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Conversation with Hunter Muse on her experience with Carlos Castaneda, the sorcery path, & on the edges of Hollywood insider weirdness.
Part One: The Gospel of Carlos (0 – 28 mins)
First encounter with the Castaneda group in Tempe, Arizona, witches party, talks at the Phoenix bookstore, the lure of the second attention, magical passes, tensegrity on YouTube, becoming an insect, first impressions, recruitment meetings, moneyed people, Kylie Lundahl, doing what it takes, secret Sunday classes, Carlos’ decree on bored fucks.
Part Two: Layers of the Onion (28 – 55 mins)
First meeting with Carlos, the look of a Mexican valet, expectations for a sorcerer, the spell of the books, referencing don Juan, an added secret layer, a mystical package, charging for knowledge, the power of intent, seeing through the cult, government programs, the seed of don Juan, Carlos’ compound, working at Cleargreen, the layers of the onion, Merilyn Tunneshende, Margaret Runyan, Amy Wallace, doing sound at seminars, Carol Tiggs’ notes, throw the books away, wanting to believe.
Part Three: The Trigger Effect (55 mins – end)
Writing Sorcerer’s Apprentice, editorial assistance, Irving Wallace’s amphetamine addiction, an incoherent narrative, Amy’s drug use, dumping secrets on Amy, the bridge between Carlos and the cult, Castaneda’s death, the cover-up, a magical veneer, the disillusionment process, enmeshed sorcerers & sex games, the trigger effect, the Castaneda legacy, the film rights, Haley Van Houston, where the witches went, the final edit of Amy’s book, Amy’s sacrifices, Amy’s bugging devices, assignments from Amy, sorcery soap opera.
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Part Four: The Teeth that Fit the Wound (0 – 22 mins)
Amy Wallace’s drug addiction, Castaneda’s power circle, sorcerers hierarchy, a cult of masturbators, the androgynous look, exploiting narcissism, friends with Carrie Fisher, losing don Juan, Amy’s childhood trauma, the teeth that fit the wound, dissociative disorders & brain bifurcation, a sorcerer’s rationale, ego destruction.
Part Five: A Manufactured Mythos (22 mins – 45 mins)
A tragic trajectory, the capstone of the Castaneda opus, UCLA cover-up, an industry of sorcery, Margaret Runyan’s book, a manufactured mythos, Bruce Wagner & Map to the Stars, a Hollywood party, one of the elements, synchronized scripts, working as a hostess at a taxi dancer club, Tracy Kramer, Suzanne Lanza, Wagner & Carol Tiggs, John Cusack’s body work in Map to the Stars, the egotism of the healer, sorcerers’ placebo.
Part Six: Hollywood blood party (45 mins – end)
More parallels between Map to the Stars & Castaneda, sorcerer-incest, the blue scout, evil Hollywood, Wagner as the usher, Julianne Moore & Carrie Fisher, child sacrifice, the Hollywood rat race, a celebration of depravity, procuring women in Hollywood, normalizing perversity, Hollywood blood party, sexual objectification of children, dark Disney, amorality for sorcerers & superstars, Family Guy.
Songs:
1: “Pirates” & “Relapse” by Entertainment for the Braindead; “Dobro 1″ by The Deadly Nightshades”
2: “Pirates” by Entertainment for the Braindead; “What Took So Long Live” by The Moondoggies; “Changes” by Short Hand.
I really enjoyed this discussion, there are some great leads to follow here. Wagner, Kramer, people who may have been instrumental in ways behind the scenes in Castanedaland.
The way Carlos was so enamored with the rich and powerful, the focus on fame and influence, feels so similar to the CoS/Celebrity Center shenanigans/ops.
I would like to commend you for posting this on the heels of a DO episode.
Great conversation. Thanks to you both.
we aim to provide balance
“DO episode” has an interesting double entendre
an unintentional one I assure you and if I’m being honest I like how you return from a good DO meet a bit giddy, even if I myself would not take a hit of a DO meet
The women in the Tensegrity videos look like they are training to carry out political assassinations.
