Page:Para leer a Carlos Castaneda.djvu/34

 learn too, but without the use of reason. Indeed, plants and insects, for example, have learning processes and do not use reason. In the common life, there are many things that the mind forgets but the body retains, as knowledge.

This way, many of "the Don Juan teachings", were focused on the Castaneda body and later the apprentice could use them when necessary. Learnt to loosen a little the world of reason "command" and explore the intuition unknown fields, which in western culture are in an almost total lethargy state, is a challenge. Castaneda then discovers the mystery of beetle life and to speak with a coyote. When he made this "amazing fact" possible he managed "stop the world". This implies "perceiving the world", without ideas arisen from internal dialog, but through observation and sensitivity. Stop the world, rather than a metaphor, is to face life and the world from a new perspective in which ideas and thought are nonexistent.

"I tried to feel", as don Juan always recommended... I was still for about an hour. My thoughts began to diminish gradually, until I was no longer talking to myself... —What stopped yesterday inside of you was what people have been saying that is the world. You see, since we are born people tells us that the world is this and that, and naturally we have no choice but to see the world the way people have told us it is... I told him that the events of the past three days had caused irreparable harm to my idea of the world. I said that, during the ten years I had been seeing him, I had never experienced such a shock, not even the times I took psychotropic plants.

—The plants of power are only aids —don Juan said—. The real is when the body realizes it can see. Only then we are capable of knowing that the world we witness every day isn't nothing more than a description. My intention was to show you that." C.C.

JOURNEY TO IXTLÁN

This is one of the most poetic and beautiful metaphors of the books. Don Juan teaches Castaneda that when a Toltequity apprentice begins the path to knowledge (The journey to Ixtlán), the apprentice has to leave all he knew and loved before; the trip to Ixtlán is difficult and lonely, but not bleak. On this trip there are no familiar places, nor known people; it is stalked by "ghosts", humans with anguish and common anxieties; "ghosts" that call and seek the apprentice to lose the path to Ixtlán.

Don Juan says that only as warriors can survive the trip to Ixtlán. The technique of the "warrior path" was drawn up by the old Toltec to be able go the full path to Ixtlán. Don Juan says that the warrior art, is balancing the prodigy of being a man with the terror of being a man. To survive the trip to Ixtlán, one must be clear and mortally sure of his impeccability.

The book "Journey to Ixtlán" is what we recommend to start reading the works of Carlos Castaneda. In it, the author manages a first recount of his experiences. It conveys the saving energy basic techniques and provides an idea of the path to knowledge. Perhaps this, along with "Tales of power", are the basic books of the first part, in which the author writes next to the Don Juan "physical" presence. Somehow "Journey to Ixtlán" lays the foundations of what the Don Juan teachings will be, touching basic points and objectives on how to move towards