LITERATURE RELATED TO CARLOS CASTANEDA

Castaneda

The main work in the world of Carlos Castaneda is obviously the twelve books by Castaneda himself:

     -    "The Teachings of Don Juan" (1968)

     -    "A separate reality" (1971)

     -    "Journey to Ixtlan" (1972)

     -    "Tales of Power" (1974)

     -    "The Second Ring of Power" (1977)

     -    "The Eagle's Gift" (1981)

     -    "The Fire Within" (1984)

     -    "Silent Knowledge" (1987)

     -    "The Art of Dreaming" (1993)

     -    "The Active Side of Infinity" (1998)

     -    "The Wheel of Time" (1998)

     -    "Magic Passes" (1998)

His witches

Four women who associated with Castaneda and who were also said to be disciples of Don Juan were called the 'witches'.

Joanie Barker and Carol Tiggs did not publish any books.

Florinda Donner published three books:

     -    "Shabono" (1982)

     -    "The Witch's Dream" (1985)

     -    "Being-in-Dreaming" (1991)

Taisha Abelar published a book:

     -    "The Sorcerer's Crossing" (1992)

His ex-wife

Margaret Runyan was Castaneda's first American wife, and she published a book recounting the years they were together (from 1955 to 1960):

     -    "A Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda" (1997) 

One of his lovers

American writer Amy Wallace met Castaneda when she was a teenager and published a book recounting her experiences with him and his inner circle:

     -    "Sorcerer's Apprentice: my Life with Carlos Castaneda" (2003)

His followers

The French writer Veronique Skawinska  became so obsessed with Castaneda that she traveled to the United States to search for and find him, and after many journeys she finally succeeded in 1985. She  recounted this odyssey in her book:

     -    "A Magical Encounter with Carlos Castaneda" (1989)

Gaby Geuter was a student of Castaneda in Los Angeles, who, along with her husband Greg Mamishian, decided to spy on Castaneda during the last two years of his life, and they published their research in the book:

     -    "Filming Castaneda: the Hunt for Magic and Reason" (2004)

Instructors

Several believers in Castaneda  have published books detailing Don Juan's teachings, and the main ones have been:

Daniel Noel:

-       "Seeing Castaneda: Reactions to the Don Juan Writings of Carlos Castaneda" (1976)

Nevill Drury :

-       "Don Juan, Mescalito and Modern Magic: the Mythology of Inner Space" (1978)

Donald Lee Williams :

-       "Border Crossings: A Psychological Perspective on Carlos Castaneda's Path of Knowledge" (1981)

Gabriel Jaime Rivera:

    - "Castaneda in quotation marks" (1992)

Guillermo Marín:

   - "How to read Carlos Castaneda" (1992)

   - "Don Juan Matus: the Here and Now of Toltec Wisdom" (2024)

Victor Sanchez

-      "The Teachings of Don Carlos: Practical Applications of the Work of Carlos Castaneda" (1995)

-   "The Toltec Path of Recapitulation: Healing Your Past to Free Your Soul" (2001)      

Thomas:

-      "Creative Victory: Reflections on the Process of Power Based on the Complete Works of Carlos Castaneda" (1995)

Joaquín Castillo and Richard Dixey:

    - "The Spirit of Don Juan" (1996)

Martin Broussalis:

    - "Castaneda for beginners" (1998)

Ken Eagle Feather:

    - "The Toltec Way" (1998)

Joachim Gartz :

-       "Scientific and Other Realities: the Case of Castaneda" (2001)

Armando Torres:

-       "Encounters with the Nahual: Conversations with Carlos Castaneda" (2002)

Graham Kane:

-      "Toltec Dreamer: a Collection of Memorable Events from the Life of a Man-of-Action" (2002)

Andrés García Corneille:

    - "Carlos Castaneda: Drugs, Witchcraft and Personal Power" (2005)

William Patrick Patterson:

-       "The Life and Teachings of Carlos Castaneda" (2008)

Douglass Price-Williams:

-       "Dreams of Life: Field Notes on Psi, Synchronicity and Shamanism" (2008)

Felix Wolf:

-       "The Art of Navigation: Travels with Carlos Castaneda and Beyond" (2010)

James L. Desper Jr.:

    - "The End of History, a Commentary on the Warrior's Way" (2012)

Joan Wulfsohn:

-      "Stalking Carlos Castaneda: the Story of a Woman's Journey with Aging Sorcerer, on her Way to a Magical Life" (2012)

Juan Morales Martín:

-      "Trapped in the Tremendous: Carlos Castaneda's Knowledge System" (2014)

Peter Luce:

-       "Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda" (2017)

F. Lawrence Fleming:

-       "Understanding the life and work of Carlos Castaneda" (2018)

Christos Voudouris:

