Burning Down the Hall: Castaneda's Critics versus Other Ways of Knowing
Alan Steinfeld
This is a response to the Reality Sandwich article by ST Frequency, "Shamans and Charlatans: Assessing Castaneda's Legacy." This writing was particularly initiated by this peculiar pronouncement of ST: ". . . the halls of academia are tarnished with the elevation of charlatans." It appears that ST has perhaps only read Carlos Castaneda's first book and more closely the books of the critic and researcher Richard De Mille, The Don Juan Papers and Castaneda's Journey.
I am a staunch upholder of the Castaneda legend that begins with a young anthropology student from UCLA who goes to the Arizona desert to document the uses of psycho-active plants by the Native Americans of the southwest. During his early research in the field, Castaneda discovered his teacher, the mysterious don Juan Matus. In a secluded bus station in a Mexican border town, probably Nogales, he awkwardly introduces himself to the strange old Indian. As their eyes meet, Castaneda suddenly finds himself captivated. He writes: "It was a formidable look . . . It was a look that went through me. I became tongue tied and could not continue with the harangue about myself". [i] Here and throughout the 12-book narrative, Castaneda portrays himself as a heavy-handed fool who continuously challenges Don Juan to explain his definitions and motives. This device helps to invite the readers to look at their own narrow opinions about what is possible.
ST Frequency writes: By accepting such questionable documents as authenticated knowledge, the truth about indigenous peoples becomes diluted with misinformation and (perhaps more lamentable) the halls of academia are tarnished with the elevation of charlatans to pedestals of high esteem.
How many real shamans have passed through those tarnished halls? I would say very few. Shamans and in this case sorcerers do not communicate in a paradigm that is limited to the linear level of academic understanding. The predicament that ST and De Mille are in is one that Castaneda himself had to overcome in the early years of his apprenticeship. In the second book, A Separate Reality, Don Juan tells Castaneda: "Your problem is that you want to understand everything, and that is not possible. If you insist on understanding you're not considering your entire life as a human being. Your stumbling block is intact...you are chained to reason." [ii] In "academia" there is no room for other ways of knowing. The Western tradition of learning says we can only know with our minds--thus we have been robbed of our bodies. Fortunately for Castaneda, he discovered that other ways of knowing were possible. For instance, he is coached by one of Don Juan's cohorts to know "that human beings have a superb center of perception on the outside of the calves, and that if the skin in that area could be made to relax . . . the scope of perception would be enhanced in ways that would be impossible to fathom rationally." [iii]
In a careful reading of the Castaneda work, from 1968 to 1998, we see his continued extrication from the culture of education that formed his (and our) original worldview. In The Active Side of Infinity (1999), which was his last book (not Magical Passes of 1998 as stated by ST), Castaneda acknowledges his hard-fought effort. He dedicates this final volume to his original anthropology professors at UCLA: "I plugged into a field situation from which I never emerged . . . a greater force . . . called infinity swallowed me before I could formulate clear-cut social scientist's propositions." [iv]
Throughout the course of his oeuvre, Castaneda elucidates techniques and applications which, if followed correctly, will produce mind blowing (and I don't mean drug-induced) results to change your life: "Dreaming," "seeing," "stalking," "re- capitulation," "controlled folly," and "stopping the world" are all designed to drop below the mask of our personality structure and access deeper ways of knowing the world and ourselves.
Anyone who makes it beyond the first two books learns that the real objective of Don Juan's work was much more than to teach the young naïve Castaneda about the use of peyote and other entheogens. In his 3rd book, Journey to Ixlan (1972) Castaneda goes back to his earlier notes and re-evaluates everything he had learned up until that point. He realizes that Don Juan gave him those mind-altering plants specifically to break him out of his academic habit of intellectualization. In the forward to his 8th book, The Power of Silence (1987), Castandea writes: "It takes years of training to teach us to deal intelligently with the world of everyday life. Our schooling is rigorous, because the knowledge we are trying to impart is very complex. The same criteria apply to the sorcerer's world: their schooling, which relies on oral instruction and the manipulation of awareness, although different from ours is just as rigorous, because their knowledge is as, or perhaps more complex." [v]
The Yaqui Question
Another way that ST and DeMille try to discredit Castaneda is by questioning the subtitle of the first book: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. ST writes: Castaneda maintains that it was added per suggestion of the University Press who, prior to reading his manuscript, insisted on its inclusion to help categorize the book. To imply that Don Juan is representative of all Yaquis, he says, was never his intention. This admission stands in stark contrast to a comment made by the associate editor of the University Press who, in a letter to De Mille, states, "The title of Castaneda's book and the entire text are the work of the author". . . .It seems then that Castaneda himself erroneously labeled his work as an exposition of a "Yaqui way of knowledge," and purposely so - but for what reason?
