magazine_interviews/cesare_medail_italian_november_1997

Last edited by u/TechnoMagical_Intent on 2021-10-30 20:20 UTC

CC Interview - Cesare Medail (Italian) - November 21, 1997

Interview 1997 Castaneda, Cesare Medail (Italian)

[Google Translated from Italian]

First version of the text

by Cesare Medail,

Journalist for Corriere della Sera and author of the book "Le Piccole Porte" published by Corbaccio (out of catalog)

“Los Angeles. What happened to Castaneda? Why did it disappear? Are you a prisoner? He committed suicide? Did he die 20 years ago on a Mexican bus? Are the latest books really yours? These and other fantasies flourished around the anthropologist of Peruvian origin who became a cult writer around 1968, after having recounted his years of full immersion in Mexican witchcraft; a mystery fueled by his actual disappearance from the public scene, as well as by the absence of photos (except for one that portrays him as a student) and audio and video recordings.

Carlos Castaneda, seventy-two, has materialized in the doorway of a small French restaurant, the Mustache Café in Westwood, his face half hidden by a black cap well pressed on his forehead. After a month of faxes and phone calls with his agents, postponements and a last-minute counter-order, Castaneda was there, on November 12, 1997, to grant one of the very rare interviews of his life away from the mass media, the first, in decades , to a European newspaper. Not tall, lean, brown complexion, straight gray hair, a little tousled, dark eyes in perpetual motion, a face capable of modulating more varied expressions such as the comedians of the silent.

We sit at the table for four hours, he hardly eats but is produced in a crescendo of humor and philosophy, words of wisdom and jokes with the two companions, Talia Bey, president of Cleargreen, a company that takes care of the initiatives that Florinda of the three anthropologists who followed him in the experiences lived among the brujos, the sorcerers of Mexico.

As he sought an escape from opulent America, the alternative culture, emerging from the ashes of the protest of the 1960s, was bewitched by his tales. In 1973, Time dedicated the cover to him. The glory lasted until the mid-seventies, when he launched a campaign of academic denigration with essays where his name was inexorably accompanied by the term hoax, swindler ...

But what subversive did those books sold by the millions of copies have? They transmitted a knowledge that crumbled the compactness of the empirical world: don Juan Matus, the sorcerer of the Sonoran desert met at the bus station in Nogales (Arizona) who had become a literary levels of reality that soon became a mirage for anyone in America who cultivated "altered states of consciousness". Academic anathema did not stop his books from being released, but he was lost track.

"I'm not gone at all," Castaneda protests. "Except that for many years there was no way to contact me, since I was cultivating gardens in the mountains of Guatemala, a land with traditions close to the Mexican brujos". Certainly in those years Castaneda did not limit himself to gardening but he deepened the techniques of those sorcerers who did not know how to handle the enormous amount of knowledge inherited over the centuries. Secretly. Castaneda in those last years tried to spread the extraordinary teachings he had learned before they were lost forever ... What was the intent of the brujos? “The intent, the ultimate goal - continues Castaneda - is the freedom that is reached through the awareness of being: it is not just a matter of psychophysical well-being.

For the brujos, we are like a city besieged by a very special Predator who is part of the universe: it is an invisible force that they can physically see, as it devours our energy. The Predator takes away the awareness of being one with the flow of the universe: and leaves us at the mercy of the Ego, prisoners of egomania and therefore unhappy. By redistributing the blocked energy with the right movements, the magical passes can stop the Predator, promoting the growth of awareness and the expansion of perception. It is at this point that practitioners are able to access unimaginable worlds ”.

But are those worlds real or is it a literary fiction, or a product of the subconscious stimulated by the practices of the brujos and drugs?

"At the school of sorcerers I had a perception of concrete and dangerous worlds, so concrete that they attract you and sometimes do not let you out. on the contrary, the visions induced by the subconscious are changing, constantly changing. As for drugs, don Juan has given me many, and very strong ones. This is why my stomach is so bad: I take a drop of coffee, that I already feel guilty! At that time I was a prisoner of common sense, square, stubborn, because old-minded people, full of prejudices, fearful of the new, had educated me. Don Juan's drugs have unhinged this world: to enter his one must be fluid, without preconceived ideas and above all without fear of the unknown.

Of course, the experiences that Castaneda had tried to convey were not, in his opinion, attributable to any category of the civilized world; They could be understandable, but surely undermined faith in the visible world as the only possibility being, faith in "close-fitting bandage that holds us, forbidding us to perceive reality puffs different and more" as sciagrive plate in tory ... But here was the point, the unresolved knot of the chestnut tales as well as of all visionary literature. Were the worlds visited and described by Carlos concrete, real or just the product of a hallucinatory state, favored first by the use of drugs and then by the practices of the brujos? The question could concern his initiation into the Mexican deserts as well as the experiences of the mystics, seers, great dreamers of all time. Faced with my doubts, Castaneda spoke to me about Tonal and Nagual, explaining that the first corresponded to the physical reality as we know it, while the second is the "other possibility of being", which can only be experienced by those who "learn to see" appearance ".

