlos Castaneda: My major discipline now is to disrupt my routines. I was always a very routinary person. I ate and slept on schedule. In 1965 I began to change my habits. I wrote in the quiet hours of the night and slept and ate when I felt the need. Now I have dismantled so many of my habitual ways of acting that before long I may become unpredictable and surprising to myself.

Sam Keen: Your discipline reminds me of the Zen story of two disciples bragging about miraculous powers. One disciple claimed the founder of the sect to which he belonged could stand on one side of a river and write the name of Buddha on a piece of paper held by his assistant on the opposite shore. The second disciple replied that such a miracle was unimpressive. “My miracle,” he said, “is that when I feel hungry I eat, and when I feel thirsty I drink.”

Carlos Castaneda: It has been this element of engagement in the world that has kept me following the path which don Juan showed me. There is no need to transcend the world. Everything we need to know is right in front of us, if we pay attention. If you enter a state of nonordinary reality, as you do when you use psychotropic plants, it is only to draw from it what you need in order to see the miraculous character of ordinary reality. For me the way to live –  the path with heart – is not introspection or mystical transcendence but presence in the world. This world is the warrior’s hunting ground.

Here again, at the end of Keen’s interview, is an answer Castaneda would echo 22 years later in Keith Thompson’s interview.

Keith Thompson: If you could do it over again, would you ‘just say no’?

Carlos Castaneda: My path has been my path. Don Juan always told me, “Make a gesture.” A gesture is nothing more than a deliberate act undertaken for the power that comes from making a decision. Ultimately, the value of entering a nonordinary state, as you do with peyote or other psychotropic plants, is to exact what you need in order to embrace the stupendous character of ordinary reality. You see, the path of the heart is not a road of incessant introspection or mystical flight, but a way of engaging the joys and sorrows of the world. This world, where each one of us is related at molecular levels to every other wondrous and dynamic manifestation of being – this world is the warrior’s true hunting ground

Time Magazine: Don Juan and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice

This early 1973 Time article begins by placing the success of Castaneda’s first three books in the dual contexts of “occult Mexico” and popular culture. “The Mexican border is a great divide,” the article begins. “Below it, the accumulated structures of Western ‘rationality’ waver and plunge.” While above it, the popular culture of young Americans and “middle-class middlebrows” eagerly soak up “non-rational” approaches to reality – Castaneda’s in particular. In a time of acupuncturists sharing the limelight with Marcus Welby, M.D., and “weeping throngs of California 13-year-olds getting blissed-out by the latest child guru off a chartered jet from Bombay,” Castaneda’s agent, Ned Brown, notes that Journey to Ixtlan will make Carlos a millionaire [not to mention earn him a Ph.D. in anthropology from UCLA as a dissertation renamed, Sorcery: A Description of the World, prefaced by a 500 word abstract].

Heady times, indeed. “However, with Castaneda’s increasing fame come increasing doubts. Don Juan has no other verifiable witness, and Juan Matus is nearly as common a name among Yaqui Indians as John Smith farther north. Is Castaneda real? If so, did he invent don Juan?” Well, Carlos Castaneda is real. “At present he lives ‘as inaccessibly as possible’ in Los Angeles, refreshing his batteries from time to time at what he and don Juan refer to as a ‘power spot’ atop a mountain north of nearby Malibu: a ring of boulders overlooking the Pacific.” Anyone trying to probe into his life, however, “finds himself in a maze of contradictions. But to Castaneda’s admirers, that scarcely matters.”

“Look at it this way,” says one. “Either Carlos is telling the documentary truth about himself and don Juan, in which case he is a great anthropologist. Or else it is an imaginative truth, and he is a great novelist. Heads or tails, Carlos wins.””Indeed,” the article continues, “though the man is an enigma wrapped in mystery wrapped in a tortilla, the work is beautifully lucid.” The “superbly concrete setting” is captivating, the “narrative power unmatched in other anthropological studies,” and the “utter weirdness of the events that happen in it” are “dense with animistic meaning.” Detailing the destruction of a “young anthropologist’s interpretation of the world” and the arduous “education of a sorcerer,” the Time writers summarize Castaneda’s experiences with peyote, Jimson weed and Psilocybe mushrooms. Afterwards, the meaning of these experiences is briefly contemplated with regard to the system within which don Juan taught. Personal history, impeccability, seeing, stopping the world, etc., are briefly discussed before continuing on to the subject of sages.

