Cleargreen

To this day, Cleargreen lies about Castaneda’s death and the missing women. The loathsome, despicable deception Cleargreen has engaged in and doubled down on ever since Castaneda died his mundane death involves promulgating a blizzard of obfuscating falsehoods about the disappearance and likely suicides of five of its highest profile former shareholders. This includes two of the three Witches–Florinda and Taisha–they have continued to claim are still alive, and for awhile asserted were somehow guiding and advising their efforts.

Their silence regarding the facts they know about where the women went and their transparently bullshit stories about what happened, all just to avoid damaging the “brand,” have certainly been deeply hurtful to the families of those women, and to those of us who also loved and cared about them, depriving them of any sense of closure. These ongoing deceptions have also helped turn the whole Castaneda enterprise into one of the most scandalous and reprehensible cult coverups of all time.

-Richard Jennings (former Castaneda student)

Background on Cleargreen and its Lies

Where to begin? Sure, Cleargreen, Inc., is the business entity established by Carlos Castaneda that sought to market and sell bogus techniques for following the path of a mythical, long debunked lineage of “ancient sorcerers” that had supposedly succeeded in transcending death by amassing enough energy to leave this plane of existence bodily and travel permanently in other realms of reality. Sounds insane when one puts it that way, but that made it no less appealing as a goal for longtime seekers of “real magic” and those that felt there just had to be “something more” to life than the commonly accepted wisdom.

It was no less crazy as a pitch when Carlos Castaneda was alive, but his decades of crafting intriguing and, for some, believable tales, as well as his charismatic personality and apparent conviction that he and his lineage’s philosophy held the answers to everything somehow made it engaging for those of us who felt “lucky” enough to have tracked him down and be learning these supposed ancient techniques literally at his feet.

Nonetheless, the words of Tensegrity huckster numero uno, Hollywood writer Bruce Wagner, have certainly not worn well over these past two and half decades. As David Worrell noted in a piece he wrote for this site in 1999, Bruce’s 1994 Details magazine story about Castaneda and “the Witches”–the mainstream breakthrough story that led me and many others to learn for the first time about the existence of other living disciples of don Juan who had written books about their supposed experiences (Florinda and Taisha), thereby giving a huge credibility boost to Castaneda’s solo shamanic apprenticeship claims–included the following assertion about Castaneda:

“After thirty years, there is still no price on his head. He has no interest in gurus or guruism; there will be no turbo Bentleys, no ranches of turbaned devotees, no guest-edit of Paris Vogue. There will be no Castaneda Institute, no Center for Advanced Sorcery Studies, no Academy of Dreaming–no infomercials, mushrooms, or Tantric sex. There will be no biographies and there will be no scandals. When he’s invited to lecture, Castaneda receives no fee and offers to pay his travel fare. The gate is usually a few dollars, to cover rental of the hall. All that is asked of attendees is their total attention.”

Castaneda himself clearly had other ideas when he had his agent Tracy Kramer incorporate Toltec Artists in 1992 and then set up Cleargreen, Inc., in June 1995, with the immediate goal, at that point, of producing his own three-week Tensegrity workshop, rather than relying on other entities, like the Omega Institute, to host and produce it (and take much of the revenue) for him. Cleargreen then set up shop alongside Toltec Artists at 3122 Santa Monica Blvd., Suite 300, Santa Monica, 90404, and a week later Talia Bey, soon to become President of Cleargreen, issued the organization’s first announcement, about the Culver City three-week workshop where I was to first meet Castaneda, under the dba name “Chacmool Center.”

So Castaneda did set up Cleargreen to produce the Tensegrity workshops that followed, around the world, giving employment to the many women and handful of men in his inner circle, and then used the same entity to publish some of his later writings as well as to market Tensegrity videos (produced by Bruce Wagner) and T-shirts.

