i met l.g. at a coffee house near the bookstore i worked at then and own now. he posessed the amazing 'presence' of someone who has 'been in the work' for decades. his gaze bored into me and stayed there. i froze. he stared. and DID not look away when it was polite to do so. i was sitting there, outside in the sun, in january in l.a., reading, or pretending to read beckett--molloy.

i tried to ignore him but couldn't concentrate on molloy and felt flushed and uncomfortable. finally i gathered my courage, raised my head from my book and met his eyes. his intensity broke into a completely disarming, childlike grin. he came over. he liked beckett too. i'd been doing so much hatha yoga and writing, and thinking about things on my own, so much, without many friends to discuss things with, i detected depth and mystery in him and blurted out everything i thought and felt, which launched us into a deep discussion about??? what i remember of it: personal authenticity and beckett, the irish/the jews, how society colonizes our psychic space, writing and how breath facilitates the creative process and how linear, representational art was dead.

boom!

i was 29. he never told me his age. (later, i stole his wallet just to get a peek at his driver's license. i think i wanted proof he was human..if it was accurate, he was 44. it was 1997.) i told him about the bookstore and he said he would stop by. i waited for him to appear every day for weeks and then months. then it was six months and i had finally almost forgotten him--and there he was. he entered talking as if no gap existed in our dialogue. he stayed for the rest of the day. no one came into the shop, or if they did, i didn't notice. he told me he was a practitioner of toltec shamanism. i didn't know what that was. he had just returned from mexico. visiting the pyramids, tula, etc...i'd never read castaneda, didn't have any context for what he was talking about, so i was unimpressed with his associations but very impressed with him.

he returned the next day with a stack of brochures from every spiritual school, group, teacher imaginable. he suggested i enroll at naropa in boulder. then he told me about the zen teacher on mount baldy. he mentioned others, i forget. one after the other. the salient thing in my memory is how much the encouragement meant to me. this person who i looked up to, yet barely knew, saw potential in me to do similar to what he had done. he spoke with simple sincerity. frequently emotion, ranging from sorrow to joy, caused his eyes to fill with tears, and he laughed with his whole body--his whole self. he told me it was time for me to take spiritual work out of the realm of 'hobby' and into the realm of it being my entire life.. it was exactly what i wanted to hear.

he mentioned in passing that he was looking for a place to stay. that night i dreamt he lived next door to me in an apartment that was vacant at the time. in the dream we were married and very much in love. he came by the store the next day and i told him my dream, without mentioning the love & marriage part. he said the dream was a sign--he'd come by and look at the apartment.

after a walk-through we sat in my living room and he said it wouldn't be good for us to live next-door to each other, i might want space from him down the road. he said if it was alright with me he could stay with me for a while--if i wanted him to. i was elated! i told him with some embarrassment that i was in love with him and also that i felt he was the spiritual teacher i'd been looking and hoping for. he TOLD me then and there that he was NOT a spiritual teacher, he was a RECRUITER. i didn't really know what that meant and didn't ask. he stayed for a month that seemed like a year. at the end of it i kicked him out in a rage and put all his stuff on the front porch and locked the door. i didn't realize it had only just begun.

the first thing he did was take me to trader joe's to buy food. i had been practicing yoga 3-5 times a week for several years and at that time was living primarily on coffee, kale and blue-green algae. i didn't have a car and had begun having panic attacks on buses to and from yoga. l. said my nervous system was too sensitized by the yoga and diet to cope with city stresses. he took me off coffee and put me on meat, which was quite nauseating at first. (but no flour, no sugar, dairy, fruit. no tomatoes, no beans?--beans (!) steal our energy for awakening, according to ej gold.) i would wake up to the smell of eggs and bacon frying...but the dietary changes quickly evened out the anxiety. he explained that my kundalini was awakening (true) and i was in some danger of having a meltdown. luckily he'd been through it and knew the way through.

the indoctrination began quite simply, like this: he told me i was asleep. he told me that everyone i knew or had ever known was asleep. the president was asleep. margaret thatcher was asleep. i kept asking, but what about so-and-so? is so-and-so asleep? what about michelangelo? how could he have been asleep? van morrison? einstein! leigh told me that moments of creation or discovery happen because someone accidentally or intentionally trips into the waking state. (he told me the only people he knew who were awake ALL the time were ej gold and the 20 people who live with him in nevada city.)

we are all born asleep, l. told me; we can awaken, but it is hard WORK. he said the moment you identify yourself in sleep, boom, there is a shift, you are awake! so this was the first practice i was to do: catch myself in sleep and say, 'i am asleep.' --boom!