“The essential lessons don Juan has to teach,” Mike Murphy, a founder of the Esalen Institute, is quoted as saying, “are the timeless ones that have been taught by the great sages of India and the spiritual masters of modern times.” And, quoth the Time writers, “in 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.” Still, despite such accolades, validating Castaneda’s work as anthropology and don Juan as a real, live informant has not been possible, “there is no corroboration – beyond Castaneda’s writings.” Conventions at the “Brujo Bar-B-Q of the Mescalito Motel,” and all the “would-be disciples and counterculture tourists,” have come up empty in their search.

Don Juan’s personal history, as recorded in Castaneda’s books, is reconstructed at this point and incongruities between his character and Yaqui culture are noted. The “apparent disconnection from the Yaquis” does not sit well with most anthropologists. “I believe that basically the work has a very high degree of imagination,” Jésus Ochoa, head of the department of ethnography at Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology, is quoted as saying. “But,” the article goes on, “Castaneda’s senior colleagues at U.C.L.A., who gave their student a Ph.D. for Ixtlan, emphatically disagree: Castaneda, as one professor put it, is ‘a native genius,’ for whom the usual red tape and bureaucratic rigmarole were waived; his truth as a witness is not in question.”In trying to discover some of Castaneda’s personal history, which was in question, the Time writers ran into a problem. “Oh, I am a bullshitter!” Carlos exclaims. “Oh, how I love to throw the bull around!” He warned Time correspondent Sandra Burton, who had spent many hours with him over a period of weeks, that “in talking about his pre-don Juan life he would change names and places and dates without, however, altering the emotional truth of his life.” He told her, “I have not lied or contrived. To contrive would be to pull back and not say anything or give the assurances that everybody seeks.”

The next few pages of the article cover Castaneda’s version of his personal history contrasted with what the Time writers had dug up on their own. When confronted with “the time and transposition of his mother’s death,” Carlos replied, “One’s feelings about one’s mother are not dependent on biology or on time. Kinship as a system has nothing to do with feelings.” And furthermore, “To ask me to verify my life by giving you my statistics is like using science to validate sorcery. It robs the world of its magic and makes milestones out of us all.”

Castaneda’s time as a student at U.C.L.A. is briefly described, noting professor Clement Meighan and professor Harold Garfinkel as influences in shaping his academic career, then the article turns to a discussion of reality and the ‘multiverse’. Edmund Carpenter of Adelphi College writes, “Native people have many separate realities. They believe in a multiverse, or a biverse, but not a universe as we do.” Castaneda suggests a kind of cultural relativism in which another culture cannot be explained in terms of one’s own categories. The crux of anthropology, he says, is the acquisition of real membership.

“Most anthropologists,” Michael Harner writes, “only give the result. Instead of synthesizing the interviews, Castaneda takes us through the process.”The article concludes by talking about Castaneda’s search for a ‘power spot,’ his ducking of the ultimate confrontation with an ‘ally,’ his being torn between a commitment to sorcery and the pull of the mundane world, his desire to be a respected writer and anthropologist, his notorious inaccessibility, and finally his confidence in becoming a sorcerer. “Power takes care of you,” he says, “and you don’t know how. Now I’m at the edge, and I have to change my whole format. Writing to get my Ph.D. was my accomplishment, my sorcery, and now I am at the apex of a cycle that includes the notoriety. But this [Tales of Power] is the last thing I will ever write about don Juan. Now I am going to be a sorcerer for sure. Only my death could stop that.”

Ronald Sukenick – Upward and Juanward: The Possible Dream

“Everything happens,” Sukenick opens his article, “and everything that happens is a part of the story and everything that everyone thinks about what happens is part of the story and Journey to Ixtlan is part of Carlos Castaneda’s story about don Juan’s story and this is my story about Carlos Castaneda’s story.”

Sukenick describes his astonishment at finding “a number of similarities in incident and idea” between the first published excerpt from A Separate Reality and a novel he was completing at the time entitled, Out. The things in Out that most paralleled Castaneda’s book came from Sukenick’s dreams.

“How could such a thing have happened, I wondered, unless I were a sorcerer or Castaneda a novelist – alternatives I have good reason to think equally absurd, Joyce Carol Oates, though I have to admit that the possibility of don Juan being a kind of new Ossian presented itself strongly at first.”
[From the previous Time article; “Ossian, the legendary third century Gaelic poet whose works James Macpherson foisted upon 18th century British readers.”]