In 1968 when his first book was published, Castaneda was unaware of Don Juan's true lineage. It is only later that he corrected himself by diving deeper into the sorcerer's world. In 1972 he writes: "I have made no attempts to place Don Juan in a cultural milieu. The fact that he considers himself to be a Yaqui Indian does not mean that his knowledge of sorcery is known or practiced by the Yaqui Indians in general." [vi] Don Juan is Yaqui, but his teaching is from a much older tradition. It is like being Jewish but practicing Buddhism. In the books from the 1980s, Castaneda is informed that Don Juan's lineage is not Yaqui at all but Toltec. Castaneda explains that for Don Juan, Toltec was not a culture, but "a man of knowledge." [vii] Don Juan could trace this particular lineage back centuries, or even for a millennium before the Spanish Conquest. [viii]
ST also states: Furthermore, the knowledge of witchcraft is thought by the Yaquis to be "an inborn quality," a power that cannot be taught or inherited. This statement directly contradicts Castaneda's accounts of the art of Yaqui sorcery as a cycle of apprenticeship handed down across generations from a "benefactor" to his "chosen man."
In the Toltec tradition, knowledge that was handed down was not based on inheritance. The Toltec leader of each generation (Don Juan and Carlos Castaneda) called "the Nagual" passed the teachings onto those that he sensed had a certain formation of energy in their bodies. Many of the Naguals in Don Juan's lineage were not even Native Americans. The Nagual Luhan was from China, but he had the right energetic configuration to be the inheritor of this grand tradition. This hopefully answers ST's concerns that "The nature of sorcery as practiced by Don Juan . . . differs strikingly from that traditionally understood to exist in Yaqui society" and that there is a "conspicuous absence of Yaqui terminology in Don Juan's teachings." The Toltec wisdom is more aligned to the mystery schools of the West, where the student would undergo certain initiation practices in order to evolve his spiritual knowledge.
Sorcerer or Seers?
In book 7, The Fire from Within (1984), Castaneda realizes the ultimate goal of the teachings. He says that Don Juan and his fellow teachers "were not teaching me sorcery, but how to master three aspects of the ancient knowledge they possessed: awareness, stalking, and intent, and they were not sorcerers; they were seers. [ix] One of the special talents of seers, according to Don Juan, is that they are able to see man as a field of energy which looks like a luminous egg.
This leads to another point that ST tries to make by quoting the anthropologist Muriel Thayer Painter. "Painter . . . notes that, according to Yaqui belief, those persons that practice witchcraft (i.e., sorcery) are timorous and feeble." Can any serious researcher really believe such a superstitious description of cultural knowledge? Painter goes on to say that: "both traits are utterly incongruous with Don Juan's depiction as a man who has ‘vanquished fear' and is ‘remarkably fit,' despite his advanced age."
This point is addressed in the introduction to The Power of Silence. Castaneda states, "at various times DJ attempted to name his knowledge for my benefit. He felt the most appropriate name was nagualism, but that the term was too obscure. Calling it simply ‘knowledge' made it too vague, and to call it ‘witchcraft' was debasing. 'The mastery of intent' was too abstract and 'the search for total freedom' too long and metaphorical. Finally, because he was unable to find a more appropriate name, he called it 'sorcery,' though he admitted it was not really accurate." [x]
Almost until the end, Castaneda refrained from calling Don Juan's teachings "shamanism." For Castaneda the anthropologist, this term referred to "a belief system . . . that maintained that an unseen world of ancestral forces, good and evil, is pervasive around us." [xi] This was far too simple a definition for the sophisticated unfolding of Don Juan's work, which maintained the existence of a multiplicity of realities. For instance, Don Juan saw the world not just as the solidity of material forms he called the tonal, but as a world of energy, which he labeled the nagual. We might say that the nagual worldview is more right-brained as opposed to the linear left-brained understanding. We are culturally conditioned to see only the latter view. It was only in the late work, when shamanism was more broadly understood, that Castaneda referred to Don Juan a shaman.
Many scholars throughout the course of Castaneda's rise to fame have claimed that the work was one of forgery and plagiarism from other anthropological studies of Native American culture. However, it seems that no one has ever been able to place the exact source of the terminology of many of Castaneda's unique concepts. Such phrases as "inorganic beings," "allies," "the movement of the assemblage point," and "petty tyrants" do not appear to have any anthropological antecedents.
Don Juan tells Castaneda that "the definitive journey" is the ultimate task of the seers of his lineage. This means that: "They are warriors of total freedom, that they are 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 it they had never existed." [xii]
There is nothing like a little "fire from within" to not just tarnish but to burn down the halls of academia. In book 6, The Eagles' Gift (1981), Castaneda witnesses such an event as Don Juan and his warrior party ascend to heaven. Describing the action as a string of lights in the sky, he's reminded of the plumed serpent, Quetzaquotal, of the Toltec legend. [xiii]
ST quotes a New York Times article from July 23, 1970 which "describes the plight of Oaxacan Indians suffering from the flood of American 'mushroom addicts' and the subsequent crackdown by Mexican authorities; once considered a 'great medicine,' the fungi are now contraband in Oaxaca."
