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Carlos Castaneda Biography |
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Carlos Castaneda, also spelled Castañeda, (December 25, 1925 (?) – April 27, 1998) was an author of a series of books that claimed to describe his training in traditional Native American (Americas) shamanism, which he referred to as a form of "sorcery". Castaneda claimed to have met a Yaqui shaman named Don (honorific) Don Juan Matus in 1960. Castaneda's experiences with Don Juan allegedly inspired the works for which he is known. He claimed to have inherited from Don Juan the position of nagual, or leader of a party of seers. He also used the term "nagual" to signify that part of perception which is in the realm of the unknown yet still reachable by man; implying that, for his party of seers, Don Juan was a connection in some way to that unknown. The term has been used by anthropologists to mean a shaman or sorcerer who is capable of shapeshifting into an animal form, and/or, metaphorically, to "shift" into another form of perspective. Castaneda's works contain descriptions of paranormal or magical experiences, several psychology techniques, Toltec (Castaneda) Magic (paranormal) rituals, shamanism and experiences with psychoactive drugs (e.g. peyote). Carlos Castaneda's works have sold more than 8 million copies in 17 languages. /b> Castaneda claimed to have been born in São Paulo (city), Brazil on Christmas Day in 1931. Immigration records show, however, that he was born six years earlier in Cajamarca, Peru. Castaneda also claimed that "Castaneda" was an adopted name, but records show that it was given by his mother Susana Castañeda Navoa. His surname appears with the Ñ in many Hispanic dictionaries, even though his famous published works display an anglicised version. He moved to the United States in the early 1950s and became a naturalized citizen in 1957. He was educated at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) (Bachelor of Arts 1962; Doctor of Philosophy 1970). Castaneda wrote twelve books and several academic articles detailing his experiences with the Yaqui Indians indigenous to parts of Central Mexico. His first three books, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, A Separate Reality and Journey to Ixtlan were written while Castaneda was an anthropology student at UCLA. Castaneda wrote these books as if they were his research log describing his apprenticeship with a traditional shaman identified as Don Juan Matus. Castaneda was awarded his bachelor's and doctoral degrees for the work described in these books. His writings have been criticized by academics, and are seen as highly suspect in terms of strict anthropological fieldwork. Many have tried to corroborate Castaneda’s stories with his own personal history and that of his fellow apprentices. Contradictory evidence suggests Castaneda wrote in the traditional allegorical style of the storyteller (ethnopoetics) common to many native Indian cultures. Perhaps the most highly contested aspects of his work are the descriptions of the use of psychotropic plants as a means to induce altered states of awareness. In Castaneda's first two books, he describes the Yaqui way of knowledge requiring the use of powerful indigenous plants, such as peyote and datura. In his third book, Journey to Ixtlan, he reverses his emphasis on 'power plants'. He states that Don Juan used them on Castaneda to demonstrate that experiences outside those known in day-to-day life are real and tangible. Castaneda later disavowed all use of drugs for these purposes, stating they could inalterably damage the luminous ball (energy body) or physical body. Castaneda was a popular enough phenomenon for Time magazine magazine to do a cover article on Castaneda on March 5 1973 (Vol. 101 No. 10) that was five or six pages long. His fourth book, Tales of Power, ended with Castaneda leaping off a cliff marking his graduation from disciple to man of knowledge (actually a leap from the tonal into the unknown). Some writers thought this must necessarily mark the end of his series. They were very surprised to see he continued to produce more books. Despite an increasingly critical reception Castaneda continued to be very popular with the reading public. Twelve books by Castaneda have been published, and three videos released. In 1997 Castaneda launched a lawsuit against his ex-wife, Margaret Runyan Castaneda, over her book, A Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda; but this was dropped when Castaneda died. Castaneda purportedly died on April 27 1998 from liver cancer in Los Angeles. Little is known about his death. There was no public service, Castaneda was apparently cremated and the ashes were sent to Mexico. The controversies surrounding the facts of Casteneda's life and death may be explained by deliberate confusing of the public which corresponds to the practice of erasing personal history described first in the Journey to Ixtlan. An Dr. Carlos Castañeda Elementary School in the southern Texas city of McAllen is named for him. Works The nine popular works (as opposed to the academic or scholarly works) of Carlos Castaneda are organized into three sets of three, where each set corresponds to a Toltec mastery: the mastery of awareness, the mastery of transformation, and the mastery of intent. For each mastery there is also a compendium that describes essential teachings from the overall body of work. The three compendiums were published posthumously. Thus, each mastery is described in four works: three works presented in story form and one work compiled as a cross-set reference: The Mastery of Awareness The Mastery of Awareness entails the re-emphasis of awareness from the world of the tonal (every day objects) to the world of the