Books - Castenda's flawed legacy

[enquirewithin]

Those who take the Shamanism of the likes of Pinchbeck seriously would be advised to look at the tale of Casteneda's fakery. Jonathan Ott (Pharmacotheon) demolishes Casteneda well.

____________________________________

The Tragedy of Don Carlos

http://singingtotheplants.blogspot.com/

There is a Greek word, hamartia, which is usually translated as tragic flaw, although it connotes more a cognitive than a moral failing — the lack of an important insight, a misperception, a blindness, a failure to perceive ethical and spiritual consequences. The idea of hamartia is often ironic; the very strength that makes the protagonist a hero is what brings about disaster.

A complete biography of Carlos Castaneda has yet to be written. His life in many ways followed a classic Hollywood arc — a trajectory from obscurity to fame and fortune and, finally, to a sort of desperate madness. And the story, too, is a classic tragedy, since Castaneda was undone by the very qualities that brought him his remarkable success. He was charming, boyish, imaginative, clever, filled with imagination, and driven by a need to outwit the world. Castaneda was ultimately undone by a profound hamartia.

For many of us, The Teachings of Don Juan was our first glimpse into a shamanic world at once magical and meaningful, not just for primitive and superstitious people in distant countries, but for ourselves. The character don Juan Matus was the teacher we all yearned for, an initiator into this dark and magical realm — self-contained, charismatic, cynical, intimidating, loving us despite our flaws.

It was all, of course, a fraud. But we were willing to forgive Castaneda, at least for a while, because he was himself the trickster teacher, who had caught the spirit of our deepest needs.

Eventually it all unraveled. The books became increasingly bizarre and inconsistent. Detailed skeptical analysis revealed fiction after fiction. It seemed that every time Castaneda had a new enthusiasm, his purported teachers would have a new teaching. I stopped reading after the third book.

If you were not paying close attention — if you were not within the oddly contoured boundaries of Castaneda's inner circle — it was easy to miss the accelerating weirdness of Castaneda's final years. When he died of liver cancer in 1998, at the age of 72, the impeccable warrior left behind a legal mess, irreparable damage to Yaqui and Huichol cultures, and a core of female cult followers, at least one — and perhaps all — of whom committed suicide.

Soon after Castaneda's death, The New York Times published an article about the lingering legal and familial chaos. In 2007, Salon published a comprehensive article about Castaneda's last days and the fate of his followers, entitled The Dark Legacy of Carlos Castaneda. And in 2006 the BBC produced an hour-long documentary on Castaneda, which you can see here.

Reputation Comments on this post:

nice review, like more objective books, especially when so many enthusiast blindly follow idiocy

[Expat98]

That "Singing to the Plants" blog you linked to is really good. Lots of interesting stuff there.

I don't have an opinion on Carlos Castaneda, as I've never read his books. I probably will at least read The Teachings of Don Juan some time though.

BTW, I could not find the video documentary on the BBC site.

[enquirewithin]

The documentary is here:

http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/loc...tid=121&page=1

It's worth reading one or two of Casteneda's books. The first The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, gives a good idea of what he writes. Like the author of the blog, I only managed to read the first two or three.

[rxbandit]

Yeh, I've read a bit about this. His books are entertaining but I wouldn't trust them for any factual information.

The guy was a coffee baron I believe.

Andy Lechter has a bit to say about him in his book, "Shroom" as well. He also examines Terrence McKenna, Gordon Wasson, and Maria Sabina fairly critically.

sounds like a good read.

[Expat98]

I watched the BBC documentary. It portrays him as a cult-like figure who presented himself as having magical powers and urged his followers to isolate themselves from their friends and family.

I did not know that he had a PhD in anthropology. From the standpoint of anthropology, I think the last sentences of the documentary sum it up:

There are so many centuries of misunderstanding between Europeans and native peoples, and Castaneda didn't do anything to make that better. He only made it worse.

I'm still interested to read his first book though. Should be entertaining if nothing else.

[radiometer]

Yeah, a PhD based on what is now considered to be spurious material.

Don't let this ruin your perception of his earlier novels (which I how I refer to them). They are very enjoyable and useful books.

[Expat98]

Here is another (long) article debunking Castaneda. I will follow this with another article which attempts to rebut this one.

