Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 8 No.

1} January 1977

THE DON QUIXOTE PROBLEM OF MULTIPLE

REALITIES IN SCHUTZ AND CASTANEDA*
ROBERT W. M'ALOr
I although implicitly, a particular aspect of the
It is rather that the worlds of different peoples
have different shapes. The very metaphysical pre­
suppositions differ; space does not conform to
Euclidean geometry, time does not form a continu­
ous unidirectional flow, causation does not conform
to Aristotelian logic, man is not differentiated from
non-man or life from death, as in our world.
Walter Goldschmidt, “Introduction”
The Teachings of D on Juan
Relatively unexamined in discussions of Alfred
Schutz’s theory of “multiple realities4^ has been
his paper, “Don Quixote and the Problem of
Reality.”^ The paper was presented in 1953 before
the General Seminar of the Graduate Faculty of
the New School for Social Research, and was first
published in English in the Collected Tapers II.
The essay is a utilization of the concept of mul­
tiple realities, developed in Part IH of Collected
Papers l,s to Cervantes’ classic novel on the mis­
adventures of the knight of La Mancha, Don
Quixote.
However, the Don Quixote paper can be viewed
as more than an application of general theoretical
ideas. I will contend that Schutz has identified,
question of multiple realities; what I will label
“the don quixote problem.” Specifically, this is
the situation of social interactions with Others for
individuals who have adopted an alternative
“finite province of meaning”^ from the “world of
physical things, experienced by common sense”,
as a more or less permanent “residence.”
Before proceeding, it is necessary to establish
the don quixote problem as a distinct aspect of the
question of multiple realities. This can be shown
by briefly reviewing Schutz’s ideas on the nature
of social reality. For Schutz, individuals are in­
volved in the construction and maintenance of
“several, probably an infinite number of various
orders of reality, each with its own special and
separate style of existance . . For most persons,
the world of common sense is the paramount
reality; the “accent of reality” is centered there.
Alternative finite provinces of meaning are entered
into during the course of daily life, but it is to the
paramount reality that the individual returns.
This is not the case for those who live “most of
their lives” in another reality. For such indivi-

*1 would like to thank George Psathas, Department of Sociology, Boston University, and Jeff Coulter, Visiting
Lecturer, Boston University, for helpful comments on drafts of the paper. I am responsible for errors that
remain.
1. Among recent discussions that draw on Schutz’s theory of multiple realities would be the following:
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckman, The Social Construction o f Reality, A Treatise in the Sociology of
Knowledge, Doubleday Anchor, Garden City, 1967.
Burkhart Holzner, Reality Construction in Society, Schenckman, Cambridge, 1968.
George Psathas and Paul Becker, “The Experimental Reality: The Cognitive Style of a Finite Province of
Meaning", Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, Vol. 3, Fall, 1972, p. 35-52. _
Peter L. Berger, “The Problem of Multiple Realities: Alfred Schutz and Robert Musil”, in Maurice Natan-
son, Phenomenology and Social Reality, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1970, pp. 213-233.
Clinton Collins, “The Multiple Realities of Schooling”, in David E. Denton, Existentialism and Phenomen­
ology in Education, Teachers College Press, New York, 1974, pp. 139-155,
2. Alfred Schutz, “D on Quixote and the Problem of Reality”, Collected Papers II, Studies in Social Theory,
Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1964, pp. 135-158.
3. Alfred Schutz, “On Multiple Realities”, Collected Papers I, The Problem o f Social Reality, Martinus Nij­
hoff, The Hague, 1962, pp. 207-259. Alfred Schutz, “Symbol, Reality and Society” , Collected Papers I, The
Problem of Social Reality, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1962, pp. 287-356.
4. The term “finite province of meaning” is used by Schutz in his paper “On Multiple Realities” while in the
D on Quixote paper the term “sub-universe” of reality, taken from William James, is used. I have used
finite provinces of meaning throughout this paper based on a footnote to the Multiple Realities paper (page
229-230) in which Schutz noted: “We speak of provinces of meaning and not of sub-universes because it is
the meaning of our experiences and not the ontological structure of the objects which constitutes reality.”
