        Hon , F. Internet Archive's 25th Anniversary Logo. Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest. Sign up Log in. Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book.Books Video icon An illustration of two cells of a film strip. Video Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker. Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs.Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. Anyone who has lived through a long, difficult experience--perhaps a serious illness, broken relationship, sexual abuse, or a childhood spent in a divisive family environment--can benefit from this process. Recapitulation makes it possible to actually relive and resolve the events that have caused emotional distress.In this clear and straightforward workbook, the author guides readers through the ten steps of Recapitulation and invites them to experience the powerful and positive new energy that results from healing the wounds of the past. The Toltec Path of Recapitulation offers an ancient ritual of renewal for the contemporary world. Enhanced with an introduction and original commentary by the author, this powerful work illuminates the shaman's life as never before.Castaneda's words explore how the ancient shamans could literally touch and direct the wheel of time -- a profound yet pragmatic tradition that can be felt even in our day. What if culture, religion, or science could not explain them, and family and friends were unable or unwilling to understand?This happened to Craig Spielman right in the middle of his contemporary American life and successful professional career. Sudden, profound inner shifts led to years of inquiry to explain and assimilate them. A World Within begins with the story of Spielmans extraordinary struggle to live with a transformed inner world amid a continuing, conventional external existence.With insights from his journey, he provides an invaluable guide to spiritual discovery for those who wish to directly explore their divine potential comfortably for themselves. By using our site, you agree to our collection of information through the use of cookies. To learn more, view our Privacy Policy.Log In Sign Up. Download Free PDF. The teachings of Carlos Castaneda Stochastic Press,  Mike King. Download PDF. A short summary of this paper. The teachings of Carlos Castaneda. The teachings of Abstract This paper examines the spiritual Carlos Castaneda teachings found in the writings of Car- los Castaneda.While he presents them as the wisdom of a Yaqui Indian called don Juan Matus, the attribution is not considered essential to this analysis. By dividing the teach- ings into exoteric and esoteric head- ings it is possible to see both what is universal to the spiritual life and what is unique to shamanism in the teachings of Carlos Castaneda.I shared a house with yoga practitioners and spiritual seekers and mentioned to my yoga teacher that I had sensed a spirit guarding the meadow. I had never heard of the term before but it set me on a course of reading that continues today. Indeed in preparing this essay I was sur- prised to find what an extensive range of material on animism and shamanism I have on my bookshelf.Amongst those books were three by Carlos Castaneda, a man now rele- gated to the New Age crazes of the s. Despite that I believe his work is an important contribution to our understanding of the spiritual life in general and shamanism in particular. The importance I attach to shamanism does not come from books but from per- sonal experience like in the Oxford meadow.Book-reading helps me understand the global and historical context of such experiences and helps me answer the question, what in a single word might be the real significance of shamanism today? My answer is simple: animals. I find in shamanism a spiritual tradition in which our relationship to animals — and the rest of Nature — is most deeply understood and best expressed and without which we have no chance of dealing with our coming environmental crisis.Put simply the shamanic traditions show us that the animals, and hence all of Nature, live within us. The work of Carlos Castaneda includes this special relationship to animals though does not greatly focus on it. His books were part of my shamanic reading in my late twenties and revisiting his work now has convinced me again of the value that lies in it. Background Why Castaneda? While he received the anthropological stamp of approval at the time — his third book earned him a doctorate — academics have since put this down to an aberration in scholarly discipline, perhaps understandable in the hippy culture of the time but now cited with horror as an example of failed meth- odology in the field of anthropology or ethnology.Either way a considerable archaeology of the spiritual life is re- quired to dig out these teachings from the surrounding story-telling and wider con- troversy, an archaeology I have practised once before in digging out Socrates — as mystic — from underneath Plato. He said: Carlos has come across a being superior to himself, he has come across a being who knows some secrets.Maybe he has not realized them, maybe he has stolen them, maybe he has just borrowed them from someone else. But he has met somebody who has somehow got some facts of spiritual life and Carlos has been able to create imagination around it.Otherwise you can become a victim of a fiction. You will have to read. You cannot escape Carlos Castaneda. Burroughs, Andrei Tarkovsky