Page:Para leer a Carlos Castaneda.djvu/2

 INTRODUCTION

Each of the autonomous origin cultures (Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India, Mesoamerica, Andean culture) have had men of knowledge that forged the basic philosophical infrastructure, over which developed a multitude of values, symbols, feelings, and activities that provided their personality and characteristic traits.

In ancient times, thousands of years ago, an amazing mother culture emerged, in what is now Mexico, it has maintained its philosophical matrix in time and space. From the Olmec epochs, through Toltec times and up to the period just before the conquest, with the Mexica, there was a thread that immaculately knitted every process, every "new cultural facet" of the same matrix, whose validity reached, hidden, the current time.

The cultural matrix can be appreciated in the archaeological remains and the Olmec iconography, and how it remained through time, space and cultures that followed. Each of them took the matrix and enhanced it; hence the old Mexico is seen today as a multicultural mosaic, with a common essence or matrix. This matrix, fundamental element which allowed continuity of the Anahuac cultural process, developing through thousands of years, during which it gradually developed until reaching its splendor in the late classical.

This profound cultural essence has not been recognized by the West: at the time of the conquest, because the Spaniards could not perceive the advanced cultural development of the people they brutally razed, and today, because of the Western overwhelming supremacy in the fields of philosophy, science and culture. The vestiges of the cultural greatness of ancient Mexico almost succumbed in the darkness of time and in the minds of those that were dominated by force.

Currently, far from acknowledging the existence of a Cem Anahuac profound philosophy, references are made of a transfigured polytheistic religion, still judged by heavy Eurocentric opinions. The ancient past of Mexico represents, for the vast majority of those who hold the political and cultural power, a source of populist nationalism; a disjointed cultural heritage of stones and objects of great aesthetic value whose tourism "attraction" is important only from an economic point of view.

But where are the basis in which the true wealth of our cultural heritage can sustain? Only the existence of an anahuaca philosophy can give sense and explanation to thousands of years of evolution and development.

How can we understand the Greco-Roman cultural heritage without the study of knowledge by its philosophers and thinkers? Without that fundamental basis, all the vestiges of its past would not have a clear explanation. Likewise, without the knowledge of the anahuaca philosophy it is rather difficult to understand the cultural processes of ancient Mexico. ____________________