Translation:To read Carlos Castaneda/3
GUILLERMO MARÍN
Oaxaca, spring 1996.
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The global Western culture dominance began in the 16th century after the invasion suffered by America, Africa, Asia and Oceania. Through their brutal warrior machinery, Europeans, guided by Anglo-Saxons, dominated all the peoples of the world, including those which emerged from the "mother cultures".
Thus Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, India, Mexico, and the Andean zone were subjugated, not only by inhumane exploitation of their peoples and fierce destruction of their natural resources, and perhaps the most important destruction were the attempts to destroy their ancient philosophical thoughts, their religions, their ways of life; and from their ruins construct the omnipotent Western culture. After the passage of the invading armies, arrived the institutions, laws and the European authorities, and with them a new conception of the world and life was imposed, of well-being and progress, the sacred and divine. Colonial societies around the world, despised any value of the invaded cultures and overly exalted an assumed European superiority.
In these 500 years of Western hegemony, the wisdom and knowledge of many peoples had to hide and survive clandestine, others have been diluted and are believed to be almost extinct. The Western view of the world from material values and consumerism over spiritual, the dehumanized cult to science and technology, the looting of the planet and the disposal of human being in favor of industrial, commercial and consumerist societies, have led to the bankruptcy of the Western culture and are endangering life on the planet.
However, the human spirit is not dead and its wisdom live sheltered in many ancient peoples of the world. This is the case of the Toltecáyotl, knowledge that engendered the miracle of the civilization of the ancient Mexico, with its apogee between 200 BCE and 850 CE.
In fact Nahuatl, Maya, Zapotec and Mixtec cultures, among many others, are part of a single civilization, from the earlier Olmec times of the preclassical period to the classical and postclassical periods, and its evolution line has reached our days avoiding its historic death. But all of them in their diversity, maintain a cohesive philosophical structure and which has allowed them to survive the ups and downs and denial, to which they have been submitted these last five hundred colonialism years.
The Toltecáyotl or Toltequity, as referred to by don Juan Matus, represents an immeasurable wealth of knowledge and practices, which not only have to do with food, medicine, sciences and the moral and ethical standards of the human groups that practice them consciously or unconsciously[1]; but for the very sophisticated and complex skills that have to do with energy and the spiritual strength of human beings and entities around them.
The "don Juan teachings", today more than ever, come to uncover an unknown world until now for the non-indigenous society of Mexico. Ever since the uprising of the indigenous Maya of Chiapas in 1994, the dominant society began to discover the existence not only of the "profound Mexico", discussed by Dr. Guillermo Bonfil, but has begun to acknowledge that part of his face is indigenous. A face refused and denigrated by colonization. An unknown face, an own face of ours.
The Indian peoples of Mexico are so strange and foreign to us, as long as we remain "uneducated foreigners in our own land". A Zapotec Indian, Javier Castellanos said "being indigenous is not a choice, it is a disgrace" and we add "but not being indigenous, is a real tragedy". The Mexican society of the late 20th century is facing a dilemma, we are debating an identity conflict five hundred years old. Who are we Mexicans really? Indigenous in the ontological, philosophical and spiritual, with Western features. Or people with a Western thought and indigenous features, that we all want to vanish.
Within this individual and social debate, "the don Juan teachings" presents the “other reality". They reveal a complex and difficult to understand philosophical thinking. Talks to us of an ancient life and world conception that somehow lives in our everyday life and that in the Western view is interpreted as "magical or surreal" and pejoratively defined as folkloric.
This essay was written in 1991 and from that date to present day, our country has changed a lot. The indigenous issue is in the national debate and it seems that today more than ever we need to know how Mexican indigenous people think and perceive the world and life. The don Juan teachings appeared in United States in the late 1960s. A huge number of American young people took these texts as a passport to the world of drugs. The works of Castaneda, were translated into several languages and apparently have printed 30 million copies. In Mexico, thanks to the worldwide success, the books began to be read in the 1970s by very skeptical intellectuals, and despite the large printings, the Castaneda work is really unknown. The don Juan teachings may open our perception capacity to understand not only the "other reality", but basically the "others", the ignored indigenous.
Thus far, the don Juan teachings are assumed as "esoteric" or shamanism. Its audience in general is composed of young people in search of new paths in the midst of the chaos and failure offered by modernity and neoliberalism. Many people play in individual fantasies of "becoming warriors or entering the terrifying and mysterious world of the nahual" and become "fans" of the Castaneda female warriors and attend expensive seminars to learn about Tensegrity, though few have undertaken Toltequity from a philosophical and cultural point of view.
The don Juan teachings, also contain a rich and large body of philosophical knowledge which is alive and present not only in popular culture, but which are surprisingly represented in physical evidence of the ancient cultures of Mexico. And the Academy has interesting research such as that of Rubén Bonifaz Nuño, Laurette Séjourné, Alfredo Lopez Austin and Miguel Leon Portilla that address the Toltecáyotl at the Academy from the philosophical aspect.
The work of Castaneda can also be a valuable reference point for understanding "the other", the indigenous, to the other side of ourselves that we have stubbornly denied these last five hundred years. The wisdom of the teachings of Don Juan bequeathed Castaneda, can guide us to understand and interpret other ways of understanding life and the world, close forms that live within indigenous and peasant communities.
Very few have access to the Toltequity knowledge, of those few only some can scrupulously follow the disciplined practices and of them, only the chosen can come into contact with the power. However, all readers of the teachings of Don Juan, will find a philosophy that is alive in the indigenous cultures from throughout the Americas.
In my experience with indigenous and peasant communities, I have found many parallels between the teachings of Don Juan and community practices. I believe that to survive five hundred years as an indian in a colonized country, it is necessarily required to be a warrior. Indians and peasants of Mexico are the Toltequity cultural practitioners, because only in this way they have been able to survive injustice, exploitation and denial.
The free and democratic society we all want to build for the next millennium will have to end colonialism, there may not be any longer winners and losers, a "profound Mexico" nor an "imaginary Mexico" in permanent struggle, nor indigenous Mexicans and non-indigenous Mexicans. Mexicans will build this country looking for answers in our deep inside, on the basis of our own wisdom and philosophy, will finally stop importing solutions. We are holders of an incomparable cultural heritage and are direct heirs of one of the oldest civilizations in the world. The Toltecáyotl is the philosophical thinking of our "old grandparents", in the works of Carlos Castaneda we can find some reference points of this millenary wisdom, because the future of Mexico lies in its past. This might be another way of approaching the work of Carlos Castaneda.
GUILLERMO MARÍN
Oaxaca, Spring 1998
- ↑ Indigenous communities maintain this wisdom their cultural practices of their daily community life.