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Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda
In 1968 Carlos Castaneda burst onto the scene with his blockbuster story about his apprenticeship with an awesome, authentic Mexican sorcerer, don Juan.
Roaming the deserts of Mexico, he learned how to grow and use psychedelic 'power plants'. As an apprentice of sorcery practised for thousands of years, he survived a leap from a cliff and watched a sorcerer dance across a waterfall. Along the way, he shared with us long-lost secrets about death, dreaming, our other self, and the vast and inexplicable forces of the universe.
Or did Castaneda deceive us all?
With 11 books written over 30 years, this bestselling American author, philosopher and anthropologist opened a window into another world and era. Writing detailed depictions of practices and beliefs of an ancient civilization, he revealed unexpected, exciting and frightening events with compelling believability.
Revered by followers and reviled by critics, Castaneda, the author and character, and all his works are given a new, comprehensive interpretation in Getting Castaneda.
Roaming the deserts of Mexico, he learned how to grow and use psychedelic 'power plants'. As an apprentice of sorcery practised for thousands of years, he survived a leap from a cliff and watched a sorcerer dance across a waterfall. Along the way, he shared with us long-lost secrets about death, dreaming, our other self, and the vast and inexplicable forces of the universe.
Or did Castaneda deceive us all?
With 11 books written over 30 years, this bestselling American author, philosopher and anthropologist opened a window into another world and era. Writing detailed depictions of practices and beliefs of an ancient civilization, he revealed unexpected, exciting and frightening events with compelling believability.
Revered by followers and reviled by critics, Castaneda, the author and character, and all his works are given a new, comprehensive interpretation in Getting Castaneda.
- GenresBiography
186 pages, ebook
Published September 13, 2017
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February 17, 2019
“Getting Castaneda” is a thoughtful assessment by Peter Luce of the fascinating and challenging body of work by “Carlos Castaneda”, entailing twelve volumes written over the last thirty years of his life, between 1968-1998. I appreciate that Peter chose the middle road approach, being both open to accept Carlos' thesis at face value, while accepting it could also be a fictional literary conceit. Like Peter, I too, early in life, became interested in these books. Over the past fifty years, I have re-read the full canon several times, including spinoffs by other authors on the subject of ancient Mexican Toltec shamanism.
What makes this subject matter both interesting, yet challenging, to those living the contemporary Eurocentric western scientific materialist paradigm, is the Indigenous philosophical premise, explained and consistently reinforced throughout Carlos' work that the true path of knowledge comprises the embrace of duality, rather than the glorification of one aspect and demonization of the other. Castaneda introduces this duality, as expressed by the ancient Toltec words: “tonal” and “nagual”. In its most simplistic sense, the tonal is the realm of the “known” familiar rational reality and the nagual is the realm of the “unknown”, or everything else. The problem with accepting only a tonal reality is the reinforcement of self-importance, that unfortunately perpetuates a fear of the unknown. By creating a satisfying grand narrative, the tonal eliminates the unknown with its confident explanation of everything, attempting to deny that a nagual even exists. According to Carlos, an ancient school of Mexican sorcerers, after centuries of patient observation, developed strategies to enable them to look beyond the “first attention” of our familiar awareness of the materialist world. They evolved an awareness of what they called the “second attention”, to “see” the energetic foundation of the universe, understood as the nagual. In this way, the tonal narrative could be expanded to include the unknown.
The basic premise of Carlos Castaneda's work is that, it is his personal account, beginning as an anthropology student at UCLA in 1960, where he became fascinated with doing field work throughout the Southwest USA to study the Indigenous use of medicinal plants. He apparently connected with a 70 year old Yaqui Indian, named “Juan Matus”, in southern Arizona. “Don Juan” initially agreed to share traditional knowledge of various hallucinogenic plants. It's later revealed that don Juan gave Carlos these plants to eat or smoke, to jolt him out of his attempt at intellectual objectivity, preventing him from direct experience of “silent knowledge”. Castaneda's first two books, focusing on these drug experiences, attracted great mainstream interest. This had become a trendy subject due to the popular work of writers, such as, Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey on “psychedelic drugs”, like Mescaline and LSD.
It became apparent, that don Juan had a far more involved agenda, including Carlos in an extended family of other sorcerers and apprentices devoted to a modern sorcery quest. Teachings were shared in both the first attention of familiar reality, as well as in a heightened state of awareness understood as the second attention. While in this second attention, similar to being under hypnosis, Carlos experienced a lucidity and expanded ability of comprehension, where his experiences were faithfully stored somewhere in his body. After a lesson was complete on his return to familiar reality the event was immediately forgotten. He then was tasked with applying complex strategies of either “dreaming” or “stalking” to later remember and incorporate the silent knowledge into conscious awareness. Apparently, it's impossible to fully learn about sorcery, while in our normal state of mind, as too much of it goes against common sense and rationality.
