Visiting Professor Irvin Silverman:English as a Second Language and Lecturer in Mass Communications, Hanoi Pedagogical University, Xuan Hoa, Vietnam

https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow/transcript

Ted Talks by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has been seen by over 4,000,000 viewers since 2004.

Four Decades of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Optimal Flow Theory and its Effects on the World of Psychology and Motivational Thought

Chapter I. What actually is the Autotelic Personality:

Chapter II. The Achievement of Optimal Flow :Optimal Flow Theory of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Seen in Accord with New Age Mystic, Novelist, Carlos Castaneda

Chapter III. Managing Balance between the ′Play′ of challenge and ′Work′ of skill building" 

Chapter IV. Computer Cybernetics and the Optimal Flow Theory of Csikszentmihalyi

 

Chapter I. What actually is the Autotelic Personality:

Autotelic: adjective au?to?te?lic \?o?-tō-?te-lik, -?tē-\

Csikszentmihalyi’s personal definition of an Autotelic Personality is mainly focused on the fact that ′Autotelic′ is a word which when broken down by structural linguists is really composed of two Greek roots: auto (self), and telos (goal). 

What actually is the Autotelic Personality and how and why do certain people find fulfillment and more importantly appear to be generally happier than other less gifted persons who appear to not possess Flow Theory competencies.

First of all we need to define what autotelic activities are and are not; we than need to examine what specifically are the important autotelic activities we see in every day life because experiencing them is really the main goal of this review. 

In Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, he describes certain types of persons with autotelic” personalities who basically live life on their own terms.

“Flow,” is associated with six neurotransmitters: dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, norepinephrine, anandamide and endorphins. Knowing the neurochemical profile of flow means, in theory, people can devise ways of achieving it more often, more reliably and more quickly.

In our new generation of flow thinkers we are excited, perhaps, that using the advances of neuroscience, we might not have to meditate every day for 10 years to gain access to these layers of their brains.

According to others who chart, test and write about autotelic personalities it is further characterized by people who at the least have a combination of very specific personality traits which allow them to be better able to achieve the “flow experience” more rapidly and more successfully than the average person. 

We are not in any way shape or form making the argument here that only certain types of personalities can have Flow Theory creative experiences but it does require a strong combination of intelligence and energy to achieve this intrinsic level to our thought processes.

Many different answers come to mind when one is asked what really is the best way to live?

Optimal Flow Theory provides an understanding of experiences during which individuals are fully involved in living in present moments. Many view 'starving' artists as the finest examples of the intrinsic stage of Optimal Flow Theory in action;Optimal Flow Theory will state that the 'starving' artist whether working in oils or the writer in their letters medium, always shows complete time-dedication to the concept of "present moment thinking"and is in his or her own mind-set operating correctly and what is most important is that they are being 'authentic'.

Extrinsically focused thinking does come about over time but the artist painting or the writer in their third floor garret is there simply because an intrinsic need is showing itself at that point-in-time in that individual's life.

Patrons of the arts are not excluded from practicing Optimal Flow Theory however although they too may paint or write over time it becomes very apparent to the average patron that the reason they are patronizing certain artists is because they can never seem to reach that same Optimal Flow of creative motion as the artist they admire.

When that great painter or writer achieves the sublime and the world recognizes their handiwork, this is so because in their earliest creations the great painter or writer works mainly from a purely intrinsic platform in developing their Art or Letters.

Both driven and possessed at one and the same time by the fact that their intense work on their painting or book being written is going swimmingly well, they can by blocking out all outside distractions completely focus a laser-like attention on completing their ultimate art in imagery or words.

When in this Optimal flow of creativity they may even attempt to displace their humanly body needs which of course leads to certain discomforts; however like all Optimal Flow driven artists they may lose interest in their last creation once completed and begin moving on to other artistic endeavors.

Very specifically Optimal Flow Theory research has its intellectual origins in a desire to understand the phenomenon of intrinsically motivated, or autotelic, activity: activity rewarding in and of itself (auto self, telos goal), quite apart from its end product or any extrinsic good that might result from the activity.

The Personality Traits that will yield Flow Theory Competencies:

These personality traits include:

• Curiosity:
• Persistence:
• Low self-centeredness:

Evaluating the Need to Perform Activities for Intrinsic Reasons Only:

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes people who are internally driven, and who as such may exhibit a sense of purpose and curiosity, as autotelic. Although flow research as he interpreted it is primarily concerned with flow as a motivational state; Csikszentmihalyi as early as 1975 had introduced the concept of an autotelic personality.

That is to say a person that actively seeks challenges and flow experiences might as easily be an Opera Star like the great Italian Opera singer Caruso or a current famous NBA super-star like Basketball player Stephen Curry. 

Because only certain athletes become top five in any global sporting endeavor, we have chosen only one to focus on, namely Stephen Curry of the World Champion Golden State Warriors. However make no mistake about the fact that Basketball players are also artists of a certain type of physicality that is always seeking Optimal Flow motion but they are truly of a different ilk.

Many world Champion level Basketball coaches have in the past and will again in the future invoke the use of Ballet instructors to teach the movements of the Ballet to their Basketball team.

Their hope is to make an advanced form of muscular transference come more naturally to these gifted athletes who already possess lightning fast twitch and slow twitch muscle control; simply said the synchronicity of movement sought by the Ballet Master and the Basketball Coach are to bring these muscles more frequently into the zone or flow of near perfection on a game by game or single Ballet Performance basis. See 5. Citation

5.https://www.bodybuilding.com/fun//drobson33.htm

Athletes like San Francisco Warrior Basketball star Stephen Curry will tell you directly that he started out playing basketball as an activity for its intrinsic value in his own personal world.

Stephen Curry has described what the flow feels like for him sometimes as it begins when... "loud sounds become muffled, crowd noise may even go totally silent in my ears and than the feeling like nothing can stop me on the court and than the shots, the shots just start dropping for me and than and only than do I recognize that I have been operating in a real live flow zone."

This is quite the opposite and vastly different from being only externally driven, in which case things such as comfort, money, power, or fame are the motivating force. But when latent autotelic merges with an overlay that only quests for power and fame we than can characterize that unique etiology as not really in any way similar to the classic formation of Flow Theory originally described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in 1975.

However in Chapter I we attempted to in general reflect the search for more stable causes of flow experiences such as "flow personality" or "autotelic personality". Also in chapter I we introduced the casual reader to an overview of Csikszentmihalyi's Flow Theory with the only glue that appears to be holding this all together being found in the simplistic beauty and easy cadence of writing that is at the very core of Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's conceptual ideas and wonderfully crafted phenomenological descriptions of autotelic personalities. 

They reflect differences either in the need (achievement motive) or in the ability (selfregulation) to experience flow. The concept of an autotelic personality should encompass both aspects simultaneously. Next, the achievement flow motive needs to be introduced which integrates need and ability aspects. As such, achievement flow will be proposed as a way to operationalize an autotelic personality. 

Finally, we offer a functional analysis of flow in an achievement context within the framework of personality systems that show interaction and this yields us a framework for that specific outlook.

Chapter II. The Achievement Flow Motive:Optimal Flow Theorist Csikszentmihalyi Linked to New Age Mystic and Novelist Carlos Castaneda

I am only now starting to understand why after spending inordinate amounts of time exploring both New Age writer Carlos Castaneda and noted Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's who in their own way as scientists infused ground-breaking thought with the Optimal Flow Theory of life. That these two widely divergent personalities some how effortlessly do seem to intersect for me in their joint concepts of how our lives on earth are really lived out.

Because much like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Carlos Castaneda in his free-form "New Age" writings reasoned that in order to enter the Optimal Flow of our mind and body relationships we must make a conscious choice to not allow our minds to control our every moment, our every thought.

However Castaneda took a less methodical approach to Optimal Theory creation but still managed to arrive at most of the very same conclusions in his largely allegorical writings that absolutely do concur with Csikszentmihalyi.

When Castaneda stated that when we take a stand to be in our power, we come to recognize that our power is not really ours but belongs to the Optimal Flow Theory of the universe that is guiding us, providing for us, and orchestrating our life’s events with or without our approval or consent.

Though both were trained as scientists Carlos Castaneda never clinically reached the lofty heights of academic excellence as had Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's landmark research on Optimal Flow Theory after being published in the Journal of Psychology opened up numerous other academic avenues for his new more analytical approach to intrinsic and extrinsic thinking first published in 1975.

Here with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi a new psychological approach took root and it started growing out of his closer examination of the values that state emphatically that Optimal Flow creative thinking comes directly from primary intrinsic thinking and is in reality far more important and valuable than extrinsic thought will ever be on any level.

On the other hand Castaneda was to achieve more universal acclaim as a best selling nonfiction novelist and on balance became far more widely read than Csikszentmihalyi but in reality Castaneda was moving along in an entirely different creative venture as an acclaimed nonfiction writer in a career that ran thirty years in length spanning 1968 to 1998.

We will be addressing whether Castaneda should be considered a nonfiction writer rather than a fiction writer.The differences can be large because normally honest objective nonfiction writer's are what certain large groups of readers search for when trying to learn new concepts.

