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1968 Theodore Rosak Radio Interview

With Carlos Castaneda - Part 1
 
 
 
 
 
 

Interviewer: For six years from 1960-66 Carlos Castaneda served as an apprentice to a Yaqui Indian brujo, or sorcerer named don Juan. During those years, Mr.

Castaneda was a graduate student in Anthropology at UCLA. His experiences with don Juan lead him into a strange world of shamanistic lore and psychedelic

experience and adventures in what Mr. Castaneda calls states of non ordinary reality, some of which were frightening in the extreme, and all of which are fascinating

in the extreme. His experiences with don Juan are recounted in a book which has been published this year by the University of California Press called "The Teachings

of don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge". Mr. Castaneda is with us here at KPFA today and has agreed to discuss the book and his experiences with don Juan.

Let me begin by asking you how you managed to meet this remarkable personality, don Juan, and can you give us some idea what sort of a person he is?

CC: I met don Juan in a rather fortuitous manner. I was doing, at the time in 1960, I was doing, I was collecting ethnographic data on the use of medicinal plants

among the Arizona Indians. And a friend of mine who was my guide on that enterprise knew about don Juan. He knew that don Juan was a very learned man in the

use of plants and he intended to introduce me to him, but he never got around to do that. One day when I was about to return to Los Angeles, we happened to see

him at a bus station, and my friend went over to talk to him. Then he introduced me to the man and I began to tell him that my interests was plants, and that,

especially about peyote, because somebody had told me that this old man was very learned in the use of peyote. And we talked for about 15 minutes while he was

waiting for his bus, or rather I did all the talking and he didn't say anything at all. He kept on staring at me from time to time and that made me very uncomfortable

because I didn't know anything about peyote, and he seemed to have seen through me. After about 15 minutes he got up and said that perhaps I could come to his

house sometime where we could talk with more ease, and he just left. And I thought that the attempt to meet him was a failure because I didn't get anything out of

him. And my friend thought that it was very common to get a reaction like that from the old man because he was very eccentric. But I returned again perhaps a

month later and I began to search for him. I didn't know where he lived, but I found out later where his house was and I came to see him. He, at first, you know, I

approached him as a friend. I liked, for some reason, I liked the way he looked at me at the bus depot. There was something very peculiar about the way he stares

at people. And he doesn't stare, usually he doesn't look at anybody straight in the eye, but sometimes he does that and it's very remarkable. And it was more that

stare which made me go to see him than my interest in anthropological work. So I came various times and we developed a sort of friendship. He has a great sense of

humor and that eased the things up.

Q: About how old a man was he when you met him?

CC: Oh he was in his late 60's, 69, or something like that.

Q: Now, you identify him in the book as a brujo. Can you give us some idea of what this means and to what extent don Juan is connected, if at all, with some sort of

an ethnic background, a tribal background or is he pretty much of a lone wolf?

CC: The word brujos, the Spanish conception, it could be translated in various ways, in English could render a sorcerer, witch, medicine man or herbalist or curer,

and, of course, the technical word shaman. Don Juan does not relate, or does not define himself in any of those ways. He thinks of himself, perhaps he is a man of

knowledge.

Q: That's the term he uses, man of knowledge?

CC: He uses man of knowledge or one who knows. He uses that interchangeably. In as far as his tribal allegiances, I think he, don Juan, is very much, I think his

emotional ties are with the Yaquis of Sonora since his father was a Yaqui from one of the towns in Sonora, one of the Yaqui towns. But his mother was from

Arizona. Thus he has sort of a divided origin which makes him very much a marginal man. At the present he has family in Sonora, but he doesn't live there. He lives

there part of the time, perhaps I should say.

Q: Does he have any formal livelihood? How does he earn his way in the world?

CC: I wouldn't be able to, to, to discuss that, rather I don't think that I could at the moment.

Q: One point I'd like to clear up - it's something that I wondered about as I read the book. The book consisted in large part of recordings of your own experiences

in using the herbs and mushrooms and so on that don Juan introduced you to, and long conversations with don Juan. How were you able, just as a technical

problem, how were you able to keep track of your experiences over such a long period of time. How were you able to record all of this?

CC: It seems difficult, but since one of the items of the learning process of recapitulation of whatever you experience, in order to remember everything that

happened, I had to make mental notes of all the steps, of all the things that I saw, all the events that occurred during the states of, let's say, expanded consciousness

or whatever. And then it was easy to translate them into writing after, because I had them all meticulously filed, sort of, in my mind. That's as the experience itself

goes, but then the questions and answers I simply wrote them down.

Q: You were able to take notes while you were....

CC: Not at the very beginning of our relationship I never took any notes. I took notes in the covert manner. I had a pad of paper inside my pockets, you know, big

pockets on my jacket. I used to write inside my pockets. It's a technique ethnographers use sometimes that they convert notes and then, of course. you have to work

very hard to decipher the way they're written. But it has to be done very quickly, very fast. As soon as you have time; you cannot postpone anything. You cannot let

it go for the next day, cause you lose everything. Since I think I work compulsively, I was capable of writing down everything that took place very, very shortly after

the events themselves.