Martin’s comment about the militant “look” of the tensegrity videos is on point. The way Hunter describes Carlos’ inner circle of lieutenant/witches , including K. Lundahl, certainly gives the impression that they had been separately trained as a small group with a shared intention. And then later, this same inner circle of officers mysteriously vanishes, leaving the regular enlisted ranks to scratch their heads, wondering what happened? I participated in a Castaneda-fueled group for a few years in the late 90s, and I saw many of the same things as your guest. I’m still grappling with this experience and what was going on, twenty years later. Groups promising “magickal” spiritual growth tend to attract healers, and benevolent types, then these benevolent people slowly discover the layers of secrecy and coarse animating forces that lurk behind the group’s leadership. The Hollywood connections to Castaneda are fascinating, I hope your guest is able to come back to share more of what she knows.
I was also fascinated by the lack of emotional perspective in Maps to the Stars—neither expose nor celebration, as you guys put it… Hollywood is full of people whose only talent is ambition, and you feel that in this film with almost no likable characters, although I did feel for the Mia Wachoski character and the poor actor who’s dog gets killed, who is only in it briefly but is probably the most likable character. I was also sorta baffled by parallels Wagner appeared to be suggesting about Hollywood and ancient mythology. This didn’t seem very well-thought out, but neither did Wachoski’s take on it in her movie within the movie, so maybe there’s a significance and intentionality there relating to the shallow nature of the ghost stories told by the ghost town.
Thanks so much for the interview. Very interesting. Very much enojyed Hunter Muse’s passion on these issues.
Very interesting second part of the conversation. It’s confusing – flabbergasting. I totally get the emotion that Hunter is expressing with what this world expresses. Jasun captures this idea very nicely with his term “prisoner of infinity”, where the experience of trauma and the experience of infinity – or the eternal, unchanging nature of being – are rolled up into the same process: where continuous trauma is deliberately inflicted in order to generate this duality – this separation of the immediate, imminent self from the transcendental, reflective self. I also found it quite edifying doing a little google search on this Bruce Wagner guy, to find out he was a student of Ramesh Balsekar, who in turn attracted former students of Chogyam Rinpoche. West or East, the same demented, traumatological metaphysics and shamanic practices appears again and again; a discovery that seems to be a virtual biodynamical ‘attractor’ for a very small proportion of people (elite) vis-à-vis a much larger group they exploit.
From a purely anthropological and biosemiotic perspective, I can’t help but be interested in this as a ‘phenotype’ of human self-organization. Basically one of two possible ways of regulating the self (left vs. right hand path). I don’t believe for a second that there is any self ‘above’ who decided at some point in the ancient past to act against nature, as if that person wasn’t once a child, and therefore, isn’t imbued with experiences that distort the quality of his feeling relationship with reality. To me it seems very important – however astonishingly wrong and insane these people are – that we not give in to the fiction of a self that is acting independently of the way the environment (social relationships) potentiate certain ways of knowing and believing within the world.
I for instance am absolutely opposed to the idea that free will isn’t real; but I’m also very aware that free will is mostly an illusion. The question is, how free are we? How much freedom do we have, and what are the conditions which determine a persons experience of freedom? If a person has been traumatized since infancy, and deals with a dissociative identity disorder, how much freedom can this person really have? If this person has since become aware – as Randy Noblitt, Wendy Hoffman, and others suggest is the way secret society networks are organized – than their awareness becomes regulated through the dynamic regularities of the setting, people, and power of the network, which is the ‘idol’ itself. In other words, they protect themselves through the inference chains of the ideal/value, and thus if anyone criticizes or deconstructs or makes apparent the inherently false and ultimately self-destroying nature of this ideology, the person in question will become as discombobulated as surely as infrared radiation destroys and scrambles DNA.
