We are in Part Two of 'Tales of Power'. Castaneda is in Mexico City on a Sunday afternoon. He is wandering around the market stalls in aimless fashion, when there is a tap on his shoulder. It is none other than Don Juan. And he is wearing a suit.
Castaneda is as dumbfounded as the typical reader probably was. Don Juan has to keep on getting Carlos to close his mouth, which falls open in astonishment at regular intervals.
Not only is Don Juan wearing a suit, but he is apparently wearing it impeccably. He looks, Castaneda tells us, 'an impeccably tailored urban dweller.'
Something of the impact of this event is captured in notes I made in a personal diary-of-sorts. "When Don Juan first turns up in his city suit in 'Tales of Power', it's the moment when you feel like giving up on Castaneda. 'He's gone too far this time. I'm not letting him get away with this.' Gone the solitary nature ascetic, the desert shaman, the wise old sorcerer standing remote and alone, aloft and above it all. Instead we've got this guy in pinstripes who's got a job and goes to restaurants."
For three and a half books we've got accustomed to Don Juan in his sandals and straw hat, leaning against the wall of his rude little house, maybe, or out beneath the unforgiving desert sun, speaking to the plants and the wind. He embodies the image perfectly, the archetype, if you like. And now...... As Castaneda says a few pages on: "Your suit scares me more than anything you've done." And later still: "I did not know what to think. I felt that I had arrived at the end of my path."
So much adheres to an mage. When it collapses, we too can feel lost, or confused at the very least. Merlin, Gandalf, Don Juan: all of a type. Wise old men who live 'out there', deigning to enter our own vulgar, tedious world on the rare occasion. The Don Juan of the desert will always be there. But by turning up in Mexico City in his pin stripes and brown shoes he acquired another dimension altogether.
'Tales of Power' is the fourth and final - I would say climactic - volume in Castaneda's first and best known series of books. It appeared in 1974 to an eager audience of folk like myself, riding the wave of 'back to the land' ethos, and intent on leaving behind as quickly as possible the world of the pin-striped suit. However, any aversion created by Don Juan's newest manifestation was dissolved by some of the content of this book. In my view, it is one of Castaneda's finest works. 'Tales of power': it's not just the incidents themselves, about the power surging through the cosmos. The tales in this book are related in writing that is indeed full of power, some of Castaneda's best.
It is in 'Tales of Power', over a lunch of soup in Mexico City and in his suit, that Don Juan gives his explanation of the tonal and the nagual. "The tonal is everything we know" he informs an increasingly perplexed Carlos, while "The nagual is the part of us for which there is no description." The tonal is like the table we are eating from, continues Don Juan; the known items are the knives, forks, salt cellars and the rest.
The most magnificent section of all, in my view, is reserved for the end of the book. It is the moment for great farewells, sorcerer-style, and Don Genaro expresses his love for the Earth. Whenever I return to these paragraphs, their effect is invariably profound. ".... the earth knows that Genaro loves it" explains Don Juan "and it bestows on him its care ....... Genaro roams on the paths of his love and, wherever it is, he is complete." And so it goes on.
My recent revisit of this outstanding piece of writing has led me to realise yet another aspect to the power of these tales. It is one part of how, I suppose, over forty years ago, I became a Buddhist rather than heading off to the desert in search of a Mexican shaman.
Much of my own experience of multidimensional realities, let us call them, could be couched in terms of 'consciousness'. Pale Green Vortex is full of references to 'consciousness'; less so to 'mind' which is a more problematic word, more prone to being identified with 'brain' and with 'thoughts'. A major personal gateway in the early 1970s was LSD. And, in my experience, LSD was all mind, all consciousness. I have since then had the privilege to sample the blessings conferred by other 'psychedelic type plants and substances', such as cactus and ayahuasca. But none, in my view, approach old-fashioned LSD in terms of pure consciousness.
The emphasis has remained. A common thread weaving its way through many of the topics turning up on this blog is that 'c' word.
Read Castaneda, though, and it's very different. Much of the experience described in the books is somatic. It happens in the physical, in the body. Just open any of Castaneda's books at random and it will stare you in the face. I let my copy of 'Tales of Power' fall open in the chapter entitled 'Shrinking the Tonal'. See what happens to poor little Carlos here as he goes through typically strange experiences under the tutelage of Don Juan. "There was a pressure in my head, a tickling feeling, as if carbonated soda were going through my nose. I was speechless. I tried to say something without success." A couple of pages on: "We walked in silence for a moment. My body was feverish. I noticed that the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet were burning hot. The same unusual heat also seemed to be localized in my nostrils and eyelids." And another from near the end of the chapter: "I shivered. My body felt it was at the edge of an abyss........ The struggle made me numb by degrees, until I could not feel my body. My mouth was open and my eyes were half closed....."
This is what you get for involving in 'the evil world of sorcery', as Don Juan terms it. Pressure in the head, fevers, burning hands and feet, shivers and numbness. And it's a far cry from consciousness, at least as commonly understood. Not only is it physical rather than mental, a lot of it doesn't seem very nice at all, a million miles away from the calming mindfulness that some meditation promises. Not the sort of thing that any right-minded person would sign up to at all. In truth, Castaneda's experience bears more resemblance to some full-on kundalini event than it does to a public meditation class. Which is where things all begin to tie up, I suppose.....
The fairly unconscious urge to revisit this book of Castaneda's has opened this up for me. My own 'spiritual life', if we can call it that, has recently become filled with physical, bodily events. It is energetic and physical, radically different to what I have been accustomed to in the past. But the world of sorcery, as described in 'Tales of Power' and elsewhere, resonates with the weird happenings within my own body. I 'feel' Castaneda more fully than in the past.
Images: Sonoran Desert
Mexico City
