I Am the Man Who Invented Carlos Castaneda

Carlos Castaneda was the counter-culture phenomenon of the 70s who related his adventures on the edge of the human form. Under the tutelage of a Yaqui sorcerer with the absolutely generic name of don Juan, Castaneda, at one point in a long “apprenticeship to power,” evades the lattice of words and symbols that dictate the material world Man inhabits and joins other sentient beings in a different dimension than our own. One may have thought this would be a big deal, a guy escaping the chains of our reality, opening the doors of perception, taking it to a whole new level sort of thing, but I don’t recall Castaneda’s achievement causing much of a buzz. The Watergate hearings were on at the same time. That’s probably it.

Castaneda’s first book, A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, came to us on the newsstand claiming to be a California graduate school paper recounting an anthropological research project in the Sonoma desert of northern Mexico or southern Arizona. The actual whereabouts of Castaneda’s road to Ixtlan were unclear. The best explanation for the mystery is that Castaneda’s apprenticeship to don Juan Matus and his training to become a sorcerer didn’t literally happen; the whole story and twenty or so books and videos about exceeding the human form were a fiction devised by Carlos Castaneda, who died in 1998 (and if it could happen to him, it could happen to anyone).

Castaneda’s breakthrough transcendence of this earthly plane was fictional. Or was it?

My purpose in this essay is to acknowledge that Castaneda didn’t invent of whole cloth his psilocybin-induced insights into the constructed nature of human reality. I did! The honest truth is I am the man who invented Carlos Castaneda. It was I who invented the author of A Separate Reality and The Journey to Ixtlan. Superimposing my existence over another was easier than you might think. Unlike our empirical world, the textual universe has many available wormholes at the ready. Schematically, my accomplishment can be described as, “I said, ‘Carlos wrote, “Why are you always scribbling on that little pad,” don Juan laughed. “You look like you’re playing with yourself!”’” And so forth. Disclaimer: Don't try this at home! I'm a professional punctuator.

The anthropological treatise and its writer invented by me were obvious fakes, but my point in writing in the voice of Castaneda was to illustrate how the absence of empirical proof to support The Teachings of don Juan is literally immaterial. I’m not even the only writer who got in on the Carlos spoof. I was fascinated by Richard de Mille’s Castaneda's Journey: The Power and the Allegory (1976) that lays bare the falsehoods in the texts attributed to Castaneda without, of course, discerning my hand behind the scenes. Elsewhere, I remember an article in the L.A. Weekly (Jul 1998) in which Celeste Fremon claims she knew Carlos when he was a graduate student at UCLA and tosses around contradictory reports of his death in which “he left the world like don Juan with full awareness” seems as plausible as any. Reviewing The Art of Dreaming by one “Carlos Castaneda,” Vance Lehmkuhl in the Philadelphia City Paper (Sep 1993) makes an interesting point about the use of lucid dreaming to harness the fluidity of the dreamscape in our everyday, waking life. “Whatever kind of jerk he may be, and whether [Castaneda] stole his metaphysics from some old Mexican guy or synthesized it from various shamanistic and philosophical sources, Castaneda’s onto something.” I can’t recall the source exactly, but in another article concurrent with his death, the man who hurled himself from one side of a canyon to the other, suspending his luminous, egg-shaped form on tendrils of light, was described as “looking like a Mexican waiter.”

Carlos Castaneda didn’t have to be reporting real events to be relevant. If we realize the physical world we apprehend with our senses is constructed from cultural and evolutionary forces and not as it appears empirically, then any addition to the human narrative, especially mythic ones, substantially changes the narrative possibilities for every man’s existence. I think a consensus exists among anthropologists that the words a culture has to explain its history on Mother Earth are the limiting factor of the archetypes on which that culture survives. This is the tale of Carlos, who meets an old, wise guy in the desert, and the master teaches him how eliminating his interior dialogue is the first step to penetrating the illusions of everyday reality and finding the extra-dimensional realm in which our familiar universe is a mere subset. George Lucas: big fan.

Until now, the hallucinogenic nature of the sorcerer’s apprenticeship may have kept me from admitting I was the author of don Juan’s author. By this time, however, science has caught up to my vision, making a Castanedean model of reality more credible. Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman of the University of California, for instance, asserts that the possibility of natural selection resulting in a human sensory apparatus that accurately perceives whatever is out there is exactly zero percent. Evolution is a life-promoting racket that only gives us enough equipment to manage our food and reproduce ourselves. We don't actually need to see things as they are. In the arena of theoretical physics, scientists assert that the universe exists in 16 or so dimensions. As in the classic, mathematical fable Flatland, we would perceive extra-dimensional beings intruding in our dimension as three-dimensional objects. We wouldn’t see them as they truly are. In don Juan’s desert encampments, simple, nearly devout actions performed on the mundane plane–like sweeping the brush and stones from the earth’s dusty carpet– have ramifications unseen in the realm of power, the Nagual. Science itself asserts the likelihood that this constructed reality of ours is not the whole drama.

