Carlos Castaneda

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The Active Side of Infinity – A Tremor in The Air: A Journey of Power

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Active side of Infinity / By / 22 minutes of reading

In this chapter, Carlos Castaneda recounts the events leading to his first meeting with don Juan Matus. Initially, his academic ambitions to conduct fieldwork on medicinal plants are dismissed by his anthropology professors as outdated and irrelevant. Feeling defeated, Castaneda is persuaded by his friend and fellow anthropologist, Bill, to join him on a road trip through Arizona and New Mexico. During their journey, Bill reveals a hidden, personal side, sharing unsettling and unexplainable stories of his encounters with shamans who could transform or appear as apparitions, which deeply affects Castaneda. The trip culminates at a bus depot in Nogales, where Bill points out a mysterious old man he believes to be a powerful sorcerer. Acting on a strange impulse, Castaneda confronts the man, who introduces himself as Juan Matus and cryptically invites him for a future meeting before vanishing onto a bus. This brief, powerful encounter leaves Bill jealous and perplexed, and instills in Castaneda a profound and unfamiliar sense of longing and anxiety.

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The Active Side of Infinity – The Return Trip

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Active side of Infinity / By / 17 minutes of reading

This final chapter of the book details Castaneda’s experience immediately following his jump into the abyss. He awakens in his Los Angeles apartment with no memory of the return trip from Mexico, his body wracked with pain but his mind strangely calm and detached. The jump has shattered his linear perception of time and self, leaving him with quasi-memories and the stark realization that his old life is over. At a diner, he experiences a total unification of his being, as all his fragmented memories from states of heightened awareness become a single, continuous stream. He understands that this integration is a direct result of the jump. He now fully grasps his new condition as a “warrior-traveler,” for whom only energetic facts matter. He feels don Juan not as a person to be missed, but as an impersonal, silent passageway that he must now travel alone. The chapter ends with a strange, mentally unbalanced man screaming in terror upon seeing him, confirming Castaneda’s new, altered state of being and his ultimate aloneness.

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The Active Side of Infinity – The Intent of Infinity

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Active side of Infinity / By / 35 minutes of reading

In this chapter, don Juan asks Carlos Castaneda to recount in great detail his initial journey to find him, specifically his encounters with two men, Jorge Campos and Lucas Coronado. Castaneda describes how his search led him to Guaymas, where he met Jorge Campos, a charismatic but deceitful Yaqui entrepreneur who promised to lead him to don Juan for an exorbitant fee. Campos first introduced him to Lucas Coronado, a truculent Yaqui shaman and mask maker. After a series of manipulative events, Castaneda eventually finds don Juan through Lucas Coronado and his son, Ignacio. Upon hearing the full story, don Juan reveals that Campos and Coronado were not mere obstacles but essential parts of a map laid out by the “intent of infinity.” He explains that Campos, the ruthless con man, and Coronado, the sensitive, suffering artist, represent the two conflicting ends of Castaneda’s own being, and that their actions, guided by infinity, were necessary to bring Castaneda to his path as a sorcerer.

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The Active Side of Infinity – Syntax and The Other Syntax

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Active side of Infinity / By / 2 minutes of reading

This consists of two poems that explore the relationship between language and the perception of reality. The first poem, “Syntax,” posits that our scientific understanding of the universe—having a definite beginning (the Big Bang), a development, and an end—is not an objective discovery but a mere reflection of the linear syntax of our language, which structures everything in terms of birth, growth, and death. The second poem, “The Other Syntax,” proposes an alternative worldview based on a different linguistic structure. In this other syntax, the universe is understood not through linear events but through “varieties of intensity.” From this perspective, there are no true beginnings or endings, only endless fluctuations of intensity.

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The Active Side of Infinity – Who Was Juan Matus, Really?

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Active side of Infinity / By / 15 minutes of reading

In this chapter, Castaneda reflects on his first true meeting with don Juan, realizing the mental image he had constructed was entirely false. The real don Juan is powerful, athletic, and vital. Upon arriving, don Juan performs a “quasi-slap” without physical contact that instantly brings Castaneda into a state of profound clarity and peace. Don Juan then formally introduces himself as Juan Matus, the “nagual” or leader of a 27-generation lineage of sorcerers. He explains that sorcery is not witchcraft but the ability to perceive energy directly, a state of conscious awareness that sets sorcerers apart. He reveals that their meeting was orchestrated by the “intent of infinity,” which he describes as a palpable “tremor in the air,” and that he has been searching for a successor with a double energetic configuration—the new nagual—whom he has found in Castaneda. He describes past naguals as being “empty,” reflecting not the world, but infinity, a quality Castaneda later realizes don Juan embodies perfectly.