Sukenick continued to find similarities when he read the whole of A Separate Reality and later Journey to Ixtlan. Anaïs Nin, who helped Castaneda publish The Teachings of Don Juan, and who, according to Sukenick, “has over the years insisted on the continuity of dream and reality, as does don Juan,” invited Carlos to her house so he and Sukenick could meet. The first thing Sukenick discussed with Carlos was the novelistic quality of his books. He described Carlos as a Candide-like character who “looked like someone who had been holding himself together under enormous strain.” Due to this demeanor and “signs of a struggling psyche,” Sukenick thought it “impossible that anthropological forgery could have been a matter of concern for him or even of attention.”

As it turns out, Castaneda was not surprised by the similarities between Sukenick’s novel and his own reportage, “not even at the fact that my main source for them was my dreams. He said that there was a common fund of such knowledge that could be tapped by different people in different ways and that one of those ways was through dreams. He seemed to have in mind something like a lost Jungian race heritage.” On this occasion Carlos also told Sukenick stories about don Juan which would later appear in Journey to Ixtlan in “somewhat less intimate detail, and which have the cumulatively convincing smell of experience rather than imagination.” Sukenick hence concluded that Castaneda “could not write a sustained work of pure imagination.”

Sukenick then admits that some of the grounds for similarities between his and Castaneda’s stories could be found in his experience with a Sioux medicine man that he’d met in South Dakota while writing the novel Out. He had also “been reading about the beliefs and practices of the Plains Indians which are in some ways like those of the Mexican Indians.” Having thus supplemented his assertion of dreams being the main source of similarities, Sukenick goes on to defend Carlos as a visionary, and vision as being “beyond category of fact, other than the fact of its having happened at all.” Furthermore, “Like a story, it is neither true nor false, only persuasive or unreal, and I think there are few people who would argue that Castaneda’s accounts of his experience are not persuasive, as persuasive in fact as the most accomplished novels.”

The similarity of Castaneda’s work with other works and religions “is part of an important subplot in the story of the culture, and in stories, as I said, everything comes together.” Sukenick presents the argument that everyone has their stories – from philosophers and scientists to historians and journalists – and that they’re only descriptions. “The secret of the sorcerer’s power, it follows, is to know that reality is imagined and, as if it were a work of art, to apply the full force of imagination to it. The alternating descriptions of reality that don Juan works with are possible only by working through, and on, the imagination.”

“Don Juan shows us that we live in fictions,” says Sukenick, “and that we live best when we know how to master the art. Fiction is the master art . . . The sorcerer, the artist, sees beyond any particular form fiction may take to the fictive power itself, and in the absence of powerful fictions in our lives, maybe it’s time for all of us to become sorcerers.”

The next time Sukenick saw Carlos he was “much more together, more animated and cheerful, stronger, and there was nothing of the Candide left in him.” Sukenick tried to draw him out on the similarities of his work with “the processes of the imagination in art” but Castaneda’s notion of art was “rather crude.” Still, to Sukenick Carlos was an artist and laments, “Must we really wait on the testimony of anthropologists about the value of [Castaneda’s] books? If the anthropological establishment were to rise up and cry fraud – and since it hasn’t by now one can be certain it’s not going to – wouldn’t that, in a way, be even more exciting in imaginative terms?”

At one point, Carlos went to a class Sukenick was teaching to discuss one of his books. Sukenick noticed “his great caution in making claims about his apprenticeship to don Juan, or ‘the field work’ as he calls it.” He was also “stubbornly indifferent to any similarities between his experience with don Juan and Zen or any other discipline – that wasn’t his concern. Sukenick had a lot he wanted to talk to Castaneda about, but as time went on “he became increasingly elusive,” and “notoriously hard to locate.” Someone would say he was in Mexico, then someone else would meet him in an elevator at the university an hour later. “Another time it was reported to me that he had abruptly left a line of students outside his office and disappeared, exclaiming that he had to speak to me right away – I never heard from him.”

“The best way to meet him was by accident,” Sukenick continues. “And that, in fact, is how I met him last, a few weeks ago, in a coffee shop in Los Angeles (neither of us is teaching now) after coming from a talk by – we are apparently approaching the end of the story – Anaïs Nin. However, there was no chance for conversation because it was not the place and because, he said, looking me straight in the eye, ‘I’m in Mexico.’”

7. Rebuttal: Beyond Tales of Power, the Controversy Continues

“With the completion of the tetralogy in the fall of 1974,” Noel writes, “Joyce Carol Oates returned to the public argument over the books’ veracity which her letter two years earlier had helped to spark. Her essay Don Juan’s Last Laugh appeared to be her own attempt to get the last laugh on those who believed Castaneda was telling the truth.” Oates states that perhaps it takes a fiction writer to recognize “a fellow artist,” but Noel points out that Sukenick failed to see in Castaneda any such fellow artist.

