Page:Para leer a Carlos Castaneda.djvu/9

 is a code that allows us to reinterpret our past, our cultural heritage (tangible and intangible). In short, it provides us with a language that allows us to understand the essence, the depth of our culture; it is a bridge between the past and our present.

To understand the work as a whole allows us, through this code or language, to stop seeing our past as something foreign, incomprehensible, disjointed, dead! It ceases to be just "aesthetic, archaeological, museum"; to become something live, existing, vibrant complementary, vital, transcendental, totally ours!

Castaneda presents in his work an impressive biography of how he "hooked" onto Toltequity. He brilliantly recounts with a high literary quality his path to knowledge, his "JOURNEY TO IXTLÁN". Presents for the first time an Indian as a man full of knowledge of a completely unknown reality, "A SEPARATE REALITY"; through "TALES OF POWER" we can dimly glimpse "THE SECOND RING OF POWER", and try to "see" another conception of the human being and life as energy.

describes Don Juan as a wise teacher (nahual), generous but demanding, impeccable and responsible of his knowledge. Don Juan Matus is revealed in Castaneda work as what might have been these men that "learned to be gods" in Teotihuacán, those who reached the "INTERNAL FIRE". While "understanding" his philosophy, a veil of the obvious and evident magically disappears of everything that has been our cultural process and that, even though we live in it, we have failed to make it conscious.

When reading the Don Juan teachings, in all the Castaneda work, we get the feeling that we knew it all, that somehow nothing is new in the wonderful and prodigious knowledge, that it always existed in our depths or that it coexisted in our skin fragmented and disjointed in our everyday life, as a "SILENT KNOWLEDGE".

The Don Juan teachings in some way help order and make what we feel and know of the world and life coherent. It reveals what we have been, what we are and what we will be. The teachings of the old indigenous Yaqui, the shaman Juan Matus, is an encounter with our unknown millenary face, an approximation to our past. Is a reconciliation with the "other side of ourselves", which we have learned to deny for 500 years; it is an avenue to reach the necessary cultural fusion. Toltequity proposes a path to "total consciousness" similar to Buddhism, Islam or Christianity, but different insofar as it is our own, born and developed in our land, with our people. Toltequity, nagualism or witchcraft (as Don Juan called it), requires humans to change their ideas about themselves and the world; to become: "warriors", individuals capable of maximum discipline and control over themselves, to live an impeccable life, of internal strength, of equanimity and detachment. Acting eh act responsibly; with consciousness, sobriety and aplomb, maintaining a sense of "unyielding intent" in its objectives, without haste, without win or lose concern, without expecting rewards... to reach the SILENT KNOWLEDGE.

Don Juan and his teachings propose an old formula created by our wise ancestors thousands of years ago and that today, before the failure of the Western civilization project, is vitally presented to us at the dawn of the third millennium.