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Author: Keith Thompson

Literary agents are paid to hype their clients, but when the agent for Carlos Castaneda claimed that he was offering me "the interview of a lifetime," it was hard to disagree. After all, Castaneda's nine best-selling books describing his extraordinary apprenticeship to Yaqui Indian sorcerer don Juan Matus had inspired countless members of my generation to explore mysticism, psychedelic drugs, and new levels of consciousness. Yet even as his reputation grew, the author had remained a recluse, shrouding himself in mystery and intrigue. Aside from a few interviews given seemingly at random over the years, Castaneda never ventured into the public spotlight. Few people even know what he looks like. For this interview, his agent told me, there could be no cameras and no tape recorders. The conversation would have to be recorded by a stenographer, lest copies of Castaneda's taped voice fall into the wrong hands.

The interview — perhaps timed to coincide with the publication of Castaneda's latest and most esoteric book, The Art of Dreaming — took place in the conference room of a modest office in Los Angeles, after weeks of back-and-forth negotiations with Castaneda's agent. The arrangements were complicated, the agent said, by the fact that he had no way of contacting his client and could only confirm a meeting after speaking with him "whenever he decides to call . . . I never know in advance when that may be." Upon my arrival at noon, an energetic, enthusiastic, broad- smiled man walked across the room, extended his hand, and greeted me unassumingly: "Hello, I am Carlos Castaneda. Welcome. We can begin our conversation when you are ready. Would you like coffee, or perhaps a soda? Please make yourself comfortable." I had heard that Castaneda blends into the woodwork, or resembles a Cuban waiter; that his features are both European and Indian; that his skin is nut-brown or bronze; that his hair is black, thick, and curly. So much for rumor. His mane is now white, or largely so, short and mildly disheveled. If asked to guide a police artist in making a sketch, I would emphasize the eyes — large, bright, lucid. They may have been gray.

I asked Castaneda about his schedule. "The entire afternoon is available. I should think we'll have all the time we need. When it's enough, we'll know." Our conversation lasted four hours, continuing through a meal of deli sandwiches that arrived midway.

My first exposure to Castaneda's work had been as much initiation as introduction. It was 1968. Police officers were clubbing demonstrators in the streets of Chicago. Assassins had taken Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Aretha Franklin's "Chain of Fools" topped the charts. All of this amidst an ocean of sandals, embroidered caftans, bell-bottoms, jangling bracelets, beads, and long hair for men and women alike.

Into all this stepped an enigmatic writer named Carlos Castaneda, toting a book called The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. I remember how it transformed me. The book I began reading was a curiosity; the book I held when I finished had become a manifesto, the kind of delirious cause celebre for which my psyche had been secretly training. What Castaneda seemed to be affirming — the possibility of awesome personal spiritual experience — was precisely what the Sunday-morning-only religion of my childhood had done its best to vaccinate me against.

Believing in Castaneda gave me faith that someday, some way, I might meet my very own don Juan Matus (don is a Spanish appellative denoting respect), the old Indian wise man/sorcerer who implores his protg Carlos to get beyond looking — simply perceiving the world in its usually accepted forms. To be a true "man of knowledge," Carlos has to learn the art of seeing, so that for the first time he can truly perceive the startling nature of the everyday world. "When you see," don Juan says, "there are no longer familiar features in the world. Everything is new. Everything has never happened before. The world is incredible!" But, really — who was this Castaneda? Where did he come from and what was he trying to prove, with his mysterious account of a realm that seemed to be of an entirely different order of reality?

Over the years, various answers to that question have been offered. Take your pick: (a) dissenting anthropologist; (b) sorcerer's apprentice; (c) psychic visionary; (d) literary genius; (e) original philosopher; (f) master teacher. For balance, let's not forget (g) perpetrator of one of the most spectacular hoaxes in the history of publishing.

Castaneda has responded to the bestowal of these conflicting ID tags with something like ironic amusement, as though he were an audience member enjoying the spectacle of a Chekhov comedy in which he himself may or may not be a character. The author has consistently declined — over a span of nearly three decades — to engage in the war of words about whether his books are authentic accounts of real-world encounters, as he maintains, or (as numerous critics have argued) fictional allegories in the spirit of Gulliver's Travels and Alice in Wonderland.

