A Separate Reality

  OVER 7 MILLION CARLOS CASTANEDA

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  CARLOS CASTANEDA’S:

  •

  THE TEACHINGS OF DON JUAN:

  A YAQUI WAY OF KNOWLEDGE

  •

  A SEPARATE REALITY:

  FURTHER CONVERSATIONS WITH

  DON JUAN

  •

  JOURNEY TO IXTLAN:

  THE LESSONS OF DON JUAN

  •

  TALES OF POWER

  •

  THE SECOND RING OF POWER

  •

  THE EAGLE’S GIFT

  •

  THE FIRE FROM WITHIN

  •

  THE POWER OF SILENCE

  •

  ALL AVAILABLE FROM

  POCKET BOOKS

  Journey Into

  The Heart Of Magic

  With

  Carlos Castaneda

  “One can’t exaggerate the significance of what Castaneda has done.”

  —The New York Times

  In The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, Carlos Castaneda published the account of his five-year apprenticeship to don Juan, a 70-year-old Yaqui Indian known to be a brujo—“a medicine man, curer, sorcerer.” In it he told of the uses of peyote, jimson weed and other hallucinogenic plants in opening the doors of perception to a world of “non-ordinary reality” completely beyond the concepts of Western civilization. And, at the end of that book, he told how in fear and exhaustion he had stopped his search.

  The Teachings of Don Juan has since become an acknowledged classic, discovered by hundreds of thousands of readers and hailed by The New York Times as “an extraordinary spiritual and psychological document . . . destined for fame.”

  Now, in A Separate Reality, Carlos Castaneda tells how he returned to don Juan and resumed the dangerous initiation necessary to become “a man of knowledge.”

  Determined to go deeper still into don Juan’s world of mystical sensation and perception, Castaneda recounts how he learned to see beyond the surface realities of life—partly with the aid of drugs, but finally and essentially through a supremely difficult and demanding effort of intelligence and will.

  “One can’t exaggerate the significance of what Castaneda has done. He is describing a shamanistic tradition, a prelogical cultural form that is no-one-knows how old. It has been described often. . . . But it seems that no other outsider, and certainly not a ‘Westerner,’ has ever participated in its mysteries from within; nor has anyone described them so well.

  “A SEPARATE REALITY is extraordinary in every sense of the word, and much more than a sequel. While it has the same intelligent modesty, graceful modulation and narrative skill as the first book, Castaneda here abandons his frustrating reticence. As he comes closer to don Juan in his struggle through his mystical obstacle course, their relationship takes on another dimension. The book ceases to be simply phenomenological reportage. The anthropologist’s rescue of an alien language from oblivion becomes a moving personal quest, an autobiography.”

  –Roger Jellinek, The New York Times

  “The Teachings of Don Juan [was an] extraordinary book . . . an unparalleled breakthrough. . . . Now Castaneda has delivered another installment of his continuing apprenticeship in sorcery, A Separate Reality, and the results are equally remarkable. In this book, Castaneda’s reportage is more subjective, his descriptions of tutelage under don Juan are more vivid and his experiences are even more amazing.”

  –Digby Diehl, The Los Angeles Times

  “In A Separate Reality his [Castaneda’s] adventure dramatically broadens to disclose in the trampled culture of the American Indian a secret spiritual tradition that produces men of profound character and eerie psychological powers. . . . His sanity lends to even his most lurid experiences the force of data. It compels us to believe that don Juan is one of the most extraordinary figures in anthropological literature, a neolithic sage. It helps us to accept, from the continent we stole, a mysterious gift of wisdom.”

  –Brad Darrach, Life

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  Introduction

  Ten years ago I had the fortune of meeting a Yaqui Indian from northwestern Mexico. I call him “don Juan.” In Spanish, don is an appellative used to denote respect. I made don Juan’s acquaintance under the most fortuitous circumstances. I was sitting with Bill, a friend of mine, in a bus depot in a border town in Arizona. We were very quiet. In the late afternoon the summer heat seemed unbearable. Suddenly he leaned over and tapped me on the shoulder.

  “There’s the man I told you about,” he said in a low voice.

  He nodded casually toward the entrance. An old man had just walked in.

  “What did you tell me about him?” I asked.

  “He’s the Indian that knows about peyote. Remember?”

  I remembered that Bill and I had once driven all day looking for the house of an “eccentric” Mexican Indian who lived in the area. We did not find the man’s house and I had the feeling that the Indians whom we had asked for directions had deliberately misled us. Bill had told me that the man was a “yerbero,” a person who gathers and sells medicinal herbs, and that he knew a great deal about the hallucinogenic cactus, peyote. He had also said that it would be worth my while to meet him. Bill was my guide in the Southwest while I was collecting information and specimens of medicinal plants used by the Indians of the area.