At this point I tried to insist on the "other possibility of being" (the interview was over but he was urging me: "Ask, ask I don't know if I'll still be here when you come back"; he would die six months later). In other words, I asked him: what can be glimpsed from the little door of vision, open in the great door of the ordinary world? Castaneda replied that the brujos could see men as conglomerates of energy, like a sort of spheres held together by luminous filaments that cross and branch out to infinity. In each sphere they see stale, unused energy, which they are able to unblock, redistribute in the body, through very simple practices, perhaps with a tap at a particular point, on the disciple's shoulder blade.

The pupil of the sorcerer insisted on the uniqueness of the teaching of the Naguals, which would not be comparable in anything to the religious traditions or initiatory schools of the East and the West. I myself perceived those speeches as aliens. However, those luminous "eggs" gradually became familiar to me: I was thinking of the almonds of light in which the painters enclosed the saints, the spheres of Bosch, the flaming auras of certain bodhisattvas or sacis (Italian for saint?).

The suggestion of those speeches pushed me to go further, to ask for example what a Nagual expects after the end of the body. In particular, I was thinking of the episode of the "leap into the abyss" which more than any other clashes with reason in the Castaneda saga. Don Juan throws himself into a ravine and disappears, at least from our plane of reality; but the decisive test for becoming a Nagual requires that Carlos, with three disciples, also throw himself into it. This happens without it being smashed: the violation of the natural order is obvious. In this regard, Zolla mentions the ascent of Saint Paul to the Third Heaven: “Was it with the body? Or not with the body? I don't know, the apostle asked himself ”; and Castaneda echoes him:

“Did we jump with the body or with the hallucinated imagination in the vortex of pure energy? We do not know ". Carlos does not have an answer but remembers that from that experience he emerged radically changed in terms of subtle perception, visionary capacity and the power to interact with the matter of visions. On the other hand, no mystic has the necessary words to describe the unspeakable of ecstatic experience. When asked what awaited the sorcerers after death, Castaneda laughed out loud as he accused me of using my logic for an absolutely prelogical system. But I insisted: what happened to don Juan? His tone changed and became serious for once:

“At the end of life, the bodies of sorcerers burn from within before disappearing like a breath of air and transforming into pure energy with awareness”.

Basically, I said to myself, it is the change of state of a being that maintains self-awareness beyond passing away: a concept of survival to death not too different from what was conceived by philosophers, theologians, religious of all time and cult But "after" , I asked, what happens to that conscious energy into which the body transforms itself and which survives it? And Carlos:

“At the end of life, neither heaven nor hell, nor reincarnation, nor nirvana await us. The real prize is to continue the struggle to acquire ever greater awareness in other levels of reality, concrete, where one can be born, live and die; and where the body, in its new form, is awaited by new challenges and not challenges: The struggle continues: and it is a tremendously congruous vision with modern theories on the nature of the universe ”.

Castaneda gave a lot of emphasis to the last words, banging his fist on the table. The idea of ​​various levels of reality (which don Juan compares to the layers of an onion) may also recall the multiple dimensions of the universe (or multiverse) conceived by modern physics; but above all it recalls how many in the West have hypothesized various degrees or levels of being, from Giordano Bruno to the purification through successive existences (on earth but also in higher worlds) of the Orientals. Bruno's man-magician is not at the mercy of mutant nature but can master it to elevate himself and ascend, through a long and harsh process of purification, the different planes of being. Not too different from don Juan.

When we left the Mustache Café, Carlos seemed to me much closer than the strangeness of his stories to our mental categories suggested. It had opened a door to inexorably alien landscapes but then, as I observed the details and discovered familiar references, I had the impression of finding myself at home, albeit enriched by perspectives and angles of vision subverted with respect to my cultural geography.

Castaneda himself, in accompanying me to the hotel, showed cordiality, spoke to me about the film never shot with Fellini and confided to me that he had attended the Brera Academy as a boy, when it was directed by the sculptor Marino Marini, a stone's throw from my home in Milan.

At the door of the hotel he hugged me for a long time: perhaps he knew that we would never see each other again, in any case I felt an unexpected emotion in the disciple of the sorcerer. I thought back to the "infinite masks of God" that the Christian novelist Morris West spoke of and wondered if at least one of them was not applicable to that ancient Mexican tradition. I knew too little to answer. Surely those hours had given me the opportunity to look at Western thought, at the metaphysical question itself, at the comparison between cultures and traditions, from an absolutely eccentric point of view compared to my knowledge. Castaneda had also been an asset; I was, and I am more than convinced of it.