----------------------------------------------------------

http://www.realitysandwich.com/shama...tanedas_legacy

Shamans and Charlatans: Assessing Castaneda's Legacy



When it was published in 1968, Carlos Castaneda’s groundbreaking ethnographic diary, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, received enthusiastic reviews from both the academic community and mainstream critics. Castaneda enjoyed immediate success and went on to write a series of sequels chronicling his apprenticeship to Don Juan Matus, a Yaqui Indian and sorcerer from Sonora, Mexico. Combining anthropological observations with engrossing storytelling, The Teachings of Don Juan represented to many scholars an exciting new methodology in ethnographic literature, inspiring praise from such figures as Margaret Mead and Yaqui scholar Edward H. Spicer, who called the text a “remarkable achievement.”[1] The doctoral committee at UCLA echoed Spicer’s esteem for Castaneda, awarding him a Ph.D. in 1972 for his third book, Journey to Ixtlan.

With fame came scrutiny, however, and the celebrity anthropologist soon met with controversy that would span his entire career. Questions emerged over the existence of Don Juan, Castaneda's representation of Yaqui culture, and the basic authenticity of The Teachings as academics, scientists, and authors identified dubious elements in Castaneda’s ethnography. Today, almost four decades after the book appeared and nine years since its author’s death, the legacy of The Teachings of Don Juan is as much about the consequences of its debated legitimacy as it is about Carlos Castaneda himself.


Richard de Mille, son of Hollywood director Cecil B. de Mille, wrote two books on Castaneda’s published works and was one of his earliest and most outspoken detractors. De Mille argued that Don Juan and his teachings are wholly counterfeit. He presented a scathing indictment of academic malpractice, charging that the UCLA faculty and the University Press should be held accountable for a spurious work of scholarship.


A major point of contention among Castaneda’s critics is the conspicuous absence of evidence to support his claims that he actually did know and study under a Yaqui sorcerer named Don Juan. When a university publishes an account of anthropological fieldwork, it is standard practice to require tangible proofs that the fieldwork actually took place. With The Teachings of Don Juan, argues De Mille, this verification was never made. He claims that basic support materials “did not exist either, except in Castaneda’s highly developed imagination.”[2] De Mille suggests that the book was ultimately printed as a rebellious statement from marginalized sectors of the UCLA intelligentsia against more punctilious rivals. In addition, the university press likely saw in Castaneda’s narrative a viable new youth market: wild-eyed denizens of the mushrooming counterculture, hungry for psychedelic yarns of Mexican Indians and peyote trips.


Regardless of the actual details of publication, the book did exceptionally well in both popular and scholarly markets, achieving unlikely success for a work shelved as anthropology. In addition to its scientific classification, The Teachings of Don Juan bears the authoritative sub-heading, "A Yaqui Way of Knowledge." Many critics find fault with this title, noting that the character of Don Juan bears no resemblance to a Yaqui Indian. Spicer, the anthropologist whose positive review lent early and enduring credibility to the text, admits in the same article that it is “wholly gratuitous to emphasize, as the subtitle does, any connection between the subject matter of the book and the cultural traditions of the Yaquis.”[3]


Although Don Juan is explicitly named as a Yaqui, Castaneda offers no details throughout the narrative to support this claim, and in fact depicts him engaging in activities associated with markedly dissimilar Indian cultures. Don Juan’s use of peyote, datura, and psychotropic mushrooms, for example, is completely divergent from Yaqui tradition and more closely resembles Huichol and Navajo ritual practices. Spicer theorizes that Don Juan, while perhaps of Yaqui descent, is more likely a cultural composite of various Indian and mestizo influences; the subtitle, he assumes, was probably the work of a “publisher [that] went beyond Castaneda’s intention.”[4]


Spicer is not the only Castaneda critic with relevant scientific experience. Revered ethno-mycologist and early psychedelics proponent Gordon Wasson read The Teachings soon after its publication and wasted little time composing a letter to Castaneda. Wasson’s questions, while politely worded, were directed to clear up what he felt to be anomalies in the mushroom rituals depicted in the book. The notoriously candid Castaneda responded with uncharacteristic eagerness, no doubt excited to correspond with the man whose seminal writings on hallucinogenic fungi were a formative influence for him. Yet his replies, as paraphrased in De Mille’s The Don Juan Papers, are curiously vague and evasive. Most interesting is his answer to Wasson’s inquiries about Don Juan’s ethnic origin; in response, Castaneda revises the rough biography offered in The Teachings, explaining that the sorcerer is “not a pure Yaqui” and therefore cannot be situated culturally, “except in a guessing manner.”[5]


