Page:Para leer a Carlos Castaneda.djvu/113

 '''IX. THE ART OF DREAMING'''

First English edition, 1993

Until the spring of 1996 Carlos Castaneda had published nine books. In the time elapsed between the publication of the eighth (silent knowledge, 1987) and the last (the dreaming art, 1993) Castaneda probably lived the consequences of being a three point nagual and not four, as was supposed by his teacher Don Juan.

The naguales are people who have four energy compartments instead of two, as is common in people. Castaneda had many difficulties to "assemble" with the group that Don Juan prepared and apparently started another group integrated by Florinda Donner, Taisha Abelar and Carol Tiggs.

Those years between the eighth and ninth book publication, are probably the activation of a new power strategy or the creation of a new lineage to these modern naguales and warriors who have taken a mortal leap, coming out of hiding and gone from an oral to a written culture.

Indeed, as Don Juan points it out, in these ten thousand years of “knowledge” existence, from the ancient witches, through the Don Juan lineage and up to the modern nagual Castaneda, knowledge has undergone many changes.

According to Don Juan, it is noted that the first antiquity witches failed because they became obsessed with the second attention world and neglected the immediate reality, that of the first power ring. These ancient Toltec focused on the reverie world and did not cultivate "the warrior path", which made them impossible people, "lost in a fantasy world", when invaders arrived, they seized the material world in which Toltecs lived very easily, since it had been neglected by the first Toltec. Another period mentioned by Don Juan, was initiated by first stage surviving witches, by recounting their practices and analyzing their mistakes, again began to study knowledge, but now through an iron clad discipline which they called "the warrior path", "the art of dreaming" and "the art of stalking". When they were in the beginning of this cycle the European invaders arrived and with the conquest and colony, this new stage had to take refuge in the second attention and further refine their discipline in order to survive in the colony hell and to take maximum advantage of their fucking tyrants.

It was at that time, at the beginning of the 18th century, when another cycle begins with the appearance of nagual Sebastian —who was hiding as a church sacristan— a surviving witch from the first epoch and who had managed to stay mysteriously alive for hundreds of years, but was losing his power at the time. So nagual Sebastian was forced to make a deal, in which the naguales