When Castaneda died on April 27, 1998, and Cleargreen President Talia Bey (as well as Cleargreen shareholders/employees Florinda Donner-Grau, Taisha Abelar, Nury Alexander and Kylie Lundahl) left town to fulfill their apparent mutual suicide pact, titular leadership of the group fell to former Chacmool and Tensegrity video co-star Renata (“Reni”) Murez (née Alexis Burzynski), who had been Cleargreen’s designated corporate Secretary. She was promoted to President, receiving direction and counsel for the next year or so from lone remaining Witch Carol Tiggs, as well as PR support from Bruce (and me, too, at least for several months after Castaneda died).

After Castaneda’s Death

According to Amy’s recollection of what Kylie told her in Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Castaneda insisted before he died that he didn’t care if Cleargreen continued or not. Nonetheless, for all these years after, Cleargreen under Reni continued to market and sell Tensegrity workshops and events, even virtual ones during Covid. They also continued to make up new movements and supposed practices of the ancient sorcerers, running endless less-than-inspired variations on Castaneda’s con, albeit without his public stature and salesmanship.

So yeah, they sell (or sold–for more on their current minimal level of activity, see the info gleaned from their current website and remaining social media accounts below) transparent bullcrap and made some money off it, enough to still support some members of Castaneda’s former entourage, although income reportedly declined so steeply in the months following Dear Leader’s passing (and the establishment of Sustained Action), Reni had to terminate a number of staff and move the operation to less pricey office space in late 1999. Nonetheless, per Nyei’s boast in a YouTube interview with “Guru Viking,” by 2020 the group had “certified” over 150 Tensegrity instructors (caching!).

Cleargreen’s greatest misdeed, however, is not the New Age commercialism it traffics in, like so many other “spiritual” and self help enterprises with sketchy or blatantly bogus backstories. No, the loathsome and despicable deception Cleargreen has engaged in and doubled down on ever since Castaneda died his mundane death involves promulgating a blizzard of obfuscating falsehoods about the disappearance and likely suicides of five of its highest profile former shareholders. This includes two of the three Witches–Florinda and Taisha–they have continued to claim are still alive, and for awhile asserted were somehow guiding and advising their efforts (Lanham Act claim regarding false advertising anyone?).

Their silence regarding the facts they know about where the women went and their transparently bullshit stories about what happened, all just to avoid damaging the “brand,” have certainly been deeply hurtful to the families of those women, and to those of us who also loved and cared about them, depriving them of any sense of closure. These ongoing deceptions have also helped turn the whole Castaneda enterprise into one of the most scandalous and reprehensible cult coverups of all time.

For this reason, the spotlight on Cleargreen’s shameful, self serving lies will remain at full beam here on Sustained Action. For more detailed information in this regard, the videos, quotes and links below, to other pages on this site, contain many of the organization’s misleading and downright false statements in releases that immediately followed Castaneda’s passing and the women’s disappearance, as well as responses to those statements from Sustained Action contributors. Below is also a summary of the current status of Cleargreen as a California general stock corporation and its minimal activity these past two years as compared to its operations over the first two decades following Castaneda’s death.

In the coming months we expect to add other stories about post-Castaneda workshops and Tensegrity events. The story about Cleargreen’s big loss in the copyright and trademark lawsuit filed against it by two former Cleargreen members and Tensegrity teachers is here. Aerin Alexander and Miles Reid decided in 2010 they could do better marketing and selling the “wisdom of the ancient sorcerers” on their own, and the federal district court in California gave them a big win, declaring Tensegrity movements to be in the public domain (i.e., non-copyrightable). The court’s decision on Miles and Aerin’s summary judgment motion also ruled that Cleargreen’s and Laugun Productions’ trademarks on Tensegrity and Magical Passes were unenforceable.

When you claim, as Castaneda did, that your “magical passes” were movements discovered and practiced by ancient sorcerers going back thousands of years, there’s no way to copyright those movements. As the piece about the lawsuit and its aftermath relates, it appears that as of 2024, Miles Reid, with an active workshop schedule offering movements he claimed to have learned from Castaneda, has supplanted Cleargreen as the primary source of ersatz “margical passes of the sorcerers of ancient Mexico.”

