Inspiration for Prey?

[SolarMyth]

From "The Active Side of Infinity"
By Carlos Castaneda
HarperCollins Publishers; 1998
From the Chapter entitled Mud Shadows; Pages 218-227

[Don Juan speaking] "We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos, and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The predator is our lord and master. It has rendered us docile, helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it demands that we don't do so...

...They took over because we are food for them, and they squeeze us mercilessly because we are their sustenance. Just as we rear chickens in chicken coops, the predators rear us in human coops. Therefore, their food is always available to them...

...What I'm saying is that what we have against us is not a simple predator. It is very smart, and organized. It follows a methodical system to render us useless. Man, the magical being that he is destined to be, is no longer magical. He's an average piece of meat. There are no more dreams for man but the dreams of an animal who is being raised to become a piece of meat: trite, conventional, imbecilic."

Whole passage at: http://www.harmonymindbodyspirit.com...predator.shtml

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From Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Juan_Matus

Don Juan Matus is a major character in the series of books by Carlos Castaneda...

In Castaneda's books, Don Juan Matus was a Yaqui Indian whom he met during anthropological field work around the U.S.-Mexico border beginning in the early 1960s. On subsequent visits, Don Juan revealed himself to Castaneda as a brujo (Spanish for warlock), which is a sort of healer, sorcerer, or shaman who had inherited (through a lineage of teachers) an ancient Central American practice for refining one's awareness of the universe. Don Juan was an expert in the cultivation and use of various hallucinogenic plants (specifically, psychedelic mushrooms, Datura, and Peyote) that can be found in the Mexican deserts, which are used as aids to reach states of non-ordinary reality in the philosophy he conveyed to Castaneda.

Don Juan's philosophy, which has been enormously influential, might be summed up in a passage from Castaneda's first book, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge:

For me there is only the traveling on the paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart.
There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge for me is to traverse its full length. And there I travel—looking, looking, breathlessly.

The actual existence of Don Juan is a matter of some dispute between Castaneda's supporters and critics. ([1] Author Robert Marshall claims that Castaneda got the idea for Matus’ name from the popular brand of Portuguese rosé wine, “Mateus.”) If Don Juan were a real person, his real name was apparently changed to maintain his anonymity. Taisha Abelar and Florinda Donner-Grau – associates of Castaneda – also wrote about the same Don Juan Matus, although he went by different pseudonyms in their books such as Mariano Aureliano. In all of these books, Don Juan Matus was a nagual who was leader of a group of practitioners of tradition of perceptual enhancement.

[Johny82]

Hey, that's interesting