Q: I must say that many of the dialogues are extremely fascinating documents. Don Juan, as you record his remarks has a certain amount of eloquence and

imagination.

CC: Well one thing, he's very artful with usual words and he thinks of himself as a talker, although he doesn't like to talk. But he thinks that talking is his predilection,

as other men of knowledge have all the predilections like movement, balance. His is talking. That is my good fortune to find a man that would have the same

predilection that I have.

Q: Now, one of the things that's most impressive about the book is the remarkable chances that you seem to have taken under don Juan's tutelage; that is, he

introduced you to various chemicals, substances, some of which, clearly I suppose could have been fatal if they had not been used carefully. How did you manage to

work up sufficient trust in this man to down all of the concoctions that he put before you?

CC: The way the books present it seems to heighten some dramatic sequences, which is, I'm afraid, not true real life. There are enormous gaps in between in which

ordinary things took place, that are not included. I didn't include in the book because they did not pertain to the system I wanted to portray, so I just simply took

them away, you see. And that means that the gaps between those very height states, you know, whatever, says that I remove things that are continuous crescendos,

in kind of sequence leading to a very dramatic solution. But in real life it was a very simple matter because it took years in between, months pass in between them,

and in the meantime we did all kinds of things. We even went hunting. He told me how to trap things, set traps, very old, old ways of setting a trap, and how to catch

rattlesnakes. He told me how to prepare rattlesnakes, in fact. And so that eases up, you see, the distrust or the fear.

Q: I see. So there was a chance for you to build up a tremendous amount of confidence in this man.

CC: Yes, we spent a lot of time together. He never told me what he was gonna do, anyways. By the time I realized, I was already too deep into to turn back.

Q: Now, the heart of the book, at least as far as my reading was concerned, certainly the most fascinating part of the book, has to do with your experiences with

what you term non-ordinary reality, and many of these experiences as you recount them have a great deal of cogency to them; that is, they are experiences that seem

to come very close to demonstrating the validity of practices like divination, and then on the other hand you have experiences that, at the time, seemed to have been

tremendously vivid experiences of flight and of being transformed into various animal forms, and often you suggest a sense of some ultimate revelation taking place.

What sense do you make of these experiences now as you look back on them all? What seems to have been valid about them and how was don Juan, do you feel,

seem able to control or predict what these experiences would be?

CC: Well, in as far as making sense out of them, I think as an anthropologist, I think, the way I had done it, I could use them as grounds for, say, set up a problem in

anthropology, but that doesn't mean that I understand them or use them in any way. I could just employ them to construct a system, perhaps. But if I will view them

from the point of view of a non-European man, maybe shaman or perhaps a Yaqui, I think the experiences are, they are designed to produce the knowledge that

reality of consensus is only a very small segment of the total range of what we could feel as real. If we could learn to code reality or stimuli the way a shaman does,

perhaps we could elongate our range of what we call real.

Q: What do you mean by that, how does a shaman like don Juan code stimuli?

C

C: For instance, in the idea that a man could actually turn into a cricket or a mountain lion or a bird, is to me, this is my personal conclusion, it's a way of intaking a

stimuli and readapting it. I suppose the stimuli is there, anybody who would take a hallucinogenic plant or a chemical produced in a laboratory, I think will experience

more or less the same distortion. We call it distortion of reality. But the shamans, I think, have learned through usage in thousands of years, perhaps, of practice, they

have learned to reclassify the stimuli encoded in a different way. The only way we have to code it is as hallucination, madness. That's our system of codification. We

cannot conceive that one could turn into a crow, for instance.

Q: This was your experience under don Juan's tutelage?

CC: Yes. As a European I refuse to believe that one could do it, you see. But...

Q: But it was a tremendously vivid experience when you had it...

CC: Well it was hard to say, it was real, that's my only way of describing it. But now you see the things over, if I would be allowed to analyze it, I think, you know,

what he was trying to do was to teach me another way of coding reality, another way of putting it into a propitious frame that could turn into a different interpretation.

Q: I thought the passage in the book where these very different orientations toward reality that you had, and don Juan had, the point at which it came through most

clearly to me, was the point in which you question him about your own experience of apparent flight. And you finally came around to asking if you had been chained

to a rock, would don Juan feel that you still had flown, and his answer was, in that case you would have flown with the chain and the rock.

CC: He alludes, you know, that, I think what he means, what he meant to say is that one never really changes. As a European my mind is set, my cognitive units are

set, in a sense. I would admit only a total change. For me to change would mean that a person mutates totally into a bird, and that's the only way I could understand

it. But I think what he means is something else, something much more sophisticated than that. My system's very rudimentary, you see, it lacks the sophistication that

don Juan has, but I cannot pinpoint actually what he means like, things like what he means that one never changes really, there's something else, another process is

taking place.

Q: Yes, it is difficult to focus on this. I think I remember don Juan's line was, you flew as a man flies. But he insisted that you flew.

CC: Yes.

Q: There's another remarkable statement he makes. It is in a discussion of the reality of the episode. He says, that is all there is in reality, what you felt.

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