enoch.abraham

Well Carlos, for all the criticism, I find have very valuable insight on spiritual practices and a way of shamanic interaction with each person's particular reality. When it comes to criticism, it is always something that is somewhat problematic because you have people who are attempting to analyze a practice that is greatly different from the standard view of reality. Even before the psychedelic plants, which were a quite small part of what Carlos highlighted in his literature (what he facilitated in public is a completely different matter), it's a bit foolish for a person to attempt to assess what he writes about as valid when a person does not come from an experiential background that has practiced any shamanism. It's perhaps why he is considered by some the "Father of the New Age", even though the New Age movement has quite a bit of nothing to do with the shamanism highlighted in Carlos' works. Perhaps he might be considered such because of his public workings with the Tensegrity camps and things of that nature, but those things have absolutely nothing to do with what he wrote about. The Nagual path outlined in his books would leave a person anything but "New Age", but whether or not Carlos reflected that understanding through his public actions as a "cult leader" is a completely different matter. I'm not too concerned with the person that Castaneda was, but rather what he facilitated in his books. The former is only a concern to those who are invested in idol worship, where their faith in a system of beliefs and practices rest in a figure that supposedly stands for it. In such a situation, if that figure does not live up to the system of beliefs to a 100% degree, then the idol worshiper automatically fails as well to continue on their path. This presents major issues, as most idol worshipers will not even have the experiential knowledge to know whether or not a perceived "break of rules" is actually a true breaking of a particular rule or ideology. However, more importantly, idol worshipers tend to also have very weak personal investment, in that they only work on their path if they feel someone is watching, or to impress their personified deity. But their motivation is only tied to external objects, rather than being generated from their own personal assessment of worth. They will also often be limited by the height of accomplishments their deity reached, barely being able to find out if that limit is the true "limit" of what they are doing. But if a person can still find value in a system despite many of it's followers or popular figures being sketchy or reaching limits that can otherwise be broken, I think that person is going to do a whole lot more on their road to self-discovery, self-realization, and self-empowerment. As such, if a person can look at the work that Carlos facilitated, they can find very valuable ways of accomplishing those things. Whether or not an individual becomes like Castaneda would be completely up to them, but overall I find Carlos' work to be very valuable to a spiritual aspirant. I would suggest that if they try his stuff out, they give it a chance to work and work primarily with it. If a person has they head in yoga, violet flame meditations, Microcosmic Orbits and everything like that, then they might not have to force of focus to achieve anything valuable. So like all of the above mentioned, it would be better to focus on the work of Castaneda rather than to try and "add" it to other stuff.