"Ordinarily events that change our path are impersonal affairs and yet extremely personal."

Don Juan said this to Carlos Castaneda in guiding him to fulfill a shaman's task: collecting what don Juan called an album of memorable events, events of his life events that changed things for him, that illuminated his path.

"The memorable events of a shaman's album are affairs that will stand the test of time," don Juan tells his student, "because they have nothing to do with him, and yet he is in the thick of them. He'll always be in the thick of them, for the duration of his life, and perhaps beyond, but not quite personally."

This is Carlos Castaneda's album of memorable events, stories whose beauty will startle, move and enlighten. They bring us closer than we have ever been to Carlos Castaneda the man, and his epic struggle to make sense of-and transcend-a lifetime.

"Don Juan described the total goal of the shamanistic knowledge that he handled as the preparation for facing the definitive journey: the journey that every human being has to take at the end of his life. He said that what modern man referred to vaguely as life after death was, for those shamans, a concrete region filled to capacity with the practical affairs of a different order than the practical affairs of daily life, yet bearing a similar functional practicality. To collect the memorable events in their lives was, for shamans, an entry to that concrete region, which they called the active side of infinity."