I. Cleargreen Video & Audio Lies: Nyei and Reni Respond to Questions about the Missing Witches and Castaneda’s Death

“Taisha and Florida made the decision at that time that it’s time for them to leave the public eye.  it’s time for them to leave where they were living and all that. . . .  They’re around somewhere. They’re not directly involved with us. . . . . They’re traveling, they’re dreaming. When they left they took all sorts of travel gear. . . . . Carol Tiggs chose to stay and help a second ring of beings . . ..”

Nyei claims Castaneda burned with the “fire from within” and just left a little “residue” that was subsequently cremated. (She admits she wasn’t personally a witness, so she’s apparently repeating what Carol told her and the others at the time.)

II. Cleargreen Lies from the Current Website (as of 8/18/24)

Fellow Travelers of Awareness: Carlos Castaneda, Carol Tiggs, Taisha Abelar and Florinda Donner-Grau

Along with his cohorts, women who undertook the same shamanic journey with don Juan Matus as himself, Dr. Castaneda founded Cleargreen, an organization that promotes Tensegrity®. . . . . He and his cohorts — Carol Tiggs, Taisha Abelar and Florinda Donner-Grau — pulled together what they were individually taught, succeeding in taking it out of their ritualistic and secretive origins, transforming it into generic, modernized versions capable of being utilized by anyone. Castaneda called this new form; Tensegrity®.

Through the Official Tensegrity® Certification program, you will have access to principles, teachings and tools, being taught to you through direct apprentices of Carlos Castaneda and his cohorts, providing a connection and experience far greater than can be conveyed through the books alone. You will join your cohorts on a modern day apprenticeship path.

As one scans through the site, though, it’s apparent that Cleargreen’s activity has slowed considerably, especially since 2022. The five levels of Tensegrity Certification offered at one time–from Level 1 “Navigating Past Fear” to Level 5, a 24-month course toward “Advanced Shamanic Dreaming” certification–are all marked with an electronic stamp icon: “Enrollment is Closed.” No reason or further information is given, but there is still an option to sign up for an email newsletter at the bottom of the page. The last blog entry too, “The Significance of Self Importance,” is over two years old, dated May 19, 2022.

Fear not, however, as the apparently burned out husk that still calls itself Cleargreen (albeit having changed their web domain at some point to Castaneda.com) is offering a six-week canned video course on “Successfully Dealing with the Petty Tyrants in Your Life,” videos featuring Reni Murez, for the low-low price of $597. You can spend less money but lose an extra week of your life watching videos if you take the only other training still on offer–a seven-week video course, again taught by Reni, claiming to impart the “7 Essential Principles of Personal Power.” This one’s a relative bargain at $397.

Their social media presence has also dwindled to very little. The Instagram profile they once had up was deleted. Their Twitter/X account hasn’t posted since 2019. They joined Twitter in April 2011–“Official site for Tensegrity® & Theater of Infinity®: Movement, self-review, dreaming & inner silence to integrate self & soul–developed by Carlos Castaneda”–but the last post there was April 4, 2019. The last big promotion was a March 2019 ad for a 10-day “All-inclusive Deep Exploration into a Dimensional Portal of Inca Shamanism” (now what did any of them know about Inca Shamanism?) in Machu Pichu. They also still have a page on Facebook, with 5K followers, but the last post there is dated June 21, 2022.

Digging down into that page a little, one can watch video testimonials posted in November 2021 from three Tensegrity Certification instructees sharing their experiences with Reni. Two of those, a woman in Italy and an American man living in Northern Arizona, had only recently enrolled in the program. The third, a German man, was then on Level 4–“Impeccability and Leadership.” Hmm, I wonder if he managed to make it to the end of Level 5 before “Enrollment is Closed”?

III. Cleargreen Corporate Status and Staff

As best I can determine from online information sources, Cleargreen currently has one, or maybe two, remaining staff: Reni, and a possible office administrator/event organizer. It is also still in good standing as a California general stock corporation per the California Secretary of State’s database, and Thomas Cajka, who did accounting work for Castaneda in his lifetime, is still listed as the agent for service of process at his El Segundo, CA, office.