nagual (spirit). During this stage of development the warrior-traveler endeavors to minimize self importance, and to find and store power. First and foremost, the student is encouraged to take action and assume responsibility for his or her life. The Mastery of Transformation During The Mastery of Transformation the warrior-traveler endeavors to cleanse and retrieve energy and to hone his only link to spirit, the intuition. The warrior-traveler becomes impeccable by empirically testing this connection and eventually banishing all doubts, accepting his or her fate, and committing to follow a path with heart. The Mastery of Intent Mastery of Intent – Once the warrior-traveler has accumulated enough surplus energy, enough personal power, the dormant second attention is activated. Dreaming becomes possible. The warrior-traveler maintains impeccability, walks the path with heart, and waits for an opening to freedom. Ideas Castaneda's books can be read as philosophical/pragmatical texts that express a world view by which a person can live one's life. The books contain practical transformational exercises, for example a practice called recapitulation to review one's life to gain detachment from it and increase awareness and energy. There are practitioners around the world, applying Castaneda's published ideas either independently or through consultation with Castaneda's associates. According to Castaneda, the most significant facts in a person's life are his possession of a dormant awareness and the possibility that one may keep this awareness after death. The primary goal of a warrior (also warrior-traveler) is the continuation of his awareness after bodily death: to "dart past the Eagle and be free"; Eagle being the force which consumes the awareness of all beings at their death. To cheat death in this way requires all of the discipline and procedures that constitute the warrior's way of life. These practices are devised to maximise the warrior's personal power, or experience. The condition for maintaining personal power is known as "impeccability". Sufficient personal power leads to the mastery of intent, chiefly the controlled movement of what is known as the assemblage point. This is an artifact of the tradition's description of another world underlying what we perceive as ordinary reality. In this description men are glowing cocoons of awareness inhabiting a universe consisting of the Eagle's "emanations", described euphemistically as all-pervading filaments of light. Humans' cocoons are intersected throughout by these filaments, producing perception, but they filter our perceptions by concentrating on only a small bundle. The assemblage point is the focusing lens which selects from the emanations. In its accustomed position, the assemblage point produces what humans perceive as everyday, 'normal' reality. Movement of the assemblage point permits perception of the world in different ways; small movements lead to small changes in perception and large movements to radical changes. For example, dreaming is presented as the result of a movement of the assemblage point; "power plants" such as Peyote, used in the early stages of Castaneda's apprenticeship, produce powerfully altered states of mind through such movement. The simplest form of movement of the assemblage point is through dreaming. Many practitioners world-wide were able to 'stalk' or hold their assemblage points fixed at a position other than the customary via lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming techniques which are likened to gates are comprehensively discussed in the "Art of Dreaming . In Journey to Ixtlan , Don Genaro warns us “Intent is not intention”. Intent is psychic energy and its nature is luminous and magical. Our energy body, as is the whole metaphysical reality, is made of Intent. Through techniques such as stalking the self (recapitulation, erasing personal history and developing the warrior’s mood), dreaming (setting up dreaming, dreaming and ascension) and handling intent (changing awareness, stopping the world, collapsing the world), the warrior aims at regaining his/her luminosity that has been lost by the wear and tear of everyday life and ultimately to control Intent. The Universe resembles an infinite amount of conglomerations of luminous, self-aware filaments, called the Eagle’s emanations. These emanations form a cocoon around each living being, with a point of intense brilliance, called the assemblage point, which aligns the filaments outside the cocoon with those inside. Just as Man is considered the Microcosm of the Macrocosm (Universe), so too the assemblage point is a microcosm of the Macrocosm called Man. In one of his books, Don Juan describes to Castaneda how our state can be compared to being a huge man in the room (luminous cocoon) and at the same time a tiny person at the window (assemblage point), observing the subject in the room. It is hard to comprehend this view without having had personal experiences with the movements and shifts of the assemblage point, through dreaming. Ultimately, Castaneda argues, everything we perceive, feel and how we act is determined by the position of the assemblage point. When we are babies, our luminous cocoon is not yet rigid and the assemblage point flows fluidly throughout the luminous cocoon. As we grow up and our social conditioning sets in, we fix the assemblage point at a certain position and move or shift it only in dreams, after a trauma, due to drug abuse/use, love, through inner silence, or as is preferred, through Intent. Gradually, the average being looses its luminosity and becomes an empty shell, without purpose, integrity or power, as it becomes more and more grounded in every-day reality. It is the goal of Toltec sorcerers to achieve fluidity of awareness, through