This strategic reticence was learned from don Juan himself. "To slip in and out of different worlds you have to remain inconspicuous," says Castaneda, who is rumored (his preferred status) to divide his time nowadays between Los Angeles, Arizona, and Mexico. "The more you are identified by people's ideas of who you are and how you will act, the greater the constraint on your freedom. Don Juan insisted upon the importance of erasing personal history. If little by little you create a fog around yourself, then you will not be taken for granted, and you will have more room for change." Even so, scattered clearings in the fog offer glimpses of tracks left by the sorcerer's apprentice in the years before his life faded to myth.

The scholarly consensus, unconfirmed by the author himself, is that Carlos Cesar Arana Castaneda was born in Peru on Christmas day 1925 in the historic Andean town of Cajamarca. Upon graduating from the Colegio Nacional de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe, he studied briefly at the National Fine Arts School of Peru. In 1948 his family moved to Lima and established a jewelry store. After the death of his mother a year later, Castaneda moved to San Francisco and soon enrolled at Los Angeles City College, where he took two courses in creative writing and one in journalism.

Castaneda received a B.A. in anthropology in 1962 from the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1968, five years before Castaneda received his Ph.D. in anthropology, the University of California Press published The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, which became a national best seller following an enthusiastic notice by Roger Jellinek in the New York Times Book Review: "One can't exaggerate the significance of what Castaneda has done. He is describing a shamanistic tradition, a pre-logical cultural form that is no-one-knows how old. It has been described often. . . . But it seems that no other outsider, and certainly not a 'Westerner,' has ever participated in its mysteries from within; nor has anyone described them so well." The fuse was lit. The Teachings sold 300,000 copies in a 1969 Ballantine mass edition. A Separate Reality and Journey to Ixtlan followed from Simon & Schuster in 1971 and 1972. The saga continued in Tales of Power (1974), The Second Ring of Power (1977), The Eagle's Gift (1981), The Fire from Within (1984), The Power of Silence (1987), and The Art of Dreaming (1993). (Bibliophiles may be interested to learn that Castaneda says he actually wrote a book about don Juan before The Teachings, titled The Crack Between Worlds, but lost the manuscript in a movie theater.) In assessing the impact of his work, Castaneda's admirers credit him with introducing to popular culture the rich and varied traditions of shamanism, with their emphasis on entering nonordinary realms and confronting strange and sometimes hostile spirit-powers, in order to restore balance and harmony to body, soul, and society. Inspired by don Juan's use of peyote, jimsonweed, and other power plants to teach Castaneda the "art of dreaming," untold numbers of pioneers extended their own inner horizons through psychedelic inquiry — with decidedly mixed results.

For their part, critics of Castaneda's "path of knowledge" dismiss his work as an ongoing pseudo-anthropological shenanigan, complete with fabricated shamans and sensationalized Native American religious practices. The writings, they claim, have netted an unscrupulous author tremendous wealth at the cost of denigrating the sacred lifeways of indigenous peoples through commercial exploitation. Castaneda's presentation, writes Richard de Mille in Castaneda's Journey, "appeals to the reader's hunger for myth, magic, ancient wisdom, true reality, self-improvement, other worlds, or imaginary playmates." Appropriately, the Castaneda I encountered was a study in contrasts. His presence was informal, spontaneous, warmly animated, and at times contagiously mirthful. At the same time, his still heavily accented (Peruvian? Chilean? Spanish?) diction conveyed the patrician formality of an ambassador at court: deliberate and well-composed, serious and poised, earnest and resolute. Practiced.

The contradiction, like so much about the man, may strike some as a bothersome inconsistency. But it shouldn't. To reread Carlos Castaneda's books (as I did, astonishingly, all nine of them) is to see clearly — perhaps for the first time — that contradiction is the force that ties his literary Gordian knot. As the author had told me, intently, during our lunch break: "Only by pitting two views against each other can one weasel between them to arrive at the real world." I had the sense he was letting me know his fortress was well guarded — and daring me to storm it anyway.

Keith Thompson: As your books have made a character named Carlos world-famous, the author called Castaneda has retreated further and further from public view. There have been more confirmed sightings of Elvis than of Carlos Castaneda in recent years. Legend has you committing suicide on at least three occasions; there's the persistent story of your death in a Mexican bus crash two decades ago; and my search for a confirmed photo and audio tapes was fruitless. How can I be sure that you're truly Castaneda and not a Carlos impersonator from Vegas? Have you got any distinguishing birthmarks?

