A week or two ago I was walking with my fiancée among the hills on the north end of town. It was evening, and the sun was going down. The city lights were winking into view, and the shaded mountains that lined the valley to the east and west loomed over it. There were small patches of snow here and there on the hilltops among the scrubby bunchgrasses and stems. My partner’s and my shoes crunched along as we walked. Reality had taken on that sort of fuzzy-around-the-edges character that it gets around dusk. Several mountains down the valley, on the east side of the city, I noticed a manmade structure: a normal-sized tower, perhaps for radio or cell phones, with a blinking red light at the top. Immediately to this first tower’s left, however, was a second tower. It also held a blinking red light at its point, but the light was impossibly higher than the first, thousands of feet into the sky. I was arrested by the height of it—no manmade structure could possibly reach so high, especially not here on a mountaintop. My world momentarily stopped as I beheld it, a tower-shaped hole in my apprehension of the world.
Carlos Castaneda was an American anthropologist, famous for the accounts of his training under the tutelage of one Don Juan, a Yaqui (indigenous Mexican) sorcerer. While there is now wide consensus that Castaneda fabricated most of what he wrote about his adventures, and that Don Juan likely never existed, his work remains a phenomenon, especially in new age circles. His first book, The Teachings of Don Juan, emphasized the use of psychoactive substances, such as peyote and psilocybin-containing mushrooms. I find the subject interesting, but am rather ambivalent about the drug use. The second Castaneda book that I read, Journey to Ixtlan, had a much greater influence on me.
In Journey to Ixtlan Don Juan teaches Casteneda about being a hunter of power, and eventually a warrior and man of knowledge. One of the critical lessons that Don Juan tried to instill was the importance of “stopping the world.” In my understanding, “stopping the world” means that the mind of a person becomes confounded by thoughts and perceptions so outside its understanding that all of the trappings of normal thought falls away. The person’s normal world “stops” and their mind is lain bare to previously unfathomable forces and powers existing in the world. Drugs are, in Don Juan’s tradition, an important way to create opportunities for “stopping the world,” but, as he teaches in Journey to Ixtlan, it can occur under normal mental circumstances, and these experiences are to be sought out and prized.
One example of an instance in which Castaneda’s world was stopped was when he and Don Juan were out in the desert near Don Juan’s home. As they came upon a patch of bushes in the distance, Castaneda saw a strange creature moving amongst the branches. It had a somewhat terrifying appearance and looked like no other animal that he had seen before. It also seemed to be injured and moving in a strange way. It was a frightening sight for Castaneda and raised a variety of emotions (as well as the hair on the back of his neck). While he beheld it, Castaneda tried to work out what the creature really was, and Don Juan admonished him to stop doing so and just to keep observing it. Eventually, Castaneda realized that the “beast” was nothing more than some pieces of rubbish caught in the bushes, moving around due to the wind. He was elated by his discovery, and confused by Don Juan’s disappointment.
In a later instance, Castaneda and Don Juan were sitting on the ground. After a little while, Castaneda noticed a strange looking mountain in his vision. The mountain was of a different color than he expected, but beyond that it seemed to sway and shimmer. Castaneda was astounded by the sight, but, again, his mind immediately set to working out what was really going on. As before, Don Juan wanted him to sit with the sight, not to look away, and not try to grasp it with his thinking mind. Castaneda eventually realized that the sight was not actually a strange moving mountain in the distance, but just a small piece of cloth on the ground some ways in front of him, moving in the breeze. Again, Castaneda was excited by the power of his mind to figure out “the truth,” and Don Juan, deflated and saying little, picked up and placed the cloth into his pocket, declaring it an “object of power.”
I chose the above two examples of “stopping the world” because they have stuck with me the most clearly in the years since reading the book. The world can be “stopped” in other ways described by Castaneda, but, as humans rely so strongly on our visual sense in navigating the world, these instances based on the confusion of visual perception are particularly striking. I’ve had numerous such instances of perceptual (usually visual, though sometimes aural) confusion that have occurred in the years since reading the book. And I’ve always noticed how quickly the gears of my mind spin up to explain away the confusion. If the regular operation of the mind can be likened to grooves carved by habitual thought, down which our mind most easily flows, then perceptual confusion is like being hoisted onto a ridge between those grooves. The sharper the grooves, and the narrower the ridge, the more quickly “gravity” forces the mind back down into habitual thought.
The mind can be thought of as a landscape, carved by waters, with our daily thoughts flowing across its surface. The possibilities of the mind are governed strongly by the distribution and depth of the canyons thus carved, and it is of inherent value to take the mind to places where it will not normally go, expanding its possibilities, even if we do not ever embark completely on our own journey to Ixtlan. An unchanging mind is a dead mind, forever sleeping without dreams.
The normal operation of the mind has value in our ability to survive and thrive, especially in the modern built world. The thoughts that define the peaks and valleys of our mental landscape are largely congruent with the realities of the world around us. This is no accident, of course. Through the sciences we have gained a better understanding of the inexorable progress of physical processes, and through our creative spirit we have placed the objects of our thought themselves into the world. Thus, as we move through this world we find that the world unfolds in a largely similar fashion to our thoughts. The world acts, and we react; we act, and the world reacts, our mind’s and the world’s patterns tightly enmeshed. Through this interplay of thoughts and the world, we reinforce existing, and create new, mental patterns—the topography of our minds.
This built human world, composed of many and varied thoughts, is the mental landscape that we find ourselves navagating most days. The valleys are many and dense, and the ridges between them sharp. We rarely find ourselves stuck on a high and forlorn peak for long, and much of our mental processing flows smoothly and effortlessly. Most of us do, of course, have pathological patterns of thought that cause us grief and suffering, but we aren’t often faced with a mental situation in which our entire conception of reality is turned on its head. We are usually flowing through a reality that is sensible (though not necessarily just or kind).
It’s possible to find regions of experience where the landscape of our mind is less densely populated, where the network of channels is relatively sparser. If we are used to a built reality, seeking natural settings might provide this opportunity. Or if we travel to a different human culture we may find that the world works differently than our expectations. The operation of our mind may be altered as well. We may “lessen the gravity” through meditative practice, allowing our mind to traverse the landscape in a less deterministic way. Drugs might flip the gravity sideways or upside-down, transporting us to places that Aldous Huxley, in his Heaven and Hell, called “the antipodes of everyday consciousness.”
We’ve also, at various times and places in our human history, systematized “stopping the world.” This was (allegedly) described by Castaneda in the shamanistic practices of the Yaqui, and exists in various forms throughout the world’s religions and cults. It is also made entertainment by street and parlor magicians. In both settings, the intent is often to evoke emotional responses such as awe, dread, or delight. Interestingly, one is primed with the knowledge going into an entertainment setting that the transformations witnessed are not “real.” One goes into a religious liturgy with the knowledge that events are “real,” but typically something greater than and beyond the grasp of the observer. Both attitudes somewhat blunt the impact of stopping the world, making it “safer,” but also may play a role in suspending the mind’s automatic response to explain it away.
After a few moments of confusion I realized that the unfathomably tall tower on the distant mountain was actually a normal-sized tower on the next hill over. My mind had gone ruthlessly into explaining mode and filled in the hole. I reflected on the experience and, as I had in past instances, briefly mourned its passing.