5. Schutz, “Don Quixote and the Problem of Reality”, op. cit., p. 135.

28
duals, an alternative finite province of meaning
has become the scheme of interpretation to which
the accent of reality has been more or less per­
manently shifted. As Schutz noted of Don
Quixote:
. . . Don Quixote reacts differently than we do in
similar situations. He does not submit to the “explo­
sion of his experience”, he does not acknowledge
his delusion and does not admit that the attacked
objects have always been windmills and never
giants.6
In saying that the shift is to a more or less per­
manent "residence”, it must be noted that what is
involved is not a specifiable amount of time or
types of activities, but the ways in which both
time and activities .are regarded by those making
such shifts. William James defined reality as
“simply relation to our emotional and active life.”
For those such as Don Quixote who have more
or less permanently shifted the accent of reality
it is the world of an alternative finite province of
meaning, rather than the world of everyday
life that stands in relation to the individual’s
emotional and active life.
If the shift affected by Don Quixote constitutes
a distinct aspect of multiple realities, why is such
a shift also a problem? This is because the assign­
ing of the accent of reality to an alternative finite
province of meaning may produce conflicts and
contradictions with Others when those Others do
not hold or accept that scheme of interpretation.
This was the central theme Schutz found in Cer­
vantes’ novel; not a dispute between fact and
fantasy, but conflict and contradiction between
differing interpretations of reality.
Crucial here is how the question of multiple
realities is viewed. Peter Berger has noted, in his
paper "The Problem of Multiple Realities: Alfred
Schutz and Robert Musil”/ when alternative
finite provinces of meaning are viewed from the
perspective of the world of everyday life, the
problem is the means by which the common sense
6. Ibid., p. 136.
7. Peter L. Berger, “The Problem of Multiple Realities: Alfred Schutz and Robert Musil” in Maurice Natan-
son, Phenomenology and Social Reality, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1970, pp. 213-233.
8. Ibid., pp. 225-227.
9. Carlos Castaneda, A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with D on Juan, Pocket Books, New York,
world seeks to explain, and thereby neutralize
and control, the "alien presence” of another
reality.
On the other hand, when the meaning scheme
is seen from the perspective of an alternative
finite province of meaning itself, the issue is
reversed. This is the "don quixote problem” of
multiple realities; how to protect the alternative
reality framework from the conflict and contra­
diction inherently presented by "the massive
threat of the surrounding reality of everyday life.”
Such a threat necessitates the maintenance of an
ongoing, to use Berger’s term, "plausibility struc­
ture” ; that is, “specific social relations that serve
to confirm and sustain”* a particular accent of
reality. It is the grounds for, and the course of,
such social relations between reality frameworks
that I will examine in this paper.
As a comparative reference to Schutz’s Don
Quixote paper, I will use Carlos Castaneda’s
series of anthropological field studies of his
apprenticeship with the Yaqui Indian “sorcerer”,
Don Juan, specifically A Separate Reality: Further
Conversations with Don Juan.9 Castaneda’s Don
Juan, like Don Quixote, has assigned the accent
of reality to an alternative finite province of mean­
ing from the world of common sense, the world of
sorcery. Thus I see a central theme of A Separate
Reality as in fact the “don quixote problem” of
conflict and contradiction between schemes of
interpretation.
II
A man of knowledge chooses a path with heart and
follows it; and then he looks and rejoices and
laughs; and then he sees and knows.
Don Juan, A Separate Reality
Before examining the social relations of the
don quixote problem, it is necessary to establish
the basis for conflict and contradiction between
meaning schemes by briefly discussing the struc­
tures of two finite provinces of meaning as they
29
exist, uncontradicted, for Don Quixote and Don
Ju an .
For Don Quixote, as we have noted, the world
of common sense is not the paramount reality.
Alternatively, Don Quixote views the world, and
thus reality, from the perspective of his personal
phantasy, the world of chivalry and knight
errantry, where knights ride forth in pursuit of
evil to overcome and honor and truth to establish.
Don Quixote can be said to act toward his finite
province of meaning not “as if” it were real, but
“as real.”
By comparison, the same is true for Don Juan.
