Surely, many generations of human beings have experienced collectively memorable events, even some generations in very ancient times when news did not travel fast. In those ancient times, remarkable and therefore memorable events usually occurred in the form of cataclysms of nature. Earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and sudden inexplicable climatic changes; various extinction events among plants and animals; and, of course, the great human migrations of the past have left enduring marks on human culture, and through cultural assimilation, even on the consciousness and behaviour of an individual who is living hundreds, or perhaps, thousands of years after a particular memorable event. (For example, it’s not unlikely that a certain number of the approximately 86 billion neurons in my brain are constantly firing in a specific, preordained sequence as a direct and long-lasting result of the arduous migration of our species out of Africa into Eurasia, a migration that took place from about 150,000 to about 100,000 years BP.)
Closer to our own time, collectively memorable events have more often occurred in the form of cultural upheavals. My parents, for instance, who belonged to the generation that in the United States is known as the “Greatest Generation,” had the date of 24 October 1929 etched into the neural pathways of their brains. Naturally, as they were both eight-year-olds in 1929, they had understood nothing about the stock market and had probably never heard of a place called Wall Street in New York City. What they did gather from the grownups around them during the weeks following the crash of the stock market and the demise of the banking system, was that the good times of the 1920s were over and the bad times of the 1930s had begun. (My grandfathers were tenant farmers; thus, the so-called “Roaring ‘20s” had not roared that loudly for them, a circumstance that probably made the Depression years all the more miserable and therefore memorable.)
Another memorable date, at least, for my mother, and for other women who were at that time in their teens, was 7 June 1937, the day Jean Harlow died from a freak illness. Jean Harlow’s reputation as the quintessential “bad girl” of provocative, pre-Code Hollywood films caused considerable discomfort for many conventionally minded people. I doubt that my mother had ever seen any of these films. Nevertheless, news of Jean Harlow’s unexpected death from kidney failure at the age of 26 years and 94 days—she narrowly missing membership in the 27 club before it was even founded—hit many, both fans and non-fans, like a bombshell. I imagine that her death was, for these people, one of those bothersome reminders of the inescapable mortality of human beings. Neither youth nor beauty and good fortune will ever save anyone from that hole in the ground or from the flames of the crematorium.
Other memorable dates for my parents were 3 September 1939, the day England declared war on Germany; 7 December 1941, the day Japan launched a surprise attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor; 6 June 1944, or D-Day, the beginning of the end of World War II; and, of course, 6 and 9 August 1945, the days Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nearly bombed out of existence by the splitting of atoms.
I am myself a product of the so-called “baby boom” that began immediately after the Second World War. I am one of the approximately 78.3 million Americans who were born between 1946 and 1964. Together we are quite a sizable and culturally influential generation, and some of us have even managed to get into more than our fair share of trouble.
For us leading-edge baby boomers, one very memorable event was the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962. I remember that some years earlier we school kids had been obliged to take part in drills that would prepare us for the eventuality of all-out nuclear war with the USSR, that is, during those years we could fit ducked-and-covered under our school desks. (This position, we were told, would protect us from flying shards of glass in the event of an atomic bomb hitting the schoolyard.) In 1962, it seemed very possible that we would have to take refuge under our school desks once again, even though most of us no longer fit; and in 1962, it would not necessarily have been just a drill.
The assassination of President Kennedy, about a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, made an indelible impression on most Americans, although our parents were probably more deeply affected than we teenaged baby boomers were. John F. Kennedy, one of the most powerful people in the world, was shot dead at the age of forty-six. We thought that forty-six was positively ancient, but our parents knew otherwise. And yes, I do remember where I was when I first heard news of the president being shot. We were just finishing up in geometry class when another teacher burst into the classroom and told our geometry teacher to turn on her transistor radio. But I don’t remember if we got the rest of the day off once the principal realised that the president had actually been killed. Probably not.
I also remember where I was in 1965 when we baby boomers learned that President Lindon Johnson had committed the first regular ground troops to battle in Southeast Asia. Considering myself something of an intellectual, I was attending an interstate debate competition in Sioux City, Iowa. Ironically, the topic for the debate was whether or not capital punishment should be abolished. It’s true, these first ground troops were all United States Marines, that is to say, mostly volunteer soldiers—sometimes you get what you ask for. Nevertheless, the future prospects for every draft-aged boy or young man in the United States had dimmed considerably. Some fifty-eight thousand American soldiers during the following ten years would get the death sentence, not to mention the one and a half million Southeast Asians.
On a somewhat lighter note, most baby boomers will remember the Summer of Love in 1967, whether or not we personally took part in the Countercultural Movement. And we certainly remember when Alexander Dubček became First Secretary of Czechoslovakia in January of 1968, prompting the Soviet Union to invade his country; and we also remember the student rebellions that began in Western Europe in May of that same year.
Also in 1968, Carlos Castaneda published his first book, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, in an initial edition of 1250 copies. These books sold out in a matter of months, and a second printing of 2,500 copies was ordered by Castaneda’s publisher, the University of California Press. This second printing also sold out in a very short time. For a few of us, I assume, the initial publishing of The Teachings of Don Juan was indeed a memorable event, for example: What lecture at UCLA were you attending when your professor mentioned that Carlos had finally published his long-awaited Master’s thesis? How quick were you to get to the Ackerman Union bookstore down at Westwood Plaza in order to procure yourself a copy? Most of us, however, were neither Castaneda’s fellow students at UCLA, nor first-generation hippies ingesting hallucinogens at the intersection of Haight and Ashbury in San Francisco, desperately attempting to follow the recently published teachings of don Juan. Most of us would have to wait for our own memorable event until we actually became aware of the fact that Carlos Castaneda had written a book about a wise old Indian he had met. By the end of 1972, he had published three books about this wise old Indian.
How many of us baby boomers have read a book by Carlos Castaneda, cover to cover? Let us take the book Journey to Ixtlan, for example, which appears to be almost every Castaneda fan’s favourite Don Juan book. How many of us experienced the reading of this book as a particularly memorable event? Where were you, and how was your life progressing, when you first read Journey to Ixtlan? Having read it, was your life changed in any immediately palpable way?
