Carlos Castaneda DVD
No, Carlos has not made an after-life appearance on DVD, although one or two pictures of him in what appears to be his mid-30's have actually surfaced after all these years (since Carlos sent a stand-in to the famous Time Magazine shoot, they don't have any stock photos to draw on either).
(I can't vouch for the authenticity of the two pictures that are floating around the internet; I did see Carlos just once, at the 1993 Anaheim Tensegrity program, and he looked quite different from the pictures - older, of course, but also leaner. He apparently lost the pudginess that Don Juan had ribbed him about. He could have easily passed for Don Genaro! At least in my mind's eye.)
Instead we have an independent (independent of Carlos's surving organization Cleargreen, that is) 2004 production entitled "Carlos Castaneda: Enigma of a Sorcerer." This movie/video may have had a brief theatrical release, but it's taken a while for it to make it onto DVD and for me to get it from Netflix.
It's not clear to me who put this video release together; Rich Jennings/Corrie Donovan is one of the important commentators in the piece, and I suspect that this is either his work (as an outgrowth of SustainedAction.org) or he was strongly involved with it. (It's never clear with Charlie's Angels since they tend to adopt different names and personas; part of that "erasing personal history" thing.) Rich looks different from what I remember of a lunch meeting with him in the early '90's - he, too, has lost his pudginess but, more amazingly, he actually looks younger than a decade ago.
(So despite the massive grumbling about how CC tricked everyone, most of the people who got caught up his Theater of the Real in the '90's seem to have come out of it in pretty good shape.)
I got turned off by SustainedAction.org, which appeared on the 'net in the late '90's; in mind-numbing detail the site documents how (gasp) CC and the other members of his crew made up a lot of their stories, including inventing (shock) Don Juan. (Thanks to SustainedAction.org, we can now definitely re-catalog the Don Juan books out of anthropology/shamanism into fiction/mystic literature/tales of power. Yawn. I suppose next I'm going to find out that Madame Blavatsky didn't really get the Mahatma Letters, that there was no Golden Dawn Charter from Frau Sprengel, and that McGregor Mathers brilliantly extrapolated/made up the Golden Dawn materials instead of being in communication with Secret Chiefs.)
But this DVD is different. It debunks, but it does not destroy.
What is far more interesting to me than debunking Castaneda, is to what extent (seemingly a large extent) Carlos was nevertheless a brujo, a modern sorcerer, in his personal life, and what effect he had on his party.
Before the current DVD, I had only five sources of information on the real (?), as opposed to the fictive, Carlos: (i) an offhand comment repeated by Carlos's former "wife" in a Fate Magazine interview that a friend cautioned her that Carlos was a brujo; (ii) the Nagualist Newsletter; (iii) my limited experiences with Tensegrity seminars; (iv) SustainedAction.org and comments from friends; and (v) Amy Wallace's book, Sorcerer's Apprentice: My Life with Carlos Castaneda.
Even while I was getting absolute confirmation that Carlos "made up" most of what he wrote, a portrait of a real magician, a real sorcerer, began to emerge.
The new DVD adds poignant personal testimony to the enigma of Castaneda. It is a mixture of personal recollections from members of a weekly workshop held by Castaneda in fairly tight secrecy in the early to mid-90's, plus commentary from a couple of writers who either spun their own works off the Don Juan mythos (while treating it as real) or made early efforts to debunk Carlos.
Neither the witches (Florinda, Taisha, Carol) nor the Chocmools (the three females who led the initial Tensegrity seminars) make an appearance; but the practitioners who do, were closely enough involved to have been deeply affected and to have authentic comments to make.
It is also a mature work: the doubts, anger, and back-biting have been dropped. There is a genuine effort to try to understand what CC was, and what he accomplished, and where his students have been left. Perhaps most importantly, the interviews resonate with character and integrity; with economy of expression and sincerity; to the point where the interviews become tales of power themselves.