On the other hand many top publishers will tell you that a Carlos Castaneda seen as a nonfiction writer would conceivably sell more books than a fictional Carlos Castaneda. We will thoroughly vet this idea in the following article; Michael Korda of world-class publisher Simon and Schuster, the than Editor in Chief that signed Castaneda always wanted Castaneda to be seen as a writer of nonfiction. Unfortunately the facts do not line up very well for that position and the Anthropological community sees Castaneda today purely as a writer of exciting psychodrama wrapped in a nonfictional wrapping but at the core his body of work is now considered clearly fiction.

In any event we I can only give you the expert opinions from the Academic and Literary Critics polled and my own personal and precise interviews done with his classmates at UCLA accomplished some ten years after his first three books had already been published. The truth some say falls out after you shake the fact trees but somehow many of us are still rooting for Castaneda to come out a little better on the nonfiction side of the ledger but alas and alack it may not be meant to be.

And if this Castaneda name draws a blank for readers under 30, all they have to do is ask their parents. Deemed by Time magazine the “Godfather of the New Age,” Castaneda was the literary embodiment of the Woodstock era. His 12 books, supposedly based on meetings with a mysterious Indian shaman, Don Juan Matus, made the author, a graduate student in anthropology, a worldwide celebrity. Admirers included John Lennon, William Burroughs, Federico Fellini and Jim Morrison.

Overview: Carlos Castaneda:

Under don Juan’s tutelage, Castaneda took Mescaline and Jimson Weed and Magic Mushrooms but did not experience Peyote, Castaneda claimed that he talked to coyotes, turned into a crow, and learned how to fly. An interesting point of drug taking among the Sonoran Desert Yaqui was pointed out by one of Castaneda's critics who noted that Castaneda had Don Juan Matus using Peyote but Don Juan Matus could not have favored Peyote at all because he was a Sonoran Yaqui; the Huinchol Yaqui of Arizona were the Peyote users not the Yaqui of the Sonoran Desert.

Castaneda was viewed by many as a compelling writer, and his early books received overwhelmingly positive reviews. One journal called them “beautifully lucid” and remarked on a “narrative power unmatched in other anthropological studies.”

They were widely accepted as 'factual' but the sticking point here is that as it turned out Castaneda was writing fiction and really no upstanding Physical Anthropologist wants to be considered a fiction writer. This reality is that Castaneda had the mantle of 'nonfiction' placed upon him by his publisher Simon and Schuster. This helped to market and 'hard-sell' those 10 million books but more than likely if he was called a fictional writer only possibly 5 million books would have sold and that is the cold reality of international book sales.

Richard Jennings, an attorney who became closely involved with Castaneda in the 1990's, was studying at Stanford in the early 1970's when he read the first two Don Juan books. “I was a searcher I was looking for a real path to other worlds. I wasn’t looking for metaphors".

That is exactly how I also felt after reading Castaneda's first books;metaphors were not my goal either .....I was also a 'searcher' just like Jennings and we both became addicted to the tales of Don Juan Matus the Teacher and his anthropologist neophyte student, Carlos Castaneda.

Castaneda's status as serious anthropologist went almost unchallenged for five years. Skepticism increased in 1972 after literary critic Joyce Carol Oates, in a letter to the New York Times, expressed bewilderment that a reviewer had accepted Castaneda’s books as nonfiction.

The next year, a cover story revealing that Castaneda had lied extensively about his past also came out and over the next decade, several researchers, most prominently Richard de Mille, son of the legendary director Cecil B. de Mille, worked tirelessly to prove by annotated demonstration that Castaneda’s body of work was largely a hoax.

In spite of this exhaustive debunking, the Don Juan books still sold well; the University of California Press, which published Castaneda’s first book “The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge,” in 1968, still steadily sells 7,500 copies a year. BookScan, a Nielsen company that tracks book sales, reports that three of Castaneda’s most popular titles, “A Separate Reality,” “Journey to Ixtlan” and “Tales of Power,” sold a total of 10,000 copies in 2006.

None of Castaneda’s titles have 'ever' gone 'out of print' — a highly impressive achievement for any author.

Today, Simon and Schuster, Castaneda’s main publisher, still classifies his books as nonfiction. However it can be argued that this label does not really matter since ,most everyone now knows Don Juan was a fictional creation. But not everyone realized that fact in the beginning of his writing career and the trust that some readers had invested in those books leads to a darker story that has received almost no coverage in the mainstream press.

In the beginning Castaneda's best-selling books literally 'flew off the shelves' of University and international bookstores;they sold by the millions all over the globe; international readers and Literary Critics alike were proclaiming that the"New Age" had finally found their new 'Rock Star' of letters and his name was Carlos Castaneda.

Castaneda first began with The Teachings of Don Juan in 1968 and finally it all ended as it had once begun with his twelfth and final book, The Active Side of Infinity in 1998.

Carlos Castaneda the singularly reclusive UCLA trained Physical Anthropologist wrote an absolutely magnificent series of twelve books and not only were they all best sellers but more significantly they defined him preternaturally as the most talented writer produced by the "New Age". This designation of "New Age" relates to a period which is loosely interpreted to have run roughly from around the publication of Castaneda's first book in 1968, to the millenium year 2000.

Carlos Castaneda did his Graduate work at UCLA in Physical Anthropology and than turned to writing rather than teaching. He broke new ground with his seminal explorations of mystical and pharmacological frontiers and helped to define the psychological landscape of the late 1960's.

Though largely discredited as fiction by other Academics and literary gurus, these books whether labeled nonfiction or fiction were still wildly successful sellers in the book stores at the nation's University book stores and equally successful at the local Barnes and Nobel stores across the United States.

Michael Korda the Editor in Chief that had signed Castaneda, was himsef a newly hired Editor-in-Chief at one of the world's leading publishing firms Simon and Schuster and Korda saw absolutely no problem with either category fiction or nonfiction but of course preferred nonfiction because these titles just sell much better.

Castaneda's books were being sold under nonfiction and if they could call Castaneda's books nonfiction all the better as long as the buyers were voting their approvals with their purchases and even today most listings still list Castaneda as nonfiction.

Although Timothy Leary of Harvard would became the High Priest of LSD during the time period known as the "New Age" it is a well-known fact that he disdained Castaneda and vice-versa, as both "New Age" author-rivals became more and more contemptuous of each other because Leary was receiving the lions share of public acclaim but Castaneda was still selling millions more books.

Castaneda's works will clearly endure longer than any other "New Age" writer because his stories were simply more layered with mysticism.

Castaneda's next three works after "The Teachings" were “A Separate Reality,” “Journey to Ixtlan” and “Tales of Power.” These books were replete with hallucinogenic evocations of ancient paths to knowledge, based on what Castaneda had described as an extended apprenticeship with the Yaqui Indian 'Shaman' Don Juan Matus. In any event all of this took place in what Don Juan called “a separate reality.” The simple facts are indisputable as the love affair between Castaneda and his fans during his lifetime saw his books sell at least 10 million copies.

The first book "The Teachings"was published at the University of California Press but the next three came out under the guidance of Michael Korda the Editor in Chief at Simon and Schuster Publishers in New York City.

Castaneda's continuing string of publishing successes were artfully steered by Korda but Castaneda was as always still doing the hard work of writing and creating the psychological nuance, mysticism and intrigue that drove all of these books into becoming international best sellers. The fact that they were to be translated into 17 languages, credited Castaneda with helping to usher in New Age sensibility and revived interest in the indigenous Indian tribes like the Yaqui of the Sonoran Desert and Southwestern cultures in general.

Carlos Castaneda, whose best-selling explorations of mystical and pharmacological frontiers helped to define the psychological landscape of the 1960's, died in 1998 just as privately and secretly as he had lived, befitting a man who made beauty out of mystery and even his age is still uncertain but he was believed to be 72.

7.Castaneda,Carlos, December 25, 1925-32? Cajamarca, Peru, Died April 27,1998: Beginning with The Teachings of Don Juan in 1968 and ending with The Active Side of Infinity in 1998,

Rituals and Rites: An Issue of Functionality in the Yaqui Tradition:

Rituals and rites are a means of bringing into the limelight the experience of a group of people; rituals and rites thus constitute some kind of religious expression. They are a means of establishing one's belief system. They are a means of expressing one's experience at the mysteries of the world and the supernatural beings. In short and simple terms, they are acts of forms of worship or communion and communication between one and one's objects of worship.

Before we begin an analysis of the types of rituals and rites of the indigenous Yaqui Indians let us review some of the following basic ideas. The Yaqui Indian sub-culture that Castaneda wrote about captured his readers, dazzling them with mighty tales of teleportation, and animism where wolves and mountain lions were actively morphing from animal forms into humans and than back again to animals.

What I found always very intriguing about the way Castaneda went about setting up dynamic interaction between his many set-piece characters was never more vividly illustrated than when Castaneda early on in his first novel in The Teachings of Don Juan, finds an opportunity to introduce his readers to the awesome power of the 'Shaman' Don Juan Matus.

