Did Carlos Castaneda make it all up?

[manitou]

Listening to that is fairly convincing to me that he did meet someone and that at the stage of the recording he had stepped back from this knowledge as it was too much for him. His later works are really reinterpretations by him of the message he was given ... and become increasingly elaborated and perhaps more and more invented ... but I have to say everything up to the Eagles Gift is extraordinary and inspiring (and as far as my knowledge goes completely accurate). Later books also are good I'm not discounting them but I think he began to invent a little too much by then ....

 

 

Seems like he stepped back from the knowledge placed before him with regularity. It was always too much for him. Remember how several times he had decided that he never wanted to see that old fool again, as long as he lived? And then, sure enough, a year later he'd find himself down in Mexico one more time, looking him up or "running into him"...

 

I sometimes wonder if the suicide thing at the end wasn't actually the ability of he and a few others to step into a lucid dream and take up residence there? Who's to say it wasn't? I was always very impressed that don Juan was able to invoke a lucid dream at will, it seems - and bring Carlos into it. Now that's talent, a mutual lucid dream. What mind control.

[Nikolai1]

My guess is, Castaneda was a true and great visionary and mystic. Maybe he gained his powers through peyote, maybe he didn't: it doesn't matter which.

 

Yes, he made it all up. Don Juan was not some real personage that existed in time and space and who others could have gone to chat with if they'd wish. Don Juan WAS Castaneda and this doesn't matter at all. Someone had those ideas and everyone who reads the books sincerely recognises the greatness within them.

 

So why did he do it? Why the elaborate hoax?'

 

Anyone who has any kind of original, extraordinary ideas is held back by the ordinariness of their own physical person. They are never going to be believed, and will probably be abused as a madman. This is the problem that all original people have. Jesus himself complained that 'the prophet is a nobody in his own country' (John 4:39). But the moment he crossed the border and become the 'exotic foreigner' he was listened to by the thousands.

 

Castaneda did not cross the border in person, he put his own outstanding genius into the words of an fictional alter-ego: Don Juan.

 

This is where Castaneda crapped out, to use his words. He told a lie, stuck with the lie and forced himself into isolation and eccentricity.

 

With more courage he would have waited to become the sorcerer he wrote about. He would have quietly gone about his business and the people would have gravitated to him. It is only when we try to hard to preach that the uncomprehending masses reject us. So he would have let himself be the teaching and by being the real one himself he could have let Don Juan be fictional. He wouldn't have isolated himself and his teaching would have been heard.

 

I think the modern reader has to separate the teachings from the catastrophe that Castaneda the man became.

[9th]

http://youtu.be/bMR53zHrdzg

[PLB]

Apech,

I am glad to hear you say,
"I also feel that he did meet someone who taught him something - just an instinctive thing really."

For me, the whole story he spins is an attempt to deal with an encounter he was unwilling to speak of.

Maybe a demand that was made of him.

An exchange.

[manitou]

My guess is, Castaneda was a true and great visionary and mystic. Maybe he gained his powers through peyote, maybe he didn't: it doesn't matter which.

 

Yes, he made it all up. Don Juan was not some real personage that existed in time and space and who others could have gone to chat with if they'd wish. Don Juan WAS Castaneda and this doesn't matter at all. Someone had those ideas and everyone who reads the books sincerely recognises the greatness within them.

 

So why did he do it? Why the elaborate hoax?'

 

Anyone who has any kind of original, extraordinary ideas is held back by the ordinariness of their own physical person. They are never going to be believed, and will probably be abused as a madman. This is the problem that all original people have. Jesus himself complained that 'the prophet is a nobody in his own country' (John 4:39). But the moment he crossed the border and become the 'exotic foreigner' he was listened to by the thousands.

 

Castaneda did not cross the border in person, he put his own outstanding genius into the words of an fictional alter-ego: Don Juan.

 

This is where Castaneda crapped out, to use his words. He told a lie, stuck with the lie and forced himself into isolation and eccentricity.

 

With more courage he would have waited to become the sorcerer he wrote about. He would have quietly gone about his business and the people would have gravitated to him. It is only when we try to hard to preach that the uncomprehending masses reject us. So he would have let himself be the teaching and by being the real one himself he could have let Don Juan be fictional. He wouldn't have isolated himself and his teaching would have been heard.

 

I think the modern reader has to separate the teachings from the catastrophe that Castaneda the man became.

What an excellent analysis, Nikolai! What has struck me about the Castaneda path is that you can never convince anyone whom the path didn't 'grab' just how incredibly viable that path is, regardless of the man that Castaneda may have evolved into. But if the path did grab you, it grabs you in a serious way (and I truly mean grabbed; my husband was on the Castaneda path, I was on a different one, and his path literally reached out and grabbed me in the strangest ways). Before long I was entrenched in it. But evolution continued, and I no longer needed the structure of the Toltec path to guide me after a few years. I do continue to use Native American ceremony in healings, because it separates one moment from the next, it designates a piece of ground as being holy or special, and it adds just enough strangeness to the mind of the one being healed (hopefully) that it totally dislodges their assemblage point, as Carlos would say. It makes all things seem possible to them; healing is truly in the mind of the believer.

[manitou]

 

http://youtu.be/bMR53zHrdzg

 

Pablito, is that you??? Great video - and a good metaphor when the stairs increase in size that the path is so much more than it seems at first.

[Coaster]

According to what I have read (so just repeating it), Castaneda had a journal entry about going to a peyote ceremony and participating. Someone researched Castaneda's UCLA Library stacks usage and found that at the exact date and time mentioned in his journal entry, he was in the UCLA Library reading a book on a peyote ceremony.

 

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Here is a similar one, except this is more direct. A close friend of mine worked at one of the first big mail order spiritual bookstores. She filled orders from Rajneesh's ashram for many spiritual books. Some months/years later, the bookstore receives a review copy of a new Rajneesh book, so she reads it... and finds some things familar... and having a whole bookstore at her fingertips, is able to find most of the paragraphs in the book have been lifted from exactly the same books she mailed to Rajneesh months before.

 

Of course, there are dozens of other Rajneesh incidents... it is sad that this whole nonsense is being perpetuated posthumously as "Osho"... but, of course, you get undeniable authority and validity from plagiarizing good sources.

 

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Crowley I don't know much about, but everything I have read about him, gives me the impression that - like many "experts", his skill is in writing. He lived in a period of time where anything about Asia was brand new to Westerners, so what today might be introductory Eastern Philosophy, back then was startingly different. So, your eloquence in talking and writing about these ideas was what made you famous, not any depth of your knowledge or expertise. But that is just an impression from the biographies I have read.

[manitou]

Have you read his books?