Carlos Castaneda: None! Just my agent vouches for me. That's his job. But you are free to ask me your questions and shine a bright light in my eyes and keep me here all night — like in the old movies.

You're known for being unknown. Why have you agreed to talk now, after declining interviews for so many years?

Because I'm at the end of the trail that started over thirty years ago. As a young anthropologist, I went to the Southwest to collect information, to do fieldwork on the medicinal plants used by the Indians of the area. I intended to write an article, go on to graduate school, become a professional in my field. I hadn't the slightest interest in meeting a weird man like don Juan.

How exactly did your paths cross?

I was waiting for the bus at the Greyhound station in Nogales, Arizona, talking with an anthropologist who had been my guide and helper in my survey. My colleague leaned over and pointed to a white-haired old Indian across the room — "Psst, over there, don't let him see you looking" — and said he was an expert about peyote and medicinal plants. That was all I needed to hear. I put on my best airs and sauntered over to this man, who was known as don Juan, and told him I myself was an authority about peyote. I said that it might be worth his while to have lunch and talk with me — or something unbearably arrogant to that effect.

The old power-lunch ploy. But you weren't really much of an authority, were you?

I knew next to nothing about peyote! But I continued rattling on — boasting about my knowledge, intending to impress him. I remember that he just looked at me and nodded occasionally, without saying a word. My pretensions melted in the heat of that day. I was stunned at being silenced. There I stood in the abyss, until don Juan saw that his bus had come. He said good- bye, with the slightest wave of his hand. I felt like an arrogant imbecile, and that was the end.

Also the beginning.

Yes, that's when everything started. I learned that don Juan was known as a brujo, which means, in English, medicine man, curer, sorcerer. It became my task to discover where he lived. You know, I was very good at doing that, and I did. I found out, and I came to see him one day. We took a liking to each other and soon became good friends.

You felt like a moron in this man's presence, but you were eager to seek him out?

The way don Juan had looked at me there in the bus station was exceptional — an unprecedented event in my life. There was something remarkable about his eyes, which seemed to shine with a light all their own. You see, we are — unfortunately we don't want to accept this, but we are apes, anthropoids, simians. There's a primary knowledge that we all carry, directly connected with the two-million-year-old person at the root of our brain. And we do our best to suppress it, which makes us obese, cardiac, cancer-prone. It was on that archaic level that I was tackled by don Juan's gaze, despite my annoyance and irritation that he had seen through my pretense to expertise in the bus station.

Eventually you became don Juan's apprentice, and he your mentor. What was the transition?

A year passed before he took me into his confidence. We had gotten to know each other quite well, when one day don Juan turned to me and said he held a certain knowledge that he had learned from an unnamed benefactor, who had led him through a kind of training. He used this word "knowledge" more often than "sorcery," but for him they were one and the same. Don Juan said he had chosen me to serve as his apprentice, but that I must be prepared for a long and difficult road. I had no idea how astonishingly strange the road would be.

That's a consistent thread of your books — your struggle to make sense of a "separate reality" where gnats stand a hundred feet tall, where human heads turn into crows, where the same leaf falls four times, where sorcerers conjure cars to disappear in broad daylight. A good stage hypnotist can produce astonishing effects. Is it possible that's what don Juan was up to? Did he trick you?

It's possible. What he did was teach me that there's much more to the world than we usually acknowledge — that our normal expectations about reality are created by social consensus, which is itself a trick. We're taught to see and understand the world through a socialization process that, when working correctly, convinces us that the interpretations we agree upon define the limits of the real world. Don Juan interrupted this process in my life by demonstrating that we have the capacity to enter into other worlds that are constant and independent of our highly conditioned awareness. Sorcery involves reprogramming our capacities to perceive realms as real, unique, absolute, and engulfing as our daily so-called mundane world.

Don Juan is always trying to get you to put your explanations of reality and your assumptions about what's possible inside brackets, so you can see how arbitrary they are. Contemporary philosophers would call this "deconstructing" reality.

Don Juan had a visceral understanding of the way language works as a system unto itself — the way it generates pictures of reality that we believe, mistakenly, to reveal the "true" nature of things. His teachings were like a club beating my thick head until I saw that my precious view was actually a construction, woven of all kinds of fixated interpretations, which I used to defend myself against pure wondering perception.

