by Sandy McIntosh
It’s welcome news that the Sustained Action website is once more flourishing its elegant, studious quill pen (eQuill pen?) and looks to continue the promise of its inception: First, to deal with Castaneda’s world and its aftermath, and second to explore the larger implications of movements and cults and why we are attracted to them—from the secret Toltec knowledge we believed Castaneda was sharing with us, to the mass cults of angry political affiliation which today (as they always have) share the same motive dynamics.
After Castenada’s death in April 1998 much of the vision of cohesiveness and symmetry that the living Castaneda had put into place began to unravel. Some members of the Sunday Group with whom I was friendly shared previously obscure information on many of the tales Castaneda told in his books and the true origin of the techniques and philosophy that he taught.
Richard Jennings (aka Corey Donovan), who had been webmaster of Sustainedaction.org, began to post information that had come to light since Castaneda’s death that cast extreme doubt on the validity of stories he told and wrote about regarding the origin of others in his group who were also claimed to have been involved with don Juan and his party.
This information circulated among the rank-and-file workshop participants. Some immediately lost interest and disappeared. Others stayed around hoping for things to be explained.
Richard encouraged several of us to write for the Sustainedaction.org website. We began to post investigative exposes revealing the falsehoods Castaneda and Cleargreen, Castaneda’s business organization, had been promoting as truth to sell tickets to the workshops.
From our collective efforts, Richard began to assemble an impressive library—available here, now–of documented information about Castaneda, don Juan, the Witches, and so on—material including an album of photographs of the notoriously camera-shy Carlos.
A good first question might be: Is there continuing interest in the books of Carlos Castaneda? Without book sales reports it’s hard to estimate. I know that on my own page at Academia.com, I receive several pings each day searching out the Castaneda material I’ve posted there. If an obscure website of interest to professors and students can cull even that small but consistent interest, I believe that a more general, user-friendly site such as Sustained Action has the potential to draw many more.
For myself, I decided a couple of summers ago to reread all the Castaneda books, including those by his associates.
I’d first read Castaneda when I was in college in the 1970s. I was just as enthusiastic about his books purporting to be non-fiction reports of miraculous events in the desert, as was my brother reading the unquestionably fictional Lord of the Rings.
I reread the books and was disappointed. The heart-pounding adventures Castaneda relates were, of course, still there, but my heart no longer pounded while reading them. Of course, I knew how each book was going to end, but where was the wonderful adventure that transported my imagination on first reading?
I think the answer is that what seemed, in 1970, to be extraordinary revelations of alternate realities has now become, as we continue deeper into the 21st century, a part of our present accepted reality—as myth, fantasy, or practical everyday knowledge.
Castaneda once complained at a seminar that he had been proclaimed “The grandfather of the New Age.” “Grandfather!” He protested. “Am I that old? Let me at least be known as the Father of the New Age.” Even during his lifetime, his books had already begun to settle into the general collective consciousness.
I was disappointed at first when friends of mine, exigent writers, declared what Castaneda wrote to be moribund. “It’s all old stuff,” they said. “From a long time ago.” However, that summation is much too easy. Could Castaneda’s influence, the subtle power of it, be something else entirely? The poet T.S. Eliot pointed us in the right direction, I believe, when he wrote: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did. Precisely, and they are what we know.”
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