Despite the commercial success of Castaneda's work, he was both highly praised and highly condemned. “Some said, his writing was among the most important ever published in the history of anthropology, because he was getting information about Neolithic beliefs of a pre-literate civilization directly from a survivor of that era. Others said it was a hoax, fiction and there was no sorcerer named don Juan; Castaneda made it all up. Many thought the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) was wrong to give him a PhD.”
Like Peter Luce, I've been more intrigued by the controversy, than persuaded to reject the possible validity of these books. I find compelling Castaneda's willingness to portray his resistance to overcoming fear of the unknown. There's hope for us all, if a bonehead like Carlos was slow to embrace the intriguing explanations of don Juan Matus, reinforced intuitively by his benefactor, “don Pedro Flores”. It's impressive that, despite his failings, Carlos revealed great discipline to accomplish the documentation of these events in such detail. Am especially impressed by the hilarious sense of humour of these characters, usually at Carlos' expense, as well as their patience and impeccability, sharing such a coherent, complex and conceptually consistent message. Whether fiction or non-fiction, the result is brilliant and thought provoking.
Peter has performed a valuable task recapitulating the longwinded process of this interesting series of books. “Getting Castaneda” encourages both old and new readers to recognize the importance of the reasonable notion that, whether plagiarized or not, truth and wisdom lies within, waiting patiently for our awakening and transcendent remembrance.
What makes this subject matter both interesting, yet challenging, to those living the contemporary Eurocentric western scientific materialist paradigm, is the Indigenous philosophical premise, explained and consistently reinforced throughout Carlos' work that the true path of knowledge comprises the embrace of duality, rather than the glorification of one aspect and demonization of the other. Castaneda introduces this duality, as expressed by the ancient Toltec words: “tonal” and “nagual”. In its most simplistic sense, the tonal is the realm of the “known” familiar rational reality and the nagual is the realm of the “unknown”, or everything else. The problem with accepting only a tonal reality is the reinforcement of self-importance, that unfortunately perpetuates a fear of the unknown. By creating a satisfying grand narrative, the tonal eliminates the unknown with its confident explanation of everything, attempting to deny that a nagual even exists. According to Carlos, an ancient school of Mexican sorcerers, after centuries of patient observation, developed strategies to enable them to look beyond the “first attention” of our familiar awareness of the materialist world. They evolved an awareness of what they called the “second attention”, to “see” the energetic foundation of the universe, understood as the nagual. In this way, the tonal narrative could be expanded to include the unknown.
The basic premise of Carlos Castaneda's work is that, it is his personal account, beginning as an anthropology student at UCLA in 1960, where he became fascinated with doing field work throughout the Southwest USA to study the Indigenous use of medicinal plants. He apparently connected with a 70 year old Yaqui Indian, named “Juan Matus”, in southern Arizona. “Don Juan” initially agreed to share traditional knowledge of various hallucinogenic plants. It's later revealed that don Juan gave Carlos these plants to eat or smoke, to jolt him out of his attempt at intellectual objectivity, preventing him from direct experience of “silent knowledge”. Castaneda's first two books, focusing on these drug experiences, attracted great mainstream interest. This had become a trendy subject due to the popular work of writers, such as, Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey on “psychedelic drugs”, like Mescaline and LSD.
It became apparent, that don Juan had a far more involved agenda, including Carlos in an extended family of other sorcerers and apprentices devoted to a modern sorcery quest. Teachings were shared in both the first attention of familiar reality, as well as in a heightened state of awareness understood as the second attention. While in this second attention, similar to being under hypnosis, Carlos experienced a lucidity and expanded ability of comprehension, where his experiences were faithfully stored somewhere in his body. After a lesson was complete on his return to familiar reality the event was immediately forgotten. He then was tasked with applying complex strategies of either “dreaming” or “stalking” to later remember and incorporate the silent knowledge into conscious awareness. Apparently, it's impossible to fully learn about sorcery, while in our normal state of mind, as too much of it goes against common sense and rationality.
Despite the commercial success of Castaneda's work, he was both highly praised and highly condemned. “Some said, his writing was among the most important ever published in the history of anthropology, because he was getting information about Neolithic beliefs of a pre-literate civilization directly from a survivor of that era. Others said it was a hoax, fiction and there was no sorcerer named don Juan; Castaneda made it all up. Many thought the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) was wrong to give him a PhD.”
Like Peter Luce, I've been more intrigued by the controversy, than persuaded to reject the possible validity of these books. I find compelling Castaneda's willingness to portray his resistance to overcoming fear of the unknown. There's hope for us all, if a bonehead like Carlos was slow to embrace the intriguing explanations of don Juan Matus, reinforced intuitively by his benefactor, “don Pedro Flores”. It's impressive that, despite his failings, Carlos revealed great discipline to accomplish the documentation of these events in such detail. Am especially impressed by the hilarious sense of humour of these characters, usually at Carlos' expense, as well as their patience and impeccability, sharing such a coherent, complex and conceptually consistent message. Whether fiction or non-fiction, the result is brilliant and thought provoking.
Peter has performed a valuable task recapitulating the longwinded process of this interesting series of books. “Getting Castaneda” encourages both old and new readers to recognize the importance of the reasonable notion that, whether plagiarized or not, truth and wisdom lies within, waiting patiently for our awakening and transcendent remembrance.
