Carlos Castaneda: Theories, Beliefs and Practices

The High Priestess of Backwordness used to attend “Get High on Dance,” accompanied by one little girl and sometimes two. These free-form sessions were held at Dance Home, upstairs from some store in Santa Monica. Imagine the High Priestess’ astonishment, decades later, upon discovering that Castaneda used to hold classes in that space. Corey Donovan’s notes from the 38th session (Sept. 22, 1996) are an example of the kind of thing a person was likely to hear, when the sorcerer Carlos Castaneda shared details of his home life in two adjoining apartments inhabited by female followers:

He told us that he sometimes stayed in the other half of Florinda’s place, where there was a tub that la Gorda supposedly used to use before she assertedly died from an aneurysm. Nobody would use her tub anymore, and he claimed he was the only one who would stay in that part of the place where she used to live. So they started setting stuff in the tub to use it as a place from which things could disappear.
Florinda had plumbing problems–they called it the “Day of the Yellow Shrimp” because the tub backed up with run off from the toilet. So the Bible that had been sitting there was literally “full of shit.” It also affected other things that had been sitting there for awhile, including “papers of the Leperchun,” meaning Tycho–the so-called Orange Scout. Those papers had supposedly not disappeared after ten years. “But there is something not human about the Leperchun anyway,” he asserted, so it somehow made sense that her stuff had not disappeared. Nyei had also placed a stack of her yearbooks there and they had supposedly disappeared.

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These anecdotes come from Amy Wallace’s book, Sorcerer’s Apprentice:

In one of the classes Castaneda held in Santa Monica, the talk turned to colors. “If you want to kill yourself in six days, put turquoise sheets on your bed,” Castaneda is quoted as saying. (Wonder if anyone has ever tried? This would be good news for the Final Exit, Hemlock Society types, people who want to die on their own time schedule, but find guns too messy and plastic bag suffocation too grotesque.)

“Never eat onions. Sorcerers don’t touch them because they resemble the human form, layer upon layer. Eating onions will reinforce your humanity.” Castaneda, quoted by Amy Wallace.

Advice given to Wallace by one of the Tensegrity instructors, aka Chacmools:
“In the sorcerer’s world we must cover our knees.”
Advice given to Wallace by one of the witches:
“Never let hair grow on you knees, because bare knees perceive energy.”

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Castaneda student Daniel Lawton summarized the belief system:

This planet is a gigantic chicken coop, run by beings from another dimension, who control our minds by replacing our normal circular brain rhythm with a side to side one. They control everything around us, even our movie stars, whom they transplant into another body at death… These minds live on, giving the feeling of re-incarnation… At night they lick our energy from our toes, making us unaware and submissive. You can escape this by hiding in a tree, because the fliers can’t climb trees. But they can hop over pyramids in Mexico, that’s another thing.

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One of Castaneda’s doctrines was not so odd, really. This comes from Strawberry Woman, who went to a Tensegrity workshop.

One of the teachers told us that Carlos Castaneda had once said that after awhile, you realize that ‘it is all the same story.’

If he meant what the High Priestess thinks he meant, it’s what the Buddha said, about how we all face old age, suffering, and death. (And of course there’s birth and joy and life too, quite often.) Werner Erhard said the same thing in another way, “Everybody’s life is a soap opera.” That’s the bottom line of it.

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Michael Ventura once wrote about a conversation with Castaneda, who had worked for a year as a short order cook in a Tucson diner. Some of the local good ol’ boys picked on him. Ventura related it like this:

Being very small, there was nothing he could do when these big guys threw food. He asked his boss for advice. ‘Duck,’ his boss told him. He thought this a profound lesson and worth his time.

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Corey Donovan – notes from a Tensegrity workshop in 1995

Florinda digressed, claiming “Carlos doesn’t read anymore like an ordinary person–he sleeps on top of books all day, because his liver and spleen were taught to absorb heavy, philosophical type tomes. His legs down to his ankles read thrillers. Unfortunately, he has no spot on his body for reading letters. His penis doesn’t read at all; he can’t even read Playboy with it.” She said that she and Carol Tiggs “placed a batch of letters on his buttocks one day while he was sleeping, and when he woke he said he’d had the best sleep ever, but had felt alligators, snakes and barracudas biting into his back. His head is only good for reading magazines–Time, Der Speigel and Hola.” So Florinda read his letters to him.

This theme recurred in Corey Donovan’s notes of May 11, 1997. A woman named Laurel spoke in the class of a feeling she sometimes had that the ground was shifting under her feet.

