Page:Para leer a Carlos Castaneda.djvu/142

 Perhaps the most important thing is the answer that the body or luminous egg will be receiving. Indeed, as these teachings are not rational but energetic, the body through exercise and practice, "teaches the mind" to exercise better, under the stimulus that receives or put another way, wellbeing experienced by doing exercise in certain ways.

This is, therefore, the final proposal delivered by the nagual Carlos Castaneda before retiring from this world. His work contains important contributions to the world of the ideas of our time. Either as the world conception or Don Juan and the ancient Anahuac Toltecs life or that of Carlos Castaneda, assuming the entire work was created from this "talented writer" imagination. However, the work is there and cannot be denied in these 40 years.

Among the most important contributions we fund in the Castaneda works, would be the addition of the shaman, or "indigenous knowledge man" figure, to the scientific world, intellectuals and occidental scholars. As Octavio Paz noted in the prologue of the first book edited by the Fondo de Cultura Económica in 1974.

"If the Castaneda books are literary fiction, this is in a very strange way: its theme is anthropology defeat and magic victory, if they are anthropology works, its theme at least is the revenge of the anthropological 'object' (a witch) over the anthropologist up to converting him into a wizard. Anti-Anthropology. "C.C. (don Juan teachings.)" (Page 11).  

Anthropologists are who deny the most any value to the Carlos Castaneda works. Our admired friend Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, one of the brightest anthropologists Mexico has had, when I asked him to write the prologue to the first edition of the essay To Read Carlos Castaneda, he refused outright and literally told me; "namesake you can ask me for anything, except the prologue on Castaneda".

The second contribution would be exposing a body of very polished and complex ideas about the world and life, that an indigenous Yaqui called Don Juan names Toltequity and experts such as Miguel León Portilla recognize as Toltecáyotl. In fact, Castaneda presents a knowledge system, as was taught to him by his teacher Don Juan, as a millenary legacy from ancient Mexico, properly said of the Anahuac.

To talk and accept that in ancient Mexico existed a very complex and polished knowledge system, that not only explained the world and life (philosophy), but which gave them "power" to efficiently interact in the concrete world in which they lived. Thus the European settlers created myth collapses, used to permanently subjugate peoples and indigenous cultures, that the indians were wild and unable to create a well-defined and polished philosophy, that only possessed a diabolical polytheistic religion splattered by bloody human sacrifices.

But what is also important, it destroys the myth that "everything ancient is necessarily primitive". The energetic proposals of the world and human beings that Don Juan and his lineage manage according to Castaneda, are well advanced even for our times.

Toltequity, the Toltecáyotl or as it is called by Castaneda, "Tensegrity", is presented as a very advanced knowledge of the energy, that occident still