I think that some of CC's trickiness has also rubbed off on the producers of this DVD; two of the commentary inclusions are suspect. One is from a researcher who, very early in the game, tried to debunk Castaneda with absolutely no success (except perhaps for academics who didn't believe in Carlos in the first place). He pops up here, vindicated at last, the true believers acknowledging the skeptic was right all along (metaphorically, by his inclusion in the film, not literally). By his very presence, he creates a pregnant pause: yes, but so what, you've proven the wizard of Oz isn't from Oz, but have you proven he isn't a wizard?
The other hilarious inclusion, is a very serious, pompous Victor Sanchez, who totally ignores the fact that Don Juan was a fiction, that there is no Toltec Tradition, who spouts on about Carlos having been consumed by the path.
I'm sorry. Carlos was fucking brilliant. William Blake said he needed to invent his own poetic mythology, or be a slave to another's; Carlos actualy did it. He was not some obese writer of fantasy novels about lost realms. He was lean, taut, charismatic; his books are concise, spare, instructional, visionary, and poetic. In his life, "he had more women that Wilt Chamberlain" (as one interviewee puts it) but nevertheless convinced the daughter of one of America's great writers that she would be his "first woman in 20 years." He had boundless energy, and the people around him had more "siddhis" than the typical itinerant Indian yogi. (I remember one bookstore lecture by Florinda Donner in which she scathed that the men in the audience with their blazing third eyes were completely missing the point - and she was awfully damned psychic on that one.) In the film, the casual comment is made that Carlos had an uncanny ability to read people; to seemingly read minds. I'd say that his ability to read minds, is easier to explain as a psychic phenomenon than to explain rationally a the ability to read body language; it was that spot-on.
Carlos is accused of inventing Tensegrity as a way to reach a larger audience, but he was already teaching similar moves to people in the late '60's. Tensegrity, as many note in the film, produces a strange clarity/serenity/focus of mind that other body movement series do not.
I highly recommend this DVD to those who are not still invested in taking the Don Juan books as holy writ, but who haven't written off Carlos as a charlatan. It is an excellent bridge between the public world of Carlos Castaneda, and his inner Theater of the Real.
(I can't vouch for the authenticity of the two pictures that are floating around the internet; I did see Carlos just once, at the 1993 Anaheim Tensegrity program, and he looked quite different from the pictures - older, of course, but also leaner. He apparently lost the pudginess that Don Juan had ribbed him about. He could have easily passed for Don Genaro! At least in my mind's eye.)
Instead we have an independent (independent of Carlos's surving organization Cleargreen, that is) 2004 production entitled "Carlos Castaneda: Enigma of a Sorcerer." This movie/video may have had a brief theatrical release, but it's taken a while for it to make it onto DVD and for me to get it from Netflix.
It's not clear to me who put this video release together; Rich Jennings/Corrie Donovan is one of the important commentators in the piece, and I suspect that this is either his work (as an outgrowth of SustainedAction.org) or he was strongly involved with it. (It's never clear with Charlie's Angels since they tend to adopt different names and personas; part of that "erasing personal history" thing.) Rich looks different from what I remember of a lunch meeting with him in the early '90's - he, too, has lost his pudginess but, more amazingly, he actually looks younger than a decade ago.
(So despite the massive grumbling about how CC tricked everyone, most of the people who got caught up his Theater of the Real in the '90's seem to have come out of it in pretty good shape.)
I got turned off by SustainedAction.org, which appeared on the 'net in the late '90's; in mind-numbing detail the site documents how (gasp) CC and the other members of his crew made up a lot of their stories, including inventing (shock) Don Juan. (Thanks to SustainedAction.org, we can now definitely re-catalog the Don Juan books out of anthropology/shamanism into fiction/mystic literature/tales of power. Yawn. I suppose next I'm going to find out that Madame Blavatsky didn't really get the Mahatma Letters, that there was no Golden Dawn Charter from Frau Sprengel, and that McGregor Mathers brilliantly extrapolated/made up the Golden Dawn materials instead of being in communication with Secret Chiefs.)