Don Juan operates from the perspective of his
alternative finite province of meaning, a world of
sorcery, in which an individual, in his quest to
become a man of knowledge, uses certain con­
sciousness-altering plants (peyote, jimson weed,
mushrooms) to meet and manipulate his “allies.”
Through the drugs, and the intervention of one’s
“allies”, a man of knowledge is able to “see” the
world; that is, “perceive the essence of things in
the world.”70
Don Quixote and Don Juan’s experiences are
thus fundamentally distinct from their fellow-men
who live within the world of common sense as
the paramount reality. When representatives of the
common sense world adopt an alternative finite
province of meaning, they do so with the common
sense world as a starting and return point. And
as Schutz has noted, reality is assigned to these
experiences when they possess a specific cognitive
style and when the experiences are consistent in
themselves and are compatible with one another
“with respect to that style.”77
However, for Don Quixote and Don Juan the
world of common sense understandings is, to use
Castaneda’s term, “inapplicable.” They do not
necessarily share common schemes of interpreta­
tion with the fellow-men they encounter. In
10. Ibid.
11. Schutz, “On Multiple Realities”, op. cit., p. 230.
12. Schutz, “Don Quixote and the Problem of Reality”,op. cit.. p. 143.
13. Castaneda, A Separate Reality, op. cit., p. 9.
14. Schutz, “Don Quixote and the Problem of Reality” , op. cit., p. 139.
15. Ibid., p. 139.
Schulz’s terms the basis for intersubjective under­
standings is disrupted. The shared, taken for
granted, assumption that despite individual varia­
tions, there are common experiences of common
objects—that a room is in fact understood by the
Other to be a room—is no longer present7^
For Don Quixote the world he encounters has
castles, knights, armies, and giants, although a
representative of the world of everyday life such
as Sancho Panza would perceive only inns, an old
man on a horse, peasants with flocks of sheep,
and windmills. For Don Juan the states of altered
consciousness and perception induced by smoking
certain plants were concrete realities; not hallu­
cinogenic modifications of the common sense
world. Similarly, the physical numbness and loss
of motor control experienced after taking the
drugs were explained by Don Juan as the “ally
removing one’s body”, rather than the physio­
logical effects of the drugs that Castaneda initially
attributed them to he.
Clearly, distinct ways of explaining the same
experiences are present. As Castaneda noted:
“What I perceived in those states of altered con­
sciousness was incomprehensible and impossible
to explain by means of our everyday mode of
understanding the world.”7-?
Moreover, the finite provinces of meaning of
Don Quixote and Don Juan are characterized by
what Schutz called “peculiar modifications of the
basic categories of thought, namely, space, time,
and causality.”7^
For example, the work of the enchanters, “who
fulfill in Don Quixote’s sub-universe the role of
causality and motivation.”
And all of these places can easily be brought within
reach: the sage, necromancer, or magician who looks
after the knight’s affairs — and certainly every
knight, to be a true one, has such a friend — picks
him up in his bed and the next day he will be a
thousand miles away from his place; or he sends
him a chariot of fire or a hippograph or Clavileno,
the wooden horse, or an enchanted boat.-?*
 Similar modifications in the categories of the
common sense world are present in the world of
Don Juan. An example can be drawn from one
of the several lessons Don Juan provided for
Castaneda as “preliminaries to seeing”, speci­
fically his explanation of Don Genaro’s actions at
the waterfall. Don Juan had explained to Cas­
taneda that, in “seeing”, human beings are
“luminous beings composed of something like
fibers of light, which rotated from the front to
the back and maintained the appearance of an
egg.”?*? Don Genaro proceeded to illustrate that
insight by what seemed to Castaneda, operating
from his common sense assumptions, to be a
series of acrobatic manoeuvres across the rocks
at the top of the falls. For Don Juan such an
explanation, based on Castaneda’s categories of
time and space, did not apply.
You think everything in the world is simple to
understand because everything you do is a routine
that is simple to understand. At the waterfall, when
you looked at Genaro moving across the water, you
believed that he was a master of somersaults,
because somersaults was all you could think about,
and that is all you will ever believe he did. Yet
Genaro never jumped across the water, if he had
he would have died. Genaro balanced himself on
his superb, bright fibers. He made them long, long
enough so that he could, let’s say, roll on them
across the waterfall.-??