This is mostly likely due to the fact that the so-called seekers went looking for enlightenment in the enthogens of Mexico because they had found only bland reasons for living in their institutions of higher learning. Castaneda gave people hope in the authenticity and magic of being. The world he described was not one fabricated on academic concepts but based on experience.
ST also writes: "New Age ‘shamans' modeled on Castaneda's sorcerer exist in abundance in today's society . . . . While some operations offer legitimate and conscientious experiences of traditional shamanism, others are little more than opportunistic scams." Who might these pseudo shamans be? Perhaps they are people giving others a real opportunity to have the experience of Native American perceptions as opposed to reading about it in the journals of academia.
In addition ST wrote: "Carlos Castaneda re-emerged in the public eye in the early nineties espousing the virtues of a meditation technique he named Tensegrity, after a term coined by R. Buckminster Fuller."
Castaneda did not "re-emerge" in the 1990s. He was writing detailed accounts of his own integration into the sorcerer's world all through the 1970s and 1980s. In Tales of Power (1974), he concludes his formal training with Don Juan with the inconceivable act of jumping off a high mountain plateau and shifting his energy to live to write about it. The Second Ring of Power (1977) describes Castaneda's confrontation with female sorcerers. The Art of Dreaming (1993) sums up the steps of lucid dreaming outlined in his previous books. In general, the Castaneda canon was an ongoing narrative of adventures into other realms of existence. The works of his sorcery associates Florinda Donner (Being and Dreaming) and Taisha Abelar (The Sorcerer's Crossing) matched perfectly Castaneda's teachings of dreaming, stalking, and intent.
But what became of the legend? If we read Amy Wallace's post-mortem epilogue to the Castaneda phenomenon, Sorcery's Apprentice: My Life with Carlos Castaneda, [xiv] we can see how the great master lost his way. Throughout his years of instruction Don Juan would always emphasize that the key to true knowledge was impeccability, what the Tao Te Ching calls virtue. According to Don Juan, a lack of ruthless impeccability leads to self-importance, which he explained was really self-pity. It is this condition of the mind that eventually kills most people. This why a true warrior learns to "stalk" himself.
Wallace's account of Castaneda's inner circle shows a calculating man using the power of his sorcery to control and manipulate his students, to whom he had hoped to pass his knowledge. He ultimately failed the final task of a warrior: "the definitive journey" - to leave the world as Don Juan did as a luminous being. Castaneda let the self-importance of absolute power corrupt him absolutely. Although it seems that there is no heir apparent to continue the Nagual line, Castaneda left an indelible path for others to follow. His books, which Don Juan urged him to write, contain formulas by which, if taken seriously, anyone might become a warrior of total freedom.
Conclusion
From the very beginning of Castaneda's career, people have attempted to smother the enthusiasm for the mystery of life that these books have brought. Robert Marshall, in The Dark Legacy of Carlos Castaneda, writes, "in spite of the exhaustive debunking, the Carlos Castaneda books still sell well. The University of California Press, which published Castaneda's first book, steadily sells 7,500 copies a year. BookScan, a Nielsen company that tracks book sales, reports that three of Castaneda's most popular titles sold a total of 10,000 copies in 2006. None of Castaneda's titles have ever gone out of print -- an impressive achievement for any author. Today, Simon and Schuster, Castaneda's main publisher, still classifies his books as nonfiction". [xv]
Overall Castaneda's books are a concentrated, consistent and comprehensive study of a particular worldview. It is a perspective of non-linear reality that most of us skeptical of anything other than Western thought refuse to take the first step to explore. DeMille, perhaps Frequency, and other debunkers fail to see the spiritual movement emerging in this country. They are cynics who, as Oscar Wilde said, "know the price of everything and the value of nothing."
Perhaps Castaneda's critics will one day emerge from the ivory towers of their educational institutions to smell the roses and realize that their sweet fragrance is more than a list of chemical components. As Castaneda learned in the rules for "stalking": "For a warrior there is no end to the mystery of being, whether being means being a pebble, or an ant or oneself. That is a warrior's humbleness. One is equal to everything." [xvi]
Alan Steinfeld is the founder of http://www.newealities.com a portal; of holistic activity in New York dedicated to mind, body, and soul awareness. He can be reached at newrealities@earthlink.net
Photo by true2source, courtesy Creative Commons license.
Notes:
[i] Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan (Simon and Schuster, 1972) 18
[ii] Carlos Castaneda, A Separate Reality (Simon and Schuster, 1971) 310-312
[iii] Carlos Castaneda, The Eagle's Gift (Simon and Schuster, 1981), 257.
[iv] Carlos Castaneda, The Active Side of Infinity, (HarperCollins book, 1999) Dedication, page v,
[v] Carlos Castaneda, The Power of Silence: Further Lessons of don Juan (Simon and Schuster, 1987) page 7.
[vi] Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan (Simon and Schuster, 1972) page 8.
