Teaching of Don Juan

Description

The book is divided into two sections. The first section, The Teachings, is a first person narrative that documents Castaneda’s initial interactions with don Juan. He speaks of his encounters with Mescalito (a teaching spirit inhabiting all peyote plants), divination with lizards (by using a hallucinogenic powder rubbed on his temples to understand their language), and flying in animal form using the “Devil’s Weed” (the datura plant). The second, A Structural Analysis, is an attempt, Castaneda says, at “disclos[ing] the internal cohesion and the cogency of don Juan’s Teachings.”[1] The 30th anniversary edition, published by the University of California Press in 1998, contains commentary by Castaneda not present in the original edition. He writes of a general discouragement from the project by his professors (besides Dr. Clement Meighan, a professor who supported the project early in its conception. In the forward, Castaneda gives “full credit” for the approval of his dissertation to Meighan.) He offers a new thesis on a mind-state he calls “total freedom” and claims that he used the teachings of his Yaqui shaman as “springboards into new horizons of cognition.”