Sé que estoy dando pasitos adelante en mi crecimiento interior... mucho de ello está inspirado por los libros de Castaneda, pero no me pregunten muy bien por qué. El caso es que hoy, un cielo de persona me ha "leído" por dentro, y lo que podía haber causado terrible inquietud meses atrás, sólo ha dejado un sentimiento de paz generalizado... cada vez me doy más cuenta de que nuestros problemas son "nuestros", y que los hemos causado nosotros... el ser humano tiende a culpar de sus desgracias a quien tiene alrededor y a autocompadecerse... pues bien, estoy bastante segura de que no es así: no somos infelices porque nuestros padres nos hicieron infelices, por ese "trauma" de la infancia, porque nos caímos de un columpio a los seis años... cada cual es responsable de sus tristezas y alegrías. Cuanto más nos demos cuenta de que somos responsables de ser felices, menos tendencia a autocompadecernos tendremos.Esto que he dicho es una verdad de perogrullo que casi todo el mundo sabe y que se dice todos los días, pero qué difícil es darse cuenta de verdad... casi todo está en aceptarse y quererse. Sí... hoy creo que he subido un escaloncito más.
12 comentarios:
hola Faerie, estaba buscando algo sobre ensoñar y llegué a tu block. muy bacano las experiencias que has tenido y pues te cuento que yo también las he tenido o mejor dicho lo estoy intentando.
ahhh y no soy anonima jajaja...me llamo Adriana Ospina
Hace poco terminé de leer el Arte de Ensoñar y creo que como a muchos lectores, me tenía atrapada.
Ahora que terminé he quedado con ganas de más y bueno, con muchas preguntas, además que es el único que me he leído de Castaneda.
Adriana!!! Sí, lo de ensoñar es una pasada... te recomiendo Viaje a Itxlán y Las Enseñanzas de Don Juan además de El Arte de Ensoñar... a mí aún me quedan libros suyos por leer y no puedo esperar a conseguirlos...
Yo en sueños consigo mirarme las manos, provocar acontecimientos y me pasan cosas muy raras y preciosas, pero últimamente me distraigo con la belleza de los sueños y se me olvidan cosas... a veces da miedo, pero es increíble...
Muchas gracias por pasarte por aquí!!! ;)))))
The Phenomenology of Don Juan Excerpt from Marvin Harris, Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture. New York: Random House, 1979, pp. 315-324.
Carlos Castaneda's widely read books about the alleged lived experience of Don Juan, a Yaqui Indian shaman, exemplify the obscurantist consequences of phenomenology. At the University of California in Los Angeles, Castaneda studied under the ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel, in turn a student of Alfred Schutz--mentioned above. (Garfinkel [1967], who was on Castaneda's dissertation committee at the University of California at Los Angeles, is famous for experiments designed to prove that the essence of social reality consists of conventional meanings attached to everyday activities by communal consensus. The experiments consisted of having students board buses and decline to pay the fare, or having them go home and sit at the dinner table and refuse to pass the salt.) Inspired by his phenomenological mentors, Castaneda resolved to do fieldwork that would involve him in the symbols and conventional meanings of a lived experience entirely different from that of Western social reality.
The Yaqui Indians provided Castaneda with a suitably exotic context for studying the "separate reality" of another culture, especially as he singled out and sought to penetrate and participate in the the most exotic aspect of this culture--the activities and thoughts of the community of Yaqui sorcerers and shamans. To a certain point, therefore, Castaneda's phenomenological journey merely qualifies as a typical cultural idealist study of the mental superstructure. An exclusive preoccupation with mental and emic superstructure adds up to an ineffectual, stunted, and scientifically undesirable strategy, but it does not necessarily add up to an obscurantist strategy. The obscurantism of Castaneda's approach arises from his presentation of the emic reality associated with shamanic consciousness as a challenge to the legitimacy of the epistemological principles upon which science is based.
Castaneda reports that Yaqui shamans believe they can fly through the air, change into animals, kill an adversary by sorcery, and see through opaque objects. None of this is news. Many anthropologists have provided vivid accounts of shamanistic exploits without becoming national celebrities and without being accused of obscurantism. Castaneda's account differs from the others because he tells his story from the "inside," deliberately letting the emics and his own subjective feelings dominate the narrative. The aim of the narrative is to get the reader to participate in the shaman's system of intelligibility and thereby to demonstrate that reality is the creature of social consensus. If we can be persuaded to participate in the shamanic consensus, we will believe that shamans can fly. (Just as we will believe drug-induced hallucinations when they are happening to us.)
