Introduction to the Journals of Applied Hermeneutics

The attempts to publish these journals of hermeneutics and phenomenology date back to 1971, when Carlos Castaneda requested that the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Press publish them in this format under its Berkeley Press imprint. His request was quickly denied. It was not until 1996, 25 years later, that Castaneda finally realized this dream.

An academic history form, signed on January 6, 1969, records Carlos Castaneda’s literary projects in progress: “A book, A Separate Reality: The Phenomenology of Special Consensus, will be published in the spring of 1969. It deals with a special agreement among shamans concerning the nature of reality.”

Although the book was ultimately published in 1971 under the title A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan, that form demonstrates that from the moment he entered Don Juan’s cognitive world, Castaneda vowed to remain faithful to what he had been taught. For thirty-five years, he kept that promise alive. The passage of time reveals how difficult this work was and how many obstacles had to be overcome.

Through reading these publications, we seek to share, acknowledge, and honor this body of work, which we now possess as a treasure thanks to Carlos Castaneda’s years of sustained effort.

The year was 1974, and the academic community began seriously questioning whether Castaneda’s experiences with Don Juan constituted authentic ethnographic fieldwork or a work of fiction.

Shortly after the malicious publication of the Time magazine article, Castaneda granted an exclusive interview to the Brazilian magazine Veja. In late March 1975, Luiz André Kossobudzki, then an education fellow at the University of California, conducted the interview. There were three meetings: one at the author’s home and two on the UCLA campus, “where,” Luiz says, “Castaneda works between fourteen and eighteen hours a day on his research into ethnohermeneutics (the study of how different ethnic groups interpret perception).” His research was so intense that the name of his first company was “Hermeneutics Unlimited.”

On September 5, 1974, Carlos Castaneda, Florinda Donner, Taisha Abelar, Beverly Evans, and Joanie Barker signed the articles of incorporation for Hermeneutics Unlimited, which were subsequently filed with the California Secretary of State on September 10, 1974. The corporation’s specific purpose was “the production of documentary ethnology.”

Hermeneutics is the philosophical theory and methodology of interpreting texts and meanings. The prefix “ethno-” indicates a focus on how a particular cultural group or society perceives, interprets, and assigns meaning to the world around it. Castaneda’s strategy was to use the term “Ethnohermeneutics and Its Philosophical Foundations” to transform his learning with Don Juan—from the use of psychotropic plants to the metaphysical theories of Indigenous peoples—into a formal methodological framework. He wanted to demonstrate that he was not merely recording “magical stories,” but analyzing an entire autonomous system of knowledge and perception of reality.

This poster* dated November 13, 1974, captures an exceptional moment when Castaneda returned to his university to defend his work from a strictly academic perspective.

At that time, the title he had chosen for the work was The Journal of Ethno-Hermeneutics. Years later, he discovered that a publication bearing the same name was already in circulation.

A few years later, in the early 1980s, Castaneda told the writer Graciela N. Vico Corvalán, in an interview published in the Argentine magazine Mutantia, the following about his books:

“Don Juan gave me the task of putting into writing everything the sorcerers and sorceresses said. My task is simply to keep writing until one day they tell me, ‘Enough, this is where it ends’… All the material in the books belongs to Don Juan in the past and to the Toltec woman now. They are responsible for everything that is said in them.”

“Personally,” he continued after a pause, “I am working on a kind of journal; it is something like a manual. This work, yes, I am responsible for. I would like a serious publishing house to publish them and take responsibility for distributing them to interested individuals and study centers.”

He told her that he had developed about eighteen units in which he believed he had summarized the entire teaching of the Toltec nation. To organize the work, he had used Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology as a theoretical framework to make what he had been taught comprehensible.

“Last week,” he said, “I was in New York. I took the project to the editors at Simon & Schuster, but I failed. They seem to have been frightened. The thing is, something like this cannot succeed. I am solely responsible for those eighteen units,” he continued in a contemplative tone, “and, as you can see, I was unsuccessful. Those eighteen units are something like the eighteen falls in which I hit my head hard.”

“Why do I call them units? I call them that because each one seeks to show one of the ways of breaking the unity of the familiar. That single perceptual view can be broken in different ways.”

According to Castaneda, Edmund Husserl was the first person in the West to conceive of the possibility of “suspending judgment.”

The phenomenological method does not deny these elements; it simply “brackets” those that underpin our ordinary perception.

Castaneda considers phenomenology the most useful theoretical and methodological framework for understanding Don Juan’s teachings. In phenomenology, the act of knowing depends on intention rather than perception. Perception always varies according to one’s history—that is, according to the subject, with their acquired knowledge, immersed in a particular tradition. The most important rule of the phenomenological method is the principle of “going back to the things themselves.”

“The task Don Juan carried out with me,” he insisted, “was to gradually break down perceptual prejudices until they were completely shattered.”

Phenomenology “suspends” judgment and confines itself to the “description” of pure intentional acts. “For example, I construct the object ‘house.’ The phenomenological referent is minimal. Intention is what transforms the referent into something concrete and singular.”

For Castaneda, however, phenomenology has merely methodological value. Husserl never went beyond the theoretical level and, consequently, never touched the human being in everyday life.

And so we arrive at the 1990s. Talia Bey, president of Cleargreen, announced that proceeds from the seminars would help finance the publication of a journal by Carlos Castaneda entitled The Warrior’s Way: A Journal of Applied Hermeneutics. Finally, in January 1996, the first journal of applied hermeneutics was published. The second followed in February of the same year, the third in March, and the fourth in April.

The purpose of these journals is to connect some of the philosophical concerns of Western humanity with the explorations of the sorcerers who inhabited ancient Mexico and their cultural descendants, Don Juan Matus and his party.

The sorcerers maintain that complete units of thought and their expression can emerge from inner silence rather than mental rumination. What we obtain in doing so is not an intellectual product, but a reading of infinity.

These journals are congruent in spirit and practice with that challenge. They arise from inner silence and are an invitation to everyone to become “READERS OF INFINITY.”

PRESENTACIÓN ©️ por Ensō & Sofía

Escuchar lectura por Energía Fina

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