Castaneda

I have this habit of keeping a track of all books that I have been suggested to read. Especially when they come through random conversations with people I hardly know. I am quite sure there are many different facets to one's interest and different faces gets pictured when when you start talking to new people. And based on these short discussions they make an picture of the kind of person you are and suggest some books that they think you will like. I happened to mention once that I love Paulo Coelho's books and have read all his available(that referred to footpaths of Bangalore) publications.

This person mentioned you might then look for Carlos Castaneda's books. The book he referred to was "The Eagle's Gift". I came back home and made a note of it somewhere. Now I don't really remember when I transferred that list to Shelfari but a few days back I happened to check my wishlist. And thus began my search for Mr. Castaneda's books.

I don't really like e-books. Always prefer the touch and feel of a great book.. but at the same time I seem to have "Compulsive Obsessive e-book Collection Disorder"(severely aggravated by the free broadband in my motel in US and now the 1Mbmps connection here). It is a disorder because i hardly read those, but since I had no hope of getting my hands on Carlos books, I decided to go ahead with the digital copy. I did get all of his works (now stored as a DVD)

The first in the series is "The teachings of Don Juan"...

Sadly, I am not liking it.. I am almost halfway through it and all I can say is that I can understand the fascination that people from rest of the world have for it. Till now he has been describing his initiation into occult and hallucinatory experiences. But India is a place where you are exposed to many such stories by the time you are in any position to blog ( provided you share your origin to some village in a state like Orissa in India). These stories of black magic or occult are nothing new.

So I am still waiting to learn the teachings of don juan, but till then I am dissapointed. If you are from India and have heard numerous stories of witches, tantriks and hat yogis dont waste your time learning that bhang and ganja can get you on a high and make you feel things that you can never imagine in your sane mind or that there are people who are supposed to have strange powers which even you would agree not to believe...or that there is a different way to look at life, a way which your advanced physics and quantum mechanics cant explain..
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But the story is yet to be completely revealed, so I rest my judgement till then. But as of now, my initial assesment is that, this is overrated and too much commercialized to have too much truth in it.

I downloaded almost 2Gb of stuff titled : Magical Passes: Supposed to be a series of steps that were taught by this Mexican/IndianAmerican for the well being of human beings. This matches my hatred for so called "Kriya Yoga" which I almost got sold into when I was 18. True lessons of life and that of the occult are not that easy to get, and internet is definitely not the channel. Anything that you get from the commercialized channels is sure enough commercial shit. You have to experience them to believe them and that does not come easy and definitely not to every one.

That brings me to something that I have been thinking of blogging recently. A friend of mine swears he has witnessed things which are beyond natural. I dont feel I can put it up in third person but I would definitely try to express it in some form.

I am a skeptic but too much of an optimist i guess.