[Castaneda], who once thought he was a student and wrote his first book as a doctoral thesis, is unquestionably a teacher. His books are as didactic as Plato's and just as fat with instructional dialogue. His Don Juan, who constantly tells Carlitos to end his own internal dialogue, is as garrulous as Jonathan winters and just as fractured by his own jokes. And yet if Castaneda is not about to inseminate Western culture with a vision of how it really is, he is at least on the cusp of twisting its head a few millimeters. He is a cult figure now, especially with the young but not exclusively so, approaching Hesse, Vonnegut, Golding and Salinger. (p. 29)

[According to Castaneda, we achieve the totality of ourselves] by seeing in a special way what few others see, by dreaming, by will, by stopping our internal dialogue. We get there by...