[vii] Carlos Castaneda, The Fire from Within (Simon and Schuster, 1984) page 18.
[viii] Carlos Castaneda, The Fire from Within (Simon and Schuster, 1984) page 18.
[ix] Carlos Castaneda, The Fire from Within (Simon and Schuster, 1984) page 10.
[x] Carlos Castaneda, The Power of Silence: Further Lessons of don Juan (Simon and Schuster, 1987) page 9
[xi] Carlos Castaneda, The Art of Dreaming (HarperCollins book, 1993) p. vii-viii
[xii] Carlos Castaneda, The Fire from Within (Simon and Schuster, 1984) page 13.
[xiii] Carlos Castaneda, The Eagle's Gift (Simon and Schuster, 1981), p316
[xiv] Amy Wallace, North Atlantic Book company, 2003
[xv] Robert Marshall, The Dark Legacy of Carlos Castaneda, April 12, 2007 for salon.com http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/04/12/castaneda/
[xvi] Carlos Castaneda, The Eagle's Gift (Simon and Schuster, 1981), 281-282
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my experience of Castaneda
was flanked by my readings of literature that if not nearly as applied in the cycle of interlocking formula terms that link the gems of thought, Carlos was so adept at, but nevertheless writings that held up similar departures from linear western thinking.Therefore i see Nietzsche as a kind of parallel thinker to Castaneda's research put into a far linked Thus Spake Zarathustra context.Today we link each context so deep into the web of threads that shoot off each link, by typing into a little box, and hitting enter.When CC began writing his amazing project he was linking his knowledge of philosophy and his mysterious knowledge of the world of ancient native practice.Here is the real academic coming through but with a reflexive coming into his own time, he deconstructs our world before our eyes, as he makes another world of the pure imagination.We are initiated at this moment of his coming because this is that novel peak moment of the late 60's when we were poised for our assemblage points to be moved and shaken.
Where Nietzsche began his journey to the twilight of the idols, and saw his nagual in a horse's eyes, his seer looked back at him, his will had passed through the tales of power, and the eternal return of the same, weaves its sorcery through the dead god of reason's mirror to superstition and civilization in its free fall of tragic masks.
it's here that Dionysus rides in on the ass, like a Castenada april fool, we stalk him through the streets of western philosophy and the seperate reality begins its magic passes over our cliff note meditations on the abyss of seeing.
WE are Carlos looking over that mountian cliff, about to take wing off the edge into OTHER WAYS OF KNOWING.
Amy Wallace
teacher/disciple
'Furthermore, the knowledge of witchcraft is thought by the Yaquis to be "an inborn quality," a power that cannot be taught or inherited. This statement directly contradicts Castaneda's accounts of the art of Yaqui sorcery as a cycle of apprenticeship handed down across generations from a "benefactor" to his "chosen man." '
This teacher/disciple dynamic seems to often be frowned upon in the West. But I think it is very valuable. I don't think either party necessarily chooses to engage in such a relationship, I think rather there is an unavoidable resonance between them, that is very benificial to learning.
' he awkwardly introduces himself to the strange old Indian. As their eyes meet, Castaneda suddenly finds himself captivated.'
directly
i rather think it is more indirect, in fact finding contradictions, direct or indirect, is part of the mystique, of this, where as we in our western educated minds we are in constant contradiction of the four directions.As it were.We are asked to recapitulate our "normal reasoning" and allow for contradictions to play out, until at the point they no longer contradict themselves.This would be where the real work begins, as most people never stop their conditioning long enough to experience a "seperate reality" the teacher/deciple configuration does a kundalini sumersult or not at all.
But we have to always find new ways of deciphering this cycle of becoming.AS the language is always in flux and fire.
the legend of CC
Hi Allan,
I also appreciate the "legend" of Castaneda. While I might want to believe that much of what he describes in the books actually happened, I don't find much evidence for it. Also, the system he lays out doesn't seem very consistent to me, but rather peculiar and confusing. There seems to be an intentional confounding of fact as well as reason throughout the books - this creates a rhetorical reality where we can almost suspend our disbelief. However, from the first volume, where he describes smoking mushrooms, to much of what is described in all the rest of the books, there is something off and oddly distorted about the whole enterprise.
I would see CC and his tensegrity as a stage - kind of a murky one - in the return of the shamanic archetype into modern culture. Alberto Villoldo or the author of The Four Agreements seem to be doing this work today with more validity and less self-serving hogwash. However I will always appreciate CC for his great imagination, and I do suspect there are gleanings of real teachings buried in his works.
"Will the transformation."-Rilke
for the guy that gets distracted by "poetry"
so, a work of such literate intent,is partly self serving hogwash,partly "great imagination" well what is it then?
who cares if it"really happened" did Howl really happen? did Walden Pond really happen?
did you experiencing that you were Quetzaquotal really happen?
why don't you try writing a geat poem of imagination about that, and see if there is any really happen?
or are we just privy to your great insights, that really happened?
did 'The Four Agreements' really happen? or do we suspend our belief and just use it with all the other works of great imagination?
