Page:Para leer a Carlos Castaneda.djvu/4

Octavio Paz^[1] mentions, the fact that there are no Mexican names among the hidden face of Mexico researchers is revealing. This indifference, Paz attributes it to professional deformation due to scientific bias of the anthropologists of our country. In this regard, he said that Mexican anthropologists are heirs of missionaries, the witches and the prehispanic priests. He said that, as the missionaries of the 16th century, anthropologists approach indigenous communities, not to understand them but to try to transform them and integrate them into the Mexican society. Affirms that unlike the missionaries who saw beliefs and religious practices of the Indians as something really serious, for Mexican anthropologists these are only aberrations and mistakes, classified and catalogued "at the Museum of curiosities and monstrosities called Ethnography".

The fundamental problem for approaching a comprehensive understanding of the Anahuac civilization philosophy, is that paths must be taken different from the traditional. With the exclusive use of reason, the deep knowledge of the cultures of the Anahuac cannot be reached. The heart of this knowledge must be acquired voluntarily avoiding the use of reason or detaching from the "modern" view of the world. The path at first, may seem inaccessible to all those who submit all who we are and what we do to the dictates of “Western” reasoning. But the truth is that anahuaca cultures possessed a deep and different knowledge, and that it was not founded on the reality that we can perceive and accept, according to logical reasoning with our traditional conception of the Western world as a frame of reference.

The purpose of this paper is not to prove that a philosophy and a deep knowledge in the Anahuac existed, which is clearly evident. Our purpose is to demonstrate that that philosophy or deep knowledge of the world has survived to the subjugation and the passage of the centuries, transmitted from generation to generation secretively, and that, "by a power design", comes to light in this Westernized world, through a series of books that will allows us to deal with the principles of a brutal and powerful knowledge, which shakes our reason over and over again to show the splendor of a separate reality underlying the ancient anahuaca "philosophy". We refer to the works of Carlos Castaneda, which summarizes the teachings of a man of knowledge which Castaneda called "Don Juan Matus", indigenous Yaqui, holder of ancient Toltec knowledge.^[2]

Could we through the knowledge of Don Juan find the foundations of the cultures of the ancient Mexico? We believe that we have never before been so clear about our cultural origins from a philosophical point of view. Our proposal is to invite the reader to change any fantastic perspective about the Castaneda stories, by a deep philosophical perspective, with which we will find the "reasons" of the great Anahuac civilization. Eurocentric archaeology has widely shown, that by itself is very limited to "explain" the superior knowledge of the Anahuac civilization.

The Toltecáyotl^[3], as noted by Miguel León Portilla, or the Toltequity as called by Don Juan, is the sum of knowledge, uses and customs, that the peoples of the Anahuac used to develop based on experimentation with various ways to gather the knowledge. Don Juan, who calls himself a "Toltec", says that the knowledge he possesses was not
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1. Prologue of the fourth edition in Spanish of the teachings of don Juan, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982.
2. Toltec isn't a culture or a people, it is instead "a degree of knowledge" which was given to those men and women who were able to master the art of this ancient wisdom.
3. Body of knowledge developed by the Toltec.