Don Juan’s fundamental understandings of the
world are achieved through “seeing.” “By think­
ing he meant the constant idea we have of
everything in the world. He said that “seeing”
dispelled that habit and until I learned to see I
could not really understand what he m eant”?5
Yet, this existance of different schemes of inter­
pretations does not become problematic until
such alternative perspectives come to confront,
that is, contradict, one another. Different finite
provinces of meaning can mutually co-exist as
long as they are uncontradicted for those who
hold them as real.
This is possible for, as William James noted,
the basis of reality is ourselves. Additionally, as
Schutz noted, “any object which remains uncon­
tradicted is ipso facto believed and posited as
absolute reality.”?5 This is what Don Juan under­
stood when he spoke of the “will” possessed by
a warrior.
He was very careful to establish that the world was
whatever we perceive, in any manner we may choose
to perceive. Don Juan maintained that perceiving
the world entails a process of apprehending what­
ever presents itself to us. This particular perceiving
is done with our senses and with our will.2<?
Thus, both Don Quixote and Don Juan can
create the worlds of chivalry and sorcery as real,
and go forth into the world of fellow-men to
operate on those assumptions.
And if the fellow-men they encounter agree to
go along with this (“fall in with his humor” was
Cervantes phrase) as did the innkeeper who re­
ceived Don Quixote as a knight, no problem for
the different schemes of interpretation that are
present will result. As James established, we may
“think differently of the same object”, and having
done so, “can choose which way of thinking to
adhere to and which to disregard. ”^?
This capacity to maintain the integrity of one’s
scheme of interpretation functions, however, only
when the differences are defined as inconsequen­
tial. The very act of falling in with Don Quixote’s
humor suggests the innkeeper had decided the
question of different meaning schemes would
not be pursued, or that the knight himself was
inconsequential to the situation at hand and could
be dismissed as “mad.”
However, what if the innkeeper decided not to
accept Don Quixote as a knight, or if Don
Quixote had felt the necessity to convert the inn­
keeper to active participation in the mission of
knight errantry? Here the conflicting and con­
tradictory schemes of interpretation emerge as a
problem for both participants that needs to be
resolved; specifically, how do Don Quixote and
Don Juan continue to regard their finite province

16. Castaneda, A Separate Reality, op. cit., p. 106.

17. Ibid., p. 107.
18. Ibid., pp. 84-85.
19. Schutz, “D on Quixote and the
20. Castaneda, A Separate Reality,
21. Schutz, “Don Quixote and the
Problem of Reality”, op. cit., p. 135.
op. cit, p. 147.
Problem of Reality”, op. cit., p. 135.

31
of meaning as real in the face of contradiction
from Others, who, alternatively adopt the common
sense world as the paramount reality? It is to the
resolution of this problem that I will now turn.
I ll
You’re chained! D on Juan exclaimed. You’re
chained to your reason.
D on Juan, A Separate Reality
We have concluded that conflicting and
contradictory finite provinces of meaning are
problematic when the differences between the two
schemes of interpretation are defined as conse­
quential by the actors involved. Most immediately,
such conflicts occur in the context of face-to-face
interaction when a scheme of interpretation, pos­
sessed by one participant, is called into question
by an alternative scheme of interpretation, pos­
sessed by another participant. At this point, if the
integrity of the meaning schemes involved, and
the social relationship with the Other are to be
maintained, steps must be taken to try and resolve
the conflicts and contradictions.
For Schutz, this involves the establishment of
a “sub-universe of discourse”,-5 between the
differing meaning frameworks; that is, an explana­
tory scheme that will deal with the differences
causing conflict. Such a sub-universe of discourse
is the result of certain social relations between
individuals who hold different finite provinces of
meaning as real, and have defined such differences
as requiring explanation.
However, a sub-universe is not the only pos­
sible outcome of such social relations, but one of
several possible results of ongoing negotiations
between individuals with different interpretations
of reality.
