Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Thunderbird

Oh, BTW did you ever read "The Art of Dreaming"?

I’ve not read any Castaneda or Castaneda compilations more recent than 1981’s The Eagle’s Gift. I’ll catch up in the next few weeks, skipping ahead to “The Art of Dreaming”, which I just loaded onto my handheld. I get a lot of reading done “in the cracks”, waiting for busses, trains, people, and lying abed before I need to be doing anything on a schedule.

My enthusiasm for Castaneda’s writing waned a lot in the late 1970s, as I became increasingly aware of its fictional nature. I’m a consensus-seeking person. In the mid ‘70s, the consensus I found among the many people, peers and mentors, from whom I sought it was that his books described real, if very subjective, experiences. By late 1970s, the consensus had turned to “Castaneda’s full of s**t”. As pure fiction, the Don Juan books paled in comparison to the undisguised fiction of Tolkien, Moorcock, and a host of professional and amateurs from that period, and I found myself and the people in my community focused on the purely fictional – Intensely focused, as by then my community could be well described as “role playing gamers”, and my place in it as evangelist (translating in the 70s hemispheric vernacular and my local zeitgeist best, I think, to “young dude carrying the news” )

Originally Posted by Thunderbird

The cryptic configuration of, character/ author, was part of Castaneda’s way of going about things. He was called the “trickster” by the people that knew him, and no one really knew him well.

I never met him, and know only one person who has, but anybody who can get an anthropology PhD thesis, a wad of cash, and generations of fame out of an absolute fabrication has in my book shown extraordinary ability to P it h and D. My personal discomfort with trickster/coyote/Anansi types of people is, by the time I was 20, I’d both had enough of them, particularly the 40-ish OTO-traditioned pederastic kind I’d grown up with, and with practicing to be one. Microcomputers were appearing in places I could go and touch them, bringing for many folk my age with decent math backgrounds a heady sense of being-in-the-right-place-at-the-right-time good fortune and power, but demanding an introverted, objective, precise worldview. BS what would work with a thrown-together cult/coven was useless for getting silicon to do your bidding, and I found myself increasing discarding my complicated, verbose magical subjective world view for a stripped-down, essentially numeric, objective one.

In the mid 1980s, married, moved from rural West Virginia to urban Washington DC and working full time or more most of the time, I found myself reengaging with local esoteric new age communities. Castaneda was in low esteem among most of these folk, in favor of writers like Ram Dass and Starhawk, both of whom regularly appeared in the DC area, and were open and approachable – in short, untricky, nice, and very authentic people. Their non-fiction was really non-fiction. They are un-mysterious people who have been to and done what they write of, as witnessed and corroborated by many people. Those who write fiction, even when it contains autobiographical elements, represent it clearly as fiction. I also enjoy the company of “Hopis and hippies” (as the saying goes), though they’re mostly an emotive, un-intellectual bunch.

Although I’ve had no contact with Castaneda’s folk at Cleargreen (not surprising, as I’m on the east cost, and they’re on the West), the impression I get from reading about them in writings like Corey Donovan’s Sustained Action website’s is that I wouldn’t benefit from the contact.

Still, I’m very curious about what Castaneda and his folk did in the 1980s and ‘90s, after I’d lost interest in them. From just the beginnings I’ve made reading in the last 48 hours, I’m starting to sense a similarity between his story and that of folk OTO-based folk like Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard (like Castaneda, a consummate trickster, now dead, and in addition a mind-bogglingly prolific and proficient writer).

Perhaps the oddest connection I’ve noticed so far is Castaneda’s adoption/cooption of the concept of tensegrity, better know from the writings of Buckminster Fuller and art of Ken Snelson. Although connected in little more than name, tensegrity appears to be a major focus at Cleargreen these days.