There is a website called www.sustainedaction.org that dishes all the dirt available about Castaneda and his crew. Not a problem in itself. Folks should know that later in life he, like many people who become powerful, succumbed to lust and greed and hurt people. I am here to argue that his early experiences were honestly presented and offer evidence of that: The practices he mentions work.

Whether you call it God, Allah, Hashem, Brahma, Tao, or the Spirit, connecting with it requires faithful acts: persistent truthful acts. There is no bullshitting. One cannot achieve union or insights related to union simply by spinning tales. Castaneda connected with it. And the people who were closest to him during his time in graduate school, when he was writing the early books, confirm it in this podcast. He was completely devoted to it. He had a secret life with Don Juan that took much of his time. Nearly all the major cultural creatives of the past fifty years resonated with his work, because, deep down, with or without drugs, we know he is describing reality. Hit the first episode of the podcast and listen to them talk. There would be no Star Wars without Castaneda. Obi Wan was based on Don Juan. There would be no TOOL or Rage Against The Machine. There would be no Oliver Stone or later Fellini. The list is endless. The reality map Castaneda was given and passed on turned us on.

To validate that he connected with the divine, all you have to do is the practices described in the books, and connect yourself. If you do them, layer after layer of insights arrive that are also described in the books in a very orderly map. To think that one man could have invented all this is too farfetched to believe. Clearly, hundreds of generations of people did this research, and the 11 books unpack them skillfully. A living master with powers greater than Jesus or the Buddha schools a modern, cocky, clever man in how reality works, humbly and often gently. That cocky, clever man—an observer, reporter, and storyteller as skilled as Hemingway—learns that our connection with the divine is everything. Without it we are out of step with events and unsuccessful. He had to be intensely in-step to write these books, period. And he had to have a teacher drawing on generations of seekers and their findings who spelled it all out to him and made it accessible; no one could have figured it out in one lifetime. It was two remarkable men working together, drawing on the work of hundreds of committed seekers, who made these books possible. That is why they have the authority and impact they do.

Castaneda was very smart and skillful, charming, and an amazing talker and storyteller, and the impulse to lead with those and rest there had to be beaten out of him—not destroyed, but subjugated to a dominant natural order all of us need to recognize and harmonize with. That’s what the teachings are set up to do—help us recognize and harmonize with the natural order and put our talents to appropriate use. Nature is God. God is Nature. Call it what you want. It has rules. Recognize them and life is sweet. Ignore them, and stumble around like an idiot, hurting yourself. The 11 books present that in painful detail. You can call them timeless divine teachings for modern audiences. In some vocabularies that is “God’s law.” Call it whatever you want, just follow it. The books make clear: It is not about "being moral" or "being good": It is about realizing how reality works and playing along. God gives commands, we either follow them and thrive, or ignore them and hurt. The commands are personal: We have to figure them out for ourselves and do what is right to discover what is possible for us. There is no generic set. Some of the books, particularly "The Power of Silence," tell how to recognize divine commands, and others tell how to restructure our lives efficiently, particularly "Journey to Ixtlan."

If you consider the evidence that Castaneda connected with the divine for a while, you may recognize the most recent set of complete instructions provided to humanity for reconnecting with the divine in each of us. Saying “nuh-uh” is what four-year-olds do. It does not disprove anything. It just shows your unwillingness to make an effort or learn. You either do the practices and verify the findings for yourself, and join the tradition of metaphysical empiricism using your own body and consciousness as the research tool, or you don’t. End of story. Maybe some other divine transmission speaks to you. Good enough. But these are a complete set from a lineage in which hundreds of people all achieved powers like Jesus, about a dozen in every generation, and kept improving their techniques and passing them on. Worth considering, eh? Even if you think of yourself as Christian, does your religion have that success rate? Are you serious about being successful? Well, upgrade your practices. This is not about thinking about yourself as spiritual, this is about getting results. There is only one God passing out directions! Jesus won't be jealous if you do what he did. He'll be proud of you. Go for it!

For the doubters, go read the TIME magazine Castaneda pieces, linked on www.sustainedaction.org. They are clearly hit pieces. They are clearly produced to create doubt and suspicion. The De Mille book too. The illuminists who rule the world with deceit and violence discredit anyone who threaten their man ranch. Castaneda democratized knowledge about how to free oneself from their Matrix that had been carefully gathered for thousands of years. They didn’t like that. They made him look bad over and over.