So this whole process is held together by a tight tensegrity (I’m also aware that Castenada apparently called himself this). Why else would Satanists be so sure that free will is an illusion if not because they experience themselves to be prisoners of their own circumstances? They are completely and utterly chalk full of dissociated fear states; they are horrified of what exists within them, and hence, when I mentioned to you Michel Serres book of foundations, the second of which is titled “statues”, that the concept of a anthropic statue is itself reflective of the rigid and dense mentality of the human beings subject to these unconscious archetypal potencies. Their surface is an ice-like inversion of the deep pervading trauma, depression, anxiety and fear of the depression and anxiety, that lies within them.
Is it impossible for a human being to change? Of course not. Change is not possible for a human being to do alone; for an organism which fundamentally exists through and grows through intersubjectivity, growth can only be facilitated through the Other. You need another human being to create the external conditions for your biology to correlate to new internal realities; so the environment needs to change for a Satanist to change. And for Satanism at large to end, quite obviously, there needs to be a realistic understanding of what it is, why and how it emerged in human history, and why it persists – and why, above all, its reality is kept secret and concealed behind a society that is deliberately engineered to be as shallow as possible. Shallowness and Satanism are two sides of the same coin: you cannot have one without the other. You cannot know yourself truthfully without knowing reality truthfully first. “Crazy wisdom” – in Buddhism, shamanism, etc, is bullshit because it assumes a duality between internal knowing and external action. Therefore, the continuing advance of the sciences of the mind will, I have much reason to believe, create the conditions to make Satanism less and less plausible, and enticing, as our schools and our social reality begins to reflect the structure of the real more and more.
How does Hollywood and fantasy fit into this picture? Does it mean the two aren’t compatible? I don’t think that’s necessarily so, but it does imply that fantasy is very volatile; and it does suggest that reality (science) must be cultivated to a much greater degree than fantasy, otherwise we fall victim to illusions, dissociative processes, and trauma; and as Hunter noted, certain forms of media – such as the Kardashians, are inherently false because they are fundamentally designed to promote a certain ideal – an aspiration for the girls watching the show to ‘be that way’. How much on TV is like this? The other day my dad asked me to watch Fast and Furious 9 with him, and he was so excited about it that I said yes; and the trailer really does look exciting. Am I being seduced by the spectacle, as Guy Debourd argued was the modus operandi of the ruling class? Is there any room for spectacle – for the play of imagination, and fantasy? This is a really hard question to pronounce upon, because one part of me says yes, while another part says no.
If there’s anything I know about humans (and animals), its this: we continuously push our boundaries. The Bible has a good term for this: “stiff-necked”. Humans are a stiff-necked, stubborn, resistant-to-change creature that if they do change, typically (or maybe always) happens through the most grueling suffering.
Men involved in sex racket rings who get whatever girl they want whenever they want them are not likely to change without the world forcing them to change. Alan Douchewitz, for instance, is one of the slobs associated with Jeffrey Epsteins pedophile network. The man has pretended to be a champion of human rights his entire life. As a 5’3 or so man with a Jew-fro, he probably couldn’t attract the girls he would want to attract. For men – and Satanism is primarily a racket run by and for men – like this, life is sex. Sex is the be-all-end-all for them. To take away their “ecstasy” is probably something they will fight to the end to “protect”.
I know how I am with coffee and (earlier), weed, and I have my own addictions related to sex; but nothing as obscenely filthy as what these people are involved in – basically having exhausted every other fetish, only S&M works for them now; they need as much perversion and taboo as possible to ‘feel right’. They believe deeply in the power of the “coincidentia oppositorum”, or the paradoxical pleasure which comes from doing whats wrong.
Disabusing people of fetishes like this is like climbing up Mt. improbable.
>Satanism is primarily a racket run by and for men
I feel I detect an anti-male bias in your perspective with this and recent posts – and I am not sure it is backed by facts (hence bias). Ironically, this is a Castanedan perspective, that, literally as stated in one of the books, “women are better than men.”
My impressions from the literature & testimonials is that the women, mothers and grandmothers, are as involved in Satanic ritual abuse as the men, and that their abuses are even more central because more devastating to the children, the betrayal all the deeper. Hell hath no fury, and all that.
