“As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”  — William Shakespeare, in “King Lear”

I like the Bible (does that make me a Bibliophile?) but I reserve my admiration for the Old Testament, which is a lot more intellectually complex than the New. I particularly like two brilliant books in the Old Testament – the book of Job, and Eccelesiastes.

Today’s post is about the book of Job, which I read in Stephen Mitchell’s translation some time back. The book has a fascinating set-up (in my opinion bettered only by the Bhagvat Gita’s war). Job is a pious, religious rich merchant who never fails to worship God with his family. He has several sons and daughters, and whenever they meet, Job offers prayers and sacrifices to God, because even though they haven’t done anything wrong, they may have *thought* something blasphemous or sinful. That’s how pious he is.

Satan decides to look up God one day after ‘walking the earth’, and God points proudly to Satan, telling him, “Look at my follower Job. Ain’t he a beaut?” and Satan says, “Yeah well, you’ve given him everything that all people wish for. Anyone would worship you diligently if they had all that Job has.” And God says, “OK, do your damnedest to Job. Just don’t hurt him. I bet you he’ll still be pious.”

And so one day, when Job’s daughters are feasting with their brothers, a servant comes running to Job and tells him that a foreign invasion has destroyed all his flocks of camels and sheep. And another servant comes running to him and tells him that a wall has collapsed over his children’s lunch party, and they are all dead.

Job grieves, but does not blame God – he says, God gave me all of this, and he has the right to take it away. And God boasts to Satan once again – “Look at Job! Did you hear what he just said? What did I tell you?”. Satan answers, “That’s all very well – his camels and sheep and children may be gone, but no one gives a damn unless something happens to them personally. Give me a free hand with Job, and I’ll have him cursing you in no time.” And God says (and this is the scary scene) ”Do whatever you want with him – but keep him alive.”

So Job is infected with a horrible disease and develops boils all over his body. He is depressed and disheartened, and is sitting silently scraping himself with a broken piece of pottery, and his wife says, “What kind of a man are you to take all of this abuse lying down? There’s nothing left for you now, you pious bastard - just open your mouth, curse God, and die.” Job is aghast, and chastises his wife: “Foolish woman,” he says, “God gives us both good and evil.”

At this juncture, three friends of Job come to offer condolences from a faraway place. For seven days, they perform their mourning and bereavement duties silently; Job doesn’t speak. On the seventh day, however, Job lets loose all his bottled-up frustration and anger. He calls on God asking for an explanation. Never cursing God explicitly, he nonetheless raves against the seemingly uncaring deity, who has no sense of fairness, who rewards the evil and the good alike, and who is constantly watching Mankind like a prison warden, waiting for a transgression that can be punished with disproportionate severity.

Job’s friends are scandalized by Job’s statements, and turn on Job, telling him God would never have punished him if he hadn’t committed some Sin, which he now compounds by not confessing. They tell Job to confess, and that God will make him rich and healthy again. Job remains steadfast in his denial of having committed any sin. He proclaims, “God! If you have the guts, let’s go together in front of some impartial judge, and you state your case against me. I’m sure he’ll find that I’m innocent of anything that you may accuse me of.”

And then, suddenly, a whirlwind appears. And from within the whirlwind, God speaks. And God’s message is awesome, it is an experience not unlike the 12th chapter of the Gita - it is completely different from the anthropocentric message of the rest of the Bible. In essence, God says “Fuck you and your species. I make the sun rise, I give the lion cub his food, I hold the waters back from deluging the Earth. I created the morning stars and the angels wept at their beauty. I am responsible for all the awesome things in the Universe. I do whatever I want, and I don’t have to answer to you little people with your little laws about good and evil.”

I love this speech. I also love the appearance of two absolutely unexpected creatures in God’s list of “awesome things” he has created – the hippopotamus, “his penis stiffens like a pine; his testicles bulge with vigor; he is the first of the works of God, created to be my plaything”, and the crocodile, “go ahead; attack him; you will never try it again”.

