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"A man of knowledge is free...he has no honor, no dignity, no family, no home, no country, but only life to be lived."--don Juan In 1961 a young anthropologist subjected himself to an extraordinary apprenticeship to bring back a fascinating glimpse of a Yaqui Indian's world of "non-ordinary reality" and the difficult and dangerous road a man must travel to become "a man of knowledge." Yet on the bring of that world, challenging to all that we believe, he drew back.
Then in 1968, Carlos Castaneda returned to Mexico, to don Juan and his hallucinogenic drugs, and to a world of experience no man from our Western civilization had ever entered before.
This book was a total escape into another world for me. I went through a phase of reading all the books I could find from Carlos Castaneda. He is known as the Godfather of New Age. The top review of the book from the publishing company mentioned psychedelic drugs but that wasn’t what the book was about, drugs were only used a tool to get to a different mindset. The journey was the point of the story. You take a totally urban man; put him in Mexico with a teacher to learn the ways of a Yaqui shaman. From there, the entire book is something you don't want to put down and you wish it wouldn't end. At least that was the way I felt reading them. There’s been a lot of controversy over the books. A lot of people have tried to debunk them as being totally fiction. The critics say Don Juan never existed and the Yaqui never smoked peyote—which is the drug mentioned in the books. The book felt genuine to me, nothing fake or new agey. The book publisher still lists the book as non-fiction. I’d recommend it, I loved all the books.