There's a contradiction in there, somewhere. On the one hand, don Juan desocialized you, by teaching you to see without preconceptions. Yet it sounds like he then resocialized you by enrolling you in a new set of meanings, simply giving you a different interpretation, a new spin on reality — albeit a "magical" one.

That's something don Juan and I argued about all the time. He said in effect that he was despinning me and I maintained he was respinning me. By teaching me sorcery he presented a new lens, a new language, and a new way of seeing and being in the world. I was caught between my previous certainty about the world and a new description, sorcery, and forced to hold the old and the new together. I felt completely stalled, like a car slipping its transmission. Don Juan was delighted. He said this meant I was slipping between descriptions of reality — between my old and new views.

Eventually I saw that all my prior assumptions were based on viewing the world as something from which I was essentially alienated. That day when I encountered don Juan in the bus station, I was the ideal academic, triumphantly estranged, conniving to prove my nonexistent expertise concerning psychotropic plants.

Ironically, it was don Juan who later introduced you to "Mescalito," the green-skinned spirit of peyote.

Don Juan introduced me to psychotropic plants in the middle period of my apprenticeship, because I was so stupid and so cocky, which of course I considered evidence of sophistication. I held to my conventional description of the world with incredible vengeance, convinced it was the only truth. Peyote served to exaggerate the subtle contradictions within my interpretative gloss, and this helped me cut through the typical Western stance of seeing a world out there and talking to myself about it. But the psychotropic approach had its costs — physical and emotional exhaustion. It took months for me to come fully around.

If you could do it over again, would you "just say no"?

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.

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.

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.

Some of your critics grow quite livid in their contention that Juan Matus sometimes speaks more like an Oxford don than a don Indian. Then there's the fact that he traveled widely and acquired his knowledge from sources not limited to his Yaqui roots.

Permit me to make a confession: I take much delight in the idea that don Juan may not be the "best" don Juan. It's probably true that I'm not the best Carlos Castaneda, either. Years ago I met the perfect Castaneda at a party in Sausalito, quite by accident. There, in the middle of the patio, was the most handsome man, tall, blond, blue-eyed, beautiful, barefoot. It was the early '70s. He was signing books, and the owner of the house said to me, "I'd like you to meet Carlos Castaneda." He was impersonating Carlos Castaneda, with an impressive coterie of beautiful women all around him. I said, "I am very pleased to meet you, Mister Castaneda." He responded, "Doctor Castaneda." He was doing a very good job. I thought, He presents a good way to be Castaneda, the ideal Castaneda, with all the benefits that go with the position. But time passes, and I'm still the Castaneda that I am, not very well suited to play the Hollywood version. Nor is don Juan.

Speaking of confessions: Did you ever contemplate downplaying the eccentricity of your teacher and presenting him as a more conventional character, to make him a better vehicle for his teachings?

I never considered such an approach. Smoothing rough edges to advance an agreeable plot is the luxury of the novelist. I'm not unfamiliar with the spoken and unspoken canon of science: "Be objective." Sometimes don Juan spoke in goofy slang — the equivalent of "By golly!" and "Don't lose your marbles!" are two of his favorites. On other occasions he showed a superb command of Spanish, which permitted me to obtain detailed explanations of the intricate meanings of his system of beliefs and its underlying logic. To deliberately alter don Juan in my books so he would appear consistent and meet the expectations of this or that audience would bring "subjectivity" to my work, a demon that, according to my best critics, has no place in ethnographic writing.

Skeptics have challenged you to exorcise that demon once and for all, by presenting for public inspection the field notes based on your encounters with don Juan. Wouldn't that alleviate doubts about whether your writings are genuine ethnography or disguised fiction?

Whose doubts?

Fellow anthropologists, for starters.

The Senate Watergate Committee. Geraldo Rivera . . .

There was a time when requests to see my field notes seemed unencumbered by hidden ideological agendas. After The Teachings of Don Juan appeared I received a thoughtful letter from Gordon Wasson, the founder of the science of ethnomycology, the study of human uses of mushrooms and other fungi. Gordon and Valentina Wasson had discovered the existence of still-active shamanic mushroom cults in the mountains near Oaxaca, Mexico. Dr. Wasson asked me to clarify certain aspects of don Juan's use of psychotropic mushrooms. I gladly sent him several pages of field notes relevant to his area of interest, and met with him twice. Subsequently he referred to me as an "honest and serious young man," or words to that effect.