“The Teachings” is largely a dialogue between Don Juan, the master, and Carlos, the student, punctuated by the ingestion of carefully prepared mixtures of herbs and mushrooms. Carlos has strange experiences that, in spite of Don Juan’s admonitions, he continues to think of as hallucinations. In one instance, Carlos turns into a crow and flies. Afterward, an argument ensues: Is there such a thing as objective reality? Or is reality just what it seems to be?

In this, their first meeting, Carlos Castaneda carefully set the meeting in a nondescript dusty Bus Station in the border town of Nogales, Arizona on the American side of the border with Mexico. The great writers always like detail and never so clearly was this brought home to all his millions of readers than in the first power meeting between this little man with the big chest who was clearly outclassed by the mystical and much more powerful Yaqui 'Shaman' Don Juan Matus.

Here for the very first time his millions of readers come to appreciate Castaneda's extraordinary dexterity in turning a phrase with his very precise wording; Castaneda always sought to allow his readers to take front row seats in vicariously peering not only into his mind but at one and the same time the mind of the powerful Yaqui 'Shaman' Don Juan Matus.

Carlos Castaneda with his incredible literary talent in this, his very first attempt to combine psychodrama with Physical Anthropology, was able to set the operational overtones going forward for Castaneda as Student and Don Juan as mentor over an extended period where he produced a total of twelve books over three decades.

So here is Castaneda face to face in Nogales, Arizona with a clearly very powerful 'Medicine Man' who is allegedly the most famous and powerful 'Medicine Man' in all of Mexico.

Why Castaneda chose to position the Yaqui 'Shaman' Don Juan so close to him physically at this stage of plot development is not quite clear but in developing the arc of any story writers always have an objective in mind, however the reader will only faintly begin to actually begin to discover some of the writers ulterior motives. My theory has always been that Castaneda set up this meeting so that he could verbally and intellectually wrest control from Don Juan but his plans go awry and he fails miserably.

Don Juan takes over the meeting and utilizes different languages to confuse Castaneda and takes control, moving him around like a little chess piece on a rapidly expanding chess board. As the dialogue opens up in that dusty Bus Station, Don Juan is seen trying to throw Castaneda off balance by aggressively switching back and forth between the three languages, Spanish, English and the Aztec Nahuatal language and the result is that he easily takes control of Castaneda.

The reason Castaneda tells Don Juan he has traveled from Los Angeles to meet with him specifically was based on the reported stories that he claims to have heard back in Los Angeles about this great Yaqui 'Shaman' who was allegedly performing fantastic new magic in the Sonoran Desert. Unfortunately for Castaneda he than makes an almost fatal faux pas when he most indelicately tells Don Juan that he just assumed the stories were mostly just fairy-tales.

Don Juan is not pleased of course, so to recover Castaneda decides to become a slight bit more politic and says to Don Juan he now, is maybe, for the first time starting to believe in how powerful Don Juan really is and he tells Don Juan that he, Castaneda will do just about anything to learn some of the Shaman's secrets.

Than Don Juan tells Castaneda if you want to become a man of some higher level of Yaqui "Knowledge,"and after conferring with some of the Yaqui elders they were unanimous in saying that he should absolutely move Castaneda forward by considering a journey of new exploration for Castaneda by having him indulge in Mescaline.

But again we see the cautionary Don Juan appear and he says to Castaneda;"I am warning you in advance that Mescaline can be a very 'dark' weed" and as my new student, I am duty bound to caution you, that the God of the drug Mescaline has a big black devil dog called Mescalito and he carefully watches over all who dare to use his drug. The 'Shaman' is in reality also trying very hard to send Castaneda a stern message that if you have been a liar in the past, this may well be where it all stops for you Carlos Castaneda.

Don Juan referred to the black dog in the vernacular Spanish Mescalito and he tells Castaneda directly that if the God of Mescaline does not like or approve of someone like you for example my new friend Carlos, than the God of Mescaline almost assuredly will attempt to kill you through deadly convulsions brought on by the devil incarnate as seen in the black dog "Mescalito."

As the story line develops Castaneda takes the Mescaline and nearly dies from life-threatening convulsions. Castaneda now fitfully sleeps for a whole two days while being wracked by numerous dark nightmares of seeing the Devil brought on in the form and shape of the black dog Mescalito. After sleeping for the two full days in the ramshackle home of Don Juan he wakes up totally dehydrated and says to Don Juan after recovering from his 'near-death' experience by drinking copious amounts of well water; 'why did you allow me to take Mescaline'?

Don Juan Matus tells Castaneda that you asked me to give it to you and I warned you that it could be a perilous trip; you should remember I told you that if you have done bad things like lying in the past Carlos, these lies will come back to haunt you in a journey into the land of the Gods of Mescaline. Keep in mind Carlos you told me that everyone back in the real world thinks you are a good person. Obviously you are not as good as you purport to be because the God of Mescaline thought much differently about you after more closely examining your whole life and in fact he was going to take your life but I intervened on your behalf.

And so the debate began; over the years, scholars and critics had debated whether Don Juan even existed and whether the books were anthropology or pure fantasy, fact or fiction, distinctions which no doubt amused Mr. Castaneda all the way until his passing in 1998 of liver cancer.

But before we get into the personal interviews that I was able to accomplish with two of his Graduate School peers at UCLA in 1983-1984, I would like to digress for a moment about the circumstantial facts surrounding why Castaneda always stayed as far away from the public after his negative biographical expose came out in 1973 as he possibly could and rather chose a life style not unlike that of a hermit and possibly just a little less reclusive than a Howard Hughes. He was in his own secretive way dropping 'bread crumbs' telling us something very important about how and why he was really in hiding from the public and even from his friends.

Over time it became very obvious to his closest contemporaries from his Graduate school days in Anthropology at UCLA, that Castaneda, had became famous based largely on allegorical flights of fairy-tale fantasy.

The two Professors that I personally interviewed felt that it was in part due to Castaneda always living his life in dread fear of being debunked, unmasked and seen as a fraud for writing fairy tales. Castaneda could not face being unmasked; he would rather have faced the tortures of Hades than be thought of as a charlatan and not as the serious, hard-working academic Physical Anthropologist which had really always been his life long goal.

Even from the hard scrabble days of his impoverished youth in a large Peruvian family living in the back-water town of Cajamarca, he had always had his dreams but they were white-washed dreams of being a world famous Physical Anthropologist and esteemed University Professor and certainly not a hack writer of fairy-tales.

I have never ruled out personal jealousies as cause and effect from the two peers but since both of these people interviewed had lived and studied daily with Castaneda in Graduate School at UCLA. I have long since accepted that they were as purely honest and truthful as you might have expected them to be considering their humble circumstances. That their friend Castaneda was now a rich, famous author may have caused a twinge of jealousy but after spending considerable time with both of these people I never changed my solid citizen first opinion of their veracity.

But we now see Castaneda after 1973 and the expose dealing with that very negativity by becoming aggressively reclusive. He was now an author who did not want to suffer more negative criticism than he had to and why should he because he was now a rich man and could afford to build his defensive walls and live life on his terms.

Besides the fact that Castaneda had by this time gained world wide acclaim from a personal perspective I am only now starting to see how he managed to weave together the psychodrama of his supposed encounters with Yaqui mysticism and than moved away from those very same thoughts into an incredible 'stream-of-consciousness' in his books. How he managed to leap-frog from his first simple experimentation with 'stream-of-consciousness' in his first book into a much more highly involved mystical experience level, which was much more heavily multilayered with allegorical overtones, and this has never ceased to both amaze and astonish me to a very high degree.

How Castaneda managed to accomplish this writing challenge and move the tales into a whole new realm in the study of mystical literature is simply astonishing and even today favorably disposed literary critics will often times allude to the fact that they see Castaneda even rivaling some of the well known British mystics like Coleridge and Blake. Bear in mind those writers still are the most revered writers of mystical incantations seen in one thousand years of British letters and culture and even placing Castaneda on the same page as those two giants of British letters means Castaneda had really made a significant dent in writing history.

To compare Castaneda's mysticism right up there with Coleridge and Blake says something about how highly Castaneda's body of works is currently being viewed by Professors and historians of the period of the English Lake Country Poets.

When we speak of the heavy weight world of letters created by Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Lord Byron we must remember that for all intents and purposes these guardians of English sonnet and tome had been doing exactly what Castaneda was now doing just three hundred years earlier. Castaneda was simply returning the favor three hundred years later and than into the future when his writings occupied front page during our"New Age"and now going forward are holding up rather nicely.

Very specifically the Lake Country English writers Coleridge, Blake and Percy B. Shelley spoke mainly of Opium induced trances while Castaneda three hundred years later spoke to the mysticism of the Meso-America ceremonial incantations, Aztec gods, and the still beating hearts of the Aztec human sacrifices on altars and the fear of the mystical God of ill-tempered Mescaline.

When you take the time as I did to run them all together they speak to the same need in humans through the centuries to some how symbolically address the ethereal and the mystical. With no real slight intended to the much-revered English Lake Country Writers called the Romantics and even in considering their place in the overall body of work of world-famed writers... and certainly yes most Anglophiles and Bibliophiles will shudder at my comparison of these immortals to Carlos Castaneda.