December 23, 2017
If you haven't read any Carlos Castaneda books I wouldn't start with this book. Although interesting and well written it is more of a reminder and recap of Castaneda's great books. Interesting for fans of Don Juan and the sorcerers knowledge but you won't learn anything new but will be reminded of a lot that you may have forgotten. A good inspiring read to revisit the original works.
September 12, 2022
I suppose my curiosity about the books of Carlos Castaneda were triggered as I became interested in psychedelics: it seemed, by the existence of these books, that there is, or are, alternative metaphysical systems for comprehending, understanding, and organizing what we experience as reality that one can better understand through conscientious consumption of peyote, mushrooms, datura, and LSD.
If that's the case, then that's a big deal! I should not remain ignorant!
The first four "classic" books had already been published by the time I first became psychedelicized in in college in 1976. However, I never saw them as texts and didn't race through them to find the deep meanings. I read them as I got around to them. And... I wasn't impressed. I think I read the fifth volume and that was it for me.
Ten years later, I was hired by Will Noffke–one of the founders of New Dimensions radio until he split off to host his own KPFA show New Horizons–to manage the new metaphysical and shamanic book store he had just added to his pre-New Age event center Shared Visions. The store was called Sound Choices. We later added a third adjacent space for events called Acts of Creation.
I met a lot of New Age neo-shamans there, including the guy who triggered the resurgence, Michael Harner who had published one of the first New Age bestsellers, "The Way of the Shaman."
In Harner's treatise, all of us could become shamans by simply entraining ourselves to an ongoing rapidly-repeating drum beat. The trance triggered by that state was the shamanic state.
In the same college bookstore where I became entranced by the covers of Castaneda's books, I can still remember picking up one of the first books about modern day native Americans and considering its blue and brown cover, "Rolling Thunder" by Doug Boyd. I didn't buy it though, until almost a decade later.
Over a 36-hour period in 1985 I lost my home, my job and my girlfriend. Some off-campus UC Berkeley dorms became available for the summer months to non-students and that's where I ended up that summer. It was there that I had my first bibliomancy experiences.
I've always collected lots of books, and by this time I had acquired "Rolling Thunder," which is still my favorite book for several reasons. A couple of years later I met and became friends with the author. We put on many of his workshops on "Natural Powers."
I wouldn't be surprised if Doug was on the autism spectrum. He had "his way" of being, a very simple way and lifestyle of being. I met one of his sisters who was very bright and very normal, with a shared scientific passion and concern for the human threat to the biosphere.
Their parents, Elmer and Alyce Green, invented biofeedback and ran the voluntary controls lab at Menninger. My grandfather was a pathologist at Cedars Sinai, so I was very in sync with their scientific orientation to life.
Doug was an assistant at that lab where they set about scientifically looking at people who had spiritual powers that could impact matter. Swami Rama and the Nevada medicine man Rolling Thunder were two of the people the Greens tested.
One amazing test of Swami Rama showed that he could change the surface temperature of two points on his hand, an inch apart, by ten degrees. Doug explained that he did this by intensely visualizing a burning match on one point and an ice cube on the other. The skin temperature increased five degrees on the one point and fell five degrees on the other. This really happened! In a lab, in Kansas!
While these people were in town, Doug was their companion, and took them around town during their off-time. This began Doug's life long occupation as what he called himself, a resourcer. He would go around the world looking for the "medicine people" of the world who actually seemed to control material reality with mental or "spiritual" healing powers.
Doug accumulated the things that were for real from these practitioners, and then presented it in his "Course on Natural Powers." So, unlike the New Age neo-shamanic charlatans popping up everywhere in the Berkeley New Age scene, he didn't preach creative visualization or that you create your own reality and use these powers to become rich and buy a house on the Malibu beach.
So, "Rolling Thunder" was more like a book of anthropology about a radical ecology activist medicine man Doug travelled around with for a couple of years, a man he claimed could actually make rain.
In July 1985, as I was trying to unpin my head from those three big losses that had all been connected, I began to read "Rolling Thunder." Amazing things would happen. I would be deeply suffering about some aspect of my experience. And when I resumed reading the book, on the first page, I read exactly what I needed to read. This happened several times, POWERFULLY!
That's bibliomancy.
Do I believe that there was something wild happening to me spiritually with that book? Who knows! I don't have any belief system. I know what I know, and I know that I don't know an immense amount about everything else.
In his course, Doug taught the As-if principal. Even if you don't believe the religious stories behind a ritual, if you go into the ritual as if you believed it, the ritual will have the desired impact. A placebo effect. Doug learned that the Indians at one end of a valley would use certain herbs for one healing effect, but at the other end of the valley those Indians used the same herbs for opposite effects!
Rolling Thunder told Doug that in the ritual it didn't matter how many times you shook the eagle feather, but in your rituals you better shake it the same number of times every time!
