The Casteneda story rises above so many mystery inquiries into fascinating but distant questions like “Was this guy a British spy in 1778?” or “Why does that star wobble?” or even “Whodunnit?” It has all the elements of other mysteries, rich What happened? and Whodunnit? questions. The grating questions of the missing women, the bones […]
The second list–what we don’t know–is even more intriguing than the first one–what we do. To be clear, Castaneda was once interested in anthropology as the study of his life, both as an undergraduate and later for doctoral studies at UCLA, in California. That part’s not fiction, by any means. Somewhere along the line, searching […]
A mature, learned man named William Patterson can be seen on a long, high-quality video tape (YouTube) speaking about his journey with Carlos, or more nearly with his books and his “truths.” His audience are mature people, captured on camera with intimate clarity, perhaps of a median age of 50, and they are…rapt. They could […]
Those born after about 1980 might not understand the Carlos Castaneda phenomenon, and it’s fairly called a phenomenon, in the same way as those who lived and remember it. When he died in 1998, The New York Times remembered him this way: Carlos Castaneda, whose best-selling explorations of mystical and pharmacological frontiers helped to define […]