Arturo Cantu-Rivera – författare

Thirty years in prison has a dramatic impact in the human soul. It either kills you or forces you to change one way or another. In my case it did both, killed the old self and gave birth to a new outlook in life. This work was written during my incarceration, 1989-2019, and rescued by my sister Hilda after my release. It represents reflections of the spirit and its evolution throughout said period of time. Unlike other books of its kind, this work does not speak directly of the shortcomings of prison life, rather, it focuses on the search for spiritual understanding of our fate as human beings, of our human condition. It depicts a spirit in motion towards the light of the inner self. May these reflections find solace in the land of wandering souls.

The radical whirlwind that swept the Sixties and early Seventies not only impacted the arena of politics and the arts but also altered the way in which we viewed our human condition and our place in the universe. This is story of a fortuitous encounter that turned into an adventure; a spiritual odyssey into the land of the mushroom people - the Mixtecos, living up in the highest point of the Sierra Madre del Sur in the state of Oaxaca. Inspired by the books of Carlos Castaneda, a group of young men took their soul search into the cloud forest of Southern Mexico hoping to find some answers. What they found was another version of the pre-Colombian philosophy made famous by don Juan in the works of Castaneda; their ideas of our human condition and our place in the universe forever altered by the impact of such an experience. A must read by the readers of Castaneda.