Doug always insisted that the indigenous people of the world weren't stupid! These healing rituals wouldn't stick with a tribe for thousands of years if they didn't work!
Anyway, now, as I write this, a week before my 65th birthday, I can see looking back, that "Rolling Thunder" was a book about someone very much like myself. Except for the medicine man powers, I am Rolling Thunder!
In the book, RT used his medicine powers to find and film Bureau of Land Management bulldozers that were plowing down piñon pine stands that provided food to the Indian peoples of Nevada. Three bulldozers would spread out with ship anchor chains fifty yards long between them and they would just mow down the trees.
I began reading "Rolling Thunder" just two moths after I joined up with the tree-sitters and monkeywrencher of Earth First! Three years later I would become the first EF!er to document our campaigns on video.
Our Bay Area EF! group also founded the Rainforest Action Network. Randy Hayes, one of the two principal co-founders and director of RAN was also a close friend of Doug Boyd. Earth First! and RAN always had deep connections to the indigenous people of the threatened wild areas we fought to save. Randy was also a filmmaker who helped him what I think is the first film or video about Earth First!, "The Crack in the Glen Canyon Dam."
The movie "Billy Jack" was inspired by and largely written around the life and medicine community Metatantay of Rolling Thunder. The Grateful Dead's drummer Mickey Hart named his first solo album after RT and includes in it a recording of a Rolling Thunder morning ceremony's opening tribute to the four directions.
Doug too, was immersed in the struggles of North American and rainforest First Peoples. So, for all of us, this medicine work was about improving how humans lived in nature, and protecting nature for its own magnificence.
This is why I have had a problem with Castaneda's stories of shamanism as sorcery. Doug taught that the medicine view is a view of disease as symptom of humans breaking or damaging their connections from tribal and natural reality. The role of the medicine man is to reconnect the disconnected, to keep everyone whole and well. The last thing a medicine person would be is an individualist, like Castaneda.
Also, at Shared Visions I met and worked with a man named Prem Das who married a daughter of a Huichol medicine man name Don Jose Matsuwa. Supposedly, as the story went, Don Jose was the real Don Juan interviewed by Castaneda.
From my readings of five books, and Peter Luce's exposition on all of the books, Don Juan and Castaneda and their cohort of sorcerers don't do anything to fix anything with "the people" or the world. In fact, Don Juan seems to be a lone sorcerer outside of any tribal culture. Their world's are of petty tyrants battling it out in a different reality to consume our energy, even though these "inorganic beings" live forever. So why do they need to prey on our energy to get energy, if they already live forever?
I think Luce does a creditable job laying out the metaphysical realities taught by the Castaneda books. You can see the entire picture quite well, what everything Castaneda wrote about over thirty years looks like when put into one viewscape. Actually I would give him five stars for that. In that regard, the book was exactly what I was looking for. If you are looking for that, I would wholeheartedly recommend the book. I listened to the audiobook read by Clay Lomakayu, which was also very well done.
But this is a niche book. Somebody could write an excellent book on how to make your own reel and rod for fishing, which would be great for the wilderness craftsman. Would such a book be a five-star book for anyone else?
So I knocked off a star because it has little to offer most readers and because Castaneda's body of work itself, has little to offer anyone. They certainly are not books to teach you how to become a medicine person.
Luce himself points this out: “[Don] Juan Matus... epitomized the worldwide human condition of our age...[a sense] of outrage, offense, self-pity and grievance." Castaneda's sorcerer's all exemplify these characteristics. In fact, to buy Castaneda's metaphysics, one has to believe that the ultimate spiritual reality is one of battling petulants. Thus, Luce provides a service, giving us a preview to help us decide if we want to go on Carlos's journey.
I think Castaneda was a conman, who created the most audacious, yet extraordinary literary con in history. I think his books convey nothing more about human reality than the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. His books include nothing to aid you in your explorations of psychedelic reality, or finding any deeper truths from the use of psychoactive substances. I think he was mendacious and that this book might help you see that too.
Mostly, I think you can't be a lone shaman. You can't use your medicine powers to make the people whole if you don't have a people. You can't trance out to machine-gun-like drum beats and become a medicine person.
Probably more than anything else he taught, Doug Boyd would implore us to wake up each day and say to the universe, "I am fully available to serve!"
That's probably the first step to take to become a medicine person. You might find you get into deeper states of knowledge and medicine power from serving food to ailing people at a soup kitchen than you do from consuming psychoactive plant teachers.
Doug Boyd did cite "Carlos" a few times in his course. He never talked about Castaneda's books or Don Juan, just some good one-liners he valued, as I remember. It didn't sound like Doug rejected Castaneda, so it's left me curious all this time about his overall conclusion about its veracity.
What about RT, could he really make it rain? Considering how famous he was (e.g. the Grateful Dead's Medicine Man and the real Billy Jack), I've never seen anybody report that any of RT's rainmaking ceremonies were a bust. Some Indian people criticized him for sharing too much with the hippies, but nobody ever said he wasn't a true medicine man, although he wasn't the medicine man of any single tribe.