Even so, some critics proceeded to assert that any field notes produced by Castaneda must be assumed to be forgeries created after the fact. At that point I realized there was no way I could satisfy people whose minds were made up without recourse to whatever documentation I might provide. Actually, it was liberating to abandon the enterprise of public relations — intrinsically a violation of my nature — and return to my fieldwork with don Juan.

You must be familiar with the claim that your work has fostered the trivialization of indigenous spiritual traditions. The argument goes like this: A despicable cadre of non-Indian wannabees, commercial profiteers, and self-styled shamans has read your books and found them inspiring. How do you plead?

I didn't set out to write an exhaustive account of indigenous spirituality, so it's a fallacy to judge my work by that criterion. My books are instead a chronicle of specific experiences and observations in a particular context, reported to the best of my ability. But I do plead guilty to knowingly committing willful acts of ethnography, which is none other than translating cultural experience into writing. Ethnography is always writing. That's what I do. What happens when spoken words become written words, and written words become published words, and published words get ingested through acts of reading by persons unknown to the author? Let's agree to call it complex. I've been extremely fortunate to have a wide and diverse readership throughout much of the world. The entry requirement is the same everywhere: literacy. Beyond this, I'm responsible for the virtues and vices of my anonymous audience in the same way that every writer of any time and place is so responsible. The main thing is, I stand by my work.

What does don Juan think of your global notoriety?

Nada. Not a thing. I learned this definitively when I took him a copy of The Teachings of Don Juan. I said, "It's about you, don Juan." He surveyed the book — up and down, back and front, flipped through the pages like a deck of cards — then handed it back. I was crestfallen and told him I wanted him to have it as a gift. Don Juan said he had better not accept it, "because you know what we do with paper in Mexico." He added, "Tell your publisher to print your next book on softer stock." Earlier you mentioned that don Juan deliberately made his teaching dramatic. Your writings reflect that. Much anthropological writing gives the impression of striving for dullness, as if banality were a mark of truth.

To have made my astonishing adventures with don Juan boring would have been to lie. It has taken me many years to appreciate the fact that don Juan is a master of using frustration, digression, and partial disclosure as methods of instruction. He strategically blended revelation and concealment in the oddest combinations. It was his style to assert that ordinary and nonordinary reality aren't separate, but instead are encompassed in a larger circle — and then to reverse himself the next day by insisting that the line between different realities must be respected at all costs. I asked him why this must be so. He answered, "Because nothing is more important to you than keeping your personal world intact." He was right. That was my top priority in the early days of the apprenticeship. Eventually I saw — I saw — that the path of the heart requires a full gesture, a degree of abandon that can be terrifying. Only then is it possible to achieve a sparkling metamorphosis.

I also realized the extent to which the teachings of don Juan could and would be dismissed as "mere allegory" by certain specialists whose sacramental mission is to reinforce the limits that culture and language place on perception.

This approaches the question of who gets to define "correct" cultural description. Nowadays some of Margaret Mead's critics declare she was "wrong" about Samoa. But why not say, less dogmatically, that her writings present a partial picture based on a unique encounter with an exotic culture? Obviously her discoveries mirrored the concerns of her time, including her own biases. Who has the authority to cordon off art from science?

The assumption that art, magic, and science can't exist in the same space at the same time is an obsolete remnant of Aristotelian philosophical categories. We've got to get beyond this kind of nostalgia in the social science of the twenty-first century. Even the term ethnography is too monolithic, because it implies that writing about other cultures is an activity specific to anthropology, whereas in fact ethnography cuts across various disciplines and genres. Furthermore, even the ethnographer isn't monolithic — he or she must be reflexive and multifaceted, just like the cultural phenomena that are encountered as "other." So the observer, the observed phenomenon, and the process of observation form an inseparable totality. From that perspective, reality isn't simply received, it's actively captured and rendered in different ways by different observers with different ways of seeing.

Just so. What sorcery comes down to is the act of embodying some specialized theoretical and practical premises about the nature of perception in molding the universe around us. It took me a long time to understand, intuitively, that there were three Castanedas: one who observed don Juan, the man and teacher; another who was the active subject of don Juan's training — the apprentice; and still another who chronicled the adventures. "Three" is a metaphor to describe the sensation of endlessly changing boundaries. Likewise, don Juan himself was constantly shifting positions. Together we were traversing the crack between the natural world of everyday life and an unseen world, which don Juan called "the second attention," a term he preferred to "supernatural." What you're describing isn't what comes to mind for most anthropologists when they think about their line of work, you know.