But this DVD is different. It debunks, but it does not destroy.
What is far more interesting to me than debunking Castaneda, is to what extent (seemingly a large extent) Carlos was nevertheless a brujo, a modern sorcerer, in his personal life, and what effect he had on his party.
Before the current DVD, I had only five sources of information on the real (?), as opposed to the fictive, Carlos: (i) an offhand comment repeated by Carlos's former "wife" in a Fate Magazine interview that a friend cautioned her that Carlos was a brujo; (ii) the Nagualist Newsletter; (iii) my limited experiences with Tensegrity seminars; (iv) SustainedAction.org and comments from friends; and (v) Amy Wallace's book, Sorcerer's Apprentice: My Life with Carlos Castaneda.
Even while I was getting absolute confirmation that Carlos "made up" most of what he wrote, a portrait of a real magician, a real sorcerer, began to emerge.
The new DVD adds poignant personal testimony to the enigma of Castaneda. It is a mixture of personal recollections from members of a weekly workshop held by Castaneda in fairly tight secrecy in the early to mid-90's, plus commentary from a couple of writers who either spun their own works off the Don Juan mythos (while treating it as real) or made early efforts to debunk Carlos.
Neither the witches (Florinda, Taisha, Carol) nor the Chocmools (the three females who led the initial Tensegrity seminars) make an appearance; but the practitioners who do, were closely enough involved to have been deeply affected and to have authentic comments to make.
It is also a mature work: the doubts, anger, and back-biting have been dropped. There is a genuine effort to try to understand what CC was, and what he accomplished, and where his students have been left. Perhaps most importantly, the interviews resonate with character and integrity; with economy of expression and sincerity; to the point where the interviews become tales of power themselves.
I think that some of CC's trickiness has also rubbed off on the producers of this DVD; two of the commentary inclusions are suspect. One is from a researcher who, very early in the game, tried to debunk Castaneda with absolutely no success (except perhaps for academics who didn't believe in Carlos in the first place). He pops up here, vindicated at last, the true believers acknowledging the skeptic was right all along (metaphorically, by his inclusion in the film, not literally). By his very presence, he creates a pregnant pause: yes, but so what, you've proven the wizard of Oz isn't from Oz, but have you proven he isn't a wizard?
The other hilarious inclusion, is a very serious, pompous Victor Sanchez, who totally ignores the fact that Don Juan was a fiction, that there is no Toltec Tradition, who spouts on about Carlos having been consumed by the path.
I'm sorry. Carlos was fucking brilliant. William Blake said he needed to invent his own poetic mythology, or be a slave to another's; Carlos actualy did it. He was not some obese writer of fantasy novels about lost realms. He was lean, taut, charismatic; his books are concise, spare, instructional, visionary, and poetic. In his life, "he had more women that Wilt Chamberlain" (as one interviewee puts it) but nevertheless convinced the daughter of one of America's great writers that she would be his "first woman in 20 years." He had boundless energy, and the people around him had more "siddhis" than the typical itinerant Indian yogi. (I remember one bookstore lecture by Florinda Donner in which she scathed that the men in the audience with their blazing third eyes were completely missing the point - and she was awfully damned psychic on that one.) In the film, the casual comment is made that Carlos had an uncanny ability to read people; to seemingly read minds. I'd say that his ability to read minds, is easier to explain as a psychic phenomenon than to explain rationally a the ability to read body language; it was that spot-on.
Carlos is accused of inventing Tensegrity as a way to reach a larger audience, but he was already teaching similar moves to people in the late '60's. Tensegrity, as many note in the film, produces a strange clarity/serenity/focus of mind that other body movement series do not.
I highly recommend this DVD to those who are not still invested in taking the Don Juan books as holy writ, but who haven't written off Carlos as a charlatan. It is an excellent bridge between the public world of Carlos Castaneda, and his inner Theater of the Real.
posted by Wm Blaker, printer at 1:24 PM
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