Did he lie about some things? Sure. He hid the names of people in his group to protect them from waves of stoned hippies in microbuses who would have overrun their lives. Did he lie about details of his personal life? Sure. To someone who knows the story of self is just a hunting blind, dismantling it is a duty. He was innocent, childlike, and generous with those who knew him. According to Armando Torres, in either "The Secret of the Plumed Serpent" or "The Universal Spiderweb," who knew Castaneda personally for about 15 years, there came a point when Castandeda’s health was deteriorating when he became possessed and was no longer himself—that is when the scandalous affairs with women began. Many of us are possessed; we are time shares. If you read the last book, "The Active Side of Infinity," you can learn how that works. Not a big thing. The vast majority of people alive today are at least partially possessed and do not act on our intentions all the time.

The big thing is that the universe gave us this incredible opportunity to learn what the ancient scientists of Mesoamerica knew, transcend ego, time, and space, and reconnect with God without the baggage of thinking of it as God. Through Juan Matus, Carlos Castaneda, and the other witnesses of power, the all-animating intelligence gave us incredibly precise, practical directions for reclaiming what we have lost—and what we have lost is what we are looking for. It gave us an impartial science of consciousness and realistic cosmology fully formed by folks who had carefully crafted and tested it for centuries. It gave us a map to liberation and empowerment, just as it had through prophets of old in other times.

Why do I say that? Having read all Castaneda’s books closely, and those of his collaborators, and having done comparative religion with Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and European texts, I find consistent themes. And through doing the practices I know these are not religions, they are sciences of knowing, of claiming awareness and agency, just as Yoga is. For example, in "Tales of Power," Castaneda calls Don Genaro, who appears out of nowhere. Don Juan later calls Don Genaro, who appears out of nowhere. In the relatively recent Rumi translation, “Light Upon Light,” two or three travelers from the Orient show up in Rumi’s house in Persia bearing flowers that do not grow within a thousand miles. They appear out of nowhere in the back of the house. His wife is in the front part and they do not come in the door, from the street, and the house is surrounded by a high wall. They then disappear equally mysteriously. Rumi was a Muslim and Sufi. Similar things happen with Lahiri Mahayasa in Yogananda’s “Autobiography of a Yogi.” It happens across traditions.

Rumi and Yogananda were linked as part of the Mahasiddha tradition, that stretched from China through Tibet, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran to the Middle East. You can get a sense of it in the Gurdjieff documentary, “Conversations with Remarkable Men,” that also includes the Enneagram. There was a single ancient tradition that linked all people seeking consciousness. It is now known that Jesus was also part of that tradition and spent his 13th through 30th years traveling to various monasteries between the Middle East and Tibet. That’s where he learned to do what he did. Like Jesus or Moses, Rumi fasted 40 days—but three times. That’s why his poetry is so transcendental and still communicates such insights. He was truly etheric and moved by his union with all.

Two tie-ins are: The ancient wisdom people of the Himalayas are known as Rishis—“knowers.” The ancient wisdom people of Central America are known as Toltecs—“those who know,” or “people of knowledge.” The term for the “sacred serpent sex power” in Sanskrit, in the Himalayas, is “kundalini.” In Mayan, in Central America, it is “kultanlilni”—a slight dialectic difference. Homophones like this are discussed in the books “The Mayan Oracle” by Spillsbury and Bryner, and cross cultural spiritual teachings are discussed in “The Mayan Factor” by Jose Arguelles. According to information Castaneda received, traveling between continents was possible for people of knowledge, much as he witnessed and experienced it—not in days or months, in seconds. They did this and were honored and respected wherever they went. In this way, knowledge about the workings of the universe and how to navigate it were transmitted non-locally and such parallels can be explained.

The big “nuh-uh” seems to come with wanting to defend our limited lives. “I am good enough. I am a success. I am better off than other slaves.” Well, fine. If you never overcome ego, time and space are out of the question. Stay where you are uncomfortable but feel in control, or explore what is possible. Your choice. Stay in your diaper full of poo or take it off, clean yourself off, and walk free. The books will tell you how.

To imagine how this might all work out for you, start with the idea of an aboriginal dreamtime, where we notice things beyond time and space—before they happen or from a distance that disqualifies our regular sensory organs for being responsible for our knowing. Read Robert Moss’s book “Dreaming True” for tons of excellent examples. The life of Harriet Tubman would have been impossible without this kind of knowing, and he shows how.

Around age ten I had a portentous dream. A woman in my life who was half-Cherokee appeared to me and thanked me for our time together. She told me she was about to die and was grateful for what we had shared. I woke up knowing that the visitation was totally real, that there was another layer of reality below the usual one where the important things really happen, and that I needed to call her. Two weeks later she was dead of cancer no one knew or suspected she had.

