. , 1976
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Seeing Castaneda (1976), reprinted from Psychology Today, 1972
: , 1999, E-mail: level@aport.ru
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Sam Keen: Castaneda Interview. 1976
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Source: "Seeing Castaneda" (1976) reprinted from "Psychology Today", 1972.
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SAM KEEN: As I followed don Juan through your three books, I
suspected, at times, that he was the creation of Carlos Castaneda. He
is almost to good to be true--a wise old Indian whose knowledge of
human nature is superior to almost everybody's.
CARLOS CASTANEDA: The idea that I concocted a person like don Juan
is inconceivable. He is hardly the kind of figure my European
intellectual tradition would have led me to invent. The truth is much
stranger. I wasn't even prepared to make the changes in my life that my
association with don Juan involved.
KEEN: How and where did you meet don Juan and become his
apprentice?
CASTANEDA: I was finishing my undergraduate study at UCLA and
was planning to go to graduate school in anthropology. I was
interested in becoming a professor and thought I might begin in the
proper way by publishing a short paper on medicinal plants. I
couldn't have cared less about finding a weirdo like don Juan. I was
in a bus depot in Arizona with a high-school friend of mine. He
pointed out an old Indian man to me and said he knew about peyote and
medicinal plants. I put on my best airs and introduced myself to don
Juan and said: "I understand you know a great deal about peyote. I am
one of the experts on peyote (I had read Weston La Barre's __The Peyote
Cult__) and it might be worth your while to have lunch and talk with
me." Well, he just looked at me and my bravado melted. I was
absolutely tongue-tied and numb. I was usually very aggressive and
verbal so it was a momentous affair to be silenced by a look. After
that I began to visit him and about a year later he told me he had
decided to pass on to me the knowledge of sorcery he had learned from
his teacher.
KEEN: Then don Juan is not an isolated phenomenon. Is there a
community of sorcerers that shares a secret knowledge?
CASTANEDA: Certainly. I know three sorcerers and seven
apprentices and there are many more. If you read the history of the
Spanish conquest of Mexico, you will find that the Catholic
inquisitors tried to stamp out sorcery because they considered it the
work of the devil. It has been around for many hundreds of years.
Most of the techniques don Juan taught me are very old.
KEEN: Some of the techniques that sorcerers use are in wide
use in other occult groups. Persons often use dreams to find lost
articles, and they go on out-of-the-body journeys in their sleep. But
when you told how don Juan and his friend don Genero made your car
disappear in broad daylight I could only scratch my head. I know that
a hypnotist can create an illusion of the presence or absence of an
object. Do you think you were hypnotized?
CASTANEDA: Perhaps, something like that. But we have to begin
by realizing, as don Juan says, that there is much more to the world
than we usually acknowledge. Our normal expectations about reality
are created by a social consensus. We are taught how to see and
understand the world. The trick of socialization is to convince us
that the descriptions we agree upon define the limits of the real
world. What we call reality is only one way of seeing the world, a
way that is supported by a social consensus.
KEEN: Then a sorcerer, like a hypnotist, creates an
alternative world by building up different expectations and
manipulating cues to produce a social consensus.
CASTANEDA: Exactly. I have come to understand sorcery in
terms of Talcott Parsons' idea of glosses. A gloss is a total system
of perception and language. For instance, this room is a gloss. We
have lumped together a series of isolated perceptions--floor, ceiling,
window, lights, rugs, etc.--to make a totality. But we had to be
taught to put the world together in this way. A child reconnoiters
the world with few preconceptions until he is taught to see things in
a way that corresponds to the descriptions everybody agrees on. The
world is an agreement. The system of glossing seems to be somewhat
like walking. We have to learn to walk, but once we learn we are
subject to the syntax of language and the mode of perception it contains.
KEEN: So sorcery, like art, teaches a new system of glossing.
When, for instance, van Gogh broke with the artistic tradition and
painted "The Starry Night" he was in effect saying: here is a new way
of looking at things. Stars are alive and they whirl around in their
energy field.
CASTANEDA: Partly. But there is a difference. An artist
usually just rearranges the old glosses that are proper to his
membership. Membership consists of being an expert in the innuendoes
of meaning that are contained within a culture. For instance, my
primary membership like most educated Western men was in the European
intellectual world. You can't break out of one membership without
being introduced into another. You can only rearrange the glosses.
KEEN: Was don Juan resocializing you or desocializing you?
Was he teaching you a new system of meanings or only a method of
stripping off the old system so that you might see the world as a
wondering child?
CASTANEDA: Don Juan and I disagree about this. I say he was
reglossing me and he says he was deglossing me. By t