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The Active Side of Infinity – The End of An Era: The Deep Concerns Of Everyday Life

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Active side of Infinity / By / 17 minutes of reading

In this chapter, Castaneda, feeling a strange emotional agitation, seeks don Juan’s counsel. Don Juan explains that this turmoil signifies the “end of an era” in his life, as his perception shifts and his time in the ordinary world runs out. At don Juan’s request for a “formal talk,” Castaneda recounts a recent attempt to change his life by moving to a new city for summer school. There, he took a job listening to tapes of people discussing their everyday problems and was horrified to realize their self-absorbed, repetitive complaints were identical to his own, shattering his sense of individuality. His disillusionment was compounded when his boss, a psychiatrist, subjected him to a long, sordid, and self-pitying account of a failed sexual encounter. The final blow came when his pompous anthropology professor made a lewd joke in class, collapsing Castaneda’s world under the weight of the mundane’s “deep concerns.” Overwhelmed, he fled back to Los Angeles, an experience don Juan finds hilarious, explaining it as Castaneda’s old world hitting him with its tail as it comes to an end.

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The second gate of dreaming – The Art of Dreaming

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Art of Dreaming / By / 33 minutes of reading

In this chapter, Carlos Castaneda details his journey through the “second gate of dreaming.” After mastering the first gate by developing his “dreaming attention,” he is instructed by don Juan that the next task is to learn to move from one dream into another. This practice leads him to experience jolts of fear, which don Juan reveals are the initial contacts from conscious, non-biological entities called “inorganic beings.” These beings are attracted to the energy charge created by dreamers. After Castaneda’s dreams become fixated on two candle-shaped inorganic beings, don Juan guides him to confront them in the waking world. Castaneda physically wrestles one of the beings, an act which establishes a “watery” or emotional connection that don Juan warns is dangerous and can lead to dependency, even as it opens the door to forming alliances and exploring other worlds.

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The fixation of the assemblage point – The Art of Dreaming

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Art of Dreaming / By / 38 minutes of reading

In this chapter, don Juan introduces the concept of “stalking” as the art of fixating the assemblage point, which is crucial for achieving perceptual “cohesion” in new worlds entered through dreaming. He explains that the mysterious voice Castaneda has been hearing is the “dreaming emissary,” a conscious but impersonal energy from the realm of inorganic beings, which he warns against trusting. To illustrate the long and complex history of sorcerers’ interactions with such forces, don Juan tells the story of “the tenant,” a death-defying sorcerer from antiquity who survives for millennia by forming a symbiotic, energy-draining relationship with his lineage of naguals. The chapter culminates with Castaneda performing a practical exercise in stalking, using a mesquite tree to fixate a minute shift in his assemblage point, which plunges him into a fully sensorial other world and highlights the difference between the “human unknown” sought by old sorcerers and the “nonhuman unknown” which is the goal of modern ones.

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The world of inorganic beings – The Art of Dreaming

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Art of Dreaming / By / 29 minutes of reading

This chapter details Castaneda’s first intentional journey into the world of inorganic beings. He learns to identify their “scouts”—incongruous elements in his dreams—and, following the ancient sorcerers’ method, voices his intent to follow one. He is pulled into a vast, spongy, tunnel-filled dimension, which the dreaming emissary explains is the interior of a massive inorganic being. The emissary acts as a guide, teaching Castaneda how to navigate this new reality and revealing that this is how the sorcerers of antiquity learned the secrets of dreaming. Don Juan warns him of the dangers, explaining that the inorganic beings are predators of awareness who imprison dreamers by catering to their desires. He recounts the cautionary tale of the nagual Elias and his partner Amalia, who were bodily transported to that world and became its prisoners, emphasizing the supreme risk of trusting these entities or becoming overconfident in one’s own control.

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The shadows’ world – The Art of Dreaming

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Art of Dreaming / By / 35 minutes of reading

In this text, Carlos Castaneda recounts his increasingly intense and perilous experiences with dreaming under the guidance of his teacher, don Juan. Carlos Castaneda is warned about the manipulative nature of inorganic beings who inhabit a separate universe accessible through the gates of dreaming. As Castaneda delves deeper, particularly into the “shadows’ world,” he encounters an “emissary” and other energetic entities, eventually discovering a “prisoner scout” in the form of a little girl. Don Juan expresses grave concern, emphasizing the dangers of becoming trapped by these beings, who covet human energy and use elaborate drills to ensnare dreamers. Despite the warnings and escalating anxiety, Castaneda finds himself inexorably drawn to this other realm, culminating in a desperate attempt to free the prisoner scout by merging his own energy with hers.

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