It's hard to know where to start on this topic, so I'll just jump into the thick of it.
Tonight I came across a few paragraphs written by a person with the online username,corboykatz, a person I'd met online in other cult recovery forums, American-Buddha, discussing a variety of cult abuses by Tibetan lamas, in Sustained Reaction and SustainedAction, cult recovery forums discussing the cult around Carlos Castaneda.
I am impressed with the clear thinking of this person's thoughts and wanted to post them here.
http://forum.rickross.com/read.php?12,5623,page=1
I was also impressed with the forthright insight of Robin Billings and thought I'd post his thoughts here as well:
http://sustainedreaction.yuku.com/topic/4678#.T87JqcUeeSo
Tonight I came across a few paragraphs written by a person with the online username,corboykatz, a person I'd met online in other cult recovery forums, American-Buddha, discussing a variety of cult abuses by Tibetan lamas, in Sustained Reaction and SustainedAction, cult recovery forums discussing the cult around Carlos Castaneda.
I am impressed with the clear thinking of this person's thoughts and wanted to post them here.
http://forum.rickross.com/read.php?12,5623,page=1
- corboy
- Date Added: 06/19/2002
Article by a Former New Age Teacher
you can go visit the www.sustainedaction.com website--it covers the very troubled legacy of Carlos Castaneda, whose work has been revealed as fraudulent, and who has, since last year, been unmasked as leader of a very cruel, secretive cultic group.
Castaneda's fantasy books were a major contribution to New Age thought, which has its earlier sources in Gnosticism, Blavatsky/Theosophy and Gurdjieff.
There were a small group of dedicated correspondants on SA, such as emiliolizardo, greg mamishian, and robin billings, who tried to argue with people who'd invested their peace of mind and sanity in Castaneda's wierd world. They got burned out, got tired of being screamed and jeered at, and left.
The clash of the two cultures is quite visible on the website.
If you use the concept of meme theory, you can see that the big difference between New Age and science is that both are bundles of memes, but the New Age 'meme-plex' lacks 'meme busters', while science has 'meme busters.'
Critical thinking (aka 'meme testing/meme busting') is the intellectual equivalent of a boundary--like a well functioning immune system.
When you lack a healthy immune system, you get sick from any alien micro-organism that comes along, because your physical boundaries are readily breached.
If you dont know how to detect and test new memes through use of critical thinking (and a capacity for healthy, appropriate annoyance when your BS detector is triggered)--then your brain will be infected by any stray meme that floats in on the cultural tide.
If you dont have a 'meme buster'--that is, critical thinking skills and tools such as Carl Sagan's Baloney Detector, you have no way to test the memes in your collection and determine which ones are truthful and which ones are just cluttering up cognitive space.
Unless you can test memes, you'll eventually get stuck with what I call 'cognitive packrat syndrome'--your inner life gets more and more cluttered up with a burgeoning jungle of memes that you've never tested and dont ever toss out, exactly the way you get more and more dust bunnies under your sofa when you neglect to clean house on a regular basis.
(Guilty as charged!)
I flirted mildly with some New Age material myself. But I never really got into crystals, even when these were fashionable; it wasnt critical thinking that saved me.
What saved me was sensing that if I let myself take crystals and channelling seriously, there would be an expanding list of things I'd have to worry about and that I'd have too much stuff to worry about.
Thats the thing with New Age stuff--without a 'meme busting' process built into it, there's no limit on the amount of mental curios you end up burdened with.
The embargo on anger had a crippling effect. My peace group boycotted anger, and we thought it bad to 'be judgemental'.
As a result, we were constantly taken advantage of by various street savvy crooks.
The limit was achieved when one of the women in our group came home early from work and found her boyfriend at home, in their bed, shagging another woman.
X got mad.
Know what her boyfriend said?
He bleated, 'You're being judgemental!'
Castaneda's fantasy books were a major contribution to New Age thought, which has its earlier sources in Gnosticism, Blavatsky/Theosophy and Gurdjieff.
There were a small group of dedicated correspondants on SA, such as emiliolizardo, greg mamishian, and robin billings, who tried to argue with people who'd invested their peace of mind and sanity in Castaneda's wierd world. They got burned out, got tired of being screamed and jeered at, and left.
The clash of the two cultures is quite visible on the website.
If you use the concept of meme theory, you can see that the big difference between New Age and science is that both are bundles of memes, but the New Age 'meme-plex' lacks 'meme busters', while science has 'meme busters.'
Critical thinking (aka 'meme testing/meme busting') is the intellectual equivalent of a boundary--like a well functioning immune system.