-      "The Metamorphosis of the Subject in Foucault and Castaneda: the Way to Experience the Spirit" (2018)

David Silverman:

-      "Reading Castaneda: a Prologue to the Social Sciences" (2019)

Mike Sager:

-       "Shaman: The Mysterious Life and Impeccable Death of Carlos Castaneda" (2020) 

Fatih Gunicen:

-     "The Science of Seers: The Opposite Twin of Modern Science: A Review of Carlos Castaneda" (2021)

C. Ramírez:

     -    "Castaneda on the Internet"

Critics

Several individuals have published books criticizing Castaneda, and among the main ones are:

American academic Richard de Mille published two books in which he carried out a structural and chronological analysis of the texts, demonstrating the impossibility of Castaneda's alleged encounters being real and exposing contradictions in his accounts :

-       "Castaneda's Journey: the Power and the Allegory" (1976)

-    "The Don Juan Papers: further Castaneda Controversies" (1980)

American anthropologist Jay Courtney Fikes published a book demonstrating that Don Juan's supposed teachings were fabricated:

-       "Carlos Castaneda, Academic Opportunism and the Psychedelic Sixties" (1993)

Richard Jennings was a student of Castaneda during his later years and subsequently opened a website where he posted a lot of information about Castaneda and his inner group, revealing many of the lies they told.

     -   

Researchers

The French essayist  Christophe Bourseiller published:

   -   "Carlos Castaneda's Biography: the Truth of the Lie" (2005)

The Spanish researcher Manuel Carballal conducted an exhaustive investigation on Castaneda, which he summarized in his book:

   - " The Secret Life of Carlos Castaneda " (1918)

He also published a special edition of his magazine 'El ojo crítico'  dedicated to Castaneda:

   - "Monographic No. 3: Carlos Castaneda file"

Journalist Geoffrey Gray investigated what happened after Castaneda's death and published a digital book about it:

   - "The Case of the Missing Chacmools" (1924)

American writer Ru Marshall published:

-        "American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda" (2026)

On this blog I have published many articles detailing the world of Carlos Castaneda, both the good and the bad.

Others

And there are also numerous forums, articles and interviews that have been published about Castaneda; to that can be added the audio and visual documentation (documentaries, YouTube videos, interviews that Castaneda gave and that were recorded, etc.) that have been transcribed.

THE PSYCHOMETRICAL EXPERIENCE THAT THE FAT LADY HAD

 

The writer Carlos Castaneda revealed that, besides himself, the nahual Don Juan Matus had other apprentices, including: The fat Lady, Néstor, and Pablito.  And in his book  'The Eagle's Gift,' Castaneda recounted the following story:

« The Fat Lady told me about her experience with a mysterious stone:

"Something very strange happened to me in the ruins of Monte Alban, in Oaxaca.

I used to go walking around these ruins a lot, even though the nahual Don Juan told me not to set foot there.

I don't know why, but I loved this place. Every time I went to Oaxaca, I went there.

Since women who walk alone are always bothered, I usually went with Pablito, who's very daring. But once I went with Néstor and he saw a glint on the ground. We dug a little and found a very strange stone that fit in the palm of my hand.  They had carved a neat hole in the stone.

I felt very bold, I put my finger in the hole and realized that the stone had been cut to be carried in the hand. Right then and there I began to feel what the owner of that stone felt.

Its owner had been a man of enormous size; I could feel that his hand was twice the size of mine. He clung to that rock because his life depended on it, and in the end, someone killed him.

His terror horrified me. I could feel something approaching me, ready to devour my flesh. That's what that man felt. He was a powerful man, but someone even more powerful than him had captured him.

He could sense that someone was after the owner of the stone. He could feel his terror. Without a doubt, it was a very powerful sorcerer, and whoever was after him not only wanted to kill him but also wanted to eat his flesh.

This truly frightened me. At that moment I should have thrown the stone, but this feeling I was experiencing was so new that I kept holding it in my hand.

When I finally let go, it was too late: something inside me had been trapped. I had visions of men approaching, dressed in strange clothes. I felt them biting me, tearing at the flesh of my legs with their teeth and small, sharp knives.

That man, when they were killing him, clung to the stone so that he could gather all his concentration.

The nagual said that the man's power shifted from his body to the stone; he knew what he was doing and did not want his enemies to benefit by devouring his flesh. »

(Chapter 1, extracts)

OBSERVATION

As usual, we don't know if this story told by Carlos Castaneda was really true or if it was a story invented by this writer.

But esotericism explains that some people who have activated their clairvoyance (consciously or unconsciously) can, simply by touching an object, see the person who owns or created this object, or events or places related to that person or object. This ability is called psychometry.

So maybe the Fat Lady did psychometrically interpret this stone.

