Page:Para leer a Carlos Castaneda.djvu/119

 his dreaming practices is, logically and rationally, impossible to accept, mainly because of the lack sufficient energy to "understand" it.

We note an idea that Castaneda handles on pages 162 and 163 of his book. There he says that one day, while at the Mexico City National Museum of Anthropology and History with Don Juan, he told him that all the sculptures in the room were a "file" left by ancient witches, and that each stone could be read through the lace point movement, in the same way a book page is read.

Don Juan suggests to Castaneda to fix his eyes on one of them, to silence his mind and try to move his lace point. In this regards, Castaneda says that he began to see and hear things that could not explain. Mentions that he had been in that room before as an anthropologist, managing "scholars" information in the topic, descriptions based on modern man mentality (and we would also add that in a colonized mind). Castaneda acknowledged that for the first time they seemed "crap," totally arbitrary. But this time, because of under what he could perceive through the lace point movement, coupled with what Don Juan said bout them and what he "saw and heard," had nothing to do with what he had read and heard before.

This is another example of the relation that exists on the ancient Mexico history, the philosophical thought and what Castaneda calls the " Don Juan teachings", Toltequity or Toltecáyotl. When Don Juan says that some of the so-called archaeological zones are places where the Toltec left much information in rocks, but in second attention fields. So these places, especially the classic period, are not cities, palaces or fortresses. The work of Castaneda may be a reference point so that Mexicans deal with our past from a un-colonialized point of view and a philosophical perspective.

Studies such as what Dr. Rubén Bonifaz Nuño presented in his book "Mexican ancient cosmogony. Iconographic and textual hypothesis", UNAM, 1995, come to fill the huge gap that exists in the vision and understanding of our cultural heritage, from a non-colonial position, being that from 1521 our own, our culture became: first evil, then primitive and now folklore and tourism.

"The dreaming art" represents a challenge to those that followed the "autobiography" Castaneda offers in his work. The dream world, with explorers, trackers, emissaries, inorganic beings powerful forces and, finally, the encounter with that disturbing, mysterious and terrifying impossible to accept or imagine, character called "the tenant", a death challenger alive for whole millennia and antiquity witches knowledge possessor and that, according to the text, has found the freedom door through Carol Tiggs and Carlos Castaneda energy, leaves us in a real uncertainty state.

If to all this we added the actions which apparently contradict Don Juan teachings, such as giving courses and lectures to people who can afford them; or accepting that the ancient knowledge, cultural heritage of the Mexican people, now "belongs" to a nagual Castaneda select group of disciples, we should think that Castaneda is looking for a personal destiny, in which the thousands of worldwide followers do not fit and contradictorily, today more than ever, is exposed to the masses who think that Castaneda is transmitting Don Juan knowledge, in trying to pay back what he gave him.