Such negotiation processes are not the primary
focus of Schutz’s Don Quixote paper; he chose to
center on the results of such processes, the “dialec­
tic of intersubjectivity” present in the novel, Yet,
22. Ibid., pp. 135-136.
23. Ibid., p.
24. Ibid., p. 146.
25. Castaneda, A Separate Reality, op. cit., p. 26.
32
the specific social relations that produce such
results need to be more precisely examined within
the context of the results for the attempts to
resolve conflict to be understandable. Simply put,
the negotiation of the don quixote problem is
problematic in terms of the specific interactions
that are present. I shall discuss three inter­
actional negotiations of conflict and contradiction
that can be located in the cases of Don Quixote
and Don Juan.
(1) The most obvious possible resolution con­
text for Don Quixote and Don Juan, simply to
assert that their beliefs are correct, is in fact the
least used means of dealing with the problem of
conflict. More complex negotiation processes are
at work.
However, as Schutz noted, when faced with
Sancho Panza’s challenge to the existance of the
lady Dulcinea, Don Quixote replied: “ To make
an end of the matter, I imagine all I say to be
true, neither more or less.” For Schutz, “ This is
the basic axiom which identifies truth with exist­
ence in the particular sub-universe upon which
the accent of reality has been bestowed.”^
Similarly, Don Juan, when pressed by Cas­
taneda to explain how all the participants at a
“mitote” agree as to the nature of their experi­
ences, replied: “They agree because they see.”^
In addition to the identification of truth with
existence such comments reflect the burden car­
ried by alternative finite provinces of meaning in
relation to the world of everyday life. Don
Quixote and Don Juan’s views on reality must
make a case to the Other when called into con­
tradiction in ways that the representatives of the
common sense world do not. In this sense Don
Quixote and Don Juan believe they possess a cer­
tain enlightenment or vision (the mission of
knight errantry or the ability of a man of know­
ledge to “see”) and in interactions with Others
who do not share this perspective they can
temporarily end conflict and contradiction by
informing the Other that his lack of understanding Don Quixote meets during his journeys or the
stems from his lack of enlightenment. young Indians Don Juan encounters at Lucio’s
house. It is not necessary that these fellow-men
(2) A more complex negotiation process centerstotally, or even partially accept the alternative
upon the role of the “enchanters” in the world of scheme of interpretation for the social relation­
chivalry, and the roles of the “allies” in the world ship with them is not going to occur over time.
of sorcery. These agents have parallel influences; These are fellow-men encountered, as it were, in
“strictly speaking, what they (enchanters) change passing. What the enchanters and allies provide
is the scheme of interpretation prevailing in one is a means by which Don Quixote and Don Juan
sub-universe into the scheme of interpretation can maintain the accent of reality on their realities
valid in another.”36 Thus, for Don Quixote, in the face of passing conflict and contradiction.
Mambrino’s helmet appears to Sancho Panza to
be a washbasin because it was changed through (3) Separate from the problem of interactions
the intervention of enchanters. And, as I have that occur in passing are those social relationships
noted, for Don Juan "the altered perceptions and that occur over time; for example, the relation­
changed physical states experienced by Castaneda ships between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza,
after smoking the peyote were not drug-induced or Don Juan and Castaneda. The problem of
hallucinations, but concrete realities caused by negotiation here is to establish a basis for the
the ally “removing one’s body.” relationship to exist over time in the face of the
different schemes of interpretations maintained
Enchanters and allies thus inherently resolve by the participants.
conflicts between what Don Quixote and Don
Juan, and the representatives of the common The various resolutions we have noted (the
sense world they encounter alternatively hold as differences being defined as inconsequential and
real. “Nothing remains unexplained, paradoxical, certain strategies for temporarily ending conflict)
or contradictory as soon as the enchanter’s acti­ are insufficient in situations that last over time.
vities are recognized as a constituent element of For without an assurance of common experi­
the world.”37 ences of com m on objects (intersubjective under­
standings, as we have noted, do not necessarily
Moreover, not only is conflict removed, but apply) the integrity of one’s scheme of interpreta­
compatibility is established between finite prov­ tion, and thereby the social relationship, is open
inces of meaning: the washbasin is also Mam- to question.