and Janis Joplin. Just as an example John Lennon told Playboy magazine in a interview how he viewed Yoko Ono: It is a teacher-pupil relationship.That's what people don't understand. She's the teacher and I'm the pupil. I'm the famous one, the one who's supposed to know everything, but she's my teacher. She's taught me everything I fucking know. She was there when I was nowhere, when I was the nowhere man. I'm married to fucking Don Juan, that's the hardship of it.And what goes on around Don Juan is irrelevant to Don Juan. After his first four books everyone who was anyone wanted to meet Castaneda, and director after director wanted the movie rights, including Dino de Laurentiis, Pier Paulo Pasolini, and Alejandro Jodorowsky.Later he met him in Los Angeles but never succeeded in making a film about don Juan. A marvellous book! And very true, because — 1.Here I attempt to rescue what is time- less from his work. Why shamanism? By shutting off this dialogue, along with a range of other techniques, the separate reality of the nagual can be experienced, in which specialised knowledge and spiritual power can be gained.More than that, however, are the teachings regarding the proper life suited to this endeavour. Many of them would be recognisable from strictly non-shamanic systems like Zen Buddhism, while many exchanges in the relationship between Carlos Castaneda and don Juan are similarly reminiscent of a pupil with a Zen Master.But why is shamanism so important? Not long ago it was regarded as primitive su- perstition. It lies in its account of the structure of the shamanic world and the personal discipline to master it.Ethnography or fiction? This could equally have been a fictional strategy. In other words the status of the text con- ferred to it by tradition, science, academe or any other route is to be discarded in favour of the content alone. However the efforts of researchers over decades al- lows a highly provisional conclusion to be drawn on the provenance of the Casta- neda texts.Here I draw mainly on two key researchers, Richard de Mille, and F. Lawrence Fleming. On that basis all of it is, declares de Mille. While aware of twelve pages of field notes given by Castaneda to the re- spected ethnomycologist Robert Wasson — which could be evidence for the exis- tence of don Juan — de Mille dismisses them as likely forged by Castaneda to dis- courage Wasson from further probing.He is not really a member of any tribal society. He is a loner. How- ever if, as Goldschmidt says, it is mere allegory, then I would not be writing about it either. I am concerned here to evaluate and rescue the important spiritual teach- ings in it. Having said that there remains a strong possibility that the teachings do have a location within an ancient spiritual tradition of Mexico or the wider region. His books were just a pastiche culled from such reading.De Mille uses the example of common imagery between passages by Yogi Ramacharaka in reality an American called William Walker Atkinson and Carlos Castaneda to illustrate his conviction that all of it is borrowed. For me Castaneda has no more debt to Wittgenstein than Plotinus to Plato, or res- taurant tables to cloth bundles of sacred objects. I completely disagree that you can find don Juan in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, for example, despite some interesting parallels.They belong to different spiritual universes. More importantly, any- one who dismisses the shamanism of any region in the world so lightly, as Bharati does, has most definitely not understood its meaning.While parallels can be found, as with Patanjali, St John of the Cross belongs to a different spiritual universe again, one which had long set its face on any kind of shamanism.Reading what is now known about his life I realise that it is better to see his personality as essentially Latin. It is believed that he was born in in Peru of parents of mixed Spanish and Portuguese descent.Castaneda provides glimpses of his early life in the first series of books but it is not until The Active Side of Infinity, published in the year of his death in that he provides more probably fictional but instructive passages about himself.Now writ- ing in his seventies, two things emerge. These are utterly alien to the stolid Anglo-Saxon milieu I grew up in, though my Hungarian background helps me relate to a life ruled by profound and sudden mood-swings. Magical realism as a genre has been defined as "what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe" — a good description of the Castaneda material.What Castaneda presents in his last book is an early life which, by all Western suburban standards, appears quite extraordinary.It is worth repeating one story that Castaneda tells about growing up in Brazil. His grandmother rescues a local Indian accused of sorcery who had been strung up in a lynching on her property. He recommends she adopts an orphan boy who turns into a handsome and athletic man who succeeds in his literary efforts only through plagiarism, including the farewell poem he writes on the occasion of her final departure.In her old age the sorcerer-counsellor tells her to cash in her stocks and hand over the money to this man, after which she departs, terminally ill, with the Indian, never to be heard of again. That is why their poems cannot really hit the center of true gestures for the spirit. They hit pretty close to it, though. I consider the first two books, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge