Throughout this book I play on the theme that the key to magic is some sort of deliberate dissociation, part of what I mean when I talk about intentional consciousness.  Later I am going to return to the idea that just as there are different levels of "reality" as we move from the physical world of tables and chairs to the shared world of our interpersonal relationships (all of what sociologists think of as a "social construction of reality"), there is a further world of transsubjective entities, entirely products of our consciousness yet real at the same time.

The ones I talk about as the naturals (the genetic witches, as I used to call them), exhibit a spontaneous ability to move in this extra dimension.  Because it is not just something happening within their own minds, their movements can then involve a genuine interaction with the world the rest of us share.  They can "know" and they can "will."  They appear to bend our world.

Carlos Castaneda, to whom I have a certain debt in that his agent and his editor made my second and third books possible, developed an extensive set of metaphors for all this.  He talked about the man of knowledge who was also the warrior, and he presented the concept of the nagual.  I had once thought of trying a thorough discussion of Castananeda, and I do have an essay in Richard deMille's anthology, The Don Juan Papers), but I think there would be too little interest in such a project at the present.  Carlos himself has died--I am not aware of whether it was in the way he once told me he did not want it to happen, because of illness and the ravages of old age--and so a chapter is closed forever.   However, I have every reason to believe that his personal inability to tell the truth, as noted by his harshest critics, is much the same thing I found with Tanya, and when I met him I had the powerful impression that don Juan Matus was certainly a projection of himself.  At the same time, I think he was definitely explaining something about what magic is, and I would be quite willing to accept it was because of his own experiences.

And if I'm wrong about magic?  What if those we call psychics are simply indivduals exhibiting certain hysterical patterns that at times involve unexpected coincidences?

Not much changes in what I am trying to do.  The natural still must struggle, perhaps harder than others, to achieve a balance in her life.  Positing a religious framework, as we do in Wicca, then can be something strongly therapeutic in that it allows an expression of innate tendencies within moral boundaries,

And if I'm right about magic?  That framework becomes even more important, since the Gnostic tendency (which I found in Castaneda) is to eliminate conventional moral standards with the risk of something that is destructive to oneself as well as to others.