I'm doing my bit to bring down the average rating for Castaneda's book because I think that science and scholarship require rigorous honesty with both others and oneself, and Castaneda's work was a conscious and deliberate fraud. It is also part of (and a prime influence on) a larger and long-standing trend of misrepresenting the cultural traditions of peoples ranging from the Lakota to the pre-Christian Celts, misrepresentations that always conveniently march with the author's own yearnings for peace, brotherhood, inner harmony, harmony with nature, or mind-blowing drug trips, as the case may be.

There are many who support such lying, although they may call it tricksterism. Their motives vary: contempt for rational inquiry as a disease of the Western mind, or a personal preference for imaginative possibility over too-much-work realilty, or a tricksterish joy in pulling the noses of scientists and scholars, or (perhaps) admiration of someone who managed to parlay THEIR tricksterism into fame, fortune, and a Ph.D. from UCLA. I've read at least one "why-should-we-care" review in which the reviewer's attitude seems founded in the idea that only an unsophisticated, uptight person would care if Castaneda was a liar.

I prefer to believe that an enlighted Westerner truly respectful of indigenous shamanic traditions should care if such a tradition is being misrepresented and exploited for money. (If indigenous peoples have not always fared well at the hands of conventional anthropology, it is merely adding injury to injury to go all postmodern on them and start treating them as fictional characters subject to infinite regressions of irresponsible description.) Castaneda's lies aren't a critique of conventional fieldwork (as David Silverman absurdly claimed); they are merely an awful warning reminding us of the necessity for rigor in research and analysis--and some rigor on the part of the junior scholar's mentors, as well. The conventional fieldworker who fronts himself in his writing invites the critic to evaluate his experience and discount as much of it as seems appropriate. Castaneda, sitting in the UCLA library reading about peyote trips at times he was supposedly in the desert having them, is just lying.

One reason many of his admirers don't care if he's lying is that they see him as playing Don Juan to us, putting the reader through hoops as Don Juan put him through hoops in the books. They want there to be an imaginative truth in Don Juan that justifies the place of honor it held in their youthful reading. But Castaneda's books aren't skillful koans begging to be deciphered in order to trigger mystical insights. They are just clumsy and rather obvious fictional descriptions of mystical experiences that are commonplaces in fiction (including fictional encounters with shamans). The only difference with Castaneda is that his experiences were presented as fact, and a generation of hippies invested themselves in finding significance in this claptrap when they might have found greater spiritual benefits in reading some good poetry. Strip away the claims of literal truth from Castaneda's books, and there is no deeper or higher or more spiritual or more poetic truth. He isn't reaching for the stars; he is lying for profit.

It is perhaps useful to compare "The Teachings of Don Juan" to Aldous Huxley's "The Doors of Perception," a sincere and well-written book that really is reaching for something. Or Robert Graves' "The White Goddess," a work often taken as descriptive history, but freely admitted by its author to be a speculative, poetic meditation on the divine sources of inspiration in Western mythic tradition. Or Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," an attempt at original philosophy told (sort of) through first-person experience whose genesis was transparent and mundane. Or the genuine self-fronted fieldwork in African Diaspora religions done by James Wafer in "A Taste of Blood" and Karen Brown in "Mama Lola." By contrast, Castaneda is a tawdry sideshow shill.

Or, to take a different sort of example, a ghost story in a collection of supposedly true ghost encounters is almost always short and matter-of-fact in writing style, with nothing like the chilling effect of a literary ghost story such as "The Haunting of Hill House." There's no reason it should be well-told, because its perceived value is as an accurate account of true experience. If it isn't a true experience, then it had damned well better be well told. With Castaneda, even though doubts about the veracity of his experiences began to be expressed quite early, the "true story" assertion carried all before it, and created a nimbus of apparent value around not very much. (The same thing is the case with the appalling success of "The Da Vinci Code," which was so popular because so many people believed it be a true--or at least plausible--account of history, employing sound methods of research and interpretation.)

Most of us can look back on our youth to find infatuations that don't really stand the test of time. (I'm looking at you, "Collected Poems of Dorothy Parker"!) We can appreciate in retrospect what was of value in whatever it was, and why it spoke to us, without having to prove that it really did contain the wisdom of the ages. Let go, Don Juan worshippers!

But the main point can't be made too often: Castaneda presented lies as spiritual truth, hoaxing a generation of seekers for his own profit. (also posted on Amazon) ( )

The books from Carlos Castaneda are an experiential journey in themselves : as he grows in understanding and ability over this utterly strange-seeming world he has been absorbed into, so something in us can be "switched on", a kind of second-hand - even third-hand - enlightenment, if you will. Castaneda's journey can be life-changing, even from the depths of an armchair.

This first book though, is the foggiest and dimmest of them all. At this stage, Castaneda has little or no understanding, and his account is mostly baffled reportage. Actually, the first 4 or 5 books are reportage, and are succeeded by a lengthy explanation that itself takes several more books to accomplish. The difference is that as the books progress, so the events begin to take on more meaning and context, even though they may leave us with dropped jaws over and over again!

For the first and only time, Castaneda - a student of anthropology - essays his own explanation for the events that have befallen him, and this takes up the last portion of this book. He argues entirely from anthropological premises, and has missed the awesome truth that he is engaged in shamanic "sorcery". Never again does he attempt to make an explanation that does not stem from his own enlightenment bubbling up from a deeper inner place, put there by his teacher Don Juan.

Drugs play a major part in this first journey, which probably explains why, on its release in the 1960s, it proved so popular. However, the drug aspect retreats, and by the third book (Journey To Ixtlan), has more or less disappeared. We find out much later, that they were only a device used by Don Juan Matus to alter Castaneda's "perception matrix", a necessary precursor to becoming a "man of knowledge" and acquiring "impeccability".

There is much in this first book to capture the intellect, imagination, and sense of mystery, but it is nonetheless the least satisfying. The journey could equally begin (as I did) with the second (A Separate Reality), or even the third (Journey To Ixtlan). Although the first in the series, it is the least essential. ( )

Nagy élmény olvasni. ( )

Do yourself a favor and read the original series, it will make you question the way we live and perceive reality ( )

Review located at http://lupabitch.wordpress.com/2008/0... ( )