the reason people are incapable of waking up, leigh told me, is that we don't know that we are asleep! and sleep conspires to keep us asleep. and many people love their sleep so much that they don't ever want to wake up. if anyone tries to wake someone like that up--that person could become violent in their efforts to protect their sleep! these people were to be pitied, l said. there was nothing to be done but be polite to them and steer clear. but BE AWARE: people like this were hostile to the work. they were enemies of the work. after some reflection we identified together that everyone i knew was part of this group and i would have to avoid them.

l. said before a teacher began work with someone, the teacher had to ascertain if the 'student' had an essence that would become violent when confronted with waking up. if the teacher detected a violent essence, the prospective student would regretably have to be turned away because of the danger to the teacher and other students. i was terrified l. would discover a violent essence in me and would leave. luckily he discovered my essence was passable. asleep but not violent. i was workable.

recognizing-myself-in-sleep practice went hand in hand with 'not expressing negative emotion.' i had to 'use' any 'negative emotion' i might feel as fuel for my awakening. so i COULD NOT REACT! to anything! but should instead become aware of the sensation of negativity (which could mean anger/jealousy/lust/fear--or also--just as deadly: passivity--boredom--numbness--etc etc.) in my bodymind and recognize that experiencing 'negative emotion' meant i was asleep, because it was impossible to experience negative emotion in the waking state.

instead of reacting i was to experience the pressure i felt, of wanting to react, and i was to say to myself, "i want to use this (negative emotion) to invoke the presence of my presence into the present." (ej gold 'invocation of presence.') all of this still, to this day, makes brilliant sense to me--brilliant! i followed these instructions and it worked. i felt increased power and optimism when i did not give into expressing my negative emotions. it did create energy. i was awake. i could do this.

then leigh began to push each and every fear and insecurity button he brilliantly identified in me. all i had to do was not react to him doing that, he told me, and the extreme pressure he was creating for me would surely pop me right into enlightenment. i still blame myself for the fact that it didn't work. i couldn't do it. i failed.

meanwhile i was unwittingly helping him in his task to provoke me by telling him virtually every aspect of my 'personal history.' every secret, fear. etc. childhood. parents' childhoods. endless.

his response to all i told him about my life was to tell me that i had an innate capacity/prediliction for the work. he told me that people from abusive/alcohoiic families like the one i came from, were great candidates for the work! he gave me information to read about the enneagram and told me i was a 6. i said i thought i was a 4. he said 4's were not capable of the work, i would have to be a 6. 6 was defined as 'heroic striving.' (read: masochist.) a person from an alcoholic family who parented her parents from an early age and derived a sense of superiority to the rest of the world at age 5 due to surviving family trauma was definitely a 6. and this type was perfect, leigh told me, not only for work, but for work with him (a 1) and potentially ej, (also a 1) down the road--if it ever came to that. l. told me my spiritual gift was the reason i had always been an outsider--had never fit in. i wasn't supposed to because i was meant for this. it made perfect sense.

he told me about castaneda and the witches and many details of his experiences with them. he hinted at having a sexual relationship with carol tiggs, which made me crazy with jealousy. he told me how amazing the witches were. how strong, beautiful and vibrant. ageless..timeless..(and when i saw them i came to the same unshakable conclusion--they WERE amazing.) he told me about the castaneda celibacy rules, which only applied to the 'bored fucks' like us, who did not have enough energy for awakening. sex was ok for carlos and the witches, but probably, he said, he and i (which meant me) did not have enough energy to expend energy in sex, and we should abstain. he told me about the energetic worms that we all leave in each other when we have sex. worms that function as cords connecting us vampirically to our sex partners as well as everyone they ever had (or will have) sex with. ( the worms stay forever, unless undone by recapitulation.) he told me about flyers (castaneda) and entities (ej) and magic wombs (witches) used for dreaming instead of breeding. he began to tell me about dreaming, the tenant, recapitulation and tensegrity.

he told me that he and castaneda and the witches and a few other people (would total 13?) were planning to take off soon and burn from within. he told me they were working like dogs to get ready for this amazing opportunity. he told me they had been on the lookout for the 'electric scout,' a being with the particular energy configuration needed for the configuration necessary for the trip. he told me he thought i was the scout. he told me that maybe i could go with them but i would have to work 3 to 4 times harder than any of them were working because i was many years behind them. was i ready to leave the earth and home and everything comfortable and familiar and safe? forever? for eternity?

the vision of sleep leigh lay out for me was so horrifying. so heartbreaking. so twilight zone disgusting. i literally and symbolically was looking out over my whole life and everything, everyone, i had ever known, seeing a vast and horrible wasteland. a charade. there was no real love. no real life. no integrity or soul. everything, including me, was on automatic pilot and if you scratched the surface of any mechanical person, they would scratch your eyes out.

the experience of the deadness of everything and the opportunity to escape it, is something i have never come back from. in a sense i left then and there, later came to regret it, and like dorothy in the wizard of oz, i've been fighting like mad to find my way back home ever since.

