Sorcerer's Apprentice, my life with Carlos Castaneda
Amy Wallace's book is an excellently written, honest and revealing account of her years with Carlos Castaneda.
Castaneda has had a tremendous influence on a generation of students in the western world, on the hippy scene of the 60's and early 70's and on seekers of spiritual achievement and freedom in general.
The reason why we discuss this book about Castaneda's life on this Wiki is not because his teachings represent a contribution to scientific thinking about the present state of humanity, for they don't, but rather that Castaneda's followers, like groups of followers of so many guru's and spiritual teachers, have demonstrated a very stereotyped type of group behaviour that shows us a number of propensities in human - social - behaviour that also form the basis for humanity's religious attitudes and habits world-wide. Since religions form an important part of the present day make up of humanity and since it is shown on this Wiki that behaviour towards religions will show tremendous shifts by the time Point Omega will start to emerge, understanding the social behavioural reflexes around gurus and spiritual groups can be of great help.
Amy Wallace, as a seasoned and gifted writer, has laid bare in this book her own adventures as one of Castaneda's mistresses as well as the mechanisms ruling the group life around this master. All participants of such a group have more or less broken loose from the anchors of established society and together create a novel type of social structure and fabric with their own rules and habits. More often than not such groups, forming around a teacher, in spite of their initial ideals, end up in a strongly hierarchical structure in which the guru is treated as all-powerful and infallible, as a super-macho dictator or a God.
When searching the spiritual literature of the last decades of the previous century and the New Age movements with growth philosophies, one can easily trace similar structures and mechanisms as described by Amy Wallace in the Castaneda clan. In general the teachers end up as self-proclaimed super-heroes with superior powers and capacities and with pretended insight in how seekers can be directed and led to greater wisdom, spiritual achievement and happiness. The followers on the contrary, instead of finding the sought after wisdom and happiness, mostly end up as highly dependent subordinates of the master, often loosing their ability to function in ordinary society and thus being effectively "trapped" in the movement of the teacher who tends to exploit them in a most cynical and abusive way, from sexual slavery to being stripped naked of all one's assets.
In these pages we will not go into the details of what Amy Wallace has been describing, because these are factual accounts of what happened and we can add nothing factual to her reports. What we will do here instead is pointing out some of the mechanisms that are typically responsible for those patterns to emerge and develop and that we can find back in almost all of such teacher - follower groups. Subsequently we will explain what typical mistakes and misconceptions are at the basis of such developments, what fallacies such power structures depend and rely on. And we will explain which parts of the insights as presented on this Wiki, have evidently been missing with the people who form such groups of devotees, insights that could serve as inoculations against becoming the victim of such collective delusional structures of slavery and dependence.
The author of this page has himself been attending a number of training camps of Andrew Cohen, who has established himself as a modern spiritual teacher and also has assembled a specific group of followers, "students", around him. Whereas in the initial years of his teaching, Andrew Cohen in general produced an unhappy and neurotic attitude in his students, as perceived by onlookers from the outside, in more recent years the psychological condition, resilience and stability of his followers seems to have been steered in a more healthy direction. That indicates that the more recent methods and approaches in Cohen's organization (............................) are more and more supportive of inducing healthy processes of growth and development in his students. Nevertheless, in the yearly retreats of some weeks at a time, it could be observed that Cohen utilized the same old tricks of internal intelligence networks, trust and treason, reward and punishment, status and hierarchies, to keep the followers under severe control, thus increasing an almost irreversable dependence on the master.
For those interested, there is an also a very well written record by Andrew Cohen's own mother of these group-psychological processes of dependence and subjugation. In the early years of Cohen's teaching, his mother, Luna Tarlo, stayed in his communes for some years and had a difficult time to wrestle herself loose from the clutches of the all repressive power structures.
The general patterns that can be discerned almost every time such a movement emerges around some sort of Guru, have been described in a very professional scientific way by
