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After he received his associate’s degree, Carlos enrolled in the anthropology
department at UCLA, a change of direction influenced by the publication of a book called The Sacred Mushroom, by Andrija Puharich. The book dealt with Puharich’s work with
a Dutch sculptor who could recall vivid details of his past life in ancient Egypt. Placed under deep hypnosis, the sculptor became Ra Ho Tep, a IVth Dynasty shaman who spoke a lost Egyptian dialect. Puharich’s work with Ra Ho Tep revealed that the
ancient shamanistic phenomenon of leaving the body was linked to the use of the
sacred mushroom, Amanita Muscaria. As part of his study, Puharieh interviewed anthropologist Gordon Wasson, an expert on drug use among primitive mystics. Wasson told of an
ancient mushroom cult that still existed in remote regions of the Mexican desert, in which curanderos, or sorcerers, ate psilocybin mushrooms in healing and divination ceremonies. Of particular interest to Carlos was the fact that Puharich had also
involved Aldous Huxley in his experiments. With Huxley in attendance, Ra Ho Tep
had requested and was given some sacred mushrooms, and then proceeded through the motions of an ancient ritual. Puharich’s book also included conversations
with
anthropologist J. S. Slotkin, who specialized in the study of the Native American Church, which used peyote to reach dream states of non-ordinary reality.

These notions of non-ordinary reality appealed to Carlos. He identified strongly with the Dutch sculptor who brought forth Ra Ho Tep from his subconscious, a man named Harry Stone. Like Stone, Carlos was a foreigner in America, shy and insecure, who’d
been trying to no avail for almost a decade to establish himself as an artist. The idea of never reaching his potential frightened Carlos. He often complained
to Margaret about the routine sameness of his very ordinary life, how he got up
every morning,
went to class, went to work, came home, started over again the next day. It was
not the kind of future he’d envisioned, a lifetime toting his lunch to work in a brown paper bag. There had to be something more.

And so it was that Carlos found himself in an undergraduate anthropology class called California Ethnography. Needing a topic for a term paper, he decided to continue the work of Puharich and Huxley, Wasson and Slotkin, and conduct a ethno-botanical
study of the natural hallucinogenic plants of the American southwest. The professor’s assignment carried an interesting caveat: anyone who actually went out into the field and found a live Indian informant would automatically receive an A.

[Note how before Carlos supposedly met his "magical informant"
he was already into Puharich, Huxley, Wasson, Slotkin, and Goddard.]

Now, on this January evening in 1960, Carlos walked past Margaret, into the living room of her apartment, and came face to face with her gentleman caller, a wealthy Jordanian businessman she’d been seeing daily for the past two weeks, during which time
Carlos had been roaming the California desert, looking for an Indian informant,
hoping to secure an A, an early leg on his new career choice—professor of anthropology.

The two men chatted amiably for a few minutes, and then the subject turned to Margaret, who had resumed her place on the over-stuffed chintz sofa, next to the Jordanian. His name was Farid Aweimrine. He was the brother of another man Margaret had dated
in the past; they’d met at a Christmas party. Carlos continued to stand.

“You know,” said Aweimrine, “I would have married Margaret the first night I met her if my divorce had been final.”

“Over my dead body!” said Carlos.

“Well why haven’t you married her?” asked Farid.

Carlos looked puzzled for a moment. He crossed his arms, scratched his chin. “You know,” he said wistfully, “I never thought of that.” He turned to Margaret, broke a big grin. “Come on, Mayaya! We’re getting married tonight!”

***

On a winter afternoon in 1973, Carlos and Gloria sat cross-legged on the beach near Malibu, a blanket wrapped cozily around their shoulders. The sun was low on the horizon, a blood-orange ball; wispy clouds glowed pink and magenta against the perfect
cerulean sky. Seagulls swooped overhead, calling and complaining; sandpipers skittled on stick legs across the sand; surfers in wet suits worked a left-hand
break a quarter mile offshore. Carlos took Gloria’s hand tenderly in both of his, gazed into
her startling, gold-flecked blue eyes.

["Startling, gold-flecked blue eyes". Again.]

“You have always been like a bird, like a little bird in a cage,” he said, projecting his voice above the rush and pound of the waves. “You are wanting to fly, you’re ready, the door is open — but you’re just sitting there. I
want to take you
with me. I’ll help you soar. Nothing could stop you if you come with me.”