and A Separate Reality: Further Con- versations with Don Juan , not so important because the emphasis in them is on drug-induced experiences, while the degree of fictionalising probably grows with each book after the fourth.In Journey to Ixtlan Castaneda makes clear that the book presents a reprise of those teachings that are drug-independent. While their style is different, the sorcery is the same. It is not unfair perhaps to describe any attempt to delve into this in search of veracity as a journey down a rabbit-hole. Castaneda justifies the continued reprisal in his books of the formative teaching period by saying that so much happened to him during altered states of con- sciousness that he did not remember them immediately afterwards.Only slowly did memories surface, often in brilliant intensity, which then formed the material for his new books right up to his death. The first reprisal occurs in Journey to Ixtlan which he introduces by saying: My original assumption about the role of psychotropic plants was erroneous.His books convey a gradual realisation that his relationship with his teacher was not an ethnographic apprenticeship but one of a spiritual disciple engaged in the transformation of self. In this sense, my books are the account of an on-going process which becomes more clear to me as time goes by.Sometimes familiar events are described in slightly different ways, sometimes we learn of quite new conversations not present in the earlier works. What Castaneda often presents as key new concepts are not found in earlier works, while key early ideas often disappear. Yet thirteen years later in The Power of Silence there is not one mention of moths.We are in a world perhaps of metaphors offered and then dis- carded by an enigmatic spiritual teacher. Alternatively we are in the world of pure fiction in which case it is odd indeed that such inventiveness over forty-one years is constrained to the compulsive retelling of a single fictional story.At the same time her own spiritual interests are not developed enough to help us. I can find no record of such translations and no mention of a Felix Wolf from Amy Wallace.In this story, conventional ethics had consistently been violated, and from a conventional point of view, not much good could have possibly come out of an association with Carlos Castaneda.Partin's sun- bleached skeleton was discovered in Death Valley by hikers in  No trace of the other four women has been found. Osho, Sangharakshita, Andrew Cohen, many Tibetan Masters; the list is long, though not all were hypocrites about sex and not all were sexual predators. If don Juan was imagined then that poses a far greater puzzle.Can one really imagine a moral universe that one does not inhabit in the slightest? It is easy enough to twist every element of a moral teaching into something self- serving, but can one present those elements in a coherent system in all their purity in advance of corrupting them?A rabbit-hole indeed. What don Juan does not teach Spiritual teachers are sometimes criticised because their teachings appear so dif- ferent to others. Questions over the authenticity of don Juan can take this form, meaning that his system appears to lack elements considered essential in other systems.We need therefore to be clear what don Juan does not teach. Firstly, this is not a teachings of religious love. The anthropological literature tells us that the Yaquis were converted en-masse to Catholicism and that they adapted their reli- gious system to it. Don Juan is clear however that his system goes back not just to the period before the Spanish but further back before other invasions imposed servitude on Mexican Indians.His teachings therefore have no tinge of Catholic de- votionality. Secondly, this is not a teachings for a family setting, as for example in Judaism. Don Juan is quite separate, not just from other Yaquis who appear to largely regard him with contempt, but from his former family life. Thirdly, his system is not a form of nature mysticism as found for example in the American Transcen- dentalists, or in the works of John Muir or Richard Jefferies, nor is it touched in any way by concern for the environment.Nor does it have any political dimension. Reading Castaneda With these introductory remarks in mind I will now explain my approach to reading the Castaneda material. Firstly I will take the position that it is a fictionalised version of some actual encounters with living shamans, principally a character named don Juan Matus.Thirdly I assume that Castaneda himself may not have lived up to the teachings in their moral dimension. Fourthly I do not assume that he did in fact experience any kind of separate reality. He may have imagined it or been affected by the ingestion of hallucinatory entheogenic plants. As space is limited I have focused on what I think are some key teachings of don Juan and other sorcerers in the stories, mostly derived from the third and fourth books.The way that they are received by Castaneda is also important however. He portrays himself as a slow learner, rather as Arjuna is portrayed in the Bhagavad Gita as he receives the teachings of Krishna, or in another parallel, as Ouspensky receives the teachings of Gurdjieff. Don Juan is forced, as Krishna and Gurdjieff are, to not just repeat the teachings but continuously employ new ways of explanation.A summary of the teachings Exoteric teachings 1.  

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