books:

	• Tales of Power Carlos Castaneda, 1991 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 22 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

This time I let the terror go, and went to use the bathroom, realizing I was dreaming. The bathroom door wasn't there, so I intended it to be there and it materialized. I was experiencing something I later discovered is called lucid dreaming. Why I hadn't come across this concept before is inexplicable, but I'd always considered Castaneda to be in some sort of waking state induced by Don Juan when he did his 'dreaming'. In retrospect, that oversight seems to be a defense mechanism my mind set up to protect me from the obvious fact that Carlos was asleep and doing lucid dreaming.

Now all of Castaneda's work, seen from the viewpoint of lucid dreaming, makes sense in a completely new way. Whether his entire episodes in Mexico are lucid dreams or whether he actually met a 'Don Juan' there who taught him how to enter lucid dreaming, there is no doubt in my mind that THIS is what he is talking about. His feelings of dread, his lapses of consciousness and being shaken awake by Don Juan, the feeling of being in two places at once, all fit with what I've experienced first hand in my false awakenings and my one (so far)lucid dream.

Was Castaneda a sincere communicator of his 'field' experiences or a cynical charlatan or both? I don't know. What I do know is that the reality of lucid dreaming, as I've experienced it, is congruent with his writings.

So I'm reading them all again ....

Contact me by email with your thoughts or experiences. big_bill_jeff@yahoo.com

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Don't Bother Reading Beyond This One

This is the last of the Castenada books that I bothered reading, and I was thrilled with it. It documents the extraordinary conclusion of Castenada's apprenticeship with don Juan and as such, should have ended here. But like a blockbuster movie with interminable bad sequels, Castenada continued to crank out increasingly lousy permutations of the don Juan teachings theme that degenerated into obfuscation and just plain silliness. Lost was the focus and tautness of the earlier works. As Robert Graves once observed, the story of an ugly duckling who becomes a swan is far more interesting than the story of a swan, formerly an ugly duckling. Castenada should have stopped here, master of a path with heart bequeathed to him by the Yacqui old ones and a thousands-of-years old oral tradition. He chose instead to create a don Juan franchise with Tensegrity workshops and other such nonsense available at your local New Age emporium. Only Castenada diehards will want to read much beyond Tales Of Power. The books written after this shows a Carlos Castenada more in pursuit of a fat bank account then a Shaman's power and knowledge.

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Even if everything is pure fiction, it's still a masterpiece

The Castaneda series has become one of the most controversial
in literary history, abetted by the fact that the author himself
swore to the truth of every fantastical event he described in their pages until his dying day. That Castaneda died an old,
frail man when the books promised an extraordinarily long and healthy life seemed to give lie to his words, but in fact this
does not take away from the philosophical beauty of works like
"Tales Of Power", which is my favorite of the six I have read
so far (there are ten in all).

The first book, "The Teachings Of Don Juan", is easily the
slightest--although it introduces the saga and provides the reader with some of the terminology, it is clear that Castaneda
had yet to grasp what was happening to him, and much of it is (as he later admits) a strange cross between far-fetched prose and overly-analytical text. "A Separate Reality" is a vast improvement, even as the stories get wilder and wilder; some readers have howled with laughter over tales of invisible 'allies' which guard the sorcerer, or of an astral
"yoke" which can give a man superhuman powers, but the imagery
is extraordinary and the philosophical lessons behind such
truly bizarre events are unique and important.

The third book, "Journey To Ixtlan", is the easiest to swallow for most people, since it concentrates on the self-help and ethical aspects of the teaching and keeps the wild stories to a bare minimum (as such, it is highly recommended). However, "Tales Of Power" picks up where "A Separate Reality" left off and ups the ante on both the crazy events (at one point Castaneda is teleported in time and space) and the overall
philosphical arc of the series, for it is in this volume that the all-important ideas of the 'tonal' and 'nagual' are introduced, discussed and exhibited. Although the concepts may sound like a souped-up version of Sartre-styled existentialism (anyone remember "Nausea"?) and Zen, there is nothing wrong with
this and, in fact, by presenting the ideas in these new terms
he makes them sound fresh and arguably easier to understand. His characterizations of Don Juan and Don Genaro are as meticulous as ever, and both men emerge in the book as spiritual
masters of a most peculiar order. Even if neither ever existed,
or if Casteneda made every word up out of thin air (and he didn't--researchers have verified his trips to Mexico on these
dates), it doesn't matter--the wisdom you will receive from these books is priceless.

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