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.
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.