I think the case is closed when detractors of Carlos Castaneda have no legs to stand on. I've mulled over this deeply on whether he was a gross charlatan and don juan is just a fiction of our imagination. However, In journey to itxlan chapter 7 he has a slip of the tongue almost a footnote inserted saying he found don juans metaphor interesting i.e in the middle of a trafficked road. Spanish vs. English idiom. the narrative is flowing smoothly and then there is a dissonant element inserted into the text. Also, another slip of the tongue in the Art Of Dreaming CC can't determine the Death Defiers gender denotation by the way don juan uses spanish and switches back and forth. Obviously their wouldn't be a break in the text like that..CHECK IT: I told him that his point was bypassing me. I truly could not understand what he meant by being available. He had used the Spanish idioms 'ponerse al alcance' and 'ponerse en el medio del camino'; to put oneself within reach, and to put oneself in the middle of a trafficked way. As he talked, I realized that part of my confusion was the result of his use of words. He rendered 'death defier' in Spanish as el desafiante de la muerte, and 'tenant' as el inquilino, both of which automatically denote a male. But in describing the relationship between the tenant and the naguals of his line, don Juan kept on mixing the Spanish-language male and female gender denotation, creating a great confusion in me. Charlatan, I THINK NOT
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Looks like you (?) have made efforts to craft a family-tree style flowchart of sorts with of the various members of the sorcerers house:
https://www.reddit.com/user/At_The_Left_Hand_Of/comments/usa223/lineage_of_carlos_castaneda_and_don_juan_matus/
I also made an attempt to list all the core generational members:
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/oyps5u/a_list_of_the_most_used_names_of_the_people_in/
Several people in the private subreddit, just yesterday in fact, were talking about how we should start a concordance/citation version of the all-in-one PDF with notations in the side-margins:
u/danl999
"…Which implies, those dates you came up with could be significant, for comparing what was going on in the open, with what was going on behind the scenes.
We have a huge lesson about how to teach, hidden in the books. But no one has ever taken the time to try to understand it. Except bad players looking for crap to add to their latest "Toltec" book. Find an "unusual" topic, and then lie your fat Miguel Ruiz butt off over it. But since we have the real thing, and hopefully none of us are greedy bad players, we might extract a lot more information than anyone expected, by comparing book timelines .
For instance, the most basic thing I'd like to know, about the timelines: Can we even align all of the chapters to a central time clock? From all the books?
If we could, I'd recommend making that plain in the combined book publication. A lot of work, but easy dates on every new section in the text would be very useful to people....
...An analogy is that there's Bullinger's copy of the king james bible, with notes on the side. From the late 1800s, the renaissance of Bible Analysis. If you want to "really study the bible" as Carlos advised, you're pretty much forced to use his version. Same as a pure king james, but with translation corrections on the side and explanations about who various people mentioned were, and are today. He used the King James instead of "fixing it", because there's also a dictionary available which has each of the king james words, with the original greek or hebrew, and some definitions and helpful info. His commentary was a supplement to a simple dictionary of King James bible words.
But Bullinger went further with other useful tips such as the word "Hell" is not actually in the original. It's mistranslated from 6 different words, none of which have the meaning modern people think they're reading about. That's a Chinese version of hell. But it also tells who "the Hittites" actually are, so you don't go nuts trying to follow the plot. And it gives "subplots". Like, how Jesus had to be born directly from the adamic bloodline. No mixing was allowed or a prophecy would fail, proving God fallible. Which resulted in a pretend prostitute being in his bloodline, seducing one of the kings for the father.
Bullinger brings "clarity" to reading the bible. I wouldn't do such a thing, but a good commentary on the books of Carlos and the witches would be invaluable. And our generation is the one to write that. It could even include "reference technique numbers" on the margin, which allow you to verify what that part of the book claims using material from this subreddit. Keep in mind, no one actually reads Bullinger's commentary. They just check it out once in a while."
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An academic-minded release, from the perspective of a practitioner rather than an academic detractor.
Someone already started an intended series of 20 PDF's that lean in that direction, with side-by-side translations.
It could help pull-out additional tidbits from unexpected sources:
u/danl999
"We could map every single mention of a location or a person who could be researched, like mask makers named the same as the one in his book, and map them.
I started that map project until I noticed, it was draining my attention too much.
You'd think with all the bad player men out there, some of them would have mapped out all of the books, and accurately. But maybe what makes them bad players, is laziness and a need for immediate rewards.
I think it's perfectly possible to find a road leading from that restaurant, to the mask makers house. And then to deduce where their west coast home was. At the end of the bus route leading to the end of the Yaqui wars.
Why? It would obliterate the idea that he made it all up. Even that mexican reporter who saw his "gait of power muscles" down in mexico, where Carlos had been practicing that, helps.
You don't make up things like that, and then use them so much you get weird muscles marching around in the mountains near mexico city."
There's even a newer book we were made aware of, that compiles circumstantial evidence to refute the mainstream media's viewpoint.
If there is anything this subreddit has convinced me of it’s that the timeline issues can be solved by Castaneda having much of his teaching at home, in nonordinary states of awareness, interacting with IOBs and the dreaming bodies of his teachers. He then had to place this as teachings from people physically in Mexico, to make it believable to the audience. In the same way he could simplify things by saying ”Don Juan said” for everything that could be attributed to Don Juan’s world. If Don Juan as a single individual was responsibel for all those teachings, the linear time spent in the field does not add up, realistically. Castaneda himself gives this explanation in Active Side of Infinity when he travels from silence and meets with (some version) of Don Juan. And from reports (that maybe Dan can verify?) we heard that he channeled tensegrity movements from a realm where he could see Lujan, or something similar. For the masses the story was sufficient that the movements were learned in non-weird ways from physical people in Mexico.