However many of the works of Blake and Coleridge are in no way superior to Carlos Castaneda's best mystical books. And I dare say modern critics might offer that in many instances they are now saying Castaneda's mystical flights of fancy in his books are clearly worthy of praise even when seen from an overall comparison to the greatest mystics of all time in English Letters, Blake and Coleridge.

However what finally brought me to closure on the subject of whether Castaneda was a poseur or really an oracle, all came together for me when we started tying together the specifics of why he would not allow himself to be interviewed.

Castaneda as seen when looking back by Peers:Puerto Rico and New York City Interviews 1983 and 1984:

So to answer that question I had to search back some thirty years to the people who were Castaneda's peers that I had met and spoken with directly concerning the veracity of Carlos Castaneda. In 1983 I found myself living in San Juan, Puerto Rico where I had been working on a rather well paying but very involved Training and Organizational Development project with a Fortune 500 firm who had recently opened corporate offices and a plant in Caguas a forty five minute drive 'out on the island'.

While working in Puerto Rico, I had numerous times heard from my friends at the company about Monkey Island which was really literally around the corner from my offices in Caguas. In any event this was the week that I finally was being introduced to the first of Castaneda's two Graduate Student peers who had studied with him at UCLA. They both had agreed to speak with me both on-and-off the-record but only one of the the people to be interviewed was still living on the Island; the other a paramour of Castaneda and a Linguisitic Anthropologist, Eva G. had left Puerto Rico and moved on to New York City to Lecture in Linguistic Anthropology as an adjunct at two different top universities.

Some of my mutual friends knew that like many other people I had some major doubts, about Castaneda's truthfulness or for a lack of a better word, some very serious reservations about authenticity regarding Castaneda. Was Castaneda a literary charlatan who couched all of these tales in what looked like a normal every day work a day world of a traveling academic Physical Anthropologist and author or was he an inauthentic fraud who was going to vigorously act out this charade over the foreseeable future which actually turned out to be thirty years.

So my friends who lived in the Ocean Park section of San Juan arranged a meeting with the first Primary source in late April of 1984 in Puerto Rico. That night in a most relaxed tropical outdoor setting I was very fortunate to meet with and interview Erik C, a Physical Anthropologist who had found his way to Puerto Rico from UCLA.

Erik C. was than teaching Physical Anthropology at the University of Puerto Rico, in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico; Erik C. was like myself a very young 40 but he was already reasonably well-known in Latin American Physical Anthropology circles for his work with the smaller big three of the Primate world, the Rhesus, Macaque and Bonobo.

His academic papers later on were published in numerous learned Anthropological Journals on the interactions found in the every day lives of the many thousands of Rhesus monkeys living on and off their island on the coast of Puerto Rico. The off the Island refers to their habit of escaping their Island and floating over to the Humacao mainland on the Puerto Rico side.

These Rhesus primates were being bred for medical research purposes primarily because Global society was now being dramatically threatened with epidemic and possibly pandemic levels of A.I.D.S. This Research required Rhesus by the thousands for the vital research needed to bring A.I.D.S. vaccines to market. So the Rhesus of Isla de Los Monos were now under the very close supervision of the Department of Agriculture of the United States.

The facts were not favorable because those cagey Rhesus primates were constantly escaping to Humacao and getting themselves lost in the Jungles. What had previously been low level concern about the Rhesus now became a very important new topic for the Executives running the United States Agricultural Department and now others in the triangle of government agencies concerned with these primates was the [N.I.H]National Institute of Health in Bethesda Maryland and the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia.

In the old days if the stock of the Rhesus dipped precariously low and because these particular monkeys were native to India, there would be a simple buy arranged with the Indian Government for help in restocking the Rhesus for Isla de los Monos.

When the Indian Government officials saw an opportunity in the A.I.D.S. epidemic to enhance their Import and Export profits numbers during the very early 1980's, they simply raised the base price per Rhesus for breeding stock, by 40% per Rhesus Monkey sold to the United States Agricultural Department.

Of course the Reagan Government was not pleased and told the United States Agricultural Department to start a pro-active Rhesus breeding program forthwith, and taking major umbrage to India's predatory actions and decided to reinvigorate the Rhesus stock with its own methods.

So there was a crying need to halt the outflow of escaped Rhesus and at the same time the authorities were accelerating the growth of the research stock to deal with the growing need for Rhesus primates as clinically necessary and vital test subjects to keep up with the accelerating A.I.D.S research in the United States, France and elsewhere.

8.Citation:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cayo_Santiago:Cayo Santiago, also known as Santiago Island, Isla de los monos is located at 18°09′23″N ... Since December 1938, the island has been the habitat for a free-ranging population of Rhesus monkeys.

The same friends from the Ocean Park section of San Juan that set me up with Erik C. also owned a rustic little beach-house in Humacao a little village set one mile off shore from Cayo De Santiago or as it is better known today as Isla de los Monos, the Island of the Monkeys.

On the last Saturday in December just before Christmas in 1983, I drove my new Honda Prelude out to visit my friends at their beach house in Humacao the little village directly across the inlet from the Island of the Monkeys. They were not at home because we had all obviously confused my arrival time in Humacao after drinking one too many Pina Coladas the night before, albeit we had suicidally topped off the Coladas with Myers Dark 180 Proof Rum; I left a short note and headed for the dock.

At this point in time I was being personally driven by a strong need for self-exploration so I drove over to the Humacao dock house, rented a little Evinrude runabout for a twenty and after the 100 deposit, the boat dock owner offered to help launch me out past the surf line and the breakers.

After about ten minutes of motoring across the calm inlet, the beach and the main dock of the island was now in my sight line; I was only about 350 meters from the dock when what looked like a couple of Forest Rangers dressed in tropical green uniforms with badges and holstered guns, started very aggressively waving me off from docking at their "Dock". They assumed that I spoke Spanish and they than Bullhorned me in Spanish to turn around and go back to Humacao or face the consequences. Well that got my attention.....

Yes this was the place Isla de los Monos and I guess I should have expected that a Government Property operated by the United States Agricultural Department might have rangers but in the absence of any formal introduction it was clear that I needed a far better introduction if I was ever going to be welcomed onshore.

Besides the two mildly agitated rangers on the Dock, what I was actually seeing all along the sky line going from farthest left to farthest right were these very dark brown Palm Trees with a coloration that appeared to be of an unusually dark reddish brown;I was speculating that they were all just dead Palm Trees and at just the same moment I decided to cut the engine and started a slow side ward drift; picked up my Binoculars and than to my amazement focused in on the treeline and than I realized that the red brown Palm Trees were actually thousands of Rhesus Monkeys in plain view as I adjusted the sight through the Binoculars and they were just sitting up there in those Palm Trees.

From as far left as I could see and all the way over to the far right a distance of at least roughly 1000+ meters, it was all a reddish brown hue and now with the Binoculars on I could actually see the Rhesus jumping back and forth and in between the Palm Trees and some even running around on all fours over the white sand beneath the trees.

After gamely waving to the Rangers to let them know I would be turning around I realized that these many thousands of Rhesus monkeys were just a very small part of the total numbers of these primates resident on the island. But I had no illusions as to why they were there;certainly they were not there to inquire about my health but were situated in those Palm Trees because they lived there and I did not.

This Isla De Los Monos later became very famous on its own when it was written up on the Lonely Planet Travel network and later became the subject feature of a National Geographic program in the mid 1980's.

Later on Erik C. told me an even more amazing story about his other job that he actually did for the the Agriculture Department and the rangers on the Island of the Monkeys. Erik C. having to offset his smallish pay check from the University to live on had created an Eco-Business by trapping runaway Rhesus that had successfully navigated at some point in time, the short trip to the mainland.

Here is how Erik explained what he did for the Island's rangers and for the United States Agricultural Department. He laughed at me when I told him the weekend adventure story of how the two rangers had turned me away from the island. He said on the weekends that the heavy-set ranger was 'Gordito' and the other ranger was also his good friend Juan one of his Anthropology students in Mayaguez. Obviously he could have easily arranged a tour of the island for me, but since I went there on my own I had already seen essentially what I had come to see, so it was now a moot point.

The background is very simple;Rhesus Monkeys had been escaping to Humacao and the mainland for fifty years; the Rhesus were very adaptive ocean travelers; they accomplished this trip according to my very credible sources, riding on whatever flotsam and jetsam the ocean would give up in its changing tides.

Sheets of wood from construction sites, old car and truck tires, life preservers that for one reason or another been discarded and tossed overboard, big hunks of dead Palm Trees and even big Banana leafs all were being used by the brainy and clearly most adaptive Rhesus for the one mile trip across the inlet.

Erik C. than told me the whole story of how he had become "Trapper Erik"for these Rhesus monkeys. Through contacts from some of his undergraduate students at the Mayaguez Campus of the University of Puerto Rico, Erik had become fast-friends with most of the Rangers assigned to the Island duty.

Their problem was very real; the Rhesus were in a never ending struggle to get to the mainland and that it had always been that way ever since 1938 when the first small colony of Rhesus Monkeys was established on the Island. Over the years and as noted above, Rhesus Monkeys had been escaping the island on whatever transport they could 'hitch a ride on' to get to Humacao which of course was the actual mainland of Puerto Rico.