THE DEATHS CAUSED BY CARLOS CASTANEDA

 

Several people died because of Carlos Castaneda, and here I will mention some of them.

FIVE WOMEN COMMITTED SUICIDE

Five of the women closest to Castaneda disappeared shortly after he died in 1998; they were:

Nury Alexander, Castaneda's adopted daughter

Taisha Abelar, one of Castaneda's witches

Florinda Donner , another of Castaneda's witches

Talia Bey, the president of Cleargreen, the company Castaneda founded to market his teachings

Kylie Lundahl, the leader of tensegrity instructors

Since then, nothing more has been heard of them, with the exception of Nury, whose skeletal remains were found in Death Valley.

It is suspected that they committed suicide, and this shows how Machiavellian Castaneda was, who intended to turn his warriors into "free beings," but in reality made them so existentially dependent on him that when he died, these women, despite having a lot of money and years of life ahead of them, preferred to take their own lives because they could not conceive of continuing on Earth without their "Nahual."

I detail their disappearance further in this other chapter (see link).

A WOMAN JUMPED OFF A BRIDGE

In 2002, a woman named Janice Emery jumped from a bridge crossing the Rio Grande Gorge near the town of Taos in the U.S. state of New Mexico.

But she did not do it to commit suicide, but to imitate Castaneda, who in several of his books claimed that he had jumped into the abyss from a cliff and that this allowed him to "open the wings of his nagualistic perception" 

But instead of gaining access to the "Other Reality" described by Castaneda, Emery killed herself.

I detail this case in this other chapter (see link).

A MAN MURDERED HIS BROTHER-IN-LAW

The researcher Manuel Carballal in his book "The Secret Life of Carlos Castaneda" mentioned the case of a man who killed his brother-in-law under the paranoia that he was vampirizing his energy.

And in the court ruling, Castaneda's books were listed in the records as having incited this crime. 

MORE CASES

Above I mentioned the cases that have been made public and that I have learned about, but surely there must be more cases that have not been revealed of people who also jumped into a abyss or killed influenced by what Carlos Castaneda wrote.

CARLOS CASTANEDA CLAIMED TO HAVE JUMPED INTO AN ABYSS

 

The first time Castaneda mentioned this event was in his fourth book "Tales of Power" (1974) where in the third part of this book he put a long story describing how first Don Juan and Don Genaro (Don Juan's colleague) were preparing him and Pablito (Don Genaro's apprentice) to make this leap.

A few days later Castaneda saw Pablito being thrown into the abyss by Don Juan and Don Genaro.

And then Castaneda recounts the sensations he had when Don Juan and Don Genaro also made him jump into the abyss:

« I had a fully conscious sensation of spinning or floating for a moment. Then I fell through the air, plummeting to the ground at tremendous speed. I felt my clothes tearing away, my flesh peeling off, and finally only my head remained.

I distinctly felt that, as my body dismembered, I was losing superfluous weight, and so the fall lost momentum and my speed slowed. The descent was no longer a dizzying experience. I began to oscillate in the air like a leaf. Then my head was stripped of its weight, and all that remained of "me" was a cubic centimeter, a nugget, a tiny residue like a pebble.

All my feelings were concentrated there; then the nugget seemed to burst and I became a thousand pieces. I knew, or something somewhere knew, that I was conscious of all a thousand pieces at once. I was consciousness itself.

Then, some part of that consciousness began to stir; it rose up, it grew. It acquired a location, and little by little I regained a sense of boundaries, understanding, or whatever it was, and suddenly the "self" that I knew and was familiar to me burst forth into a spectacular vision of every imaginable combination of "beautiful" scenes; it was as if I were looking at thousands of images of the world, of people, of things.

Then the scenes blurred. I had the sensation that they were passing before my eyes at increasing speed, until it was no longer possible to examine any of them separately. Finally, it was as if I were witnessing the organization of the world rolling before my eyes in an endless, continuous chain.

Suddenly I found myself standing on the cliff with Don Juan and Don Genaro. »

And then Castaneda wrote:

« When I woke up at dusk, Don Juan and I sat down by the door of the house, and then Don Juan said to me:

. . .