The influence of Garfinkel's phenomenology is apparent in the little-read technical addenda to Castaneda's first book, The Teachings of Don Juan. Castaneda here portrays his apprenticeship to Don Juan as a search for the validating consensus that converts the nonordinary component element of his experiences from illusion to reality. (In other words, if two people have the same fantasy, it is no longer a fantasy.) Since these nonordinary component elements were not subject to ordinary consensus, their "perceived realness" would have been only an illusion if he had been incapable of obtaining agreement on their existence. For Castaneda, the "special consensus" came from the sorcerer himself:
"In Don Juan's teachings, special consensus meant tacit or implicit agreement on the component elements of non-ordinary reality. . . . This special consensus was not in any way fraudulent or spurious, such as the one two persons might give each other in describing the component elements of their individual dreams. The special consensus Don Juan supplied was systematic. . . . With the acquisition of the systematic consensus the actions and the elements perceived in non-ordinary reality became consensually real. . . ." (1969:232)
Eventually, through a process by which Don Juan put Castaneda into the proper state of mind, hundred-foot gnats and man-sized butterflies ceased to be illusions. They became instead another reality--another ordinary reality--for "the classifications 'ordinary' and 'non-ordinary' [became] meaningless for me":
"there was another separate but no longer unordinary realm of reality, the 'reality of special consensus.'" (lbid.:250)
To expose the flaw in Castaneda's phenomenological exercise, I should like to compare the expository technique of the Don Juan books with that of an even more compelling phenomenological account rendered in another medium; that of the classic Japanese movie Rashomon. In this movie the viewer witnesses four different versions of the "same" scene. The principal actors are a man, his wife, a stranger, and an onlooker bidden in the bushes. Each of the actors narrates a different version of the lived experience, and each version appears on the screen as the lived reality. Manly heroism in one version is abject cowardice in another; chastity in one is carnal heat in another; magnanimity in one is brutality in another; and so on. Each narrative unfolds as a graphic, vivid reality, and the audience is left on its own to decide which version, if any, actually represents the event--or indeed, if there ever was an "event" to begin with.
For a cultural materialist there are only two possible solutions of Rashomon's contradictions and ambiguities: one of the versions is etically correct and the others are false; or they are all etically false. For the phenomenologist there is a third solution: all versions are equally true. This third possibility arises because in the phenomenological strategy, there is no way to distinguish etic from emic events. If the participants are not lying, then what they saw within their system of intelligibility must be accepted as true.
The very fact that Rashomon (or Don Juan) can be presented as a problem of multiple truths, however, proves that the problem of which version, if any, is true can be solved. In order to convince the audience that truth is relative to consensus, the film maker actually obtains a consensus concerning the truth of what the camera sees during each version. The camera shows vividly and unequivocally that there is a seduction, a rape, a murder, a duel, and so forth. These events are the analogues of etic events in the strategy of cultural materialism. Since it is possible to obtain a consensus about what happened in each episode, even though each version contradicts the others, one must conclude that a film maker could have filmed the actual event and achieved the same kind of consensus. Such a film would not constitute the whole truth, but it would provide us with a sound basis for deciding which one of the other versions was most nearly correct or whether they were all equally false. Except by trickery or incompetence, a camera could never show them all to be equally true.
Of course I am aware that a filmed version of an event involves selective viewing, and that interpretations of pictures, like interpretations of lived scenes, are influenced by a person's total perceptual and cognitive framework. Yet one does not need to obtain the total and absolute truth about a scene in order to refute the obscurantist claim that contradictory versions of scenes may all be equally true. The fallacy involved here is a variant of the search for empirical certainty discussed in Chapter 1. It does not follow from our inability to obtain absolutely certain knowledge that all knowledge is equally uncertain. By using recording devices under explicitly operationalized conditions, the community of scientific observers can get closer to what happened etically even though they may never get to the absolute final truth. Cultural materialism is committed to getting closer and closer to this etic reality: phenomenology is committed to getting further and further away from it.
Again: "What Does It Matter?"
No one can object to Castaneda's artful presentation of the different reality of shamanic consensus. Unfortunately, however, his attempt to get closer to the emics of the shamanic world is shackled to a mischievous attempt to mystify what was happening while he was cultivating the shamanic consciousness. In fact, there is so little about the etic who, what, when, where of Castaneda's experiences in his books that substantial doubts arise as to whether or not Don Juan exists--doubts which Castaneda has never taken the trouble to dispel (Time, 1973; Harris, 1974:246ff; Beals, 1978; New West, January 29, 1979).
Internal inconsistencies in the chronologies of the earlier and later volumes, the absence of a Yaqui vocabulary, the close parallel between Castaneda's visionary experiences and those reported in other works on shamanism, testimony of his ex-wife, friends, and colleagues, and Castaneda's failure to defend himself against the accusation that he deceived his Ph.D. committee at UCLA, make it very unlikely that Castaneda was ever an apprentice to Don Juan (De Mille, 1976). This is not to assert that Castaneda's knowledge of shamanism in a more general sense is defective, nor that his vivid descriptions of shamanic consciousness are without redeeming value. Castaneda probably has much first hand as well as literary knowledge of shamanic practices, and he has communicated that knowledge in a uniquely effective manner. The only problem is that without the etic context, we do not know whose system of intelligibility is represented. We cannot rule out the possibility that Castaneda never interviewed any Yaqui Indian shaman, and that the apparent authenticity of his shamanic experiences derive entirely from his own shamanic gifts and literary and imaginative powers.