The Quest for Castaneda: Richard de Mille of Montecito, Calif., is a man with a mission. Mr. De Mille, a former university psychology teacher, is determined to discover the truth about the life and works of Carlos Castaneda, whose five books – ”The Teachings of Don Juan,” ”A Separate Reality,” ”Journey to Ixtlan,” ”Tales of Power” and ”The Second Ring of Power” – profess to report the author’s conversations during an 18-year apprenticeship with a Mexican Indian shaman named Don Juan Matus. These collections of ”anthropological fieldnotes” have sold over 10 million copies in this country and are among the most influential testaments of the youth culture of the past dozen years. [Ray Walters, The Quest for Castaneda, New York Times, 11 January 1981.]
Even a conservative estimate, based on the overall number of copies sold, would probably give us a historical readership of at least four million people for Castaneda’s most popular book, Journey to Ixtlan. Gathered together in one area, these four million people would constitute the population of a fairly large city, a virtual city that we might call San Juan de Brujería in order to distinguish it from San Juan de Puerto Rico, for example, which only has about three hundred and forty thousand inhabitants. San Juan de Brujería would be a very interesting city in which to live, for despite claims by the more extreme of Castaneda’s detractors that the teachings of don Juan are detrimental to one’s mental health, I believe that a very great majority of the citizens of San Juan remember their experience of reading Journey to Ixtlan as something life-affirming and almost immeasurably edifying. Most people in this city remember exactly the circumstances in which they were first initiated into the teachings of don Juan, and they probably each have a well-thumbed copy of Journey to Ixtlan to prove the impact that this book had had on their lives and their manner of thinking. One might even say that they became better people because Juan Matus and Carlos Castaneda had once met by chance, regardless of whether this meeting actually happened at the Greyhound Bus station in Yuma, Arizona, or only in Castaneda’s literary imagination.
I am a long-standing citizen of this virtual city of San Juan de Brujería, although I acquired my citizenship somewhat later than many other leading-edge baby boomers. Carlos Castaneda had managed to publish four best-selling books before I became aware of his existence and, of course, his authorship. I have not, however, had cause to regret the occasion of my pledge-taking as a naturalized citizen of San Juan, despite all the subsequent years of public controversy, within the city and without, regarding the question of whether or not don Juan Matus had been a real person, and despite the disappointment and indignation that most of the citizens of San Juan felt when we finally realised that Carlos Castaneda had been a liar and a fraud. I still believe, however, that don Juan had been a real person, but that is neither here nor there in the context of this present blogpost. Two, in my opinion, revolutionary ideas that Dr. Castaneda gave us through his books about don Juan transcend the debate of fictionality versus non-fictionality. One of these ideas is that the world—in all its aspects—can be conveniently and very usefully described in terms of what the character don Juan, in the book Tales of Power by Carlos Castaneda, calls the dichotomy of the tonal and the nagual:
“I’m going to tell you about the tonal and the nagual,” don Juan said and looked at me piercingly.
“The tonal is everything we are. Name it! Anything we have a word for is the tonal. And since the tonal is its own doings, then everything, obviously, has to fall under its domain.”
“The tonal is everything we know, and that includes not only us, as persons, but everything in our world. It can be said that the tonal is everything that meets the eye.”
“We begin to groom it at the moment of birth. The moment we take the first gasp of air we also breathe in power for the tonal. So, it is proper to say that the tonal of a human being is intimately tied to his birth. The tonal begins at birth and ends at death.”
“There is a personal tonal for every one of us, and there is a collective one for all of us at any given time, which we can call the tonal of the times.”
“If the tonal is everything we know about ourselves and our world, what, then, is the nagual? [Carlos asked don Juan.]”
“The nagual is the part of us with which we do not deal at all. The nagual is the part of us for which there is no description—no words, no names, no feelings, no knowledge.”
[Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power, Simon & Schuster (1974), related excerpts, pp. 116-128.]
The other idea is more of an assertion than merely an idea or a suggestion: Profound and lasting behavioural change is facilitated for the individual who learns to self-induce the trance state of consciousness.
At the beginning of our association don Juan had delineated a procedure: walking for long stretches without focusing the eyes on anything. His recommendation had been to not look at anything directly but, by slightly crossing the eyes, to keep a peripheral view of everything that presented itself to the eyes. He had insisted, although I had not understood at the time, that if one kept one’s unfocused eyes at a point just above the horizon, it was possible to notice, at once, everything in almost the total 180-degree range in front of one’s eyes. He had assured me that that exercise was the only way of shutting off the internal dialogue. He used to ask me for reports on my progress, and then he stopped inquiring about it.
I told don Juan that I had practiced the technique for years without noticing any change, but I had expected none anyway. One day, however, I had the shocking realisation that I had just walked for about ten minutes without having said a single word to myself.
I mentioned to don Juan that on that occasion I also became cognisant that stopping the internal dialogue involved more than merely curtailing the words I said to myself. My entire thought processes had stopped and I had felt I was practically suspended, floating. A sensation of panic had ensued from that awareness and I had to resume my internal dialogue as an antidote.
“I’ve told you that the internal dialogue is what grounds us,” don Juan said. “The world is such and such or so and so, only because we talk to ourselves about it being such and such or so and so.”
[Carlos Castaneda, ibid., p.13.]
“Stopping the internal dialogue is the key to the sorcerers’ world,” he said. “The rest of the activities are only props; all they do is accelerate the effect of stopping the internal dialogue.”
He said that there were two major activities or techniques used to accelerate the stopping of the internal dialogue: erasing personal history and dreaming. He reminded me that during the early stages of my apprenticeship, he had given me a number of specific methods for changing my “personality.” I had recorded them in my notes and had forgotten about them for years until I realized their importance. Those specific methods seemed at first to be highly idiosyncratic devices to coerce me into modifying my behaviour.
“Erasing personal history and dreaming should only be a help,” he said. “What any apprentice needs to buffer him is temperance and strength. That’s why a teacher introduces the warrior’s way, or living like a warrior.”
