The Teachings of Don Juan

"A warrior chooses a path with heart, any path with heart, and follows it; and then he rejoices and laughs. He knows because he sees that his life will be over altogether too soon. He sees that nothing is more important than anything else."

This statement was purportedly said by the sorcerer, don Juan Matus, to whom the anthropologist Carlos Castaneda claimed to have been apprenticed for many years. Now, whether this is so or not, or even whether don Juan actually existed, is for me not so much of an issue. The point is that Castaneda's narratives still offer many remarkable insights into the nature of reality, and the way in which we are conditioned to accept the material reality around us.

The stars in the background are from a Pawnee chart of the heavens drawn upon a buffalo hide. They gave me exactly that feel of being hand-drawn and yet retaining that authentic sense of pattern and purpose that I sought for this image. 

A Separate Reality

“You don’t understand me now because of your habit of thinking as you look and thinking as you think.”

We see everything through the veil of our own past experiences, social conditioning and prejudices. Don Juan tells Castaneda that a sorcerer has no history. This is, I believe, partly what he meant: that to see things, not as we think they are but as they actually are, we must necessarily stop looking and thinking through this veil: to 'see', rather than merely to 'look'.

Nieríca, a term from the Native Mexican Huichol language, indicates a mystic door or portal – between life and death, between this world and another, or perhaps more succinctly: between different realities. If there are indeed multiple realities (as both Carlos Castaneda’s writings and recent science suggests), are they all equally real, or equally sham? Coyote in Native American stories has the role of the trickster, and I have here used a coyote skull as the guardian for the portal into this 'separate reality'. We are only-too-willing to allow ourselves to be tricked into thinking that our material reality is the reality.

Journey to Ixtlan

"I left. And the birds stayed, singing."

This haunting remark is spoken by don Juan's companion sorcerer, don Genaro. He is paraphrasing a line from The Definintive Journey, a poem by Juan Ramón Jimenéz. Jimenéz is one of my own favourite poets, so here is the poem as quoted in Castaneda's text:

...and I will leave. But the birds will stay, singing:
and my garden will stay, with its green tree, with its water well.
Many afternoons the skies will be blue and placid,
and the bells in the belfry will chime,
as they are chiming this very afternoon.
The people who have loved me will pass away,
and the town will burst anew every year.
But my spirit will always wander nostalgic
in the same recondite corner of my flowery garden.

We all journey towards our own Ixtlan, whatever that Ixtlan represents to us. For this image I wanted to convey the idea that the landscape somehow felt unreal. Rather than use an actual landscape, my solution was to create one with virtual software. The eagle and the sky also were created with the same software program.

Tales of Power

“One of the acts of a warrior is never to let anything affect him. The control of a warrior has to be impeccable.”

The crucial difference between equanimity and indifference, and learning to distinguish between the two. True power is not the posturing power of the political arena, or the petty power of the executive boardroom, and certainly not the games of power that crackle within domestic relationships. We all have our own power, and we cannot be dispossessed of that power. The only way that our power can be taken from us is by us allowing that to happen, even when it feels like it has been stolen from us. We are never without our personal power in some form. We are never powerless.

The flint arrowheads are in my collection. They were sold to me as being 'Apache', although they could be from any of the southwest nations.

The Second Ring of Power

"Those are the four winds. They are also associated with the four directions. The breeze is the east. The cold wind is the west. The hot one is the south. The hard wind is the north."

Stars circle and restless planets spin around their appointed courses. A woman runs faster and faster around a room, suddenly to mount the wall, run across the ceiling, and down the other side. This bizarre incident, related in this account of Mexican sorcery, apparently was witnessed by author Carlos Castaneda. But did it really happen? What is more to the point is the way in which the force of the author’s narrative makes it true within the covers of his book.

The Eagle's Gift

“The Eagle, that power that governs the destinies of all living things, reflects equally and at once all those living things. There is no way, therefore, for man to pray to the Eagle, to ask favours, to hope for grace.”

Huge and dispassionate, the Eagle passes overhead, its wings blackening the sky. Its gift is to let you live.