Second version of the text

Interview with the "invisible writer" who rejects photos and recorders.

For decades away from the mass media, now out of the shadows CARLOS CASTANEDA A sorcerer will save you. He became a cult author in the 60s with his initiation among shamans.

"They gave me mescaline to unlock me."

While his latest book on ancient magic of Mexico...agreed to meet us in LOS ANGELES what happened to Castaneda? Why did he disappear? Are you a prisoner? He committed suicide? Did he die 20 years ago on a Mexican bus? Are the latest books really yours? These and other fantasies flourished around the Peruvian anthropologist who became a cult writer around 1968, after having recounted his years of full immersion in Mexican witchcraft; a mystery fueled by his actual disappearance from the public scene, as well as by the absence of photos (except for one that portrays him as a student) and audio - video recordings.

A few days ago, however, Carlos Castaneda, 72, materialized at the door of a French restaurant, the "Mustache Cafe" in Westwood (Los Angeles), his face half hidden by a black cap well pressed on his forehead. After a month of faxes and phone calls with his agents, postponements and a last-minute counter-order, Castaneda was there to grant one of the very rare interviews of his life away from the mass media, the first in decades to a European newspaper ... Not tall, lean, brown complexion, gray hair, straight a little tousled, dark pupils in perpetual motion, face capable of modulating the most expressions as varied as the silent comedians.

We sit at the table for four hours, he hardly eats but is produced in a crescendo of humor and philosophy, words of wisdom and jokes with the two companions, Talia Bey, president of Cleargreen, the company that takes care of the initiatives that concern him, and Florinda Donner, one of the three anthropologists (with Taisha Abelar and Carol Tiggs) who were beside him in the experiences, splendid and terrible, lived among the brujos, the shamans of Mexico.

As he sought an escape from opulent America, the alternative culture that emerged from the ashes of the 1960s protest was bewitched by his tales. In 1973, "Time" dedicated the cover to him; not only that, but Castaneda became a subject of study in the most widespread series of questions and answers for university exams, the Cliff Notes manuals. His glory lasted until the mid-1970s, when he launched a campaign of academic denigration with essays where his name was inexorably accompanied by the term hoax, swindler. On that occasion, Octavio Paz manifested him 'affectionate and devoted words and Elemire Zolla dedicated him' numerous pages of the essay Letterati e lo shaman, recalling that in the Toltec code of origin preserved in Liverpool he finds himself "the figure that Carlos composes with the witches."

But what was subversive about those books sold by the millions of copies? They transmitted a knowledge that crumbled the compactness of the empirical world: a Mexican sorcerer, the Indian yaqui don Juan Matus, met in 60 at the bus stop in Nogales (Arizona) who later him became a literary myth, gave an apprenticeship of thirteen years before using drugs, then simple gestures such as a tap on the shoulder to make him experience those levels of reality that soon became a mirage for anyone in America who cultivated "alternative states of consciousness". The academic anathema did not stop the following of the books, but all traces of him were lost. "

I'm not gone at all," Castaneda protests. "Except that for many years there was no way to contact me, since I was cultivating gardens in the mountains of Guatemala, a land with traditions close to the Mexican brujos. Every now and then I would travel to conferences and seminars in Latin America or California, but the mass media paid no attention to us ". That he retired to Guatemala only to do gardening seems hardly credible and the incipit of the Fire of the Deep (1984) helps us: "Over the past fifteen years, I have written long and detailed accounts of my apprenticeship with the Indian sorcerer don Juan . Since the practices and concepts it required me to understand and internalize were rather unusual ... ". More likely, therefore, that Castaneda and her companions had retired to transcribe, to " internalize "that incandescent material to then transmit a distillate to the public, as happens today with" the magical movements of the shamans of ancient Mexico "subtitle of Tensegrita '(the book just released in Italy by Rizzoli), a term that defines a property of masonry structures, to be tense and elastic at the same time. Why did you decide to divulge only now, through seminars, internet, videotapes those "magic passes" that sorcerers reserved for a few? Is it a surrender to the mass media? "The brujos they did not know how to handle the enormous amount of knowledge inherited over the centuries; and they did everything in secret. We, on the other hand, felt, after years of reflection, that it was more reasonable to communicate them: also because, if you do not pass it on, this knowledge suffocates you.

"In the intent of the brujos who created them". Castaneda now spells out every word: "The Intent, the ultimate goal, is the freedom that is reached through the awareness of being: it is not just a matter of psychophysical well-being.