Oh, I'm certain you're right about that! Someone recently asked me, What does mainstream anthropology think of Carlos Castaneda? I don't suppose most of them think about me at all. A few may be a little bit annoyed, but they're sure that whatever I'm doing is not scientific and they don't trouble themselves. For most of the field, "anthropological possibility" means that you go to an exotic land, arrive at a hotel, drink your highball while a flock of indigenous people come and talk to you about the culture. They tell you all kinds of things, and you write down the various words for father and mother. More highballs, then you go home and put it all in your computer and tabulate for correlations and differences. That to them is scientific anthropology. For me, that would be living hell.

How do you actually write?

My conversations with don Juan throughout the apprenticeship were conducted primarily in Spanish. From the outset I tried to persuade don Juan to let me use a tape recorder, but he said relying on something mechanical only makes us more and more sterile. "It curtails your magic," he said. "Better to learn with your whole body so you'll remember with your whole body." I had no idea what he meant. Consequently I began keeping voluminous field notes of what he said. He found my industriousness amusing. As for my books, I dream them. I gather myself and my field notes — usually in the afternoon but not always — and go through all my notes and translate them into English. In the evening I sleep and dream what I want to write. When I wake up, I write in the quiet hours of the night, drawing upon what has arranged itself coherently in my head.

Do you rewrite?

It's not my practice to do so. Regular writing is for me quite dry and labored. Dreaming is best. Much of my training with don Juan was in reconditioning perception to sustain dream images long enough to look at them carefully. Don Juan was right about the tape recorder — and in retrospect, right about the notes. They were my crutch, and I no longer need them. By the end of my time with don Juan, I learned to listen and watch and sense and recall in all the cells of my body.

Earlier you mentioned reaching the end of the road, and now you're talking about the end of your time with don Juan. Where is he now?

He's gone. He disappeared.

Without a clue?

Don Juan told me he was going to fulfill the sorcerer's dream of leaving this world and entering into "unimaginable dimensions." He displaced his assemblage point from its fixation in the conventional human world. We would call it combusting from the inside. It's an alternative to dying. Either they bury you six feet deep in the poor flowers or you burn. Don Juan chose burning.

I guess it's one way to erase personal history. Then this conversation is don Juan's obituary notice?

He had come to the end, deliberately. By intent. He wanted to expand, to join his physical body with his energy body. His adventure was there, where the tiny personal tide pool joins the great ocean. He called it the "definitive journey." Such vastness is incomprehensible to my mind, so I can only give up explaining. I've found that the explanatory principle will protect you from fear of the unknown, but I prefer the unknown.

You've traveled far and wide. Give it to me straight: Is reality ultimately a safe place?

I once asked don Juan something quite similar. We were alone in the desert — nighttime, billions of stars. He laughed in a friendly and genuine way. He said, "Sure, the universe is benign. It may destroy you, but in the process it will teach you something worth knowing." What's next for Carlos Castaneda?

I'll have to let you know. Next time.

Will there be a next time?

There's always a next time.

*************************************** An exclusive interview with three if the female warriors of Carlos Castaneda's sorcery lineage Florinda, Donner-Grau, Taisha Abelar, and Carol Tiggs interview by Keith Nichols.

It's been over twenty years since Carlos Castaneda began igniting his readers' imaginations about the possibility of viewing reality differently. Today, American seekers are involved in a magical blend of religious practices aimed at the same thing from Zen Buddhism to Yoga to herbal remedies and even Wicca and spiritualism. Yet questions still remain from the intensive searching of the last several decades, such as when are we going to get free, anyway? And how do we explain the inexplicable?

These were the questions on my mind when I found myself journeying down the coast toward Los Angeles for an encounter with three women of Castaneda's sorcery lineage: Florinda Donner Grau, Taisha Abelar, and Carol Tiggs.

When Florinda Donner-Grau and I first met, she told me about an encounter that serves well to explain the threshold that many people have already encountered. As she walked down the streets in downtown Los Angeles, she saw a floating blob of energy. As she watched it bounce up and down the street, she was a little unsure about her senses. She tugged on the shoulder of a man standing nearby whose mouth was open wide in a state of disbelief—or maybe bewilderment. She saw that he too was looking at the blob.

