Карлос Кастанеда. Разрозненые материалы за 1994 год -
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worlds that are constant and independent of our highly conditioned awareness. Sorcery involves reprogramming our capacities to perceive realms as real, unique, absolute, and engulfing as our daily so-called mundane world. Don Juan is always trying to get you to put your explanations of reality and your assumptions about what's possible inside brackets, so you can see how arbitrary they are. Contemporary philosophers would call this "deconstructing" reality. Don Juan had a visceral understanding of the way language works as a system unto itself -- the way it generates pictures of reality that we believe, mistakenly, to reveal the "true" nature of things. His teachings were like a club beating my thick head until I saw that my precious view was actually a construction, woven of all kinds of fixated interpretations, which I used to defend myself against pure wondering perception. There's a contradiction in there, somewhere. On the one hand, don Juan desocialized you, by teaching you to see without preconceptions. Yet it sounds like he then resocialized you by enrolling you in a new set of meanings, simply giving you a different interpretation, a new spin on reality -- albeit a "magical" one. That's something don Juan and I argued about all the time. He said in effect that he was despinning me and I maintained he was respinning me. By teaching me sorcery he presented a new lens, a new language, and a new way of seeing and being in the world. I was caught between my previous certainty about the world and a new description, sorcery, and forced to hold the old and the new together. I felt completely stalled, like a car slipping its transmission. Don Juan was delighted. He said this meant I was slipping between
