Margaret Teel Castanedaerie Ort ler Meh men OM LeeLee imo cele Ua me) PUM Me eis Melt a ere CoML TL Le Mme el atectt| apprenticeship with a Yaqui Indian sorcerer named Don Juan. While academic critics contend Castaneda invented don Juan, believers say PURCELL MERU Lams CRUEL @r ite attributed to his apprenticeship. Little is known of the Peruvian claiming to be Don Juan's apprentice, but in addition to leading a generation into a mystical otherworld, Carlos Castaneda was also a man. Married to him for thirteen years was Eee aa merece PW eee er ae mer emer Lie Been RL ao MVC Cele (eerel Me meme) CCUM cc Ore ite Gerelite eel Me lam LY T-lea tlle Reem et Muir le ME tm eR) Margaret and Carlos explored many of the ideas—from controlling dreams to using hallucinogenic mushrooms—that he claims to have Tai Rice Lee aCe eM eel Me Meta ne Lo ) sorcerer, and she still loves him. She insists Castaneda's academic critics miss the point. "I'm willing to accept Don Juan as a spiritual teacher, and it really doesn't matter if he's not real.” But the role she claims—in developing the ideas Carlos purports to be Don Juan’s— ought to be recognized, she says, so she wrote this bookA MAGICAL JOURNEY WITH CARLOS CASTANEDAA MAGICAL JOURNEY WITH CARLOS CASTANEDA Margaret Runyan Castaneda iUniverse.com, Inc. San Jose New York Lincoln ShanghaiA Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda All Rights Reserved © 2001 by Margaret Runyan Castaneda No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by ny means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical,including photocopy recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher. Published by iUniverse.com, Inc. For information address: iUniverse.com, Inc. 5220S L6th, Ste. 200 Lincoln, NE 68512 www. iuniverse.com The information and material contained in this book are provided “as is,” without warranty of any kind, express or implied, inclu without jon any warranty concerning the accuracy, adequacy, or completeness he results to be obtained from using such information or material. Neither iUniverse.com, Inc. nor the author shall be responsible for any claims attributable to errors, omissions, or other inaccuracies in the information or mat contained in this book, and in no event shall iUniverse.com, Inc. or the author be liable for direct, indirect, special, incidental, or consequential damages arising out of the use of such information or material. cof such infor: mor material at ISBN: 0-595-15318-6. Printed in the United States of AmericaDon't write in stone or write in wood, that T was honest or that I was good, But write in smoke on a passing breeze— Seven words and the words are these: Filling more than a volume could, He lived, he laughed and he understood. —Don Blanding, My EpitherIntroduction Carlos looked at me with those big brown eyes that looked like ebony almonds. He was in an impish mood. He whispered, “Oh, Missa Runyan, | will start a revolution that will last beyond our lifetime—and you are a part of it!” He laughed. It sounded almost inhuman, like the cawing of a crow. “Carlos, you are crazy!” [ said. Then he picked me up and shung me over his shoulder. 1 hit him with my purse. We fell down laughing. 1 was hooked by this diminutive man whe would become my husband. One of Carlos’s good friends during his early days in Los Angeles was Lydette Maduro, a chubby, dark-eyed Costa Rican who lived in Los Angeles with her mother. He called her Nanecca and saw her frequently prior to the end of 1955, It was Lydette who brought Carlos to my apart- mentin December 1955. Mrs. Angela Maduro, her mother, had made two cocktail dresses for the Christmas holiday season for me. Carlos accom- panied Lydette on the errand. He sat silently in the corner while [ tried the dresses on to see that they fit just right. The dresses were beautiful. One was blue peau-de-soie with a dropped waist line and Chantilly lace fitted top with rhinestone straps. The skirt was puffed at the bottom like pan- taloons and quite short. The other dress was a mandarin silk brocade with Chinese motifs on it, They fit perfectly, As Carlos and Lydette were leaving, she stepped outside the door and with Carlos beside her she said, “Ob Margarita, this is my friend, Carlos from South America.” He smiled at me—said nothing and they turned and walked away. [closed the door, stood there averwhelmed by the look he had given mie. My head pounded while my mind was thinking over the encounter. Teouldn’t get him out of my mind; I felt the look he gave me was a sure sign he would call soon. However, he didn’t. viiviii # A Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda Shortly after that, | went to the Maduros ta pick up the dresses. They were ready fora final fitting. Before leaving my apartment, I had an intuitive impulse or hunch that prompted me to do something unusual. I wrote my name, address and telephone number in a book by Neville Goddard, The Search. | planned to give it to Carlos if the occasion arose. My arrival at