The Castaneda Debate


Recently there was an article in Salon about Carlos Castaneda, written as a kind of expose. There were suggestions that he ruled over a cult and led some followers into suicide, but the evidence was mostly innuendo and gossip. Castaneda's major books are delightful, laugh out loud funny, and filled with wisdom. And they can't take you anywhere you don't already know how to go, to paraphrase The Eagles' gift. If he lost it in his old age, well, he's not the first or the last to do that.

The suggestion that Castaneda was somehow obliged to be ultimately successful as a sorcerer is naive. Anyone who reads his work knows that Don Juan, the sorcerer, constantly points out the contradictions and absurdities in Carlos' thinking, and reminds him that the chances of achieving freedom are almost nonexistent. And yet the sorcerer tries anyway. That is just the human condition.

Like Merle Haggard's mama, Don Juan tried.

So the expose in Salon is that Carlos didn't reflect back to society the image of an acceptable academic once he started displaying witchy ways. He wasn't inside the collective gloss. My recollection is that only his first book purported to be the work of a doctoral student in anthropology. After that he wrote, at least as I read him, that he was going to try and break his gloss. He was going to explore a form of shamanism, the foundation of which is that that perceptions are habitual. At the base of his writing is that if you are in the moment, where reality is materializing, you can influence it.

That's just another way to say what physicists were saying: that there is no deep reality and that measured and unmeasured particles are subject to different laws. One has all possibilities open while the other, having materialized, does not. The problem was, "why is the measuring instrument different?" There were a lot of solutions proposed, including the many worlds theory, which became the most popular. But behind this problem lay a philosophical problem: What is the measuring instrument? One solution was that consciousness itself is involved in the process of determining what materializes. (The salient passage in the preceding link is under "Defining a Quantum Reality, paragraph five.)

I don't personally think that there is some magical faculty that makes things come into being, like a baby thinking it created the delivery room and everybody in it when it first experiences the shock of consciousness. I suspect it is more the processing of energy fields which are amorphous, in terms of meaning, and so are assigned symbols which bring them into the realm of emotional relatedness. But if the fields are essentially amorphous, they depend on perceptual constructions to produce "reality." The symbols are not the field, in Castaneda's view, and what appears to be a duality is not two unreconcilable concepts, but the opposing polarities of the field which define it. The "assemblage point" of the energy field can be shifted.

When Castaneda moved from the first to the second book, he entered the world of the storyteller. The clash between academia and the "fake" is between the storyteller and the researcher, or compiler of evidence. The thing about compiling evidence is that it can be done selectively, to support a thesis. One cannot compile evidence for experience which is outside a gloss. It has no coordinates or repeatability. But that doesn't mean it didn't happen. The evidence for the ability of G.I. Gurdjieff to send energy into someone else's system is all anecdotal. But if you were on the receiving end of the energy the proof was not separate from the experience.

Certainly Gurdjieff was capable of unexpected personal powers. His father was a professional storyteller, and passed along to him that knowledge. He was a remarkable man mentored by remarkable men. But was he also a charlatan?

Of course he was. More accurately he was a trickster (or sorcerer). He was also warrior and wanderer and orphan (from the same root as Orpheus), like everyone else who shares the human psyche. To think that you would not find a reflection of the whole psyche in a fully conscious person is illogical. How could they bring someone else to inclusive consciousness if they were not there already? And how could they be there by letting essential energies of the psyche go dark because of cultural prejudices and fear of shadow projections? They couldn't.



Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

Joseph Campbell relates that James Joyce specified as pornography any literature which did not recognize this seemingly simply requirement. If the author created a character who was attractive because he or she has the values of the collective, or unattractive because he or she is assigned shadow values, then there is no art. There is pornography. For example, if I create a white hatted hero who follows a code of conduct admired by the collective, and a black hatted character who does not, I am by Joyce's definition a pornographer. The emphasis is not on prurience, but on exposing the opposites as a contrivance of mind, and not the essential nature of reality. True art, Campbell observed, holds one in a state of aesthetic arrest, by bringing the shifting experience of dualistic thinking into a stasis, or timelessness. The opposites are united and there is wholeness, at least for a moment or two ...

