Book summary

In THE TEACHINGS OF DON JUAN, Carlos Castaneda, an anthropologist with an interest in peyote and psychedelics, introduces Don Juan Matus, the Yaqui Indian shaman who became Castaneda's teacher and passed on to him the wisdom of a long line of sorcerers. Under the tutelage of Don Juan, the author embarked on a quest to transcend the boundaries of self and identity through drugs, magic, and dream analysis. The accounts of Castaneda’s visionary drug experiences in Mexico can be viewed as either "field notes" or fiction, but there is no doubt that the book, published in 1968, struck a chord with an audience who identified with the author's need to break the bonds of convention and assert his individuality. THE TEACHINGS OF DON JUAN and Castaneda's many sequels continue to be popular with readers interested in mysticism, parapsychology, and alternate realities.

Media reviews

"Mr. Castaneda's descriptions of his experiences with peyote are both interesting and moving....[But] his ponderous discussion of suggestibility is vitiated by his failure to consider either the Don's motivation or the possibility that his demonology was arbitrarily composed on an ad hoc basis. His attempt to establish criteria for testing the coherence and objectivity of the Don's system are surprisingly simple-minded: a sophomoric essay on the phenomenology of perception, about which the author clearly knows very little. This book is unsatisfying becuase it falls uneasily between ethnography, spiritual autobiography, and travel literature....One feels that the author's 'scientific' scruples led him to withhold several chapters of the story."