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What do you guys think of this book?

I lost faith with Castaneda when he turned his life's work into a suicide cult.

>>2085 Can you explain? I only recently found this book. What's it really about? I thought it was an ordinary lucid dreaming instruction manual and then there was a part about sorcery and heavens. Is this thing for real? Is it accepted amongst academics and skeptics?

>>2086 He claims to have acquired mystical power by jumping off a cliff. People have died jumping off his cliff. He talked a close friend into committing suicide by driving her car into the desert "looking for answers". Her skeleton was found later. Don Juan probably never existed, and Castaneda was a psychopath who talked four women into committing suicide with him.

The only good Castaneda books are the first three (The teachings of Don Juan, A Separate Reality and Journey to Ixtlan), then it all came spiraling down due to Castaneda appointing himself as the leader of the Tensegrity, a new age cult that was pretty much a way for him to get laid and feel powerful, so the books are like propaganda for this. Anyway, I really liked the style of the first books and Don Juan as a character. Supposedly those books were Castaneda's thesis for his Anthropology degree, since this is what he was doing when he met Don Juan. In these books, Castaneda describes his process of apprenticeship for becoming a Man of Knowledge, a shaman. I don't judge the books by how Castaneda turned out to be a cult leader, its just that the first three are well written and pretty interesting coming from a guy who probably had some training in psychotropic healing with real mexican masters, using peyote and mushrooms in the process; but then on, well, the subject kind of lost appeal, became too fantastic for me.

>spend your life becoming a shaman >gain untold insight into dreams >an hero anyway Laaaaame