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But this entailed a perfect honing of the will. A man of knowledge, Don Juan insisted, could only develop by first becoming a "warrior"—not literally a professional soldier, but a man wholly at one with his environment, agile, unencumbered by sentiment or "personal history " The warrior knows that each act may be his last. He is alone. Death is the root of his life, and in its constant presence he always performs impeccably " This existential stoicism is a key idea in the books. The warrior's aim in becoming a "man of knowledge and thus gaining membership as a sorcerer, is to "see." "Seeing," in Don Juan's system, means experiencing the work directly, grasping its essence, without interpreting it. Castaneda's second book, A Separate Reality, describes Don Juan's efforts to induce him to "see" with the aid of mushroom smoke. Journey to Ixtlan, though many of the desert experiences it recounts predate Castaneda's introduction to peyote, datura and mushrooms, deals with the second stage: "seeing" without drugs.
'The difficulty," says Castaneda, is to learn to perceive with your whole body not just with your eyes and reason The world becomes a stream of tremendously rapid, unique events. So you must trim your body to make it a good receptor: the body is an awareness, and it must be treated impeccably." Easier said than done. Part of the training involved minutely, even piously attuning the senses to the desert, its animals and birds its sounds and shadows, the shifts in its' wind, and the places in which a shaman might confront its spirit entities-spots of power, holes of refuge. When Castaneda describes his education as a hunter and plant-gatherer, learning about the virtues of herbs, the trapping of rabbits, the narrative is absorbing Don Juan and the desert enable him, sporadically and without drugs to "see" or, as the Yaqui puts it "to stop the world." But such a state of interpretation-free experience eludes description—even for those who believe in Castaneda wholeheartedly.
Sages. Not everybody can, does or will But in some quarters Castaneda s works are extravagantly admired as a revival of a mode of cognition that has been largely neglected in the West, buried by materialism and Pascal's despair, since the Renaissance. Says Mike Murphy a founder of the Esalen Institute: "The essential lessons Don Juan has to teach are the timeless ones that have been taught by the great sages of India and the spiritual masters of modern times " Author Alan Watts argues that Castaneda's books offer an alternative to both the guilt-ridden Judaeo-Chns-tian and the blindly mechanistic views of man-"Don Juan's way regards man as something central and important. By not separating ourselves from nature, we return to a position of dignity.
But such endorsements and parallels do not in any way validate the more worldly claim to importance of Castaneda's books: to wit, that