Aww, dammit, Castaneda!!

I’ve loved Carlos Castaneda's books since I discovered them 20+ years ago.  To get more “info” about him and his ideas, I even read books by his female followers. I recently got his last book as a gift, one that I wasn’t aware was published, although apparently it had been out since 1998. So yeah… I guess it had been a while since I really was “into” his books

Well, yesterday, I finished that book… and I just felt a little disturbed.  I guess the fact that the book is prefaced by a note that he died in 1998, coupled with the fact that in his books, his premise was that his ending was going to be very different, kind of bothered me. It’s all kind of fantasy ,“way out there” stuff anyway, although some of his first novels actually do read like an anthropologist’s journal. Somehow, though, in the back of my mind, I guess I hoped some of the stuff about spirituality and energy was true.

So… I Googled him this morning and found this article. The dark legacy of Carlos Castaneda. Much darker than I would have guessed.

Its not so much that I believed everything he wrote was true, but that to be such a favorite author of mine and then read about a truly dark and somewhat insidious past kind of pulled the rug out from under me.

Awww, crap!