Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan’s Teachings

You didn’t have this knowledge before, now you do. I have revealed it to you, but it doesn’t make a bit of difference, because you don’t have enough personal power to utilize my revelation. Yet if you did have enough power, my words alone would serve as the means for you to round up the totality of yourself and to get the crucial part of it out of the boundaries in which it is contained.

Your body is the boundary I’m talking about. One can get out of it. We are a feeling, an awareness encased here. We are luminous beings and for a luminous being only personal power matters.

* * *

Dreaming entails cultivating a peculiar control over one’s dreams to the extent that the experiences undergone in them and those lived in one’s waking hours acquire the same pragmatic valence. The sorcerers’ allegation is that under the impact of dreaming the ordinary criteria to differentiate a dream from reality becomes inoperative.

The early stage of the preparatory facet, called setting up dreaming , consists of a deadly game that one’s mind plays with itself. Some part of yourself is going to do everything it can to prevent the fulfillment of your task.

As soon as the sight of your hands begins to dissolve or change into something else, you have to shift your view from your hands to any other element in the surroundings of your dream.

Something in us is threatened by our activities in dreaming . Each warrior has his own way of dreaming . Each way is different. The only thing which we all have in common is that we play tricks in order to force ourselves to abandon the quest. The counter-measure is to persist in spite of all the barriers and disappointments.

The sorcerers’ explanation of how to select a topic for dreaming , is that a warrior chooses the topic by deliberately holding an image in his mind while he shuts off his internal dialogue. If he is capable of not talking to himself for a moment and then holds the image or the thought of what he wants in dreaming , even if only for an instant, then the desired topic will come to him.

* * *

If one is to succeed in anything, the success must come gently, with a great deal of effort but with no stress or obsession.

* * *

You must learn how to stop your internal dialogue at will. At the beginning of our association I delineated another procedure: walking for long stretches without focusing the eyes on anything. My recommendation was to not look at anything directly but, by slightly crossing the eyes, to keep a peripheral view of everything that presented itself to the eyes. If one keeps one’s unfocused eyes fixed at a point just above the horizon, it is possible to notice, at once, everything in almost the total 180-degree range in front of one’s eyes. That exercise is the only way of shutting off the internal dialogue.

The internal dialogue is what grounds us. The world is such and such or so and so, only because we talk to ourselves about its being such and such or so and so. The passageway into the world of sorcerers opens up after the warrior has learned to shut off the internal dialogue.

To change our idea of the world is the crux of sorcery, and stopping the internal dialogue is the only way to accomplish it. The rest is just padding. Nothing of what we do, with the exception of stopping the internal dialogue, can by itself change anything in us, or in our idea of the world. The provision is, of course, that that change should not be deranged. Therefore a teacher doesn’t clamp down on his apprentice. That would only breed obsession and morbidity.

* * *

A warrior takes his lot, whatever it may be, and accepts it in ultimate humbleness. He accepts in humbleness what he is, not as grounds for regret but as a living challenge.

The humbleness of a warrior is not the humbleness of a beggar. The warrior lowers his head to no one, but at the same time, he doesn’t permit anyone to lower his head to him. I know only the humbleness of a warrior, and that will never permit me to be anyone’s master.

* * *

Things are real only after one has learned to agree on their realness.

* * *

You’re afraid of me, you say, of the awesomeness of my knowledge, that there is no solace for you, no haven to go to. I represent the warrior’s freedom. Solace, haven, fear, all of them are moods that you have learned without ever questioning their value.

* * *

Seeing is a special capacity that one can develop which allows one to apprehend the ultimate nature of things.

* * *

The world had to conform to its description; that is, the description reflects itself. We have learned to relate ourselves to our description of the world in terms of what sorcerers call habits or intentionality, that is, the property of human consciousness whereby an object is referred to, or is intended.

Persist in acting like a warrior. The rest comes of itself and by itself. The rest is knowledge and power. Men of knowledge have both. And yet none of them could tell how they got to have them, except that they had kept on acting like warriors and at a given moment everything changed. A warrior must be calm and collected and must never lose his grip.

* * *

The flaw with words is that they always force us to feel enlightened, but when we turn around to face the world they always fail us and we end up facing the world as we always have, without enlightenment. For this reason, a sorcerer seeks to act rather than to talk and to this effect he gets a new description of the world–a new description where talking is not that important, and where new acts have new reflections.

We are luminous beings and everything we are or everything we feel shows in our fibers. Humans have a brightness peculiar only to them. That’s the only way to tell them apart from other luminous living beings.

* * *

Seeing happens only when the warrior is capable of stopping the internal dialogue.

* * *

A warrior starts off with the certainty that his spirit is off balance; then by living in full control and awareness, but without hurry or compulsion, he does his ultimate best to gain this balance. In your case, as in the case of every man, your imbalance is due to the sum total of all your actions.

There is nothing in this world that a warrior cannot account for. You see, a warrior considers himself already dead, so there is nothing for him to lose. The worst has already happened to him, therefore he’s clear and calm; judging him by his acts or by his words, one would never suspect that he has witnessed everything.

Knowledge is frightening, but if a warrior accepts the frightening nature of knowledge he cancels out its awesomeness. Knowledge is a most peculiar affair, especially for a warrior. Knowledge for a warrior is something that comes at once, engulfs him, and passes on.

* * *

I urge you to feel at ease and confident and trust your personal power.

* * *

Any thought that one holds in mind in a state of silence is properly a command, since there are no other thoughts to compete with it.

* * *

Feelings are the gauge that assesses the state of being of the subject you are seeing .

* * *

We are dealing with that immensity out there. To turn that magnificence out there into reasonableness doesn’t do anything for you. Here, surrounding us, is eternity itself. To engage in reducing it to a manageable nonsense is petty and outright disastrous.

Whenever the internal dialogue stops, the world collapses and extraordinary facets of ourselves surface, as though they had been kept heavily guarded by our words. You are like you are, because you tell yourself that you are that way. You are too heavy and self-important. Let go!

* * *

I’m going to begin telling you about the “double” or the “Other.” The double is the sorcerer himself developed thru his dreaming . The double is an act of power to a sorcerer but only a tale of power to you. The double is the self; that explanation should suffice. For a sorcerer who sees , the double is brighter.

Don’t take things so seriously. I’ve told you time and time again that the world is unfathomable, and so are we, and so is every being that exists in this world. It is impossible, therefore, to reason out the double.

A sorcerer can double up, that’s all one can say. No sorcerer knows where his Other is. A sorcerer has no notion that he is in two places at once. To be aware of that would be the equivalent of facing his double, and the sorcerer that finds himself face to face with himself is a dead sorcerer. That is the rule. That is the way power has set things up. No one knows why.