Sustained Reaction

[Moma_porcupine]

Reply #29 ra6as

"I would say between Weheli and Kaioatey for now, and my intention is to suggest a more abstract basis for discussion, less about each other and more about whatever the issues may be that underlie the rift."

"as far as I've been able to find out, the argument that Castaneda and/or Cleargreen are racist has not been clearly presented anywhere;"

Hi ra6as

What strikes me as blatently racist,  is that when someone claims something is a Native tradition or secret Native wisdom , or a traditional ceremony,  or that they are authorized to lead Native ceremonies or teach Native Spirituality , and this isn't true , that people assume this is something that should be open to debate .

It is like people think Indians aren't real , that indiginous peoples don't have a real culture , that Native people don't know their own culture well enough to be able to authoritively say "that is not true" and that Native people aren't real enough to know what is right within their own Spiritual traditions , and protect this from corruption.

So to me, just the continued presumption that all this should even be open for debate , seems extremely racist .

Native peoples are real , Native people have real cultures , with real cultural norms which are well known to the real people living within these cultures . Native communities have the internal authority to select their Spiritual leaders and protect traditions from corruption , and to say what is and is not corruption  .

To think any of this is open to debate,  is to be willing to replace real Indian peoples and cultures with fantasy Indians and cultures ,that were dreamed up to fufill the desires of bored , Spiritually lost, non natives .

To imagine New Age fantasies are more important than than living Native peoples and cultures , is extremely disrespectful , selfserving and racist .

Which is one of the reasons why people keep saying the poster Kaioatey , over at SR , is racist .
( obviously there are other reasons and comments made by this poster which are too numourous and stupid to even bother addressing )

Of course people with racist attitudes are rarely aware they have racist attitudes , because if they were , they would stop being so ignorant and full of stupid presumptions .

Hope this helps you understand what the perspective is here . And why most of us sound like we aren't really interested in debating this further ... To turn things around , it would be kind of like thinking we have a right to debate with you what you had for breakfast , when we weren't there , but you were , but we still think we know better than you do .
                                             

[Sidarthur Prospero]

The Sustained Reaction forum has been badmouthing you people for quite some time. From my perspective that must mean that you are rather cool. Any forum Ghost Dog badmouths has something in common with me. Ghost Dog doesn't like you and I don't like Ghost Dog.

So, let's see what happens

BTW: Ghost Dog is the Sustained Reaction administrator. He got the forum after Corey Donovan was about to throw it into the Internet trash along with all his other Sustained Action trash. Giving everything to Ghost Dog was Corey Donovan's way of throwing it all into an Internet garbage heap.

I was posting at Sustained Reaction long before Ghost Dog ever registered his name. Corey Donovan and the other gullibles took Carlos Castaneda as their guru and refuse to take full responsibility for their stupidity. They want to make their gullible stupidity Castaneda's fault.

I went to a Tensegrity workshop and I use Tensegrity along with my martial arts and bodybuilding training, but I knew those witches were not to be trusted. I was never stupid enough to even want to become part of their group back in about 1995. The knuckleheads took Castaneda as their guru. Amazing how stupid some people can be!

[Barnaby's note]
Hello Sidarthur. I've merged your post with this pre-existing thread about the Sustained Reaction forum.

[ra6as]

 
Well I would never insist on debate, I'm genuinely interested in why you consider Castaneda inauthentic ~

bearing in mind that the question is hardly straightforward, since according to Castaneda the teacher of don Juan (don Julian) was not an Indian (but nor was he Anglo white either)

but when you decide to call the discussion to a halt I will respect that.

It's worth mentioning that we (at SR and Abe's place) only ever had two Native American Indian visitors (well, only two who identified themselves as such)

and while one of them (Nagualqo) told quite fantastical tales about his involvement with Castaneda

the other (Rahelio) gave an altogether more sober account

and both were warmly supportive of what Castaneda was trying to do.

Obviously you know much more about Indians than I do and if you say these people are all frauds that clearly makes a difference but I would hardly just take your word for it without thinking it through

So anything you'd like to say about this would be interesting, and if you feel you've already given this more than enough time that's also OK
 

[frederica]

The bait and manuplation is interesting, but it becomes boring as with Castaneda. frederica

[educatedindian]

Rasas,

"the argument that Castaneda and/or Cleargreen are racist has not been clearly presented anywhere"

Yes we have, many times already. But let me make it more explicit in addition to what Moma P said.