"Last night, your bubble of perception opened and its wings unfurled. There's nothing more to say about it. It's impossible to explain what happened to you, so I won't try, and neither should you. Suffice it to say that the wings of your perception touched your wholeness. Last night you went back and forth from nagual to tonal, again and again. You were thrown into the abyss twice to leave no room for error. The second time you experienced the full impact of the journey into the unknown. And your perception unfurled its wings when something within you realized your true nature. You are a cluster. »

Much of his book 'The Second Ring of Power' (1977) is dedicated to this leap; it would be too long to transcribe everything, so I will only give you the beginning of the preface:

« My last encounter with Don Juan, Don Genaro, and their two other apprentices, Pablito and Néstor, took place on a flat, arid summit on the western slopes of the Sierra Madre in Central Mexico. The solemnity and significance of the events that unfolded there left no doubt in my mind that our apprenticeship had come to an end and that I was, in fact, seeing Don Juan and Don Genaro for the last time. Toward the end, we said our goodbyes, and then Pablito and I leaped from the mountaintop, plunging into an abyss. »

In his book "The Eagle's Gift" (1981) Castaneda wrote:

« Don Juan made me jump at the precise moment when he and all his warriors had ignited their consciences. »

In his book 'The Active Side of Infinity' (1998) Castaneda dedicated an entire chapter to this topic; I transcribe the most relevant parts:

« After seeing Don Juan and his companions transform into luminous orbs, ascend into the sky, and finally disappear.] I knew what I had to do. My time was up. I sprinted at full speed toward the precipice and leaped into the abyss. I felt the wind on my face for a moment, and then the most merciful blackness swallowed me like a peaceful underground river.

[Later, when I returned to the United States, I exclaimed]

I had jumped into an abyss in Mexico!

My next thought was a quasi-logical deduction: since I had deliberately jumped into the abyss to die, I must now be a ghost. "How strange," I thought, "that I should return in ghostly form to my apartment on the corner of Westwood and Wilshire in Los Angeles after having died. No wonder my feelings weren't the same. But if I were a ghost," I reasoned, "why would I have felt the rush of cool air on my face or the ache in my calves? »

FROM WHAT HEIGHT DID HE JUMP?

In his book 'The Active Side of Infinity,' Castaneda specified that it was 200 m:

« A single path led up to the flat plateau. After arriving, I realized that it was not as extensive as it had appeared from a distance. The vegetation on the plateau was no different from that below; greenish, woody-stemmed shrubs that had the ambiguous appearance of trees.

At first I didn't see the abyss. Only when Don Juan led me there did I realize that the plateau ended in a precipice; in truth, it wasn't a plateau, but the flat summit of a mountain. It was round, and the slopes to the east and south were worn away; however, the sides facing west and north looked as if they had been sliced ​​open by a knife.

From the edge of the precipice, I could see the bottom of the abyss, perhaps two hundred meters [219 yards] away. It was covered with the same woody plants that grew everywhere. »

INCONSISTENCIES

There are contradictions in the different accounts Castaneda gave, because:

In his book 'Tales of Power,' Castaneda stated that Don Juan and Don Genaro made him jump into the abyss, and they continued with him the next day.

In his book 'The Eagle's Gift,' Castaneda said that Don Juan was the one who made him jump into the abyss at the precise moment when Don Juan and his sorcerers had ignited their consciousness and transformed into luminous globes. Genaro and the others were in the sky waiting for Don Juan. And while Castaneda was jumping, he saw Don Juan and his group ascend through the sky until they finally disappeared.

But in 'The Active Side of Infinity,' Castaneda says that he first saw Don Juan and his sorcerers ignite their consciousness, become balls of light, and it was only after they disappeared into the sky that he decided to jump into the abyss.

This is yet another example of the numerous inconsistencies that Castaneda stated.

HOW TRUE IS THIS?

Master Pasteur explained that when humans reach a high level of development, they can tune into the divine world and consequently be able to transcend physical laws, which among other things will allow them to levitate.

That's what Jesus did when he walked on water, and that's probably what the people throughout history who levitated did (when those events were real and not faked).

But to achieve this, one needs to have reached a very high degree of spirituality, something that Castaneda was far from achieving.

But it seems there are other ways to levitate, since spiritualism mentions cases where "spirits" (actually astral entities) made objects and even people float. And after investigating this matter, I believe that a few of those cases may have actually been true.

But in the two techniques I mentioned above, it is only stated that the people floated (in the most surprising cases) a few meters off the ground, not that they survived a jump made from 200 meters high.

And the explanation that Don Juan supposedly gave, that Castaneda was saved because he was going from the nagual to the tonal (that is, from the physical world to the subtle world) over and over again, which allowed "his bubble of perception to open and his wings to unfold," I haven't heard this assertion anywhere else.

And since no other teaching mentions this method, nor did Castaneda ever perform this leap again, nor has any shaman been able to demonstrate that with his shamanic powers he can survive something like this, it is most likely that this leap into the abyss is yet another lie invented by Castaneda.

And I find it truly inconceivable that Castaneda was so reckless as to put that story in his books, claiming it was true, without worrying about what that might cause.

Unfortunately, that lie caused at least one tragedy (although there were possibly more) because a woman  named Janice Emery, who  was a big fan of Castaneda, decided to follow in the footsteps of the "Nahual" and she jumped off a bridge "to also open her wings of perception" but all she managed to do was kill herself.