Don Juan believed the states of non-ordinary reality to be the only form of pragmatic learning and the only means of acquiring power.Don Juan alluded to our similarity as beginners through incidental comments about his incapacity to understand his teacher during his own apprenticeship. It was clear that don Juan's knowledge and his method of conveying it were those of his benefactor thus my difficulties in understanding his teachings must have been analogous to those he himself had encountered. My inability to arrive at an understanding seems to have been traceable to the fact that, after four years of apprenticeship, I was still a beginner.Thus, as don Juan had traveled a great deal, his knowledge may have been the product of many influences. All he said was that he had been born in the Southwest in 1891 that he had spent nearly all his life in Mexico that in 1900 his family was exiled by the Mexican government to central Mexico along with thousands of other Sonoran Indians and that he had lived in central and southern Mexico until 1940. Don Juan disclosed very little about his personal life.Don Juan had, in turn, chosen me to serve as his apprentice, but he warned me that I would have to make a very deep commitment and that the training was long and arduous. One day he explained that he possessed a certain knowledge that he had learned from a teacher, a 'benefactor' as he called him, who had directed him in a kind of apprenticeship. I had known don Juan for a whole year before he took me into his confidence.It connotes essentially a person who has extraordinary, and usually evil, powers. The Spanish word brujo means, in English, medicine man, curer, witch, sorcerer. the people with whom he lived believed that he had some sort of 'secret knowledge', that he was a 'brujo'. The friend who had introduced me to don Juan explained later that the old man was not a native of Arizona, where we met, but was a Yaqui Indian from Sonora, Mexico.Becoming a man of knowledge was a task that could not be fully achieved rather, it was an unceasing process comprising (1) the idea that one had to renew the quest of becoming a man of knowledge (2) the idea of one's impermanency and (3) the idea that one had to follow the path with heart.

To become a man of knowledge was an unceasing process. has, without rushing or without faltering, gone as far as he can in unravelling the secrets of power and knowledge.

It purports to document the events that took place during an apprenticeship with a self-proclaimed Yaqui Indian Sorcerer, don Juan Matus from Sonora, Mexico between 19.Ī man of knowledge is one who. The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge was published in 1968, written by Carlos Castaneda and submitted as his Master's thesis in the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) Department of Anthropology.

The lessons of don juan