Consider the messenger
Hi Alan,
Thank you for contributing your essay here. At Reality Sandwich, we are dedicated to creating an environment where differing opinions can meet and intermingle, with the hope that we may broaden our individual perspectives and come together as a community. I found your piece compelling – you have clearly been moved and enriched by Castaneda’s writings, and have presumably followed his work for much of your life. This is a wonderful thing, to be sure, and nothing that I would ever wish to disparage or discredit. From your explication (and from the numerous responses my own post received), I submit that Castaneda has contributed a meaningful system of knowledge through his many books.
I’d like to take this opportunity to respond to your concerns with my essay. I feel that this is an important discussion to have, so I hope you’ll forgive the length of my reply. I wrote this piece several years ago for a university course on the American Southwest (hence the tone of my “peculiar pronouncement”). As a psychonaut and countercultural history buff, I’d long been intrigued by Carlos Castaneda, though I’d not yet read anything by him. I decided to pick up a copy of The Teachings of Don Juan and do some research into the phenomenon that surrounds his books. Like so many others, I was struck by the magic and wisdom of Don Juan’s world, well aware of the transformative effect Castaneda has had on readers for nearly four decades. I was also aware of a controversy over the authenticity of his work, and I endeavored to explore the details of this debate as part of my research.
As I soon discovered, the body of writings that seek to discredit Castaneda’s dozen or so books is nearly as voluminous as his oeuvre itself. After weighing the diverse arguments of Richard de Mille, Gordon Wasson, Daniel Noel, and finally, Jay Courtney Fikes, I came to the conclusion that Castaneda had likely plagiarized and fabricated the work of ethnography that launched him as a young anthropologist to academic (and later, cult-hero) stardom. The evidence to support this conclusion is, in my mind, wholly convincing.
Castaneda’s most prominent critics come from many walks of life, pose distinct and well-supported arguments, and seem to be working from unique perspectives in their debunking efforts. De Mille, it appears to me, is essentially an investigative journalist and critical thinker. His 1976 book Castaneda’s Journey raised the first public doubts about the legitimacy of the developing Don Juan book series, the third of which (Journey to Ixtlan, 1972) earned Carlos a Ph.D. and $1 million in sales profits, making him a true celebrity in both academic and popular circles. Along a different vein of criticism, the self-taught ethnomycologist Gordon Wasson’s suspicions of Castaneda are rooted in his personal experiences working with Mexican shamans that practiced mushroom rituals.
Anthropologist Jay Courtney Fikes offers entirely novel (and most compelling) evidence that Castaneda constructed the Don Juan character based on his encounters with a Huichol “shaman,” Ramon Medina Silva, featured in the work of UCLA anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff. In his 1993 book Carlos Castaneda, Academic Opportunism, and the Psychedelic Sixties, Fikes condemns Myerhoff (and fellow UCLA alumni and Castaneda cohorts, Peter Furst and Diego Delgado) whose sensationalized depictions of Huichol peyote rituals stoked an invasion of disillusioned Western youths into Mexico’s aboriginal lands. He states: “American youth, suffering from a crisis of meaning which became especially acute as the credibility of the ‘establishment’ diminished in the mid-1960s, abandoned tangible political objectives to pursue ‘tales of power’ … disseminated by a disorganized group of collaborators interested in profiting from meeting the unmet [societal] demand for gurus and mysticism.” (Fikes 136)
Here, it seems Fikes is in agreement with your suggestion that the influx of “enlightenment-seekers” was due to a larger anomie borne out of the secularized academic atmosphere. Yet as a dedicated researcher of Huichol culture, Fikes also witnessed firsthand the detrimental effects of misrepresenting and caricaturing Native American peoples, as I recount in my essay; his reproach for Castaneda, then, is based upon his deep respect for genuine indigenous and shamanic knowledge, which he feels has been appropriated and maligned by Castaneda’s fictions.
I don’t want to belabor the details of the authenticity debate here – if anyone desires further discussion of these points, I suggest checking out the work of some of the above-mentioned writers, of which there is plenty to explore. I’m only raising the banner of Castaneda’s foremost detractors to point out that they come from disparate backgrounds and philosophies. This is not, as you suggest in your essay, a simple case of narrow-minded academics bristling against an iconoclast’s “mind blowing” worldview. In the case of Wasson and Fikes, especially, we are talking about individuals who have openly accepted the validity of a “separate reality” through their own rigorous work with shamanic cultures. It is precisely because of their passion for these alternate ways of knowing that they felt moved to question the veracity of Castaneda’s anthropological fieldwork. While it’s certainly likely that some Castaneda critics are motivated by a secular-materialist’s Skepticism towards “anything other than Western thought,” it is assuredly possible to both accept the reality of a shamanistic worldview while casting doubt on the Don Juan legend.
