ABSTRACT
Central to the appeal of Carlos Castaneda’s work was the notion of ‘non-ordinary reality’, which was described as being ‘only slightly different from the ordinary reality of everyday life’. For all its weirdness and apparent ephemerality non-ordinary reality is as stable as ordinary reality. Castaneda’s early description of non-ordinary reality identified three core characteristics. First, it is stable and, as such, feels similar to ordinary reality. Second, it is characterised by singularity in that the shaman ‘possessed the power to come to a halt in order to examine any of the component elements for what appeared to be an indefinite length of time’. And third, it lacked ordinary consensus because of the solitude of the observer; it lacked ‘the tacit or the implicit agreement on the component elements of everyday life which fellow men give to one another in various ways’.