Don't forget that Carlos was in fact down in Mexico practicing difficult techniques for tedious amounts of time, in private, and we know that from the Spanish language account of a Mexican reporter, of the weird muscles Carlos had on his calves. It's in the wiki.
Those come from practicing the "Gait of Power" in the mountains. I believe the account makes it clear, he'd been working down there pretty hard for months at the least.
Near Mexico City.
And we now have 9 eye witnesses to the identify of don Juan, plus Anthropologist Michael Harner was invited to meet don Juan and given a mask (probably from the mask maker in the books) when Carlos wasn't yet famous. So no "scam" to uphold yet.
But it was like asking an anthropologist to meet yet another random indian "informant".
I grew up around those. Most anthropologists would blow that off as Michael did. "Informants" are typically just angry/racist native americans. Who hate anthropologists but need their financial gifts.
It's the whole problem where Europeans tried to murder their entire population, and brought them disease plagues which almost accomplished that. And stuffed them onto land they wouldn't have selected if there were no Europeans dominating everything.
That kind of made them grumpy back in the 1960s.
I'm not aware of Carlos going to a different realm to learn from Lujan, but I do things like that almost nightly these days.
That IS the sorcery path. Anything at the end of the J curve can be outside the limits of time and space.
Sorcery rapidly goes past everyone having to be located in the same place, in order to work together. But it's not made clear in the books, for obvious reasons.
A lot of stuff isn't made obvious for the same purpose. To not go so far that ordinary people can't understand the path.
As a practical example, how come we don't get lists of Cyclic Being worlds, and how their actual appearance is different from our own.
Carlos implied some might have 4 arms.
Hopefully that sort of thing is in Carol Tigg's unfinished book.
Any chance we get it one day?
I have no info on it.
But I believe, she will feel compelled to finish it at some point.
We're missing specific info on "navigating".
We get small excerpts. And the witches have done some.
But if Carlos was going to go exploring, he'd have best results with the extra energy of Carol.
She literally pushed me into an IOB tunnel.
I was told by someone, maybe Cholita, that Carlos didn't really like Carol much.
They had some tension going on.
About what, I have no idea.
Cholita knows a bunch.
Jade might know about that too.
Cholita also told me, Amy was NOT the sex partner of Carlos, when private classes started.
That had ended.
She wasn't that specific about it. But she got indignant I thought they were going at it for hours at a time, as someone else had told me.
I suppose if a double male had a lover, he'd feel obligated to last more than 10 minutes...
I know that witches and Carlos had plenty of Don Juans group members belongings, have Cholita ever mentioned smth? may be Don Juan's pipe location?)
I'm not sure why anyone would want that pipe. The smoking mixture is useless once you can get silent.
And also useless if you have no Ally and no ritual to guide them.
But yes, they had lots of don Juan's lineage stuff! By my estimates, the lineage was very wealthy.
That's partly why Carlos was interested in Cholita.
She works with "stuff".
I suppose Soledad got to use up their wealth to further the same cause we have?
Wish I had don Juan's stock!
He might have bought stock in oil companies, back when people didn't think those would be worth much.
If you have a lineage, anything is potentially very valuable after hundreds of years.
Even old coins become super valuable.
I just want to go off on a tangent rant about this translation, which has been mentally taxing. I am currently in the midst of translating a literary book from Spanish to English (those are the only two languages that I know). You have to literally engulf yourself and play pretend in your head as if you're the author whom wrote it in the original language, before actually writing it.
It's very anecdotal, but those who only speak 1 language will never comprehend the translation issues that will undoubtedly arise. Language(s) isn't like mathematics were you try to get "2=2", you just have what I call degrees of approximation. Yeah, simple terms like no and yes, etc. will have the 2=2 component of math, but everything else falls short of it.
For instance in the book I am working on translating, in one sentence the author says en la construccion de la realidad which literally translates to in the construction of reality. But what he is really saying is.. in the construct of reality. This is were AI and Machine Learning translations fall short. It's a easy to read translations made by that and fall short of interpreting the author's message.
Also, far as collaborating on making an informational PDF. I should point you to Microsoft OneNote, that shit is fucking insanely good. I am using it at the moment to type down and consolidate my book notes (not just on Carlos's books, but many others of different topics). I place the PDF file of the book in my notebook tab, then make notes/pages next to it. It's so insanely good and helps me organize myself. Plus you can collaborate on it in real time.
For those who haven't read the later books, The Death Defier is one of the old sorcerers. And born male, before he flipped his assemblage point around and became female in order to escape one of the many IOB realms.
Very politically correct to have jumped the transexual acceptance trend 25 years before it became headline news. Though that certainly wasn't the actual motivation.
So many lists!
We don't like to have angry people in here.
And especially not those implying they are native american.
We had a series of attacks from pretend native americans, who follow that horrible Kachora fraud.
Maybe you should read the "Are you a Bad Player" link on the side?
And try to avoid implying you have knowledge you don't?
Posturing is also not welcome in here.
We're the last place on earth to learn real magic. And it's free.
You should respect that.
Comment or post only if it's helpful. Not to get attention.
True or not true you can’t deny the wisdom of his books