So with the approval of the United States Agricultural Department, Erik C. had created a very active Rhesus Monkey Trapping facility in the valley below the highest of the Humacao mountains; this was an enclosure complete with nets and a pit and Government supplied cages; Erik had built it just 1.5 miles in from the beach at Humacao.

In another one of my many trips out from San Juan, Erik would get into the mud-splattered Jeep and take us up on this unusually bumpy road to the mountain top where you would be able to see the brilliant coral sea and a scattering of small islands like Vieques and Cayo de Santiago [Monkey Island], because you were now high above Humacao. So on the first time we took this particular trip and as we proceeded up the mountain in his Jeep we were coming closer to the top of the mountain, Erik pointed to his ears and told me to listen closely for the radio beeps.

Erik had not told me he had wired up electronically as many as two hundred of the monkeys that he been capturing; he noted to me rather sheepishly, that he did not return all of the captured Rhesus as he always kept some of the Rhesus around for his own research projects and to sell back as needed for ready cash. So as the Jeep rode up the mountainside the beeps steadily were increasing in their insistence and intensity.

He said to me don't look now but I was finding the intensity of the beeps some what disorienting and Erik said to me relax he said there are only probably thirty or forty Rhesus monkeys surrounding us with each male as strong as three grown men; he noted that this gaggle of Rhesus in the trees were of both sexes in the brush surrounding the Jeep. Interestingly enough I never saw one Rhesus but believe me they were definitely there because you could hear the heavy chattering and I did see lots of stealthy movement in the underbrush and Palm and Banana Trees.

After we came down the mountain he showed me the compound where he did the actual trapping;a little compound lined by eight foot wooden fence post stakes which believe me are not an impediment to a fully grown Rhesus;with a ten foot pit in the middle of the compound. Erik would line the pit with plenty of Bananas, Rhesus monkey treats like grubs and such as you see under wet logs, a lot of water to avoid Rhesus dehydration and of course what would a Rhesus Monkey pit be without nets...and when the 'runaway' Rhesus would investigate they would fall into the nets and become once again the property of the United States Agriculture Department ensnared by the irrepressible 'Trapper Erik'.

Erik of course was no doubt an expert trapper of Rhesus monkeys and being a really gentle person and of course an animal lover, he saw to it that no harm ever came to the Rhesus and he would periodically bring 20 or so caged Rhesus back to the Rangers and they would dutifully arrange payment of $200.00 USD for each Monkey that Erik returned to replenish the island supply of breeding stock.

Yes Erik C. was a true Physical Anthropologist of the highest order and whenever I interviewed him it was becoming increasingly obvious that he knew Carlos Castaneda extremely well and absolutely believed he was writing fairy tales.With Eva G. having also studied with Castaneda at UCLA when they were all in Graduate school together, he told me quite directly that there was never any doubt registered by Eva G. ......she like Erik C. would completely concur when I met her for the first time in New York City, that Castaneda had made up all his tales of Don Juan and sorcery.

You can now understand that my respect for Erik C. was very high and his veracity was painfully honest, truthful and with regard to Eva G. shewas also a dedicated scientist and who I would have the pleasure of meeting later on that year in New York City. He was absolutely and unequivocally convinced that the 'Shaman' Don Juan never existed and that Castaneda's increasingly wild cast of characters submerged in his allegorical story lines, could not by any stretch of the imagination be considered reality.

One night back in San Juan at my condo La Reina Del Mar while we were sitting on my Fifth floor patio looking down at the ocean at the Cruise Ships moving in and out of San Juan Harbor, Erik C. looked at me and said Irv "all Carlos really ever wanted to do was to write one book but than he got caught up in this long-running thirty year literary scam and hoax posing as a nonfiction writer when he was really at his core a truly great fiction writer.

Erik went on to say that according to the way he saw the situation the fact that Castaneda's publisher never pushed to change his status from nonfiction to fiction just proved that the publishers mainly had money signs in their eyes. He than went on to say that this one little white lie made the publisher at the least able to sell twice as many of Castaneda's books as if they had come clean with the public and told the truth and called it total fiction. Erik ended up saying this little white lie probably in some small way rivaled Clifford Irving's bogus, unauthorized and fraudulent "one" book biography of Howard Hughes.

If you are like me and like to follow the literary trail of famous people, Howard Hughes had founded TWA with Juan Trippi and became later in life and in a way a more reclusive hermit than Castaneda. Howard Hughes was a reckless pilot who crash-landed one of his many experimental aircraft more than once into a suburb of Los Angeles and he eventually had built the largest plane ever built from wood, that flew a mile at 70 feet altitude and never flew ever again. Today it is on exhibit at the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon

9.https://www.history.com/speeches/howard-hughes-breaks-his-silence

This Texas billionaire and heir to the Houston Texas, Hughes Tool Company fortune which originally came from his father's specialized drilling tip for oil rigs.

10.Patent US8356398 - Modular hybrid drill bit - Google Patents www.google.com/patents/US8356398 Jan 22, 2013 - A method of assembling a hybrid drill bit, the method including the steps of: .... and cable tool, but the two-cone rock bit, invented by Howard R. Hughes Sr., ... The original Hughes bit drilled for hours, the modern bit drills for days.

Hughes went to Hollywood built air planes for the Government's World War II effort and made pictures with Rita Hayworth, Jane Russell, Jean Tierney and other famous stars of the period. Hughes escorted literally just about every beautiful actress in Hollywood in the period. In fact many of our readers may even be more familiar with Leonardo De Caprio's film work in "The Pilot" a cinema which factually told the story of the fabled Howard Hughes.

Much like Mt. Everest mountain climbers who say when asked why do they climb mountains the answer always invariably is because 'they are there'; Hughes was cut from the same cloth and went to the Glamour capital of the western world because 'it was there' and in so doing carved out an exciting life as a bon vivant and man about town in the 1940's and 1950's.

The tragedy for Hughes was that he was a manic-depressive with an OCD personality and unfortunately ended up as a reclusive and well-known 'hermit' and in the end in Mexico became completely deranged and a 'germaphobic' hulk of what he was in his twenties and very early thirties.

Before Hughes made the final move to Mexico he had moved his whole base of operations to Nevada from Los Angeles and while buying up a third of the strip in Las Vegas, he built and remodeled numerous hotels and finally took up residence in his new Desert Inn. Many years later famous Casino magnate Steve Wynn built The Wynn and the Encore on the original site of where Hughes had placed his Desert Inn.

14.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Inn

15. Spruce Goose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hughes_H-4_Hercules The Hughes H-4 Hercules was a prototype strategic airlift flying boat designed and built by the Hughes Aircraft Corporation;

In fact both Erik C. and my next interview Eva G., both intimated to me that Castaneda was as surprised as anyone when his first book The Teachings of Don Juan published in 1968, had sales take off like a rocket and immediately began selling in the millions of copies.

According to these two primary sources, Castaneda had always thought this first book was going to be 'a one and done' but he had gotten much more than he had bargained for because along with the great success of his work he now would have to continue to conjure up more books and he could not stop now because he was fast becoming a very wealthy man.

On my first meeting with Eva G, back in New York City she told me she was now becoming a reasonably well-respected Linguistic Anthropologist and from this point we will know her here as just Eva. She was an Adjunct Professor at several top New York City Universities and had also studied with Castaneda at UCLA. More importantly she had dated Castaneda on and off for about five years and when ever he came East she was always with him and since her home was originally in Los Angeles Eva said she joined him there for long summers when she was not teaching in New York City.

Needless to say I did not trust Eva as much as Erik but why? she had a romance going with Castaneda and sometimes what is thought of as truth might also be some mild form of vindictiveness since they had since separated out....so I was more circumspect with her remembrances of Castaneda.

Eva in our second meeting about six months went on record saying that the famous Simon and Schuster publisher Michael Korda, the Editor in Chief really began 'hounding' Carlos to come up with brand new sequels and in some cases entirely new characters to flesh out the new adventures with the Yaqui 'Shaman' Don Juan and was pushing Carlos to at the very least publish at least once every three years.

So according to Eva, Carlos was now in a type of 'hamsters on a treadmill' situation; Castaneda over the next three decades from 1968 to 1998 produced a total of ten more books, and by loading them up with even more mystical fantasies he absolutely became the most famous writer of the "New Age".

So as we all can now see, what had happened in this Greek tragedy was that through all of this chicanery by Castaneda and his publishers, he had truly became a 'victim of his own success'. Also in that second interview she confirmed what Erik C. had also claimed, that Castaneda was 'way in over his head' and she told me directly that Castaneda had told her that his publishers in New York were continually pressing him to enliven his stories.

One day in 1977 almost one decade after his meteoric rise to fame and two more books after The Teachings of Don Juan, Eva told me Castaneda looked her straight in the eye and said to her "Eva you know I can not just make this stuff up.... just because the publisher wants to sell more books".

According to the story told by Eva it is a well-known industry fact that nearly all Book publishers including of course Castaneda's top-rated publisher Simon and Schuster wanted their authors out on the road constantly at the book stores autographing and doing 20 to 30 minute simplistic and innocuous speeches to promote their new books. 

