Page:Para leer a Carlos Castaneda.djvu/49

"To stop this vision of the world that one has had from the cradle, it is not enough that one simply has the desire, or makes a resolution...

—Erasing the personal history and reverie should be only be an aid —he said—. What an apprentice needs to shore up is sobriety and strength. This is why a teacher talks about the warrior path, or living as a warrior. This is the glue that sticks all the parts of the witches world. The teacher must forge and develop it gradually. There is no possibility of resisting the knowledge path without strength and serenity...

—The teacher must teach the apprentice another responsibility, yet more subtle: the possibility of acting without believing, without expecting a reward, acting just for acting..." C.C.

For the westernized Mexicans to accept, not the validity of the knowledge path, as Don Juan puts it, but the existence of some value in indigenous cultures, becomes a reckless challenge. "Mexicans" during the last 500 years have learned, first from foreigners and later from "Creoles", to belittle and deny our roots and our culture. For "Mexicans" the indigenous peoples represent the last place in the social scale. Indigenous peoples have always been a nuisance for "advancement and a stain on modernity" of foreigners and Creoles.

The only cultural heritage recognized by "creoles" and "Mexicans" is the "AESTHETIC" value of the material vestiges left by the remote indigenous cultures of the past. Even so, the spiritual value and possession of a knowledge form, not based on reason has lived underground, not only in groups of men and women of knowledge, but in the collective subconscious of the peoples that make up our ethnic and popular cultures. The work of Castaneda has had greater echo in other countries, which free of these prejudices, they have taken the teachings of Don Juan with greater respect and interest.

Anthropology is what has denied the most any value in the Castaneda work, primarily because it is a colonizer science which seeks to know and explain "the others" from an implicit superiority point of view. The Castaneda work is not anthropological or literary, but reveals another knowledge form, developed by the ancient peoples of the Anahuac.

There are people who think that all this is quackery or the product of the mind of a talented and creative writer, or is assumed as a matter of Messianic or justification to use hallucinogens. We believe that it is the survival of ancient knowledge, which was part of the structure of the ancient Mexico knowledge and that has secretively survived through the oral culture, obviously with many changes required to overcome these 500 years of persecution.

The Castaneda work is an act of "Toltec witchcraft" (Toltec wisdom). Don Juan by designs of the power, used Castaneda to let reason know, the knowledge of our ancestors, where "witchcraft" converts oral tradition into written culture: "witchcraft" faces reason through books. As a result, truly "reasonable" men see these books more seriously and respectfully.

Don Juan says that a Toltec knowledge teacher is never looking for apprentices and nobody may request the teachings, since there are few people willing to take this knowledge seriously; and of the few who take it seriously, even fewer are willing to strive and discipline; of them, even less manage to save enough energy to take advantage of their acts.