  Bill got up and went to greet the man. The Indian was of medium height. His hair was white and short, and grew a bit over his ears, accentuating the roundness of his head. He was very dark; the deep wrinkles on his face gave him the appearance of age, yet his body seemed to be strong and fit. I watched him for a moment. He moved around with a nimbleness that I would have thought impossible for an old man.

  Bill signaled me to join them.

  “He’s a nice guy,” Bill said to me. “But I can’t understand him. His Spanish is weird, full of rural colloquialisms, I suppose.”

  The old man looked at Bill and smiled. And Bill, who speaks only a few words of Spanish, made up an absurd phrase in that language. He looked at me as if asking whether he was making sense, but I did not know what he had had in mind; he then smiled shyly and walked away. The old man looked at me and began laughing. I explained to him that my friend sometimes forgot that he did not speak Spanish.

  “I think he also forgot to introduce us,” I said, and I told him my name.

  “And I am Juan Matus at your service,” he said.

  We shook hands and remained quiet for some time. I broke the silence and told him about my enterprise. I told him that I was looking for any kind of information on plants, especially peyote. I talked compulsively for a long time, and although I was almost totally ignorant on the subject, I said I knew a great deal about peyote. I thought that if I boasted about my knowledge he would become interested in talking to me. But he did not say anything. He listened patiently. Then he nodded slowly and peered at me. His eyes seemed to shine with a light of their own. I avoided his gaze. I felt embarrassed. I had the certainty that at that moment he knew I was talking nonsense.

  “Come to my house some time,” he finally said, taking his eyes away from me. “Perhaps we could talk there with more ease.”


  I did not know what else to say. I felt uneasy. After a while Bill came back into the room. He recognized my discomfort and did not say a word. We sat in tight silence for some time. Then the old man got up. His bus had come. He said goodbye.

  “It didn’t go too well, did it?” Bill asked.

  “No.”

  “Did you ask him about plants?”

  “I did. But I think I goofed.”

  “I told you, he’s very eccentric. The Indians around here know him, yet they never mention him. And that’s something.”

  “He said I could come to his house, though.”

  “He was bullshitting you. Sure, you can go to his house, but what does it mean? He’ll never tell you anything. If you ever ask him anything he’ll clam up as if you were an idiot talking nonsense.”

  Bill said convincingly that he had encountered people like him before, people who gave the impression of knowing a great deal. In his judgment, he said, such people were not worth the trouble, because sooner or later one could obtain the same information from someone else who did not play hard to get. He said that he had neither patience nor time for old fogies, and that it was possible that the old man was only presenting himself as being knowledgeable about herbs, when in reality he knew as little as the next man.

  Bill went on talking but I was not listening. My mind kept on wondering about the old Indian. He knew I had been bluffing. I remembered his eyes. They had actually shone.

  I went back to see him a couple of months later, not so much as a student of anthropology interested in medicinal plants but as a person with an inexplicable curiosity. The way he had looked at me was an unprecedented event in my life. I wanted to know what was involved in that look. It became almost an obsession with me. I pondered it and the more I thought about it the more unusual it seemed to be.

  Don Juan and I became friends, and for a year I paid him innumerable visits. I found his manner very reassuring and his sense of humor superb; but above all I felt there was a silent consistency about his acts, a consistency which was thoroughly baffling to me. I felt a strange delight in his presence and at the same time I experienced a strange discomfort. His mere company forced me to make a tremendous reevaluation of my models of behavior. I had been reared, perhaps like everyone else, to have a readiness to accept man as an essentially weak and fallible creature. What impressed me about don Juan was the fact that he did not make a point of being weak and helpless, and just being around him insured an unfavorable comparison between his way of behaving and mine. Perhaps one of the most impressive statements he made to me at that time was concerned with our inherent difference. Prior to one of my visits I had been feeling quite unhappy about the total course of my life and about a number of pressing personal conflicts that I had. When I arrived at his house I felt moody and nervous.

  We were talking about my interest in knowledge; but, as usual, we were on two different tracks. I was referring to academic knowledge that transcends experience, while he was talking about direct knowledge of the world.

  “Do you know anything about the world around you?” he asked.

  “I know all kinds of things,” I said.

  “I mean do you ever feel the world around you?”

  “I feel as much of the world around me as I can.”

  “That’s not enough. You must feel everything, otherwise the world loses its sense.”

  I voiced the classical argument that I did not have to taste the soup in order to know the recipe, nor did I have to get an electric shock in order to know about electricity.

  “You make it sound stupid,” he said. “The way I see it, you want to cling to your arguments, despite the fact that they bring nothing to you; you want to remain the same even at the cost of your well-being.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I am talking about the fact that you’re not complete. You have no peace.”

  That statement annoyed me. I felt offended. I thought he was certainly not qualified to pass judgment on my acts or my personality.

  “You’re plagued with problems,” he said. “Why?”

  “I am only a man, don Juan,” I said peevishly.