By contrast, the list of Cleargreen, Inc.’s shareholders of record as of April 1, 1998, and their respective number of shares (which gives a pretty good idea of the pecking order in the Castaneda cult’s hierarchy when he was right at death’s door) was as follows:

I note that this listing reflected the grant of shares to two people who weren’t even on the list for the prior quarter: Maria Guadalupe Blanco and Heiko Hippen. This should give some idea of the dynamic and mercurial nature of the hierarchy. And some people who had previously been high in Cleargreen’s ranks, like Florinda’s supposed daughter, the one-time Orange Scout Tycho Thal, was nowhere on the list, since she had been kicked out of the group and given a small settlement months earlier. Before she was expelled, Tycho had a share the same size as Nyei, Reni and Kylie. Others, like Amy Wallace, Rosa Coll, Rylin Demaris and Lance Billitzer, often worked at the Cleargreen office, and staffed workshops, but were not Cleargreen shareholders.

With five of these shareholders missing (and presumed dead; one positively identified as dead years later) as of May 1998, Cleargreen was down to 11 shareholders. Fabricio Magaldi, Cleargreen’s CFO since soon after its founding, formerly Humberto Fontanez (and formerly Talia’s boyfriend), had some kind of falling out with Carol in the days immediately after Castaneda’s death, and has never been heard from again in Los Angeles per any reliable reports. So we’re now down to 10. Carol quit appearing at workshops and played an increasingly small role in the organization after a year or two, so that left nine active employee/shareholders. By fall of 1999, Reni had taken others off the payroll due to declining revenues.

In 2010, Aerin Alexander (formerly Maria Guadalupe Blanco on the shareholder list above) went out on her own with former “Element” Miles Reid (then her husband) to teach their own version of Tensegrity. When Cleargreen sent letters to potential participants in Aerin and Miles’s workshops, and otherwise challenged their right to offer training on Tensegrity style movements, Aerin and Miles filed suit against Cleargreen. As summarized here, Cleargreen lost badly in that case when the federal district court in California ruled there was no copyright or trademark protection for Tensegrity.

Bruce Wagner remained a shill for the organization, managing to publish a couple more disingenuous articles glorifying Castaneda and the Witches without accurately identifying his role in this whole thing. (Keep in mind he controls the movie and T.V. rights to Castaneda’s books under Carlos’s will.) He also appeared in promotional material and videos for workshops through 2018 and was a featured speaker at Cleargreen’s November 2017 workshop in Soriano nel Cimino, Viterbo, Italy. He certainly didn’t work there as an active employee, though, after 1998.

Meanwhile, former Chacmool and self-described “Castaneda apprentice and scribe” Nyei Murez, who was probably the longest standing Cleargreen employee besides Reni, went on “sabbatical” from the company in September 2018 and now offers herself as some kind of spiritual and creative “life coach.” Well, her full job title/description on LinkedIn is: “Creative Expression and Sound Journey Facilitator, Flutist, Sound Dreamer.” As a one-time HR professional, I don’t remember any of my companies having many openings for that. Her side, side hustle is something called Creation in Flow, offering “[i]ndividual and group coaching for via [sic] movement, breath, and sound journeys for writers, songwriters, musicians, composers, visual artists, and all creators!”

IV. Castaneda on Cleargreen

Castaneda responded to a question about his “real relationship” with the corporation and its affiliated entities in a February 1997 interview for Uno Mismo, translated and republished on the Cleargreen website: “Cleargreen is a corporation that has great affinity with our work, as are Laugan Productions and Toltec Artists.”

Castaneda ruminated aloud about his creation of Cleargreen at the February 22, 1997, Night Session: “Cleargreen supports a lot of people. A lot of people are eating on Cleargreen. We intend it to be an entity with a certain force around it and a certain configuration. But Talia is worried about contracts and subcontracts,” then he imitated Talia’s nasal mumble, “‘And there are these taxes.’ And I don’t even have a team together. This is all premature.”

