Blog #7: The Teachings, Ch. 5-8

Blog #7: The Teachings, Ch. 5-8

In this weeks reading, I was noticing Castaneda’s constant desire for Don Juan to interpret his visionary experiences. I found Castaneda’s experiences with the smoke to be particularly difficult to understand myself. The line between physical reality and his internal reality seems skewed after he smokes from Don Juan’s pipe. I think perhaps it’s our rationale that gets in the way of seeing (and experiencing) things clearly; as Don Juan tells him on page 101 that “The trouble with you is that you understand things in only one way.”

In “Other Worlds” we finally have images to accompany our readings. The way the Shipibo lived mirrored what I visualized while reading The Teachings. There were countless similarities between the uses of psychoactive plants in both groups. One common idea in these Shamanistic people is the perception of reality. We consider reality as our waking consciousness, but in these parts of the world, reality is internal as well as external. When we put our experiences into words, as Castaneda did, the experience has no importance because that reality only has meaning within oneself. On page 110, Castaneda is explaining his experience with the smoke and he says, “All I can tell you is what I felt,” and Don Juan replies, “That is all there is in reality- what you felt.” And Don Juan doesn’t want to hear about Castaneda’s experience because he didn’t believe that his views were clear. The line between the truth (the experience) and the story is always distorted by interpretation.