Because.

"artists use lies to tell the truth."
more likely than not his work is (at least to a degree) fraudulent. however some of his work (particularly his earlier stuff) still holds some value (to some people).

Id be interesting in reading any hard evidence concluding that carlos actually admitted to being a fraud as the rumor goes.

What does "being a fraud" consist of, in this case? I mean, do you have to believe everything he wrote literally 100% or consider him a total fraud?

I've never read the books but it's always been around through friends. Seemed from what they told me that he wrote interesting shamanitic/sorcery stories. Maybe he did meet one or many shamans and used some things he experienced to base his catchy writtings on. My friends seem to have learned from it and enjoyed it. Didnt seem like one had to necessarily believe in "miracles" to think there were some value to it... no?

nexalizer:




Oh goody! I think I have finally found a thread that I can call home....

Unfortunately I'm currently short on time...but you can bet your boots I will contribute to this thread as soon as I get some time.

BTW I agree with all the above statements....and endlessness...I would highly suggest giving one of the books a shot if you ever have the free time.

the first one isn't a required starting point...the second one is a bit more interesting and is a little better to begin with IMO...

one of the easiest things to debate in reguards his work is his allie the "little smoke" I think it was called. Don Juan taught him this he claimed..and it is a smoking mix that contains psilocybe mushrooms..and the effects from the accounts in the book sound quite dramatic..I have the book here in front of me but I cant find the page with the exact recipe..but it did contain psilocybin mushrooms from what I understand. The effects sound powerful like a DMT trip to me..but as many people may have found out personally simply smoking does not do much. Maybe vaped crystals as that is still not much explored. The mix Don Juan had used had been left to sit for a year I think according to Carlos..perhaps it is possible that the alkaloids undergo some sort of change and other actives are then present..

Another issue is his constant referance to "mescalito". I have never heard of natives calling peyote "mescalito". Infact they find it offensive from what I have been told first hand by some born and raised mexians I met a few years back when I asked them about it. This one guy lives in the area where the cacti grows and claimed to have been on pilgrimages into the desert with the huichol to collect and ingest the cacti. What I was told by this guy is that if you go there and ask them for "peyote", "mescalito" or "mescaline" they will pass you off as some gringo and ignore you. They always refer to peyote as "Hikuri" or "Wiricuta".

Now, even having the name "mescaline" for the alkaloid of peyote is in some respects a mistake. "mescalito" refers to the mescal bean..not peyote. I am unsure of how this origionally got mixed up but from what I was told when I asked about this issue is that the natives definatly know what mescalito is and what it is not. They dont confuse that name with peyote, gringos call peyote "mescalito".

Now, I understand this might just be of little relevance to this discussion..but I have always found it just a little odd that a native american man of knowledge like the character "Don Juan" would not know this, and refer throughout all of the encounters in the books to the spirit of peyote as "mescalito"..

I am unsure of how deep this misunderstanding of terminology goes though..and I dont know if the Yaqui origionally used peyote..or if they use peyote at all even at this point..so it may be totally understandable some native americans refer to peyote as mescalito..still I think this is a somewhat valid question and something I have wondered about whenever Castaneda comes to mind.

i remember reading cosmic trigger and iirc according to bob mescalito was a term used for an archetypal jester/trickster spirit encountered on peyote. i could be wrong though

^ yeah but he is most likely passing on gringo knowledge. Historically "mescalito" did come from a reference to the mescal bean. The mescal bean was used in hallucinogenic ceremonies by some of the same tribes that use peyote. I think it's use is even older than peyote use.

Okay so I must clarify something here..I have my copy of "a seperate reality" here and realize that he did not say he smoked the mushroom mix persay..it was claimed to be a mixture of mushrooms and some other herbs that is let to sit for a year. He calls it the "little smoke" and says it is to be smoked in a pipe..but then he also says this..

"Don Juan's procedure to utilize the mushrooms was to let them dry into a fine powder inside a small gourd. He kept the gourd sealed for a year and then mixed the fine mixture with five other dry plants and produced a mixture for smoking in a pipe"

and then this..

"The process of 'smoking' consisted of ingesting the fine mushroom powder, which did not incinerate, and inhale the smoke of the other five plants that made up the mixture."

..so he is inhaling it, and not necessarily smoking it?

Also if you read the pages this is taken from(page 6 and 7) the emphasis is on the mushrooms and not the other herbs. It is quite clear that the mushrooms are Don Juans "ally".

These are not amanita mushrooms either as it states quite clearly that is it "a species of mushrooms belonging to the genus psylocebe(psilocybe?)"

So..if there is any truth to this, what could be going on here?

here is a link explaining why mescaline came to be called mescaline.

http://www.erowid.org/ask/ask.php?ID=2818

I enjoyed the books, but it became clear towards the end that he'd run out of steam and became a cult leader of sorts (read The Sorcerer's Apprentice, by Amy Wallace, a disciple of Castaneda, for a firsthand account ) . . . Ever read Magical Passes? Boy, oh boy, that was a stinker.

But his cult leader years, or the truth behind the books, don't matter to me: I enjoyed most of his books, they inspired me to pursue consciousness in all its forms. Like any good work of fiction, the story is what matters, and Castaneda could tell a darn good story, so what if he made it up? It's real enough when you read the books, and one would be wise to question the truth behind anything they read.

Jamie wrote







-I have actually tried gourd experiment with fresh psilocybe cubensis...of course I have no idea what the other "herbs" in the mixture are for, Don Juan Claims they are basically for flavor..but who knows?

