04.08.08

SK sends me a book on Castaneda: un-erasing personal history

Posted in Booknotes at 4:42 pm by nemo

Sillykitty has, strangely, sent me a book about Castaneda: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: My Life with Carlos Castaneda (Hardcover)
by Amy Wallace
I feel very grateful for such an expense, but am worried that I should return it.
I am unsure of your reason for this, apart from the obvious one, you wish some guidance or feedback on how to consider all this, or some other reason, as if I were some kind of expert on all this. I should say at once that I don’t pursue such subjects anymore. My last contact with a ‘separate reality’ was a vision of Frodo the Hobbit in the desert, who said, ‘Prune your bibliography’. I skulked away humbled and penitent.
Although I investigated a large number of New Age issues years ago, I never at any time read Castaneda’s book. I must have picked one of them up at one time, but they didn’t check out as far as I was concerned. I used to watch people mix Castaneda-isms with yoga-isms/Buddh-isms or Ouspensky-isms, leaving me suspicious, imagination takes hold and nothing can come of it, especially in the mixtures. I see no problem with researching these episodes, as long as one keeps a distance, and stands guard against the contamination of ‘magical fantasy’.
I can’t fully reject Castaneda since I haven’t read him, but his experience is recognizable as some kind of ‘contact’ experience, followed by the inexorable onset of imaginative delusion. What that ‘contact’ experience was, I don’t know. We often ‘touch’ the noumenal, almost, almost, and then think the experience is permanent, or will continue, when all you are doing is flying off on a tangent of self-delusion. That tangential smorgasbord of ‘profundities’ is pure quicksand.

Anyway, let me think about it, and read your book. In a hurry to do some catch up on this question, I read the Wikipedia article, which had a link to a good article at Salon:

The dark legacy of Carlos Castaneda

The godfather of the New Age led a secretive group of devoted followers in the last decade of his life. His closest “witches” remain missing, and former insiders, offering new details, believe the women took their own lives.

Your gesture does put one idea in my head. Instead of a fiction about a magical Don Juan, how about a factual expose of the sufi hyenas, ‘un-erasing personal history’.

I will keep trying here, but I am in a ‘separate reality’ at this point, and live behind a six-foot Kantian firewall where Castaneda type stuff doesn’t penetrate.

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