He explained that in order to help erase personal history three other techniques were taught. They were: losing self-importance, assuming responsibility, and using death as an advisor.
[Carlos Castaneda, ibid., related excerpts, pp. 238-240.]
I have written earlier about my own initiation into the teachings of don Juan in the first book I published concerning the life and literary legacy of Carlos Castaneda. Allow me to quote from this book. (I should probably explain that at the time of my initiation, I was very interested in the question of why some people seem to be musically gifted while others seem not to be.)
[There are times when even the least musically inclined among us become entranced by music, times in which listening to a particular piece of music excludes all other unrelated activities.]
Music can be entrancing. Perhaps musically talented people are simply those who tend to fall into a slightly altered state of consciousness while listening to or performing music. After all, musicians are often rather interesting people. Conversely, if musical ability, most importantly, a good tonal memory and a reliable sense of relative pitch, is to any extent dependant on such a tendency, then perhaps those of us who are less fortunate with respect to musical ability might be helped to become more able by means of hypnosis or some form of meditative trance induction.
This idea that altered consciousness might be a means of acquiring or, at least, enhancing musical ability was the focal point of a discussion I had with a friend one December evening in 1974. Anders Svensson (1925-1987), sociologist, practising psychotherapist, and one of the early proponents of music therapy, listened patiently while I expounded my theory. When I had finished, he said that he thought there might be something in what I was saying. Anders was an accomplished concert cellist as well as music therapist. “Yes, perhaps getting into the right mood for music appreciation or musical performance is an ability that might be taught by means of some form of mental exercise,” he said. “After all, the Mexican Indian sorcerer Juan Matus had taught his anthropologist apprentice, Carlos Castaneda, to achieve profoundly altered consciousness by means of a fairly simple exercise, an exercise that consists of inducing a trance by walking for long stretches while deliberately maintaining the eyes out of focus.”
I had not heard of either Juan Matus or Carlos Castaneda. Anders was surprised. He said that Carlos Castaneda had published the first book detailing his apprenticeship to a Mexican Indian sorcerer more than six years ago in 1968. The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge was then followed by A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan in 1971; Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan in 1972; and Tales of Power in 1974. The books had already sold more than a million copies. Anders had the latest two books on his shelf. He told me to take them home.
[F. Lawrence Fleming, Making Sense of the Life and Works of Carlos Castaneda (2018), pp. 6-7.]
On the morning following my interaction with Dr. Svensson, I opened my borrowed copy of Journey to Ixtlan at the introduction and commenced to read while I was still having my breakfast. I am a fairly fast yet very retentive reader. By two o’clock in the afternoon, I had finished the book. I was pleasantly stunned, yet curiously agitated by the experience. I could hardly wait to start reading Tales of Power, which I did after dinner that same day, and I finished the book, along with a bottle of wine, at about two o’clock the next morning. I spent the next couple of days staring a considerable amount into the middle distance, quite inattentive to my usual daily chores, and then I read both books a second time; I knew I would be thoroughly catechised by Anders when I brought the books back to him after the Christmas holiday. (In the following, I am very freely reconstructing in English the first part of the conversation that Anders and I had in Swedish some fifty years ago.)
“Well,” he began, “what do you think?”
“I think that you and Carlitos have thwarted my ambition of becoming a professional philosopher. All the philosophers I have studied thus far now seem such utter fools when compared with Don Juan. What is the use of studying them? You have burst my academic balloon, thank you very much.”
“That was a balloon well worth bursting. Do you really want to make a living as a professional philosopher, teaching others to become professional philosophers like yourself? I think philosophers are mostly people who like to appear clever. Aristotle liked to appear clever; Descartes and Leibniz did too. Hegel loved to appear clever, and so he wrote volumes of impossible-to-decipher nonsense. Some profession! I still think you are wasting your time studying philosophy. Switch to sociology or psychology. You can make some real discoveries. By the way, you say that all the philosophers you have studied were fools. Are you including Wittgenstein on your ship of fools?”
“No. Wittgenstein is the one exception, that is to say, in my view; but certainly, every one of his self-appointed disciples has been a fool.”
“Instead of trying to be clever for the sake of cleverness itself, why not try being clever with the ambition of changing yourself into a different and better person? This is the essence of Don Juan’s warrior philosophy, I think. Don Juan asserts that waging war on one’s own condition as a human being can only be effectively done by someone who has learned to silence the internal dialogue. I think this is essentially true, although there is more than one way to skin a cat. A good hypnotist can silence the client’s internal dialogue in a heartbeat, and without the need for any preliminary program of mental training on the part of the client. Milton Erickson has pretty much shown that psychotherapy is only truly effective if carried out while the client is in a trance. Don Juan would say that the client’s internal dialogue has been switched off with the aid of the therapist’s suggestions. There is, of course, the question of who therapized the therapist. In the case of Milton Erickson, I believe he had learned to silence his own internal dialogue well before he began helping others to silence theirs. In the parlance of Don Juan, Milton Erickson is a warrior. He may even be a man of knowledge. I don’t think that Ludwig Wittgenstein was a warrior. He was just a very clever person who never overcame any of his own personal shortcomings by means of his cleverness. If Wittgenstein had learned to silence his internal dialogue, he might have been able to help others with their existential crises. But be this as it may, few people have the means and the opportunity to engage a therapist—or a very clever philosopher—to help them solve their personal problems. You, for example, would benefit greatly from some psychotherapy—and so would I, for that matter—but you’re not crazy enough to be eligible for therapy through the courtesy of the health care system, and obviously, you can’t afford to pay for therapy out of your own pocket, which seems forever empty. For those who have neither means nor opportunity, I think that following the teachings of Don Juan, that sorcerer, therapist, and philosopher par excellence, can be of enormous help. So, if you really want to change, you should teach yourself to silence your internal dialogue, and then you should strive to follow the dictates of warriorship as outlined in Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan. Your heightened suggestibility while entering into a state of trance and for the duration of the time you remain in this trance state, no matter how the trance has been induced, will help you accomplish the changes that before were just wishful thinking. Through the means of meditative trance induction, you can thoroughly convince yourself to change by triggering your innate suggestibility, and then you can command yourself to change.”