Oates’ essay first appeared in the September 1974 issue of Psychology Today.

Joyce Carol Oates: Don Juan’s Last Laugh

Oates briefly summarizes the tetralogy and describes the character of Carlos as “likable, funny, naïve, and occasionally so dense as to be an outrageous parody of Western Academic Rationalism, subcategory Anthropology.” She goes on to note that though the books are “constructed around question-and-answer sequences” the dialogue is not quite Socratic because don Juan does not draw answers out of his student. They do, however, provide “marvelous, concise definitions” as well as “offhand remarks that never suffer by being quoted out of context.” Oates also notes that the stories have “genuine dramatic tension and development,” and that in Tales of Power Carlos seems oddly younger than his actual age, “very nearly childlike, and innocent.”After these observations, Oates brings up the fact that the books are controversial in that “their factual authenticity has been widely questioned, and widely defended. Are these dramatic books really the ‘field notes’ of an anthropology student? Theodore Sturgeon, a science fiction writer, included one of them in an omnibus review of new science fiction: he was very enthusiastic, and suggested they represent something new in his field.”

Oates reiterates, in somewhat milder terms than in her previous letters, that “it seems to me beyond a doubt that this series of books is art, not mere reportorial observation.” After a section titled, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, wherein she notes among other things don Juan’s use of odd Anglo-Saxon cliches, Oates moves on to, Everyone Writes Fiction. “Art is usually richer than nonfiction, and more valuable, for it deals with layers of experience – emotional and psychological as well as intellectual – that nonfiction cannot comfortably touch.”

On the other hand, “It is impossible not to feel, having read the don Juan books, that Carlos Castaneda did experience something terrifying, oceanic, ineffable, and finally transforming, and that these books are his sincere attempt at explaining the inexplicable, to himself and to us.” In the next section, Evoking Yaqui Culture (though she doesn’t use the word ‘Yaqui’ in the section), Oates says, “What is unique about the don Juan books is their evocation of native American Indian culture . . .”

The last part of Oates’ article summarizes Tales of Power once again and asks, “Who is don Juan? Why does he speak in so many voices and idioms?” To which Oates replies, “I suggest that Castaneda is concerned primarily with teaching his readers a few general, and very important, truths, and that he will use any means possible to explain the inexplicable – in which case he ultimately honors the urgency of his vision over its esthetic forms, in the tradition of nearly all mystics.”

PART THREE – Analysis and Application

8. Castaneda as Experimental Fictioneer

Jerome Klinkowitz, co-editor of Innovative Fiction and The Vonnegut Statement, “represents a literary-critical perspective and a special interest in the history of contemporary American fiction,” Noel writes. He is “amply qualified to draw out the connections between the don Juan writings and the techniques of experimental novelists and short story writers.” The writer he is concerned with in the following essay is Ronald Sukenick, whose work “stands in the forefront of fictional experimentation today.”

Jerome Klinkowitz- The Persuasive Account: Working It Out with Ronald Sukenick and Carlos Castaneda

An exchange between the protagonist of Ronald Sukenick’s novel Out and a Sioux medicine man named Empty Fox opens this essay on the art of writing, and the writing of art. “I want to write a book like a cloud that changes as it goes,” says the protagonist. “I want to erase all the books,” says Empty Fox. “My ambition is to unlearn everything . . .” Empty Fox would return to a time “before the Wasichus came.” Klinkowitz explains that Wasichus, or “fat-takers,” are what the Sioux call white men. They are the “despoilers of the continent and disgusting examples of the wrong way to live.” Seeing the land as commodity instead of community is a Wasichus flaw. “But Empty Fox does more than show a white man how to live,” says Klinkowitz, “he points a way of life for something else that’s dying –
 fiction – and provides Sukenick with a model for sustaining his novel, which is what the book is all about.”

With talk of literature being “exhausted” and the novel dead, Klinkowitz points to Sukenick’s work as “proving that there is a great deal of life to be rediscovered” in the novel. Up, Sukenick’s first book, avoided “disappearing up its own fundament” through indulgence in “aesthetic allegory” by pointing to the real world and asking: “Is the real world too ponderous and depressingly dull to capture in interesting fiction? Is it indeed a problem for art?” To which Sukenick’s “aesthetic-allegorist character, who’s involved with living the novel, writing it, and teaching literature at the same time” replies, “Sure, that’s what Wordsworth is talking about. He tells how as a kid he had to grab hold of a wall to make sure the world was really there, but when he grew up the dead weight of reality almost crushed the sense of his own existence. It’s when the world seems oppressive, dead, or to put it another way, unreal, that I get the feeling I’m walking around like a zombie.”