Since Castaneda shows no interest in defending himself against this speculation, many of his admirers have been obliged to consider the question of whether it matters to them if the Don Juan stories are fact or fiction. Professor David Silverman (1975:xi), lecturing in the Department of Sociology at UCLA, had no problem disposing of this issue: "It does not matter to me in the least whether any or all of the 'events' reported by Castaneda ever 'took place,'" just as it does not matter to Levi-Strauss if his "book on myths is itself a kind of myth" (p. 169). Levi-Strauss rationalizes his indifference to fact or fiction on the basis of his conviction that his own mind works the same as any Indian's mind; Silverman rationalizes his indifference on the ground that any phenomenological account is interesting in its own right. Castaneda's books are a phenomenological account or a "text." Since truth is always relative to a system of intelligibility, there is always an "invented" imaginative, or fictional component in such "texts." "What text is not a construction?" asks Silverman.
Going one step further, the novelist and literary critic Ronald Sukenick sees everything that happens as a story or a story of a story, and so forth. And stories are "neither true nor false, only persuasive or unreal." This has been the great revelation inspired equally by Zen, the Book of the Dead, witch lore, Sufism, various Eastern disciplines, Western mystical tradition, Jungian speculations, Wilhelm Reich, and Carlos Castaneda:
"All versions of 'reality' are of the nature of fiction. T'here's your story and my story, there's the journalist's story and the historian's story, there's the philosopher's story and the scientist's story. . . . Our common world is only a description . . . reality is imagined. . . ." (Sukenick, 1976:113)
This invitation to intellectual suicide returns us full circle to the epistemological anarchism of Paul Feyerabend (another one of Castaneda's admirers). The rebuttal of Sukenick, like the rebuttal of Feyarabend (see p. 22), comes in two parts, intellectual and moral. Let me attend to the intellectual part first. Does Sukenick seriously believe that all versions of reality are fictions? If so, then he believes his version of reality is a fiction. Since he believes that everything he says is a fiction including what he says about reality, only a fool would believe such a man about anything.
More astonishing than the intellectual obscurantism of phenomenology is its moral opacity. Morality is the acceptance of principled responsibility for the way in which one's actions or lack of actions affect the well-being of other members of the human species. The absolute precondition for any kind of moral judgment is our ability to identify who did what to whom when, where, and how. The doctrine that all fact is fiction and that all fiction is fact is a morally depraved doctrine. It is a doctrine that conflates the attacked with the attacker; the tortured with the torturer; and the killed with the killer, It is true that at Dachau there was the SS's story; and the prisoners' story; and that at Mylai, there was Calley's story and there was the kneeling mother's story; and that at Kent State there was the guardsmen's story and the story of the students shot in the back, five hundred feet away. Only a moral cretin would wish to maintain that all these stories could be equally true.
Enseñame como se llega a esa escalera!!!
Besos que se compadecen
Vaya, persona anónima, muchas gracias!!!!!!
Dani... si te das cuenta de que estás soñando alguna vez, y esto pasa de vez en cuando, mírate las manos... mira repetidamente tres objetos de tu sueño... y a partor de entonces, pregunta a la gente a la que veas, señala con el dedo meñique de tu mano izquierda objetos de tu sueño, y si desprenden unps rayos de energía, dirígete a ellos... y quizás llegues más lejos que yo... es mágico e inexplicable... yo no he llegado lejos, pero ojalá entre todos podamos.
Besos!!
Dani! Te he interpretado mal! Creía que me hablabas de ensoñar... pero hablas de compadecerse... no te compadezcas, pofa............. además, no sirve para nada......... BESOTES!!!!!!
¿Qué libro me aconsejas leer primero si no sé nada sobre este tema?
Mar: Las Enseñanzas de Don Juan es el primero... el tercero es Viaje a Ixtlán... no he leído el segundo, pero creo que da igual en qué orden se lean esos tres ya que los entremezcla... Las Enseñanzas de Don Juan tiene un apartado final muy caótico donde todo se explica epígrafe por epígrafe de una forma en la que yo me enteré de poquito... pero Viaje a Ixtlán es alucinante... El Arte de Ensoñar, desde luego, lo recomiendo tb, pero después de leer los primeros libros, cosa que yo no hice y me lié un poco... BESOTES!!!!
Bien, tengo una visita pendiente a la librería. Gracias
:)
Sí, la verdad es que yo también...
Besos!
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