Art of dreaming PDF
Preview Art of dreaming
USA $22.00 CANADA $29.50 After six years of silence, Carlos Castaneda (whom the Los Angeles Times called “one of the godfathers of the New Age movement”) now returns with a breakthrough book; a book that fully explains don Juan’s teachings on discovering the world of the spirit through the power of dreams. Like the skins of an onion, there are other worlds existing within our own and, through training and study, we can alter our con- sciousness and visit these amazing places. The greatest student of traveling through those spiritual universes is anthropologist Carlos Castaneda. Via the teachings of the great sor- cerer don Juan, he has taken millions of readers on amazing journeys of the soul with such books as The Teachings of Don Juan, A Separate Reality, and Journey to Ixtlan. After six years of study and meditation, Carlos has now written what may be his most significant book of all, The Art of Dreaming—a book that fully explores how those on a spiritual quest can use “the fourth gate” of dreams as a two-way hatch to other worlds. With The Art of Dreaming, you will learn, as Carlos did, how finding the way to alternate realities through the consciousness of dreams is the essence of the great sorcerers; how ancient, (continued on back flap) 00893N T H E ▪ A R T ▪ O F Dreaming Other Books by Carlos Castaneda The Teachings of Don Juan A Separate Reality Journey to Ixtlan Tales of Power The Second Ring of Power The Eagle’s Gift The Fire from Within The Power of Silence T H E A R T O F ▪ ▪ Dreaming CARLOS CASTANEDA HarperCollinsPublishers A leatherbound signed first edition of this book has been published by The Easton press. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to use material in this book: ”I Have Longed to Move Away,” by Dylan Thomas, from Poems of Dylan Thomas. Copy- right 1939 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Direc- tions Publishing Corp. the art of dreaming. Copyright © 1993 by Carlos Castaneda. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Pub- lishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022. HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information, please write: Special Markets Department, HarperCollins Publish- ers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022. Designed by Jessica Shatan Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Castaneda, Carlos. The art of dreaming / Carlos Castaneda.— 1st ed. p. cm. ISBN 0-06-017051-4 (cloth) 1. Dreaming. 2. Juan, Don. I. Title. BF1091. C34 1993 135’. 3—dc20 CONTENTS Author’s Note vii 1 Sorcerers of Antiquity: An Introduction 1 2 The First Gate of Dreaming 20 3 The Second Gate of Dreaming 35 4 The Fixation of the Assemblage Point 57 5 The World of Inorganic Beings 82 6 The Shadows’ World 106 7 The Blue Scout 128 8 The Third Gate of Dreaming 141 9 The New Area of Exploration 166 10 Stalking the Stalkers 183 11 The Tenant 199 12 The Woman in the Church 220 13 Flying on the Wings of Intent 241 AU T H OR’S N O T E Over the past twenty years, I have written a series of books about my apprenticeship with a Mexican Yaqui Indian sorcerer, don Juan Matus. I have explained in those books that he taught me sorcery, but not as we understand sorcery in the context of our daily world: the use of supernatural powers over others, or the calling of spirits through charms, spells, or rituals to produce supernatural effects. For don Juan, sorcery was the act of embody- ing some specialized theoretical and practical premises about the nature and role of perception in molding the universe around us. Following don Juan’s suggestion, I have refrained from using shamanism, a category proper to anthropology, to classify his knowledge. I have called it all along what he himself called it: sor- cery. On examination, however, I realized that calling it sorcery obscures even more the already obscure phenomena he presented to me in his teachings. In anthropological works, shamanism is described as a belief system of some native people of northern Asia—prevailing also among certain native North American Indian tribes—which maintains that an unseen world of ancestral spiritual forces, good and evil, is pervasive around us and that these spiritual forces can be summoned or controlled through the acts of practitioners, who are the intermediaries between the natural and supernatural realms. Don Juan was indeed an intermediary between the natural world of everyday life and an unseen world, which he called not viii AUTHOR’S NOTE the supernatural but the second attention. His role as a teacher was to make this configuration accessible to me. I have described in my previous work his teaching methods to this effect, as well as the sorcery arts he made me practice, the most important of which is called the art of dreaming. Don Juan contended that our world, which we believe to be unique and absolute, is only one in a cluster of consecutive worlds, arranged like the layers of an onion. He asserted that even though we have been energetically conditioned to per- ceive solely our world, we still have the capability of entering into those other realms, which are as real, unique, absolute, and engulfing as our own world is. Don Juan explained to me that, for us to perceive those other realms, not only do we have to covet them but we need to have sufficient energy to seize them. Their existence is constant and independent of our awareness, he said, but their inaccessibility is entirely a consequence of our energetic conditioning. In other words, simply and solely because of that conditioning, we are compelled to assume that the world of daily life is the one and only possible world. Believing that our energetic conditioning is correctable, don Juan stated that sorcerers of ancient times developed a set of practices designed to recondition our energetic capabilities to perceive. They called this set of practices the art of dreaming. With the perspective time gives, I now realize that the most fitting statement don Juan made about dreaming was to call it the “gateway to infinity”. I remarked, at the time he said it, that the metaphor had no meaning to me. “Let’s then do away with metaphors”, he conceded. “Let’s say that dreaming is the sorcerers’ practical way of putting ordinary dreams to use.” “But how can ordinary dreams be put to use?” I asked. “We always get tricked by words”, he said. “In my own case, my teacher attempted to describe dreaming to me by saying that it is the way sorcerers say good night to the world. He
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