Castañeda and Don Juan Matus, Wissai and Omar Sabat

Castañeda and Don Juan Matus, Wissai and Omar Sabat 

Carlos Castañeda was a literary sensation in late 1960's and 1970's. A South American student in anthropology at UCLA. He wrote a sensational "field work " study about an American Yaqui Indian named Don Juan Matus, which earned him a M.A. in Anthropology, released under the title The Teachings of Don Juan. He followed with Separate Reality, Journey to Ixtlan, and Tales of Power. They were all bestsellers. He wrote other books, but I found them tiresome and repetitive and devoid of fresh insights and enthralling language present in his former books. His creation of Don Juan Matus character was superb. Even forty years later, some of the things Matus said have stayed with me and strengthened me and given peace. In the past, in times of sorrows, I usted to turn Castañeda and Nietzsche for help. Now, Castañeda seemed too much of a fraud to me. He didn't practice what he preached. He was an artist, not a true thinker, not like Nietzsche. 

I created the character Omar Sabat in my fiction. It was fiction that I wrote, hence I didn't feel like I was a fraud. I am basically a writer of fiction and tales of fantasy and wishful thinking. I make up stories as I go along. I mine my fertile imagination with inputs of incidents in real life and news accounts. Some readers whose personal lives are afflicted with failures, disappointments, and feelings of despair and unfulfillment, have projected themselves onto my words and my life and my world, and have declared that I am full of fraudulence and bullshit. I think those readers are incapable of self-reflection. Neither do they have a capacity for truth. They don't have a mirror in their homes; thus they don't know what and how they look like to bystanders. They don't know what irony means. I could easily unmask them; expose their pathetic lies and self-lies; denigrate their essence which is essentially that of an animal and an unaccomplished, untalented, stupid, grandiose animal at that, but I won't. I don't want my soul get contaminated by just thinking and writing about them. I could easily squash their phony, delusional self-conception with a litany of facts and solid reasoning, but I won't, because I want to write beautifully about Omar and in the process writing about myself. I am an artist with words while those who have denounced me are nothing but short, fat, ugly, animals. I am sorry for crossing their paths. They re too stupid of not knowing that meeting me was a momentous event in their lives and they should have seized upon that opportunity to improve themselves. Instead, they kept wallowing in delusions of grandeur and phony, false, and stupid self-conceptions. They never look at themselves in the mirror and ask the question, "Do I like the short and fat and ugly image that I am looking at?". They never examine their lives and ponder and shudder at the whole meaninglessness of their existence for realizing that they have not done one damned thing that is outstanding, that is artistic and creative; and that they have not had a single thought that is striking and true. They are dissatisfied with their lives. They know that. Those who have crossed paths with them know that. I know that. And then they stupidly asked me what I have done ! They have taught me that it is futile and useless and totally not beneficial for me to associate myself with certain animals. I would rather spend my time with a dog instead of running around with human bitches, and bitches are those short, fat, and ugly women.