Journey to Ixtlan
This volume shows the reader the means by which a "man of power" sees, as opposed to merely looking, & how by his concentrated "seeing" he can, indeed must, "stop the world." In it, Carlos Castaneda describes the lessons, the omens, the exercises of the will & body, the arduous trials & tests, the simple yet mysterious demonstrations, the extraordinary visions & experiences by which don Juan, his mentor & friend, prepares him for the task of perceiving things as they are, instead of describing them by the words, conventions & standards of conventional, a priori ideas & language. Here, in the high mountains & in the bright arid desert, Castaneda reaches for power in a series of startling encounters with the unknown--a confrontation with death & the past in the form of an albino falcon, with the twilight wind, with a flesh-&-blood mountain lion, with a mountain fog--& learns the techniques, the concentration, the compassion of the hunter, the man who is "without routines, free, fluid."