As for the subtitle, 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.”[6] 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? De Mille suggests that, in aligning the book with a relatively obscure Indian tribe, Castaneda not only ascribed a scientific legitimacy to his account, but also sought to fashion a “kind of red man no one had ever met,” and in so doing, corner the market on a new pop-cultural archetype.[7]


With the overt nature of the subtitle in effect, whatever Don Juan teaches throughout the text becomes a “Yaqui way of knowledge” by default. It is then unnecessary for Castaneda to prove Don Juan’s “Yaqui-ness” to his readers (unless of course, those readers happen to be Yaqui scholars, in which case he relies on clever obfuscation). In the “Introduction” to The Teachings, for example, Don Juan’s provenance is described quite briefly, and in rather broad terms:


“All he said was that he had been born in the Southwest in 1891; that he had spent nearly all his life in Mexico; that in 1900 his family was exiled by the Mexican government to Central Mexico along with thousands of other Sonoran Indians.”


The “Yaqui Diaspora” is well documented in the historical record, and little is offered in the way of authentication with this short synopsis. Careful to avoid pigeonholing Don Juan into any recognizable ethnicity, Castaneda further muddies the image of his Indian with a caveat acknowledging the sorcerer’s murky heritage: “I was not sure,” he maintains, “whether to place the context of his knowledge totally in the culture of the Sonoran Indians. But it is not my intention here to determine his precise cultural milieu.”


Prefacing the book with this disclaimer, Castaneda effectively shields his ethnography from charges of misrepresentation and fashions his depiction of the “Yaqui” sorcerer in such a manner as to render the Indian cultureless – or as Spicer phrases it, suspended in “cultural limbo.” Don Juan’s origin is thus couched in ambiguity and skillfully blurred, rendering him both inoffensive to discerning critics and appealingly enigmatic to the lay reader.


However innocuous his presentation might appear, Don Juan nevertheless aroused the suspicions of more skeptical readers who exposed further aberrations in Castaneda’s work. As the series progressed, many critics observed glaring discrepancies in the details and chronologies of events, as well as a general drift in tone from scholarly observation towards more whimsical storytelling. Yet even with his first book, Castaneda's literary techniques invited some serious scrutiny. The Teachings of Don Juan is allegedly a translation of the anthropologist’s field notes from Spanish to English, with occasional bracketed asides imparting the polyglot Indian’s original dialogue. Why is it then, wondered some critics, that Don Juan tutors Carlos solely in their lingua franca – especially when certain concepts would doubtless be more genuinely articulated in his native tongue?


The conspicuous absence of Yaqui terminology in the text raised the eyebrows of more than one scholar in Castaneda’s audience, and prominent critics such as Spicer, Wasson, and De Mille sounded the alarm to this anomaly. In his letter to Carlos, Wasson inquires whether he managed to gather any Yaqui translations of the recurring philosophical terms Don Juan uses in his teachings. Castaneda replies that he has, indeed, learned a few Yaqui words but is loath to expound further on the issue. De Mille is far less congenial in his disputation, pointing out that the young anthropologist apparently “learned not one word of Yaqui during his first five years with Don Juan,” and then in later writings, makes reference to only two, rather commonplace terms.[8]


Spanish expressions abound, on the other hand, as Castaneda repeatedly employs the words “brujo” and “diablero” to denote those experienced in the knowledge of Yaqui sorcery. Conveniently for Castaneda, “brujo” is sometimes used in Yaqui culture to refer to dabblers in black magic. The nature of sorcery as practiced by Don Juan, however, differs strikingly from that traditionally understood to exist in Yaqui society. Anthropologist Muriel Thayer Painter notes that, according to Yaqui belief, those persons that practice witchcraft (i.e., sorcery) are timorous and feeble – both traits utterly incongruous with Don Juan’s depiction as a man who has “vanquished fear” and is remarkably fit, “despite his advanced age.” 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 her book With Good Heart: Yaqui Beliefs and Ceremonies in Pascua Village, Painter presents a sampling of Yaqui vocabulary associated with spirituality: “morea,” an equivalent to the Spanish brujo; “saurino,” used to describe persons with the gift of divination; and “seataka,” or spiritual power, a word which is “fundamental to Yaqui thought and life.”[9] It is indeed hard to believe that Castaneda's benefactor, a self-professed Yaqui, would fail to employ these native expressions throughout the apprenticeship. In omitting such intrinsically relevant terms from his ethnography, Castaneda critically undermines his portrait of Don Juan as a bona fide Yaqui sorcerer.