V. Sample Cleargreen Lies from Years of Announcements & Communications

Response to Castaneda’s death announcement finally appearing in the Los Angeles Times in June 1998:

“For don Juan, the warrior was a being who lived a life filled to the brim with exploring the endless possibilities for human awareness that ordinarily remain untapped, a being who embarks, when the time comes, on a definitive journey of awareness, “crossing over to total freedom.” . . . . At the moment of crossing, the body in its entirety is kindled with knowledge. Every cell at once becomes aware of itself and also aware of the totality of the body.” Carlos Castaneda left the world the same way that his teacher, don Juan Matus did: with full awareness. The cognition of our world of everyday life does not provide for a description of a phenomenon such as this. So in keeping with the terms of legalities and record keeping that the world of everyday life requires, Carlos Castaneda was declared to have died.

Cleargreen “Magical Passes Practitioners’ Log” posted on website repeats statement February 1999 and read by Rylin at the Pomona workshop: “The three female students of don Juan would like us to read the following to you: The three female students of don Juan said it’s fabulous to see what these practitioners, these apprentices are doing. You are apprentices, if you choose to be.”

April 17, 1999, Cleargreen Bulletin responds to hand-selected questions. The final question & response are: “Why did the female students of don Juan stay here? Are they going to appear at workshops?” Response: “The three female students of don Juan Matus are here to supervise the efforts of the Tensegrity instructors . . .. For the moment, they are not going to appear personally at the workshops because they want this dream to take wings. For Carlos Castaneda and for them, it is a dream in which a group of practitioners is focused not on a person or a group of persons, but on the abstract purpose of freedom of perception.”

In response to the Carol Tiggs Chronology here: “Carol Tiggs left, and was gone for ten years, anchored somewhere else in infinity. During those ten years, a projection of Carol Tiggs would sometimes return here to live in the world we know. It took Carol Tiggs—the being who was gone—ten years to return here, to reintegrate her energy body (dreaming body) and her physical body into one being.”

“The Nagual told us: The only enterprise for a warrior is freedom. So we are not tied to any policy of making money nor to any other policy. . . .. At present, the opening to present the magical passes and bring to light all that Carlos Castaneda taught us–tasks we have only begun to undertake–is through seminars about the magical passes. To present a seminar entails some expenses.”

From a 1997 interview with Carol, Florinda and Taisha for Mas Alla that Cleargreen translated and posted on its website: “The old nagual and his cohorts died an alternative death, which is possible for any one of us, if we have the necessary discipline. All we can tell you is that the old nagual and his people lived life professionally, meaning that they were responsible for all their acts, even the most minute ones, because they were extremely aware of everything they did. Under such conditions, to die an alternative death is not such a farfetched possibility.”

“The movements of Tensegrity are very old and have been tested perhaps over thousands of years. They are ready for use. . . . . The Mexican sorcerers of antiquity who discovered them stated that they bring life through oxygen and circulation to the most recondite parts of the body which are perhaps never moved under ordinary circumstances.”

VI. Historical Cleargreen Lies in Bulletins, and SA Responses

Response to Cleargreen Bulletin of July 2, 1999

Cleargreen’s Statement ‘Responding’ to Questions about Carol Tiggs

Response to Cleargreen’s Dreaming Workshops Annoucement

Controversy in Mexico: Questions Asked and Unanswered

A Conversation with Cleargreen, by VS

VII. Other Posts regarding Cleargreen Lies

Tensegrity Copyright & Trademark Litigation

Compassion for the Remaining Staff at Cleargreen: The Difficulties of Emerging from a Cult

Amy Wallace Answers Questions

Blue Scout Chronology

Eagle’s Trust Agreement Summarized

FAQ

Florinda Donner Chronology

Taisha Abelar Chronology

©️ 2024 by Richard Jennings, all rights reserved