Back from the abyss and without don Juan, Carlos Castaneda is faced with the staggering effort of recovering, on his own, don Juan's teachings. In doing so, he understands what don Juan and his cohorts were really doing to him: «They were not teaching me sorcery, but how to master three aspects of an ancient knowledge they possessed: awareness, stalking, and intent. And they were not sorcerers; they were seers.» This work deals with the mastery of awareness and with the realization of a new cycle of seers, «warriors of total freedom... such masters of awareness, stalking, and intent that they are not caught by death, like the rest of mortal men, but choose the moment and the way of their departure from this world. At that moment they are consumed by a fire from within and vanish from the face of the earth, free, as if they had never existed.»