Table of contents
Backkground
According to de Mille’s research, Carlos Castaneda’s doctorate was awarded on March 23, 1973. His doctoral dissertation was defended and accepted in January. University Microfilms received the dissertation from UCLA some time in February. De Mille found that Castaneda’s dissertation was Journey to Ixtlan, almost verbatim, with a different title (Sorcery: A Description of the World) and an abstract added that contained some social science jargon.
The manuscript of Journey to Ixtlan was shown to students at UC Irvine in the spring of 1972 [in a graduate course taught by Castaneda], presented to them one chapter at a time as the course reading, and finally published by Simon & Schuster in October of 1972.
Book Timelines Summarized
To generalize:
- Everything in Castaneda’s first book had to have happened prior to 1968 when first published. If you trust Castaneda’s dates then everything in it happened before October 1965.
- Castaneda said he quit his apprenticeship/training in September 1965 and didn’t see don Juan again until April 1968 (claiming he quit for nearly 2 1/2 years).
- Everything in A Separate Reality had to have happened before 1971 when it was first published. Castaneda claimed the events began in April 1968 and ended in October 1970. (Note: Castaneda writes in that book, “I made the last entry in my field notes on October 16, 1970.” Yet many pages later, he adds another entry dated October 18, 1970.)
- Everything in Journey to Ixtlan had to have happened before October 1972 when it was first published. Castaneda claimed the latest incidents took place in May 1971.
- Everything in Tales of Power had to have happened before 1974 when it was first published. Castaneda claimed he jumped into an abyss AFTER everything in Tales of Power (at the END of the book). For decades after, he claimed don Juan left the world that same day. Castaneda claimed Tales of Power events begin in “autumn 1971,” but no other trips or incidents in that entire book are dated. It is clear from the content that multiple trips to see don Juan were included in Tales of Power, but all those trips are undated.
- Castaneda stopped dating ALL book entries for decades afterwards. I posit he realized he could be caught by them.
- Everything in The Second Ring of Power had to have happened before 1977 when it was first published.
- Everything in The Eagle’s Gift had to have happened before 1981 when the book was first published. Any incidents involving don Juan in The Eagle’s Gift had to have happened before don Juan “left.” The best data we have on that is Castaneda’s claim of June 1973. (Not that it happened.)
- Everything in The Fire from Within had to have happened before 1984 when it was first published. Any incidents involving don Juan had to have happened before June 1973.
- Everything in The Power of Silence had to have happened before 1987 when the book was first published. Any don Juan incidents had to have taken place before June 1973.
- Everything in The Art of Dreaming had to have happened before 1993 when it was first published. Any don Juan incidents, again, had to have happened before June 1973.
Who cares about the rest? Corrections and additions are welcome.
Why Dates in the Books at All?
So why put dates in a work if they aren’t real dates? The only plausible answer: to make work look legitimate that really isn’t. Dates by themselves (even with general places) do not pin down anything.If I tell you I was “in Oregon on August 17th last year,” how could you “pin me down” with just that? It totally doesn’t help. (Unless I later contradict the account.)
Book Contradictions
One of my favorite contradictions between Florinda and Castaneda is the following:
In A Separate Reality, published in 1971, near the end of the book, Castaneda writes that in October 1970, Genaro made the mountains tremble, and then he was behind Carlos while Carlos followed him. Then don Juan made the same leaf fall twice.
Castaneda wrote this all happened in October 1970 (while he was still a UCLA student). In any case it HAD to happen before 1971 when A Separate Reality was published.
In her book, Being In Dreaming, Florinda claimed that in July 1970 (three months before the dated account in A Separate Reality), she supposedly met Carlos working as a cook in a Tucson restaurant. But how could Carlos already be working as a cook?
Castaneda later claimed (in a 1980 Magical Blend interview) that after don Juan “left,” it had been the “Toltec woman” who assigned the “task” of working as a cook to him, along with la Gorda, in “the last three years” [i.e., circa 1977].
