Forum4 > New age myths
sustained re action
Mr X:
hello you,
to combine two threads i have thinking about, i am curious about two things, like an cat.
is there anything at all to suggest that carlos castaneda was anything other than an fraud who ended up being an cultie.
i like the train of thought of "so he was an fraud but why did he gather those particular concepts, what was the system he tried to make from other peoples stuff, what was the point trying to be achieved".
although generally speaking, i also do like the shallow approach - if you want to debunk carlos castaneda, just read his books. do you really think it is possible for people to do the magical things in those books, do you really belief an ancient shaman can dissapear into an inorganic dimension then return and become an nazgul vampire. can an car be moved by magic. for anyone who is reasonable it is easy to just say no.
the other thing i wonder aboot, and am combining with this thread to avoid making 2 useless threads, is - what did sustained reaction do wrong, how did it go so bad.
this is purely for wonder. i only have minor problems with how sustained reaction debunked castaneda, but otherwise i think they successfully did debunker castaneda. there does however seem to be and schizm.
i think there is something to be found in the examination of beliefers and non beliefers discussing things. something that sustained reaction had for an time. but then they lost it, and it seems "it" will never be recovered. not there, not here, not anywhere else.
what went wrong ? exactly.
that are my questions for this thread, born of curiously,
is there any value in castaneda, at all ? is there any value in the systems castaneda stole from, or any new age system ?
what went wrong at sustained reaction that made beliefers choose to stop interacting with skeptics ?
mr x .
ju4o:
Hmmm... no replies to this entertainingly provocative post. I think that talking in terms of an ancient shaman disappearing into an inorganic dimension then returning and becoming a "nazgul vampire" could tend to put believers off from replying.
Mr X:
was there anything i said that was wrong.
i think i describe the situation to be accurate.
if you are to belief in doctor castaneda stories of cliff jumpers, you are to acknowledge the story of the interdimensonal nazpire.
if you are to think there is no such thing as an nazpire, you must explain the criteria of youre cherry picking.
there is also the questions of where did sustained reactions go wrong. i would say treating people as unworthy of voicing their voice is one of them.
mr x.
ju4o:
Well you say "cherry picking" but there is a good rationale for treating Castaneda's first three books differently from the subsequent ones.
In his interview with Time (March 1973) shortly after he had published his third book,
"Now I'm at the edge, and I have to change my whole format. Writing to get my Ph.D. was my accomplishment, my sorcery, and now I am at the apex of a cycle that includes the notoriety. But this is the last thing I will ever write about Don Juan."
The "whole format" did indeed change after that ... not sharply and suddenly, since the first half of his fourth book is fairly similar in tone to his third ... but increasingly and definitely.
You mention "interdimensional nazpire" and I think that tracking occurrences of the word "dimension" in the books, and the increasingly odd ways in which it is used, would be a good marker for how Castaneda's change of format developed.
If we grep through the online versions of the books for the character string 'dimension':
in the first book TTodJ it does not occur at all;
in the second book ASR it occurs once, but in a reasonably ordinary sense: "When I moved my eyes away from his face and looked at it with the corner of my eye, so to speak, I could perceive his solidity; that is to say, I could perceive a three-dimensional person; without really looking at him I could, in fact, perceive his whole body, but when I focused my gaze, the face became at once the luminous object."
in the third book J2I it does not occur at all;
in the fourth book ToP it occurs twice; first, early in the book, in the ordinary sense, "Although I had no criteria to judge dimensions, I had had the feeling that it was about a foot long"; but the second time, near the end of the book, we have "Don Juan's voice brought forth another dimension to my state of being at that moment."
After that, dimensionality takes wing.
In TEG for example, "The sound of her voice seemed to act for me as a conduit into another dimension, another kind of time" and "Through the exercise of the third not-doing, Silvio Manuel gave a new dimension to our perception of the world around us" and even, "She said that a part of her last-minute instruction was to make me enter into the second attention as stalkers do, and that dona Soledad was more capable than she herself was to usher me into the stalker's dimension."
In TAoD, "the total mood of the dream changed and I would find myself in a dimension unknown to me" ... "the bluish blob of energy was from a dimension entirely different from ours" ... "He and his party were going to fulfill the sorcerers' dream of leaving this world and entering into inconceivable dimensions".
My guess would be that don Juan never actually used the word 'dimension' or its Spanish equivalent, and that where it occurs, it is Castaneda's invention.
ju4o:
Also consider, (Castaneda interview in Uno Mismo, 1997)
--- Quote ---As far as I know, nothing of what don Juan taught us seems to have a counterpart in Western knowledge. Once, when don Juan was still here, I spent a whole year in search of gurus, teachers and wise men to give me an inkling of what they were doing. I wanted to know if there was something in the world of that time similar to what don Juan said and did. My resources were very limited and they only took me to meet the established masters who had millions of followers and, unfortunately, I couldn't find any similarity.
--- End quote ---
I think a year's immersion would have had a marked and difficult-to-undo effect on the vocabulary he used for talking about things.
*edit* I mean, regardless of if he actually found any correlations.
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