I am somewhat surprised that you chose to quote from Salon’s 2007 article by Robert Marshall, “The dark legacy of Carlos Castaneda”. I had not yet discovered this piece until finding it referenced in your essay. After reading it, I have to say, I would be hard-pressed to find a more concise, even-handed inquiry into Castaneda’s dubious legitimacy than what this article delivers. Yet beyond this, Marshall thoroughly explores the debased, sinister side of Castaneda that few knew, and about which details have only recently begun to surface. I chose not to venture into this territory when researching my essay, but I now find it impossible to ignore the direct relationship between Castaneda’s personal life and his literature. Marshall describes in lurid detail the secretive Hollywood sex cult that Castaneda began to assemble in 1973; the brainwashing of its members, forced to sever ties with parents and loved ones; the fixation on suicide, which likely drove several members to kill themselves; and the capricious, hypocritical behavior of the cult’s guru-leader, obsessed with satisfying his own personal desires.
It was during the 25-year evolution of this sect that Castaneda penned the majority of his books. Certain elite members of his inner sanctum appear in his narratives throughout this period, attending the literary Carlos on his adventures with Don Juan. Marshall explains how, according to former cult member Amy Wallace, Carlos conjured up events in his books specifically to manipulate members of the group to bend to his will. In The Eagle’s Gift (1981), Castaneda writes of the dramatic ascension experience and 10-year interdimensional sojourn by inner circle “witch” Carol Tiggs, who triumphantly returns through a space-time portal to be declared the “nagual woman.” At the time, Tiggs was estranged from the group, but as Marshall notes, “Wallace believes this was an incentive to get Tiggs to rejoin.” (It worked.)
(In response to some of the points in your essay where you quote from Castaneda’s books to refute the arguments of his critics, I find it likely that he also manipulated his narratives to shoot down these looming controversies. He was, of course, aware of the charges raised against him; for such a “calculating” man, surely concerned with his legacy, it could only be expected that he would re-sculpt his legend over the years to render it unassailable.)
As quoted by Marshall, Wallace also states: “[Carlos] became more and more hypnotized by his own reveries…. I firmly believe Carlos brainwashed himself.” And later in the article: “If he hadn’t presented his stories as fact … it’s unlikely the cult would exist. As nonfiction, it became impossibly more dangerous.”
Such comments are echoed by other close associates, like devotee Gaby Geuter, who told Marshall: “Florinda, Taisha, and the Blue Scout [key members of the cult] knew that it was a fantasy structure. But when you have thousands of eyes looking back at you, you begin to believe in the fantasy.”
From these candid avowals by his closest companions, it appears, again, that Castaneda’s bestselling books are bogus as works of anthropology – or as nonfiction, for that matter. (Marshall also suggests a mutually beneficial arrangement between Castaneda and his publisher, Simon and Schuster, to uphold the Don Juan mythos as legit.) This is not to say that he wasn’t possessed with a powerful gift as a writer, or blessed with a rare ability to impart a meaningful system of knowledge about non-ordinary states of being, plant allies, etc. Many have attested to the real-life benefits of the philosophy Castaneda conveyed. But we should also be willing to acknowledge that he did so dishonestly, under the cloak of, at first, scientific scholarship, and enduringly, a stamp of factual authority.
Perhaps, as Amy Wallace contends, this ruse was orchestrated to perpetuate the allure of his self-styled mystique, to draw in fresh converts to his revolving-door cult. Going back to his UCLA days, maybe this was initially just an open-and-shut case of academic opportunism, as Fikes maintains. Both circumstances, I would argue, have produced casualties – in cultural misinformation, in academic disgrace, and possibly in human lives.
So, what is Castaneda’s legacy all about? As we have both shown, reflecting upon this complex man’s life and formidable influence, it is quite easy to be of two different minds about it. All things considered, I am left with this thought: In our exaltation of a powerful message, we should also stop to consider the messenger.
Regards,
ST Frequency
no matter how much you find fault, which is your bent
you did not write the Castenada books, nuff said.
your consideration of the messenger is a cottage industry.
maybe you should consider your own message now, in the light of your critique.
see what happens?
Carlos Casanova
John Lash has recently had a few things to say about ol' Carlos and Wallace's book:
Carlos Casanova - Sex and the Sorcerer
My Thoughts.
it is sad, but true. and yet....
castaneda's books have been amongst the most formative of my life. i have read them and re-read them many times. after all of this, and much research, i have come to the conclusion that castaneda was most likely 'making it all up.' his books, when correllated with the spiritual movements in the society at large, almost always seem to be distillations of what everyone else was saying, integrated. the entire metaphysical system begins to parallel vajrayana buddhism very closely, for example. the only real difference being the idea that a teacher is wholly and completely necessary to progress. this is ironic, because carlos, in the books, reads from the tibetan book of living and dying to don juan, and don juan knocks it.
however. as a collection of wisdom, and an illustration of the apprentice becoming the adept becoming the master, it stands above most every thing else i have read. carlos attempted to harness the truth for his profit, and he hurt a lot of people, by all accounts. but -- the message will outlive the messenger. the castaneda books were virtually the beginning for me in the study of conciousness, and were a reliable roadmap for a large portion of my journey.