“Doesn’t it bother you that Castaneda may be making some of this stuff up? It’s not that I doubt the real-life existence of the Mexican Indian sorcerer Don Juan; nor do I doubt that Castaneda has worked with him. But many of the things Castaneda claims to have experienced while in the tutelage of Don Juan are just too spectacularly otherworldly to be believable. I mean, he does conclude his apprenticeship by throwing himself from a precipice and, somehow, living to tell the tale. I was talking to Hanna Jakobsson at the library, who has followed Castaneda’s literary career ever since his first book, and she says that he was caught lying about his personal history during an interview for Time Magazine, and that since the interview, Castaneda appears to have gone into hiding. Absolutely incognito. That’s not a good sign for the unconditional truthfulness of what he writes.”
“What bothers me is that he probably did feel he had to add some quite fantastic embellishment to his original field notes in order to keep his readers glued to his published pages. In the first and second books, the teachings of Don Juan were all about the achievement of wisdom—whatever that may be—through the altered states of consciousness that are induced by the ingestion of hallucinogens. This was just perfect for the late sixties when people with any coolness at all were following Timothy Leary’s advice and were turning on, tuning in, and dropping out. Then came the third book, and then the fourth and final book, and we learned that taking hallucinogens is not at all necessary or even especially facilitating for the person who is seeking Don Juan’s kind of esoteric knowledge. Castaneda discovered towards the end of his ten-year apprenticeship that there are no time-saving shortcuts to the acquisition of this knowledge. Certainly, a ten-year apprenticeship to a master sorcerer is no shortcut. Learning about this in the third and fourth books was, of course, not going to sit well with many who had read and liked the first two and were hoping to get their hands on some peyote or some magic mushrooms and, like Carlos Castaneda, become powerful non-Indian sorcerers, practically overnight, to the admiration and envy of all their New-Age peers. With the hallucinogens out of the picture—I mean, he hardly mentions them in his latest two books—Castaneda needed something with which to replace them. Apparently, he chose the promise of spooky, paranormal experience for those who are brave enough to follow the teachings of Don Juan, inexplicable experiences that are real events in the real world, and not just hallucinations caused by the ingestion of poisonous plants. “Why not amaze your friends and neighbours with tales of your own paranormal experiences? Read the books by Carlos Castaneda and find out how you can accomplish this!” I think that this is what most of the hocus-pocus is about in the last two books, especially in the fourth book—salesmanship. But perhaps not all the hocus-pocus in these books is fictional embellishment. Don Juan appears to be an authentic Mexican brujo. He’s probably capable of producing some pretty weird, unnerving effects.”
“But what if Castaneda has fabricated everything? What if Castaneda never met an old Yaqui Indian at a bus station in Arizona? What if he never made field trips to Mexico in order to study Indian sorcery? What if it’s all a tall tale very cleverly told using anthropology as a pretence to show that his philosophical speculations are absolutely true. Maybe he is fooling both you and me, not to mention almost everybody else.”
“Do you mean: What if he were to openly confess that he has made everything up, and that his books are entirely fictional? Yes, I could live with that. His confession would mean that he himself is the genius behind the teachings of Don Juan. It would mean that he has written an allegory; let’s call it The Anthropologist and the Indian Sorcerer, a very unorthodox allegory, written in the guise of an equally unorthodox doctoral dissertation by a student of anthropology who claims that his allegorical story is absolutely true. What little I know about Castaneda, however, leads me to believe that there really is an Indian sorcerer behind the teachings. Like you, I don’t doubt that there is a Don Juan. Nevertheless, it appears that Castaneda has embellished his reports from the field with extraordinary personal experiences that he did not actually experience, just to make his reports more affecting and impressive, and in such a manner, I suppose, make them more convincing. No matter how you slice it, one single such act of fictional embellishment to a report of academic fieldwork is tantamount to academic fraud, but Castaneda is probably guilty of much more than just one act of embellishment. It’s reprehensible. But what’s done is done. Carlos Castaneda has let the cat out of its bag, and there’s no sense in us trying to put it back in just because we are unhappy with his ways and means.”
“So, you think that Castaneda’s books should be read as allegory rather than ethnography.”
“Well, the books are most useful and most beneficial when they are read as allegory, although I doubt that Castaneda intends them to be read in such a fashion. He seems primarily concerned with getting his PhD in anthropology, which I imagine he has done by now. Of course, he has also made a lot of money in the process.”
“And what exactly is the allegory?”
“Let me see. Well, once upon a time, almost fifteen years ago, an undergraduate student of anthropology from the University of California enlisted a Mexican shaman as his native informant for a study which was to concern the use of peyote among North American Indians. The shaman went reluctantly along with the recruitment, but made it almost painfully clear to the budding anthropologist that learning about peyote is a very serious matter, and that if he wished to survive his initial encounter with Mescalito, the deity contained in the peyote cactus, he would first have to remodel most of his day-to-day behaviour. ‘One of us has to change,’ said the shaman to the anthropologist, ‘and you know which one of us I am talking about.’ The shaman said that one can only accomplish the extremely difficult task of remodelling one’s behaviour by becoming a warrior, and that the first step to becoming a warrior is to learn to silence the internal dialogue, according to the shaman, by walking for very long stretches while maintaining the eyes out of focus. The allegory contained in this story is, of course, that regardless of whatever it may be that you truly wish to succeed at, you will probably have to radically change your day-to-day behaviour in order to have any chance of succeeding, and that the biggest hinder for changing your ways is your internal dialogue, which is extremely conservative and almost always convinces you that things are best kept as they are.”
“But you do like the books?”
“Oh, I love the books, and I admire Don Juan. I certainly hope that he is a real person.”
“Yes, so do I.”