For the brujos, we are like a city besieged by a very special Predator who is part of the universe: it is an invisible force that they can physically see as it devours our energy. The Predator takes away the awareness of being one with the flow of the universe: and leaves us all at the mercy of the Ego, prisoners of egomania and therefore unhappy. By redistributing the blocked energy with the right movements, the "magic passes" can stop the Predator, promoting the growth of awareness and the expansion of perception. It is at this point that practitioners will be able to access unimaginable worlds. "

But are the worlds he described real or are they literary fiction, perhaps produced by the subconscious stimulated by the practices of the brujos and by drugs?

Without preconceived ideas and above all without fear of the unknown. Then there was no more need for mescalito ".

Therefore, there are also natural ways to get out of everyday life. Is the dream one of them? "Yes, the dream state is a door to enter and exit other realities, but first you have to understand what it is. Try to keep your attention on a detail of the dream, for example on the hands: if the dream it is normal you will not make it: if you manage to keep your attention on the object, then it is a vision. There are no techniques to produce it. Dreaming of worlds not created by the subconscious is a gift from the universe bestowed on everyone. , sooner or later, in life; and the art of dreaming consists precisely in learning to distinguish the psychological dream from the vision-like opening a door into the large door that locks us in everyday life. " But what is'the end of Mexican witchcraft, for example with respect to death? Let's take the case of don Juan, who "disappears" in 1973: is he dead and cremated as someone wrote, or was it different?

"For the shamans of Mexico, at the end of life, man has nothing to lose or gain: he can only aspire to continue the struggle for awareness in other levels of reality. The unso allows the sorcerer to transform himself. totally in consciousness of being: in this way, the physical body is transformed into energy. And in the new form new challenges await it ". Other than cremation, Carlos and his companions laugh, almost amazed that I believe more in the newspapers than in the brujos: don Juan's physical body is burned from the inside and vanished like a breath of air. "But there is nothing spiritual", Castaneda warns: "It is a pragmatic philosophy, founded on a hard discipline that allows you to experiment with new realities.

At the table of the "Mustache Cafe" Castaneda stops only to joke with her companions: "Florinda and Talia can have as much sex as they want, they are so full of energy. They were conceived with passion; not like me, conceived in the manner husbands who, returning from work, fuck their wives telling her not to wake up. Those born like this have little energy: that's why don Juan told me to avoid sex ". The shaman's heir is in such a good mood that you want to photograph him. "Eh no", he snaps, "the photos and the tapes of the voice trap the ego in time, they fix the personal history that the sorcerer takes a lifetime to erase. The photos on the table are an exaltation of the Ego".How to dissolve a hymn to our prison.

His meeting with Fellini. For a missed movie Just sitting at the "Mustache Cafe", Castaneda talks about Fellini (pictured).

"Federico, great, intelligent, sensitive man. Too bad he died so young, but he ate too much and compressed his energy. That time in Rome, in 1984, he took me to a restaurant where they served twelve courses. Marcello was there too. (Mastroianni): they ate everything, I was scared ".

Castaneda says that Fellini wanted to make a film inspired by don Juan's world:

"He was fascinated by the universe of brujos because he was a visionary. He also wanted to try peyote for once, but I told him it was not advisable: with what he ate, it would be a disaster".

The film was not made: Fellini will say that Castaneda's visions attracted and at the same time disturbed him. He made a story about it, published in installments in the "Corriere" in 1986. In conversing Anglo-Hispanic Castaneda slips in a few words of Italian and a completely unpublished biographical detail emerges:

"When I was young, I spent a period in Milan to study art in Brera: the sculptor Marino Marini was the director. My maternal grandfather, Sicilian, self-taught sculptor and unrepentant womanizer, had wanted him. He always said: porca bella Italia,.".

Biography and works Castaneda was born in Peru in the Inca city of Andean di Cajamarca in 1925. His father Cesar was a watchmaker - goldsmith. In '48 the family moved to Lima where he graduated from the Colegio National de Guadalupe. In 1951 he emigrated to Los Angeles where he graduated in anthropology from UCLA. In '68 he obtained a Phd (research doctorate): his thesis, published by the University, was entitled "A school from the sorcerer" and was the first besteller on his experience with don Juan Matus, which began in the 1960s and lasted until 1973. Now he lives between Los Angeles and Latin America. His works, all published by Rizzoli, except the first two, released by Astrolabio:

"A Sorcerer's School" 1970;
"A separate reality" 1972;
"Journey to Ixtlan" 1975;
"L'isola del Tonal" 1978;
"The second link of power" 1980;
"The gift of the eagle" 1983;
"The fire of the deep" 1983;
"The power of silence" 1988;
"The art of dreaming" 1993.
"Tensegrita" came out a few days ago, always from Rizzoli. The three "Tensegrity" videocassettes are published in Italy by "Il Punto d'Incontro" (via Zamenhoff 441, Vicenza) with a booklet of the Italian translation.

Medail caesar Page 31 (November 21, 1997)
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