OVERVIEW

This is a birds-eye view.

It’s a collection and integration of pieces of Carlos Castaneda’s life and teachings, and how they affected one person.

As mentioned before, these are not “truths” or “facts” in an attempt to postulate some kind of edict about Carlos Castaneda’s work.  These are simply personal perceptions about the nature of life and the world, and how Carlos Castaneda’s teachings informed those perceptions.

Magic

Somewhere along the line, we were magical beings. This has changed in the course of life – evolution, programming and trauma, and how it has affected us, has removed the sense of magic in life, and replaced it with an experience of conformity, uniformity and routine.

magickOne of the central themes of Carlos Castaneda’s work, is the re-introduction – through Don Juan Matus’ mentoring – of the element of magic in life.  This is one of our deepest cravings as humans: to return to that place of simplicity that we knew as children where that sense of magic, and the unlimited, unfettered perception of “energy” was available to us.

This is perhaps one of the greatest callings of Castaneda’s work, the calling of humans back to the pathway of magic.  Even though many of us cannot respond to that calling in the way that Carlos did, we each feel the resonance, the pull inside us, toward the acknowledgement and understanding that we are so much more than we allow ourselves to be.

Lifespan

The work and life of Carlos Castaneda spans and encompasses a large portion of the scope of human existence.  On a micro scale, it involves our own lives and the unfolding and maturing of our own understanding.  On a larger scale it involves the evolution of mankind as a race, over vast tracts of time; and in an interim, historical chronicle, it renders a spoken history of the Toltec Tradition, the passing on of the mastery of awareness between generations of naguals and apprentices.

In understanding and integrating his teachings, it calls for an evolution of our own individual human souls.  In the work that Castaneda set out to do, he opened the previously closed or secret doctrine of the Toltecs to humankind in general.  Rather than naguals fetching their disciples through outrageous acts of intent, Castaneda “fetched” his disciples – now legion in number – through the open dissemination of his teachings.  Being the last in his line of naguals, and also having a unique energetic configuration – different than other naguals before him – he became the gateway of furthering and culminating the Toltec agenda, in effect “crowning” its purpose with the larger-than-life endeavor of making it available to all of mankind.

This fulfills an unspoken prophecy in both Toltec and humanitarian lines of evolution: giving back to the bank account of man, and assisting mankind in evolving toward the recovery of our true nature.

Purpose

Somehow, Carlos Castaneda’s work – and any work of value – is work that will “add to the human bank account”… more specifically, work that will encourage us each along our own individual paths of enlightenment. Work that gives to us as human beings, in our understanding of self, life, and our position in the universe, is work that has intrinsic, unspoken value.

This value is value that no one outside of ourselves might totally understand, because these words enable and acknowledge our deep purpose and our deep fulfillment as human beings.  This message and this deeper purpose is totally individual, and will only echo how we rest with ourselves at the end of the day.

The Warrior’s Journey is in the end, a solitary journey: the only one we have to answer to is ourselves.

Click on the image below for an expanded visual of the entire sequence of Carlos Castaneda’s books. The last one, The Active Side of Infinity, was published after he left the world….

Carlos Castaneda - Bibliography (Visual)