Lydette’s house unexpected caught her off guard, Carlos was there (which proved my hunch was right). The cocktail dress was lying on the bed. Carlos and Lydette were talking and didn’t notice I was there ‘till T cleared my throat and said, “Hello, Lydette.”” She turned towards me startled, while Carlos just smiled. She said, “Carlos, mother needs your help in the kitchen.” As he left the room, Lydette smiled and said sweetly, “Next time, call before you come.” Tknew she was hopelessly in love with the man she told me was only a friend of the family. She needn't worry though. | would never fall in love again. It was the only thing | was certain about. Still [ felt nervous. I wanted to run. Of course [ couldn't run. | had come to try the dresses on and take them with me. [ had parties to attend. Then she said they were not quite ready. “I'll come back,” I said, “when would be a good time?” “Mother will call you,’ Lydette said. Then with a change of mood she became friendly and talked about our times in the past, things we did with Carlos and her brother that [ dated whe had been killed in a revolution in Costa Rica. [ had spent many happy times with their family. As Lydette showed me to the door, she said, “You really like Carlos, don’t you?” “Well, he seems nice," I said. “LT warn you, beware of him, he has power...” “That little man? Lydette, he only comes to my shoulder.” “Not physical power,” she whispered, “He can charm your saul, he is acurandero.”ix (Introduction “A what?” “Shame, a magician.” I looked at Lydette in disbelief. Carlos looked more like an Indian with a youthful face, than a wizard. “I'm sure he's a magician." [ said to humor her, because [ didn’t believe a word she said. “Lam right,” she said. “I know what | believe is true and you will find out too, if you're not careful.” Believing she was trying to scare me away from the man she con- sidered her property, | said, “Don’t worry, Lydette, I'm not very attracted to Carlos.” [ wanted it to be true, but something was happening to me, | don’t know what—but I sensed this was not my last meeting with Carlos, “L think you are lying, Miss Runyan,” Lydette’s eyes said, then she walked me to the door in silence, We stood there a moment, Lydette on the threshold, and T on the step. Suddenly, Carlos appeared beside Lydette smiling broadly—his teeth looked like pearls. "Goodbye, Missa Runyan,” he said, stepping forward, extending his hand. [t was then I slipped him the book from my purse, Neville’s, The Search. Inside | had written my telephone number and address. He tucked it under his arm out of Lydette’s view and returned to the house, Lydette waved goadbye. I walked along the sidewalk to the bus stop, and sat down beside an ald lady with a shopping cart full of bottles. She asked for a quar- ter, My hand was shaking as I looked in my purse. Something had happened to me at Lydette’s house. What, I did not know—but it was exciting. As the bus rumbled up Vine Street and onto Wilshire Boulevard, I looked out at the city lights and saw Carlos’s face reflected in each of ther. He had my number. | will not try to call him, | told myself. But it was to no avail, Deep down I knew we would meet again. Sa I visualized his face and whispered a silent message: cull re. Then the long wait began... Thus began my magical journey with Carlos Castaneda.x / A Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda Mother and I- The dress is the one I wore on my first date with Carlos, 1956Contents Introduction Part One Beginnings .... Part Two Spun by Allegory... Epilogue .... About the Author .. xiPart ONE BeginningsIn sleep that night, the dream returns, He's alone on the desert again, barefoot and frightened and looking for the strange force they call the ally, which is sort of a spirit guide or psychic being. It’s something Carlos must somehow find and defeat as a final ritual of passage. So he is out here in the middle of this forsaken wilderness, just wandering around among the shrub and the waterbarrel cacti, marooned, search- ing, one man alone in the wasteland. And the only thing he can think about is the twelve years he’s spent getting here. Twelve years as a sor- cerer's apprentice, twelve years learning the ritual and technique. one- fourth of his life preparing for this moment. .this extstential moment! Iwelve years! And absolutely nothing is happening. Nothing, Not even the lizards are aut yet. A vacant silence has settled over the place. There is nothing but the shrub and the cacti and the shadows rolling back away from the dawn, It's as if Carlos has been out there forever, when suddenly, he s samething—a man, a huge, towering hulk of a man with thick arms ris- ing out of the shadows. He's dressed in a dark jacket and a pair of dou- ble-knits with a red bandanna tied at the throat, which seems so ludicrous in this place, and he’s got these thin spectral cheekbones and agreat angular nose, There are hollows where his eyes should be, Carlos steps backwards in awe and for a moment the whole