FIRST UK EDITION, THE BODLEY HEAD, HARDCOVER, 1971, 315 PAGES, CONDITION: NEW.
Carlos Castaneda takes the reader into the very heart of sorcery, challenging both imagination and reason, shaking the very foundations of our belief in what is "natural" and "logical."
In 1961, a young anthropologist subjected himself to an extraordinary apprenticeship with Yaqui Indian spiritual leader don Juan Matus 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.
Carlos Castaneda was the author of the bestselling books, including the acknowledged classic The Teaching of Don Juan and most recently The Art of Dreaming and Magical Passes. He departed on his definitive journey in 1998.
"Castaneda books were very popular when I was an undergraduate, and when I first started teaching in the 1970s. I remember reading all three and being amused and confused. I suspect I was mostly interested in the author's descriptions of his experiences with peyote. Years have passed, and I revisited A Separate Reality after a friend's adult son passed away. I saw imagery and a quote from Castaneda in his artwork, and thought this might be a time to see what I could learn from the book. What a difference all those years of living made in my interest and understanding! I was fascinated in the student and mentor's different ways of perceiving the world, and in the ongoing conversation they have about the differences between looking and really seeing, between an intellectual understanding of the world and and experiential understanding. This time I felt Don Juan had something to teach me, not just Carlos, about living life as fully aware as possible, with intention, and respect for death, that comes for each of us."
