30 Castaneda

John also recommended A Separate Reality by Carlos Castaneda. To it, too, I was immediately hooked. In this book a Yaqui Indian sorcerer and shaman from northwestern Mexico makes the author his apprentice. An anthropologist studying psychotropic plants for his doctorate, Carlos is gradually initiated by his teacher don Juan Matus into a whole new way of seeing and understanding reality. What seems certain to Carlos and a simple matter of common sense is, Juan demonstrates, only his subjective interpretation of his experience. Carlos must learn, his teacher tells him, to see in a different way. At the beginning of his tutorial Carlos rejects the idea.

He scoffs.

"You make it sound stupid," Juan tells him. "The way I see it, you want to cling to your arguments, despite the fact that they bring nothing to you; you want to remain the same even at the cost of your well-being."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Carlos replies.

Denial—

"I am talking about the fact that you're not complete," Juan insists.

Deficient.

"You have no peace."

This statement annoys Carlos.

He is offended.

He believes that Juan is qualified to judge neither his acts nor his personality.

"You're plagued with problems," Juan tells Carlos.

Unhappy.

"Why?" Juan asks.

"I am only a man," Carlos protests.

No.

Now it is Juan who scoffs.

When things seem unclear, he explains later to his apprentice, we must remember the inescapable fact of our mortality. We will die—and only the idea of death can temper our spirit. For himself, Juan says, nothing matters. His acts, he states, are a controlled folly.

Carlos grows still more confused.

Lost.

He should think often of his inevitable death?

Why—

Controlled folly?

Huh—

Nothing matters?

"Detach yourself from everything," his teacher orders.

Let go.

When Juan was seven years old, for no reason Mexican soldiers killed his mother. When he would not let go of her body, the soldiers broke his fingers so that he could not grasp her any longer.

Then the soldiers killed his father.

Yet—

"I don't hate anyone," Juan tells Carlos.

Juan has learned, he says, that the countless paths of life are all equal, that oppresssors and oppressed meet at the end, and that for both alike life is altogether too short. Only this truth, Juan says, prevails. As long as a man thinks that he is a victim, Juan explains to Carlos, his life will be hell.

"What makes us unhappy is to want."

If we learn to reduce our wants to nothing, Juan adds, then the smallest thing we get will be a precious gift.

"Life is hard," Juan says, "and for a child it is sometimes horror itself."

But nothing matters.

"In order to become a man of knowledge one must be a warrior," Juan explains to Carlos, "and not a whimpering child."

One must learn to see.

"We are men," Juan explains, "and our lot is to learn and to be hurled into inconceivable new worlds."

"Are there any new worlds for us really?" Carlos asks only half in jest.

"We have exhausted nothing, you fool!" Juan responds.

Immediately I read the next book in the series, Journey to Ixtlan, and devoured the third, Tales of Power, when it was published, then went back and read the one I had missed, the first of the series, The Teachings of Don Juan. Nonattachment, the fact of mortality and impermanence, courage, honesty, truth, first in Stephen Gaskin and now again in Carlos Castaneda and in his Indian shaman don Juan Matus.

What on earth was all this?

Then John loaned me his hardcover copy of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by the Soto Zen master Shunryu Suzuki. Stephen Gaskin, I had learned from his own book and from John, had been a sometime student of Zen and of Suzuki at the San Francisco Zen Center. John and I talked as I thumbed the pages of the slim book in my hands. John explained words and concepts I had only recently encountered—Theravada, Hinayana, Mahayana, the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, and more. I was at first intrigued, then fascinated, finally obsessed. It was then—in reading Monday Night Class and Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind—that I began first to realize and then to understand that in his commitment to nonviolence, to honesty and to telling the truth, to right livelihood, and to other philosophical and ethical principles too numerous to detail John had been practicing Buddhism.