When you lack a healthy immune system, you get sick from any alien micro-organism that comes along, because your physical boundaries are readily breached.
If you dont know how to detect and test new memes through use of critical thinking (and a capacity for healthy, appropriate annoyance when your BS detector is triggered)--then your brain will be infected by any stray meme that floats in on the cultural tide.
If you dont have a 'meme buster'--that is, critical thinking skills and tools such as Carl Sagan's Baloney Detector, you have no way to test the memes in your collection and determine which ones are truthful and which ones are just cluttering up cognitive space.
Unless you can test memes, you'll eventually get stuck with what I call 'cognitive packrat syndrome'--your inner life gets more and more cluttered up with a burgeoning jungle of memes that you've never tested and dont ever toss out, exactly the way you get more and more dust bunnies under your sofa when you neglect to clean house on a regular basis.
(Guilty as charged!)
I flirted mildly with some New Age material myself. But I never really got into crystals, even when these were fashionable; it wasnt critical thinking that saved me.
What saved me was sensing that if I let myself take crystals and channelling seriously, there would be an expanding list of things I'd have to worry about and that I'd have too much stuff to worry about.
Thats the thing with New Age stuff--without a 'meme busting' process built into it, there's no limit on the amount of mental curios you end up burdened with.
The embargo on anger had a crippling effect. My peace group boycotted anger, and we thought it bad to 'be judgemental'.
As a result, we were constantly taken advantage of by various street savvy crooks.
The limit was achieved when one of the women in our group came home early from work and found her boyfriend at home, in their bed, shagging another woman.
X got mad.
Know what her boyfriend said?
He bleated, 'You're being judgemental!'
I was also impressed with the forthright insight of Robin Billings and thought I'd post his thoughts here as well:
http://sustainedreaction.yuku.com/topic/4678#.T87JqcUeeSo
Having read The Teachings of Don Juan and all the subsequent works, mindful of the cultural context in which they were published, it seems obvious to me that Carlos was following the prevailing zeitgeist and capitalizing on the allure of psychedelic drugs that existed in the late 60s and early 70s; as their popularity fell into decline with fiascos like Charles Manson, etc., he modified and pulled back from that position in his published works.
The evidence that Carlos was crafting his characters, story line, and field data, from the very beginning, is overwhelming to any reasoning mind. As one small, but characteristic, example of the general lack of veracity surrounding his work, when asked to provide voucher material for "humito" by R. Gordon Wasson, Castaneda was unable to produce anything that met minimal standards of convincing evidence. In fact, to someone who has had training in any of the spiritual traditions he was clearly borrowing from in crafting his fiction, there is nothing at all convincing in any of Castaneda's books. Everything he borrows is twisted by the perceptual distortions his characterological disorder cast on his thought processes. Amy has indicated she has received reports from a mole at Simon and Schuster that there was heavy editorial assistance needed to make his work publishable. The success of his books enabled him to hoodwink enough of the public to make some money ("just enough money to sink a devil deeper into the pit"). That he would utilize his notoriety to aggrandize himself among a small group of gullible, albeit sincere, followers and exploit them for his own ends pretty much sums up the quality of his life's work. Castaneda's fiction, centering around his grim Gnostic cosmology of a predatorial universe, is a literary reflection of his grim, paranoid, predatorial character structure. It appears that he did burn from within, after all, devoured by the flames of his own private hell of lust, deceit, and paranoid hatred of humanity, and in particular his loathing of the one specimen of mankind that was his first care - himself.
Just my opinion,
Robin Billings, Ph.D.
The evidence that Carlos was crafting his characters, story line, and field data, from the very beginning, is overwhelming to any reasoning mind. As one small, but characteristic, example of the general lack of veracity surrounding his work, when asked to provide voucher material for "humito" by R. Gordon Wasson, Castaneda was unable to produce anything that met minimal standards of convincing evidence. In fact, to someone who has had training in any of the spiritual traditions he was clearly borrowing from in crafting his fiction, there is nothing at all convincing in any of Castaneda's books. Everything he borrows is twisted by the perceptual distortions his characterological disorder cast on his thought processes. Amy has indicated she has received reports from a mole at Simon and Schuster that there was heavy editorial assistance needed to make his work publishable. The success of his books enabled him to hoodwink enough of the public to make some money ("just enough money to sink a devil deeper into the pit"). That he would utilize his notoriety to aggrandize himself among a small group of gullible, albeit sincere, followers and exploit them for his own ends pretty much sums up the quality of his life's work. Castaneda's fiction, centering around his grim Gnostic cosmology of a predatorial universe, is a literary reflection of his grim, paranoid, predatorial character structure. It appears that he did burn from within, after all, devoured by the flames of his own private hell of lust, deceit, and paranoid hatred of humanity, and in particular his loathing of the one specimen of mankind that was his first care - himself.