At the same time, that there is an anti-female pathological drive to Satanism (& the old seers of CC) is also true, but not unrelated, if the most profound traumas men suffer is due to psyche-annihilating or devouring mothers.
as a general rule, most men I have worked with have no trouble identifying their anger against their fathers, but find it very difficult to own the same with their mothers.
I think you’re misunderstanding the complexity of my position, Jasun.
There are generalities and particularities. The statements I have been making about men are fully to be understood as ‘generalities’. I am speaking about a general archetypal trend that arises in men because of biological differences which become ‘standardized’ through the complex object-relations of human development.
I am very well read in the ritual abuse literature, and therefore fully aware of the role females play within the scheme. But you are ignoring what I have been striving to emphasize, and for which you seem a bit insouciant about: metaphysical representations of the real. This means Male and Female aren’t arbitrary classification schemas, but symbolic representations of the underlying nature of reality itself. Reality is contrapuntal, or relational, at its root. A relationship occurs between one part and another part. The philosophy I have been trying to convey, and for some reason (probably a persisting antipathy on your part towards me) is not being communicated properly, is that self and other, reflection and prereflection, and the metaphysical experiences of ‘transcending’ change, and existing within change (imminence), are symbolized in our determined sexual biological natures as male and female.
I have no anti-male bias, nor am I sympathetic in the least towards Castenada or any elite philosophy. When I say the source of our problem is male, I am basically saying that the worship of power is male; and why is the worship of power male? Because as biological organisms, the physical differences between males and females is the origin of power differences. Females may have sexuality (which Satanism always emphasizes as what a female should exploit), but the muscular strength and physical size of males tops that out; for instance, a man can simply beat his wife, or a woman, and very effectively ‘teach her’ why his physical prowess supersedes her sexual abilities. Shouldn’t that be the obvious lesson of ritual abuse? That physical abuse is a more powerful form of abuse than any other? That to be physically abused is to enact a form of emotional hostility that surpasses any abuse that can be done with words or facial expressions?
If you think processually about it, and aren’t satisfied with vague statements about females, mothers, grandmothers, and others being as fully abusive as males, if etiology is interesting to you and you want to figure out how all this stuff emerged in time, than you will have to come to the same conclusion that I, Hayden, and many others come to: that the origin of modern social inequality, trauma, etc, has to do with a patriarchal form of organization that is based in and around male secret societies.
I’m not sure how you can advocate for Haydens work yet fail to notice the emphasis he places on male secret societies; or perhaps you aren’t aware enough that this is basically the viewpoint shared in other anthropological writings at large – that the issue is male secretiveness, and that whats being defended against is the psychology of females.
As a male, as an athlete, as a heady intellectual guy with many ‘male’ characteristics, I find absolutely nothing wrong with saying that the female is the carrier of truth, because the facts – such as female maternity – makes females the more emotionally attuned, more interpersonally alert, in short, the more affectively loving sex of human beings. Males have their own advantages related to reflectiveness and symbolic representation, but its precisely this characteristic which makes us more dissociative – disconnected – from embodied, immediate, experiential realities. All the metaphysical nonsense in the East and West which dissociates from the structure of the natural world while putting in place some abstract, nondescript “ideal” at the center is the product of male dissociative fantasy.
I am not trying to suggest that females are perfect or complete or that the ideal world would be one where only females exist; in fact, the idea of male vs. female as I mean it should be understood as dissociative (of the bodys needs) vs. connected (to the bodies needs), with the idea being that the experience of being a mother makes women more connected to the other (with body understood as ‘other’ to the reflective mind), while men, in not having that experience, can fall prey to their own form of self-organization that ultimately results in delusional fantasy.
Since we live in a society of delusional fantasy, one with male secret societies, one where males dominate in positions of power, one where males dominate females, one where adults dominate children, one where the rich dominate the poor, etc, I think I have made it clear that my description is not about a personal rancor towards the male sex, but a way-of-being which is the opposite of being truly connected to experiential realities – and hence, to not be connected is the only other possibility to being connected.