My thanks to Martin Knowelden for permission to adapt the photo of his eagle for my painting. "You own an eagle?" I asked Martin, taken aback. "Oh, no," was the calm reply, "The eagle owns me."

The Fire from Within

"To be a warrior is not a simple matter of wishing to be one. It is rather an endless struggle that will go on to the very last moment of our lives."

Accepting that it is a struggle can be a difficult thing in our own age in which online social media and other outlets encourage a diminishing attention span. Our inner fire encourages us to do whatever we do with passion, neither looking to right nor left. This fire is the warrior's ally.

The Power of Silence

"Do you understand that the mind has its limits? To go beyond, you must consent to silence."

...sshhh...

The Art of Dreaming

"Only dreamers are free to continue."

Those borders again. We reach the edge of the map, and must decide whether to stay with what we know, or whether to strike out into the unknown. Don Juan means 'dreaming' in the sense of truly seeing: seeing beyond our limited reality. But perhaps conventional dreams to some extent are showing us this anyway. I know from personal experience that at times it pays to give your dreams attention, to unravel what your own mind wishes to tell you. But is it just your own mind, or are there other forces who use our dreams as a night bridge to our world, our consciousness?

Magical Passes

“Nobody is born a warrior, in exactly the same way that nobody is born an average man. We make ourselves into one or the other."

There is always a choice. Even to think that we have no choice is a choice. How we act, and what we choose, is what makes the difference.

This massive fossil deer skull I photographed in the Naturalis natural history museum in Leiden. At first glance the antlers seem rather asymmetrical, but look closely: the smaller and larger tines balance each other perfectly, making the overall weight of each antler much the same. In nature, as in sorcery and in life itself, balance can be everything.

The Wheel of Time

"Only as a warrior can one withstand the path of knowledge. A warrior cannot complain or regret anything. His life is an endless challenge, and challenges cannot possibly be good or bad. Challenges are simply challenges."

The wheel of time keeps turning. It is impossible to move through time without also moving through space. Try standing still, and you're still racing through space with the Earth at 64,000 miles an hour. Take a single pace, and a second of time has already passed. Time/space is a continuum, like the warp and weft of a woven fabric. The Mayan shamans knew this. There was, apparently, no separate word in the Mayan language for either time or space. If in some amazing way you could stop the wheel, stop time, then you would be neither where you are now, nor where you would be in even a fraction of a second. Rather, neither time nor space would have meaning: you would be everywhere simultaneously. You would be omnipresent.

This is the same coyote skull incorporated into my image for A Separate Reality. The skull habitually sits on my desk, keeping a watchful eye on me as I work. The remarkable circular horse burial was discovered in the Caucasus, belonging to the burial of a Scythian nobleman of some two millennia ago.

The Active Side of Infinity

"Do you know that at this very moment you are surrounded by eternity? And do you know that you can use this eternity, if you so desire?"

What did don Juan actually mean by his mysterious statement? Castanada admits to being baffled (he usually does!). My own idea, my personal interpretation of his statement, is that 'eternity' here refers to being able to perceive beyond the limitations of time as we experience it in our everyday world. This is the past-present-future experience of time which occupies our every moment.

But to move beyond this 'linear' view of time we must take the step into 'eternity'. Eternity is not a different kind of time: it is beyond time. It is an eternal 'now', where past, present, and future occupy the same moment. Because of this factor, this 'jumbling together' of our familiar sequence of time, I would describe this experience as 'granular'. Think of a lot of grains of sand, each one laid out in a single row, one after the other. That row of tiny grains is our experience of past-present-future time. Now think of those grains all mixed together in a jar. Past, present and future now become meaningless. That is 'granular' time - the omnipresence of the eternal 'now'.

This 'eternity' is also mythic time. Myths do not exist in some distant past. They are real now - and they go on being real because they exist in eternity. And, as don Juan implies, we can use this eternity to gain many insights: both into the everyday reality which we take for granted, and into the infinities that wait beyond.

END