Page:Para leer a Carlos Castaneda.djvu/5

 invented by him, that it was the product of many men that over thousands of years have been forming and polishing, preserving it from internal and external dangers. José Luis Martínez, in his work "Netzahualcoyotl life and work", in page 80 notes: "No wonder then, that in his religious ideas Netzahualcoyotl returned to the ancient Toltec doctrines. What we know of this people is legendary and often uncertain. To ancient indigenous peoples in the mid-15th century, the Toltec —or the Toltequity or Toltecáyotl— was a synonym of perfection, art and wisdom, and the people or the Toltec period were considered to be ancient golden past of Nahua peoples as a whole."

According to Don Juan, this knowledge has two great eras. The first begins many centuries before the conquest. At that time the men who developed and explored this knowledge failed. They were obsessed with the deviations and complex worlds they witnessed and, when conquerors indigenous peoples arrived, they destroyed them and seized some "superficial" knowledge. Many of the wizards of Mexico, are people who empirically manage limited Toltequity knowledge and who generally profit amid the evils and passions of the people, are descendants of these conquerors, hence their knowledge is incomplete. The men of knowledge that survived the crisis recounted their millenary practices and analyzed their mistakes. They started a new "cycle". Shortly thereafter the Spanish conquerors arrived and many of the men and women of knowledge that developed the "new" Toltequity were exterminated; others took refuge in an impeccable discretion that continued since then to the present day.

When Castaneda encounters Don Juan, he had a group of apprentices with whom he had been working in Toltequity "practices", since as part of the traditions, usages and customs of the men of knowledge called "Toltec" or "Naguales", before "culminating" their work they had to prepare other groups and deposit in them their knowledge, in order to continue the centuries-old tradition.

The candidates selection to become apprentices is question of "power". And it is "the power" that selects Carlos Castaneda, an anthropology South American student of the University of California, who was working on his doctoral thesis on medicinal and hallucinogenic plants used by indigenous people. A Castaneda teacher introduced him to Don Juan, who could "see" in Castaneda special characteristics which signaled him and from that point he became his apprentice.

Toltequity does not accept volunteers. Those selected possess certain energy configuration, necessary to acquire the knowledge and have to find at the right a nagual or a teacher. Entering Toltequity or witchcraft involves changing the concept we have of ourselves and the world. For the Toltecs the world, in addition to being as we perceived it, it is also a world of energy charges. The "everyday" world is perceived through reason, while the Toltequity world can only be perceived, avoiding the use of reason; in other words, through the direct perception of the energy. The Toltec argue that human beings have other elements with which to perceive knowledge found in the other "reality", as true as what we have learned to perceive from children with the use of reason.

To understand that the world and its reality, in addition to being as we perceive it, are at the same time different, requires a great deal of flexibility, and to have such "flexibility" is necessary to accumulate enough energy or "personal power", as Don