Now, fifty years later, I still believe that Juan Matus was a real person, even though the general consensus seems to be that he was not. I still think that it’s important that we uncover tangible evidence of a man of Yaqui/Yuma descent named Juan, born in 1892, who lived the latter half of his life in the vicinity of the Yaqui pueblo of Vícam in the state of Sonora, Mexico. It can’t be that hard, even now, fifty-two years after his death. He must have left some clues as to his full identity. I have myself been to Vícam with the purpose of finding hard evidence of a flesh-and-blood don Juan, but at the time, in April of 1981, I did not have the time, the resources, or the fluency in the Spanish language that was needed to have any chance of success except through dumb luck, of which I did not get any on that particular occasion. I admit, my ambition of proving that the character Juan Matus in the books by Carlos Castaneda had been a real person went off at half-cock. Was there a don Juan or was there not? In the following, I shall be asking you to give the benefit of the doubt to me, and not to the overly impassioned Castaneda detractors and naysayers. Adopting the teachings of don Juan as a therapeutic treatment protocol will probably give a better result if we can take it for granted that a certain Juan Matus was the actual source of the teachings, and not Carlos Castaneda. I think that most of us can agree on the following assessment of Castaneda’s personality: He was a pathological liar, an extremely abusive narcissist, and, at least since his death in 1998, a thoroughly exposed academic fraud. The factual life story of such a person would hardly be a good exemplification of the effectiveness of the teachings of don Juan to turn a fool into a man of knowledge. At the same time, such a person as Carlos Castaneda would not likely have been able to invent the teachings of don Juan entirely out of his own head.
Don Juan explained that the passageway into the world of sorcerers opens up after the warrior has learned to shut off the internal dialogue.
“To change our idea of the world is the crux of sorcery,” he said. “And stopping the internal dialogue is the only way to accomplish it. The rest is just padding. Now you’re in the position to know that nothing of what you’ve seen or done, with the exception of stopping the internal dialogue, could by itself have changed anything in you, or in your idea of the world. The provision is, of course, that that change should not be deranged. Now you can understand why a teacher doesn’t clamp down on his apprentice. That would only breed obsession and morbidity.”
[Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power, pp. 13-14.]
What, then, did don Juan mean by “stopping the internal dialogue?” As his apprentice astutely observes in the book Tales of Power, it’s much more than a question of being able to curtail the words one says to oneself. If you set your mind to it, you can easily abstain from talking to yourself—for a minute or two. However, in order to experience the workings of your mind for any longer period of time, but without talking to yourself about your experience, you need to be in a trance; and any transition from your normal state of consciousness to the trance state of consciousness will probably not have occurred spontaneously, but will much more likely have been purposely induced in some manner.
The entirely reflexive and very sudden reaction that can occur in an individual who perceives some immanent and overwhelming danger is, perhaps, the most readily understood instance of the trance state of consciousness. When neither fight nor flight is an obvious option; for example, when that twelve-foot-long (including the tail), man-eating tiger is standing over you, panting with hot breath right into your face as you lie in the supine position on the floor of the Indian jungle, overcome and helpless: What can you do? There is not really much you can do. A very specific reaction to your plight, however, a reaction that has been programmed by natural selection into the behaviour of various earthly creatures, including human beings, may kick in, and you, like an opossum, will play dead, but without being at all aware of what you are doing. And let us hope for your sake that this entirely spontaneous ploy is successful, and that the tiger walks off to tell her cubs to come and join in on the imminent banquet, thus giving you an opportunity to jump to your feet, once you have regained your normal consciousness, and hightail it out of the jungle.
It’s more difficult to explain how the trance state in humans is induced by means of hypnotic suggestion. Trance always appears to be the same specific mental and physiological phenomenon regardless of the manner in which it is induced. Humans, some animals, some fish (including sharks), and even a number of insect species are all susceptible to the trance state under special circumstances. Sentient beings other than human beings, however, lack the one thing that makes the induction of the trance state in humans so multifaceted: culture. Take a cat by the scruff of its neck between your thumb and forefinger, and then pinch gently. No matter how agitated and afraid the cat has been acting, it will invariably go limp and lie entranced as long as a gentle pressure is maintained. Veterinarians have been using this technique while examining and treating “difficult” cats ever since the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons was established in London in 1844. It is believed that the cat’s involuntary reaction to being pinched by the scruff of its neck has to do with the instinctive manner in which felines carry their young from one place to another. On the other hand, using hypnosis to put difficult humans into a mental state in which they can be successfully examined and treated for behavioural problems is much less straightforward and not so ultimately successful, but we do know, from the documented history of clinical hypnosis, that the suggestibility of human beings, which is fostered by the human individual’s gradual acquisition of human culture, plays a very important role in any form of trance induction. We also understand that we don’t need to know how or why hypnosis works in order to get it to work.
The intentional, self-induced trance is what don Juan prescribes to his apprentice in the books by Carlos Castaneda. He called the trance state of consciousness “stopping the internal dialogue,” not because one must deliberately refrain from talking to oneself in order to self-induce a trance, but because the subjective perception of not being able to think in the ordinary fashion is one of the earmarks of an authentic trance. Other, more objectively assessable signs that a particular person has entered the trance state may be some, or indeed all, of the following: a dilation of the pupils; a very noticeable flattening of the facial features; a noticeable change in the pattern of breathing; a decreased heart rate and a lowered blood pressure; a clearly visible change in skin tone; a significantly decreased swallow reflex; an apparent decrease of mobility; and, most significantly, a greatly increased suggestibility. Moreover, if this person is being monitored on an electroencephalograph, high-amplitude oscillations in the gamma frequency range (30-90 Hz) along with long-range and sustained gamma synchrony will very likely be evident on the display screen while the person remains in a trance. It’s interesting to note that several of the indications of an authentic state of trance cannot be faked by a person who wishes for some reason only to appear to be in a state of trance. One good example is the almost total loss of facial muscle tone that is so typical of the trance state of consciousness. An actor can only approximate the physical appearance and the behaviour of a person in trance, and usually not very convincingly. Another example is the following:
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have found that during meditation, Zen Buddhist monks show an extraordinary synchronization of brain waves known as gamma synchrony—a pattern increasingly associated with robust brain function and the synthesis of activity that we call the mind.
