magazine_interviews/psychology_today_dec_1977
The Art of Dreaming - written by Carlos Castaneda
Psychology Today - December 1977
Don Juan, the crafty Yaqui sorcerer, has gone through “the crack between the worlds.” But he's still playing tricks on his eager pupil, Carlos. In a new Castaneda adventure (here adapted from his latest book), Carlos has found new mentors- all women, among them the "marvelous warrior” La Gorda. Castaneda's women both menace and mother him. They also teach him the amazing feats of the dreamer.
BY CARLOS CASTANEDA
In the final scene of Carlos Castaneda's fourth book, Tales of Power (1974), his two sorcery teachers, Don Juan and Don Genaro, say a poignant farewell to their apprentices and vanish into the darkness of the unknown. Carlos then grasps the arm of another apprentice, Pablito, and they jump from the edge of the mesa into an abyss.
His new book, The Second Ring of Power (to be published in January by Simon . Schuster), opens two years later with Carlos returning to Mexico to try to understand the meaning of his leap. His apprenticeship is over-or so "he thinks-and he is now addressed as the Nagual, as was Don Juan, in recognition of his spiritual powers. But it quickly becomes clear that Carlos still has lessons to learn, contradictions to resolve, fears to conquer. Before he can really claim his powers, he must pass further tests-designed by Don Juan himself.
From December 1960 to June 1973 I was an apprentice of sorcery. Two old Mexican Indians were my sorcery teachers: Don Juan Matus, a Yaqui from Sonora, and Don Genaro Flores, a Mazatec from Oaxaca. During that same period I was also a student of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. These two disciplines, sorcery and anthropology, were a most propitious combination for me, despite the hardships proper to each of them; hardships which forced me, at various times, to withdraw from them, vowing never to return. My fate, nonetheless, was that I complete my training in both.
The product of my dual enterprise has been the publication of a four-volume report on learning sorcery. In that report I have struggled to maintain myself as a truthful student of both disciplines. I have defined truthfulness, in my role as a student of anthropology, as the effort to relate with fidelity everything that took place, neither inventing nor distorting anything. I did not go to the field to prove or disprove preconceived hypotheses.
The manner in which Don Juan and Don Genaro conducted their instruction made it blatantly evident from the start that it would be impossible for me to understand their premises unless I took the only alternative available, that of becoming a sorcerer myself. To be a truthful student of sorcery entailed, therefore, that I become an apprentice.
Don Juan Matus defined the fundamental premise of his sorcery in the following statement: "The world, as we perceive it, is a description which is given to us from the moment we are born and which we learn to visualize and take for granted." The purpose of my apprenticeship, in concordance with this premise, was to acquaint me with an alternative description.
Don Juan delineated the theme of the concluding phase of his teachings in this manner: "We need only a small portion of the totality of ourselves to fulfill the most complex tasks of life. Yet when we die we die with the totality of ourselves. A sorcerer asks the question, 'If we're going to die with the totality of ourselves why not, then, live with that totality?'"
What Don Juan meant by the "totality of ourselves" is the complex perception of what he considered to be the two inherent realms of the universe: the tonal and the nagual. The tonal pertains to the order or structure that we experience and produce as living organisms, and also to the order of all existing matter. The nagual pertains to the sustaining force or principle that originates that order; the unseen source of all there is.
The main issue that confronted Don Juan and Don Genaro as teachers, throughout all the years of my apprenticeship, was to explain, demonstrate, and corroborate the configurations of meaning and practice which in their view led to the totality of oneself.
Once I had corroborated with my body the concept of one's totality, my apprenticeship was terminated.
At right, Carlos gets lessons in dreaming from the little sisters. “We were spinning, tumbling, swaying like a giant, weightless leaf."
Carlos and another apprentice, Pablito, fall into the canyon. “I perceived my body disintegrating.... It was as if I were watching myself explode. I was actually a cluster of my selves."
A farewell meeting was staged on the flat top of a barren mountain on the western slopes of the Sierra Madre in central Mexico, for myself and two other apprentices, Pablito and Nestor. From what I had understood it was to be Pablito's last meeting with the two old sorcerers as well. Our apprenticeships had come to their final moment. The solemnity and the scope of what took place there left no doubt in my mind that I was indeed seeing them for the last time. Towards the end of that session we all said good-bye and then Pablito and I jumped together from the top of the mountain into a deep canyon.