And the closest thing I have to a belief is that when Doug Boyd told us it happened, it really happened exactly as Doug recounted it. I knew Doug quite well for a couple of years. Maybe because of his character, or maybe as a characteristic of autism, I don't think Doug had the capacity to lie.
If that's the case, then that's a big deal! I should not remain ignorant!
The first four "classic" books had already been published by the time I first became psychedelicized in in college in 1976. However, I never saw them as texts and didn't race through them to find the deep meanings. I read them as I got around to them. And... I wasn't impressed. I think I read the fifth volume and that was it for me.
Ten years later, I was hired by Will Noffke–one of the founders of New Dimensions radio until he split off to host his own KPFA show New Horizons–to manage the new metaphysical and shamanic book store he had just added to his pre-New Age event center Shared Visions. The store was called Sound Choices. We later added a third adjacent space for events called Acts of Creation.
I met a lot of New Age neo-shamans there, including the guy who triggered the resurgence, Michael Harner who had published one of the first New Age bestsellers, "The Way of the Shaman."
In Harner's treatise, all of us could become shamans by simply entraining ourselves to an ongoing rapidly-repeating drum beat. The trance triggered by that state was the shamanic state.
In the same college bookstore where I became entranced by the covers of Castaneda's books, I can still remember picking up one of the first books about modern day native Americans and considering its blue and brown cover, "Rolling Thunder" by Doug Boyd. I didn't buy it though, until almost a decade later.
Over a 36-hour period in 1985 I lost my home, my job and my girlfriend. Some off-campus UC Berkeley dorms became available for the summer months to non-students and that's where I ended up that summer. It was there that I had my first bibliomancy experiences.
I've always collected lots of books, and by this time I had acquired "Rolling Thunder," which is still my favorite book for several reasons. A couple of years later I met and became friends with the author. We put on many of his workshops on "Natural Powers."
I wouldn't be surprised if Doug was on the autism spectrum. He had "his way" of being, a very simple way and lifestyle of being. I met one of his sisters who was very bright and very normal, with a shared scientific passion and concern for the human threat to the biosphere.
Their parents, Elmer and Alyce Green, invented biofeedback and ran the voluntary controls lab at Menninger. My grandfather was a pathologist at Cedars Sinai, so I was very in sync with their scientific orientation to life.
Doug was an assistant at that lab where they set about scientifically looking at people who had spiritual powers that could impact matter. Swami Rama and the Nevada medicine man Rolling Thunder were two of the people the Greens tested.
One amazing test of Swami Rama showed that he could change the surface temperature of two points on his hand, an inch apart, by ten degrees. Doug explained that he did this by intensely visualizing a burning match on one point and an ice cube on the other. The skin temperature increased five degrees on the one point and fell five degrees on the other. This really happened! In a lab, in Kansas!
While these people were in town, Doug was their companion, and took them around town during their off-time. This began Doug's life long occupation as what he called himself, a resourcer. He would go around the world looking for the "medicine people" of the world who actually seemed to control material reality with mental or "spiritual" healing powers.
Doug accumulated the things that were for real from these practitioners, and then presented it in his "Course on Natural Powers." So, unlike the New Age neo-shamanic charlatans popping up everywhere in the Berkeley New Age scene, he didn't preach creative visualization or that you create your own reality and use these powers to become rich and buy a house on the Malibu beach.
So, "Rolling Thunder" was more like a book of anthropology about a radical ecology activist medicine man Doug travelled around with for a couple of years, a man he claimed could actually make rain.
In July 1985, as I was trying to unpin my head from those three big losses that had all been connected, I began to read "Rolling Thunder." Amazing things would happen. I would be deeply suffering about some aspect of my experience. And when I resumed reading the book, on the first page, I read exactly what I needed to read. This happened several times, POWERFULLY!
That's bibliomancy.
Do I believe that there was something wild happening to me spiritually with that book? Who knows! I don't have any belief system. I know what I know, and I know that I don't know an immense amount about everything else.
In his course, Doug taught the As-if principal. Even if you don't believe the religious stories behind a ritual, if you go into the ritual as if you believed it, the ritual will have the desired impact. A placebo effect. Doug learned that the Indians at one end of a valley would use certain herbs for one healing effect, but at the other end of the valley those Indians used the same herbs for opposite effects!
Rolling Thunder told Doug that in the ritual it didn't matter how many times you shook the eagle feather, but in your rituals you better shake it the same number of times every time!
Doug always insisted that the indigenous people of the world weren't stupid! These healing rituals wouldn't stick with a tribe for thousands of years if they didn't work!
Anyway, now, as I write this, a week before my 65th birthday, I can see looking back, that "Rolling Thunder" was a book about someone very much like myself. Except for the medicine man powers, I am Rolling Thunder!
In the book, RT used his medicine powers to find and film Bureau of Land Management bulldozers that were plowing down piñon pine stands that provided food to the Indian peoples of Nevada. Three bulldozers would spread out with ship anchor chains fifty yards long between them and they would just mow down the trees.
