Stopping the World

Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan (1972) is still, more than half a century since publication, an important treatise on the nature of reality.

Were the magical stories he weaved true? Probably not. Critics often got caught up in discussing whether he was ‘telling the truth’ or not. These critics missed the point of the story telling. The stories were just a mechanism to show us that the nature of reality is not necessarily what we think it is.

In any event, mostly we take “truth and lies” far too seriously. Does either state of being really matter by the end of our lives? We should always remember that death stalks us constantly, and with this in mind, it is surely preferable that we are not diverted by trivial issues with this stalker (death) always just around the corner. Do we want to be arguing, or peaceful and calm, when the end comes?

What matters is how we see the world, and Castaneda maintained that it is highly advisable to unravel the conditioning we acquired from birth.

From the time of birth, everyone who comes into contact with a child is a ‘teacher’ who incessantly describes the ‘reality of the world’ to that child until the child understands the description of the world, and can make all the proper perceptual interpretations which validate that description. He then becomes a ‘member’ of society. Is this a society which we should be a ‘member’ of?

The process of ‘unravelling’ this conditioning is explained in Journey to Ixtlan and Castaneda called this process “stopping the world”. It is the process by which a person ceases to be a ‘member’ of any group, herd, collective or whatever, and starts to think for themselves and control the way they live their life, rather than comply with the way someone else desires that the person lives their life.

Don Juan, Castaneda’s shaman/teacher, says to him in the book (as he snaps his fingers):

People hardly ever realise we can cut anything from our lives, any time, just like that.

The first stage of “stopping the world” is to lose our personal history. Every person we meet has a good idea of ‘who we are’, and we renew and reinforce that image that others have of us all the time, every day, as we tell our friends, colleagues and family everything we do.

Don Juan explains however that if we have no personal history, nobody is angry or disillusioned with our acts. And above all, no one pins us down with their thoughts, weighing us down. Erasing personal history, the image we have created, frees us. It also frees us from our sense of self-importance, our ‘place in the world’.  

The next stage is to disrupt the routines of our life. Routine allows us to be prey for something or someone else. Castaneda called this “not doing”. Don Juan says to Castaneda:

Since the day you were born, one way or another, someone has been doing something to you, and they have been doing something to you against your will.

By changing our patterns, we can encounter new people, new situations, new opportunities, new realities. This makes our lives exciting and magical again, and creates what Castaneda called the “cubic centimetre of chance”.

All of us have a “cubic centimetre of chance” that pops out in front of our eyes from time to time. If we are alert, we can grab this chance. Don Juan says to Castaneda:

Usually we are too busy, or too preoccupied, or just too stupid and lazy to realise that this is our cubic centimetre of luck. A warrior is always alert and has the gumption necessary to grab it.

There is indeed another reality out there for us to encounter, we just need to leave behind the world that others created for us, or that we created because of the conditioning of others.

Time is short and there is still so much to learn. The ‘journey’ to the imaginary place called Ixtlan never ended, and that is how it should be, we should just keep moving, changing, progressing. As Ursula Le Guin says in her classic The Left Hand of Darkness:

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

7 November 2024

[Book review: Carlos Castaneda – “Journey to Ixtlan”]