Gloria Garvin was transfixed. Though she was an attractive young woman who’d heard her share of come-on lines during her hippie wanderings of the late sixties, no one had ever spoken to her quite like this. What Carlos was saying was kind of corny,
really, the sort of drivel usually reserved for the well-thumbed pages of her mother’s romance novels, but somehow it didn’t come across to her that way at all—somehow it was new and magical and deeply fetching. She was 26 years old, petite but
amply breasted, with porcelain skin and Cleopatra bangs.

["With porcelain skin and Cleopatra bangs." Again. ?? ]

She had first heard of Carlos Castaneda on a cold day in early 1969, at a long table in the dining room of an old Victorian townhouse in Haight-Ashbury. She and her boyfriend had thumbed up to San Francisco from L.A. to see the Grateful
Dead at the
Fillmore West. When they returned from the marathon concert, someone made a big
pumpkin pie laced with hashish, and they all ate their fill—reveling in the synchronous pleasure of getting high and satisfying their munchies simultaneously. They lay
around on pillows on the floor for the rest of the night, dressed in their velvets and buckskins and beads, mesmerized by the glowing light from a paper Japanese lantern that seemed to be receiving them into the universe.

The next afternoon, still pretty wasted, they were sitting around the dining room table, drinking coffee and smoking joints, when someone began reading aloud from a review of The Teachings of Don Juan. It was a powerful book, simply written yet deeply
affecting, a groovy trip into the heady netherworld of psychedelic drugs and alternative realities — Kerouac does psychotropics. Billed as non-fiction anthropology, issued first by UCLA’s University Press, and shortly thereafter
by Simon and Schuster,
it read more like a novel, an odd combination of Hemingway’s bland staccato and Garcia-Marquez’s magical realism. Regardless of its genre — about which
there would eventually be much debate — the book was perfectly suited to its times, an era of
sex and drugs and flower power, of back-to-the-land innocence and marvelous cosmic yearnings. Offered in the form of journal entries, the story is set in a
hard scrabble desert landscape of organ pipe cacti and glittering lava massifs.
It documents the
weird, taxing and sometimes antic apprenticeship of a skeptical, slightly annoying young academic to a wily old Yaqui Indian sorcerer named Don Juan Matus, whom Carlos said he met through a friend in the waiting room of a Greyhound bus station, on the
Arizona side of the Mexican border, approximately six months after his marriage
to Margaret Runyon.

Peopled with indigenous Indians, anthropomorphic incarnations, spirits both playful and malevolent, the book evokes mysterious winds and terrifying sounds,
the shiver of leaves at twilight, the loftiness of a crow in flight, the raw fragrance of tequila
and the vile, fibrous taste of peyote. Carlos writes of his meetings with Mescalito, who comes to him disguised successively as a playful black dog, a column of singing light and a cricket-like being with a warty green head. He hears awesome and
unexplained rumblings from dead lava hills; converses with a bilingual coyote; sews shut the eyes of a lizard with a needle and thread harvested from a cactus; meets the guardian of the Second Attention, a hundred-foot gnat with spiky tufted hair and
drooling jaws. In dry, detached, scholarly language, he details the preparation
and ingestion of humito, the little smoke, made from the dust of psilocybin mushrooms, and of yerba del diablo, the devil’s weed, datura, which causes his head to sprout
wings and beak and feet, transform into a crow, and fly off into the heavens. At every development, Carlos remains the skeptical rationalist, a modern Everyman, trying in vain to translate his mystical experiences into the kind of
concrete understanding
which drives the Western mind. As such, his only tools are his questions — his persistent, often fumbling effort to keep up a Socratic dialogue with Don Juan:

“Did I take off like a bird?” he asks the old sorcerer, upon awakening from
an experience with the devil’s weed, one of twenty-two drug trips in the first two books.

“You always ask me questions I cannot answer,” the old man tells him. “What you want to know makes no sense. Birds fly like birds and a man who has
taken the devil’s weed flies as such.”

[Bullshit. If Carlos really flew - in any fashion, like bird or man -
any straight observer watching would either have seen Carlos fly
away, or vanish into thin air, or... would have merely seen him
stumbling around the desert in a drugged stupor. It's one of those.
And you know which one, if it ever happened at all.]

