Letters to the Editor
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And this, kids,
...is why nobody gives a shit about the hippies anymore. This is a tale of abuse and greed and heartlessness, not of magic.
How can anyone just live a life of lies/self deception like that is just beyond me.
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Carlos Castenada sounds like J.D. Salinger
Though I doubt we'll see that expose for some time to come. Same manipulation of women, same demands to throw away the past, cut off contact with all family members, and live as a slave. Same kind of stupid, dependent women. A couple of men thrown in, in Castenada's case. (Well, at least Salinger doesn't seem to have asked anyone to off themselves...should they be grateful for small favors?) I don’t respect this kind of man, but I don't have much sympathy for the weak minded people who give into them, either. “Oh, dear, you reject me if I don’t follow your rules!” WTF? Some people have no backbone. This isn’t about dark legacies. It’s about dim brains.
But Marshall is working a con as surely as Castenda did. Why is it the “compound” rather than his “home”? What is the supposed sinister motivation behind the praise Wagner’s book received from Updike, and his nomination for the Pen/Faulkner Book Award? (I suppose if they think the writing’s good, they think the writing’s good.) Why try to make this sound like a David Koresh/Charles Manson thing when it’s really just a money scam and some weak minded sycophants. And then, after all the portentous language, there’s the “he wasn’t all bad” sop near the end.
This article is mostly a lot of hot air.
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It Doesn't Really Matter
Does it?
Marshall has a lot of maybes lined up, but not a helluva lot of facts. Prove to me don Juan didn't exist, that Casteneda was a cult leader and charlatan. Then prove Jesus never existed and the choice of all but one of his close followers of grisly deaths rather than lying to protect themselves (suicidal gestures surely) - never happened, and...what difference does it make? What does any of it matter? Either we believe in something or we don't. It doesn't matter the iconography involved. Joseph Chilton Pearce, in the early 70's, went to the trouble to compare Jesus and don Juan, as well as their respective milieus, and the parallels were striking. They also didn't matter. We'll choose something to believe or we'll choose to believe nothing. Which leads me to wonder: Is Nothing sacred?
I am perpetually dumbfounded by the frantic, desperate need of some to kill the compulsion of the rest of us to believe there actually is something more. More! That's all. Just more.
Prove to me there isn't more. Give me a reason to believe - in nothing. At that point maybe I'll become a follower of Robert Marshall. He's got the real truth.
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Nerdnam, you're way off, the hippies were over by 1971
And this, kids,
...is why nobody gives a shit about the hippies anymore. This is a tale of abuse and greed and heartlessness, not of magic.
Why do you have to make hateful generalizations about an entire group of people just because you're under the impression that SOME of them read this book?
By the way, you're not even close to being in contact with the facts. The hippie era was officially dead by 1971, when Castenada's first book came out. Events like Altamount and Kent State took place. The Weathermen formed. Remember that?
It was even official. I remember the hippie era was officially pronounced dead after Altamount.
In fact I think the hippie phenom really ended once the antiwar movement got serious, when college campuses were upended in the riotous school term of 1968-69.
Who read Carlos Castenada's books if it wasn't hippies?
COLLEGE STUDENTS
Everyone at my university had a copy of his book somewhere in their dorm room.
So what lesson can we learn from that?
Should we ban higher education?
By the way, I know of a few thousand HIV patients in California who are deeply grateful to the hippies who started the marijuana counter culture in California. Without that, they'd be dead.
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Lobsang Rampa got there first
Before Castaneda there was the so-called Tibetan monk, Lobsang Rampa. When his hoax was revealed he cleverly claimed that the real Lobsang took over his body! Now that's chutzpah!
At least he skipped the cult phase and simply followed the fine tradition of the British eccentric, moving to Canada and continuing to churn out novels presented as autobiography. His first book,The Third Eye, was also a classic occult novel.
I'm sure there will be others in this fine tradition because there really is a sucker born every minute.
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Koan
We are all trying to find our happiness. That is spiritual life at its best--the adventure of waking up.
The Casteneda books helped us imagine that there was something beyond the spell of our own minds.
Don Juan is as real as you are.
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Truth, fiction and the whole ball of tired old wax
Kenpakk if you are a professional storyteller - whatever that is - then hopefully you are aware of the difference between non fiction and fiction. Whether or not your imagination seems more real to you, whether or not stories can be more truthful than reality - the distinction between reality and fiction is an important one. Try telling someone they can pay you for your work using money or monopoly money. It matters.
And it especially matters when you're projecting your lies all over someone else's culture. Just because we don't know much about American Indian culture doesn't meant there isn't a culture to be known. And it's not okay to lie about it and exploit it just because they're not going to sue and no one is going to ridicule you for it.
Castaneda was a cultural imperialist with no sense of respect for the truth or other cultures. People like that don't have much to teach us except about our own gullibility and wish to believe.
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On the other hand ---
There was some good to come from it all -- The Northern Mexican Yaqui (and also Apaches) are/were hideously impoverished and for several years,they praised Carlos Castaneda because of all the college students who came down there, came up to them -- anyone who looked native -- in a market or elsewhere and said "Are you Don Juan?" To which they usually replied, "Perhaps.What do you want?" And then "Teach me." And then, "Buy my groceries." "Drive me to see my cousin -- he has secret knowledge." "Get me a car."
Perhaps that's all Carlos will be remembered for -- that his stories benefitted a lot of Native Americans.
(Of course, I'm one of those, having read a lot of occult literature prior to reading Don Juan, who thinks if he made it up, I'm even more impressed than if he was no more than the stenographer for a real Don Juan.)