Richard de Mille demonstrated that Castaneda's work was a hoax. He lifted entire passages from other authors such as C.S. Lewis. The Indian tribe that he supposedly apprenticed under never used peyote.
If you think you can master his material and jump off a cliff and survive as he claimed to do, please do so.
His female followers disappeared into the death valley area after his death. I believe their bones were found, so apparently they didn't escape death either.
I don't know too much of this new age movement you speak of, can you further elaborate?
Are you asking about Carlos Castaneda's works and his followers specifically, or New Age?
As for New Age, here is a paraphrase of a good summary of the "movement":
“New Age religion” is perhaps a better term.
New Age is often a response to people's religious questions and needs, and its appeal is to people who are trying to discover or rediscover a spiritual dimension in their life.
Many within the New Age movement themselves distinguish carefully between “religion” and “spirituality”. Many have rejected organised religion, because in their judgement it has failed to answer their needs, and for precisely this reason they have looked elsewhere to find “spirituality”.
Furthermore, at the heart of New Age is the belief that the time for particular religions is over, so to refer to it as a religion would run counter to its own self-understanding.
Here's some info on it
https://www.bitchute.com/video/1T6iD5nDptL5/
He was a plastic shaman.
The Yaqui, whom Don Juan was supposedly a tribe of, never used peyote.
You can find word for word the passages he lifted from CS Lewis. Rather than go out into the desert to study with a shaman, he stayed in the air conditioned library. In the days before the internet, in the 1960s when he was supposedly doing his academic research, it was much harder to find plagiarists.
Hmmm. As far back as the 1970s, the people like Richard de Mille was able to show side-by-side plagerism of much of Casteneda's work. His followers, the ones that didn't disappear that is, however, have wrote memoirs detailing much of the hokum as well.
His practice of erasing his personal history sure makes it hard to check the veracity of anything he says, doesn't it? When he died of cancer, he didn't ascend like a Star Wars Force ghost, his followers deserted him after burning his papers. Again, it makes to hard to verify anything.
Before I read any of CC's (33!) work in my youthful prime, I once foolishly ingested Datura during a psylocybin mushrooms trip.
Everything around me turned blood-red, my vision was seeing the world in shades of blood-red only.
Imagine my surprise several years later, when reading CC and he quoted Don Juan's explanation on Datura, stating that the spirit living in this particular plant medicine was very powerful but also dangerous:
If your vision turned red, it meant the spirit had accepted teaching you. If everything turned black, you were dead.
I am a firm believer in the truthfulness of Don Juan's existence since then...