scene just hovers above itself. os4/-A Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda Then the ally starts walking. He is walking towards Carlos, taking long slow steps straight at him, digging the heels of his patent leather boots into the sand. Suddenly, there are hawks in the sky. This is it, no doubt about it—the denouement, the culminating battle of a man of knowledge! It has taken twelve yeats to reach this point. But it never goes any further. For some strange reason everything always stops right here, just as the ally is making his approach, Everything freezes, and overhead, out among the hawks, a single crow is wheeling across the Mexican sky. It is an omen, a metaphor, the last link with Carlos’ personal life—which is to say his teal life and not the character in his books—and in a single electric instant Carlos understands that this is his final weakness, the last link to be broken before he becomes a man of knowledge. And as he stands there, the details of his apprenticeship wash across his memory in a backward moving tide— An old Indian swimming in air and climbing waterfalls, alkaloid sleeps in dingy cabins, consciousness dreaming, chewing peyote, strawberry-faced allies, the hallucinations, the trance running, the ecstatic alumincmt/oil visions, the early lectures on “seeing,” his fabled smeeting of Don Juan. —And suddenly he’s back at the beginning again. ll the teachings are fresh again and the rule is new: Break all bonds! There is no coinci- dence, there are no dreams! There are only the fleeting incomprehensi- ble images crashing through the skull. Suddenly, Carlos is in the Slipstream and it is a million colors, “Chocho,” he screams at the crow, but the bird is too high. Carlos Castaneda leaps up from his bed. “Chocho!” Nanny, a UCLA student who is with him here in Westwood, walks over to the mattress and sits down and puts her arms around him. “No,” she says softly, “He's not here. C.J. is back with his mather, It’s only a dream.” “But [ was there,” whispers Carlos Castaneda.“| was right there.” Nanny strokes his hair. “Not yet,” she says.5 Beginnings It isn’t exactly easy, you know. It’s no cinch putting whole inexplicable worldviews down on paper so that every burgher from Schenectady to Long Beach can understand. Carlos Castaneda is having a great deal of difficulty doing it, waking up nights in cold sweats and then trying to reconstruct enough to make sense of it all. That’s not to say his books are a product of his nightmares. On the contrary, he has spent years research- ing sorcery and Indian culture in the libraries around UCLA, traveled the desiccated Mexican plains. and invested a quarter of his life collecting information on medical plants and the rest from informants, One-quar- ter of bis life probing their strange Paleolithic philosophies. He has paid his dues to mysticism and the great god Anthropology. Moreover, he has spent years hunched over that damned typewriter telling his whole story in meticulous detail. Now, here in the spring of 1974, with three books out and a fourth over there on the desk, he has become more than just. a cult hero of the West, more than just a minor legend, he is more than that, he has become. ..Castaneda—a Man of Power. And the way he did it was to transform rather basic Eastern philo- sophical ideas into pure shamanic apergus—that sort of danger there in the drift. The message was always the same—there is a reality apart from ego-bound real world. He would sit there at his typewriter, roll his brown eyes shut in deep metaphysical concentration, and channel every- thing through the Magnificent Mystifier way back there in the cerebral peduncle or someplace. Finally, out would come something like, “Knowledge is a moth” or “Death stands always to the left.” Something soaring and cryptic, It’s like hitting a moving target trying to understand what Carlos Castaneda is talking about—and God knows, everybody is trying to understand. The only thing you have to ga on are his books, bis magnificent story, all about how he was once an undergraduate at UCLA and ran across an old Indian whom he called Don Juan who revealed a unique personal worldview perceived by a network of Central and South American sorcerers that everybody thought was long extinct. But here6 / A Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda they were, and this student was living among them and writing about them. For twelve years, from 1960 through 1972, Carlos says he served as an apprentice medicine man to Don Juan and he watched the gradual revelation of his Indian's role as botanist, curer, sorcerer, warrior, brejo, and master of eclectic ritual. Don Juan used three drugs—peyote, mushrooms and Jimson weed—during the early stages of Carlos’ apprenticeship. The drugs were aimed at breaking down cultural condi- tioning and, ultimately, one’s safe perception of the world. Carlos wrote about his experiences as an apprentice in a series of four books, published between 1968 and 1974. It was a flat-out Hesse