It's no coincidence that Nuage arose in the 1960s, after the rise of the Civil Rights and Red Power movements made it more difficult to justify open racism.

What Castaneda begun and Nuage continued was a colonial attempt to turn Native elders into Tontos for curious and spiritually empty whites. You don't find trying to turn one ethnic group into the servants for the needs of another to be racist?

Super romanticized images also hide the realities of what Native people are actually like. If there's anything these threads with the members of SR has shown, it's that reading Castaneda books has made it extremely hard for many of you to understand Native people as we actually are.

And yes, all of this in Deloria's writings quite a bit. Look especially for his book God Is Red.

There's a passage where he talks about what it would be like if Blacks had to go through what NDNs did because of these images:

At news conferences, Martin Luther King would have been deluged with questions about African spirituality, followed around by whites wanting to know about Voodoo and dressed in Blackface. No one would have listened to or cared about civil rights or ending segregation.

"I'm genuinely interested in why you consider Castaneda inauthentic"

This has already been covered many times. Kindly quit asking us to repeat ourselves because you haven't bothered to read, or more likely, read and decide to ignore us repeatedly.

These are also sideracking the thread. Seems like Castaneda worshippers always find a way to make everything about their deity Carlos.

[Thinker]

Sustained Reaction is run by the Castaneda people themselves, in order to eliminate "unwanted elements", and also to combat other spiritual traditions with their skeptical stance that nothing supernatural exists, that there's no live after death, that everything that tends towards spiritual is either fraud or delusion, etc.

It's the other pole to Cleargreen, which they actually support, since everyone who seeks something "magical" or "mysterious" in their live is presented with two options: Either you buy the official SR viewpoint and believe magic and mystery doesn't exist, or you don't give a damn about what they say. And if you can't give up your longing for "magic" (or spiritual issues), you are an even easier prey for cults since what a cult actually wants is that you neglect your rational thinking.

I have even some suspicion that this strategy has been used by some evil sorceric traditions since long ago, to make the people ignorant for spiritual things (by telling them they don't exist), so that they don't notice what these criminals do with them. (Especially here in Europe, where we had the greatest magical tradition of all times quite nearby, the Egyptian, which got systematically erased by the Greek and later the Romans.) (And the Christians, who - except for the first centuries - are not more than a continuation of the political Roman Empire with different means.)

Also needs to be noticed that a myth is prolonged by talking about it, that "even bad press is good press", as they say in the show biz, so that might answer your question why people who say they aren't interested in Castaneda's books at all talk about him at such length and with such sustained effort.


Btw, that guy Ingeborg mentioned from the German part of SR, Shintok, he's still alive and actively recruiting, praising himself as a teacher, and even presenting some of his pupils to the others, and I also have the impression that all the sections of SR except the English one are actually pro-Castaneda and discussing his teaching as if they were fact.

[E.P. Grondine]

It's amazing to me how people continue to ignore the first hand report in "Cut Stones and Crossroads" of how Carlos Castenada constructed his fraud.

I don't have a copy of that book handy, and it is a hard book to find, but I believe that the account there is truthful, and that some people seriously need to read it before they are used even worse.

[Thinker]

"used even worse" - should that refer to me?
I mean, you're right in that I've been used, but how should anyone be able to continue using me now that I know what's going on?

And any first hand report from somebody else still is a second hand report to me, and believe me, I have so much first hand experience with these people that I'm not really interested in one more of the many theories as how "Castaneda constructed his fraud", even more so as none of these writers seems to have the slightest idea about what Castaneda really is.

[E.P. Grondine]

Hi Thinker -

It's not a "theory", it's a "first hand report", and I'm sure you'll find it fascinating, as it will clear many points up for you.  In as much as I don't have a copy of that book with me, and any attempt to summarize that report with my memory as damaged by diabetic stroke as it is right now might lead me to pokvano, the only thing I can do is to tell you to READ THE BOOK YOURSELF, and advise you to shut the hell up in the meantime before you let Castenada make a bigger fool of you.  I don't mean to insult you here, but...

I can assure you you'll be surprised to learn exactly what Castenada did and how he did it, and I can also assure you that you will see him in a whole new way. 

Please think about that before you post again. Read it and judge, and then get back to us and let us know what you think. I think that after you have done so you will be in a much stronger place to carry on discussion here.