Карлос Кастанеда. Разрозненые материалы за 1994 год -
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teach Castaneda the "art of dreaming," untold numbers of pioneers extended their own inner horizons through psychedelic inquiry -- with decidedly mixed results. For their part, critics of Castaneda's "path of knowledge" dismiss his work as an ongoing pseudo-anthropological shenanigan, complete with fabricated shamans and sensationalized Native American religious practices. The writings, they claim, have netted an unscrupulous author tremendous wealth at the cost of denigrating the sacred lifeways of indigenous peoples through commercial exploitation. Castaneda's presentation, writes Richard de Mille in Castaneda's Journey, "appeals to the reader's hunger for myth, magic, ancient wisdom, true reality, self-improvement, other worlds, or imaginary playmates." Appropriately, the Castaneda I encountered was a study in contrasts. His presence was informal, spontaneous, warmly animated, and at times contagiously mirthful. At the same time, his still heavily accented (Peruvian? Chilean? Spanish?) diction conveyed the patrician formality of an ambassador at court: deliberate and well-composed, serious and poised, earnest and resolute. Practiced. The contradiction, like so much about the man, may strike some as a bothersome inconsistency. But it shouldn't. To reread Carlos Castaneda's books (as I did, astonishingly, all nine of them) is to see clearly -- perhaps for the first time -- that contradiction is the force that ties his literary Gordian knot. As the author had told me, intently, during our lunch break: "Only by pitting two views against each other can one weasel between them to arrive at the real world." I had the sense he was letting me know his fortress was well