We can always return to where we have come from; like a homecoming of an expatriate to his fatherland, of a college student to his old hometown, of a son to his ancestral home. But the question is: Is the coming back coming back to the same place, to the same old place?
Most probably, yes; save from aged faces of acquaintances and some physical changes in the streets where most likely a building or a house or store has been built here and there to replace the old ones. But the place is the same old memorable place.
This we expect and believe to be true.
But in Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan: Lessons of Don Juan, this is not the case.
The name of writer Carlos Castaneda rings a special tone in my ears. I have heard of him, as far back as college days, for his more familiar work The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. I have been fascinated by stories of how he recorded his mystical encounter with the use of peyote, which can give you a thirteen-hour-long hallucinatory experience.
Nevertheless, there is none of that adventurousness in trying peyote in Journey to Ixtlan. If there ever was, it is rare and only through suspicious suggestive hints by Castaneda.
Instead, Journey to Ixtlan deals with the initiation of Carlos Castaneda as an apprentice under Don Juan Matus, a Yaqui Indian, to sorcery.
Castaneda, under the guidance of Don Juan, undergoes different stages of achieving the ring of power to stop the world. Don Juan, who never runs out of reason to laugh of what he sees as idiocy and simple mindedness of Castaneda, is one weird of an old man. To start, he thinks the world talks to him; say, when he declares something and the kettle whistles, he would say the kettle is agreeing with him.
When one is able to stop the world (and this Castaneda is able to achieve and through his words: I saw the ‘lines of the world’… the lines were constant and were superimposed on or were coming through everything in the surroundings. I turned around and examined an extraordinary new world) it only validates one of the teachings of Don Juan that “the world is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable.”
Don Juan teaches that a sorcerer is a warrior; though this does not mean warrior against evil per se, but a warrior against those who also know sorcery and with the intent to harm you. And when one is learning sorcery, there is always a ready worthy opponent that will wrestle you to teach you the greatest and painful lesson of sorcery.
Yet, the greatest and painful lesson of sorcery is not exclusively bound to sorcerers. It is also true to regular thinking people like you and me.
So what is the lesson then?
Even if the whole book is full of instances where Don Juan doubles up and sometimes kicks in the air as he laughs his old mystic man’s gaiety don’t be misled that he’s a happy chap. Knowing a lot is a tragedy and one cannot help in the end to see the world as one comic reality. Yet, deep within the heart, there is a sad nostalgia for the old world because being a sorcerer is faced with the fact that he can no longer return to his old place. After the debacle with the worthy opponent that throws him several mountains away, he can never return again. Every place from then on is part of a long futile journey to go home.
For us regular people, the worthy opponent can come to us through enormous personal problems. The knowledge and wisdom and experience and everything that we have seen throughout the process can lead us for the shedding of our old self, for a re-birth. And from then on, our life will be a long journey to go back to our old understanding of the world.
Thinking about this, I cannot deny that Journey to Ixtlan is the poignant life of a sorcerer and those who have achieved a higher understanding of the world we live in. It is lonely out there sitting on the top of the mountain; the wind is harsh and it is severely cold.
And even if you reached your old country, your old hometown, your old place, it is never been the same old one but a different one. Consciously or unconsciously you try to go home but you know that it is only an endless journey since you have known and seen and felt and understood a lot already.
And from then on, we take our own journey to Ixtlan.
No comments:
Post a Comment