Castaneda / Don Juan on Water / Fire Entities

[redcairo]

(I know this thread is ancient, so what, that's what forums are for)

 

"Shared hallucinations": My daughter and I shared dreams, while she was in the womb and for years as she grew. I think the last one we shared that we both recalled, she was prior to age 7 or so. I recalled one she didn't though (so I can't really evidence it as shared but I believed so), several years later. A local deva came and talked with us (I'd sent a message earlier in the day, about my plan to bug-bomb the property the next morning), and she was frightened. (Because spiders are frightening.) But the deva enthralled her a bit (which was really sort of amazing, as if suddenly a web was spun with diamond-stars, every point an amazing fascination) as distraction, and it was ok. I think shared dreams might count as shared hallucinations if both people remember it.

 

Casteneda: I read a couple little things from him in high school but had no interest in that sort of thing. I actually had a kind of eye-roll attitude about him and the whole "good vs. evil" thing at the time. Then around late '95 after a couple years of kundalini-inspired experience, I read one of his books that was fairly recent at the time -- I think The Art of Dreaming -- not because I was interested in his stuff, but I was staying with someone in a hot summer and they had the book on a table nearby on a dull day. I was "agog" that he was describing so many things I had experienced the prior couple of years -- things that to me were so bizarre and inexplicable, and I was pretty sure I had not heard/read of elsewhere at the time. (Particularly interaction with "inorganics." And other things. And I had journaled many of these so I had them in writing to refer to.) For the first time, I actually took him seriously. Then I found out that by then, a lot of people were dissing him left and right, and actually critiqued that book as being hokum, which is pretty funny, since it's one of the few books (outside Seth's writings) that ever explained internal experiences I had previously assumed were unique to me.

 

As for peoples' characters, I think like the saying goes -- when the divine light shines through someone, it magnifies all their patterns, not just the good ones.

 

If someone isn't marrying into my family I am less interested in "opinions of their character" than how their information resonates with me. Which to me is more about the information than about them. Anybody can be a conduit; like another saying says, "sometimes the worst people give the best advice."

 

I read something, I feel it internally, I should be discussing it internally with my inner angel and the rest of the consortium -- there's a ridiculously large extended family inside, so to speak -- and they guide me for understanding of the materials.

 

(I once woke up at 4am in a hotel room, and woke up my best friend in the room with me excitedly but half-asleep whispering, "It's all about the stars! The universe, the cosmos!" and spent the next 48 hours feverishly typing trying to pull an understanding together (everything is cosmic, in the end). If you just ASK for understanding and ALLOW it, for me at least, it usually comes. Sometimes at inconvenient moments.)

 

A friend once told me that on some level it shouldn't matter who wrote (or rewrote) the bible or any other holy book; it wouldn't matter, in a way, if it were written by a housewife in Kansas last week; what matters, is whether the information is aligned with Truth-capital-T, and how you can internalize it. Truth "is" and no source makes something more or less true inherently.  (In terms of probability maybe. But not inherently.) If Casteneda was essentially doing an "internal-intuitive Q&A with self" that he was writing out as conversation with Don Juan, so what?

 

I think part of the problem is that CC was made into a cult figure and got TOO popular; he was canonized early and then could only fall from grace from that point on. IMO He shouldn't have been stuck up on that pedestal to begin with. Not for any bad reason, just for lack of the cosmic-hippy-coolness-factor having anything to do with legit spirituality.

 

RC

[Taiji Bum]

On 2/10/2018 at 11:34 PM, redcairo said:

I think part of the problem is that CC was made into a cult figure and got TOO popular; he was canonized early and then could only fall from grace from that point on. IMO He shouldn't have been stuck up on that pedestal to begin with. Not for any bad reason, just for lack of the cosmic-hippy-coolness-factor having anything to do with legit spirituality.

 

RC

Yeah. I agree. People also like to point out that he died of liver cancer, like that is supposed to invalidate him. Buddha died of food poisoning and Jesus was executed for treason against Rome. I think Don Carlos Castaneda's real test will come a hundred years from now. Will he still have followers then?

[thelerner]

I agree that his death shouldn't invalidate him.  He was a good writer whose fabulous stories introduced shamanism and esoteric energy arts to a large audience.  He knew his stuff.. he had.. juice.  His subjects weren't fake, but imo.. and that of many researchers, his stories were. 

 

Like a scientist who writes science fiction.  The stories are fake.. but the science is real and/or stretched.  With Castaneda, he had a PH.D in anthropology (first book was his thesis I believe) the phenomena he writes about are from misc. authentic sources, but imo  the stories were made up.   That he insisted against much evidence that they weren't is a major flaw of his legacy. 

 

I hope people read his books, and are inspired by them, but do not become followers or take them as literal.  Rather be entertained, have there minds opened to possibilities and move on to authentic writers.  Imo Castaneda is a good place to start but bad to finish. 

Edited April 3, 2018 by thelerner

[Starjumper]

On 12/29/2017 at 1:34 PM, Jessup2 said:

Lol, the same can be said of practically all beliefs and religions. Luckily, I had many experiences of my own before reading any of his books. However, some claim his accounts come from a lot of research into other experiences or religions. A form of plagerism perhaps. I see many truths in the materials, and better explained than in most of the esoteric nonsense and practices people devote an entire lifetime to.

If all it does is to make people aware of other possibilities, which it has, then it was a success. I found the materials to be very funny and the interactions entertaining. I am sure plenty of people since the first publishing went on many drug trips and got lost in the trash heap that surrounds everything.

 

I read one of Castaneda's books and found it interesting, the strange house in the desert, and some of the practices they did.  I also liked how he compared their system of cultivation to the ways used in the Chinese internal arts.  If it's true then that is because sorcerers are psychic enough to see what each other is doing and appreciate the good points, and also there are certain basic truths to the nature of cultivation anyway.

 

What I really like about Castaneda is his very precise and full knowledge of the path of the warrior and how it can transition into the path of the wizard and how he explains it so clearly, describing my own process very well, in fact.  Whether that is plagiarism or first hand knowledge I neither know nor care;  I know truth when I see it, and he obviously did too.

 

I didn't read the long first post but I might get into that little by little.

Edited April 3, 2018 by Starjumper