TEACHINGS OF DON JUAN - Penguin

In 1960 Carlos Castaneda first met don juan, a Yaqui Indian feared and shunned by the ordinary folk of the American Southwest because of his unnatural powers. During the next years don Juan's arcane knowledge hed him into a world of beauty and terror, ruled by concepts far beyond those of western civilization. Using psychedelic drugs, peyote, jimson weed and a mushroom called 'humito', Castaneda lived through encounters with disembodied spirits, shamans in the form of huge wolves, and death in the shape of silver crows. Three times he met Mescalito, the god of the peyote. Finally, after a night of utter terror in which he knew that his life was treatened by forces which he still cannot fuly explain, he gave up his struggle to become a Man of Knowledge. After several months of indecision, he wrote this extraordinary book. 'Don Juan projects a quality of experience beside which scientific exactitude stands in peril into insignificance' -Thedore Roszak in the Nation-