Letters to the Editor
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I knew Carlos back in the day...
I was acquaninted with Carlos Casteneda in the late 1960s or early 70s when I worked for the University of California Press one summer after I had finished my graduate studies in English. I was introduced to him by Bob, who was then the head of the UCLA office of the UC Press. Carlos did have an eye for the girls. I used to meet him for coffee and conversation in the student cafeteria. I never saw him as charismatic; I thought he was a bullshit artist/pussy hound, and he actually bored me, as did his book when I read it later. I wasn't surprised when he was revealed as a fraud, but he sure had a lot of people around UCLA snowed, including a fairly well-respected anthropologist and co-producer of the documentary Number Our Days, named Barbara Meyerhoff (now deceased).
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Here's a clue
Quoting from the article:
"Castaneda, who disappeared from the public view in 1973, began in the last decade of his life to organize a secretive group of devoted followers. His tools were his books and Tensegrity, a movement technique he claimed had been passed down by 25 generations of Toltec shamans. A corporation, Cleargreen, was set up to promote Tensegrity; it held workshops attended by thousands."
When your guru starts a corporation, it's time to go.
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traumatized women were seeking security
When I was in Denmark I read the first couple of paperbacks just as if they were science fiction, quickly and lightly.
I merely wanted to see what was going on, I had long before been saved from being "born again" - a student christian movement spin off of the first Billy Graham english crusade and took an existentialist position when I joined the army and started educating myself by reading Aldershot library books.
Sargent's Battle for the Mind is dated, even wrong in application and conclusions, but is still a good description of the emotional mechanism by which a stressed mind falls in love with a political or religious idea, and has since innoculated me against preachers and prophets.
Don't blame the traumatized women for seeking security - part of our herd animal instincts make us want to "belong".
Hugh W
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O, Ye Of Little Faith!
The idiots who criticize and condemn the writings of Carlos Castaneda are pathetic. These people obviously made no efforts at self-examination during their lifetimes. If they had, they would understand it's very difficult to put into words the mysterious and magical. Just because Castaneda's descriptions don't fit within some rigid orthodox writing style doesn't mean they're lies or fiction. I've read almost all his books. I've actually experienced some of the shamanism he attempts to describe. It's irrelevant whether Don Juan is a real person because we're talking about "non-real" worlds and adventures. The ignorant, nit-picking nabobs have no idea what they're talking about. It's irrelevant whether he says the Indians were Yaqui or some other tribe. The only thing that counts is his honest attempts to bring attention to the scary fact much of reality is "unreal." Everything isn't as it seems. We still live in a world controlled by the Flat Earth Society. How else do you explain the insanity in the Middle East? I'm a better person for having read Castaneda's books and experienced the sorcerer's world. FDR said we have nothing to fear but fear itself. The Flat Earthers should learn this simple lesson.
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Transcendence
Just a follow up to my first letter. When Karen Armstrong was interviewed here, one of her main points was that the fertile period that produced many of the world's great religions had one theme in ccommon, that the true nature of reality lay in some ability to transcend the perception and world of the ego. That issues of deep connection, oneness, love all involved getting beyond one's limited view.
Whether Castandeda was "real" in this sense is secondary. Obviously he was talented and "tuned in "enough as a mystical writer to powerfully evoke in people a deep sense that life was magical, awesome, mysterious and that these qualities not only were a product of that which normally is unseen, but required dedication to awaken to them. The enormous impact and resonance for so many people, some very well rspected, that Mr. Marshall recounts vividly attests to how well Casraneda was able to stimulate this archetype, to enable people to thirst for Hamlet's truth, 'There are more things, Horatio, in Heaven and Earth, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Marshall speaks of Redfield and the Celestine Prophesy and argues Castaneda would have been on firmer ground if he had admitted his fiction. Probably so, but they were different times. And the fact is, Redfield did *not* believe the "insights" were fiction, and after the book became a sensation, developed lectures, workbooks and a "Path" that developed from that fictitious story. That one writer may have been more grounded and carried less shadow than the other is to some degree beside the point and for those who chose to immerse themselves more deeply in the "'Way" of those authors/"pholopsophers" as a mystery school to me is more about their personal karma and proclivity than the more general resonance for society that is my concern.
There is abundant evidence that the Morman religion is based on a hoax and was made up by Joseph Smith. There is an argument that Jesus was not real historically but a compendiun of theologies of the time. I personally don't believe that, but on one level it doesn't matter. At this current point in our dealing with the theology of Christianity, there has been a "ressurection" of the Gnostic point of view which was eradicated in the establishment of what became the mainstreanm religion. What is fascinating is that "reality" is nebulous, what is competing are different perspectives, 'stories" of what it means. Ultimately we respond to our story of events, not the event itself. George Bush's ability to carry out the Iraq war was based partly on a deep American belief, our story, that we are the "good guys" and that they are the "bad" guys". When a story wins, it is called "history".
I reiterate my point that in the end it is the power of the story, our response to it, and how we incorporate it into our own personal story that matters most. Castaneda, at his best, tapped into a deep well that fit the times he lived in. That he apparently had such a shadow side is tragic. Personally he may have been more akin to Jim Jones, but Jones never achieved the ability to transmit the powerful sense of connection to the idea of transendence on a more widespread level that could inspire as Castaneda did. And in this is the vast difference between the two.