the harmonious movement of the assemblage point. The goal of the warrior is to achieve the totality of the self, that is, to light up all the Eagle’s emanations within the cocoon at once and aligning them with the greater whole liberate the luminosity. Through the controlled manipulation of the position of the assemblage point, one opens to ever new possibilities of perception. The art of displacing the assemblage point is termed "dreaming" and the art of positioning the assemblage point on the displaced position is called "stalking" (to be understood as "becoming stalk-like and oblong, stretching into infinity), and the art of generating psychic energy is called Intent. Everything is the product of a being's position of the assemblage point. Brief description of books # The Teachings of Don Juan, A Yaqui Way of Knowledge - description of plant allies and way towards knowledge: mescalito (peyote) - the protector of man, seeing beings as liquid colors; mushrooms- learning to handle, fly, and perceive as animal form; datura- female spirit, hard to handle, gives strength, lengthy procedure. This book was unique of the series in that the last part included a detailed scholarly "Structural Analysis" of the teachings. # A Separate Reality - Discusses the ideas of will , controlled folly , and seeing (as opposed to looking) as tools a warrior uses to be a man/person of knowledge. # Journey to Ixtlan - lessons about the warriors way, or stalking the world, routines, personal history, self-importance , death as an advisor, not-doing , dreaming # Tales of Power - description of points of perception in body or luminous cocoon, tonal (Mythology) (1st attention, known, right side awareness, possibly the left-brain) and nagual (2nd attention, unknown, left side awareness, right-brain ), dreaming double # The Second Ring of Power - describes events after Don Juan's departure, experiences with the women warriors of the original nagual's party, 2nd attention (second ring of power), losing "human 'form'", human mold, dreaming , gazing # The Eagle's Gift - description of the force that creates, destroys, and rules the universe (or at least the 48 bands of earth), also source of emanations themselves, description of the eagle's command to man, the rule of the nagual, various levels of petty tyrants, and way towards freedom, self-stalking and dreaming, power spots. Note that Don Juan described the energy-structure/entity called eagle a thing that is not what we call an eagle, but rather a thing so vast as to be incomprehensible. # The Fire From Within - step by step (actually chapter by chapter) elucidation of the mastery of awareness or the new seers' knowledge: everything is energy (the Eagle's emanations or luminous emanations), the luminous cocoon and assemblage point (glow of awareness), the known (1st attention or tonal), unknown (2nd attention or nagual), unknowable (outside luminous cocoon), petty tyrants as a way to move assemblage point and foster warrior's way, twin worlds of organic and inorganic ( more correctly matter-beings and non-matter-bound beings -- carbon-based/not carbon based wasn't what was meant), shifting the assemblage point and other bands of awareness, bundles of emanations that are the basis for the different species source of awareness and forms/molds, the human mold, the rolling force or tumbler (that hits aura), the death defier, self-stalking, intent, and dreaming. # The Power of Silence - stories about essentially the mastery of intent, set into what were called sorcery cores. # The Art of Dreaming - steps to mastering control and consciousness of dreams. # Magical Passes - descriptions with photos of sorcery-based physical movements intended to increase well-being, a system which became known as Tensegrity (Castaneda) # The Active Side of Infinity - recapitulation, making a log of significant life events (as seen by the spirit) # The Wheel of Time - recollection of the mood in which each previous book was written; significant quotes from each previous book Interpretation and criticism (the Castaneda controversy) According to Robert J. Wallis in his 2003 book Shamans/Neo-Shamans: Contested Ecstasies, Alternative Archaeologies, and Contemporary Pagans At first, and with the backing of academic qualifications and the UCLA anthropological department, Castaneda’s work was critically acclaimed. Notable old-school American anthropologists including Edward Spicer (1969) and Edmund Leach (1969) praised Castaneda, alongside more alternative and young anthropologists such as Peter Furst, Barbara Myerhoff and Michael Harner. The authenticity of Don Juan was accepted for six years, until Richard de Mille and Daniel Noel both published their critical exposés of the Don Juan books in 1976 (De Mille produced a further edited volume in 1980). Most anthropologists had been convinced of Castaneda’s authenticity until now - indeed, they had had little reason to question it - but De Mille’s meticulous analysis, in particular, debunked Castaneda’s work. Beneath the veneer of anthropological fact stood huge discrepancies in the data: the books ‘contradict one another in details of time, location, sequence, and description of events’ (Schultz in Clifton 1989:45). There are possible published sources for almost everything Carlos wrote (see especially Beals 1978), and at least one encounter is ethnographic plagiarism: Ramon Medina, a Huichol shaman-informant to Myerhoff (1974), displayed superhuman acrobatic feats at a waterfall and, according to Myerhoff, in the presence of Castaneda (Fikes 1993). Then, in A Separate Reality, Don Juan’s friend Don Genaro makes a similar leap over a waterfall with the aid of supernatural power. In addition to these inconsistencies, various authors suggest aspects of the Sonoran desert Carlos describes