The Wheel of Time

The Wheel of Time is a book by Carlos Castaneda, comprising a collection of the most important aphorisms and passages from eight of his previous books, which describe the classical preparation for shamanic initiation that he underwent under the guidance of don Juan Matus over the course of thirty years. Don Juan Matus succeeded in introducing Carlos Castaneda to the world of the shamans of ancient Mexico — the founders of his lineage of shamans. He maintained that the world of shamans is governed by a different cognitive system, one that differs from the system of knowledge that dominates everyday life. Judging by what Carlos Castaneda learned during his apprenticeship, the world of the shamans of ancient Mexico is indeed governed by a system of knowledge entirely unlike our own. As he reviewed the quotations in "The Wheel of Time," Carlos Castaneda came to understand that there was nothing accidental in don Juan Matus's method of teaching, although at the time his instructions had seemed to Castaneda to be improvised. Yet this teaching was conducted in accordance with hidden motivating principles defined by the tradition set in motion by Mexican shamans many thousands of years ago. Drawing on one of the principles of the shamanic world's system of knowledge, shamans would call the structure discernible in the arrangement of aphorisms in this book the wheel of time — for those people, this concept was neither speculative nor theoretical, but as pragmatic as they themselves were. For shamans, time is a completely comprehensible form of the ordering of energy, one that a person can almost directly sense and set in motion. Through the incredible power of concentration developed over a lifetime, these shamans were truly capable of sensing the wheel of time and shifting it so powerfully that the aim of the displacement they caused, whatever it may have been, can be felt even in our own day. "They explained the concept of the wheel of time by saying that time is like a tunnel of infinite length and width — a tunnel with mirror-like grooves. Each groove is infinite; infinite, too, is their number. The force of life compelled living beings to peer into one groove. To peer into only one groove means to be caught in its trap, to live by that groove.