To emphasize once again the source of connection: it is motherhood. I have been around many women and have been profoundly affected by the way the tumults of pregnancy, childbirth, raising an infant and raising a child demands so much from everyone – not just the mother; but it is primarily the mother who is the ‘matrix’ of the child – and human beings – exposure to reality; it is the mother who imprints upon the child’s brainstem and midbrain the general ‘feel’ that reality will have for them. The mothers intense sensitivity to every changing state of her infant is intense – her experience of the other, therefore, is intense; more intense than males. It is because of all of this that I allow myself to describe maleness, or patriarchy, as the problem.
I don’t share the dissociative and intellectually shallow views of people like Castenada. I aim for complexity and rigorous logical analysis. If anything I write seems to be without merit, I have no problem being challenged, but claiming as you’ve done that what I’ve claimed is not supported by the facts – without stating or pointing out in what way the facts differ with my presentation of them, seems lazy. I put a lot of effort into justifying my positions, believing that what I’m writing is plausible, or more plausible, than other positions. I believe situations or events in the external world define plausibility, and therefore, I believe truth either exists or doesn’t exist; I don’t hover within any sort of epistemological ‘grey zone’ with any sort of finality; if greyness can be said to exist in any form, its ‘greyness’ just means ‘very complex’; and if things are very complex, that just means more words are required to unpack them. I believe very deeply in the value of words to bring clarity.
For example, I’ve written above that I’m not sure if fantasy is good for society, and in some sense my ambiguity here implies some greyness; but this ‘greyness’ does not mean fundamentally ‘unknowable’, but rather, ‘uncertain at this period of time’. It could be that we can have some degree of fantasy saturation without confusion about the nature of the real – and clearly the real is complicated, as both you and I, for instance, may be at loggerheads, and so the conflicts between people can occur at many different levels, in facial expressions, in situations, or in narratives-of-the-real. Too often people are experiencing conflict in one domain (narratives-of-the-real) yet they aren’t addressing the psychodynamics of what it feels like to have their version of reality logically challenged. For instance, if someone doesn’t subscribe to the logos, or the notion that reality is fundamentally controlled by causal-structure, and therefore by a logical relationship between parts, then such a person would basically be impervious to logical argument because they don’t really subscribe to the idea of reality having logical substance at its roots. In their minds, logic is ‘separate’ from reality. The two aren’t actually one (hence, it amounts to being a dissociative, masculinist fantasy where experience and logic aren’t dialectically cross-referenced). If you don’t believe that there isn’t a “big Other”, for instance, then you aren’t really paying attention to the structure of your mind, how it grew out of your body, and how you ultimately grew out of your attachments with others. How could there not be a “Big Other” if you are constantly in interaction with an Other – your body, other people? That makes no sense. Thus, if someone believes these things, and someone else challenges the incoherency of these claims, then the first person is going to be feeling like their version of the real has been devalued; and in feeling that way, they can either accept that they have misunderstood reality but now have reason to believe something new, or they can simply dissociate from what their experience is saying (based on the chemical-like reactiveness within them), and nitpick and focus on something else within the argument of the other.
Not knowing the structure of the real has reverberations throughout a human beings experience. It basically “scrambles” our coherency; its the “confusion of tongues” that the Bible speaks of. When we can’t communicate coherently, its because people can’t reflect or know themselves coherently. Incoherent social environments – like elitists environments – breeds incoherency and confusion.
This is how the world works and has worked for thousands upon thousands of years. Brian Haydens work has provided a very powerful framework for understanding the social ecology of the process, but it goes nowhere near the incredible depth that exists in the way our minds become scrambled because of these machinations.
I was going to leave a comment supporting Jasun’s reply to you and then wow, I see this reply. I’m not really sure where to start since I don’t have the same way of words as you, and I’m certainly not as verbose.
