The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge

I was very fortunate to have actually met the author. This was sometime in the late seventies or early eighties. I was living with my teacher, who was a native american medicine person. When this odd sort of person just showed up one day and stayed for... somewhere around one or two weeks. He would always sit away from the main group and simply watch, listen, and write. I do not wish to elaborate here, but I have to say that the personal experiences I had when I would notice him were enough to make me believe that Mr. Castaneda did indeed have a spiritual gift and that he had also received some very real training. He ended up leaving a notebook behind when he left and I did read what he had written. One page included an unpublished declaration of release, by Don Juan. To this very day, I still use it!

Crazy people who like hallucinogenic drugs!

I kept waiting for something to happen or to get some kind of understanding from this book, but it just kept going on an on about these hallucinogenic trips. It was actually very dull & pointless. Of all the books that I've ordered, this was the only one that I couldn't bear to finish!

There are entities living in hallucinogenic plants. One of them has a lizard. You must listen very carefully to what this lizard says and do exactly what it tells you. Of course, you have no hope of ever achieving enlightenment if you and this lizard dont click, or if you fail to inhale or imbible this specific plant.

If I had access to these plants, I might conceivably find a Blou Koggelmander lizard and it might even dance for me, providing we have a good connection, and my cats don't eat it first.

I have no idea what I was meant to have gleaned from these "trips" or how to make any sense of it. So what when he turned into a crow, or managed bodily to fly around? How very irritating. I have even less idea of what this book was trying to tell me. The only part which had any reasonable cognitive content was the Addendum. Couldn't he just have written that, and saved us the punishment?

Toltec wisdom can be rather difficult to grasp at times, but this book is an exercise in exasperation and futility. Perhaps those interested in experimenting with these plants could find more value in it.

Although it was adequately read, I found the narrator's voice to be rather too forceful, lecturing and hard.

I've read other Castaneda books, which I find far better than this.

Possibly the worst book I've come across on Audible.

THIS BOOK IS A TERRIBLE LISTEN! Save your credit unless you are intensely interested in this stuff! I will quote a critic of Castenada from the Wikipedia article:

In The Power and the Allegory, De Mille compared The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge with Castaneda's library stack requests at the University of California. The stack requests documented that he was sitting in the library when allegedly his journal said he was squatting in Don Juan's hut. One discovery that de Mille alleges to have made in his examination of the stack requests was that when Castaneda was alleged to have said that he was participating in the traditional peyote ceremony – (the least fantastic of many episodes of drug use that Castaneda described in his books) – he was sitting in the UCLA library and he was reading someone else's description of their experience of the peyote ceremony. Other criticisms of Castaneda's work include the total lack of Yaqui vocabulary or terms for any of his experiences.[15]

_______________________

[This is the third New Age author I have read that I now believe to be completely phoney. The others are Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, an alleged Tibrtan monk who was actually an old Englishman; and Lyn V. Andrews who thinks you can sweep a cabin floor and create a beautiful and powerful medicine bag from the beads and trinkets in the sweepings! Alas, I bit and read all their books!]

In the first two-thirds of this book, a young man spends time with an old shaman who guides him through elaborate ceremonies to prepare and use peyote and then jimson weed to achieve other realities. In this part of the book, Casteneda removes all his clothes, plays with a dog while high, rubs substances on himself, travels, flies and does terrible things to lizards.

In the last one-third of the book, Castaneda categorizes and generalizes and philosophizes about the hallucinogenic experiences with his teacher. He uses big words and high-flown concepts to dignify it in such a way that his professors were impressed . . . for a few years, at least. THIS BOOK IS THE AUTHOR'S SCHOLARLY THESIS! It was never intended to be popular reading. Get it, folks, this is graduate-level crapola! On the other hand, this may be a valuable anthropological record of shamanic practice and philosophy. But there are many more helpful books today telling how to meditate, how to travel and see things without ingesting hallucinogens, and how to get answers for living. Try Sondra Ray, Louise Hay or my favorite, Stuart Wilde.

Castaneda was very bright and a good writer. I have no respect for his truthfulness nor his spiritual attainments. He died at 72 of cancer. In his later years, he surrounded himself with women. Some of them wrote books. Some of them disappeared soon after he died. The old guy must've been magnetically charming. Total ego trip!

THIS WAS A TOUR DE FORCE FOR THE NARRATOR, LUIS MORENO. Obviously both he and the author are completely bilingual. Luis moves into lovely Spanish when called for. In the complex and boring last third, he slows down to make clear the stacked clauses and complex sentence structure. This material might as well have been the Martinez listings of the San Francisco phone book! Bravo, Luis!

The special afterword written in 1998 on the 30th anniversary of this book is interesting. If you spend your credit on this and get bored, skip to the last 45 minutes.

I think I was expecting more writing mastery. I have heard about this book for forty years before hearing it, and had read reviews. Overall, I am glad I finally got the story, but it seems anticlimactic. After having real experiences like this myself, it doesn't seem so new or mysterious. The book has such acclaim that my expectations were probably too high. I read that most of it was debunked as not being true, which doesn't matter one bit to me, he is telling stories that might represent other people or real experiences. This is just inspiring me to write about my own experiences, if he can do it, then so can I!

nothing

no

yes

dissapointment

what was considered a classic is actually outdated and boring. Nothing much to be learned from these "teachings"

great book for anyone interested in learning about different world views. Both the narrative and the analysis complement each other

The stories were great but at times it felt like a lecture.

The experiences of the author while hallucinating. I found the section with the lizards very interesting.

I might try one more only because of recommendation from a friend

I wouldn't recommend this book since one cannot replicate any of the experiences.

flat and boring

no

dissappointed

Although I first read this book many years ago and had fond memories of it I found with this listen that the characters generally were were annoying and pointless, particulalry the central character. I was unable to finish it as I got bored.