Author Topic: Hello.  (Read 79458 times)

card9ats

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Re: The Myth of weed
« Reply #15 on: 27 February 2013 08:42:26 PM »

Interesting...

when I first entered my name (registered) I had in mind the word kardia (heart) ...

Came out with card9ats  :D


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card9ats

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....

Sorry for the ruthless just 2 options.Actualy we can discuss it as well. :)

ju4o

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Hi.  Probably.  Except, his name was unlikely to have been Juan.

Mr X

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why do you think the probably existed ?

x.

ju4o

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Hello x.  The casta saga is a swirl of shimmering uncertainties.  My unsettled opinion is based partly on the views, so far as they are ascertainable, of people who were closest to him at the time of his initial alleged encounters with dJ.

Meighan thought he had native informants;  his wife thought he had a particularly interesting native informant in Mexico;  even arch-critic Beals thought that the character of don Juan was not entirely invented.
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Other critics have doubted don Juan's very existence. In the light of my early contacts with Castaneda given previously, I personally believe someone called don Juan by Castaneda exists. But what is he? Clearly he is not culturally a Yaqui ... Don Juan clearly lived somewhere in the Sonoran desert-steppe region, but very large parts of this life zone lie in Arizona and California so this gives little clue to his residence.
~'Sonoran Fantasy or Coming of Age?' American Anthropologist 80(2) June 1978

He could have fooled those people, but the ruse, if ruse it was, would have had to have been strangely elaborate, for Margaret writes,
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The only thing for sure was that the Carlos Castaneda of the real world was making trips away from the apartment through the rest of 1960 to talk with the Indians.  He was spending less time on South Detroit and only occasionally had friends over, and even then he didn't seem too interested in the current occult news.  There was still some talk of Puharich, but Carlos' interest in astral projection, telepathy, ESP cards and the rest of it, was on the wane.  For a while, he'd try to explain the importance of his trips to me, but I wasn't particularly interested.  The only thing I knew was that he wasn't around the apartment very much any more and I didn't like it.

One afternoon he came in from the desert, with a bundle of what appeared to be dried Datura, though I couldn't be sure.  He wanted to try an experiment and so he had me lie on the couch, while he lit the bundle with the gas burner on the stove and then he began waving the whole smoking flambeau back-and-forth over my head, telling me to inhale the smoke...
~A Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda

It seems likely that he was engaged in the kind of shenanigans with a native informant which he described in his first book.

card9ats

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why do you think the probably existed ?

x.

Mr x. you want to make this forum a sceptical one ?

I mean Oriented into sceptisism... ?

_

d9ats

Mr X

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i think the forum is neutral, what happens on it is up to the posters.

i just happen to be oriented to skepticism personally. i am also agnostic to everything, so i dont know if don juan was real, but i would be suprised if he was. also suprised if it was 100% made up.

But what is he? Clearly he is not culturally a Yaqui - Meighan

that is sort of funny. it seems like the thinking of an anthropologist or someone looking at something but not knowing what they are looking at, so they think in certain ways to figure it out. and never figure it out.

the second quote works well with the first. this is why we need belifers to post, i would very much like to hear an variety of reasons why these quotes are interesting. but i am fairly sure the disconnection from the social order in casta books/don juan stories / warrio stuff is so total and disastrous to the user, that ideas like "Yaqui" or  "South Detroit" would no longer be cared about. trying to classify the ideas or life of people like that would be extraordinarily difficult.

x.

ju4o

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Quick clarification: that quote is from Beals, not Meighan.

One of the strange aspects of the saga is the amount of sheer rubbish which has been written (and, presumably, said) about Castaneda by people who ought to know better.  That article by Beals provides a good example.  He writes,

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Castaneda calls his first book The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1968), and throughout his books variously labels Don Juan a shaman and a sorcerer, as if the two terms were synonymous.

Beals continues with several paragraphs disentangling the two terms and charging Castaneda with being misleading about their usage.

Whereas, actually, the word shaman does not occur at all in any of Castaneda's books, until The Art of Dreaming (1993), 15 years after Beals' article.  And when, finally, the word does occur, Castaneda defines it succinctly and accurately.

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In anthropological works, shamanism is described as a belief system of some native people of northern Asia - prevailing also among certain native North American Indian tribes - which maintains that an unseen world of ancestral spiritual forces, good and evil, is pervasive around us and that these spiritual forces can be summoned or controlled through the acts of practitioners, who are the intermediaries between the natural and supernatural realms.