Brain waves are produced by the extremely low voltages involved in transmitting messages among neurons. Most conscious activity produces beta waves at 13 to 30 hertz, or cycles per second. More intense gamma waves (30 to 60 or even 90 Hz) generally mark complex operations such as memory storage and sharp concentration.
The Wisconsin study took electroencephalograms (EEGs) of 10 longtime Buddhist practitioners and of a control group of eight college students who had been lightly trained in meditation. While meditating, the monks produced gamma waves that were extremely high in amplitude and had long-range gamma synchrony—the waves from disparate brain regions were in near lockstep, like numerous jump ropes turning precisely together. The synchrony was sustained for remarkably long periods, too. The students’ gamma waves were nowhere near as strong or tuned.
Such results denote more than spiritual harmony; they reflect the coordination of otherwise scattered groups of neurons. Gamma synchrony increases as a person concentrates or prepares to move. And lack of synchrony indicates discordant mental activity such as schizophrenia. Finally, a growing body of theory proposes that gamma synchrony helps to bind the brain’s many sensory and cognitive operations into the miracle of consciousness.
That hypothesis certainly agrees with the monks’ gamma readings, seemingly confirming that Zen meditation produces not relaxation but an intense though serene attention. Trained musicians also show superior gamma synchrony while listening to music—another form of calm but intense focus.
[David Dobbs, Zen Gamma, Scientific American Mind, Vol. 16, No. 1 (April 2005), p. 9.]
Historically, methods for self-induction of the trance state of consciousness have usually taken the form of meditation, that is to say, the performance of various, more or less complex and protracted mental exercises, almost every one of which has evolved over a very long period of time, and until quite recently, almost always in a strictly religious context. Much less common are the shamanistic methods of induction, which often involve various trials of endurance like extreme fasting, sleep deprivation, or listening for hours to the monotonous beating of drums. (Don Juan’s method for trance induction may be considered a trial of endurance, I suppose, inasmuch as most practitioners of this method will have to walk uninterruptedly for a very long stretch before experiencing the trance state of consciousness.)
Scientific research into the phenomenon of meditative consciousness during the past fifty years has helped to break a monopoly on the practice of meditation that has been maintained for so long by the world’s most anciently established religions. It is no longer necessary to fervently profess belief in some incorporeal supernatural agent or agency in order to successfully practice meditation. Among many people, especially in the Western world, meditation is thought of as a curative practice rather than an arduous pathway to some kind of salvation from that unfathomable horror of what we may perceive to be the ultimate destiny of all humankind: extinction. (I, along with quite a few other people, firmly believe that members of the genus Homo with the capacity to create and perpetuate culture, that is to say, we Homo sapiens and our cousins, the Homo neanderthalensis, first emerged on this planet about 300,000 years ago. Moreover, I believe that all organic life on earth will eventually be extinguished. The downside of such beliefs, however, is that they make mockery of any attempt at making sense out of the world.)
Let’s face it; almost all of us would have good use for some kind of cognitive therapy, especially those of us who blatantly deny that we need therapy, but who therefore need therapy even more than others. I think it is one of the facts of life that an individual’s gradual acquisition of human culture, as fully achieved as it can be within the span of time between conception and extinction, is hardly going to occur without some patterns of behaviour arising that are to some degree self-defeating and debilitating. Various protocols of psychotherapy have been devised for the purpose of modifying such patterns of behaviour.
In order to adopt the teachings of don Juan as a protocol for psychotherapy—while realising, of course, that the teachings were not originally meant as such—it is important to try to understand what exactly these teachings were and still are. The best way to do this, I think, is to go to the source, that is to say, the books by Carlos Castaneda:
“I want to indulge in explanations,” I said. “I’m obsessed because I haven’t dared to come to see you and I haven’t been able to talk about my qualms and doubts with anyone.”
“Don’t you talk with your friends?”
“I do, but how could they help me?”
“I never thought that you needed help. You must cultivate the feeling that a warrior needs nothing. You say you need help. Help for what? You have everything needed for the extravagant journey that is your life. I have tried to teach you that the real experience is to be a man, and that what counts is being alive; life is the little detour that we are taking now. Life in itself is sufficient, self-explanatory and complete. A warrior understands this and lives accordingly; therefore, one may say without being presumptuous that the experience of experiences is being a warrior.”
[Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power, pp. 52-53.]
Monday, July 24, 1962
Around mid-afternoon, after we had roamed for hours in the desert, don Juan chose a place to rest in a shaded area. As soon as we sat down, he began talking. He said that I had learned a good deal about hunting, but I had not changed as much as he had wished.
“It’s not enough to know how to make and set up traps,” he said. “A hunter must live as a hunter in order to draw the most out of his life. Unfortunately, changes are difficult and happen very slowly; sometimes it takes years for a man to become convinced of the need to change. It took me years, but maybe I didn’t have a knack for hunting. I think for me the most difficult thing was to really want to change.”
I assured him that I understood his point. In fact, since he had begun to teach me how to hunt, I also had begun to reassess my actions. Perhaps the most dramatic discovery for me was that I liked don Juan’s ways. I liked don Juan as a person. There was something solid about his behavior; the way he conducted himself left no doubts about his mastery, and yet he had never exercised his advantage to demand anything from me. His interest in changing my way of life, I felt, was akin to an impersonal suggestion, or perhaps it was akin to an authoritative commentary on my failures. He had made me very aware of my failings, yet I could not see how his ways would remedy anything in me. I sincerely believed that, in light of what I wanted to do in my life, his ways would have only brought me misery and hardship, hence the impasse. However, I had learned to respect his mastery, which had always been expressed in terms of beauty and precision.
“I have decided to shift my tactics,” he said.
I asked him to explain; his statement was vague and I was not sure whether or not he was referring to me.
“A good hunter changes his ways as often as he needs,” he replied. “You know that yourself.”
“What do you have in mind, don Juan?”
“A hunter must not only know about the habits of his prey; he also must know that there are powers on this earth that guide men and animals and everything that is living.”
He stopped talking. I waited but he seemed to have come to the end of what he wanted to say.
