A few weeks ago I headed up to visit my friend who is going back to school for medicine and found his copy of The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge laying around. It took me back. That book was a big reason why I originally went to school for Anthropology way back in 2000.

For those of you who haven’t read The Teachings of Don Juan, I’ll give you a brief summary:

An Anthropology Master’s student named Carlos Castaneda spent the years between 1960 and 1965 studying under a Mexican shaman named Don Juan Matus. This time period saw the death of many old indian ways of life/knowledge and Castaneda was hell-bent on documenting as much as he could before we lost it forever.

Don Juan taught Carlos all kinds of wacky shit, like corn magic and how to eat massive amounts of Peyote and Datura without dying. There were some other valuable lessons in there, but you’ll have to read the book.

When I spoke about this book with my burnout hippie college professors (who we all know escaped into academia so they could pray on 19 year old hippie girls and eat mushrooms in peace) they scoffed. Pseudo-science. Bullshit. Don’t read that. Read Derrida, Hume, Baudrillard, blah blah blah.

Anyway, I picked up my friend’s copy and re-read the first 40 or so pages and it reminded me of some concepts that ARE still relevent to today. The first one is mentioned in the book, the others fit very well, I think.

1. Belief creates reality. The wacky magic that Don Juan worked and used in the book worked because the people who experienced it BELIEVED in it. Whether it exists in our SHARED reality is irrelevant.

2. Binary opposition. This concept isn’t really outlined in the book but I’ll talk about it briefly here. Much of what goes on in the world is either in an ON or OFF status. O or 1. A system is either on or off. Communication is a great representation of this. Attraction. Why we buy. All kinds of great stuff. Read about binary opposition here. This leads me to the final and most important thought:

3. Systems. Your entire life, everything that happens to you, around you, above you, etc, can be explained in terms of systems. There are systems that you cannot manipulate (weather, politics, international law, etc) and there are systems that you can (financial, social, etc.)

I believe the most important thing you can do is realize which systems you can manipulate and which you cannot. You have a goal of going from point A to B–what systems are you going to need to master to get to B? Can you benchmark it? Set a chronological frame around it?

Most people are not self aware enough to UNDO the systems that have been put into place to control us since we were children. They blame other people for their problems. They are the people who you hear say, “Why do I always end up datingdouchebags/losers/etc.”

A good book for modeling your own thought processes is Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson.

The first step is being conscious of whatever system you wish to modify. You turn everything to ON.  You practice and practice, which ends up reducing the time-cost for implementing that particular system. Your output becomes better, more efficient, more desirable.

If you’ve ever worked a shitty McJob, then you know what I’m talking about. Your job function is systemic and usually the cost of training a replacement is low. As the saying goes, people fail, systems don’t. There is no room for autonomy in a call center or a retail environment. Unless you are selling some hippie bullshit that doesn’t really make money.

But then, I’d rather eat peyote with Don Juan and talk about hippie bullshit all day than spend the rest of my life in a cube.