The Castaneda books identify human consciousness as crucial to the self-deception about our true interaction with the galaxy. Rationality and the obsessive routines of consciousness I was taught in infancy construct a dependable reality in which to eat and procreate. Central to brushing these banalities aside is the skill of turning off the internal dialogue. That consciousness is the mysterious unifying force in reality makes intuitive sense when I consider the ineffable nature of thought. Nearly a hundred years into the Nuclear Age, 50 years since man landed on the moon, and two decades since the adoption of EZ Pass on the PA Turnpike, scientists still haven’t found biological structures in the brain to correspond with particular thoughts or memories; consciousness it seems is a non-mathematical, incalculable process spread all over the body. Our private acts of cognition aren’t even the command post for bodily activities or the center of our being. All that is an illusion. Writing for Frontiers in Psychology in November of 2017, David A. Oakley and Peter W. Halligan explain, "Despite the compelling subjective experience of executive self-control, we argue that 'consciousness' contains no top-down control processes and that 'consciousness' involves no executive, causal, or controlling relationship with any of the familiar psychological processes conventionally attributed to it."

Go figure. I knew that if I made perception of don Juan’s world dependent on turning off our interminable and inescapable internal dialogue then no one could say the key to that particular door of perception didn’t work. In the first place, who among us can freeze the endless prattle of the invisible mind, devoid of form or efficacy? (Nose Devoidoffunk? I did not invent George Clinton.) Second, we have no means of measuring anyone’s success at evading the banal traffic circles of the human consciousness. Unless, like, they can fly or something. If some guy can fly or something, me personally, I’d forget the question.

The primary teaching of A Yaqui Way of Knowledge is that the world of western civilization does not correspond to the world of nature, things as they really are. Our society clings to sad central myths, about limited resources and hegemonies of power. About the inferiority of our fellow homo sapiens. Somewhere in all those Castaneda books–ten of them rehashing and relearning from the same brief interaction between apprentice and sorcerer that occurred in the mid-sixties–”Carlos” tells how he and his group are going to perform the ultimate act signifying mastery of power: a jump into a canyon that would certainly be fatal to anyone who didn’t have supernatural abilities. A female sorceress confides to her cohort, “I’d have no problem taking the leap across the river so long as I knew my huaraches were waiting for me on the other side.” We are too used to the comfort of our depleted myths about human possibility to make radical changes in them.

A couple of pop philosophers I enjoy reading and listening to are that Slavoj žižek and, Mr. Fun, Jean Baudrillard. Their work begins with the assumption that myths and signs of culture transmit the culture unfailingly. Baudrillard pessimistically recounts the depletion of the human myth until our signs are no longer relevant to any present reality: they are copies of copies, faded, lacking clear outlines and no longer recognizable as what once was called “human.” The don Juan series rejuvenates the hero’s journey, the mythic cure to what ails Baudrillard’s robotically androgyne, heroless modern culture. Placed in its proper category–a novel mimicking an anthropological treatise–we are invited to regard the Carlos Castaneda/don Juan cycle as a post-modern masterpiece, right up there with Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinths or the cross-country happening that was Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady’s 1964 Magic Bus Tour. In Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” a staid reality is contaminated by a single volume of a much longer–but absent–encyclopedia, a reference guide to a reality strikingly similar to but fundamentally different than our own. Borges envisions the very casual way the virus of language invades and changes its host. In the postmodern sensibility, a strategic literary edit works as well as a major lifestyle reboot.

Years ago by now, I had this notion that it was appropriate to compare my invention of Carlos and don Juan to the opening in the fabric of reality that, to me, is Three Stooges comedy. I was never a fan of the Howard boys; I grew up in a violent family and grown men hitting each other with cooking utensils scared the bejeezus out of me. However, ever since I ran to the playground in my neighborhood to share their perceptions of 60s American culture with the ruffnecks and delinquents on my block, I’ve been amazed at how the ghastly, violent content of Moe, Larry, and Curly’s weird, sad, impoverished existence had been somehow normalized in kid conversation. Here was this deployment of the human form like had never been seen in history, and we were all ready to embrace absurdity for what is real. That thing that Curley did with his wrist and hands while going, “Woo-woo-woo”? What was that if not complete, unmeaning gibberish, and yet today, Curley’s pantomime is recognizable, understood by anyone. Nyuck! Why is there even a standard spelling for fucking nyuck?

I’m just a solitary artist trying to extract the meaning from my adventures in consciousness. Forgive me if I’ve succumbed to a persistent myth about the evolution of the species and the quest for mastery over a harsh environment. Alls I know is whatever’s going on, everything’s going on in it. My contribution to the collective myth of the human form is about deliberately exceeding our empirical reality. Radical uses of language expand narrative possibilities. The received story of man is about living a glorious life and then watching everything fall apart. We begin with an incandescent glow and end in dust and ruin. My pitch, if you will, is for a more complete story, at the level of eternity, where time and space don’t exist; they are mere artifacts of consciousness. Everything we are, have been, and will be is happening at the same instant, all at once. In my cosmology, we are never going to die and we’re already famous. As Dennis Hopper says to Christopher Walken’s don Vincenzo in True Romance, “If that's a fact, tell me: am I lying?”

June, 2022