Castaneda claimed: “The way of teaching of the Toltec Woman is to put us into situations . . . . One of the many tasks was that of cook in those roadside cafes. La Gorda accompanied me that year as a waitress. For more than a year we lived there as Jose Cordoba and wife!”
But Castaneda supposedly had no idea yet that la Gorda existed back in July 1970. Castaneda also supposedly had no idea yet that “the Toltec woman” existed then. The time frame Castaneda gave in that interview couldn’t have happened before 1974 at the earliest. And he damn sure could not have worked for “more than a year” as a cook in 1970, because he was still a student at UCLA. Yet Florinda claimed she met Carlos as a cook in July 1970, before he had even published A Separate Reality. That was back when Carlos was still painting himself as skeptical in his books, too. How can these two stories be fit together in a way that makes sense?
But a contradiction I find even more entertaining is the next one, which began with some early workshop notes appearing in Nagualist Newsletter 1994/1995, when – after telling everyone her book “Tales of Energy” would soon be published – Carol Tiggs also told workshop attendees she: “…was with Carlos Castaneda when he planted the power plants given to him by Vicente (as reported in A Separate Reality) and the allies appeared and asked him for a ride, etc.”
Oh, really??
That same “tale of energy” was also part of the excerpt chapter from Carlos’s upcoming book The Active Side of Infinity that Nury read aloud to workshop goers in Long Beach in February 1997. As Richard also wondered in his Chronology, was this the reason that chapter was subsequently REMOVED from The Active Side of Infinity? 🙂
Yeah, it may have been a major part of the reason why that chapter got removed, and it probably provides a good example of why Carol’s book [which was apparently never even written, per Carol’s confessions to Amy] was never published. Because that part of A Separate Reality where Castaneda told the story of Vicente giving him power plants was dated “May 23, 1968”–several years before Castaneda by his own accounts was supposed to have any awareness of Carol’s existence. By telling that story, Carol busted Castaneda good.
The capper, though, may be that Castaneda wrote and published four whole books between 1977 and 1987 where the plots entail his gradually recalling stuff he had supposedly been taught by don Juan and company in heightened awareness. (For example, in The Eagle’s Gift (1981), he acts like he was only then remembering all the stuff he did with many of the characters, like with la Gorda, and Carol.) In The Active Side of Infinity, however, claims he recollected everything he had been taught in in heightened awareness all at once in 1973, sitting at Ship’s diner, after his leap into the abyss.
From The Active Side of Infinity: “I had jumped into an abyss in Mexico! The next thought that I had was a quasi-logical deduction: Since I had jumped into the abyss deliberately in order to die, I must now be a ghost. How strange, I thought, that I should return, in ghostlike form, to my office/apartment on the corner of Westwood and Wilshire in Los Angeles after I had died. No wonder my feelings were not the same. But if I were a ghost, I reasoned, why would I have felt the blast of fresh air on my face, or the pain in my calves?
. . . .
My relationship with my cohorts had been an example of both of these consequences. I had cohorts, don Juan’s other apprentices, companions for my definitive journey. I interacted with them only in heightened awareness. The clarity and scope of our interaction was supreme. The drawback for me was that in my daily life they were only poignant quasi-memories that drove me to desperation with anxiety and expectations. I could say that I lived my normal life on the perennial lookout for somebody who was going to appear all of a sudden in front of me, perhaps emerging from an office building, perhaps turning a corner and bumping into me. Wherever I went, my eyes darted everywhere, ceaselessly and involuntarily, looking for people who didn’t exist and yet existed like no one else.
While I sat at Ship’s that morning, everything that had happened to me in heightened awareness, to the most minute detail, in all the years with don Juan became again a continuous memory without interruption. Don Juan had lamented that a male sorcerer who is the nagual perforce had to be fragmented because of the bulk of his energetic mass. He said that each fragment lived a specific range of a total scope of activity, and the events that he experienced in each fragment had to be joined someday to give a complete, conscious picture of everything that had taken place in his total life.”
©️ 2024 by David Worrell, all rights reserved
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