Castaneda's third, and presumably final, account [A Separate Reality] does not deal at all with hallucinogenic drugs …, but it is no less interesting—if anything, it is more strangely beautiful and provocative for being less dramatic.

Don Juan's point all along has been that drugs were merely alternative, if not incidental, routes to becoming a "man of knowledge," but Castaneda had been almost exclusively concerned with their role in the process. Now, in what is more an amplification than a revision of the earlier books, Castaneda has sifted through ten years of notes to study Don Juan's nondrug techniques for "stopping the world" (i.e., shifting to the perception of another reality) and arranged this material into seventeen chapter "lessons," most of which are designed to splinter the ego and erase self-consciousness. The master/student relationship—Don Juan, arch and playfully enigmatic; Castaneda, earnest and desperately trying to...