ideal: student of life meets spiritual master, only Carlos was saying that it actually happened. Here was a guy from Los Angeles saying he had lived this strange metaphysical existence on the Mexican plain and had come back to tell about it, In the four books, which from the outset were more philosophy than anthropology, he had put down in black and white the conversation, the ritual, the hallucinations, the apercus, the final sorcerer's explanation—the whole reticular system. It was all there, only it remained rather incomprehensible to the end, Even Carlos admitted that his work gave only a superficial view of how a grizzled old Yaqui bruje views the world. The key, Carlos wrote, was to understand that the world of common-sense reality is a product of social consensus, an idea basic to Carlos’ favorite area of academic study at UCLA—phenomenology. In his first book, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, Carlos wrote about mitotes—peyote ceremonies—in which the participants “see” rather than just look. That is, they use a total bodily awareness to flesh out the world as it is, not just as it appears as a result of descriptions pounded in from birth. The brujos can halt the fleeting stream of interpretation that makes up our rather feeble perception of things. What you're left with after stopping the stream is pure wondering perception—where gut-sense prevails and the body overtakes reason.TF Beginnings [t was there, in The Teachings, that Carlos described how he first met his Indian teacher, Don Juan, in an Arizona bus depot. He was collect- ing material for a college paper on psychotropic drug use among the locals and, told of Don Juan's purported knowledge in the field, he sought the old man out. It took nearly a year before Don Juan explained that he possessed a certain strange knowledge and agreed to let Carlos in on it. This was something of a revolutionary thing because there is a strict convention among brujos that the secrets are to be taught only to their own kin. But Don Juan made an exception and Carlos, who pictured himself as the most unlikely of apprentices, began his apprenticeship first in Arizona and later moved to Sonora, Mexico, At first, the Indian made him roll around on the porch under the ramada until he found his spot, which is to say the exact location where he felt absolutely right. It took Carlos six hours of rolling around there on the porch before he began perceiving delicate changes of hue anda narrowing of the vision, and finally he settled oma spat Don Juan called the sitia, the place that gave a sense of superior strength. The apprenticeship was off and running. A few months later, Carlos and Don Juan traveled to the house of another Indian and it was there that Carlos had his first taste of peyote and the soaring hallucinations it brings. There was jargon to learn and steps to take before becoming a man of knowledge in the ancient tradi- tion; there was that peculiar kind of satori called “seeing” in which the world takes on a new existential meaning. In the brijo’s system, allies stand at the periphery ready to help an apprentice, advise him, give him strength and so forth, And there was another kind of power called Mescalito, a protector and teacher who produced states of con- sciousness beyond ordinary reality. All this was pretty far out, of course, but Carlos succeeded in devel- oping these primitive religious ideas in a neat and interesting way. He recounted long Socratic sessions with his Indian teacher, conversations that gave resonance and depth to all the ritual and shamanic technique8 / A Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda that had seemed almost silly from a distance. He returned from the crest of his hallucinations with the most detailed notes on the primitive netherworld since Fr. Bernardino de Sahagun first stumbled on the pey- ote feasts of the northern desert hunters of Mexico. In a border town one day, Don Juan explained that the man of knowledge faces four enemies. Like so many of Don Juan's perorations, it was intricately constructed, beautifully conceived and devoid of real- world logic. The first enemy of the man of knowledge is fear, mostly of the unknown, As he begins to learn, the apprentice faces a second enemy, dlarity of mind, which Don Juan says can dispel fear but also blinds the initiate to the rather terrible psychic possibilities of letting go of one’s personal sense of reality too soon. [t's really a matter of balance, of mov- ing slowly in the exchange of realities, the burgher’s for the sorceret’s. It’s there, in the exchange, that the sense of personal power comes, a secret kind of ancient power that can make an apprentice cruel and capricious, such is the case for a lot of those old farts out there in the desert. But for somebody who can handle it and use it to understand the non-logical cosmos, for that person there is only one thing that stands in the way, the enemy of old age. And so here was this old man sil g in some border town with