carlos castaneda

has anyone read one of carlos castaneda's books??

 

i have read a few --- good fiction, if you like that sort of thing...
(check our 'wizard of the upper amzon' & lynn andrew's stuff for more in that genre...)
but hardly the stuff that anthropologists would regard as legitimate "field research"...
(for real tales, gotta go to schultes, plowman, wasson, even mckenna bros, etc...)
ymmv...

 

5 or 6 up to 'the eagles gift',

1980/82

 

I'm partway through "The Teachings Of Don Jaun" right now, and love it, but am having trouble reading it. It's just (for me atleast) not a total attention grabber, so I keep finding other books and reading them in between. I'll get through it though, it's a great book, I'm just past the first peyote trip, which I found fasinating.

 

Tales Of Power inspired one of my out of body experiences.

 

studied them at great length a few years ago. Castaneda's books don't jive with standard scholasticism but then again neither does McKenna.

 

carlos castaneda is at home on my bookshelf.

 

I heard that he faked his research, and that the school that gave him his degree (UCSD, wasn't it?) took it away.

 

I guess I should clarify my post a bit. As Anthropology, his books are fraudulent. As a fictional character, Don Juan has the same kind of reality as Don Quixote de la Mancha, or Sherlock Holmes. However, "quixotic" is now an accepted adjective in English, and you might well have smoked from a "sherlock", even though Dr J. Watson would have called The Great Detective's pipe a "calabash". No one besides a lit scholar would refer to anything as "cervanteian", and while "Arthurian" is in the vocabulary, it does not refer to the works of Sir A.C.Doyle. Perhaps one day Casteneda will enjoy this same kind of immortality.

 

his ex wife lives in my town and is good friends with my father

 

dish! what does she have to say?

 

I really really love it...and as a guy who want to study in anthropology I could say that maybe his job lack a little bit of objectivity. In fact, there is not objectivity in his books. But I think It's a great antrhopologic study also, because he really went on the field to see want's going on and he really had experiencing what the thing is about. And he kept his rationality all along....

conclusion: very good books, but you must know how to read between the lines...His approach to antrhopologie is really interesting thought....

 

I had a friend ask me a few weeks ago if I read his stuff and I told him that I hadn't and I kind of forgot about him altogether until I saw this post.


What's a good book of his to start out on?