Letters to the Editor
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yeah, me too, JimC
and i don't apologize for bitter envy and resentment. i hate the successful especially the young rich good-looking brilliant and charming - most especially if they are kind as well. it's the glue that holds my soul together.
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he is still very much alive
When living in Rome for 3 years I got in contact with a active and vivid group that still follows Castanedas ideas. They've changed their names, there even is a kind of guru who choose witches to live with him. Men and woman are told to stay away from sexual activities to develope at most to become like a bobble of light and they believe in dying like Castaneda. After so many years I find it very strange that there is no doubt at all about him and his fiction, they read his books like everydays bible and travel around the world to attend the seminars by Tensigrity. Only the fact that most members of this group are physiotherapists or biologists makes me wonder what attracts especially them. Sorry for my english, it has become a bit rosty.
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We want more, but ...
why does more have to be weird? Why can't work and play and home and family and travel and getting high and sex and just breathing in and out be enough? The "more" we seek might be in realizing that THIS is the life we get, the only one. Let's live it.
Enlightenment, such as it is, can liberate. But no one ever said it's supposed to make you feel good about yourself or anybody else.
Many cannot face the prospect of this--a profound, simple truth that philosophers have known for ages: your are born, you awake, you go on, you die. Your life is, in short, a relatively brief dream bordered on each end by vast expanses of subjective nonexistence.
For some, that simple fact is depressing, and they will believe almost anything a charismatic autority figure tells them in order not to face it. Others find that fact liberating.
That said, believing in "more" of a spooky or magical sort is probably usually harmless. Just like the occasional puff or two of the kind.
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Responding to one of the letters...
"After creating a new genre, assholish ignorant takedowns of perceived liberal/left cultural icons with crappy, sensationalistic lead paragraphs to beef up your New Republic bona fides, who will believe you anymore?"
There's a pervasive belief that somehow New Age nuttery is in some way associated with liberal/left politics. How, exactly? Consider the New Age types like Shirley Maclaine who proclaim that we don't have to do anything about issues like poverty because the souls of the poor or otherwise disadvantaged chose freely to spend a lifetime experiencing that kind of life. Consider the number of control freaks and cults and the focus on power and money in the New Age business, and tell me you really see anything politically progressive in that.
There's nothing wrong or inherently oxymoronic about being a rational and intelligent liberal.
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This Isn't Carlos Castaneda
The works attributed to Carlos Castaneda following Journey to Ixtlan were, in fact, not written by him (Tensegrity??).
Carlos died of sepsis in Cripple Creek CO. This article is discussing an imposter.
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personal attacks
I can only conclude that those who dismiss the content of Castanada's books as "these phony "teachings" of a dangerous, misogynist hoaxter" and suchlike, have never actually read them. Many writers have had a lot wrong with their lives, but this does not detract one iota from what they wrote. An idea is neither fact nor fiction, just an idea. If you disagree with ideas, you should deal with the ideas not the proponent of those ideas.
Also, calling him the godfather of an incredibly self-indulgent movement like the 'New-agers' is ridiculous. Yes, no doubt a lot of new-agers read his first couple of books, but us soon as the writings veered away from the drugs they soon lost interest and even joined the ranks of his detractors.
Castaneda described in great detail other worlds. That's all there is to it, you can make what you will of it (!) but personal attacks on the man's own possible weaknesses are irrelevant. I have a friend in the Four Corners monument who is a native activist, quite well known. He has white women all over him, wanting an indian baby. Do you blame him for obliging? Do you never succumb to temptation, and does that succumbing, to whatever your thing might be, invalidate all your ideas?
A lot of people don't like what he said because it goes against the self-congratulatory nonsense most modern 'mind, body, spirit' guff sells. At least Castaneda attempted to describe something actually different, as opposed to just platitudes designed to be popular with the self-indulgent culture of our times.
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Wow.
I read the first three or four Castanada books back in the early 90s. They were a lot of fun, but I didn't take them seriously. Maybe the whole "If you realize you're dreaming, make your dream-self look at your dream-hands and you can control the dream." That was kind of cool, but I've never been able to pull it off. Assuming, that is, that it even works.
However, with that said, how could anybody actually BELIEVE that those books were anything but made up? Maybe the first one, but after that? C'mon!
I recently watched a PBS special on Jim Jones. I've always been fascinated by how these crazy prophet guys get their followers. Castanada sounds like Jones on a much smaller scale.
On the other hand, I know a really good Yoga instructor who complains that he gets two or three people per year who are those exact kind of joiners. They've decided he's their magic guru guy and they'll do whatever he tells them. It creeps him out. He gets rid of them by making some all-too-human mistakes (pulling a muscle, talking about his divorce, complaining about money).
Also, just FYI, the way many people look at Castaneda's cult and ask themselves "how could anyone believe this is anything other than fantasy?" is exactly how I view all religions. Catholic/Jew/Protestant/Wiccan/Islam/Voodo/Hindu It's all fantasy.