THE ART OF DREAMING
CARLOS CASTANEDA.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
Over the past twenty years, I have written a series of books about my
apprenticeship with a Mexican Yaqui Indian sorcerer, don Juan
Matus. I have explained in those books that he taught me sorcery, but
not as we understand sorcery in the context of our daily world the use
of supernatural powers over others, or the calling of spirits through
charms, spells, or rituals to produce supernatural effects. For don
Juan, sorcery was the act of embodying some specialized theoretical
and practical premises about the nature and role of perception in
molding the universe around us.
Following don Juan's suggestion, I have refrained from using
shamanism, a category proper to anthropology, to classify his
knowledge. I have called it all along what he himself called it sorcery.
On examination, however, I realized that calling it sorcery obscures
even more the already obscure phenomena he presented to me in his
teachings.
In anthropological works, shamanism is described as a belief system
of some native people of northern Asia - prevailing also among certain
native North American Indian tribes - which maintains that an
unseen world of ancestral spiritual forces, good and evil, is pervasive
around us and that these spiritual forces can be summoned or
controlled through the acts of practitioners, who are the
intermediaries between the natural and supernatural realms.
Don Juan was indeed an intermediary between the natural world of
everyday life and an unseen world, which he called not the
supernatural but the second attention. His role as a teacher was to
make this configuration accessible to me. I have described in my
previous work his teaching methods to this effect, as well as the
sorcery arts he made me practice, the most important of which is
called the art of dreaming.
Don Juan contended that our world, which we believe to be unique
and absolute, is only one in a cluster of consecutive worlds, arranged
Cl
ick
he
re
to
bu
y
ABBYY
PDF
Transformer2.0www.ABBYY.c
om
Cl
ick