I began reading "Rolling Thunder" just two moths after I joined up with the tree-sitters and monkeywrencher of Earth First! Three years later I would become the first EF!er to document our campaigns on video.
Our Bay Area EF! group also founded the Rainforest Action Network. Randy Hayes, one of the two principal co-founders and director of RAN was also a close friend of Doug Boyd. Earth First! and RAN always had deep connections to the indigenous people of the threatened wild areas we fought to save. Randy was also a filmmaker who helped him what I think is the first film or video about Earth First!, "The Crack in the Glen Canyon Dam."
The movie "Billy Jack" was inspired by and largely written around the life and medicine community Metatantay of Rolling Thunder. The Grateful Dead's drummer Mickey Hart named his first solo album after RT and includes in it a recording of a Rolling Thunder morning ceremony's opening tribute to the four directions.
Doug too, was immersed in the struggles of North American and rainforest First Peoples. So, for all of us, this medicine work was about improving how humans lived in nature, and protecting nature for its own magnificence.
This is why I have had a problem with Castaneda's stories of shamanism as sorcery. Doug taught that the medicine view is a view of disease as symptom of humans breaking or damaging their connections from tribal and natural reality. The role of the medicine man is to reconnect the disconnected, to keep everyone whole and well. The last thing a medicine person would be is an individualist, like Castaneda.
Also, at Shared Visions I met and worked with a man named Prem Das who married a daughter of a Huichol medicine man name Don Jose Matsuwa. Supposedly, as the story went, Don Jose was the real Don Juan interviewed by Castaneda.
From my readings of five books, and Peter Luce's exposition on all of the books, Don Juan and Castaneda and their cohort of sorcerers don't do anything to fix anything with "the people" or the world. In fact, Don Juan seems to be a lone sorcerer outside of any tribal culture. Their world's are of petty tyrants battling it out in a different reality to consume our energy, even though these "inorganic beings" live forever. So why do they need to prey on our energy to get energy, if they already live forever?
I think Luce does a creditable job laying out the metaphysical realities taught by the Castaneda books. You can see the entire picture quite well, what everything Castaneda wrote about over thirty years looks like when put into one viewscape. Actually I would give him five stars for that. In that regard, the book was exactly what I was looking for. If you are looking for that, I would wholeheartedly recommend the book. I listened to the audiobook read by Clay Lomakayu, which was also very well done.
But this is a niche book. Somebody could write an excellent book on how to make your own reel and rod for fishing, which would be great for the wilderness craftsman. Would such a book be a five-star book for anyone else?
So I knocked off a star because it has little to offer most readers and because Castaneda's body of work itself, has little to offer anyone. They certainly are not books to teach you how to become a medicine person.
Luce himself points this out: “[Don] Juan Matus... epitomized the worldwide human condition of our age...[a sense] of outrage, offense, self-pity and grievance." Castaneda's sorcerer's all exemplify these characteristics. In fact, to buy Castaneda's metaphysics, one has to believe that the ultimate spiritual reality is one of battling petulants. Thus, Luce provides a service, giving us a preview to help us decide if we want to go on Carlos's journey.
I think Castaneda was a conman, who created the most audacious, yet extraordinary literary con in history. I think his books convey nothing more about human reality than the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. His books include nothing to aid you in your explorations of psychedelic reality, or finding any deeper truths from the use of psychoactive substances. I think he was mendacious and that this book might help you see that too.
Mostly, I think you can't be a lone shaman. You can't use your medicine powers to make the people whole if you don't have a people. You can't trance out to machine-gun-like drum beats and become a medicine person.
Probably more than anything else he taught, Doug Boyd would implore us to wake up each day and say to the universe, "I am fully available to serve!"
That's probably the first step to take to become a medicine person. You might find you get into deeper states of knowledge and medicine power from serving food to ailing people at a soup kitchen than you do from consuming psychoactive plant teachers.
Doug Boyd did cite "Carlos" a few times in his course. He never talked about Castaneda's books or Don Juan, just some good one-liners he valued, as I remember. It didn't sound like Doug rejected Castaneda, so it's left me curious all this time about his overall conclusion about its veracity.
What about RT, could he really make it rain? Considering how famous he was (e.g. the Grateful Dead's Medicine Man and the real Billy Jack), I've never seen anybody report that any of RT's rainmaking ceremonies were a bust. Some Indian people criticized him for sharing too much with the hippies, but nobody ever said he wasn't a true medicine man, although he wasn't the medicine man of any single tribe.
And the closest thing I have to a belief is that when Doug Boyd told us it happened, it really happened exactly as Doug recounted it. I knew Doug quite well for a couple of years. Maybe because of his character, or maybe as a characteristic of autism, I don't think Doug had the capacity to lie.
January 14, 2019
Very good for anyone who's read some of the books Carlos Castaneda wrote about his experiences, especially the explanation for discrepancies for those times he was apparently in different places between two books, as he gradually found memories which had been buried, or were only recoverable in certain states of consciousness.
June 23, 2019
HEAR IN YOUR INNER EAR...JIM MORRISON AND THE DOORS...THAT ORGA MUSIC!
