Good Advice

I have just completed another reading of Carlos Castaneda’s “Journey To Ixtlan“. This is probably something like my fourth time reading it (I think I’ve read the entire series of his books at least twice). This is also the first Carlos Castaneda book I read – as I think it is for many.

If you’ve not read any of Castaneda’s books… as the story tells it… he was an anthropologist who attempted to study the nature of psychotropic plants used by Indians. His inquiry led him to an Indian sorcerer by the name of don Juan who took him in as an apprentice. Castaneda’s journey is documented in his books.

The first two books in the series (A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan , The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge) cover a period of ten years. Then in “Journey to Ixtlan” the story is retold from the beginning. I never quite understood this time-line, actually it caused me quite a bit of confusion. Only in this read of “Journey to Ixtlan” did I finally realize the explanation that is offered in the very beginning of the book:

“In reviewing the totality of my field notes I became aware that don Juan had given me the bulk of the new description at the very beginning of our association in what he called ‘techniques for stopping the world’. I had discarded those parts of my field notes in my earlier works because they did not pertain to the use of psycho tropic plants. I have now rightfully reinstated them in the total scope of don Juan’s teachings and they comprise the first seventeen chapters of this work”

It can take 10 years to realize good advice which is freely offered. It took me 8 years (the time that has passed since I first read the book) to realize what was clearly and simply written at the very beginning. I am a funny creature.