“Sukenick,” writes Klinkowitz, “applies to the novel what he sensed about art in general, and revitalized fiction by having it do what it should: to make reality seem less unreal.” In the novel Out, the action moves from New York City through Empty Fox’s South Dakota to “the pure space of an empty California beach.” But it’s in South Dakota that the protagonist undergoes a perceptual metamorphosis and the world becomes “less unreal.” He feels “a tremendous, surging sensation of freedom, of liberation from space, even from sound, so that a resolution seems for once possible.”

Lame Deer wrote, “We Sioux are not a simple people. We are very complicated. We are forever looking at things from different angles.” Empty Fox, it turns out, “is a man in Lame Deer’s tradition, and so is Juan Matus, through whom Carlos Castaneda learned the ways of approaching the world Sukenick was at the same time finding appropriate for fiction.” As don Juan might say, “For a sorcerer, reality, or the world we all know, is only a description.” Castaneda’s “mistakes” in grasping the world as only a description, says Klinkowitz, “sound strikingly similar to the failures of modern fictionists to keep up with their world, too.” In other words, fiction should ideally represent “the ability to transcend a mere describing of life (always a danger in this most mimetic of forms) to a revelation of the truth of experience, which may be at odds with the popular consensus.”

Sukenick’s new style of fiction, and Castaneda’s popularity, according to Klinkowitz, are reflections of a trend towards calling “a halt to having one’s personal, provisional view of things” considered absolute. Stopping the world, if you will, or, as biologist Paul Shepard and philosopher of ethics John J. McMahon, commenting in The New Republic, say of Aldo Leopold, the popular environmentalist, “Leopold has learned that to absolutize our narrow wavelength of perception is sheer arrogance,” and, Klinkowitz adds, “a sure way to extinction.”

“The imagination, Sukenick has said, makes reality seem more real – and don Juan’s methods are a paradigm for liberating oneself from the obstructed, unimaginative view,” Klinkowitz goes on. What Sukenick desires are the “fullest possibilities of vision” for his fiction, and don Juan represents “the master who can show how many realities there are” before our eyes. “As Walter Goldschmidt wrote in the forward to the first Castaneda volume,” Klinkowitz notes, “anthropology can allow us to compare our culturally limited perspective with alien ones, thereby learning its relativity and glimpsing, perhaps, an absolute reality in between ours and the others.”

“Although such wonderful revelations of the world are the goal of art, and certainly proper business for the novel,” says Klinkowitz, “the vitality of Sukenick’s theories have made them controversial.” Pearl K. Bell, writing in Dissent, puts Sukenick among “such celebrants of unreason, chaos, and inexorable decay as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., John Barth, Rudolph Wurlitzer, Donald Barthelme, and a horde of mini-Jeremiahs crying havoc in the Western world.” But the real issue, according to Klinkowitz, is addressed by Nathan Scott in an essay on contemporary fiction in which he says that the “inward liberation” of the imagination “offers us an effective release from the bullying of all the vexations of history.”
“Our particular moment and place is located in our heads and our bodies,” Sukenick wrote for the Partisan Review symposium on The New Cultural Conservatism, “and at the risk of solipsism we must start there and push outward.” Furthermore, in his Village Voice essay on Castaneda’s work he says, “All art deconditions us so that we may respond more fully to experience.” This conviction has led to his defense of fiction “over history, journalism, or any other supposedly ‘factual’ kind of writing” as a more expressive medium. “Television,” Sukenick says, “can give us the news, fiction can best express our response to the news.”

Klinkowitz concludes his essay by saying that “ultimately Sukenick’s genius rests with his discovery that the reality we know is only a description.” Or, as Sukenick puts it, “The power of a sorcerer is the power of the feeling he can invest in his description so it is felt as a persuasive account of the world.”

9. Sorcery as Opposition to Technocracy and Scientism

“In working their way out of what has come to seem the cul de sac of modern technocratic and scientistic consciousness,” Noel writes, “many thinkers have begun to research neglected or undervalued corridors of Western intellectual history.” Romanticism countering the hegemony of rationalistic, utilitarian attitudes has been the result, with Theodore Roszak emerging as one of its “most forceful champions.” A chapter from his book, Where the Wasteland Ends, called Uncaging Skylarks: The Meaning of Transcendent Symbols is the first piece in this section.