Linguistic concerns aside, the Indian depicted in The Teachings of Don Juan departs from traditional Yaqui behavior in other significant ways, most notably in his usage of entheogenic plants such as peyote and psilocybe mushrooms. As Spicer and several others have argued, Don Juan’s psychedelic forays are “not consistent with our ethnographic knowledge of the Yaquis.” His exploits do, however, resemble those of Native American tribes like the Huichols who have a well-documented history of peyote consumption. Anthropologist and outspoken Castaneda critic Jay Courtney Fikes spent several years embedded in a community of Chapalagana Huichols during which time he became intimately acquainted with shamanism and the ritual practices of Mexican Indians. Once a fan of Castaneda’s work, Fikes soon grew disillusioned with what he viewed as outright caricatures of Huichol culture.


In his 1993 book Carlos Castaneda, Academic Opportunism, and the Psychedelic Sixties, Fikes explains how the character of Don Juan was likely modeled on Ramon Medina Silva, the Huichol shaman popularized by the ethnographic studies of Peter Furst and Barbara Myerhoff. These anthropologists were UCLA graduates and peers of Castaneda, and there is convincing evidence that Ramon and Carlos had actually met prior to the publication of The Teachings. A dramatic waterfall leap performed by Silva, allegedly with Castaneda as a witness, finds a curious parallel in his second book, A Separate Reality, wherein a companion of Don Juan performs similar “supernatural” feats at a waterfall. Further complicating the matter, Fikes also disputes the veracity of Furst and Myerhoff’s ethnography, noting that the Huichol shamanic practices they detail are at odds with his own findings. In developing his account of Don Juan, suggests Fikes, Castaneda likely plagiarized from his classmates a distorted portrayal of Huichol culture in the character of Silva, and unscrupulously applied it to his fictional Yaqui sorcerer, thus perpetuating the misrepresentation of Native Americans across cultural boundaries.


The effect of this caricaturing is two-fold: first, as De Mille and Fikes bemoan, erroneous ethnographic research is quite difficult to remove from the anthropological record once canonized. 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. Indeed, as he remarks in his “Introduction,” Fikes heard “nothing but praise” for Castaneda’s first four books in his graduate studies at the University of Michigan in 1975, despite their disputed validity.[10]


Second, the misrepresentation of the Yaqui people as portrayed by Castaneda negatively impacts Native American culture as a whole. In order to assess this detrimental influence of Don Juan and his teachings, one must consider the social context into which he was born. The decade colorfully referred to as the “psychedelic sixties,” with its adherence to counterculture ideology and self-exploration through drug use, was an era ripe for an iconic figure such as Don Juan to materialize.


As The Teachings of Don Juan introduced thousands of psychedelically-inclined readers to its mysterious sage, the deserts of Mexico were subsequently inundated with droves of “Don Juan seekers” determined to find, and be enlightened by, the elusive sorcerer. Anthropologist Jane Holden Kelley reports the harassment of Pascuan Yaquis during the 1970s by “long-haired hippies” in search of Castaneda’s muse. Seizing an opporunity, the crafty villagers played along, divesting the deluded youths of money, booze, and cigarettes before they realized they had been duped.[12]


It was not the Yaquis, however, but the Huichols who bore the brunt of the hippie influx throughout the seventies. As Fikes explains, the Yaquis “offer relatively little to guru-seekers” since they do not use psychedelics and are somewhat “more acculturated” than the peyote-ingesting Huichols. He relates accounts of traditional Huichols “harassed, jailed, shot at, and almost murdered by guru-seekers” and offers an anecdote depicting the attempted stabbing of his Huichol “father” by a gringo peyote hunter. These incidents grew more infrequent with time, but the lasting impact of The Teachings on Native Americans, asserts Fikes, lies in the marketing of the Don Juan archetype.