In Castaneda's case however strangely enough there was never even the slightest hint of any concerted 'push' from Michael Korda his Editor in Chief at Simon Schuster to have Castaneda participate in Book store marketing programs that inevitably were forced on just about every other author. She said Castaneda had told her that he had a very unique contract that did not require him to do Book store autograph signings and speeches as other authors are normally contracted to perform and that was because his books sold so well they did not require him to accomplish promotional efforts.

Permit me to editorialize here;Michael Korda was a brilliant publishing industry top executive and had a sparkling reputation for finding the 'next great thing' in top selling authors. He never for one minute according to what Eva told me believed that Castaneda was writing solid nonfiction; Michael Korda knew full well that Castaneda was writing fairy tales but as long as those fairy tales were selling millions of books so be it and even after an article was published that showed his number one selling author of nonfiction was not quite as 'clean' as he might have been seen previously in his personal biographical information, it just did not matter very much as long as the books were flying off the shelves..

Yes of course Korda knew that nonfiction with the type of stories that Castaneda was producing would always outsell fiction and although she said she never thought about that fact very much because her boyfriend was selling millions of books and she just assumed that his publishers did not see it necessary to place such an acclaimed and wildly successful in front of lunchtime crowds.

Years later after she and Castaneda had gone their separate ways, some people in her circle of friends had questioned her about the veracity of some of Castaneda's magical stories. 

Only than did it really ever dawn on her or very much matter to her, that there was another more sinister reason why Castaneda was being kept away from his reading public. Because the chance of him slipping up with a literary reviewer or simply an autograph seeker and revealing that his allegorical flights of fantasy were not even vaguely real, could have spelled disaster for Castaneda personally and his publisher's revenues at Simon and Schuster would have taken a 'hit'and surely plummeted.

This would have of course started up the 'rumor mill' that writer Carlos Castaneda had always feared most, being debunked, unmasked if you will, as a charlatan and a fraud and was nothing like the carefully built up image of the simple academic Physical Anthropologist he and his publishers had carefully nurtured and were trying very hard to nourish and build for Carlos Castaneda.

On a third interview a year later with Eva she had again heard through the publishing 'grapevine' from a lawyer friend working directly in the publishing industry that Castaneda's contract was indeed very unique because it specifically spelled out that making Book store appearances was not necessary.

She also went on to say that Castaneda only peripherally understood how the Yaqui Indian culture of the Sonoran Desert really developed and "his actual knowledge and understanding of the Yaqui, was at best, purely a surface level type of knowledge" and cited the fact that Castaneda had Don Juan touting Peyote when the Sonoran Yaqui did not ever bother with the unreliable effects of Peyote.

And regarding the veracity of Castaneda's wild tales of flying and teleportation was Castaneda talking about another reality in his perceptions and maybe he did have different but equally valid ways of describing them? Toward the end of the third book Carlos again encounters Mescalito the black dog of his Peyote excursion, whom he now accepts as real, not just a hallucination.

How Castaneda first came to publish "The Teachings":

In “The Teachings,” Castaneda tried to follow the conventions of anthropology by appending a 50-page “structural analysis.” Accordingly Castaneda was always attempting to force his books into the category of nonfiction with his goal being to become a psychedelic scholar along the lines of Aldous Huxley. He had become disillusioned with another hero, Timothy Leary, who supposedly mocked Castaneda when they met at a party, earning Castaneda's lifelong enmity.

The well-worn story goes that Castaneda in 1967 took his manuscript to Professor Meighan in the Anthropology Department at UCLA. Castaneda was disappointed when Meighan told him it would work better as a trade book than as a scholarly monograph. But following Meighan’s instructions, Castaneda took his manuscript to the University of California Press’ office at the Powell Library, where he showed it to a Jim Quebec. The editor was impressed but still had doubts about its authenticity. Inundated by good reports from the UCLA anthropology department, accordingly Quebec was finally convinced and “The Teachings” was published in the spring of 1968 by the University of California Press at Los Angeles.

When the University of California Press again fully cognizant that a nation of drug-infatuated students was out there in the late 1960's, they immediately moved "The Teachings" into all California bookstores with a vengeance. Sales as a nonfiction reality journey for "The Teachings"exceeded all expectations, and Castaneda was than turned over to the newly installed Editor in Chief Michael Korda, at Simon and Schuster and his time with that University Press in California now ended.

In his memoir, “Another Life,” Korda recounts their first meeting. Korda was told to wait in a hotel parking lot. “A neat Volvo pulled up in front of me, and the driver waved me in,” Korda writes. “He was a robust, broad-chested, muscular man, with a swarthy complexion, dark eyes, black curly hair cut short, and a grin as merry as Friar Tuck’s … I had seldom, if ever, liked anybody so much so quickly …

It wasn’t so much what Castaneda had to say as his presence — a kind of charm that was partly subtle intelligence, partly a real affection for people, and partly a kind of innocence, not of the naive kind but of the kind one likes to suppose saints, holy men, prophets and gurus have.”

Castaneda's First Four Books and How They Came to Be:

The next morning, Michael Korda set about buying the rights to “The Teachings.” Under his new editor’s guidance, Castaneda published his next three books in quick succession. In “A Separate Reality,” published in 1971, Carlos returns to Mexico to give don Juan a copy of his new book. Don Juan declines the gift, suggesting he’d use it as toilet paper. A new cycle of apprenticeship begins, in which don Juan tries to teach Carlos how to “see.”

New characters appear, most importantly don Juan’s friend and fellow sorcerer don Genaro. In “A Separate Reality” and the two books that follow, “Journey to Ixtlan” and “Tales of Power,” numerous new concepts are introduced, including “becoming inaccessible,” “erasing personal history” and “stopping the world.”

There are also displays of magic.

Don Genaro is at one moment standing next to Carlos; at the next, he is seen on top of a mountain. Don Juan uses unseen powers to help Carlos start his stalled car. And he tries to show him how to be a warrior — a being who, like an enlightened Buddhist, has eliminated the ego, but who, in a more Nietzschean vein, knows he’s superior to regular humans, who lead wasted, pointless lives.

Don Juan also tries to teach Carlos how to enter the world of dreams, the “separate reality,” also referred to as the “nagual,” a Spanish word taken from the Aztecs. (Later, Castaneda would shift the word’s meaning, making it stand not only for the separate reality but also for a shaman, like Don Juan and, eventually, Castaneda himself.)

In “Journey to Ixtlan,” Carlos starts a new round of apprenticeship. Don Juan tells him they will no longer use drugs. These were only necessary when Carlos was a beginner. Many consider “Ixtlan,” which served as Castaneda’s Ph.D. thesis at UCLA, his most beautiful book. It also made him a multi millionaire many times over.

At the book’s conclusion, Carlos talks to a luminous coyote. But he isn’t yet ready to enter the nagual. Finally, at the end of “Tales of Power,” don Juan and don Genaro take Carlos to the edge of a cliff. If he has the courage to leap, he’ll at last be a full-fledged sorcerer. This time Carlos doesn’t turn back. He jumps into the abyss– – – – – – – – – –

All four books were lavishly praised. Michael Murphy, a founder of the famous Esalen Institute the Valhalla for the more affluent New Agers, remarked that the “essential lessons don Juan has to teach are the timeless ones that have been taught by the great sages of India.” There were raves in the New York Times, Harper’s and the Saturday Review. “Castaneda’s meeting with Don Juan,” wrote one Time reporter “now seems one of the most fortunate literary encounters since Boswell was introduced to Dr. Johnson.”

No one contributed more to Castaneda’s debunking than Richard de Mille. De Mille, who held a Ph.D. in psychology from USC;Demille was something of a freelance intellectual. In a recent interview, he remarked that because he wasn’t associated with a university, he could tell the story straight. “People in the academy wouldn’t do it,” he remarked. “They’d be embarrassing the establishment.” Specifically the UCLA professors who, according to de Mille, knew it was a hoax from the start. But a hoax that, he said, supported their theories, which de Mille summed up succinctly: “Reality doesn’t exist. It’s all what people say to each other.”

Some anthropologists have disagreed with de Mille on certain points. J.T. Fikes, author of “Carlos Castaneda, Academic Opportunism and the Psychedelic Sixties,” believes Castaneda did have some contact with Native Americans. But he’s an even fiercer critic than de Mille, condemning Castaneda for the effect his stories have had on Native peoples. Following the publication of “The Teachings,” thousands of pilgrims descended on Yaqui territory in San Carlos.

Among anthropologists, there’s no longer a debate. Professor William W. Kelly, long time chairman of Yale’s anthropology department has repeatedly said that “I doubt you’ll find an anthropologist of my generation who regards Castaneda as anything but a clever con man. It was a hoax, and surely don Juan never existed as anything like the figure of his books. Perhaps to many it is an amusing footnote to the gullibility of naive scholars, although to me it remains a disturbing and unforgivable breach of ethics.”

After 1973, the year of the Time exposé, Castaneda never again responded publicly to criticism. Instead, he went into seclusion, at least as far as the press was concerned . Claiming he was complying with Don Juan’s instruction to become “inaccessible,” he no longer allowed himself to be photographed, and (in the same year the existence of the Nixon tapes was made public) he decided that recordings of any sort were forbidden. He also severed ties to his past; after attending Carlos Juniors graduation and promising to take him to Europe, he soon banished his ex-wife and son.