Don Juan was indeed an intermediary between the natural world of everyday life and an unseen world, which he called not the supernatural but the second attention. His role as a teacher was to make this configuration accessible to me. I have described in my previous work his teaching methods to this effect, as well as the sorcery arts he made me practice, the most important of which is called the art of dreaming.

If anyone has any theories about how Beals could have got it so wrong, I would like to hear them.

tosk

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Well, as we saw at SR, debunking, for some people, is like a drug high.
Especially if they are intimidated or offended by what Carlos wrote.

In their zeal to get that "debunking high",
they get reckless and don't seem to care if they are inaccurate or not.

(witness Emilio, Ghost Dog, Tom, and yes Wu and Jeremy.)
 

card9ats

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mR x, One thing I know ....

As long as one becomes a skeptical being ..

the battle is lost.

Not why we came here. (that's my experience.)

card9ats

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mR x, One thing I know ....

As long as one becomes a skeptical being ..

the battle is lost.

Not why we came here. (that's my experience.)

This is not saying anything

and it may say everything...

It's up to the individual

..to decide.

P.S. I 'am the only one who voted.

|----\
« Last Edit: 07 April 2013 08:23:10 PM by card9ats »

ju4o

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"The Western tradition of systematic skepticism goes back at least as far as Pyrrho of Elis (b. circa 360 BC). He was troubled by the disputes that could be found within all philosophical schools of his day. According to a later account of his life, he became overwhelmed by his inability to determine rationally which school was correct. Upon admitting this to himself, he finally achieved the inner peace that he had been seeking."

~wiki

Ο σκεπτικισμός είναι μία σημαντική και αξιοπρόσεκτη τάση στην Φιλοσοφία, που ασχολείται κυρίως με την γνώση και την πηγή της αντίστοιχα. Αμφισβητεί την πιστότητα και την ορθότητα της γνώσης, πίστεύει ότι ο άνθρωπος είναι μερικώς ανίκανος στο να αποκτήσει έγκυρη και σωστή γνώση, γιατί γίνεται ασυνείδητα θύμα των αισθήσεών του. Δηλαδή ο άνθρωπος, κατά τον Σκεπτικισμό,σχηματίζει μια ψευδή αντίληψη για τον κόσμο που τον περιβάλλει και δημιουργεί γνώσεις που δεν μπορούν να έχουν γερά θεμέλεια. Σκεπτικιστικές αμφιβολίες είχαν εκφραστεί ήδη από την εποχή των προσωκρατικών σοφιστών αλλά και από τον ίδιο το Σωκράτη. Ωστόσο ο σκεπτικισμός, ως συστηματική φιλοσοφική στάση εκφράστηκε κυρίως από τους "πυρρώνειους" (οπαδοί του Πύρρωνα από την Ηλεία) και είχε πρακτικό χαρακτήρα.

Ο σκεπτικός συνήθως επιχειρεί να δείξει ότι για κάθε θέμα υπάρχουν δύο αντίθετες και ισοδύναμες απόψεις και ότι δεν μπορούμε να αποφασίσουμε ποια να προτιμήσουμε. Γι'αυτό πιστεύει ότι θα ήταν καλύτερο να τηρούμε στάση ουδετερότητας απέναντι σε τέτοιες πεποιθήσεις και έτσι θα καταφέρουμε να επιτύχουμε μια ψυχολογική γαλήνη και αταραξία. Ακραίοι Σκεπτικιστές, όπως ο Ρενέ Ντεκάρτ ή αλλιώς Καρτέσιος, πίστευαν ότι δεν μπορεί κανένας άνθρωπος να αποκτήσει γνώση γιατί δεν είναι σίγουρος για τίποτα. Άρα η γνώση είναι ανέφικτη. Επίσης σκεπτικιστές όπως ο Ντέιβιντ Χιουμ πίστευαν ότι είμαστε εντελώς εξαπατημένοι απο της αισθήσεις μας.

~Βικιπαίδεια

* edit * P.S. guessing that Ρενέ Ντεκάρτ (ntekart) is Descartes
« Last Edit: 08 April 2013 10:05:31 AM by ju4o »

card9ats

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Yeah Ju4o I knew that.

ju4o

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Well, what battle is lost as long as one becomes a skeptical being?


card9ats

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You get to think.