Thoughts on Carlos Castaneda's Books

I want to write a short bit about Carlos Castaneda. Let me start by saying that I enjoyed some of his books and considered them informative and interesting. (You might be lost a bit now, if you've never read or heard of him). I don't know that I ever believed that his Don Juan  character was real. If one does some quick research into the matter, you quickly find otherwise. For me, it was about the techniques you can find inside the pages.  Using various activities to change one's perspective, and various mental tools for meditation and critical thinking for example. Not the more outlandish things you can find in the stories, like eating lizards. (I am never opposed to a good fantasy story though.)

I Especially liked Castaneda's book "The Art of Dreaming". Like his other books the story is fantastical bordering on young adult adventure, if you wanted to classify it. But again I point to the techniques. A lot of the information that you can find in the books is useful. You could look at it like the Bible. If you take the stories literally, you're missing the point. A better way to read the Bible, or Castaneda, is to take the useful information out of context and apply it to your life, not to try and mimic and believe every single little word.

Nobody has an ultimate answer; no guru should hold you in complete fascination. This is a key to life I think. Life is always changing, mutating, evolving, and no one has any kind of ultimate answer; that's part of the beauty of it all. Of course learn from mentors and the worn paths of those that have gone before us. Take what you need and move on. I guess you could say I am a kind of ruthless theosophist. Culling what I think is the useful part of many traditions and stories and fusing it into my own way of trying to understand and evolve in this world.

The Art of Dreaming (others I have talked to about it agree) provides some very interesting and useful techniques to achieve various stages of lucid dreaming. Coming from someone who has researched the matter - for a long time this was the most informative and useful text someone could find on the subject. Again, you have to get past the story and use the mental techniques. It's like tools for changing your thought processes and putting them in a new direction.

I always knew the stories were too fantastical to be true and that Castaneda had a somewhat shady 2nd half of his life, but I never researched his history in detail. But the other day I stumbled upon this article which was really interesting: Salon article on Castaneda. It talks about how he was really more of a hypocritical, overbearing, manipulative cult leader in his later years. I was glad to see the author did mention that although the stories were fictional, Castaneda did pull a lot of the information from various obscure academic texts. Information that was not readily available and put together in such a way as before Castaneda wrote his books.

 So I will leave with the thought that critical thinking is one of the most important tools one can have. Think for yourself, question everything, but learn what you can from others as well.

Book Review: "Anima" by Marie Buchanan

Anima by Marie Buchanan (or published as "Greenshards" in 1972) is a very creepy book; fascinating in a multitude of odd, subtle ways ( the kind of thing that fascinates me). Well, maybe creepy isn't the right word, eerily mysterious maybe. Anima translates roughly into the spirit, or 'animus' the unconscious mind or the will of the spirit or super-conscious.

Anyways in addition to the story itself what's strange is that when I first found the book and started reading it (more than 10 years ago, I just finally picked it up again and finished it recently) my good friend who had moved out-of-state told me on the phone one day that he also had picked up the book and was reading it. Which was wierd because it was spontaneous - it's not like I told him to read it he also happened to have found it (its a somewhat obscure book from 1972) and picked it up. (Well I guess the band Tool's album Ænima was big in our minds at that time, which the book made us think of obviously , so maybe its not too strange).

Back to the book itself. It takes place in the English countryside with two couples and a nanny as the main characters. One house is owned by Megan and her husband, with his sister Olive living there as the keeper of the house/nanny. The other house is called Greenshards and it's where Olive and her brother lived as children.  The husband living in Greenshards is much older than his wife, and compared to old photographs, Megan doesn't think it's the same woman at all (because she's still young looking). The mysterious older gentleman seduces Olive (or vice-versa decide for yourself) and a strange set of events ensues.

It's hard to nail down what Anima is about exactly, but that won't stop me from trying. It's about the power of the mind, the power of the will, the will of the spirit and the malleabality of everything you think you know around you. The couples hold séances at Greenshards during which Olive becomes entranced, but the real plot (without giving too much away) is the battle of willpower occurring between the mysterious gentleman and Olive and also the battle of will between herself and her own anima. The second half of the book is told through Megan finding Olive's diary and creates as many questions about the whole thing than it answers.

The question becomes - who is manipulating who? What is it that everyone is after exactly? and even - whose spirit is in what body? Mysterious and intriguing on many levels - Anima is a short but powerful book that challenged me to relook at the world in ways I hadn't done since I was a child. A very mystical, intuitive work that evokes one to examine the spiritual nature of reality (not faith, but the realness of the spirit), and of the power of intention and will.