Castaneda’s experience as a crow “is another of the issues which will no longer submit to the prevailing Cartesian and Newtonian distinctions,” writes Noel. “Roszak’s chapter sets forth how those distinctions came to prevail over the romantic orientation (one in keeping with don Juan’s sorcery) and indirectly produced the attitude Carlos had to unlearn in his apprenticeship.” As Roszak does so, he explores a larger issue concerning “the loss of root meanings,” or the loss of connection between primal experience and its symbolic expression. “The skylark,” writes Roszak, “is a symbol of the vision-flight, but in its own right as an object perceived, it is also an occasion for the experience which generates the symbol.”

The second piece in this section is an address given by Carl Oglesby during a Technology and Culture Seminar conducted at MIT in October of 1971. For both Oglesby and Roszak, ‘a Juanist way of knowledge’ can be “an antidote to the cultural poisons infecting post-industrial society: technocratic alienation, scientistic reductionism, the general separation of object from subject and fact from value,” writes Noel. Oglesby’s address is preceded by an introduction from Merton J. Kahne, psychiatrist in chief at MIT, and followed by comments from Harvard historian Everett Mendelsohn and MIT political scientist Christopher Schaefer.

“The discussion between Carl Oglesby and his fellow seminar members,” says Noel, “is often difficult to follow, but in its complexity it complements Theodore Roszak’s use of don Juan’s sorcery. Both Roszak and the technology and culture seminar welcome the don Juan writings as subversive of a Western scientific knowledge which, in technocracy and scientism, encourages a Faustian overextension we can no longer afford.”
Theodore Roszak

Uncaging Skylarks: The Meaning of Transcendent Symbols

The Vision-Flight: Experience and Symbol

Roszak begins his essay by discussing Castaneda’s flying experience and don Juan’s answer to the question, “Did I really fly?” Don Juan does not use the context of Descartes, a purely subjective-objective context, but rather the context of “an old and formidable tradition” based on the “shamanic vision-flight,” a symbol that Roszak asserts “has been elaborated into thousands of religions and artistic expressions.” In explaining this symbolic context, don Juan “is at the same disadvantage as the sun-stunned philosopher” in Plato’s cave allegory. What is substance, what is shadow?

“Because we are used to dealing with mere symbols (ciphers),” Roszak writes, “we ask automatically: what is the vision-flight a symbol of? But there is no answer, except to say that this symbol belongs uniquely to an ubiquitous experience of enraptured awe which is to be lived – whether suffered or enjoyed – but not in any sense ‘explained.’” The experience that the symbol “lies next against” is “non-verbal bedrock” and the two, experience and symbol, “taken together are what we might call a root meaning: an irreducible sense of significance, a foundation the mind rests and builds upon.” And further, “the diamond that cuts all else.”

“In the case of flight,” Roszak continues, “all language that associates height, levity, loftiness, climbing, or elevation with the qualities of superiority, dignity, privileged status, worthiness, etc., is an extrapolation from the original symbol of the shamanic vision-flight.” Contrasting extrapolations are given – highness being superior, lowliness being inferior; moving upwards to God, falling, sliding, plummeting into hell; climbing to social heights, being dragged down into the gutter. “The symbolism is universal and hardly arbitrary; the same root meaning lies behind all these elaborations, mined out of a primordial experience.” Castaneda’s difficulty in understanding don Juan’s explanation of whether he flew or not lies in the fact that he has “grown hopelessly away from the root meaning” of the vision-flight. This results in “a collection of perplexing abstractions” and “all sorts of absurdities.”

“For example, the root meaning of the vision-flight associates divinity and the skies. But when the experience that underlies the root meaning is lost, we are left with an absurdly literal proposition which seems to locate God in physical space above the clouds. Then, when Russian cosmonauts fail to find the old gentleman there, village atheism holds itself vindicated.” Roszak goes on to assert that few primitive peoples “grasping intuitively as they do the ontological status of myth and symbol, would ever be so foolish. Their reality is polyphonic: it has overtones and counterpoints and resonances –
 which is exactly what we, with our two-value, objective-subjective sensibility, are inclined to call ‘superstition.’” Scientific skeptics and religious fundamentalists, according to Roszak, “stand or fall together by the same Reality Principle.”

