Authors

The Eagle’s Gift – The Rule of The Nagual

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Eagle's gift / By / 26 minutes of reading

This chapter delves into the foundational mythos of the sorcerers’ world, which Castaneda calls “the rule of the Nagual.” He recounts how Don Juan, after a near-fatal encounter, was initiated into this rule by his own benefactor. The rule describes the Eagle, an immense cosmic force that consumes the awareness of all beings upon death. However, the Eagle also provides a gift: a chance to escape this fate and achieve freedom by keeping one’s awareness. To guide beings to this freedom, the Eagle created the Nagual, a double being who comes in a male/female pair. The chapter details the specific structure of a Nagual’s party—composed of four types of female warriors (the four directions) and four types of male warriors—and outlines their luminous features, their tasks of dreaming and stalking, and the cyclical duty of each Nagual to find and train a new party before departing the world.

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The Eagle’s Gift – The Nagual’s Party of Warriors

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Eagle's gift / By / 40 minutes of reading

In this chapter, Carlos Castaneda recounts his first formal encounters with the warriors of don Juan’s party, which are structured as a series of introductions corresponding to the four cardinal directions. Each meeting is a bizarre and often jarring experience, designed as a lesson in stalking and controlled folly, forcing him to confront his own self-importance and preconceived notions. Castaneda is introduced to a host of unique and powerful individuals, including the dreamers and stalkers who guard the gates to the Nagual’s world, the enigmatic leader Silvio Manuel, and Florinda, who is designated as his future guide into the art of stalking.

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The Eagle’s Gift – The Nagual Woman

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Eagle's gift / By / 28 minutes of reading

This chapter recounts the intricate story of how don Juan met his own Nagual woman, Olinda. It details his benefactor’s masterful stalking strategy, which involved posing as a devout Catholic for nearly a year to orchestrate their meeting. After a failed abduction attempt by his warriors, an even more elaborate ploy is staged, resulting in Olinda joining don Juan’s world. The narrative also delves into the nature of double beings, the despair and ultimate freedom of his benefactor’s party, and concludes by explaining how don Juan eventually found and secured Carlos Castaneda and his corresponding Nagual woman, using similar principles of controlled folly and stalking.

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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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