As a sorcerer, Donner-Grau is aware that reality is largely perception and that what we choose to perceive and not to perceive is based on our training. So perhaps the man in L.A. represents a sort of graduation in the school of larger possibilities, a generation prepared by Castaneda and others to perceive subtler energies.

With the recent publication of Castaneda's ninth book, as well as books by Florinda Donner-Grau and Taisha Abelar, Carlos Castaneda's sorcerers party has evolved into seems to beckon forth that this reality is not the only one; others do exist into which we can transcend.

Why are the women of this lineage just beginning to come out and speak about their practices?

Florinda Donner-Grau: Well, there is a fundamental difference in the way males and females perceive and respond to reality. Females, such as Taisha, Carol, and I, didn't write about anything for twenty years. This is the fundamental difference: females need to embody a system of belief before they can write about it. While males build their bridges of understanding with words, women build their understanding with their life. Both are equally valid ways of understanding, yet they are very different ways of processing life.

In terms of energy the male cones toward knowledge; he builds step by step. In physics, this stepping can be described like a cone, where males are always moving toward a source but never reaching it. With females, it is different because that cone is reversed. Because of the womb, females have the capacity to perceive knowledge directly. There is no reason for her to explain because she already knows. And it is this knowingness, this experience of being connected with the source-what we call Intent-that sorcerers want to get back to. Females have an inherent advantage in that they know Intent directly, while the male is always approaching it.

What is the purpose of being connected with this source, Intent?

Florinda Donner-Grau: Well, I'll tell you a story. I love books; I'm an avid reader. Now Carlos hasn't read a book in over twenty years. I know that because he gave all his books to me. Now I'm very interested in phenomenology because as an intellectual pursuit, it is the only one that comes close to sorcery. Well, I'll be reading something and then I'll ask Carlos a question. He'll be quiet for about ten minutes and then he'll give me an explanation of exactly what I have been reading. At that point, I know that he's been out there grabbing that knowledge from elsewhere. And this ability has no limitation; I can ask him something about physics and he immediately gives me a bonafide answer.

How would you describe what he is doing?

Carol Tiggs: I would say that he is practicing dreaming, which is a way of describing that he is using his energetic body to grab hold of a line of energy and access information directly from the source of the universe.

Florinda Donner-Grau: And Carlos knows exactly what line to grab. Seers see that it is all out there anyway. But what makes a capable sorcerer is the ability to access these lines of information with control and at will. Recently, Carlos took a group of twenty people to a small church in Mexico (written about in several of his books). While in the church, he took the whole group into a state of dreaming and journeyed into another world.

How does one learn how to do this?

Florinda Donner-Grau: It's all a matter of having enough energy to be able to see. We're all so consumed by the everydayness of life that we simply don't have any energy left over to see.

How do people use daily life to begin to find where they are draining themselves energetically?

Carol Tiggs: When you look back over your workday, one of the clues to where you lost your energy is where you began to feel tired and not energetically yourself. Those places are where you'll find your answers and start to develop some perspective-and you'll be able to begin to pull back your energy from these events and begin to start examining the patterns that keep you stuck within the ego game of hero and victim.

Is this process different for the males and the females?

Florinda Donner-Grau: The process isn't any different. When you recapitulate, you take yourself back and recreate every event as it happened. Once you have the energy, this happens automatically and you don't have to reach it through any shamanistic means, such as fasting and so on. You can begin any day and start from that day and move backwards. I've done four recapitulations of my entire life to date and I find something new each time. And what I find is that not directly but indirectly we always try to be the hero ourselves.

At some of the lectures we have given, people are always taking notes and I find myself saying to them, "No, don't take notes, because those things are meaningless. Just listen." All of their energy is gong into taking notes and they're missing half of what is really going on.

Taisha Abelar: We constantly hear people say, If only I was a part of your group, then I could do this or that. But what they don't understand is that wherever you are, that is where you start.

Carol Tiggs: Sorcery is really just perception. There are no rituals, no dancing, no nothing. Just perception and some techniques to enhance perception through gathering up of oneself energetically. There are aids, such as not-doing techniques.

Taisha Abelar: Or just watching your thoughts and hearing what you are really thinking. You can learn a lot by doing that.

