The cornerstone of modern technology, the belief in a universal reality accessible to thought and reasoning, is utter nonsense to the Yaqui Indian who goes by the name don Juan (Castaneda, 1971, 155). These insistant explanations, he points out to Carlos, "gives you a strange fatigue that makes you shut off the world around you and cling to your arguments (Ibid., 13)." Norman Brown's interpretation of Freud's work, though expressed in different terms, seems to agree. "The essence of man consists, not in thinking, but in desiring (Brown, 1960, 7)." What don Juan calls a "strange fatigue" may be nothing more than the manifestation of Freud's neurosis, the conflict between man's true essence and his conscious thoughts.

        The "man of knowledge" that our Yagui brujo propounds "lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, nor by thinking about what he will think when he has finished acting. ... then he looks, rejoices, and laughs (Castaneda, 1971, 106)." "Only a crackpot would undertake the task of becoming a man of knowledge of his own accord." admits don Juan, "A sober-headed man has to be tricked into doing it (Ibid., 40)." The most effective way to knowledge is to follow the path of the warrior, rather than the scholar (Ibid., 63).

        "A warrior has only his will and his patience and with them he builds anything he wants (Castaneda, 1971, 177)." The warrior uses these two powers in order to transcend the normal limits of space and mind, without any concern for meanings (Ibid., 220). With his will he sends himself "through a wall; through space; [or] to the moon (Ibid., 180)." With his will he fends off the forces of hunger and pain which seek to destroy him (Ibid., 174). Brown displays something similar in his portrayal of History as the struggle for unknown desires (Brown, 1960, 15-16); unknown and, therefore, beyond meaning. "The spirit of a warrior," explains don Juan,

"is not geared to indulging and complaining, nor is it geared to winning or losing. The spirit of a warrior is geared only to the struggle, and every struggle is a warrior's last battle on earth. Thus the outcome matters very little to him. ... And as he wages his battle a warrior laughs and laughs (Castaneda, 1971, 259)."

        Becoming a warrior is a necessary intermediate on the road to achieving sight. "To see without first being a warrior would make you weak;" don Juan tells Carlos, "it would give you false meekness, a desire to retreat; your body would decay because you would become indifferent (Castaneda, 1971, 259)." The warrior's attitude protects when "seeing makes one realize the unimportance of it all (Ibid., 204)."

        "Once a man learns to see he finds himself alone in the world with nothing but folly (Castaneda, 1971, 204)." "Everything is equal and therefore unimportant (Ibid., 104)." The warrior-seer falls not into despair of inaction. With his will he learns to control folly. Perhaps this concept provides us with the transformed historical consciousness that loosens the grip of the dead hand of the past on life in the present and frees him from the making of history (Brown, 1960, 19). "We must know first that our acts are useless and yet we must proceed as if we didn't know it. That's controlled folly (Castaneda, 1971, 97)."

        Any comments on this article will be welcomed and should be mailed to the author at Aichi Gakuin University, General Education Division, 12 Araike, Iwasaki-cho, Nisshin, Japan 470-0195 or e-mailed to him. Other papers and works in progress may be accessed at http:// www3.aichi-gakuin.ac.jp/ ~jeffreyb/ research/ index.html .

Brown, Norman O. (1960). Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press.