are environmentally implausible, and, the ‘Yaqui shamanism’ he divulges is not Yaqui at all but a synthesis of shamanisms from elsewhere (e.g. Beals 1978).As early as 1973, a Time Magazine article had questioned the more worldly claim to importance of Castaneda's books: to wit, that they are anthropology, a specific and truthful account of an aspect of Mexican Indian culture as shown by the speech and actions of one person, a shaman named Juan Matus.That proof hinges on the credibility of Don Juan as a being and Carlos Castaneda as a witness. Yet there is no corroboration beyond Castaneda's writings that Don Juan did what he is said to have done, and very little that he exists at all. But serious analytical criticism of Castaneda's books did not emerge until 1976 when Richard de Mille published Castaneda's Journey: The Power and the Allegory , in which he argues: "Logical or chronological errors in the narrative constitute the best evidence that Castaneda's books are works of fiction. If no one has discovered these errors before, the reason must be that no one has listed the events of the first three books in sequence. Once that has been done, the errors are unmistakable." de Mille, RichardCastaneda's Journey: The Power and the Allegory',' Capra Press, 1976, pp. 166 The most damning instance of this, according to de Mille, is Castaneda's relations with a witch named 'la Catalina.' "In October 1965 Carlos-One went through an ordeal so unexpected and disturbing that he sadly withdrew from his apprenticeship and avoided Don Juan for more than two years. The ordeal was a night-long confrontation with a powerful enemy who had assumed don Juan's bodily form though not his accustomed gait or speech.... Curiously, when Carlos-One begged don Juan to explain what had happened during the "special" event, 'the conversation began with speculations about the identity of a female person' (Castaneda's emphasis) who had snatched Carlos's soul and borrowed don Juan's form. The lady was not named, and the reader was left to wonder whether the galvanizing impersonatress was in fact a certain 'fiendish witch' called "la Catalina," who had been mentioned briefly on 23 Novebmer 1961, four years ealier. At that time don Juan had said he was harboring certain plans for finishing her off, about which he would tell Carlos-One 'someday.' Poor Carlos-One had to wait ten years to learn about those plans in Tales of Power, but Table 2 reveals that Carlos-Two, traveling a parallel time track, carried out those plans with moderate success in the fall of 1962, when he met the magic lady six times in a row, once as a marauding but indistinct blackbird, once as a sailing silhouette, and four times face to face "in all her magnificent evil splendor" as a beautiful but terrifying young woman. Reacting to those encounters, he felt his ears bursting, his throat choking, his hands frozen, his body chilled, and his arms and legs rigid. The hair on his body literally stood on end. He shrieked and fell down to the ground. He was paralyzed. He began to run. And he lost his power of speech. Here we are asked to believe that a flesh-and-blood anthropologist who enjoyed this tumultuous supernatural affair with a glorious witch in 1962 did not recall her name in 1965, did not make the connection between the last meeting and the previous six when sorting through his field notes in the safety of his apartment, did not put it all together when naming her in his first book, but found the memory "as vivid as if it had just happened" on 22 May 1968, a few pages into his second book. Even if we could credit this uncharacteristic amnesia, we would still have to account for don Juan's equal failure to name 'la Catalina' in 1965. The puzzle is easily solved by switching from the factual to the fictive model. The abrupt, unsatisfying ending to The Teachings is not a symptom of ethnographic battle fatigue, for our campaigner has already survived six such battles with colors flying. It is only a serialist's preparation for the next episode, a cliffhanger that makes us hungry for another book. On these showings, one thing is certain. The Teachings of Don Juan and Journey to Ixtlan cannot both be factual reports. de Mille, Richard, "Castaneda's Journey," 1976, pp. 170-171Many Castaneda supporters claim in turn that handling awareness and perception accounts for memory problems; and that the actual existence of Don Juan is irrelevant, since the important matter is the theme that Don Juan presents. One way to read the books is as a sort of game, almost like a detective novel. Depending upon one's approach, they could be either accepted at face-value in their entirety, or discarded. Some of the material could be considered true, some fictional; and some of the events described probably appeared to be real at the time, but could be interpreted as hallucinations. Significant characters in Castaneda's works This is a list of characters, claimed to be real persons, mentioned in Castaneda's works. Castaneda makes it clear that these are not the persons' real names (ostensibly to protect their identity). In denoting their function within each generation of practitioners, terms are used which can only be understood by reading Castaneda's writings: Generation of practitioners peer to Castaneda (Compact group for "three-pronged Nagual") Related authors Two other authors, Taisha Abelar and Florinda Donner-Grau, have also written books in which they claim to be from Don Juan Matus' party of Toltec warriors. Both Abelar and Donner-Grau were endorsed by Castaneda as being legitimate students of Don Juan Matus, whereas he has dismissed all other writers as pretenders. Notable works Books by other authors 
Courtesy of: http://www.wikipedia.org/ |
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