Just my opinion,
Robin Billings, Ph.D.
A little back story about Robin Billings in relation to his perception of Castaneda:
Fictional character and plot motivates suicides?!?
Amy,
I just finished reading your book and would like to thank you for telling the story of your relationship with Carlos. I trust this recapitulation will serve as an auspicious beginning on the path of truth, healing, and peace in your life.
I first read The Teachings of Don Juan in 1969 when I was 15 years old, which temporarily deflected my career course away from my first love, psychology, and into anthropology. Like many, I was motivated by the aim of eventually doing anthropology fieldwork in the Southwest and finding Don Juan. As I matured in my undergraduate training, I soon realized that Carlos' works were fiction, particularly coming to my senses with the cliff jumping scenario depicted at the end of "Tales of Power." I was then fortunate to be able to happily return to my true love, clinical psychology, to eventually complete my doctorate.
During graduate school, reading De Mille's books on Carlos sensitized me to his paranoid and misogynist tendencies, as revealed in his portrayal of the feminine in his books, such as the "diablera" he depicts as trying to "steal his soul" and which he is so frightened of in the final chapter of "The Teachings." I once met Terence McKenna at a weekend retreat in Chicago, and upon being asked about Carlos, he portrayed him as "a weird little man...." Which, following the reading of your book, pretty much sums it up. The three categories of personality disorder in the DSM-IV can be summarized by the three "W" words, the weird (Cluster A), the wild (Cluster B) and the weepy (Cluster C). Carlos appears to have crystallized out into a classic blend of a paranoid with sadistic tendencies (Cluster A), and the narcissistic/borderline pattern (Cluster B - "one who loves without measure those he will soon hate").
One question remains after reading the book. Obviously, Carlos and Florinda reached an agreement on allowing her to utilize imaginary interactions with the fictional character Don Juan in her books, as must have also been worked out with Taisha. Apparently, his wives were let into the fold of using Don Juan as a literary device to further the cause. Was this issue ever discussed by either of the witches? Knowing Don Juan as a fictional character, it seems to me, would cast a glaringly fictional light over the "burning from within" story line as well. This being the case, it would certainly seem hard to explain how the witches would be motivated to end their lives over a shared fictional story line.... Any thoughts on this matter?
Robin Billings
I just finished reading your book and would like to thank you for telling the story of your relationship with Carlos. I trust this recapitulation will serve as an auspicious beginning on the path of truth, healing, and peace in your life.
I first read The Teachings of Don Juan in 1969 when I was 15 years old, which temporarily deflected my career course away from my first love, psychology, and into anthropology. Like many, I was motivated by the aim of eventually doing anthropology fieldwork in the Southwest and finding Don Juan. As I matured in my undergraduate training, I soon realized that Carlos' works were fiction, particularly coming to my senses with the cliff jumping scenario depicted at the end of "Tales of Power." I was then fortunate to be able to happily return to my true love, clinical psychology, to eventually complete my doctorate.
During graduate school, reading De Mille's books on Carlos sensitized me to his paranoid and misogynist tendencies, as revealed in his portrayal of the feminine in his books, such as the "diablera" he depicts as trying to "steal his soul" and which he is so frightened of in the final chapter of "The Teachings." I once met Terence McKenna at a weekend retreat in Chicago, and upon being asked about Carlos, he portrayed him as "a weird little man...." Which, following the reading of your book, pretty much sums it up. The three categories of personality disorder in the DSM-IV can be summarized by the three "W" words, the weird (Cluster A), the wild (Cluster B) and the weepy (Cluster C). Carlos appears to have crystallized out into a classic blend of a paranoid with sadistic tendencies (Cluster A), and the narcissistic/borderline pattern (Cluster B - "one who loves without measure those he will soon hate").
One question remains after reading the book. Obviously, Carlos and Florinda reached an agreement on allowing her to utilize imaginary interactions with the fictional character Don Juan in her books, as must have also been worked out with Taisha. Apparently, his wives were let into the fold of using Don Juan as a literary device to further the cause. Was this issue ever discussed by either of the witches? Knowing Don Juan as a fictional character, it seems to me, would cast a glaringly fictional light over the "burning from within" story line as well. This being the case, it would certainly seem hard to explain how the witches would be motivated to end their lives over a shared fictional story line.... Any thoughts on this matter?
Robin Billings