I’ll just pick out this one section that I could not disagree more with, “Shouldn’t that be the obvious lesson of ritual abuse? That physical abuse is a more powerful form of abuse than any other? That to be physically abused is to enact a form of emotional hostility that surpasses any abuse that can be done with words or facial expressions? ”
First, your post seems to mainly focus on adult males and females, and ignore adult females, who regularly inflict extreme physical abuse on children who I would argue are at a more distinct physical disadvantage to an adult female than an average adult female with an average adult male. It also ignores the emotional and psychological abuse women regularly use against each other. And I can only imagine someone who has not been subjected to extreme emotional and psychological trauma as a small child would make the claim that physical abuse surpasses emotional or psychological abuse.
As someone who happens to be female, has lived on earth for 50 years now, and has experienced physical, sexual, emotional and physiological trauma from childhood through adulthood, the trauma inflicted by other women (mothers, grandmothers, aunts, friends, cousins, managers, co-workers, etc…) is what torments me through my days and gives me terrors at night (and nearly caused a break-down). The bruises men have given me don’t even register, and was so much easier for me to understand.
I really don’t recognize any of your characterizations of women in this piece, as somehow more loving, or connected, or any of it. It seems funny to me that you write about reality and fantasy and whatever, but what you have written here bares no resemblance to my reality at least.
Are you saying that all the trauma inflicted by women against each other and against children is simply a reaction to men? Men are the original evil here and make women behave in ways that is against their nature somehow? In any case, I don’t get it and don’t agree with what you’re saying, and thought I’d insert my female perspective here…as a more loving and connected and sensitive person who knows better, ha!
thank you for posting this kalitude, & for bringing things (back) to the lived and experiential reality, & out of endless theory, especially as (I can imagine) it might be painful for you to do so. Till means well & has much to contribute but at the same time he is, in my experience, more intent on working out his theories than connecting to people in their lived experience, ironically epitomizing the sort of masculine imposition (“mansplaining”) he is railing against (hence his every response is ten times longer than what it is responding to, which may only push people further away).
On the other hand, it did fire you up to share your female perspective & you communicated in a few lines what no amount of theorizing could ever negate (but be ready, he may try!).
Perhaps the lesson here (one of them) is that human existence can never be reduced to a theory, no matter how complex & far-reaching, and that human beings can never be reduced to binary poles of masculine or feminine, qualities that become increasingly abstract when separated from our sexual organs and biological function. In fact (again ironically), the desire to do all this is perhaps itself symptomatic of trauma. At the end of the day, it is the raw material of our own experience which we have to work with, that and nothing else. Fortunately, it seems to be enough.
The Wallechinskis use of stimulants for writing was not unusual at all in the east coast writing/publishing world of the 50’s and 60’s. Lots of people we’re using them at the time. Kerouac, PKD, and HST to mention a few well known examples. That would also explain somewhat how they kept coming up with those great encyclopedias. Going to Finland ? ! Some kind of emergent reindeer urine/amanita scene going on there, Jasun ? Hope you inform us later….Cheers.
it’s no deep state secret, see last blog post for what’s over the Finnish line
That was amazing. Hunter Muse (pen name?) was so forthright and intelligent and herself…hard to believe she fell for that shit but she makes it clear why and how. A story very fascinating to me. I can remember the moment I saw the cover of ‘A Yaqui Way Of Knowledge’ in 1975 or so at my best friend’s house – a book belonging to his hippie older brother. I read the first 4 and thought “if he writes another one it’s fake”. He wrote another 3 or 4. Didn’t read them. Joyce Carol Oates was actually the first to call him a fraud!!! HA HA! But I never saw that. Instead, I saw many academics testifying to how interesting Don Juan was.
All I can do is shake my head in wonder at the strength of “their” deception. It’s obvious, as Hunter says, that he did not do this alone.
Finding out on this blog years ago that Carlos C was CIA was such a shock. But not quite as much a shock as finding out that the Grateful Dead are also an intelligence operation.
I did minimal acid but smoked more than my share of weed and eventually made it to Peru for the ayahuasca. I regret all the weed – and I am watching my son fall into it in slow motion with the new generation of manufactured authentic fake rebellion artistry.
