Taken together—and they should be read in the order they were written—[Carlos Castaneda's books] form a work which is among the best that the science of anthropology has produced. Three aspects of the work have profoundly influenced my response to it: first, the interest and value of the teachings of Don Juan are extraordinary in themselves; second, Carlos Castaneda has conveyed these teachings with great artistry so that they affect us at many levels; third, he shows us the conditions under which the teachings were transmitted to him, and not only makes us feel the relation he had with his teacher, but also reveals something of his personal struggle with standard Western reality whose thrall kept preventing him from accepting Don Juan's lessons on their own terms. (p. 7)

The story [these books] tell is so good, and the descriptions so vivid, that I was utterly fascinated as I read. What makes these books great is that Castaneda has not been afraid to commit things to paper that he himself does not understand…. Luckily, something in Castaneda's guts told him that there was more to his experiences than what he could understand, so rather than give us the pabulum of analyzed data, he has done a wonderful job of conveying his experiences while under the tutelage of Don Juan. (pp. 7, 10)

Mescalito, the "spirit" of the Peyote plant, indicated to Don Juan that Carlos was the "chosen" one, the person to whom Don Juan should pass on his knowledge.

The result of this has been, for us, a very happy collaboration, and it is because of the collaborative nature of the work that it is appropriate, I think, to call it science. Castaneda modestly says that he is letting Don Juan's words speak for themselves, but this is true only in that Castaneda does not burden them with qualifications or alter them while trying to explain them. The fact is that the words would not be there at all if Castaneda had not been there "with unbending intent," and if he had not put his very being on the line so that Don Juan would also give him his utmost….

Although I feel he should do even more of this, Castaneda does reveal enough of himself for us to see some of the ways in which we are like him (or unlike him, as the case may be). In fact, his courage lies not only in the fact that he persists in his effort to become a "man of knowledge"—a path that involves continuing openness to the unknown—but also in the fact that he is willing to speak of things concerning himself that most people would prefer to hide from themselves as well as others. Yet it is these things, the truths that hit you in the pit of the stomach, that enable us to see that our image of man is just that—an image—and that suggest entirely other ways of perceiving man and the world. I am not thinking here of Castaneda's strange, beautiful and disconcerting experiences in what he calls "nonordinary reality," but rather of some simpler, more everyday ones which I am sure nearly every reader of these books can recognize as his own. (p. 10)

Castaneda, like nearly every member of Western civilization, feels himself to be superior to members of other cultures and in fact to all other entities in the world. But since such feelings conflict with our democratic ideology, he claims that Don Juan is his equal [in a scene described in "Journey to Ixtlan"]. Don Juan not only sees through this, but also sees that Castaneda is pimping in the sense that Castaneda's reason for being there in the first place is not to learn something but to collect information for someone else: to add to the corpus of anthropological knowledge, for instance, by writing a Ph.D. thesis that will add to what is already known so that others can then add even more and it will appear that our knowledge is actually increasing.

But knowledge of what? This is the crux of the matter…. In their studies of the cultures of other people, even those anthropologists who sincerely love the people they study almost never think that they are learning something about the way the world really is. Rather, they conceive of themselves as finding out what other people's conceptions of the world are. For the longest time Castaneda, too, thought this way about what Don Juan was telling him.

It is stupid and wasteful, however, to think of Don Juan's knowledge—and that of other non-Western peoples—as no more than conceptions of some fixed reality. Castaneda makes it clear that the teachings of Don Juan do tell us something of how the world really is, and I feel that this is knowledge of great value. I don't have the space to put down my own reading of what Don Juan is saying, and I can't even begin to point out all the delights to be found in these books. In any case, the excellence of Castaneda's writing ensures, I believe, that readers will discover these things for themselves. (p. 14)