In my twenties I was in a bookstore and had the experience of a book falling from a shelf and catching it. It was “Journey to Ixtlan.” I opened to a passage that described where I was in my life and what I needed to do. I knew that everything in it was true and that it was absolutely important to do what it suggested to reformat my life into one of integrity.

Four years later, I had been doing the practices diligently when I went looking for a teacher to confirm that I had learned what I thought I had learned. It was a scary and daring plan because I knew about the hard tactics that might be used on me: I could be hunted like an animal or pushed out of indulging in other potentially deadly ways. My plan was to catch a train to Boulder, Colorado, where I knew one was living. I got to my point of departure and there were no seats on trains to Boulder.

I spent the night in a very old house. The power was out due to a winter storm and I slept and dreamed very deeply. I woke up knowing I had to find a “Mayan Calendar.” I had never heard of one before. I walked to a bookstore where the power was on and found one. I went to Whole Foods and was sitting there, looking at it, eating lunch, when a woman came up to me and pointed at me:

“You know how to use that thing. There’s a meeting tonight and you need to be there.”

She gave me an address and I went there. At the meeting, I met someone strangely familiar. He, too, gave me directions. He said there was someone I needed to meet. I went to a house the next day and met a woman I had been dreaming with since I was a child. She was the senior apprentice of Miguel Ruiz, the teacher of the teacher in Boulder. Merely by intending to find a teacher, I had found the right teacher. And yes, other lineages exist. Castaneda’s was not the only one, and they all teach more or less the same thing.

That woman later studied with Merilyn Tunneshende and lived with her for months in the house of the witches in Sinaloa, mentioned in Castaneda’s books. She personally witnessed the nagual Elias’s sculptures. So Castaneda was not lying about the important things. He may have been a dickhead with women, but his relationship with God was okay or he would not have uncovered what he did, and the teachings he passed on actually work.

The chief prejudice of most civilized, enslaved people is materialism or nihilism: “There is nothing beyond matter. There is no meaning—that’s all arbitrary, I can believe and feel or not feel whatever I want. There is no reason to feel. My personal emotional setting of being dissociated and emotionally self-protective makes believing in a benevolent or intelligent universe impossible. Being greedy and controlling other people are enough. A mysterious, loving, and wonderful world is too much to hope for.”

There are hundreds of examples in Castaneda’s books that refute this. You could call all 11 books proof of the existence of God. Daring to believe Castaneda is daring to adopt an aboriginal worldview where the presence of a universal intelligence is undeniable. You have to do the work of reconnecting with your own emotions and sorting them out to get there, to listen to the signals, but it is possible. The books spell out how.

The funny thing is, there is a single consciousness giving all of us commands, and all we have to do is listen to them. It is that simple. It wants us to be happy. That is just the way the cosmos is set up. And it is constantly telling us how to be happy, by doing what it says. The better we listen and quicker we do what we should, the happier we are. It is not about “being good,” it is about being sane, and doing what gets positive results.

Many years later I dreamed of entering a large room. There was a man floating in the room in golden armor. I yelled “Chon!” and rushed into the room with great joy to spar with him. “Chon” was the name Merilyn Tunneshende called Don Genaro. In her books, she refers to him as a Mayan Daykeeper and describes him using the Mayan Calendar outside the City of Eternal Spring. I have no imagining about what Don Genaro looked like, but part of me knew this was “Chon.” I believe we are networking behind the scenes of everyday reality, being taught by people who help us along. I believe the books turn something on in us that allows us to find these people. Maybe you can find the ones that will help you.

There is a great book on psychedelics called “Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream.” It puts the beats, hippies, rainbows, mondoids, and burners in cultural context. Part of it deals with brilliant writer and beautiful human Ken Kesey, who talked about “the unspoken thing” and devotedly rode that wave for a while. There is a magic that happens when everything lines up—when intention, willingness, the surface dialog, what people are doing, and what events around us are doing are all perfectly synchronized—that is the unspoken thing. Kesey and his freaks the Merry Pranksters did it on their bus when they went further.

That is what Castaneda tapped into and that is why we need his books: to remember that alignment. He was just taking dictation from an aligned, integrated being and presenting it skillfully, but he did it faithfully. A mature, wise, kind elder took a crappy man and helped him understand. The undercurrent supporting the boat where they are talking is the dreamtime, where the ancestors have carefully gathered the resources of consciousness we need and are now guiding us to apply them. Castaneda’s work is just part of their providence.