Carlos, describing haw the fourth enemy was something that could never be defeated entirely, only kept at a distance for a while, and Carlos wrote it all down verbatim in a rather enigmatic exchange in his first book. The sequel, A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan, included more of Don Juan, his adventures and his teachings, and intraduced Don Genaro, a Mazatec superman with a predilection for pirouetting across the edge of waterfalls and floating a few inches off the floor. If Don Juan's method was the Socratic dialogue, Don Genaro’s was creative gymnastics. The boak covers the second phase of Carlos’s apprenticeship from April 1968 to October 1970. By the book’s end,9 F Beginnings Don Genaro tries to break Carlas’s clawhold on Western logic and rea- son by violating the rules of Aristotelian time and space. He travels ten miles in an instant. He actually moves from open plain to a distant scree-covered mountain ledge ten miles away in a single transcendent moment...here...there. [npossible! It is left to the reader to conclude that the Indians are manipulating Carlos’s conversations. Th re na signposts, It’s like when Carlos flew in the second book. At the direction of Don Juan and with the help of a little Jimson weed, Carlos felt himself one afternoon leave the ground and soar across the desert. When he returned, he asked Don Juan if, in fact, he actually had flown or merely had hallucinated the trip. The question was absurd to Don Juan’s mind, and therein lay the crux of the matter of sorcery. It was, above all, a matter of mind. Carlos few all right, a flight different from, but no less real, in the bruje’s world than that of a crow. It was the flight of a man wha had used Jimson weed and all thase arbitrary distinctions of the Western world were as irrelevant ferenice between dreaming and waking. arlos used drugs and so he to the shaman, as the In the early days of the apprenticeship, could explain everything away as a function of the chemicals, but toward the end, through the third and fourth books of the Don Juan tetralogy, he began experiencing extraordinary phenomena—lights, colors, allies, forces, inexplicable sounds—with a clear and chemically unmuddled head. Suddenly, it was obvious that the Indian, that gritty product of the open plains, was not only the progenitor of a complex ve gad system, but also of a totally unique view of things, a per- é and worldview as revolutionary in its own way as Einstein's must have seemed to the German intelligentsia in 1921. No! Even more than that—as Nietzsche’s must have seemed, or Darwin's. Sud- denly all those fineboned notions about Europeans being the only ones who could ever develop a system of rational thought would waver and fall,10 / A Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda In Journey to Ixtlan, the third book, Carlos returns to his field notes of the first two years of his apprenticeship. Most of the book, all except the last three chapters, is material he previously had excluded because it didn’t deal directly with hallucinations. In the early days, the drugs were the most fascinating aspect of becoming a primitive man of knowledge and so the other stuff, the tranquil conversations learning the shaman’s vocabulary and a whole series of esoteric lessons—all that was generally ignored. It was only later, after he understood the limits of drug use, that Carlos returned to the early conversations. There are no psy- chotropics in Journey to Ixtlan, only lessons of the sorcerer's conception of death and the various techniques for enlightenment. It came the closest of explaining that the ordinary experience of the world is only “a description” ‘The final three chapters are new material, not reconstructed field notes from the early years, and they carry the apprenticeship through May 1971. Carlos wrote as much about Don Genaro as Don Juan, espe- cially about the old Mazatec’s brilliant pantomimes and the baffling physiopsychic feats—such as making Carlos’s car seem to disappear and then reappear out on the desert. Confronting a coyote a little while later, Carlos is able to suspend the limits of his cultural conditioning enough toactually communicate with it. This is weighty stuff, the glistening edge of schizophrenia, Don Genara warns him of the dangers by explaining his journey to Ixtlan, a broad and frightening metaphor of what can happen to the psyche not ready for the deepest revelations of sorcery. Asa young man, Don Genaro chose to perform the rite of passage— which is to say, by wrestling the ally. As he tells it, he met the ally on the plain but was not strong enough and was hurled into a netherworld where people appear only as phantoms. Genaro moves constantly, heading always for his home in Ixtlan, a journey he says he can never complete. The point of this rather mystical story was that Carlos, too, would one day find himself face-to-face with the ally and would have to wrestle it. [f he was prepared, if his personal life was in order and his