brino’s helmet; human beings are also fibers of
light in the appearance of an egg; the irrigation The resolution of this aspect of the prob­
ditch also possessed the spirit of the water hole in lematic of conflict and contradiction is what is
the form of the green fog. encompassed by Schutz’s definition of a sub-
universe of discourse, and similarly constitutes
In this sense, the use of enchanters and allies what Castaneda referred to as a “special con­
as constitutive elements of alternative finite prov­ sensus”, an effort by Don Juan to establish
inces of meaning represents a communicative agreements on the “component elements of non­
strategy for dealing with temporary challenges to ordinary reality.”35
one’s scheme of interpretation. The existence of
such agents allow Don Quixote and Don Juan to It is significant to note within the negotiation of
maintain the integrity of their realities by esta­ a sub-universe of discourse that although conflicts
blishing explanations to resolve contradictions and contradictions may be resolved, they are not
with the fellow-men they may happen to meet in bridged. One finite province of meaning does not
daily life. As examples would be the fellow-men move toward the other in mutual compromise.

26. Schutz, “D on Quixote and the Problem of Reality”, op. cit., p. 139.
27. Ibid., p. 140.
28. Castaneda, The Teachings o f Don Juan, op. cit.t p. 232.

33
There remains a chasm or gap between schemes of looking at a light through my half closed eyelids.
The glow seemed to expand and recede. He must
interpretations until such a point, not reached by have begun to walk toward me because the light
any participant in Cervantes’ novel or the field became more intense and more discernible.
studies, where an individual decides to adopt the He said something to me. I struggled to under­
stand and lost my view of the glow, and then I saw
finite province of meaning of the Other, and thus Don Juan as I saw him in everyday life; he was a
“leaps” across the barrier between them. couple of feet away from me.Sl
Rather in both our examples, the principal However, if would be a misunderstanding to say
representatives of the common sense world move that Castaneda’s uncertainty as to what was real
toward agreements with the alternative schemes of was a function of the drugs themselves. While it
reality to points where Sancho Panza and Cas­ is true that Don Juan believes such experiences
taneda face the crisis of being unsure what come from the various plants themselves, Andrew
meaning frameworks they are in fact working Weil, in his study on drugs and the “higher con­
from. Moreover, such movements did not occur sciousness”, The Natural Mind, suggests that the
immediately, or even readily, but were negotiated effects of such psychoactive drugs arise out of the
over time in interactions "Tetween the actors set and setting in which they are taken.^ It is only
involved. from within Don Juan’s scheme of interpretation
that the plants can be regarded as magical for
This negotiation can be readily seen in Cas­
those who use them. This is a primary feature of
taneda’s A Separate Reality. As I have noted, the
alternative finite provinces of meaning as discuss­
central dialogue of the book centered upon Don ed by Schutz;
Juan’s efforts to teach Castaneda to “see” rather
than simply “look” at the world. It may be imagined as endowed with an intention
of realizing the project, to carry it through, and may
(1) The way to seeing initially involved the be fancied as gearing into the outer world. All this,
however, belongs to the imageries produced in and1
breaking down of Castaneda’s common sense by the imagining actJS
interpretations through the use and explanation of This can be said to have two implications for
a series of drug-induced experiences. These exper­ Castaneda. One, since he does not share Don
iences were a first step for Don Juan in creating a Juan’s scheme of interpretation, he cannot see the
sub-universe of discourse wherein “preconceived, drug experiences in the same terms, although he
new units of meaning” could be made part of his may attribute cause for his experiences to the
relationship to Castaneda. drugs themselves. Two, the set and setting function
Don Juan’s task, as a practitioner making his system so as to make it harder and harder for Castaneda
accessible to me, was to disarrange a particular
certainty which I share with everyone else, the to interpret what was happening in terms of his
certainty that our common sense views of the world common sense understandings.
