Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan’s Teachings
The rest of the book is reached through the links here and at the end of each section.
1. The Teachings of don Juan
2. A Separate Reality
3. Journey to Ixtlan
4. Tales Of Power
5. The Second Ring of Power
6. The Eagle’s Gift
7. The Fire From Within
8. The Power of Silence
9. The Art of Dreaming
12. The Active Side of Infinity
13. Appendix A thru E
14. Dialogue on the Way of Knowledge – Part l
15. Dialogue on the Way of Knowledge – Part ll
16. Dialogue on the Way of Knowledge – Part lll
17. Dialogue on the Way of Knowledge – Part lV
18. Dialogue on the Way of Knowledge – Part V
19. Dialogue on the Way of Knowledge – Part Vl
20. Dialogue on the Way of Knowledge – Part Vll
21. Dialogue on the Way of Knowledge – Part VllI
DON JUAN
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Introduction
(taken from Carlos Castaneda’s introduction in Journey To Ixtlan, and, as I explain in the forward , done in the style I’ve used throughout this compilation: put into the form of being as though it were delivered from don Juan to each of us.)
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The basic premise of sorcery for a sorcerer is that the world of everyday life is not real, or out there, as we believe it is. For a sorcerer, reality, or the world we all know, is only a description.
For the sake of validating this premise I will concentrate the best of my efforts into leading you into a genuine conviction that what you hold in mind as the world at hand is merely a description of the world; a description that has been pounded into you from the moment you were born.
Everyone who comes into contact with a child is a teacher who incessantly describes the world to him, until the moment when the child is capable of perceiving the world as it is described. We have no memory of that portentous moment, simply because none of us could possibly have had any point of reference to compare it to anything else. From that moment on, however, the child is a member . He knows the description of the world; and his membership becomes full-fledged, perhaps, when he is capable of making all the proper perceptual interpretations which, by conforming to that description, validate it.
The reality of our day-to-day life, then, consists of an endless flow of perceptual interpretations which we, the individuals who share a specific membership, have learned to make in common.
The idea that the perceptual interpretations that make up the world have a flow is congruous with the fact that they run uninterruptedly and are rarely, if ever, open to question. In fact the reality of the world we know is so taken for granted that the basic premise of sorcery, that our reality is merely one of many descriptions, can hardly be taken as a serious proposition.
Fortunately for you, I’m not concerned at all with whether or not you can take my proposition seriously, and thus I will proceed to elucidate my points, in spite of your opposition, your disbelief, and your inability to understand what I am saying. Thus, as a teacher of sorcery, my endeavor is to describe the world to you. Your difficulty in grasping my concepts and methods will stem from the fact that the units of my description are alien and incompatible with those of your own.
I am teaching you how to see as opposed to merely looking , and stopping the world is the first step to seeing .
Stopping the world is not a cryptic metaphor that really doesn’t mean anything. And its scope and importance as one of the main propositions of my knowledge should not be misjudged.
I am teaching you how to stop the world . Nothing will work, however, if you are very stubborn. Be less stubborn, and you will probably stop the world with any of the techniques I teach you. Everything I will tell you to do is a technique for stopping the world .
The sorcerer’s description of the world is perceivable. But our insistence on holding on to our standard version of reality renders us almost deaf and blind to it. I’m going to give you what I call “techniques for stopping the world.”
When you begin this teaching, there is another reality, that is to say, there is a sorcery description of the world, which you do not know. As a sorcerer and a teacher, I am teaching you that description. What I am doing with you consists, therefore, in setting up that unknown reality by unfolding its description, adding increasingly more complex parts as you go along.
In order to arrive at seeing one first has to stop the world . Stopping the world is indeed an appropriate rendition of certain states of awareness in which the reality of everyday life is altered because the flow of interpretation, which ordinarily runs uninterruptedly, has been stopped by a set of circumstances alien to that flow. In this case the set of circumstances alien to our normal flow of interpretations is the sorcery description of the world. The precondition for stopping the world is that one has to be convinced; in other words, one has to learn the new description in a total sense, for the purpose of pitting it against the old one, and in that way break the dogmatic certainty, which we all share, that the validity of our perceptions, or our reality of the world, is not to be questioned.
After stopping the world the next step is seeing . By that I mean what could be categorized as responding to the perceptual solicitations of a world outside the description we have learned to call reality.
All these steps can only be understood in terms of the description to which they belong; a description that I’m endeavoring to give you. Let, then, this teaching be the source of entrance into that description.
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Compiler’s Thoughts on the Matter by Rick Mace
One need only to reflect for a few moments on mankind’s history in order to realize that we are mere babies it terms of geologic time at least, and I would suggest, in terms of about everything related to human development as well.
Just think, life is said to have started on earth some four billion years ago. The dinosaurs are said to have roamed the earth for around one hundred and eighty million years and then died out sixty five million years ago. We are told that the earliest humans came along a tiny one million six hundred thousand years ago and basically hung around in the bushes with each other for 399 consecutive 4000 year periods (that’s 1,596,000 years) before they even figured out how to write letters to each other. So we’ve only got this teensy-weensy 4000 years of recorded history and we couldn’t even send e-mail to each other until (oh boy, this is really a long time) about 10 years ago. We haven’t known how to make airplanes, or cars, or most anything for even one hundred years yet!
Is it any big mystery, then, why so many things are screwed up on the planet. We are a bunch of babies who don’t pay attention to that fact. And we, in our infinite wisdom, assume that we know damn near everything there is to know about how it all works in life. I mean, our level of arrogance is truly unbelievable when considered against this background of time.
Think of it another way: it’s as though we think that if someone asked us this question: “What do you, Mr. person of 1998, think that the humans who roam the earth 18 million years from now will think about our 1998 level of development?”
It’s as though we would answer that question by saying, “Oh, that’s an easy question! The humans in 18 million years will probably say, ‘1998? Yeaaaah, by that year mankind had really figured out damn near everything there was to know about human existence. Hell, things haven’t changed much in the last 18 million years in the area of what we know about being human beings. And you’re stepping on my foot, you jerk!’ They’ll probably say something like that,” we would say.
Can you not see our arrogants? Why are we so self-righteous, so foolish; and so closed to possibility when; in comes Carlos Castaneda, and he tells us he is telling the truth about a discovery of an ancient system for becoming “a man of knowledge,” and he lays it out in amazing detail; as it was presented to him by don Juan.
“But we all know he is a liar, hell, we know everything, this is 1998! We’re big now!”
“Second attention? Right! Give me a break! What a bunch of crap! This is 1998! Castaneda is a liar; we all know it, this is 1998, we know everything! And stop stepping on my god damn foot!”