Castaneda responded, “That’s very good. When you do feel the ground shifting like that, take off your shoes immediately and put down some paper that has something written on it and see if you can read it with your feet. Don’t just try it once. The ‘genius way’ is to just try something one time, and then abandon it if it doesn’t work. Keep trying it. That’s a time when you could be able to read with your feet.”

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From Corey Donovan’s notes of May 11, 1997

“A mother, or an aged parent, should just be able to ‘say goodbye’ to the child and not beg for help. ‘Goodbye. I’m on my own now. Don’t be taking care of me.’ It takes a warrior to do that though. Most mothers are saying, ‘Help me! I need you to look after me.’”

“People think they have so many worries and that they need Prozac. Instead, if things are getting to be too much, it’s perfectly acceptable, in fact, you should, curl up in a fetal position and suck your left thumb. Well, not ‘suck’ it so much but ‘massage the palate.’ Twirling your hair is optional,” he joked (as he imitated this position).

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Amy Wallace:

I employed the most pragmatic sorcery trick Carlos had given me: Should I ever want anyone to depart, he instructed me to sprinkle a little of my own urine in corners of rooms or in doorways. The urine trick had worked miracles for Simon at a famous Hollywood studio….. I have used this method to good effect several times; indeed it has never failed.

Face Bookwords? Ace Backwords on Facebook

Surviving Carlos Castaneda

I don’t know who it was, but someone called Castaneda the Ultimate Trickster.

In “Homage to a Sorcerer, Carlos Castaneda,” Michael Ventura wrote an event that had happened about 12 years before, which would have been 1986. He went to a bookstore where Castaneda made himself available to answer questions. Ventura’s impression:

It was Castaneda’s laughter, more than his skills as a storyteller, that convinced me of his sincerity and authenticity. He talked for free, had nothing to gain from us, spoke without artifice. People rarely laugh when they lie. At least, in my experience, they don’t laugh sweetly. And there was an irresistible sweetness to this man.

It must have been about a year after the incident described by Ventura, when another writer, Lane Sarasohn, encountered Castaneda. The meeting was later described in a 1994 issue of The Realist, in a memoir titled “No Out-of-Body Experience Necessary.”

The teacher had a favorite anecdote about a party he once went to that was also attended by a Carlos Castaneda imposter, pretending to be him. He seems to have told it again at the meeting Sarasohn caught. (I don’t imply that’s a bad thing. Of course, any speaker with a worthwhile message is going to say a lot of things more than once. Having a stock of polished anecdotes is part of the craft. He was just doing his job. I only mention that he seems to have really liked to tell that story.) Sarasohn remembers how the teacher was trying to get a weekly session going in a city park, where he could teach body movements…

…resembling Tai Chi. He’d learned these exercises somehow from Lo Ban, a Chinese Herbalist who became a brujo, part of don Juan’s ancient lineage.

Apparently the movement class was written off as a bad idea by Castaneda, after only a couple of weeks. (This must have been what later became Tensegrity, workout program of magical passes, taught by the inner circle.)

When speaking before a group of any size, Castaneda always maintained that he didn’t care about fame or fortune or even about having disciples. Not one little bit. Sarasohn wrote,

He’d devoted his life to trying to understand certain mysteries and he’d committed himself to the “warrior’s” path. It meant for him a life of total self-discipline and extreme austerity: no wife, no family, no high-profile academic career, no celebrity status as a best-selling author (no book tours, no groupies, no flattery, no drinking, no drugs).

The fact that Castaneda endured such an uncomfortable and deprived lifestyle, would prove to his followers that he couldn’t possibly be a con artist. That was the intention, anyway. Of course, it was necessary that the followers take his word for it that the self-portrait of the guru as an ascetic was indeed an accurate picture. It was not, and the inner circle knew it, but only one of them talked (Amy Wallace, Sorcerer’s Apprentice). Most of Castaneda’s significant others went off into the desert to die, unable or unwilling to survive without their leader.

Amy Wallace, reflecting on the passionate believers who attended Castaneda’s workshops and other events, said that she always admired the ones who “picked up their marbles and went home,” once they got a taste of the leader’s erratic and dictatorial ways. She says,

Best of all were those who took in a little philosophy here, a few techniques there, were enthralled by the marvelous speakers in the heyday of the lectures, and never wanted for more. These people, who did not upset the balance of their lives, appear to have benefited greatly… To this day I feel inspiration upon reading my favorite, Journey to Ixtlan. Take the beauty therein, and aspire as he and so many millions have. I would advise every reader to remember – you are the magical being.

