Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan’s Teachings

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There are entities which are in the world, and which act on people. They are here, around us at all times. In daylight, however, it is more difficult to perceive them, simply because the world is familiar to us, and that which is familiar takes precedence. In the darkness, on the other hand, everything is equally strange and very few things take precedence, so we are more susceptible to those entities at night.

There is only one way to learn, and that way is to get down to business. To only talk about power is useless. If you want to know what power is, and if you want to stress it you must tackle everything yourself.

The road to knowledge and power is very difficult and very long. Little by little you are plugging up all your points of drainage. You don’t have to be deliberate about it, because power always finds a way. Take me as an example. I didn’t know I was storing power when I first began to learn the ways of a warrior. Just like you, I thought I wasn’t doing anything in particular, but that was not so. Power has the peculiarity of being unnoticeable when it is being stored.

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You must stretch your body many times during the day. The more times the better, but only after a long period of work or a long period of rest.

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Your body needs fright. It likes it. Your body needs the darkness and the wind. Your body now knows the gait of power and can’t wait to try it.

I’ve told you that the secret of a strong body is not in what you do to it but what you don’t do. Now it is time for you not to do what you always do.

Practice not-doing by looking at a tree or bush; fix your attention not on the leaves but on the shadows of the leaves. Running in the darkness does not have to be spurred by fear but can be a very natural reaction of a jubilant body that knows how to not-do.

To not-do what you know how to do is the key to power. In the case of looking at a tree or bush, what you know how to do is to focus immediately on the foliage. The shadows of the leaves or the spaces in between the leaves are never your concern. Start focusing on the shadows of the leaves on one single branch and then eventually work your way to the whole tree, and don’t let your eyes go back to the leaves, because the first deliberate step to storing personal power is to allow the body to not-do. The body likes things like this. You can stop the world using this technique. Once you have succeeded, you must work as if nothing has happened to you and don’t mention or even be concerned with any of the events you have experienced.

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You should not have remorse for anything you have done, because to isolate one’s acts as being mean, or ugly, or evil is to place an unwarranted importance on the self. Well-being is a condition one has to groom, a condition one has to become acquainted with in order to seek it. You don’t know what well-being is, because you have never experienced it. Well-being is an achievement one has to deliberately seek.

In order to accomplish the feat of making yourself miserable you have to work in a most intense fashion. It is absurd you have never realized you could work just the same in making yourself complete and strong. The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.

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Today you must be perfectly calm and restored, because you are going to learn not-doing in spite of the fact that there is no way to talk about it, because it is the body that does it.

That rock over there is a rock because of doing. You say that you don’t understand what I mean. Your saying that is doing. Doing is what makes that rock a rock and that bush a bush. Doing is what makes you yourself and me myself. Take that rock for instance. To look at it is doing , but to see it is not-doing. You say my words are not making sense to you. Oh yes they do. But you are convinced that they don’t because that is your doing. That is the way you act towards me and the world.

That rock is a rock because of all the things you know how to do to it. I call that doing. A man of knowledge, for instance, knows that the rock is a rock only because of doing , so if he doesn’t want the rock to be a rock all he has to do is not-doing.

The world is the world because you know the doing involved in making it so. If you didn’t know its doing , the world would be different. Without that certain doing there would be nothing familiar in the surroundings. This is a pebble because you know the doing involved in making it into a pebble. Now, in order to stop the world you must stop doing. In the case of this little rock, the first thing which doing does to it is to shrink it to this size. So the proper thing to do, which a warrior does if he wants to stop the world , is to enlarge a little rock, or any other thing, by not-doing.

Look at the holes and depressions in the pebble and try to pick out the minute detail in them. If you can pick out the detail, the holes and depressions will disappear and you will understand what not-doing means.

Doing makes you separate the pebble from the larger boulder. If you want to learn not-doing , let’s say that you have to join them. See the small shadow that the pebble cast on the boulder. It is not a shadow but a glue which binds them together. A warrior can tell all kinds of things from the shadows.

A warrior always tries to affect the force of doing by changing it into not-doing . Doing would be to leave the pebble lying around because it is merely a small rock. Not-doing would be to proceed with that pebble as if it were something far beyond a mere rock.

Is all this true? To say yes or no to that question is doing. But since you are learning not-doing I have to tell you that it really doesn’t matter whether or not all this is true. It is here that a warrior has a point of advantage over the average man.

An average man cares that things are either true or false, but a warrior doesn’t. An average man proceeds in a specific way with things that he knows are true, and in a different way with things that he knows are not true. If things are said to be true, he acts and believes in what he does. But if things are said to be untrue, he doesn’t care to act, or he doesn’t believe in what he does. A warrior, on the other hand, acts in both instances. If things are said to be true, he would act in order to do doing . If things are said to be untrue, he still would act in order to do not-doing . Not-doing is only for very strong warriors.

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There are infinite numbers of lines that join us to things. They are real lines. You can feel them. The most difficult part about the warrior’s way is to realize that the world is a feeling. When one is not-doing , one is feeling the world, and one feels the world through its lines.

Not-doing is very simple but very difficult. It is not a matter of understanding but of mastering it. Seeing , of course, is the final accomplishment of a man of knowledge, and seeing is attained only when one has stopped the world through the technique of not-doing .

Shadows are peculiar affairs. Look at the shadow of that boulder. The shadow is the boulder, and yet it isn’t. To observe the boulder in order to know what the boulder is, is doing , but to observe its shadow is not-doing .

Shadows are like doors, the doors of not-doing . A man of knowledge, for example, can tell the innermost feelings of men by watching their shadows. You may say that there is movement in them, or you may say that the lines of the world are shown in them, or you may say that feelings come from them. To believe that shadows are just shadows is doing. That belief is somehow stupid. Think about it this way: there is so much more to everything in the world that obviously there must be more to shadows too. After all, what makes them shadows is merely our doing.