Carol Tiggs: What I've found is that people generally fall into one of two categories: either they have to be in control or they are being controlled by something else. When you come from these two scenarios, you generally aren't perceiving your life clearly. By recapitulating you light up in your awareness exactly the energies (or reality) that was constructed so that you can begin to perceive the patterns and programming that control you.

Taisha Abelar: When you begin to clearly see the social patterns that control you, you start to move into stalking yourself. This is where you can become an active participant in life. Suddenly your boss is no longer that evil, horrible controller that he once was. Instead he becomes a mirror by which you start to see where you are trapped into the games of this reality. These games are what consume or tie up people's energy and keep them from perceiving the true energetic nature of this reality.

When you move away from the consensus of everyday life, you can allow the Intent or the dream that has been set up by Intent to become the moving force, the guide.

Florinda Donner-Grau: To do this you have to relinquish this feeling of having to be the one in control. But believe me, even after you have recapitulated, you still have that feeling that you have this one little area over here and that once you get to it, then you will be the one who is in charge.

Let's get back to the ways in which males and females perceive. If females perceive directly, then why aren't most females walking around steeped in understanding or knowingness of Intent?

Florinda Donner-Grau: Males have an energetic advantage in the physical world. Though the male cone shape configuration of energy makes perceiving the source of Intent more difficult, it is ideal for being able to work stronger in the physical world . There is no way for females to compete against that energetic advantage as long as they are imitating roles that males have created. Instead we as females have to find our own resources and break this cycle of imitation so that we can truly begin to evolve into something different.

What is that evolvement?

Carol Tiggs: To tell you the truth, I really don't know. What is our Intent as we evolve and what does this evolvement entail? For female sorcerers, part of this comes into enhancing the secondary functions of our wombs, which are the dreaming organs in the female body. And we do this by recapitulating, breaking old patterns, gathering up our energy, so that we can begin to dream a new dream.

Taisha Abelar: Whatever has happened to us-and something has happened-we hope to convey to younger people that change is possible. But there has to be some kind of critical mass to make this change possible.

Florinda Donner-Grau: When you go against the enormous consensus that constitutes everyday reality, you are pounding against a stone wall. When sorcerers enter into dreaming, the first thing they will usually encounter is a bank of fog. When you see this fog you are pulling at something else energetically.

ln a way, sorcery is like Chinese Medicine in that it treats the body as if it were a field of energy. Western Medicine treats the body as if it were an object so it doesn't take advantage of the more powerful energetic reality. Consequently you have doctors cutting out matter instead of using energy to change it. Medicine, like modem man, would change dramatically if it took advantage of these energetic principles to aid in a metamorphis of current limitations and illnesses.

Carol Tiggs: What a sorcerer searches for is that evolvement within his awareness or energetic field; that moment or possibility of change into a state of being that has more wellness.

Florinda Donner-Grau: Currently there is so much invested in institutions like the A.M.A. that there is no way that they are going to change things like that. But what they are doing to the body is horrendous. They teach us that medicine has advanced, but that simply isn't true. Now we have Aids and cancer and we really don't know what the hell we are doing.

I had a young female friend who died of intestinal cancer a couple of months ago. On the outside she was living the perfect life but on the inside she was being eaten alive. You see, her husband was a president of one of those huge corporations and you wouldn't believe the pains she went through to impress people. She was killing herself to impress other people. I asked her, "If things are so bad, why didn't you seek some help?" But she said that she was worried about what people would think. I answered back, "What will they think when you are dead?" Now, she is dead, and they don't think a thing. If that is the price you are going to pay, then take off.

But that's what we do. You see, in a way, we're still monkeys. Don Juan used to tease us and say that we are like a monkey who has reached into a gourd to grab some seeds. The monkey can't get his hand out as long as he holds on to those seeds. Humans are very much the same way. Our social expectations are the seeds which consume our awareness. All the monkey would have to do to become free is to just let go of those damn seeds, but he won't. We won't let go of the seeds to get ourselves out of a trapped situation. We just can't let go.

Gary Larson drew a cartoon showing an ape who had fallen out of a tree and was laying flat on the ground. Under the drawing was the transcription: The dawn of man. The only thing he forgot to add was that the monkey had fallen onto a patch of seeds. You see, he had grabbed for the seeds; that was the real fall of man.

Magical Blend Magazine (c) 1994

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