Toltec (Castaneda)

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The term "Toltec" is used in the works of writer Carlos Castaneda to denote a person who has achieved a high state of spiritual awareness. Castaneda makes it clear that his use of the term is specialized, and is not related to the Toltec people or culture referred to in the ethnohistory and mythology of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica in the Postclassic period.

Castaneda, via his primary teacher, don Juan Matus a Yaqui Indian, maintains that while the peak of "civilization" in the accepted Western sense (which may be thought to include technological advances, science and logical progression in most fields) is occurring right now, the ability to understand, manipulate and subjugate the processes of the "physical" mind and the phenomena of magic, belief, shamanism and other states of non-ordinary reality peaked then waned with the Toltecs and has now almost entirely been lost.

Don Juan insists that a man of knowledge knows that everything is not knowable or explicable by science and that logic itself is just one tool for exploring the universe.^{[citation needed]}

Don Juan referred to the Toltecs as being the Sorcerers of Ancient Mexico 10,000 years ago.^{[citation needed]}