Leadership of a society determines for the mass of people what is admitted to and what is denied and projected because it draws the collective shadow, and the inevitable sacrifice to clear shadow from the group. One of my favorite depictions of this was in "Master and Commander," when the young officer takes on the shadow and has to sacrifice himself to remove it. He jumps overboard with a cannonball in his arms. The story of Christ was historically pivotal because it brought this process to consciousness. The shadow is invited (he takes on the sins of the community), he is ritually crucified, and then reborn so that the ritual can be repeated next Easter.

This was pivotal because it marked the beginnings in consciousness of a way to remove the community shadow without actually marginalizing and murdering a bunch of people unfortunate enough to be without sufficient status to resist the process. It provided a way to build a one world community through the elimination of the violence characteristic of a fundamental thought process, which by definition cannot grasp the abstract core of the story. The great discovery was that the psyche is a pattern reading device, and that if the pattern is produced in sufficient detail, and recreated with sufficiently sincere ritual, it is accepted by the psyche as being equal to an actual shadow projection onto an innocent person, followed by their being socially ostracized and destroyed by the group. Traditionalists may prefer stoning while cutting edge revengers might prefer hellfire missiles.

If the individual can bear the sacrifice of the centrality of ego, then there is a connection with the archetype, or immortal Self. The illusion of shadow being outside of oneself is dispelled, and there is a new person born out of the process. But the ego death is experienced as a real death and the fear is of a real death. In Castaneda, the jump into the abyss is a story. The deep psyche understands it, but the ego doesn't. That is how teaching stories work. They are constructed so as to move past the critical faculties of the conscious mind, and work in the unconscious to build a new and larger container for when the smaller one breaks. If the ego merely shifts the story to ordinary reality and treats it as a recollection of factual information, there is no sacrifice. There is a strengthening of ego resistance to information which does not fit into the existing gloss. "I ain't jumping off no cliff; that's bullshit."

In the media, the argument centers on whether the stories about Don Juan by Carlos, and the stories by Don Juan, about himself and his mentors, were "true." In other words if there were security cameras recording the Sonoran Desert would they have recorded evidence for the truth of stated events.

"Now, Mr. Mateus -- all we want to know is who sold you the little smoke. Turn state's evidence and you're looking at a

suspended

sentence ..."

Anthropology records the linear history of a people, and also the foundations of of the group psyche. For example, studying the history of Europe would give you the conflicts and remembered events, the wars and the plagues, but it wouldn't show you the foundations on which the collective psyche rests. To get that you'd need to know the European fairy tales that are told to the children. These have more effect on consciousness than any recitation of history, and they reach back as far as ten thousand years. So an anthropologist would be remiss in not asking the question, "What stories did your parents tell you when you were a child, and what stories do you tell your children?"

Some of the external clothing of the fairy tales change to accommodate shifts in the conscious attitudes, as in Christian times a moral lesson might be tacked on. But the abstract core of the story remains, and is transmitted as such. They do not proscribe a moral attitude as being a survival advantage.

What saves you in one of these stories will kill you in another one. The only constant, the only thing that connects the hero to a good outcome, is following the advice of the magical animal. This reflects the objective nature of the unconscious. It is amoral, as our dreams easily demonstrate. The magical animal is the connection into this instinctual, body knowledge. Castaneda's Don Juan tells him that he can choose the upper world or he can choose the organic world. Don Juan's choice was the organic world. It is only in that world where one experiences the phenomenology of alternative states of consciousness. As Burroughs observed, you've got more of it in your big toe than in your head.

The contribution Castaneda made to preserving and passing along the abstract cores of the human psyche is important, but I think that's an understatement. His stories make these abstract cores accessible, and because of that his books can reenergize the religious impulse, not of obedience to authority, but of self-observation of these abstract cores in the individual. Carl Jung said that the living waters are always coming up somewhere. By the time a fence is built around the spring and it begins to turn a profit, they don't come up there anymore. They come up somewhere else. For a lot of people, Castaneda's creative art is a source of living water. That doesn't mean the man in his social manifestation wasn't a few tiles short of a hacienda.

