On a day in the early spring of 1998 I found myself sitting in a hotel room in Hollywood waiting to hear whether or not I would be interviewing Carlos Castaneda. He was the author of The Teachings of Don Juan, published in 1968, a book which recounted his apprenticeship in the deserts of Mexico at the feet of an elderly Indian shaman and his induction through mind-altering substances into ‘the Yaqui way of knowledge’.
In revealing the deeper reality behind the illusion of existence, providing a blueprint for the life of ‘a warrior’ free from the fear of death, Don Juan’s teachings were perfectly attuned to the zeitgeist of the age. Like Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf and Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, The Teachings of Don Juan and its sequels became essential reading for legions of seekers after truth. The books sold in their millions; yet Castaneda himself remained as mysterious as his Yaqui teacher.
A kind of New Age Salinger or Pynchon, Castaneda, following Don Juan’s instruction for ‘a man of knowledge’ to ‘create a fog around yourself’, had given only a handful of interviews in some 30 years, had never appeared on television and had refused to be photographed. I was told I could not record our conversation but only take notes, just as Castaneda himself had done with Don Juan. And then the interview was cancelled. Castaneda, I was informed, was ‘in retreat’ in the Mexican desert. A few weeks later I learned that in fact he was three miles away from where I was sitting, in his Westwood home, on a morphine drip, dying of liver cancer and watching war videos.