What happened next ? What made you leave in the end ?

thank you for asking. my active involvement spans 1997 to 2002-- so it is a long story to get out--but i will get it all out and continue posting here. six years away i have worked hard to come to whatever degree of lucidity i have about what happened. and there are big chunks i 'forgot' (!) and have to retrieve. i wrote the catastrophic concluding episode to my involvement on this board under the name 'starter.' the person i refer to as x in that long post, is l.g.

(i only use a different username now because i forgot my earlier password and when i re-registered, the name starter was already in use. that happened on another occasion and i think there are a few stray posts from me here under the name mergetroid.)

i am not able to tell what info is relevent to this forum, and what not, so please forgive the extraneous stuff which serves me to write out but probably not anyone else. in the above post i am exploring the way trance was probably being induced by the common gurdjieffian sleep/awake reminder. l. would frequently say 'you're asleep' to me at different moments when we were together. or, i would ask him a work question and he would say 'you ate not in the right state for me to answer you now.' implying I was 'too asleep' to receive 'teaching data'. perhaps another way of looking at it is that in fact, i may have been too awake! meaning i was not in trance.

on some occassion l. let me know that e.j gold used a lot of milton erickson hypnosis techniques. it was said in passing and it surprises mr now that he dropped such a big clue. i must have been in the right 'state' to hear it because i never forgot it even though i had never heard of m. erickson before. i am only now looking into it. I bought and highly reccomend a simple book for the layman about how erickson brilliantly used stories in hypnosis. of course anyone who has been in 'the work' has heard a ton of 'esoteric' teaching stories. think of the entire castaneda library. and sufi,zen,hasidic,taoist traditions are loaded with wonderful stories that can be used,for good or ill, in trance.

a cult savvy friend read my above post and asked if, by any chance, l. used any unusual hand gestures. well yes, I forgot to mention above, he did. when i asked about them--they were odd and constant--he told me they were 'magical passes' he was using to keep himself in the waking state and also to ward off negativity from the environment. i don't know but my guess is these did not come from any of his teachers, though he did a lot of tensegrity, i think he may have developed them himself, probably for the reason he gave, maintaining his state, etc. they might also had had hypnotic effect and or intention.

perhaps i am mistaken in considering '4th way' almost interchangably with 'crazy wisdom.' (would appreciate feedback on this.) the milieu of teachers i was involved with without exception considered themselves 'crazy wisdom' teachers. there is such a lot of justification in new age circles about 'crazy wisdom' shenanigans, i wanted to post this article which offers sharp (and very helpful to me) criticism of the new age (mis)appropriation of crazy wisdom paradigm. (the article begins with some political thoughts that can be bypassed to get to the meat of the cult discussion further down.)


[www.energygrid.com]

This is the definitive article on Castaneda. However, don't be surprised if a whole new generation of acid-droppers completely ignores reality and worships his books anyway. One of the greatest con jobs of the 20th Century and a very sad and disturbing end to his core followers. Why did the LAPD do so little to investigate these deaths?

[www.salon.com]

Wallace isn't sure what the women believed. Because open discussion of Castaneda's teachings was forbidden, it was impossible to know what anyone really thought. However, she told me, after living so long with Castaneda, the women may have felt they had no choice. "You've cut off all your ties," she said. "Now you're going to go back after all these decades? Who are you going to go be with? And you feel that you're not one of the common herd anymore. That's why they killed themselves."

On its Web site, Cleargreen maintains that the women didn't "depart." However, "for the moment they are not going to appear personally at the workshops because they want this dream to take wings."

Remarkably, there seems to have been no investigation into at least three of the disappearances. Except for Donner-Grau, they'd all been estranged from their families for years. For months after they vanished, none of the other families knew what had happened. And so, according to Geuter, no one reported them missing. Salon attempted to locate the three missing women, relying on public records and phone calls to their previous residences, but discovered no current trace of them. The Los Angeles Police Department and the FBI confirm that there's been no official inquiry into the disappearances of Donner-Grau, Abelar and Lundahl.

