Icelander Left Us Yesterday

I am certain it did not go well for you any more than my life-affirming (non-suicidal) view never went well for me. Any attempt to speak of God was met with cynicism in the form of the "Flying Spaghetti Monster," or some quote from Carlos Casteñeda. When I pointed out that Casteñeda's works were determined to be fraudulent, his so-called PhD dissertation work around Don Juan Matus complete fiction, my assertions about biblical material were denounced as fictional. Admittedly, much of the Bible is midrash, Hebrew story-telling similar to myth intended to illustrate a spiritual teaching. But, myth and midrash are still heads and shoulders above a 20th century charlatan who fraudulently obtained a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University on the basis of great literary fiction. My professor of Parapsychology, the Egyptologist Bob Briar met Casteñeda at Harry Houdini's grave on Halloween 1974 (a yearly thing in the 70s with all manner of esotericists), and said "There is no Don Juan Matus." Sorry Icelander, but basing one's life on the writings of Carlos Casteñeda is reminiscent of the movie Zardoz (that dystopian future culture based on The Wizard of Oz). The protagonist Zed (Sean Connery) discovers to his horror that his reality is based upon a fictional story, being used by a sinister political power.

I can understand the similar sentiment. The Roman Catholic Church was an extension of the former Pagan Roman Empire, and the midrashic story about Iesous was appropriated for similar ends, to control, extort money, and conquer. But the core story is about self-sacrificial love, not about power. The Casteñeda stories were all about power, astral plane power, moving into the astral plane and using it to change things in the physical world. It was about becoming "a man of knowledge" but a knowledge of astral "allies," "teachers," and 'entities' that were inimical to human life. This was not transcendental material, it took place in "the crack between the worlds," twilight, and for Icelander, the whole Casteñedan universe was a symbolism, I think, between life and death, an ontological cusp he teetered on for years. I hope his later considerations about Gnostic thought at least awakened him to a transcendental destination, a return to one's 'True Nature,' even if the Gnostic Pleroma or Ogdoad is just another myth. The "Ground of Being" is a much higher goal than an astral plane, a Clear Light versus a Bardo, a Logos versus some Pie-in-the-sky-when-we-die fantasy. :shrug:

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