Gee! I have little to say after reading the amazon reviews of Peter’s work before adding my own to the list! I agree with all the positive reviews and am surprised people STILL get hung up on whether CC was a liar. I could care less. I read things hoping for an impact on my pea brain, to get me out of my ego.
I vacillated between 1st and 2nd attention throughout my reading of this work. What this means, is that Getting Castaneda, in my opinion, is an experiential teaching method itself.
I can say and realize this because my path is lengthy.
Regardless, I greatly value the same things that newbies would: it lists the books in chronological order; provides SIMPLE explanations of complex spiritual processes involved in study; and makes clear the importance of the 60s and 70s in making CC’s works successful.
Naysayers: F___k you!
Gee! I have little to say after reading the amazon reviews of Peter’s work before adding my own to the list! I agree with all the positive reviews and am surprised people STILL get hung up on whether CC was a liar. I could care less. I read things hoping for an impact on my pea brain, to get me out of my ego.
I vacillated between 1st and 2nd attention throughout my reading of this work. What this means, is that Getting Castaneda, in my opinion, is an experiential teaching method itself.
I can say and realize this because my path is lengthy.
Regardless, I greatly value the same things that newbies would: it lists the books in chronological order; provides SIMPLE explanations of complex spiritual processes involved in study; and makes clear the importance of the 60s and 70s in making CC’s works successful.
Naysayers: F___k you!
July 20, 2020
Well worth reading
This is an excellent overview of Castaneda's works. I'd read most of the books but long ago. This really helped me to remember them and tie them altogether. I also liked that the author didn't pass judgment for or against but presented the info for the reader's use.
This is an excellent overview of Castaneda's works. I'd read most of the books but long ago. This really helped me to remember them and tie them altogether. I also liked that the author didn't pass judgment for or against but presented the info for the reader's use.
February 22, 2021
Excellent Summation
This book was an excellent summation of Castanetas work. It was understandable, clearly written, and thoroughly researched. I really appreciate the efforts here that went into helping us understand Castanedas complicated, (but ultimately very clear to those who understand it) important Work.
This book was an excellent summation of Castanetas work. It was understandable, clearly written, and thoroughly researched. I really appreciate the efforts here that went into helping us understand Castanedas complicated, (but ultimately very clear to those who understand it) important Work.
September 20, 2019
The explanations seemed more like expansions of the original text than simplifications.
August 17, 2022
I read Castaneda’s second book “A Separate Reality” in the late 1970s for a college assignment. I then went back and read his first and third books before I lost the thread, thinking he had gone too far into the weeds. But still, I couldn’t entirely walk away from the messages of don Juan Matus. I found something there, something of a philosophical nature that was deeply intriguing. Luce reports that this is how it has been for many Castaneda readers: “…some of us can’t just walk away from him, either, regardless of whether what he wrote was fiction or autobiography. No one before him ever reached into the world he explored and brought it forward the way he did.” He also observes that people either love Castaneda, even to the point of cult adoration, or hate him and think he’s a fraud. Luce says there is a third option—we can take him at his literary word. We read and revere the likes of Homer, and yet we don’t take the stories of the Iliad or the Odyssey as literal truth. And the Bible elicits an even greater conundrum of opinions between its factualness, truthfulness, and prophetic message.
While Luce leaves the door open in this respect, he nonetheless confesses that he finds it all but impossible to believe that the Castaneda stories could be made up of whole cloth. While not embracing a cult-like belief, he contends that the stories presented in Castaneda’s 12 books are consistent, cohesiveness, and potentially truthful. The bulk of his task is dedicated to reviewing the Castaneda books, tying them together, and interpreting them in a manner that makes a case for them as a description of how the universe works. And he does a pretty good job of it.
But the ultimate question is whether Castaneda really did find the secret truth of the universe. Luce’s answer lurks somewhere between “maybe” and “most probably”, but Luce himself has not accessed the mysterious Second Attention, and he doesn’t comment on whether he’s even tried. Until someone else comes along who can give a first-hand account and produce a smoking gun, the answer shall remain in the shadow of skeptical doubt. But either way, I have found parabolic value in the stories of don Juan, and Luce’s book is a candle that sheds a dim light on that path.
While Luce leaves the door open in this respect, he nonetheless confesses that he finds it all but impossible to believe that the Castaneda stories could be made up of whole cloth. While not embracing a cult-like belief, he contends that the stories presented in Castaneda’s 12 books are consistent, cohesiveness, and potentially truthful. The bulk of his task is dedicated to reviewing the Castaneda books, tying them together, and interpreting them in a manner that makes a case for them as a description of how the universe works. And he does a pretty good job of it.
But the ultimate question is whether Castaneda really did find the secret truth of the universe. Luce’s answer lurks somewhere between “maybe” and “most probably”, but Luce himself has not accessed the mysterious Second Attention, and he doesn’t comment on whether he’s even tried. Until someone else comes along who can give a first-hand account and produce a smoking gun, the answer shall remain in the shadow of skeptical doubt. But either way, I have found parabolic value in the stories of don Juan, and Luce’s book is a candle that sheds a dim light on that path.
