Carlos Castaneda as an Early Influence
By Lenny Gibson
This video appears as an artifact of the late 1960s, when the edges of reality blurred with psychedelic fantasy, sorcerers, and shamanic magic. In it some of the survivors question whether Don Juan was conjured differently than the shape-shifting Carlos Castaneda. The magic realism of his books mixed truth and fantasy into the credulity of mind-blown, former hippies and made such questioning seem useful to buttress memories that were fading into the oblivion of impending soon-to-become cyberization. The consequence of drinking the Kool Aid begets the threat of becoming the Kool Aid itself, when the body count of flirtation with Eastern consciousness and the God of War dissipates in the fantasy enlightenment of the Psychedelic Renaissance and seeks to remind the refugees that once there was a way to go back to the vanished home.

Note from the Editor:

Lenny Gibson, Co-Founder of Dreamshadow, asked me to include this video about Carlos Castaneda…a true relic of the 60’s. He frames this offering as a blurring of reality–Don Juan may have been actual or not–and underscores how the hippies of the time, spiritual seekers really, may have conjured him through psychedelics.

For me, Castaneda was a doorway and a path. I stumbled upon my father’s copies of these books as a young teenager, and they truly transformed how I saw the world. His words introduced me to the transpersonal, to other ways of knowing that still hold my imagination and underpin that the world is, indeed, full of mystery. For me, whether the stories are actual or merely true in the transpersonal sense is not important; what’s important is the lasting impact they have had on me and on others.

—Ronit LeMon Deneen, Editor-in-Chief