New Age “shamans” modeled on Castaneda’s sorcerer exist in abundance in today’s society. Offering travel packages to psychedelic meccas, these pseudo-shamans profit from the misappropriation of rituals and liturgical objects sacred to Native American religions. While some operations offer legitimate and conscientious experiences of traditional shamanism, others are little more than opportunistic scams. As Fikes contends, such shameless exploitation trivializes “Huichol, Yaqui, or any Native American culture by masking or ignoring its true genius.” Furthermore, these profiteers increase the Western fascination with psychedelic drugs such as peyote, bringing unwanted government attention to authentic Native American practices.


A New York Times article from July 23, 1970 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. In the United States, similar legislative measures currently threaten Native Americans' religious freedom. The Smith vs. Oregon decision of the Supreme Court, for instance, banned the ritual use of peyote among members of the Native American Church from 1990 until its repeal in 1993. Within a “War on Drugs” political climate, the mystique engendered by Don Juan and his imitators represents a real and direct threat to the “special rights” Native American cultures have been granted in American society.


Most troublingly, the fallout from nearly four decades of Castaneda-inspired drug tourism in Mexico now threatens to wipe out some indigenous shamanic cultures entirely. According to a recent NPR report, the rampant, unsustainable harvesting of peyote by foreigners and drug traffickers from the desert surrounding Real de Catorce has placed the slow-growing cactus in danger of vanishing from the region. The area is held sacred by the Huichol who regularly pass through the north Mexican desert on shamanic pilgrimages. Once thriving in abundance along their route, the peyote cactus has become increasingly scarce, prompting the Indians to lobby the government for protection of the holy site. If the peyote disappears, so does the unique knowledge system of one of Mexico's most vital remaining tribal cultures.


* * *


Carlos Castaneda reemerged 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. Consisting of movements called “magical passes” (allegedly the lost knowledge of Mexican shamans in the lineage of Don Juan Matus), this discipline was taught by the author himself to devotees at exorbitantly priced seminar-workshops. Castaneda had, in effect, fulfilled the Don Juan archetype, adopting the role of pseudo-shaman as identified by Fikes. His death in 1998 was followed by the release of his final book, Magical Passes, rounding off the Castaneda oeuvre at an even dozen titles. Along with a multi-million dollar estate, the anthropologist-guru left behind him the legacy of a successful career marred by charges of academic fraud and opportunism.


His seminal achievement, The Teachings of Don Juan, has been simultaneously embraced and vilified since its appearance, yet its influence cannot be overstated. Richard de Mille once speculated: “Is Carlos’ multistaged confessional narrative the next step in the history of ethnography, or … a further development in the novel, an ultimate fiction?” Although the answer remains to be seen, almost forty years later it is evident that Castaneda’s work of “ethnography and allegory” has had an indelible effect – for better or worse – on the way the Western world interprets entheogens and Native American culture.

Notes:

[1] Edward H. Spicer as quoted in Daniel Noel, Seeing Castaneda (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976) 31-32.

[2] Richard De Mille, The Don Juan Papers (Santa Barbara: Ross-Erikson Publishers, 1980) p 19.

[3] Spicer as quoted in Noel, Seeing Castaneda 32.

[4] Noel 32.

[5] De Mille, The Don Juan Papers 324.

[6] Ibid, 325.

[7] Richard de Mille, Castaneda’s Journey (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1976) 78.

[8] Ibid, 52.

[9] Muriel Thayer Painter, With Good Heart: Yaqui Beliefs and Ceremonies in Pascua Village (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986) 11, 43-44.

[10] Jay Courtney Fikes, Carlos Castaneda, Academic Opportunism, and the Psychedelic Sixties (Victoria: Millenia Press, 1993).

[11] Jane Holden Kelley as quoted in De Mille, The Don Juan Papers 33.

[Expat98]

Here is the rebuttal to the previous article.

http://www.realitysandwich.com/burni...039s_knowledge


Burning Down the Hall: Castaneda's Critics versus Other Ways of Knowing

by 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.

Other Ways of Knowing

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 fromJuly 23, 1970which

"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

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/2.../12/castaneda/


[xvi] Carlos Castaneda, The Eagle's Gift (Simon and Schuster, 1981), 281-282