Resumo de The Teaching Of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way Of Knowledge

Have you never felt the enormity the universe welling, dwelling in your heart?
Read this.
Have you never felt mysteriously energized energized beyond reason?
Keep reading.
Have you never felt helpless, personally confronted by the gigantic face of terrifying unreasoning?
Perhaps you will want to stop reading. Stop reading and go back to your familiar universe. Go back to your coffee and cigarettes, to your simple games and labyrinthine rituals. Go back to your monolithic beliefs wherein you will find the comfort of crowds, similar, understandable in their selfishnesses, horrifying though their actions may be.
But perhaps you will trust me: anthropological research (as an impeccable first-hand study that creates the new category of Homo Mysterium to follow the evolutionary development after Homo Sapien) was never like this. A sound knock on the locked and dusty door behind which you keep your precious: your cherished prisoner: your cementitious grip on Reality, is what awaits you in, The teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui way of knowledge, by Carlos Castaneda.
This seminal work of research explores traditional, meso-american peoples' discoveries in the objective realm of hallucinogenic plants, through the instruction that a brujo--a Yaqui indian sorcerer--named don Juan gives to his power-chosen apprentice: the then anthropology student from UCLA, Carlos Castaneda.
But more importantly, it reveals their experiences in what I will call the collective subjective realms of power: those realms which each individual must experience for him or her self, but which stand universally available to all, and which have irrevocable (spirit-if-you-will) consequences.
It was a cult classic in the late sixties, owing in large part to the aura of authenticity of its first-person narrative, and to its, for that time, attractively counter-culture subjects. Drugs yes, but beyond that, with its dual nature (which is a curious foreshadowing of a key element of later works in the series) of first, giving The Teachings of don Juan (and by extension of all the antecedent sorcerers in his particular lineage) in Part One, and the scholastically formal A Structural Analysis in Part Two, it explicitly lays out the survey-work for the argument that realms of "nonordinary" reality really exist, realms outside the influence of grasping, war-mongering, control-tyrants of what was then called the establishment. (Perhaps you have your own, new name for these elitist gangs of profiteers and philosophical predators?)
Full of nonordinary dialogue, and remarkably lucid descriptions of experiences that have no value to the modern, merchant mind, (like the intimate details of turning into a crow), this challenging little collection of field-notes from the next New World, is an exceedingly excitingly human record of just some of the infinite potentialities that in fact exist for the free soul in a free universe. It is about what, for a man of knowledge, is the only way to the finding of any real, energetic truths in life: to follow a way with a heart. And there are as many ways with a heart as mankind is diverse; and as few as befit the particular needs of each individual person. For, because it is only by following a way with a heart that a human being has any chance of knowing the true meaning and awful ramifications of that most valuable and most challenging of all human conditions: Freedom. And Freedom, is finally, what it's all about.

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