After one of his meetings with Castaneda, Michael Ventura wrote something that could sum up the whole story:

His presence was an admission that every truth is fragile, that every knowledge must be learned over and over again, every night, that we grow not in a straight line but in ascending and descending and tilting circles, and that what gives us power one year robs us of power the next, for nothing is settled, ever, for anyone.

Carlos Castaneda and the Suicide Women

If Castaneda has not been on your radar screen up until now, “The dark legacy of Carlos Castaneda” by Robert Marshall is a basic though unflattering introduction.There is biographical information– the early marriage, and, even though the marriage ended, Castaneda’s adoption of the son his wife already had from another man. We are told that he worked on The Teachings of Don Juan for seven years. The editor at the University of California Press had serious doubts, but the UCLA anthropology department convinced him to publish the book in 1968, and the Carlos Castaneda myth was off and running.

30 years later, the death of Carlos Castaneda was shrouded in mystery. A woman named Gaby Geuter wanted to become a member of Castaneda’s inner circle, but was constantly rebuffed. By 1996 she realized it wasn’t going to happen, so she and her husband Greg Mamishian started following the teacher and filming his activities whenever possible. Borrowing from the technique of government agents and A. J. Weberman, they became garbagologists and retrieved many interesting documents from Castaneda’s trash. The Gaby & Greg website was shut down in 2008 but it included a photo captioned, “Carlos being helped to the house, less than a month before he died. This was the last time we saw him…” Immediately after the sorcerer’s death, four women disappeared. An associate, Daniel Lawton, wrote,

I had telephone numbers for four of the ones who left at the same time, which were all disconnected on the same day. This, and the strange mood of the May 2 one-day workshop, led me to make certain inquiries that resulted in me learning that he was gone.

Another female member of Castaneda’s intimate group fell off the map a few weeks later. The five suicide women included two witches, a chacmool, the president of Castaneda’s company, and his adopted daughter/paramour. This is enough intrigue for anyone’s biography.

Richard Jennings (aka Corey Donovan) started a website after Castaneda’s death. Sustained Action is “devoted to exploring and evaluating the legacy of Carlos Castaneda, and to investigating other possibilities for increased awareness and expanded perception.” The webmaster did research on the women who had been so close to Castaneda and then disappeared. His records started with 1947 and ended up in 1999, tracking the lives of the fancifully re-named female disciples. In a piece called “Sex, Lies and Guru Ploys,” Donovan/Jennings gives a succinct capsule description of Castaneda:

He claimed to be the last of an ancient lineage that supposedly held the secrets not only to traveling bodily into other worlds or dimensions, but which also offered the promise of a form of immortality–evading death by keeping one’s awareness intact. He claimed to have a unique “energetic configuration”—one that he and his colleagues purportedly had not seen in any of the thousands of people they had interacted with over the past few decades—that gave him special abilities and capacities as the “Nagual.”

Amy Wallace was enthralled by Castaneda for many years and later wrote a book, Sorcerer’s Apprentice, about her experiences as a member of his inner circle. When she first got involved with him, her life was headquartered in Berkeley, so at least there was some protective distance between them. When she talked about relocating to Castaneda’s realm in Los Angeles, one of his close female companions (a witch) warned her,

Don’t move to Los Angeles. Those that do the best are the ones who take his work, use it and make it their own, and stay far away from here – the stress is too great.

But Wallace did not heed. Of course, given what she later learned of the intrigues enmeshing the sorcerer, what sounded like a warning about grave spiritual danger could have been merely a jealous reaction from a concubine already forced to share her beloved’s attention. The last thing an established favorite wanted, was another cute young college girl moving in.

Kylie Lundahl

Wallace became the confidant of Kylie Lundahl, the tall gaunt Scandanavian instructor of magical passes, or Tensegrity. (In Sorcerer’s Apprentice, she is called Astrid.) In Castaneda’s universe, Kylie Lundahl was a chacmool–a fierce guardian warrior–but it’s too complicated to go into here.

The point is, in Castaneda’s last days, Lundahl warned him that some of his people might commit suicide. To fill the emptiness, she recommended that he assign people specific tasks to carry out, once he was dead. She was talking about not only the tight inner group, but the followers who ran and worked for his organization, Cleargreen. It must have surprised Lundahl when the boss told her he didn’t care what happened to Cleargreen. But she managed to change his mind to an extent, and he did assign jobs to people as she had suggested. It kind of makes a person wonder. If he had not taken Lundahl’s advice, how many more suicides would have occurred?