And he made don Juan disappear. When “The Second Ring of Power” was published in 1977, readers learned that sometime between the leap into the abyss at the end of “Tales of Power” and the start of the new book, don Juan had vanished, evanescing into a ball of light and entering the nagual.

Some anthropologists have disagreed with de Mille on certain points. J.T. Fikes, author of “Carlos Castaneda, Academic Opportunism and the Psychedelic Sixties,” believes Castaneda did have some contact with Native Americans. But he’s an even fiercer critic than de Mille, condemning Castaneda for the effect his stories have had on Native peoples.

After 1973, the year of the main debunking had been done to Castaneda he never again responded publicly to criticism. Instead, he went into seclusion, at least as far as the press was concerned . Claiming he was complying with don Juan’s instruction to become “inaccessible,” he no longer allowed himself to be photographed, and (in the same year the existence of the Nixon tapes was made public) he decided that recordings of any sort were forbidden. He also severed ties to his past; after attending his son's junior high graduation and promising to take him to Europe, he soon banished his ex-wife and son.

And he made don Juan disappear. When “The Second Ring of Power” was published in 1977, readers learned that sometime between the leap into the abyss at the end of “Tales of Power” and the start of the new book, don Juan had vanished, evanescing into a ball of light and entering the nagual.

See 7. Castaneda,Carlos,Peruvian Born writer and considered Father of New Age Mysticism, Born Dec. 25, 1925/31?, Cajamarca, Peru-Died April 27, 1998

Overview: The Yaqui Way:

The Yaqui for at least one thousand years the Yaqui of the Sonoran Desert area understood the hallucinogenic properties to be found in weeds such as Mescaline and Jimson Weed but the Yaqui had a firm rule about the use of Peyote;they just did not employ this old weed at their ceremonies. Around that time in the very late 1970's I was still a youngish College teacher living communally in the high cliff area along the coastline near the sleepy town of San Carlos right on the Sea of Cortez. Here the Sonoran Desert comes to a dead-stop halting at the Sea of Cortez.

According to the many Yaqui Indians that I spoke with over those years the indigenous Yaqui elders had begun inviting outsiders who would pay the Yaqui elders to visit with them at their ceremonies; so the tradition of holding center court at ceremonial depictions of their animistic religious practices began in earnest. In so doing they were not only educating but entertaining European Social Scientists from the finest schools on the continent.

By the mid 1970's, the Yaqui exhibited their ceremonial drug usage at first rather freely and than the heavier they went into Mescaline and Peyote and Jimson Weed at their ceremonies, the larger the crowds were becoming and this was starting to become a 'really' big all year round educational event for many more European Social Scientists. This loosely bonded group was initially made up of more Physical Anthropologists, however as time passed a different mix of Social Scientists found their way to San Carlos. As Linguistic Anthropologists, Paleo Anthropologists and even Sociology Professors began to appear in increasing numbers at the ceremonies outside of San Carlos.

Keep in mind this was before the Social Media were anchored into the Internet so the fame of the Yaqui ceremonies started to 'take on a life of its own' albeit very slowly. In a few years after Castaneda's book had arrived to huge acclaim in 1968, the ceremonies started picking up notoriety all across the closely intertwined network of Social Scientists from only the best universities of Europe.

Soon the Yaqui realized that educational tourism was becoming more popular globally; they made arrangements with Sonoran based Yaqui run desert tour guides to promote the mystique of the ceremonies. Moreover since living in San Carlos gave me access to some of the Yaqui maintenance men that worked at my college, I was able to convince one of them in particular, to bring me along to the Yaqui ceremonies. On more than three separate occasions I witnessed these unbelievable ceremonial practices, at of course no charge, because like him, I was also on a low budget.

If you have ever seen or been to ritualistic religious ceremonies like the Snake-handling Pentecostal's of North Carolina you know that there is a wide gap between these ceremonies still found today in the Carolinas and the Voodoo practiced in Jamaica, the Macumba of Brazil or the Santeria of the Spanish Indies. With the exception of the Pentecostal's, the other cultures are heavily interlaced with the African cultural ethos of Yoruba an animistic African religion and than further along it became mixed in with a very heavy overlay of Catholic doctrine.

11.video.nationalgeographic.com/video/cuba-santeria-pp Santeria was brought to the New World by African slaves. They believe their deities are living things, with the same needs as other beings and largely found in the Spanish Indies.

12.Voodoo is a religion that originates in Africa. In the Americas and the Caribbean, it is thought to be a combination of various African, Catholic and Native American traditions. It is practiced around the world but there is no accurate count of how many people are Voodooists.Feb 26, 2011

Indigenous Yaqui ceremonies fell right into step with the above listed practicing religions because they too are totally animistic but they are comprised of a different melange of cultures than the West Indies and South American animistic religious groups. Mexico did not really ever see African slaves introduced into the genetic mix, so the African cultural mix is entirely missing and or absent if you will from the DNA of the Indigenous tribes of Mexico.

Although originally the Aztec emphasis on human sacrifice was of more significance in Mexico but that too has long since faded away and been replaced by the new emphasis on animism that now presents itself in modern day Mexico. The indigenous cultures of Mexico had a huge swath of Catholicism overlaid on to their Indian cultures and within the indigenous tribes of Mexico their animism has a completely different look, feel and sound than the indigenous groups found practicing in the West Indies and South America.

The death masks of the Day of the Dead form a precursor to how the Catholic Church has woven its way into the animism of the indigenous Indian cultural experience found in Mexico today. More recently I had been traveling with a female friend into the North Central area of Mexico that was known for its colonial era churches. We also took time out to visit the area where the famous gold and silver mines were established in Zacatecas by the Spanish King and his Conqusitadors. These Sixteenth Century mines supplied King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella with funds to continue their aggressive wars with England and others and helped the Spanish Crown to pay for colonizing the Americas.

Their are four famous Mexican Colonial era churches in San Luis Potosi. a two hour easy bus ride from Zacatecas. Here we heard all the mysterious stories of how the Federal Government in Mexico City at times over the last three hundred years had threatened to violate the Padres in their churches. My friend who was originally from the town of San Luis Potosi, in her native Spanish verified for me with a curator in one of the many museums, that the Padres in San Luis Potosi had built a network of tunnels under the main Town Square, connecting all four churches but had finally just closed them all up at the turn of the last century.

She told me that underneath this huge Plaza where the four churches stood, the Padres had built this huge network of tunnels which exited a safe 1/4 mile from the churches, so if they were attacked by the Army they had a network for escape.

In any event she also took me to a museum in that Plaza where a couple of hundred Day of the Dead Masks were being exhibited that had been used in the "Spectre" cinema and after less than an hour in this dimly lit museum my mind and the Death Masks started playing tricks on me.

13. See 2015 James Bond Movie "Spectre" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nArvRmi68Hw

If you would like to experience the shock of these Indigenous Indian Death Masks on the streets of Mexico City as they were filming, take time to rent "Spectre"from Netflix, the film stars Daniel Craig as James Bond and was released in 2015.

Animistic based religions are found all over the world;the Japanese Shinto is heavily animistic and their ceremonial activities can also go on all night and never really allow you to wander off mentally from what is actually taking place; that is why you never forget the sights, sounds and intensity of the experience of animistic religious ceremonies.

Ritualistic ceremonies when held at night bring out the animistic intensity which accelerates as in the Yaqui case the heavy drug-taking of the Yaqui starts to take effect almost immediately. It is something you never forget as the incessant drumming never seems to end and eventually overwhelms your auditory senses. This adds to the overall experience of mild confusion that most Anglo peoples seem to indicate is their experience when participating in these ancient activities.

As darkness falls somewhere out of the dark past of Aztec ceremonial rites, comes the guttural sounds of the lone coyote howling into the Sonoran Desert night and this for me only added to the ethereal time warp. As I look back, I am better equipped today to appreciate the ceremonies; I now understand completely why the tradition of coming to Mexico to see the indigenous Yaqui ceremonies places a finishing touch on the careers of these brilliant scientific researchers.

As it now exists thousands of experts in their chosen field of Social Science who together and singularly have taken the same journey and traveled half way around the world to the Sonoran Desert; they have been accomplishing this trip for well over fifty years now, as they too have celebrated their own first-hand experience with Yaqui ceremonial activities.

With the Mexican Government granting the Yaqui legal rights and ability to use obviously illegal and illicit drugs like Peyote, Mescaline and Jimson Weed for religious and ceremonial purposes, the Yaqui have since in actuality turned this into a new form of commerce.

By making use of the Europeans psychic need to intellectualize these illegal substances at religious ceremonies, the Yaqui have taken fair advantage of their animistic religion but only because in any event they have legally been granted a legitimate franchise and continue to now ritually practice their religion and employ these drugs in ceremonies that stretch back thousands of years.

The indigenous Yaqui would come full cycle with the expansion of these ceremonial activities and by 1990 the Yaqui had already developed a thriving educational tourism business. Largely still operational today and supported by Social Scientists from all over Western Europe and now other countries.