as mentioned, the concepts of 'intent', 'dreaming', 'stalking', 'stopping the world'; the explication of cultural milieu and the effects of social conditioning; the discussions of 'silent knowledge'; the bare-knuckled confrontations with self-pity, self-importance, and the techniques for destroying 'petty tyrants'. all of these helped break me from a more selfish pursuit of 'magical power', and garnered a greater and greater interest in freedom and self-realization/actualization, and impeccability. nothing carlos did can take that away from me.
they have, and will, help others similarly over the years and years. i truly believe that, at the end, more good than harm will have come of it. the truth wins out, always; because the truth is, and everything else isn't.
but carlos himself was apparrently quite a bastard, and a lying one at that. and it would be wrong to pretend otherwise.
"You must *be* the change you wish to see in the world." Mahatma Gandhi
Mythically & by Newton?
My main question is: "How can we live authentic mythic lives, pregnant with meaning, with a completely naturalistic/Newtonian worldview?"
I do not believe an answer has been found, but that there are fragments of an answer to work from.
The "Newton" bit is to counteract the tendency to try and take a "Quantum Out," as if Quantum Mechanics excused any and all belief.
Fairy-logic
Hi LionKimbro,
Check out Daniel Pinchbeck's recent column for Conscious Choice, "Enlightenment Reason or Occult Conspiracy?" -- it touches on a lot of what you're saying.
-st
Regardless. . .
No matter what one thinks about the reality of Don Juan, the information imparted by the books, in my mind, is what matters. Sometimes great truths must be clothed in fictions. . . There are things that can be said for either case, though.
One must keep in mind the concept of the Flyer's Mind when reading Castaneda, and this is a concept only mentioned in his last book, yet the idea is prevalent throughout when you go back and look at the previous material. It is similar to the idea that early Gnostics had of the Archons, and also what Rudolf Steiner mentions about Ahriman sharing with us his mind in order to deceive us, and ultimately use us for sinister purpose.
I think Carlos Castaneda was an asshole, personally. The whole Tensegrity thing, and his whole cult following is, well, it's bullshit! "Don Juan" talks a lot about self-importance and places a heavy emphasis on eliminating it, and it seems that it is something that Castaneda ultimately succumbed to in a big way. Supposing that Castaneda really did meet the real deal and learned from a Don Juan, then it stands to show that he fucked up and squandered an amazing opportunity that a very select few will ever get. Supposing, on the other hand, that it was all fabricated, it goes to show that Castaneda could not swallow his own medicine and he is certainly separate from the ideas expressed in his novels, atleast that's the case in my opinion.
But let's assume that Don Juan did exist, and this all was true. Why do the "shamanic" methods not match up with anything encountered by credible anthropologists? Well, considering how far out this material is, it is possible that it is a way of knowledge that exists outside of culture. Also, we know only so little of these ancient cultures such as the Maya and Toltec, and what we do know directly is sourced from descendants long removed from the real experience of the original culture. Consider our present knowledge of the cultures very watered down fairy tales. We also do know that these ancient cultures once had some sort of amazing wisdom, and that that wisdom is disappeared along with them. The reality of Don Juan becomes less unlikely after considering this aspect, although no one knows for certain.
Another thread to follow when reading Castaneda is Intent, which is their way of describing a vast Intuition. Other words have been used to describe it such as Conversation With the Holy Guardian Angel, or even just "going with the flow". A connection with a Universal ideal I think is the goal of life, and so Castaneda is not far from the mark there.
When stripped of all the absurd contexts and surreal events, much of the actual information imparted through Castaneda's books is insightful and at times poetic. Especially since no one has a claim on Truth, Castaneda's path should be considered along with all others that deal with the Unknown and the further evolution of awareness. The thing that many people miss about Castaneda's work, though, is that you have to actually put it into practice and experience it physically to begin to "get" it even slightly. A simple intellectual understanding of it is not sufficient to judge it's validity either way, and I implore you all to try it on for yourselves, there's just a lot of reading between the lines that has to happen to glean all the relevant information from it!!!