For two years I had examined and analyzed, in the most thorough and careful manner, my feelings, perceptions, and interpretations of that jump, and yet after all that time the only thing that was constant were my fears; I had come to the point that I could not rationally believe that it had actually happened. But another part of me held on steadfast to the notion that it did happen, that I did jump. That part of me was, seemingly, outside the realm of my reason, and it comprised my perceptions, or rather the memory of what I had perceived, during and after that jump.
Upon jumping, I perceived my body disintegrating. I went through a barrage of dissociated images and lights. It was as if I were looking at the animated walls of a tunnel from a speeding car. The images and the lights finally made me explode. It was a lingering bursting, like the slow dispersion of fireworks in the sky. It was as if I were watching myself explode and yet I was within the explosion itself. Whatever I was going through was something which did not allow me to have unity. I was in a million pieces, but not in a figurative sense. I was actually a cluster of my selves. I could not think or feel in the coherent unifying sense that I ordinarily do, and yet I somehow thought and felt.
Don Juan had always insisted that words were inadequate to portray that state. Since I have known only the world described with words, I found his statement preposterous. My idea was that one can adequately characterize anything. If words are insufficient, one can connote, circumvent meanings, use analogies. Now I know he was right. One can describe in one way or another anything that takes place in the realm of the tonal, the world of our daily use, but what takes place outside that realm, as in the case of sorcerers' perceptions of the nagual, is indescribable....
From there I went through another tunnel-like ride and emerged into the realm of order, the tonal. That explosion was the opposite of the first one. I burst into unity. I was whole. My perceiving had coherence, and I could direct my sensors. What was more important, I could evaluate what I was perceiving.
After experiencing a time of coherent perception I plummeted again into another state of disintegration, and from there I went back into another facet of unified perception. I continued through 17 bounces between the tonal and the nagual. Every time I went into the disintegrative facet I renewed my strength, and the subsequent visions of order I experienced became more and more engulfing. Their compelling force was so intense, their vividness so real, and their complexity so vast that I have not been capable of explaining them.
Don Juan and Don Genaro are no longer available and their absence has created in me a most pressing need, the need to make headway in the midst of apparently insoluble contradictions.
I went back to see Pablito and Nestor to seek their help in resolving those contradictions. But what I encountered during my visit to them cannot be described in any other way except as a final assault on my reason, a concentrated attack designed by Don Juan himself. His apprentices, under his absentee direction, in a most methodical and precise fashion, demolished in five days the last bastion of my reason. In those five days they revealed to me one of the two pragmatic aspects of their sorcery, the art of dreaming.
Carlos goes to the house of Pablito, to see if he will confirm that they really jumped into the abyss. Pablito's mother, Doña Soledad, tries to seduce and kill him, announcing to the surprised Carlos that Don Juan ordered her to do it. Four other women then enter Carlos' life in short order. The "little sisters," Lidia, Josefina, and Rosa, are mischievous young girls who like to scare Carlos and trick him. Their leader is La Gorda, a dark woman with broad shoulders and long, jet-black hair, who looks over Carlos with a "calmness and force" reminiscent of Don Juan.
With the aid of La Gorda, Carlos survives an assault by "the allies," who are really enemies-an oblong blob, a phosphorescent coyote, and a glowing man. Afterwards, Carlos learns that two days before meeting La Gorda, she had been searching for him in "the city," at the same time as he was looking for Don Juan there. He had sensed her presence, as “the being closest to Don Juan in temperament," but they had missed each other. La Gorda explains she was acting on orders to take Carlos away--but she is not sure to where. For his part, Carlos has grave doubts about going away, which he views as a final leave-taking from the world of the tonal.
[at this point begins the word-for-word pre-printing of passages from The Second Ring of Power, which hadn’t been published yet. The text is nearly identical, with only a few extremely minor grammatical changes, not worth the effort of running the scans through OCR processing...read the book instead!]
PDF of the original pages from the magazine
alternate PDF URL - https://archive.org/details/psychologytodayded.1977pg.346pgs. - Reddit won't allow the period at the end, so add it manually in your browser's address bar, if the other PDF is down
Discussion Thread - https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/qvg2hy/rare_and_uncirculated_article_penned_by_castaneda/