The Law of Gravity

In this section, Roszak uses the law of gravity as an example of how root meanings are lost. “The vision-flight asserts levity as the prime orientation of the soul. The notion of gravity –
 ‘weighed downness’ – comes into existence as a companion idea, almost by negative definition. Gravity is the shadow side of levity; in the shaman’s experience, it becomes symbolic of what one feels when the soul drifts from the sense of buoyancy that keeps it close to the sacred.” This premise is then traced through various stages of disfiguration beginning with the Greeks, where at first the concept of gravity played no important role in philosophical speculation. Prior to the late Greek period, “There is simply no body of folklore or mythology dealing with the creation of a force or substance we would recognize as physical gravitation.” So why was it discovered so late in history? Because, Roszak says, “Gravity becomes an important and isolated concept only after weightiness (fallenness) begins to seem like an irresistible fact of life needing to be accounted for. This happens as the sense of levity ceases to be a readily accessible, normal experience and becomes more and more exotically mystical – or perhaps evaporates from the mind altogether.

In the late Greek period, “the transcendent symbolism of lightness and weight gave way to a more strictly scientific discussion of two physical forces of nature called ‘gravity’ and ‘levity.’ In Greek and medieval European science these forces were still faintly imbued with the sort of animism that Galileo and Newton would later eliminate. There was still the sense that ascension moved an element or object closer to divine perfection, and that things strove or willed to rise and fall depending on their degree of worthiness.” As this idea became more abstract and removed from experience, however, “gravity was upgraded to the point of becoming coequal to levity.” When Newton came along, “gravity finally exiled levity entirely from the scientific mind.” In fact, Roszak says, “the universal law of gravity holds a special place as the master concept that inaugurated the scientific revolution –
 as if the first thing modern science had to do was to destroy the symbol of the vision-flight.”

“The understanding,” Bacon writes in his Novum Organum, “must not be supplied with wings, but rather hung with weights to keep it from leaping and flying.” And so, Roszak says, “A society that decides it must keep its thinking ‘down to earth’ is a society that begins taking the phenomenon of gravity seriously.” Religious thought in the 16th and 17th centuries is traced to this “obsession with human fallenness” and the resulting “degradation before God” with the soul taking on “an impossible weight of sin.” This in turn led to a parting of ways between “spiritual and natural” discourses. Scientists took up the discussion of gravity as a physical force without spiritual connotations, “they cut the natural phenomenon away from its primordial religious connection,” while Christianity wallowed in human fallenness and sloshed through a veil of tears. “In the new science, there was to be no trace of sacredness left in nature.” And in Christianity, no trace of nature left in sacredness.

“With Newton’s speculation on gravity, we are at the beginning of a natural philosophy grounded in alienation,” says Roszak, “the measure of alienation being the degree to which the symbols used by culture to achieve understanding have been emptied of their transcendent energy.”

Occult Properties

The objectification by Newton of gravity, defining an unseen force acting at a distance, raised one question that even he could not answer. The cause of gravity Newton admitted, “I do not pretend to know.” Critics who accepted his mathematics still accused him of inventing “occult properties.” Roszak points out that “to objectify gravity was to separate it from the experience that had always provided its meaning.” This symbolic disconnect “made scientific discussion of gravity strangely abstract.”

Primitive peoples, on the other hand, who were “acquainted with mana” had no difficulty “grasping the idea of a force that acts magically at a distance; though of course they would translate the idea into a religious experience, an action of the divine. That would carry the idea of force back to its root meaning.” Newton’s colleagues “being objective in their approach to nature, could no more find the root meaning of force than they could of gravity.” After much dispute and charges of obscurantism by Newton’s critics, gravity was left as “a measurable behavior of things.”

“In effect,” Roszak says, “this was to leave the key concepts of ‘gravity’ and ‘force’ suspended in a vacuum of abstraction. The only experiences that could restore their original meaning to these words lay on a transcendent level which was no longer in the repertory of western consciousness. So the terms finish as mere words tenuously linked to mathematical formulations.”

The Newtonian Phantasm

Roszak goes on to contend that objectivity required Newton to “strip his scientific vocabulary of its symbolic resonance.” This meant discarding animistic or visionary terms that lent “transcendent meanings to natural phenomenon.” The expected result, however, was not “to make nature more physically real.” In fact, the materialism that followed such scientific stripping of root meanings was “remarkably abstract” and “more an idea than an experience.” Newton never talks about the actual feeling of gravity, just the relationship between bodies and a force that’s out there, turned away “from human participation” and hence alienated from the human organism; “anti-organic” and “anti-symbolic.” Not till three centuries after Newton “do we learn from our astronauts that gravity is as much in the body as oxygen is in the lungs and bloodstream.”