There is, however, a file open in the Marquez case. This is due to the tireless efforts of Luis Marquez, who told Salon that he first tried to report his sister missing in 1999. But the LAPD, he said, repeatedly ignored him. A year later, he and his sister Carmen wrote a letter to the missing-persons unit; again, no response. According to Marquez, it wasn't until Partin's remains were identified that the LAPD opened a file on Amalia. "To this day," he told me, "they still refuse to ask any questions or visit Cleargreen." His own attempts to get information from Cleargreen have been fruitless. According to Marquez, all he's been told is that the women are "traveling." Detective Lydia Dillard, assigned to the Marquez case, said that because this is an open investigation, she couldn't confirm whether anyone from Cleargreen had been interviewed.

In 2002, a Taos, N.M., woman, Janice Emery, a Castaneda follower and workshop attendee, jumped to her death in the Rio Grande gorge. According to the Santa Fe New Mexican, Emery had a head injury brought on by cancer. One of Emery's friends told the newspaper that Emery "wanted to be with Castaneda's people." Said another: "I think she was really thinking she could fly off." A year later, a skeleton was discovered near the site of Partin's abandoned Ford. The Inyo County sheriff's department suspected it was hers. But, due to its desiccated condition, a positive identification couldn't be made until February 2006, when new DNA technology became available.

Wallace recalls how Castaneda had told Partin that "if you ever need to rise to infinity, take your little red car and drive it as fast as you can into the desert and you will ascend." And, Wallace believes, "that's exactly what she did: She took her little red car, drove it into the desert, didn't ascend, got out, wandered around and fainted from dehydration."

Partin's death and the disappearance of the other women aren't Castaneda's entire legacy. He's been acknowledged as an important influence by figures ranging from Deepak Chopra to George Lucas. Without a doubt, Castaneda opened the doors of perception for numerous readers, and many workshop attendees found the experience deeply meaningful. There are those who testify to the benefits of Tensegrity. And even some of those who are critical of Castaneda find his teachings useful. "He was a conduit. I wanted answers to the big questions. He helped me," Geuter said. But for five of his closest companions, his teachings -- and his insistence on their literal truth -- may have cost them their lives.

Long after Castaneda had been discredited in academia, Korda continued to insist on his authenticity. In 2000, he wrote: "I have never doubted for a moment the truth of his stories about don Juan." Castaneda's books have been profitable for Simon and Schuster, and according to Korda, were for many years one of the props on which the publisher rested. Castaneda might have achieved some level of success if his books had been presented, as James Redfield's "Celestine Prophecy" is, as allegorical fiction. But Castaneda always insisted he'd made nothing up. "If he hadn't presented his stories as fact," Wallace told me, "it's unlikely the cult would exist. As nonfiction, it became impossibly more dangerous."

To this day, Simon and Schuster stands by Korda's position. When asked whether, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the publisher still regarded Castaneda's books as nonfiction, Adam Rothenberg, the vice president for corporate communication, replied that Simon and Schuster "will continue to publish Castaneda as we always have." Tensegrity classes are still held around the world. Workshops were recently conducted in Mexico City and Hanover, Germany. Wagner's videos are still available from Cleargreen. According to the terms of Castaneda's will, book royalties still help support a core group of acolytes. On Simon and Schuster's Web site, Castaneda is still described as an anthropologist. No mention is made of his fiction.

You can find lots of stuff on Castaneda on the site newage frauds and plastic shamans : www.newagefraud.org/

That New Age Fraud site is excellent.

Note: It is run by Native Americans. Dont go there to correspond unless you are prepared to be honest, be real, and be respectful.

Two, it would probably be a matter of courtesy to ask permission before quoting any material from that site.

I only suggest this because the Native Americans have had so much stolen from them --thier land, their children (kidnapped and sent away from families to government boarding schools), their health, theiri artistic and spiritual heritages--the latter misrepresented and then marketed by opportunists like Castanenda and ilk.

One way to redress this cycle of abuse is always, when correspondaning with Native American discussion venues, check with the moderator, bring this up to the community for discussion and always, PM whoever you wish to quote and ask their permission.

If they prefer not to be quoted elsewhere than on their own site--honor that.

Here is another item:

[www.metafilter.com]

yeah, the simplicity of the New Age Fraud shaman site is good. They cut to the chase.

Theses frauds are mainly out to get lots of money out of middle-aged people in a weekend.
That's it.

and of course, they often want to get sex out of (some of) them too.

Money, power, sex.

Most of these groups fit into this pattern. Like Scarface...

To try to hide this, they bamboozle you with New Age bullshit of a million colors.

This article describes how this is done.

[cyberpaths.blogspot.com]

No magic at all. It is mere technique and careful selection of targets.

point well taken, corboy. thank you.