How can you not love a God that created the hippopotamus and the crocodile?

(All of these incredible illustrations, by the way, are William Blake’s.)

I read my first Carlos Castenada book, A Separate Reality, when I was in the second year of college. I bought it secondhand in Bangalore; the original buyer had signed the first page. When my father saw the book several years later, he was shocked – the signature was that of one of his professors. So I have my own personal mysticism incident associated with the book!

A Separate Reality is the middle book in a trilogy, of which the first and third books are called “The Teachings of Don Juan” and “Journey to Ixtalan” respectively.

The first thing to understand is that Carlos Castenada is, by all accounts, a fraud. The books are ostensibly about Castenada’s encounters with an old Yaqui Indian shaman called Don Juan during his studies at UCLA. Don Juan chooses Carlos as his disciple, and teaches him the “Yaqui way of Life”. Based on his notes about the encounters, Carlos wrote his theses, and received a Masters and a PhD from the Department of Anthropology at UCLA. (This much is true.) He also wrote these three books, and later many others, which went on to become best-sellers in the 70′s. In the late 70′s, though, Robert De Mille (nephew of Cecil) thoroughly fact-checked the books, noticed several inconsistencies, and dug deeper. He published his own books, debunking Carlos Castenada’s claims of visiting Don Juan, and casting doubt on his very existence. The prevailing view today is that Castenada did very little field travel, and made up most of Don Juan’s teachings from philosophy books in the UCLA library. Castenada never owned up his fraud, though – he died claiming everything in all the books was absolutely true.

As a reading plan, therefore, I decided to read ‘The Teachings…’ and ‘Journey…’, and also De Mille’s book about Castenada. So far, I’ve finished ‘The Teachings…’ and a  significant part of ‘Journey…’.

I like Castenada’s books. He is a very talented writer, and, even read purely as fiction, his books are worth reading. Here are a few things I liked about what I have read so far:

1. The characters of Castenada and Don Juan are very well-created and engaging, Don Juan as the patient teacher and Castenada as the sincere but bumbling student who makes slow progress and asks a lot of foolish doubts. There is real chemistry in the interaction between these two characters. Also interesting are the supporting cast of characters – other sorcerers, Don Juan’s family, other Yaqui Indians. Castenada fleshes out his own character in an often humorous way, and reveals just enough biographical detail, at the right level of intermittence, to make the books interesting even aside from their purported philosophical truths.

2. That said, the philosophical truths are interesting in themselves because of the overarching theme of Don Juan that the world we live in has a ‘separate reality  independent of our senses. This provides a rich vein of literary exploration, describing different pedagogical techniques that Don Juan employs, and different aspects of the separate reality that he gets Castenada to occasionally experience.

3. Castenada had the knack of being able to make pithy philosophical statements that make you think. For instance, one of my favorite passages in the book is when Don Juan tells Carlos that we create the world everyday by our internal dialogue, and to shut it off, we need to start practicing closing our eyes and concentrating on input from our ears. This is a provocatively simple theory, besides being an easy exercise to perform; the resultant experience is very interesting.

4. It seems fairly evident that a lot of Don Juan’s mysticism has its roots in Indian philosophy. The way of the warrior and the transcendental experience of ‘seeing’, for instance. De Mille seems to feel the same way. Perhaps the reader who considers Castenada’s work as an allegorical fictional work introducing Indian philosophy in a non-structured way, will be the one who gets the most out of it.

The parts of the books that concentrate on drugs – and in the case of the first book, this is more than 50% of it – are particularly boring. De Mille discovers that on the day that Castenada claims to have been with Don Juan smoking peyote for the first time, UCLA library records indicate he was sitting in there reading a book about peyote. It shows in the writing. There is clearly much less that I took away from the drug passages than from the conversation passages in the books.

Pablo Neruda said about Castenada that his readers should concentrate on the words, and not worry about whether they are factually true or not. I think it’s a good attitude to have while reading these books.