an important discussion
the surreal absurd context
see, here it is, actually we never strip it, of the surreal context, as in actuality in actualized reality, all there is, is the surreal, the surreal context, that we layer our perceptions over, there is no stripped down version of this process, that we play a game of strip poker with the meaning that is under the language, and then we get the wild card tossed aside, and now in all its naked truth we see the nude furniture of the words that really are what all the absurd situations lead up to, like a clown that suddenly delivers the knock out blow, the sucker punch line, the killer diller of the high jinx, the squirt in the eye of the spritzer bottle, and now if we just could stop laughing at our eureka discovery, in all its amazing complexity and at once that simple revelation,
here is the final real meaning of the words that are couched in all the zanny spoof of our senses, that the clever, the too clever author weaved his gems of wisdom that have been passed down through the ancient sorcerer grape vine to us captivated stooges for any shamanic symbolic language that will deliver the goods in a nice neat package of formula, that if we could just wrap out brains around the chosen words, "stalker" "flyer" "assemblage points" ect. now we can begin the real work now that its all been deciphered, sorted, englished, labeled the dug up artifact of knowledge, and our westernized psyches can get back to the task at hand, and when we have been transformed we can turn around and write about it with a real sense that we have figured out the reason that Don Juan is so fictional yet so familiar in a strange way. No it's not how it works, you totally missed the point, once again, you silly follower, there is no hidden message, no secret teaching, no maze of magical strip downs of our conditioning, none of that matters, there is only the surreal context, the endless narrative, that leads you around in circles, nothing more nothing less. Castenada, just was a very intense absurdist.So intense in fact that e all made a shamanic circus out of it, that the ring master, was laughing his ass off thinking we would really believe in those silly exercises, tensegrity, oh you impeccable, pecking order seekers.You, New Age nincompoops.You looking for arcane knowledge with a magnifying glass on the ceiling.Now read your Buckminster Fuller!!!
"tensional integrity", and get down to the netty gretty.
"Burning down the house" ...take me to the river...same as it ever was,...eternal return.
..
i really enjoy your defense and support of Castaneda's work. when i was a confused 16 year old A Separate Reality really spoke to and about me. for once i could relate to something, because i have never been like everyone else. i have read most of his books through two and three times as well as scouring the net for info including the site SustainedAction.org which at the time poked some wholes and put some doubt on Castaneda, yet after reading many of the documents posted there i laughed to myself. it seemed brutally obvious that if you HAVE read his books and have learned anything from them, opened yourself to the message, then you would know that it doesnt matter how the message came to be. if there was a Don Juan or not.. doesnt matter. even in the teaching this is supported, the apprentices are instructed to, "Believe without believing." and Don Juan mentions at some point that people need to be tricked into entering the sorcerer's world. whether a transmission of ancient art, covertly channeled material, or pure imagination it in no way is contradictory to the message and the way presented. it is not like the religious leader preaching honesty who deceives and takes advantage of his followers. castaneda's message supports his actions in whatever way his work came to be, and my perspective is to believe without believe or even believe both to be true, he is genuine trickster in the fact that after close examination i do not know what to believe, a state i enjoy.
::reading back through the previous posts i suppose Jarett A Sanchez has said it better than iam able to at the moment. :)
the works of Castenada
Gawain
The writings of Castenada formed the backdrop for my early spiritual explorations in the 70's. I read his first book and those thereafter as soon as they were in the book stores. They confirmed what I was experiencing as a young adult, that the dream world was as much a reality as the one I was supposedly really living. I have read and reread the books many times but have not felt the call for years. All of what you need to know in an experiential fashion is described there. To balance one's life with one foot in and one foot out is no easy endeavor. It is thee endeavor and Castenada knew it. We are all villians and priests.We know only so little...
"Also, we know only so little of these ancient cultures such as the Maya and Toltec, and what we do know directly is sourced from descendants long removed from the real experience of the original culture."
Sorry, but that's simply not true. "We" know a great deal directly from the artifacts, buildings, monuments, and texts that were created by the ancient people themselves. Ignorance of this evidence is no justification for saying "we know only so little" even though the reality may be you know only so little.
For the ancient Maya, there is a tremendous amount of information available for texts that they themselves wrote, as described in the recent NOVA (PBS) documentary Cracking the Maya Code:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/mayacode/
There is also a huge and growing corpus representing the Maya equivalent of graphic novels, the elegant vase paintings that record details of both mythology and courtly life:
http://research.famsi.org/kerrmaya.html
For a representative compendium of what is known about the ancient Maya, I recommend The Ancient Maya (6th edition) by Robert Sharer & Loa Traxler:
http://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Maya-6th-Robert-Sharer/dp/0804748179/
It is just a starting point, of course.
As for the ancient Toltecs, this depends upon what definition of "Toltec" is being used. The Pre-Columbian term, as used by the Mexica (Aztecs), was a reference to all of the earlier cultures who had come before them, including the Olmecs, Teotihuacanos, the residents of Tula, and many other pre-Aztec groups in central Mexico and elsewhere. A great deal is known about them as well, and not only from their descendants, but from the objects made, places built, murals painted, and monuments carved.
http://archaeology.asu.edu/teo/
Castaneda enjoyed cultivating an aura of mystery about himself and indigenous peoples. The reality is quite different, but requires a great deal of legwork and homework to understand and appreciate. Unfortunately, there are few good shortcuts.
actually Casteneda did not have to cult
BBC doc on CC
ran into this documentary yesterday, and today ran into the extensive posts and comments here on Mr Castaneda - great discussion.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8575648331106173390&hl=en
peace.
Thanks!
This looks really interesting, Andy -- thanks!
-st
so either Carlos became parody of himself
datura