The dazzling, fantastic work that concludes the teachings of the Yaqui sorcerer, Don Juan. Castaneda is an anthropologist, a mystic, a poet and a marvelously gifted author whose books have sold phenomenally well. "One can't exaggerate the significance of what Carlos Castaneda has done".--The New York Times

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

Every aspect of Carlos Castaneda's life, from his literary credibility and marital history to his place of birth and circumstances of death, are shrouded in mystery. Born Carlos Aranha, Castaneda graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, and soon after he published the first of eight best-selling novels detailing his purported apprenticeship with a Yaqui Indian wizard named Don Juan Matus. Castaneda's books, among them The Techniques of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge and The Wheel of Time: The Shamans of Ancient Mexico, Their Thoughts about Life, Death and the Universe, have sold over eight million copies, in 17 languages, around the world. Little is known about Castaneda's personal life. He was briefly married to Margaret Runyan in 1960. They only lived together as man and wife for six months before going to Mexico for a divorce. In 1973, after realizing that their first divorce was not legal, Castaneda and Runyan were formally divorced. Castaneda died of cancer on April 27, 1998, at his home in Westwood, California. His death was kept a secret for more than two months before word of it was finally leaked to the press.