Beneath the spectral fireworks and psychedelic drama in The Teachings (and in the subsequent eleven volumes that would follow over the course of the next 30 years) is Carlos’s quest to become a Warrior, a Man of Knowledge wholly at one with his
environment. Agile and strong, 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 the Warrior always performs “impeccably.” He is
attuned to the desert, to its sounds and shadows, its animals and birds, its power spots and holes of refuge. The Warrior’s aim in becoming a Man of Knowledge, the young academic learns through his apprenticeship, is “to stop the world” and “see�
� — to experience life directly, grasping its essence without interpreting it, coming eventually to the realization that the universe, as perceived by everyday humans, is just a construct based on shared customs and languages and understandings.

In truth, Don Juan tells his bumbling and often frightened student, men and women are not flesh at all. They are made up of fine fibers of light, glowing white cobwebs that stretch from the head to the navel, forming an egg of circulating threads, with
arms and legs of luminous bristles bursting in all directions. Through a series
of long fibers that shoot out from the center of the abdomen, every man and woman is joined with every other man and woman, and with his surroundings, and with the universe.
Don Juan lectures Carlos: “a man is a luminous egg whether he’s a beggar or
a king and there’s no way to change anything.” Of particular import in this
cosmic anatomy is the Assemblage Point, a place of intense luminosity, located about an arm’
s length behind the shoulder blades, where perception takes place. By shifting or displacing the assemblage point during dream states, the old Nagual taught, a practitioner could gain entrance into other worlds, something called “The Art of Dreaming.”

When Gloria returned to L.A., flush with the new possibilities of Don Juan’s worlds, she mentioned the far-out book to her aunt, who was working in the graduate research library at UCLA. The married author, it turned out, haunted the grad library,
particularly the rare book room. He was also dating a library worker the aunt knew well. In short order, a meeting was arranged.

[Carlos haunted the rare book room. Yes.]

Gloria and her boyfriend spent the whole afternoon with the great man in the student union at UCLA. Sitting at a Formica table, amid the hectic bustle of the student body, they spoke about life and death, drugs and sex, meaning and shamanism. At the end
of their time together, Carlos took Gloria’s hand for the first time. “This
was a most auspicious meeting,” he said. Then he nodded his head in the direction of her boyfriend. “Too bad you brought that nincompoop along with you.”

[Carlos pulled that trick over and over and over.]

Over the next few years, Gloria and Carlos stayed in touch by letter and by phone. At his urging, she enrolled in UCLA as an undergraduate anthropology student. Later, also at his urging, she broke off her longstanding engagement to her boyfriend. Carlos,
meanwhile, published his second book, A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan, and then his third, Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons
of Don Juan, which served simultaneously as his doctoral thesis.

In a departure from the first two volumes, Carlos revealed in Ixtlan that the drug part of the program was now over. After ten years of study with the old Indian, he wrote in the Introduction to Ixtlan, “It became evident to me that
my original
assumption about the role of psychotropic plants was erroneous. They were not the essential feature of the sorcerer’s description of the world, but were only an aid to cement, so to speak, parts of the description which I had been incapable of
perceiving otherwise. My insistence on holding on to my standard version of reality rendered me almost deaf and blind to Don Juan’s aims. Therefore, it was simply my lack of sensitivity which has fostered their use.” Now that his
eyes had been
properly opened, he wrote, it was necessary to focus on what the old sorcerer had called the “techniques for stopping the world.” Only then could he become an impeccable Warrior.

“One needs the mood of a warrior for every single act,” Don Juan tells him in typical fashion, harsh and judgmental but also loving. “Otherwise one becomes distorted and ugly. There is no power in a life that lacks this mood. Look at yourself.
Everything offends and upsets you. You whine and complain and feel that everyone is making you dance to their tune…. A warrior, on the other hand, is
a hunter. He calculates everything. That’s control. But once his calculations
are over, he acts. He
lets go. That’s abandon. A warrior is not a leaf at the mercy of the wind. No
one can push him; no one can make him do things against himself or against his better judgment. A warrior is trained to survive, and he survives in the best of all possible
fashions.”

As it was, by the time his third book was published, Carlos’s notion of survival had taken on quite a different hue. By 1973, he had become nothing short of a cult figure; would-be disciples and counter-culture tourists were flocking to Mexico, combing
the deserts for mushrooms and Don Juan. The Teachings was selling an astounding
16,000 copies a week. Ixtlan was a hardback best-seller. Sales of the paperback
made Carlos a millionaire. He traded in his old VW bus for a new Audi, bought the compound on
Pandora in Westwood Village. Before long, Time came calling.


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--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)