September 16, 2021
Peter Luce does a good job of summarising the various books by Castaneda and describing the arc of his writing career.
The book starts off by seeming to take a neutral and objective stance on whether Castaneda was for real, whether he really was the student of a Yaqui sorcerer or not. Luce seems to also take the attitude that Castaneda's accounts have value even if they never happened, because of the insights into human nature and the human potential. However, that aspect is not developed, and the final conclusion is rather dull and disappointing (and predictable).
I remember a college friend of mine who was a big fan of Castaneda: he was an engineering student and highly intelligent. He did not care whether they were truthful accounts or not: he was busy putting Castaneda's / Don Juan's principles into practice. He was alert, alive, full of zip and energy and joy of living.
A light read. If you've read Castaneda, you might find this an interesting and insightful summary. If you haven't, better start with the originals before reading this.
The book starts off by seeming to take a neutral and objective stance on whether Castaneda was for real, whether he really was the student of a Yaqui sorcerer or not. Luce seems to also take the attitude that Castaneda's accounts have value even if they never happened, because of the insights into human nature and the human potential. However, that aspect is not developed, and the final conclusion is rather dull and disappointing (and predictable).
I remember a college friend of mine who was a big fan of Castaneda: he was an engineering student and highly intelligent. He did not care whether they were truthful accounts or not: he was busy putting Castaneda's / Don Juan's principles into practice. He was alert, alive, full of zip and energy and joy of living.
A light read. If you've read Castaneda, you might find this an interesting and insightful summary. If you haven't, better start with the originals before reading this.
December 16, 2024
Generally- wrong.
It is easy to identify Castaneda’s sources, at least for those interested in esoterica: he ripped off many things from Alexandra David Neel & Evans Wentz works on Tibetan yoga (energy body, various exercises,..), then from Georgi Ivanovich Gurdjieff (also influenced by Tantric exercises of self-observation & self-remembering), plus Ch’i kung, Tai ch’i and Gurdjieffian “work” (hence Tensegrity & magical passes). Castaneda’s eagle is Gnostic’s demiurge. If one reads true scholars (Henry Corbin, Mircea Eliade, Hans Jonas, Ioan Culianu, Carol Zaleski, David Gordon White,..) or modern occult writers (Ouspensky, Alexandra David Neel, Evans Wentz, Colin Wilson, Raymond Moody, Joan Roberts, Daskalos ..) one sees that Castaneda was a gifted storyteller & eclectic. True- he was a psycho, by all accounts.
Further, Castaneda, in his post-junkie phase, contacted Gurdjieffian groups in Europe & perhaps influenced by Gurdjieff’s dances & Ch’i kung churned off his “magical passes”.
It is easy to identify Castaneda’s sources, at least for those interested in esoterica: he ripped off many things from Alexandra David Neel & Evans Wentz works on Tibetan yoga (energy body, various exercises,..), then from Georgi Ivanovich Gurdjieff (also influenced by Tantric exercises of self-observation & self-remembering), plus Ch’i kung, Tai ch’i and Gurdjieffian “work” (hence Tensegrity & magical passes). Castaneda’s eagle is Gnostic’s demiurge. If one reads true scholars (Henry Corbin, Mircea Eliade, Hans Jonas, Ioan Culianu, Carol Zaleski, David Gordon White,..) or modern occult writers (Ouspensky, Alexandra David Neel, Evans Wentz, Colin Wilson, Raymond Moody, Joan Roberts, Daskalos ..) one sees that Castaneda was a gifted storyteller & eclectic. True- he was a psycho, by all accounts.
Further, Castaneda, in his post-junkie phase, contacted Gurdjieffian groups in Europe & perhaps influenced by Gurdjieff’s dances & Ch’i kung churned off his “magical passes”.
May 19, 2021
I wrote a new Carlos Castaneda review with the name "The Science of Seers". It has a different perspective comparing Modern Science and the wisdom of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico and also the religion while touching all the main existential questions of human beings. And for me, it puts the writings of Castaneda to the right place as it has never done before. If you could take a look and read it I will be pleased.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...
July 17, 2021
So often I have gone back to Castaneda's books to find a story or explanation of a concept and sometimes I found it, but more often not. The list of synopses and summaries at the back of Getting Castaneda are immensely helpful. I appreciate the insights and connections, as well. Excellent, careful work, Peter Luce! Thank you!
January 21, 2020
interesting study. well thought out. I thought I knew the books by heart, discovered that I no longer do. well worth a read for fans of castaneda.
February 18, 2020
A great overview of Carlos' work. Very detailed. And also a great summary in one place that lets you consider the whole of his philosophy instead of just parts.
March 22, 2023
Excellent synopsis and summary of Castaneda’s series of 12 books published between 1968 and 1997. Highly readable and clear. Recommend!
May 7, 2025
he read all the castaneda books so you don't have to :-)
October 15, 2020
Very interesting, lead me to read his books in order.
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