So taken by the ceremonial usage of these highly toxic and hallucinogenic natural weed drugs used in Yaqui ceremonies, the Europeans still continue to pay homage to these primitive rites and pay handsomely to the Yaqui Tour guides that bring them out to the Sonoran Desert at both night and for the less adventurous, in the day light to observe their religious ceremonies.

The indigenous Indian tribes of the Sonoran Desert area of Mexico have no doubt been abused like many other Mexican tribes but now that so many Academic articles have been written describing the unique Yaqui religious ceremonies by famed German, Dutch and Swedish Social scientists in their Journals, with the upshot being that it appears to be 'win-win' for all three parties in the triangle.

Steps in the Development of Yaqui Ceremonials into Commercial Enterprise:

Step One: the Mexican Government grants the Yaqui the ceremonial usage rights to ingest these dangerous drugs.

Step Two:Social Scientists continue to come to the San Carlos area around the Sea of Cortez to observe the Yaqui rites and prepare Academic Journal entries

Step Three:Sees this activity of Yaqui Educational Tourism become a commercial success though drug-driven and allows the Yaqui some 'pay-back' in this harmless 'win-win' situation.

 14.See Historical Yaqui Milestones:

Chapter III: Managing Balance between the ′Play′ of challenge and ′Work′ of skill building" 

According to adherents to Flow Theory 'challenge finding' and 'skill building' are supported by different, sometimes even opposing traits or processes which are simultaneously present in autotelic personalities. We can see the pure curiosity and the need to achieve; enjoyment and persistence; openness to novelty and narrow concentration; integration and differentiation; independence and cooperation:

See Citations:Csikszentmihalyi et al., 1993; Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi, 2002. 

For example, the pleasure and fun associated with flow may be highly desirable. Nevertheless, flow activities also require concentration and a willingness to learn about the limits of one's skills. Where non-autotelic individuals may see only difficulty, the deep sense of interest aids autotelic individuals to recognize opportunities to build their skills.

Flow is a state of intrinsic motivation in which a person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing for the sake of the activity itself; precisely and exactly how Stephan Curry would describe his earliest goal of peer group approval among his school boy friends.

Bear in mind it is no small weight on a son's shoulders to have had a star Basketball playing father, in the National Basketball Association. How this all played out in his development today as athlete, son, husband and father is here for all of us to view as an intertwined set of circumstances forged by both nature and nurture.

We will leave the rest of the story for my upcoming book on "Athletes and Optimal Flow Theory”. This book will among other things talk about the heavy mantle carried by any young athlete who is attempting to emulate a famous basketball playing father, like Wardell Stephen "Dell" Curry. As noted, Dell Curry was a former professional basketball player who played well enough but somewhat unremarkably in the National Basketball Association from 1986 until 2002.

As it is applied to personality, autotelic denotes an individual who generally does things for their own sake, rather than in order to achieve some later external goal. "The mark of the autotelic personality is the ability to manage a rewarding balance between the ′play′ of challenge finding and the ′work′ of skill building" 

One might argue that the very simple example of Stephen Curry’s world started with peer group ‘play’ and than escalated to the ‘work’ of skill building” and in his case he has become arguably the first, second or third most skilled player on the basketball planet.

Chapter IV:Measurement:Task Characteristics and the Experience of Optimal Flow in Human—Computer Interaction 

In 1993 the research of Jawaid A. Ghani & Satish P. Deshpande on Task Characteristics and the Experience of Optimal Flow in Human—Computer Interaction was submitted to the preeminent Journal of Psychology but was not published for another 7 years.Some what akin to and a little bit like a Nobel Prize winner doing seminal and ground breaking research on the DNA Helix like Britishers Watson and Crick but not gaining the prestigious Nobel Prize until 20 years later.

In any event we should all be interested in research that builds on job characteristics and how Optimal Flow Theory enters into describing the experience of individuals using computers in the workplace.

A stable working model was developed by these two brilliant Indian nationals and they began to run testings with linear structural relationship modeling (LISREL) with data supplied from 149 professionals employed in a variety of organizations. Optimal Flow, which is characterized by intense concentration and enjoyment, was found to be significantly linked with exploratory use behavior, which in turn was linked to extent of computer use.

Now think of how focused people become when engrossed in their favorite computer games;pure unadulterated focus is a commonly seen by-product of these riveting Computer games.

Optimal Flow is by itself determined by the individual's sense of being in control and the level of challenge perceived in using computers. Perceived control was more important for individuals with high task-scope jobs, that is, jobs with high variety, identity, autonomy, and feedback.

In their studies the Indian I.T. professors claim that it becomes a greater challenge to design a greater role for low task-scope individuals. For more information on this area of practical and theoretical implications of their work model being discussed, and suggestions for further research are offered in:6. The Journal of Psychology,Task Characteristics and the Experience of Optimal Flow in Human—Computer Interaction, Jawaid A. Ghani & Satish P. Deshpande, 

Whereas the description of autotelic personalities and their developmental contexts is very rich and integrates general principles of self-growth from different theories, however the operationalization of the construct is rather poor. There are three different approaches towards measurement.

1. In the first approach, autotelic personalities are identified through frequency and intensity of characteristic experiences
2. Frequency of high-demand, high-skill situations over longer periods.
3. Techniques developed for the purpose of obtaining self-reports of thoughts and feelings at random intervals during ongoing activities are going to need more work for reliability say most researchers.

Results:

Findings indicate, for example, that autotelic individuals are not necessarily happier, but more often involved in complex activities which, in turn, make them feel better about themselves and increases their self-esteem.

Overview of Findings:

? Overall the traits were assessed with the Personality Research Form developed by [PRF]; Jackson, Goshen, New York. 1984.

? However, little is known about the role of such personality factors with respect to flow experience. More importantly, the measure is confounded with the outcome (i.e., talent development) which it was originally designed to explain.

? Taken together, the search for stable causes behind flow experience is appealing and has interested flow researchers from early on. 

? However, the concept of an autotelic personality is awaiting a clear operationalization that is not confounded with 'its to-be-' explained outcomes. But before offering such an operationalization, the existing literature on the relationships between personality traits and flow experience needs to be reviewed in more detail

 

Citations:

1.Personality Research Form developed by [PRF]; Jackson, Goshen, New York, 1984.

2.Csikszentmihalyi, 1997, p. 117.

3.Csikszentmihalyi's 1999 Systems Model of Creativity

4.Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi, 2002. 

5.https://www.bodybuilding.com/fun//drobson33.htm

6. The Journal of Psychology,Task Characteristics and the Experience of Optimal Flow in Human—Computer Interaction, Jawaid A. Ghani & Satish P. Deshpande, Pp 381-391 | Received 20 Sep 1993, Published online: 02 Jul 2010

7.Castaneda,Carlos, December 25, 1925- Cajamarca, Peru, Died April 27,1998: Beginning with The Teachings of Don Juan in 1968 and ending with The Active Side of Infinity in 1998, Carlos Castaneda wrote a series of ten books which have come to be known as defining the best in "New Age"writing.

8.Island of Monkeys (Cayo Santiago), Puerto Rico - Lonely Planet https://www.lonelyplanet.com ? ... ? Country forums ? Caribbean ? Puerto Rico Oct. 7, 2012 - "I was just watching a documentary on Cayo Santiago , the "Island of Monkeys" off the east coast of Puerto Rico, not far from Vieques."

9.https://www.history.com/speeches/howard-hughes-breaks-his-silence on Clifford Irving unauthorized biography purely fraudulent

10.Patent US8356398 - Modular hybrid drill bit - Google Patents www.google.com/patents/US8356398 Jan 22, 2013 - A method of assembling a hybrid drill bit, the method including the steps of: .... and cable tool, but the two-cone rock bit, invented by Howard R. Hughes Sr., ... The original Hughes bit drilled for hours, the modern bit drills for days.

11.Santeria is a religion that originates in Africa. In the Americas and the Caribbean, it is thought to be a combination of various African, Catholic and Native American traditions

12.Voodoo is a religion that originates in Africa. In the Americas and the Caribbean, it is thought to be a combination of various African, Catholic and Native American traditions. It is practiced around the world but there is no accurate count of how many people are Voodooists.Feb 26, 2011

13. See 2015 James Bond Movie "Spectre" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nArvRmi68Hw

14. Historical Yaqui Milestones:

1512:First contact with Spaniards in Rio Yaqui Valley, Sonora, Mexico

1884:Begin moving to Arizona

1890: Old Guadalupe settled

1910:Guadalupe settled on 40 acres

 1960:Yaquis in Old Pascua initiate request for land

 1964: Federal Government deeds 202.76 acres to “Pascua Yaqui Association”

 1983:Bingo Hall opens

 1988:Pascua Yaqui Constitution signed by Bureau of Indian Affairs

 1994:Yaquis given “Historic Status” under federal legislation

 1995: Gaming Compact with Arizona and Casino of the Sun opens

15. Spruce Goose:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hughes_H-4_Hercules The Hughes H-4 Hercules was a prototype strategic airlift flying boat designed and built by the Hughes Aircraft Corporation;Hughes built it and a house moving company transported the airplane on streets to Pier E in Long Beach, California for The Spruce Goose first and only flight as it never flew again