are final.2.9
For Don Juan the use of drugs was the only way Castaneda was undergoing experiences for
Castaneda could acquire these insights. which his existing frames of reference were
Seeing is not so simple and only the smoke can
increasingly invalid. Thus, he experienced an
give you the speed you need to catch a glimpse of increased willingness to define Don Juan’s, and not
that fleeting world. Otherwise you will only look.^9 the common sense world, as his reference point in
For Castaneda these experiences produced a relation to the drug experiences: “He was telling
crisis for his everyday life view of reality. me to pay attention to him, because his voice was
my only guide."U Or, “I began to experience an
His face was glowing; it looked like a blotch of unusual anxiety. I found it very easy to project
light. The light seemed to spill over his chest almost
to the middle of his body. It was as if I were my feelings into Don Juan’s mood.”55
29. Castaneda, A Separate Reality, op. cit., p. 10.
30. Ibid., pp. 111-112.
31. Ibid., pp. 185-186.
32. Andrew Weil, The Natural M ind, A New Way of Looking at Drugs and the Higher Consciousness, Hough­
ton Mifflin, Boston, 1972.
33. Schutz, “On Multiple Realities”, op. cit., p. 235.
34. Castaneda, A SeparateReality, op. cit., p. 172.
35. Ibid., p. 203.

34
 (2) A succeeding phase in the negotiation of a
sub-universe of discourse revolved around Don
Juan’s efforts to explain why “seeing” cannot be
analyzed or expressed in the context of the
assumptions of the common sense world. When
Don Juan repeatedly invoked the admonition,
“You think too much”, he was saying that Cas­
taneda was still attempting to express the reality
of an alternative finite province of meaning in
terms of the world of common sense. For example
this exchange:
I begged him to explain what had happened to
me from the beginning. He laughed, shaking his
head slowly as though in disbelief.
“You always insist on knowing things from the
beginning,” he said. “But there’s no beginning; the
beginning is only in your thought ”36
(3) The narrative of A Separate Reality culmin­
ated with Castaneda’s expression of fundamental
doubts as to the reality of his common sense
world assumptions:
I had seen the room hundreds of times, yet this
time there was something unique about it and about
myself. This was the first time I did not believe in
the final reality of my perception. 1 had been edging
toward that feeling and I had perhaps intellectual-
ized it at various times, but never had I been at the
brink of a serious doubt. This time, however, I did
not believe the room was “real” . . .37
Even Castaneda’s reasons for undertaking his field
studies had little relevance in the face of such
doubts.
It is at this point that the ongoing negotiation
of a sub-universe of discourse beween Don Juan
and Castaneda suffered an irreparable breakdown.
Castaneda was unable to “leap” across to an
acceptance of Don Juan’s scheme of interpreta­
tion; nor, was he able to continue to occupy a
position between the world of common sense and
one of its alternatives.
Like Don Quixote, Castaneda faced a personal
dilemma as the accent of reality was withdrawn
36. ibid., p. 171.
37. Ibid., p. 189.
38. Schutz, “D on Quixote and the Problem of Reality”, op. ch., p. 145.
from his heretofore taken for granted assumptions.
For Don Quixote this had meant the collapse of
his identity as a knight; for Castaneda, he had to
leave his apprenticeship before his own crisis of
reality became complete. This breakdown of the
negotiation of a sub-universe of discourse thereby
ended the don quixote problem for the partici­
pants.
IV
Does the respective breakdown of the negotia­
tion of sub-universes of discourse in Don Quixote
and A Separate Reality constitute the eventual
result of social interactions between alternatively
held finite provinces of meaning? For Schutz,
unless a sub-universe of discourse is maintained,
the conflict and contradiction present will lead to
a crisis of reality in which social relationships
and/or the integrity of one’s scheme of interpreta­
tion of reality are threatened. As he noted of
Cervantes’ account of the battle at the inn: “The
abyss between two sub-universes can neither be
overcome by formal logic, nor by the consent of
the majority, nor by military victory.”^
Such a breakdown is the case, however, only
when the differences are defined as consequential
by the participants — the don quixote problem
of multiple realities — and when the individuals
who have adopted different finite provinces of
meaning as real are engaged in a face-to-face
relationship over time — one of the three inter­
actional aspects of the problem I identified. The
crisis of reality represents the furthest extension of
the don quixote problem. A final resolution,
whether to maintain one’s original finite province
of meaning as real, to “leap” across the barriers
and adopt an alternative scheme of interpretation,
or to occupy a position between varying interpret­
ations, is ultimately an individual act.
Boston University