In an online discussion group, Wallace talked about the final weeks of Castaneda’s life. Apparently when the witches, chacmool, and adopted daughter left, one of the other followers, Carol Tiggs, stayed behind, thinking to take on the leadership post. She told Wallace the ones who had left were “Dead, dead, dead!”

Carlos Castaneda in Acid Heroes

Carlos Castaneda on Drugs

Amy Wallace’s book, Sorcerer’s Apprentice, is about her years in a complicated relationship with Carlos Castaneda. It contains these words:

Carlos despised this association with drug use. He explained in books and lectures that don Juan had given him psychedelics in the beginning of the apprenticeship because his thinking was so rigid that “he needed to be blasted with dynamite.”

Wallace also says,

While Carlos eschewed recreational use of all psychedelics, he wrote in detail about how “power plants” had moved his assemblage point away from “me-me-me,” The great difficulty, he explained, was to maintain this shift when the drugs had worn off.

No matter how goofy some of his ideas were, this is one place where Castaneda is absolutely right. But the Beatles said it more elegantly–

How often have you been there?
Often enough to know.
What did you see when you were there?
Nothing that doesn’t show.

The sad thing is, whatever realms Castaneda visited, if what he brought back was any indication, they might be realms we had better stay out of. In personal relationships, he seems to have taken an attitude that anything he did was okay, because it was him doing it. Any act of psychic manipulation or mental cruelty could be justified by him, as part of the teaching process. His disciples were supposed to be grateful to be on the receiving end of the sorcerer’s stern attentions, his correction, mockery, and denigration.

He was not what we normally think of as a well-adjusted human being. For many who walk the paths of seekers, just to be functionally human would be enough. But for Castaneda and his associates, humanity was the booby prize. They aspired to be witches, sorcerers, Chacmools, and so forth. It’s no wonder they were weird. There is more about their leader’s seemingly unspiritual and often objectionable behavior on another page.

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On Wednesday, March 5, 1997, Corey Donovan attended Part III of the Cleargreen Night Sessions (at Dance Home in Santa
Monica) and as usual took shorthand notes which he later transcribed and published. He quotes some of the dialog between Castaneda and one of his inner circle.

[Castaneda said,] “People who smoke a lot of marijuana don’t make good lovers. The father of a friend of mine in school did a study on it and concluded that because it makes their knees and elbows weak, they just lie flat on top of the woman and smother her.” Florinda groaned. “This is a science,” he responded.

Castaneda is, of course, the subject of one of the chapters of Acid Heroes.

Related:
What movies and music did Carlos Castaneda like?

Carlos Castaneda: Media Worth Consulting

Radio interview
YouTube offers a 1968 Pacifica Radio interview, which is the only one of many audio recordings of the sorcerer himself, recognized as authentic. (Kind of irksome to listen to. Castaneda frequently does that “uh” thing.)

Stage Production
Diablero is a rock musical, and the story behind it, which Bill Graham and Ken Kesey are parts of, is fascinating. (Go to the History page). Described as “music from the past for the future.” There are even two different versions of the work, produced in different years.

Carlos Castaneda’s Chacmools Interview part 2/3
Chaacmol supposedly meant “thundering paw” in Mayan, and the three women interviewed on this New Age TV show were the sorcerer’s fierce guardian warriors. If you start with Part 1, there is a bunch of bla bla bla to sit through first, so might as well go straight to Part 2 and get right into some Chacmool conversation. Kylie Lundahl’s recitation of the Castaneda belief system is strangely compelling, almost hypnotic in its weird fascination.

Crumb Comix
Full-page comic by Aline and R. Crumb, published in The New Yorker, Sept 28, 1998, titled “How Sweet It Is, For a Privileged Few.” A bunch of people are sitting around a table.
Somebody says, “Listen, you have to send me a Tensegrity beanbag when you get back to the States.”
Somebody else says, “A what? I refuse to aid and abet the stupidest thing I ever heard of.”
Another person says, “Hey, Tensegrity is the cutting edge! The hippest of the hip!”

Tales from the Jungle -
Divided divided into 10 segments for YouTube, this was a 2006 BBC show.

It starts out with the aftermath – the skeleton found in the desert, belonging to Castaneda’s adopted daughter/lover, and talks about the disappearance of several other women around the time when the shaman died. There’s an interview with Richard DeMille, who was the first Castaneda debunker.

One of DeMille’s complaints was that the personality of Don Juan was dark and dour in the first book, lighthearted and even clownish in the third book, yet these two chronicles purport to cover the same time period. Well, that alone is not enough to condemn anybody. DeMille says, “There’s no way Don Juan’s personality could change from day to day….” But he is so wrong, if you believe Amy Wallace, who knew Castaneda very well for many years. In her book, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, she describes how his personality could change from minute to minute.