The consequences of inflation caused by identifying with archetypal figures can be tragic, as when the American Indians got involved in the Ghost Dancer cult as a way to escape their plight, and let themselves believe they couldn't be harmed by bullets. Disconnecting from the earth is not a clever solution to practical problems.

This doesn't prove, however, that there are no archetypal beings. It just proves they don't attend a turkey shoot dressed as a turkey. Carlos once asked Don Juan what he'd do if somebody was hunting him with a rifle, and he said, he wouldn't come around. He didn't say his body was immune to bullets. His level of consciousness would warn him, in a dream image, of somebody else's focus on him.

There is a place for Ghost Dancing, and that place is storytelling, or teaching for the left side. The advantage the archetypal story has is that it arises spontaneously, like a dream, from a storyteller, with the abstract core intact. In this way it isn't altered by the conscious mind to promote a moral position or cultural prejudices. Castaneda was learning to be a storyteller and his mentor was Don Juan, who in turn had his mentors.

The Nagual Elias is presented as not very talkative, a serious man, but the abstract core of how he tricked the Nagual Julian into following the path of sorcery as his apprentice came from him. Don Juan tried often to explain to Carlos about the abstract cores in storytelling. The individual storyteller has his own style, but the foundational core of the story cannot change because it is the archetypal pattern in the psyche. If that isn't passed along intact, the story loses its universality of application.

One of the most memorable quotes from Don Juan, at least for me, was when he told Carlos that a sorcerer is an empty man except for a collection of stories which have a universal application. Within that observation is the key to what he was teaching. Everything he taught Carlos was breaking down all the glosses, or perceptual containers, and doing away with the defense of an ego in the telling of stories. By doing this, the story has no other foundation than the archetype, and an archetype cannot be destroyed. He was outlining for him the only rational path his line of mentors had settled on as leading to freedom. If you are nothing except the archetypal cores, then you are immortal ... at least for the moment. ; )

My personal suspicion is that Carlos made up Don Juan as a composite of some explorers at the frontiers of the evolution of the psyche, one of whom was Talcott Parsons. But there is nothing in the literature of Castaneda which gives evidence that he was doing more than what he said he was doing, which was exploring those frontiers himself. The greatest danger, always, for somebody who contains a great teacher is identification with the archetype. No matter how impressive the archetype, it's essentially a one trick pony, and identification with it is a restriction of consciousness with severe and painful repercussions.

Brugh Joy contains a great teacher, but Brugh is smart enough to know he can't go around being that person all the time. He'd inflate like a toad and explode like Mr. Creosote. He always stresses to those he teaches that nobody can be in that heightened space all the time. The way Brugh related this issue was that he had to speak to a group of people, and he thought, "What am I going to say to these people? I can't do this."

And his inner voice answered, "Relax, you're not the one who has to do it." He realized then that he would change state at the appropriate time, and channel the teacher, as Carlos channeled the teacher. But he could not and should not try to mix that state with ordinary daily life. For that he needs "ordinary Brugh."

I'm sure it was no different for Castaneda. If he thought he was somebody other than an ordinary man while engaged in ordinary affairs, he was tragically mistaken. Like Brando on screen or pink champagne on ice, his context was everything. And there is no insurance that great achievement in the first phases of a sorcerer's career will lead to a noble elderhood. Here is a passage from William Burroughs, "The Place of Dead Roads," regarding the aging of Somerset Maugham:

As he took Lady Greenfield's arm to lead her into dinner, Maugham suddenly shrieked out as if under torture, "Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!"

Alan Searle leads him away, Searle's pudgy face blank as a CIA man's.

Maugham would cower in a corner whimpering that he was a horrible and an evil man.

He was, Kim reflected with the severity of youth, not evil enough to hold himself together ...

It's always possible that Carlos was, in the end, not evil enough to hold himself together. But that doesn't take anything away from his work, which stands alone as a remarkable artistic achievement, as does Maugham's body of work.

Posted: Tue - April 17, 2007 at 12:10 PM