America is a cult. Cults within cults (except for those like Vonnegut who are without a country). It’s very sad but somehow that’s how we humans organize ourselves. Kudos to the courage of you both. May we all escape somehow.
Yea, she didn’t want to say “McGowan” for some reason…I suspect this audience is quite familiar with him….
My question requires some speculation as a response. But what would you imagine CIA testing of an operation like Castaneda’s operation might entail? It’s easy to game out how a figure like CC could be black budget funded and nudged from a far in certain directions by the CIA or other intelligence groups. But if part of the operation was measuring/quantifying Castanedas work and followers I wonder what that might look like? Have CIA reports/summations ever surfaced? Or of any other similar operations that might illustrate the nuts and bolts of what an intelligences outfits relationship would be like with such a figure and scene?
Perhaps I’m out of some loop here, but who is Hunter Muse? I can’t really find anything she’s done, and I just have to say I think she’s awesome.
“I think pharmaceuticals are the fucking devil”
Amen.
Thanks for doing this podcast Jasun.
Genuinely appreciate the first hand account, afterall, Castaneda shaped entire generations, including myself to a limited extent. Great guest. Really looking forward to the next conversation.
Enjoyed this conversation. Really appreciated how Hunter seemed to have an intuitive understanding, whether she knows it or not, that Jesus/Christianity is the spiritual standard by which all other spiritual paths should be measured by. I agree. That’s why the scripture is called the canon. She also clearly recognized that CC and the results of all the sorcery were demonic. I enjoyed this talk.
@zenfish wow I didn’t get that impression at all. She seemed like the classic spiritual seeker type who steadily became disillusioned by the materialistic bent of the Castaneda group. She probably was seeking something like this because the Christian churches of her childhood felt sexually stifling, or disempowering for women, but thats just a guess on my part. Where in the discussion did she ‘recognize that CC and the results of all the sorcery were demonic’? Obviously the term ‘demonic’ is triggering and can have different meanings for different people so that term would have to be defined more clearly by her to move forward with the debate . Sometimes the arrogance of Christian Exceptionalism is precisely what drives people like Hunter to investigate these groups, “whether you know it or not”.
Glen, Jasun asked her if she felt there was a parallel between the demonic forces behind Hollywood and it’s lack of any kind of moral compass and CC’s group. She said it was the same schtick. Of course, it is because it’s the same spirits influencing and giving the marching orders to all those involved. Although the people involved think it’s their own thoughts and inspirations, it’s really the influence of otherworldy “inorganic?” beings. The Bible called the the fallen sons of God and said they are very real. Hunter Muse also hinted at what true spirituality with a moral compass is by her comments like “not very Christian” or “not like Jesus” etc., when talking about CC’s group. Telling me that she knows what real spirituality is, whether she’ll consciously admit it. or not.
I enjoyed this talk with Hunter with its focus on the cultist activities of the CC pack. There was very little discussion though on the central enigma of CC which in my opinion is the teachings themselves. Initially, from 1993 when I read the first book I thought the writing & “teaching” was highly original but have discovered over time that elements of teachings correspond to other philosophical or “spiritual” writings.
It would be interesting to see in retrospect if there is anything useful or original in Castaneda’s teachings. Maybe a topic for a future liminalist catch up if there was enough interest.
Yes, I would say that there is something “useful and original in Castaneda’s teachings.” I experienced that first hand as, I believe, many others have as well. My question is related to yours: even if Carlos fell short . . . don’t the teachings support themselves in the experiences of those who practiced them with sincerity and persistence? I don’t care about all the human drama surrounding CC’s public life. Nor do I care about verification of facts about DJ and his circumstance. All I care about is the validity and dependability of the teachings. And that I am convinced of by practical and personal results. The teachings that CC chronicled improved my life to such a degree that I am in awe of my “luck” in encountering them. Gratitude doesn’t begin to cover it.
Stanley’s cousin married his first wife at Carrie Fisher’s house. Debbie Reynolds spent the night at his god-mother’s winery in Napa and refused to sleep, was terrified to sleep. Demanded the god-mother stay up all night with her. High society tweakers.