How can one deny the testimony of Carlos’s academic colleagues, friends and lovers?
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/trickster-the-many-lives-of-carlos-castaneda/id1543278419
How can one deny the testimony of Carlos’s academic colleagues, friends and lovers?
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/trickster-the-many-lives-of-carlos-castaneda/id1543278419
12 Comments
Truth doesn't sell anymore. And most everything is now editorialized in mass media; two things to keep in mind when stumbling across such content.
If you're going to do research you should look at both sides of the issue, and not get your information entirely from the people who had an axe to grind. That's something that the people in that podcast obviously didn't do:
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/wiki/reputation
And besides, nobody gives a s*** about Carlos the man in here. There are no perfect people, and cancel culture will ultimately eat the very rubes that rabidly engage with it.
This sub is about making Castaneda's teachings work, which they clearly do, based on the number of people that come through here and have success rather quickly...many who have never even read the books.
The friction comes when those users cling to the extraneous influences that are counter-productive to this path, or haven't spent enough time absorbing the materials in the Wiki or reading the books to grasp the differences.
Or, you could be one of those soap opera people that relishes cheap drama (which was all intentionally fabricated by Carlos, to break up the group after he died, per the lineage's rule), instead of actually exploring human consciousness, the very topic that Castaneda obsessively wrote about and taught for years.
And I'm willing to bet they never, or barely, mention it in that podcast. And instead want to keep listeners ears glued to as much salaciousness as they can manufacture.
Always examine the intentions behind the media sources you consume.
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Has never applied, no matter how many times people habitually repeat it, trying to make it stick. Especially since Carlos flat out stated "stop trying to make me into your Guru, I don't want it!!!"
And I've listened to such content in the past, never heard an ounce of original information in any of them. They just recycle what Marshall put out in the mid 2000's, or reference the bitter people Carlos kicked out of classes because they were intolerable and obstinate...and were wasting his limited time.
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From the single review of that podcast:
"Entertaining but misinformative
Interesting. Some of the people interviewed, particularly ‘biographer 🙄’ Robert Marshall, have obviously NOT read the books therefore has no credibility in deciphering truth from fiction. His Salon interview is full of falsehoods about the writings, as well as improper contexts galore. Nothing new here, the mystery remains. Highly entertaining podcast though."
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Wasn't me. I don't write reviews.
But I will debate someone who comes into the Castaneda subreddit without acknowledging all the available information, and drops a biased piece of content on our front stoop.
Might as well be a bag of 💩
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I'm a moderator of this sub. I have to look at everything that gets submitted. And that single review is clearly visible at the bottom of the webpage you linked to in your post, which when clicked on in desktop browser reveals around 50 more reviews not readily visible on the Android Chrome version of the page (I missed the tiny 'See All' link).
The world itself isn't strictly non-fiction. Nothing is. Everything we experience is a description, an interpretation...from our own individual viewpoints. A narrative we tell ourselves, individually or collectively as a culture.
From that reputation page linked above:
"In a review of the work of Castaneda, published in a early 1973 edition of the Village Voice, excerpted in Tales of Fictive Power: Dreaming and Imagination in Ronald Sukenick's Postmodern Fiction, by Daniel C. Noel, which was also featured in the later published work Why Nothing Works: The Anthropology of Daily Life, by Marvin Harris source; we see that even some of those who consider Castaneda's work fiction still understand that a story format was the optimal way to relate such knowledge to readers still mired in this reality, which we erroneously cling to as the ultimate truth...when we subconsciously know that it is also just a convincing story we've learned to collectively tell ourselves:
"Once philosophy was stories, religion was stories, wisdom books were stories, but now that fiction is held to be a form of lying, even by literary sophisticates, we are without persuasive wisdom, religion, or philosophy. Don Juan shows us that we live in fictions, and that we live best when we learn to master the art...The sorcerer, the artist, sees beyond any particular form fiction may take to the fictive power itself, and in the absence of fictive power in our lives, maybe it's time for all of us to become sorcerers."
To further hit home the necessity of a literary narrative, instead of a manual format, to present the nature of the separate reality of the second attention to readers, and the mixed-reality of the events of his actual life, from his perspective; Castaneda wrote a book prior to The Teachings of don Juan entitled The Crack Between the Worlds. It was an "instruction" book. He lost the manuscript in a movie theater, and took it as a sign to not write another purely procedural book, and to instead employ a narrative approach into which the functional techniques and direct perceptual observations were integrated, if he was to be successful at properly relating the knowledge he had been tasked with propagating.
The only way to counter-act a delusional narrative, that this reality is the only possible true one, is with an equally powerful and personally-demonstrative narrative; one in which the reader can actually operate and readily discover elements of other realities, which will eat away at the certainties that we've been led to believe are inviolable.
This is why people who "get Castaneda" often say that his work is a gift, while the detractors stomp on that gift and fight to remain in crippling lifelong poverty (and drag as many other's into their pit for company as humanly possible); or to cling to religious belief-systems that have long since been corrupted by the mere fact that they're officially accepted by mainstream society...a society that by design horrendously diminishes our human potential."