“What kind of powers are you talking about?” I asked after a long pause.
“Powers that guide our lives and our deaths.”
Don Juan stopped talking and seemed to have come to the end of what he wanted to say. He rubbed his hands and shook his head, puffing out his jaws. Twice he signalled me to be quiet as I started to ask him to explain his cryptic statements.
“You won’t be able to stop yourself easily,” he finally said. “I know that you are stubborn, but that doesn’t matter. The more stubborn you are the better it’ll be when you finally succeed in changing yourself.”
“I’m trying my best,” I said.
“No. I disagree. You’re not trying your best. You just said that because it sounds good to you; in fact, you’ve been saying the same thing about everything you do. You’ve been trying your best for years to no avail. Something must be done to remedy that.”
I felt compelled, as usual, to defend myself. Don Juan seemed to aim, as a rule, at my very weakest points. I remembered then that every time I had attempted to defend myself against his criticisms, I had ended up feeling like a fool, and I stopped myself in the midst of a long explanatory speech.
Don Juan examined me with curiosity and laughed. He said in a very kind tone that he had already told me that all of us were fools. I was not an exception.
“You always feel compelled to explain your acts, as if you were the only man on earth who’s wrong,” he said. “It’s your old feeling of importance. You have too much of it; you also have too much personal history. On the other hand, you don’t assume responsibility for your acts; you’re not using your death as an advisor, and above all, you are too accessible. In other words, your life is as messy as it was before I met you.”
Again, I had a surge of pride and wanted to argue that he was wrong. He gestured me to be quiet.
“One must assume responsibility for being in a weird world,” he said. “We are in a weird world, you know.”
I nodded my head affirmatively.
“We’re not talking about the same thing,” he said. “For you the world is weird because if you’re not bored with it, you’re at odds with it. For me the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable; my interest has been to convince you that you must assume responsibility for being here, in this marvellous world, in this marvellous desert, in this marvellous time. I wanted to convince you that you must learn to make every act count, since you are going to be here for only a short while, in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it.”
I insisted that to be bored with the world or to be at odds with it was the human condition.
“So, change it,” he replied dryly. “If you do not respond to that challenge, you are as good as dead.”
He dared me to name an issue, an item in my life that had engaged all my thoughts. I said art. I had always wanted to be an artist and for years I had tried my hand at that. I still had the painful memory of my failure.
“You have never taken the responsibility for being in this unfathomable world,” he said in an indicting tone. “Therefore, you were never an artist, and perhaps you’ll never be a hunter.”
“This is my best, don Juan.”
“No. You don’t know what your best is.”
“I’m doing all I can.”
“You’re wrong again. You can do better. There is one simple thing wrong with you—you think you have plenty of time.”
He paused and looked at me as if waiting for my reaction.
“You think you have plenty of time,” he repeated.
“Plenty of time for what, don Juan?”
“You think your life is going to last forever.”
“No. I don’t.”
“Then, if you don’t think your life is going to last forever, what are you waiting for? Why the hesitation to change?”
“Has it ever occurred to you, don Juan, that I may not want to change?”
“Yes, it has occurred to me. I did not want to change either, just like you. However, I didn’t like my life; I was tired of it, just like you. Now I don’t have enough of it.”
I vehemently asserted that his insistence about changing my way of life was frightening and arbitrary. I said that I really agreed with him, at a certain level, but the mere fact that he was always the master that called the shots made the situation untenable for me.
“You don’t have time for this display, you fool,” he said in a severe tone. “This, whatever you are doing now, may be your last act on earth. It may very well be your last battle. There is no power which could guarantee that you are going to live one more minute.”
[Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan, pp. 105-109.]
“Personal power decides who can or who cannot profit by a revelation; my experiences with my fellow men have proven to me that very, very few of them would be willing to listen; and of those few who listen even fewer would be willing to act on what they have listened to; and of those who are willing to act even fewer have enough personal power to profit by their acts.”
[Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power, p. 238.]
I am a voracious reader, especially when it comes to books about philosophy, psychology, and religion. Nonetheless, when I first read the above passages from the books Tales of Power and Journey to Ixtlan, I had not read anything earlier that would have prepared me for my sudden and overwhelming sense of eureka. It’s true, don Juan was talking to Carlos, but he was even talking to me, almost as if I had travelled back in time to the 24th of July, 1962, and had exchanged places with Carlos, something many other readers of Castaneda would like to have done. Don Juan’s assessment of Carlos’ situation in life applied equally to my own, as it even did to the lives of many other people. I, for one, was hooked, and I have remained on the hook ever since. I understand that the only realistic chance I have of ever bettering myself is to adopt the life style of what don Juan called “the warrior.”
And what sort of person is a warrior, according to don Juan? In my interpretation, what he calls “personal power” is the same thing as self-awareness, a term that is less ambiguous and easier to understand than personal power. (According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, “objective self-awareness is the reflective state of self-focused attention in which a person evaluates themself and attempts to attain correctness and consistency in beliefs and behaviours. This involves the viewing of oneself as a separate object, acknowledging limitations and the existing disparity between the ideal self and the actual self.” This is a definition that is fairly unambiguous but still not all that easy to understand.) And thus—again in my interpretation—the warrior is a person who seeks self-awareness by questioning the reasonableness of culturally acquired human behaviour; that is to say: Just because you have learned to do certain things in a certain way doesn’t mean that you can, in this manner, actually accomplish the desired outcomes of your behaviour. Achieving a greater degree of self-awareness may not seem like an objective that would require a superhuman amount of effort and determination, but there is, of course, a catch: According to don Juan, “to change our idea of the world is the crux of sorcery [and thus, warriorship], and stopping the internal dialogue is the only way to accomplish it.” I have no doubt that this is true. I have come to believe that one must obtain the help of a radically altered form of one’s consciousness in order to change one’s idea of the world through the means of autosuggestion; but for most people (myself included), learning to self-induce the trance state requires a seemingly superhuman amount of effort, determination, and, above all, perseverance. In the history of the world, relatively few people have even attempted to learn the skill of meditation, and of these few, even fewer have succeeded. On a more positive note, however, those few who have succeeded all appear, at least to me, to have been very worthy of others’ emulation. And speaking of people who are worthy of emulation or, at the very least, mountains of admiration:
In the fall of 2005, the Dalai Lama gave the inaugural Dialogues between Neuroscience and Society lecture at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington, DC. There were over 30,000 neuroscientists registered for the meeting, and it seemed as if most of them attended the talk. The Dalai Lama’s address was designed to highlight the areas of convergence between neuroscience and Buddhist thought about the mind, and to many in the audience he clearly achieved his objective. There was some controversy over his being invited to deliver this lecture insofar as he is both a head of state and a religious leader, and for that reason he largely stuck to his prepared text. But he strayed from the text at least once, reminding the audience that not only was he a Buddhist monk but also an enthusiastic proponent of modern technology.
