I've snagged Castaneda's first five books on the cheap,

Bump?

Heady synchronicity. Just last night I resolved to finally begin exploring Castaneda's oeuvre and then I see this when I log onto /lit/ this morning. A friend of mine who is a spiritualist/philosopher type whom I respect is a big fan of his work.

>>9314432
For what's worth, I recommend to go ahead and start reading them. If you've got the time you can read each of his books in a day, and I'm fairly sure the pdfs are just a Google search away.

Not gonna say much, I think it's better to jump into the texts and make them "your own" without preconceived hermeneutical boundaries placed by another's interpretation. I found them to be more similar to a Spinozian novel than an anthropological "memoir", for example, and I'm willing to bet you'll interpret them very differently.

>>9313836
if you keep this in mind you'll be fine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWkn2qLLV8I

I haven't read him, because how much can you really trust a book purporting to be "teachings" from some Shaman, when the guy never existed? It's like when people write autobiographies and it turns out shit didn't happen to them.

It's not like Don Juan was just some literary construct all along, Castaneda claimed he was a real person that he received teachings from, and it wasn't true. If you look at that, and then Castaneda's own actions as a "teacher" - chief of which was having manipulated several of his female students into having sex with him - I think you get a pretty good idea of what this charlatan was really all about.

but hey knock yourself out, maybe he managed to invent out of whole cloth some interesting ideas about the shit you mentioned in OP, even though he was a cunt.

>>9314566
The fiction of Don Juan's existence is irrelevant, personally, to my reading of Castaneda's books: I neither care about it as, perhaps, people did when the book first came out nor is his existence crucial to my understanding and interpretation of the text. As far as I'm concerned it's all made up and I'm reading philosofiction. I'm okay with that, and I do believe he actually managed to have some "interesting ideas".

Other than that, I don't know anything about him or his life - the fact he became a "teacher" or whatever was unknown to me until I randomly read it online. The way you're describing it, he really sounds like an average cultist bastard. Care to share a link or something about the facts? Don't want to put the guy on a pedestal undeservedly.

Bump again

>>9314492
>he unironically posts Alan Watts
Back to Plebbit, lad.