I've spent some time reading bits and pieces of The Don Juan papers by Richard De Mille, and I wrote a short critique as an exercise in developing my communication skills. Bare in mind that I haven't read the whole thing, and it presents just my personal opinion. Enjoy.
The Don Juan papers are a collection of 44 essay’s written by various authors (including R. De Mille) and edited by Richard De Mille. De Mille seems to believe through and through that Castaneda is a hoaxer and a trickster, but to his credit, the book doesn’t contain essay’s coming from just this view.
From what I read of the book (roughly 10 of the essays) it seems to me that De Mille is just trying to show that there are elements of fiction in Castaneda’s books, while making no attempt whatsoever to debunk the phenomenon. To me, it seems that De Mille’s argument is that Castaneda evidently made up his stories, therefore there is no phenomenon to debunk.
Having said that, I think taking the romance out of Castaneda’s stories isn’t such a bad idea, as it seems that quite a lot of people got carried away by the books, and as a result, caused some damage. And the fantasies created by these books may have held people back from understanding the actual phenomenon presented in the books.
De Mille seems to have found that while Castaneda was supposedly in the desert with Don Juan, according to his books, he was actually at the UCLA trying to push his writings, but no one seemed interested. De Mille also argues that the narrative in Castaneda’s books follows the rise and decline of Leary’s drug craze movement, and even borrows names and themes more of less directly.
This leads to the idea that Castaneda’s experiences in his books are just his memories from his experiences taking drugs, as well as just straight rip offs of reports by other drug users.
So, is this where Castaneda’s alternative cognitive system came from? Is it just a social consensus of reality from a group of people who experience reality zoned out more often than not? This seems possible to me on the surface, but De Mille does reference some pretty good circumstantial evidence for phenomenon that exists outside of the current mainstream scientific understanding in his attempt to show the sources that Castaneda ripped off. What I think is interesting about that is that De Mille never tries to debunk the phenomenon presented in those sources, however, I think he thinks he doesn’t need to.
De Mille does bring up the point that Castaneda speaks of some of his experience’s in the second ring of power as definite, even after he has made the point that these experience’s can’t be verified by the reasonable mind, i.e. they’re more like dreams than actual real experiences.
De Mille also suggests that some of Castaneda’s narratives are just metaphors and allegories of everyday life. For example, the idea that children steal part of their parents energy, De Mille suggests that this is a metaphor of when someone has a child, they are then forced to grow up, and thus the child has stolen the parents ability to live in the fantasy would, which is the world De Mille suggests Castaneda is writing about. Other examples include the feminist movement and the drug craze.
Suffice it to say, that either I’m completely convinced that Castaneda's narrative is at least partly fictional or De Mille’s book is filled with outright and blatant lies. Having said that, De Mille doesn’t seem to discuss the phenomenon presented in the books, and he doesn’t seem to present an opinion of whether or not there’s some truth to them. And due to the nature of the reality presented in Castaneda’s books the only way to verify the existence of the phenomenon is work on the self. Because of this, I believe that De Mille couldn't see the forest for the trees.
That's it, I still haven't finished reading De Mille's alleglossary, I'm looking for other references and information about the various subject's in Castaneda's books. I'll post anything I think is relevant here.