Elaborating, he shared a confidence with the audience, telling the audience of scientists that meditating was hard work for him (even though he meditates for 4 hours every morning), and that if neuroscientists were able to find a way to put electrodes in his brain and provide him with the same outcome as he gets from meditating, he would be an enthusiastic volunteer.
[Peter B. Reiner, Meditation on Demand, Scientific American, 26 May 2009]
All the people who live or have lived on this earth can be divided up into two very distinct categories: those who have learned to deliberately stop their internal dialogue and those who have not. These two categories of people are as different as chalk and cheese. Which of these categories you would prefer to belong to is your own choice, of course, but before you make your choice, you must become aware of the fact that there is a choice to be made, and a choice that should not be postponed for too long. Each of us walks the earth only a very short time (certainly, when compared to the age of the universe), and learning the art of meditation is a difficult and life-long task. Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, has meditated for at least an hour a day ever since he was a small child. This makes a lifetime total, very conservatively estimated, of some 30,000 hours meditated, and yet he still finds it hard work. Most of us ordinary people who would like to emulate extraordinary people like the Dalai Lama do not have an ancient religion to support us in our endeavour. I believe that what we desperately need is some form of neuroscientific technology that can help put us in a meditative state of mind with a more easily achieved level of determination and self-discipline. Most of us probably feel that the implantation of electrodes in the brain is far too invasive for comfort. (I think that the Dalai Lama’s suggestion concerning this [see above] was more of a joke, a hyperbole, than a serious consideration.) Magnetic resonance imaging technology is, and will probably remain, too cumbersome for use anywhere but in a strictly clinical setting for the purpose of neurological research. Brainwave entrainment technology, that is, the use of binaural stimulation to (purportedly) entrain neuroelectric output in the brain within the theta frequency range, is quite simple; it consists of the playback of a suitable binaural cd recording while listening by means of a set of stereo headphones. The problem is that binaural beats have not been conclusively shown to have any effects on neural activity as measured on the electroencephalograph. (I tried this technology rather extensively before I realised that it had no discernible effect on my neural activity; therefore, I cannot personally recommend it.) Hemoencephalography, which measures cerebral blood flow with the help of near infra-red light, shows some promise as a neurofeedback technology that can enhance cognitive performance, but this technology appears at present to be still in its infancy with regard to its use as an aid to meditation. This leaves us with the option of using frequency band training with the help of electroencephalography as an aid to inducing the meditative state of consciousness.
Neurofeedback in the form of frequency band training was independently pioneered in the early 1960s by Joseph Kamiya (University of Chicago) and Barry Sterman (University of California, Los Angeles). The idea behind this research was to investigate the possibility of using the real-time feedback of a subject’s neural activity as a positive reinforcement for the operant conditioning of specific brain states. Neurofeedback has subsequently been shown to be a reasonably effective therapeutic intervention in the treatment of certain behavioural disorders, more specifically: post-traumatic stress disorder; attention deficit hyperactivity disorder; major depressive disorder; and various anxiety disorders. In addition, neurofeedback protocols have been employed to enhance artistic and athletic performance. Neurofeedback as a personal aid in the practice of meditation first became feasible at the release in 2014 of the InterAxon Muse brain-sensing headband, a consumer-grade wearable EEG device.
I bought the Muse device back in 2018 in order to convince myself that neurofeedback really could work as an aid to achieving a state of meditative trance, and that this particular device really did what the manufacturer claimed it could. After a reasonably small number of training sessions, about 100 daily, one-hour sessions, I became able to self-induce a state of trance in nearly every session with the help of a simple, easy-to-follow training protocol. I went from aspiring meditator to experienced meditator within the timespan of about three months. After eight years, I still use the Muse headband and software as an aid to meditation for two hours in the morning and for one hour in the evening, and I am able to induce a meditative trance within the duration of most of these sessions. In the parlance of Don Juan, I have learned to stop my internal dialogue.
So, what’s experiencing the meditative trance like? Here, I am at a loss for words, a predicament that is quite unusual for me. Don Juan would possibly have said that the act of stopping the internal dialogue is almost exclusively within the realm of the nagual and therefore not conductive to meaningful description. Or to quote Ludwig Wittgenstein: “What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak, thereof must one keep silent.” Let it suffice to say that you have to experience the trance state yourself in order to know what it is like. There is so much more to our persons than we’ll ever be fully aware of. Moreover, I must emphasize that what works for me will not necessarily work for you. My personal theories concerning meditation are, simply, working hypotheses. I’ll insist upon them only until someone convinces me that they are false. The following protocol for using the Muse device and software to induce a trace state of consciousness is, therefore, more akin to suggestion than dictate. Use your own imagination in getting the device to work for you.
For the sake of simplicity, I shall, in the blogpost entitled Inducing a State of Trance: A Neurofeedback Protocol for the Muse EEG Headband, which immediately follows the post you are presently reading, steer clear of the proposition to specifically use the Teachings of Don Juan as a psychotherapeutic treatment protocol. Instead, I shall concentrate entirely on a manner in which you might teach yourself to silence your internal dialogue, which I believe is a prerequisite ability for any kind of psychotherapy if it is to be ultimately successful. Therefore, the post which follows will essentially be a stand-alone tutorial.