“This astonishing neglect of the organic phenomenology of geotaxis,” Roszak says, “happens not because there is nothing there of importance to learn. Modern dance (especially the work of Martha Graham) and Structural Integration therapy (the work of Ida Rolf) have made extensive explorations of gravitational dynamics within the body. Along these lines, we arrive at a deep physical knowledge of gravity that scientific empiricism has wholly ignored.” And in ignoring such physical knowledge, science has reduced basic symbols such as the vision-flight, “which undergirds all thought about gravity and levity,” to subjective unreality. It also reduces our ancestors, the inventors language, to people who “clearly did not know what they were talking about.”

“Meanwhile,” Roszak asserts, “as this self-congratulatory ethnocentrism makes a shambles of human culture, inevitably a philosophy and literature of despair grows up which has but one sad message to deliver. ‘Very well: if the Old Gnosis is meaningless, then life is meaningless.’” Which results in “ontological priorities” and the world itself being turned on its head as cultural repertories are secularized. “The shamanic vision-flight becomes an illusion; the airplane becomes the real thing.” Symbol becomes separated from “transcendent experience” and hence dies, becoming no more than a “well-embalmed corpse,” all the more “grotesque the more it is painted to imitate life.” This, Roszak says, “is what it means, most basically, to charge science with being reductionistic.” But he concedes, “This ghoulish project cannot be blamed on science. That would be to mistake symptom for cause.” The practice of science “is what passes for natural philosophy in a culture that has collectively lost its sense of transcendent symbolism. It is our peculiar, crippled effort to understand nature as best we can by way of the lifeless symbols we inherit.”

Seeing and “Seeing”

This final section of Roszak’s essay can almost (but not quite) be summarized by the quotations it contains.

“All spiritual facts,” said Emerson, “are represented by natural symbols.”

. . . then and there my mind had exercised
Upon the vulgar forms of present things,
The actual world of our familiar days,
Yet higher power . . .
–Wordsworth

“There may be,” Goethe said, “a difference between seeing and seeing; so that the eyes of the spirit have to work in perpetual connection with those of the body.”

Also from Goethe: “Nature speaks to other senses – to known, misunderstood, and unknown senses. So speaks she with herself and to us in a thousand modes. To the attentive observer she is nowhere dead or silent.”

Roszak returns to the skylark as “a symbol of the vision-flight” which is not only “an object perceived,” but also “an occasion for the experience which generates the symbol.” Symbolic transformations of objects in nature give them a transparency through which one may look, as through a window, for deeper meanings. “Where the visionary power is robust, such symbols can appear anywhere . . . all nature can become a script of root meaning wherein everything is simultaneously ordinary and sacred, at once itself and yet invitingly transparent.

Don Juan tells Carlos that learning to see reveals a new world, one which has always been there, one in which things can be perceived as either ordinary or non-ordinary, but one in which you “see them for what they really are.” All things in nature, even the works of humanity, “are symbolic doorways that invite imagination through to high experience.” But alas, “there has occurred in our culture –
 peculiarly – a strange and tragic process: a densification of the symbols, by which they lose their subtle nature.”

“We are indeed like the prisoners in Plato’s cave,” says Roszak, “transfixed by the shadows we see, sealed off from the sunlight. Even to mention the notion of transcendent correspondence would perhaps sound mystical in the most outlandish sense to the great majority of people in our society.” As a plant is a real thing for a botanist, it is also a “choreography of symbolic gestures,” a process of “growth, fertilization, flowering, and decay,” all of which “are locked together hierarchically” beyond the dichotomy of ‘in here’ and ‘out there.’ Everything is subjective, in other words, but because our “orthodox consciousness has become objectified (alienated) to the point of freakishness, there is much misunderstanding of what it means to ‘overcome the subject/object dichotomy.’”

Other books by Daniel C. Noel

The Soul of Shamanism: Western Fantasies, Imaginal Realities
Paths to the Power of Myth: Joseph Campbell and the Study of Religion
Approaching Earth: A Search for the Mythic Significance of the Space Age
Echoes of the Wordless ‘Word’: Colloquy in Honor of Stanley Romaine Hopper

• 25th Anniversary Update
• A Critical Bibliography of Carlos Castaneda
• An Interview with Daniel C. Noel by Sandy McIntosh
• Richard deMille, Castaneda’s Journey. Capra Press (1976)
• Early Book Inconsistencies