  I made that statement in the same vein my father used to make it. Whenever he said he was only a man he implicitly meant he was weak and helpless and his statement, like mine, was filled with an ultimate sense of despair.

  Don Juan peered at me as he had done the first day we met.

  “You think about yourself too much,” he said and smiled. “And that gives you a strange fatigue that makes you shut off the world around you and cling to your arguments. Therefore, all you have is problems. I’m only a man too, but I don’t mean that the way you do.”

  “How do you mean it?”

  “I’ve vanquished my problems. Too bad my life is so short that I can’t grab onto all the things I would like to. But that is not an issue; it’s only a pity.”

  I liked the tone of his statement. There was no despair or self-pity in it.

  In 1961, a year after our first meeting, don Juan disclosed to me that he had a secret knowledge of medicinal plants. He told me he was a “brujo.” The Spanish word brujo can be rendered in English as sorcerer, medicine man, curer. From that point on the relation between us changed; I became his apprentice and for the next four years he endeavored to teach me the mysteries of sorcery. I have written about that apprenticeship in The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge.

  Our conversations were conducted in Spanish, and thanks to don Juan’s superb command of that language I obtained detailed explanations of the intricate meanings of his system of beliefs. I have referred to that complex and well-systematized body of knowledge as sorcery and I have referred to him as a sorcerer because those were categories he himself used in informal conversations. In the context of more serious elucidations, however, he would use the terms “knowledge” to categorize sorcery and “man of knowledge” or “one who knows” to categorize a sorcerer.

  In order to teach and corroborate his knowledge don Juan used three well-known psychotropic plants: peyote, Lophophora williamasii; jimson weed, Datura inoxia; and a species of mushroom which belongs to the genus Psylocebe. Through the separate ingestion of each of these hallucinogens he produced in me, as his apprentice, some peculiar states of distorted perception, or altered consciousness, which I have called “states of nonordinary reality.” I have used the word “reality” because it was a major premise in don Juan’s system of beliefs that the states of consciousness produced by the ingestion of any of those three plants were not hallucinations, but concrete, although unordinary, aspects of the reality of everyday life. Don Juan behaved toward these states of nonordinary reality not “as if” they were real but “as” real.

  To classify these plants as hallucinogens and the states they produced as nonordinary reality is, of course, my own device. Don Juan understood and explained the plants as being vehicles that would conduct or lead a man to certain impersonal forces or “powers” and the states they produced as being the “meetings” that a sorcerer had to have with those “powers” in order to gain control over them.

  He called peyote “Mescalito” and he explained it as being a benevolent teacher and protector of men. Mescalito taught the “right way to live.” Peyote was usually ingested at gatherings of sorcerers called “mitotes,” where the participants would gather specifically to seek a lesson on the right way to live.

  Don Juan considered the jimson weed and the mushrooms to be powers of a different sort. He called them “allies” and said that they were capable of being manipulated; a sorcerer, in fact, drew his strength from manipulating an ally. Of the two, don Juan preferred the mushroom. He maintained that the power contained in the mushroom was his personal ally and he called it “smoke” or “little smoke.”

  Don Juan’s procedure to utilize the mushrooms was to let them dry into a fine powder inside a small gourd. He kept the gourd sealed for a year and then mixed the
fine powder with five other dry plants and produced a mixture for smoking in a pipe.

  In order to become a man of knowledge one had to “meet” with the ally as many times as possible; one had to become familiar with it. This premise implied, of course, that one had to smoke the hallucinogenic mixture quite often. The process of “smoking” consisted of ingesting the fine mushroom powder, which did not incinerate, and inhaling the smoke of the other five plants that made up the mixture. Don Juan explained the profound effects that the mushrooms had on one’s perceptual capacities as the “ally removing one’s body.”

  Don Juan’s method of teaching required an extraordinary effort on the part of the apprentice. In fact, the degree of participation and involvement needed was so strenuous that by the end of 1965 I had to withdraw from the apprenticeship. I can say now, with the perspective of the five years that have elapsed, that at that time don Juan’s teachings had begun to pose a serious threat to my “idea of the world.” I had begun to lose the certainty, which all of us have, that the reality of everyday life is something we can take for granted.

  At the time of my withdrawal I was convinced that my decision was final; I did not want to see don Juan ever again. However, in April of 1968 an early copy of my book was made available to me and I felt compelled to show it to him. I paid him a visit. Our link of teacher-apprentice was mysteriously reestablished, and I can say that on that occasion I began a second cycle of apprenticeship, very different from the first. My fear was not as acute as it had been in the past. The total mood of don Juan’s teachings was more relaxed. He laughed and also made me laugh a great deal. There seemed to be a deliberate intent on his part to minimize seriousness in general. He clowned during the truly crucial moments of this second cycle, and thus helped me to overcome experiences which could easily have become obsessive. His premise was that a light and amenable disposition was needed in order to withstand the impact and the strangeness of the knowledge he was teaching me.