In your own life you may have known people like this. What makes them that way might be alcohol; it may be a personality disorder; it could be prescription drugs or the other kind. Or just because the person is a control freak. An unscrupulous leader can keep the people so occupied with anticipating and placating his tantrums, they have time for little else. And if you believed Castaneda, his mood shifts and contradictions were teaching tools, employed as part of his sorceric teaching method.

Castaneda’s first wife, Margarita, and his son, say that he actually did go on all those trips, and they back up the story that there were many boxes of field notes at one time. When challenged by DeMille, Castaneda said they were destroyed when one of his Los Angeles homes suffered a basement flood.

Some people believe everything Castaneda wrote and said. Others believe nothing, and many are in between or just plain don’t know what to think. Some feel that even if he did make it all up, no harm was done. On the contrary, the BBC program says the shamanic yarn-spinning was not a victimless crime. The Huichol people, for instance, were overrun by hippie tourists looking to score some peyote, which attracted the interest of law enforcement in both the US and Mexico, and “struck at the heart of the Huichol culture.” Peyote pilgrimages got them busted. And there were also “catastrophic consequences” in Castaneda’s own adopted Southern California culture and beyond.

In this TV show we meet Greg and Gaby, disillusioned former disciples who surveilled Castaneda’s entourage and searched through his garbage. They went public with their discoveries, such as evidence that Castaneda had married two of his witches in one week. Also on this program is Amy Wallace, talking about Castaneda’s sexual quirks.

Related: What Movies and Music Did Carlos Castaneda Like?

And of course Carlos Castaneda is in the Acid Heroes book…

Carlos Castaneda and Alan Watts

Amy Wallace’s book Sorcerer’s Apprentice – Between those covers lie many interesting tales. She relates the generally homophobic Castaneda’s disgust at learning that Alan Watts was gay. Watts had been his hero, and Castaneda was just crushed to learn the truth. Even worse, when the two men were climbing a staircase, Castaneda said, “he made a pass at my culo!”

And playing grabass wasn’t the worst of it. Watts got “stinking drunk” and horrified Castaneda with his impiety. These are Castaneda’s words about Watts, as reported by Wallace:

He was crude, cynical about spirituality, even sneering at his own books, books I had practically memorized! But worst of all was hearing Watts, my hero, declare “Of course we can never live up to the behavior we admire – that’s the beauty of it!”

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You might dig this page:

What movies and music did Carlos Castaneda like?

Things Noticed

Ace Backwords, natural-born troublemaker and attention-getter, has made the news again. Check out this San Francisco Chronicle piece by Kevin Fagan.
People sure have a lot of opinions about it. The piece garnered 65 comments so far.

It has been suggested that Ace Backwords adopt the alternate persona of Face Bookwords, but so far no action on that front. Meanwhile, he can be found on Facebook under the old familiar moniker of Ace Backwords. And he has collected a boatload of friends. FB does enforce a limit, you know. A word to the wise.

Another suggested Facebook friend is Aline Kominsky-Crumb. Yes, she is related to R. Crumb. And an artist in her own right.

BN Duncan was not politically correct. Not surprisingly, he was Ace’s best friend. Now he’s gone but never, never forgotten.

Speaking again of the Beatles

A Toot and a Snore in ’74

Posted by JetWaveRadio on YouTube, this is a part of something called A Toot and a Snore in ’74, a Beatleg record with the participating musicians listed as John Lennon (his name is bigger on the album cover), Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, Harry Nilsson, Jesse Ed Davis and Bobby Keys. The occasion was a product of Lennon’s “lost weekend.” It was the only time we know of when McCartney and Lennon played together after the Beatles broke up.

“Genius is Pain” from National Lampoon Magical Misery Tour

Tony Hendra as John Lennon is brilliant. He was one of the writers, too. This is about the funniest thing I ever heard. The visuals are great, by Rick Moore.

Did you know there’s a website called SuckMyBeatles?

Speaking of the Beatles

….and we were speaking of the Beatles, because several chapters of Acid Heroes are about them. So here is an official, High-Priestess-Endorsed recommended article:
“The Beatles ‘bigger than Jesus’ on Google,” written by Harry Wallop for Telegraph.co.uk

Here on YouTube is 25-year old Paul McCartney being hassled by a journalist about psychedelics.
“I’m not trying to spread the word about this,” says Paul.
“I don’t think my fans are going to take drugs just because I did.”