Its true the fresh mushrooms turned to powder over the course of a year....and I did feel very different effects and more so than had I just smoked regular dried mushrooms.(yuck)... but nothing like a DMT breakthrough or anything....

I remember reading that Terrence Mckenna chimed in on this and thought the psilocin had decomposed into DMT...it would be interesting to find out if this is possible with high potency psilo-strains.

In the first book "teachings of Don Juan he says it is psylocybe mexicana...which is supposed to be lots more potent so it's hard to say...if the smoking mixture is real....

I have also considered the possibility that being as how Carlos Castaneda is from brazil
I believe he may have taken ayahuasca and just chose not to mention it in the books..."the little smoke" may represent ayahuasca and mushrooms taken together or some type of mushroom changa..?? but that is pure speculation on my part ..

I discovered one of Castanedas books when I was 13 years old. I fold it, moldering and forgotten in an old dusty room, tucked away in a cardboard box....my finding of this book was almost a lovecraftian scene. It was also a boon for me, for I was always prone to altered states, to a broader and looser definition of reality. I can very much see why the arguements about the man and his work always pop up, but I muchly count myself aloof to most of the quibbles and what-not.

Was Don Jaun real? The questions seems....not very sophisticated. Is a thought about a unicorn real? Is Doctor Spock, Great Cthulhu and Bugs Bunny less "real" than Thoth Pan and Jesus?


Like tetra just said, it's a good story. As someone else mentioned in a different thread recently, the efficacy of not-doing and recapitulation are much more interesting than any "reality". What you call reality...is made up of words baby, and limited by words, alterable by words, ultimately shaped by the syntax of your native language.




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How about the Wizard of the Upper Amazon guy?


Someone mentioned his works in another thread..actually, his writings have came up in at least a couple Castaneda threads within the past year or so around here, always in a "forget CC, this amazon guy is the real deal".

Furthermore, the back of the wizard of the upper amazon (the printing that I own anyway) has a full paragraph blurb knocking CC. A different writer, a different tribe, a different part of the world....I enjoyed both. Manuel Cordova has an awesome story to tell, one that stands perfectly fine on it's own two feet...to have to diss another work as part of your sales pitch is never a strong position to take. Really, dig up your copy of Wizard of the Upper Amazon and flip it over, read the back. Does it sound.....petty? Insecure? Ill spirited? I hope future re-printings leave this mud tossing out.

I also began reading those books when I was 13...

Over the years I have tried lots of his suggestion...some of them I maybe should not have...
but I always had staggering results with using his techniques...

In the fire from within...Don Juan And Carlos place a hand made mirror into an old river stream...they gaze into it and an inorganic being tries to come out of the mirror...

Don Juan said the technique opened up a portal to another dimension

I tried this on mushrooms ans scared the daylights out of myself...seems to work

Also the Changing into an animal thing on high doses of psychedelics.
scared me too.....seemed to work

Every one of his tips about "dreaming" also seemed to work.

As far as Mescalito goes...I believe this is just the name that the peyote spirit identified itself by to Don Juan and his cohorts...I don't believe don Juan ever claimed it was a cultural name...Don Juan despised Carlos' questions about his "cultural background" and refused to answer them.

What if the peyote spirit "knew" it would be part of a story told to a western audience? So that is why he told Don Juan his name was Mescalito?
Anyways I have gotten comfortable with it and whenever I take Mescaline....I call the spirit Mescalito. .....Mescalito appears to me sometimes in the shape of Alfred E. Nueman but that is another story.....

EDIT:
- Maybe the When someone is on peyote or san pedro and they call out the name "Mescalito" it is a way for Mescalito to know....A gringo is calling it..


tetra wrote:



I'ts just my opinion but I think Magical Passes was not bad ...it was meant as sort of a Don Juan Exercise book and I thought his form of Shaman/Ti-chi was pretty awesome personally...

What's the matter tetra? Don't like exercise??

When i was a young lad with hair down past my shoulders in the early to mid 1970's I read all of the Carlos Castaneda books. That was a time of many acid trips and a constant fog of Mary Jane smoke.

I have to agree with Tetra that the Castaneda books were a lot of fun to read (especially the first one) regardless of any factual content. I enjoyed the stories that he wrote, but never did I take them very seriously. As I got to the end of the series my impression then and my recollection a few decades later is that the stories became increasingly contrived.

If I had not have learned about "inner silence" from reading Mr. Castaneda's books....

I feel like I would have been lost when It comes to the psychedelic experience.
Quite frankly the information I got out of those books has literally saved my life..

no understatement...

death by psychedelics???

Perhaps I was a bit harsh calling it a "stinker". I actually did try to teach myself the passes from his book, and it just didn't work for me. I do have lots of respect for anyone who creates their own exercise system.

Yes he lumped it into a sort of "sacred trip spirit" archetype I think. He mentioned other cultures' versions of the same idea/vibe/entity as well.

I haven't read all of Castaneda's material, just the first few books and I haven't read too much on those that criticize the work either so I probably shouldn't even post. However, my intuition tells me that Carlos had learned somehow about the shamanic practice and spirit medicines and didn't have a good way to get this information out to the mainstream public. So he may have embellished or even flat out told a story that was just trying to explain the concepts he came to understand. I mean, he had to know something considering a lot of the information in those books is valid, regardless of whether or not Don Juan was a real person.

Hell if nothing else they make excellent psychedelic science fiction novels, which are useful in their own right you know?