Carlos Castaneda

Forty years ago the University of California Press published an unusual manuscript by an anthropology student named Carlos Castaneda. The Teachings of Don Juan initiated a generation of seekers dissatisfied with the limitations of the Western worldview. Castaneda's now classic book remains controversial for the alternative way of seeing that it presents and the revolution in cognition it demands. Whether read as ethnographic fact or creative fiction, it is the story of a remarkable journey that has left an indelible impression on the life of more than a million readers around the world.

Bestselling author Carlos Castaneda introduces readers to the worlds that exist within their dreams.

Back from the abyss and without don Juan, Carlos Castaneda is faced with the staggering effort of recovering, on his own, don Juan's teachings. In doing so, he understands what don Juan and his cohorts were really doing to him: "They were not teaching me sorcery, but how to master three aspects of an ancient knowledge they possessed: awareness, stalking, and intent. And they were not sorcerers; they were seers." This work deals with the mastery of awareness and with the realization of a new cycle of seers, "warriors of total freedom, ... such masters of awareness, stalking, and intent that they are not caught by death, like the rest of mortal men, but choose the moment and the way of their departure from this world. At that moment they are consumed by a fire from within and vanish from the face of the earth, free, as if they had never existed."

In this book, Castaneda resumes his apprenticeship, determined to go deeper still into don Juan's world, to learn to see beyond the surface realities of life. He continues his dialogue with don Juan, intuitive, wise, demanding, and fierce in his struggle to see and know beyond the vision of ordinary men; and himself, a man of courage and intelligence who submits himself to don Juan's teaching, to enter into another world as a participant rather than an observer. A Separate Reality is a work that is at once the discovery of a hitherto unrecorded body of wisdom and knowledge and the story of a remarkable and shattering personal experience.

WORLD-RENOWNED BESTSELLING AUTHOR CARLOS CASTANEDA'S SELECTION OF HIS WRITINGS ON THE SHAMANS OF ANCIENT MEXICO Near the end of his life, Carlos Castaneda gathered together and reviewed his seminal works on his training as a shaman initiate, recorded in a literary career that spans over thirty years. The result is this groundbreaking collection of quotations -- the essence of Carlos Castaneda, drawn from his landmark volumes including The Teachings of Don Juan, Journey to Ixtlan, A Separate Reality, and Tales of Power. Enhanced with an introduction and original commentary by the author, this powerful work illuminates the shaman's life as never before. Castaneda's words explore how the ancient shamans could literally touch and direct the wheel of time -- a profound yet pragmatic tradition that can be felt even in our day.

This volume shows the reader the means by which a "man of power" sees, as opposed to merely looking, and how by his concentrated "seeing" he can, indeed must, "stop the world." In it, Carlos Castaneda describes the lessons, the omens, the exercises of the will and body, the arduous trials and tests, the simple yet mysterious demonstrations, the extraordinary visions and experiences by which don Juan, his mentor and friend, prepares him for the task of perceiving things as they are, instead of describing them by the words, conventions and standards of conventional, a priori ideas and language. Here, in the high mountains and in the bright arid desert, Castaneda reaches for power in a series of startling encounters with the unknown--a confrontation with death and the past in the form of an albino falcon, with the twilight wind, with a flesh-and-blood mountain lion, with a mountain fog--and learns the techniques, the concentration, the compassion of the hunter, the man who is "without routines, free, fluid."

For us to perceive any of the worlds that exist beside our own, not only do we have to covet them but we need to have sufficient energy to seize them. In this revolutionary book, Carlos Castaneda offers readers the key to this energetic conditioning for the first time, revealing a series of body positions and physical movements that enabled various sorcerers, and their apprentices, to navigate their own sorceric journeys. By sharing this centuries-old wisdom, Carlos Castaneda makes it possible for readers to travel to some of these other realms, which are as real, unique, absolute, and engulfing as our own world. Castaneda offersboth a philosophical history of magical passes and an innovative, easy-to-understand instructional format, complete with more than 450 computer-generated illustrations. Written with humor, clarity, and authority, Magical Passes further illuminates the true meaning of sorcery and magic.

"Ordinarily, events that change our path are impersonal affairs, and yet extremely personal. My teacher, don Juan Matsus, said this is guiding me as his apprentice to collect what I considered to be the memorable events of my life…. Don Juan described the total goal of the shamanistic knowledge that he handled as the preparation for facing the definitive journey: the journey that every human being has to take at the end of his life. He said that what modern man referred to vaguely as life after death was, for those shamans, a concrete region filled to capacity with practical affairs of a different order than the practical affairs of daily life, yet bearing a similar functional practicality. Don Juan considered that to collect the memorable in their lives was, for shamans, the preparation for their entrance into that concrete region, which they called the active side of infinity."In this book written immediately before his death, anthropologist and shaman Carlos Castaneda gives us his most autobiographical and intimately revealing work ever, the fruit of a lifetime of experience and perhaps the most moving volume in his oeuvre.

The Life & Teachings of Carlos Castaneda demystifies what Castaneda sought to hide and delivers a detailed portrait of an enigmatic, driven seeker that passes beyond mere description to the very assemblage point of Carlos Castaneda. It is the first book published since Castaneda's death in 1998 to assess the meaning of his life both as a person and a Nagual, and, more importantly, to examine his ideas and their unrecognized primary source. Drawing on an original reading of texts and research, as well as his thirty years study and practice of esotericism, William Patrick Patterson uncovers the underlying threads that weave themselves like snakes through the fledgling Peruvian anthropologist's life, ones which led him to forsake his European intellectual membership for that of the dark world of sorcery and "break the human mold" to become a Nagual. Explored, too, are the questions of who don Juan really was and what actually happened with the jump into the abyss. The main ideas salted throughout Castaneda's ten major books are succinctly summarized and then compared idea-for-idea with those of an ancient, esoteric teaching to show how Castaneda disguised his source by giving the ideas a sorceric twist. Carlos Castaneda's books, particularly his early ones, showed a great narrative gift, often poetic, verging on the archetypal. His descriptions of his sorceric relationship with don Juan touched the hearts and minds of millions of readers. Patterson does justice to this and Castaneda's seriousness, intent and courage, but he also depicts Castaneda's descent in which he, the arch trickster, tricked himself into believing that the inner silence and attention of the Nagual had emptied him of his person. Self-blinded to his ambivalence toward women, fear of men and need for total power, Castaneda sought to control all aspects of his students lives, creating a rigid hierarchy, cultivating jealousies and secrecy and playing sexual power games, all in the name of breaking the human mold which would free them to travel to inorganic worlds. When Castaneda's death, the so-called trigger event, occurred, three of the four witches disappeared, the remains of one only recently found in Death Valley. The other two are assumed to have also committed suicide. There is much to be learned from the many aspects and phases of Castaneda's life that every sincere seeker could long ponder. Hardcover, chronology, notes, index, appendices.

In this astonishing work, Carlos Castaneda at last completes the long journey into the world of sorcery that began with his now-legendary meeting with don Juan. Drawn back by the knowledge that the sorcerer's task has not been completed, Castaneda returns to plumb the final, awesome secrets of the sorcerer's explanation of the world-to learn, in don Juan's world and his own, the last lesson of a unique and arduous apprenticeship. For until now don Juan has performed his acts of power in his world, the dry, barren deserts and mesas of his birth, a world in which he seems to exist as naturally as the chaparral and the rocks. Now, in an unexpected encounter, don Juan appears in Castaneda's modern urban world, at ease in a well-tailored suit, demonstrating his lessons of power in the crowded, busy streets, using the city scene, as he uses everything, to unfold the wings of Carlos Castaneda's perception.