Journalist Javier Molina interviewed Castaneda when he came to Mexico in 1984 to promote his seventh book, "The Fire Within," and the interview was published in the Mexican newspaper "Uno Más Uno" in June 1984.
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Carlos Castaneda, the author of "The Teachings of Don Juan," is in Mexico. On Thursday, at 7:30 p.m., he will speak with the public at the Fondo de Cultura Económica bookstore. We began by posing a question many readers have:
- Does Don Juan exist, or is he an invention (a literary creation) of Carlos Castaneda?
"That's the conflict for the reader of Carlos Castaneda," he states. "It refers to their own knowledge: How is it possible that he writes things that don't make sense in the everyday world? The key to this reaction is the reference one makes to oneself, to what one knows."
Then Castaneda says: "Don Juan is not a literary character; he is a person, who doesn't live now, but who lived in the world, as you and I know the world. I couldn't have created a character like Don Juan because I don't have the training. What Don Juan told me isn't something I can improvise or extract as a synthesis from my readings. It's not possible; it's something different."
- If you wanted to summarize Don Juan's teachings, or perhaps highlight his most important one, what would it be?
"The most important thing for me, the thing I would invest everything I have in if Don Juan were selling something, is this premise of losing personal importance, that feeling of self-love, the sense of honor bequeathed to us by our ancestors: the idea that the personal self is so valuable.
I once asked him why losing the feeling of personal importance would be so important. Don Juan says it's very simple: 90% of our energy is consumed in defending our personality. His idea is that there's no reason for so much effort. Defending oneself costs too much and yields nothing."
This, for Carlos Castaneda, is "the crux of Don Juan's teachings. He wants to create a savings of energy so that it can be used for something new."
This something new is found within the teachings of Juan Matus themselves.
"He is interested in perceiving sets that have no history in the everyday world. For example, a new set would be seeing man as a 'luminous egg,' a mass of energy and not merely a solid body. This gives the Indian sorcerer an extraordinary advantage, one that is forbidden to us."
- Why do you say, "We are not interested in perception"?
"When he asked me that," Castaneda recounts, "I assured him that I was extremely interested in perception, which was certainly not true, because the only interest I have, as a Westerner, is in meaning, in epistemology, in one way or another. Hence, I was searching for new meanings, and I call them new paths."
- Do these new paths have anything to do with the separate reality that Don Juan mentions?
"The separate reality is the true reality for Don Juan, because he is not interested in new directions or meanings, which is an intellectual exercise. He is interested in a search for new units of perception, which have no history, such as seeing death, the death that inexorably undoes us.
As Westerners, we intuit but do not see death. And ultimately, we are not interested in it, because (as Don Juan said) we are not interested in life."
- In the prologue to the first Spanish edition of the book 'The Teachings of Don Juan' (Popular Collection of the Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1974), Octavio Paz wrote: "...Don Juan's beliefs have nourished and enriched the sensibility and imagination of the Indians for several thousand years."
Regarding the indigenous cultures of Mexico, Castaneda tells us that "of course, it is the country's heritage. Don Juan is Mexico, pure Mexico, ancient Mexico."
“Right now,” he adds, “there are many people in the country engaged in the same quest as Don Juan. He allowed me to share his knowledge in my books. Currently, I work in northern Mexico with people who are his students, his heirs.
What is crucial,” Castaneda emphasizes, “is that when the Spanish arrived, they stripped the indigenous people of their visible freedoms. The Spanish left the indigenous people with nothing, complete outcasts.”
What remains for Don Juan, and for indigenous people like him, is to confront total freedom, which has nothing to do with political or ideological freedoms, or with the right to happiness and well-being.”
Castaneda explains that total freedom “is about confronting inescapable reality, death, the dissolution of being, of consciousness. Don Juan wants to be free, completely free. He doesn’t want to die like ordinary people.” He says he wants to become total consciousness.
- "There are two words in Juan Matus’s speech that are worth explaining," we tell Castaneda: *seeing* and *power*.
"Don Juan says that all the energy we can count on is already distributed. That's why we can't break the hegemony of perception, and when we encounter a sorcerer, we think we've run into an incoherent man, because he isn't using the available energy the way we do.
So, in order to have access to energy, since it's all distributed, we have to conserve it, and for him, there's only one way to do it: get rid of that which yields nothing. And that 'that' is the importance of the personal self."
The idea is that "if we could conserve that energy, there would be enough capacity to perceive that other reality, that separate reality, and, above all, there would be enough energy to perceive the gift of total knowledge."
Castaneda then explains power. "It's about having saved that energy that allows one to enter inconceivable realms of perception. The man of power is the one who can enter worlds of perception inconceivable to those who haven't been able to save energy, to those who have used all their energy to defend themselves.
If you stopped feeling so important," he remarks, to make the idea clear, "you would be invulnerable. What could they do to you? What hurts us is being accused, or having our self-esteem attacked. One does the best one can, that's undeniable, but one can never take oneself too seriously. That's the secret, there it is, perhaps we've grasped it perfectly."
Castaneda defines his attitude when he says: "I don't want fame or wealth, but rather to express, in the simplest way, what Don Juan taught me."
He tells us about his most recent book, his seventh, which is already circulating in the United States with a title that could be translated as 'The Fire Within'. Its author recounts that the American publisher didn't like the original title, which is most likely the Spanish version: 'The Warriors of Total Freedom'.
"What I want to do is present an outline, a kind of introduction to the three masteries that constitute the ancestral knowledge of the indigenous Mexicans: the mastery of perception, the mastery of Intent, and the mastery of what they call stalking.
The mastery of stalking is the art of living in the everyday world in the best way possible.
The mastery of Intent is the art of trying to connect with the force that sustains us, because there is something that sustains us, that gives us energy.
And of course, the mastery of perception is the art of awareness."
Regarding the assertion that we use all our energy to emphasize the importance of the personal self, we mention the existence of people very different from this idea: those who dedicate themselves to a popular, social cause.
"I imagine so," he says, "from what I know of history."
"I imagine so." Incidentally, he states that "each of the great contemporary leaders is a desperate maniac. Napoleon, for example, who contributed enormously to our way of thinking, Hitler... and he reads Freud's memoirs, it's a desperate thing..."
We disagree. We insist that we're talking about people dedicated to a popular, social cause, like Miguel Hidalgo or Emiliano Zapata.
Then Carlos Castaneda stands up without actually standing and says: "That's something else entirely. [Those figures] have a different kind of skin. There's another ancestral tenor there, another gene. Those people are closer to Don Juan than the European leaders. It's a different kind of sentimentality."
MY OPINION OF THIS INTERVIEW
It's a short interview where Castaneda repeated what he had already said before.
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