Carlos Castaneda Recently I completed a reading project which I started at New Year. I re-read/read all of the books Carlos Castaneda wrote plus three of the books by some of his fellow female students of Don Juan. I had read the first three books many years ago and thought them quite extraordinary. Castaneda writes with a very readable style and a sense of humour. The later books are extremely interesting and I agree with Saadi Haeri (on a previous post) that The Active Side of Infinity is probably the best of them. These books contain ideas and postulates that are not of the normal, cuddly pseudo-religious variety. The responsibility for human development is placed squarely on our own shoulders....much like it is in certain Sufi material. Google searches reveal a lot of attacks on Castaneda....most since his death; charges of faking his sources and so on abound. But as we see so often the truth of what Idries Shah once said, when the mighty lion dies it is the ants who have the final say, I have therefore paid such criticism little attention. The cultural anthropologist Edward T Hall refers in a note to Castanedas work as does Jeremy Beckett in his 1976 foreword to A P Elkins Aboriginal Men of High Degree. Personally, I do not think it is all that important if Castanedas books are true or not; the concepts are a way of sensing our position in regard to the reality that created us and in which we live and the possibilities open to us so, as usual, words can be as much a barrier as an aid.
Posted on: Thu, 11 Sep 2014 04:22:03 +0000
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