Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan’s Teachings

The self dreams the double. Once it has learned to dream the double, the self arrives at this weird crossroad and a moment comes when one realizes that it is the double who dreams the self. Your double is dreaming you. No one knows how it happens. We only know that it does happen. That’s the mystery of us as luminous beings. You can awaken in either one.

Storing sufficient personal power will enable you to turn your will into a functioning unit. As I’ve said, will is a force that emanates from the umbilical region through an unseen opening below the navel, an opening called the gap . Will is cultivated only by sorcerers and gives them the capacity to perform extraordinary acts.

The will develops in a warrior in spite of every opposition of the reason. You are the one who’s learning, therefore you yourself must claim knowledge as power. You must find out whether or not your will works. You must prove to yourself that you are in the position to claim knowledge as power. In other words, you yourself have to be convinced that you can exercise your will .

The body must be perfection before the will is a functioning unit.

* * *

You feel irked with yourself because you are so helpless, you say. There is nothing wrong with the feeling of being helpless. But to indulge in protesting and complaining is another matter.

* * *

What exactly is an ally? There is no way of saying, just as there is no way of saying what exactly a tree is. Just like in the case of a tree, the only way to know what an ally is, is by experiencing it.

Your reason cannot accept the possibility of such a thing to begin with. Fortunately, it is not the reason which puts ally together. It is the body. An ally is perceived in many degrees. Each of those perceptions is stored in one’s body. The sum of those pieces is the ally. I don’t know any other way of describing it.

Our reason is petty and it is always at odds with our body. This, of course, is only a way of talking, but the triumph of a man of knowledge is that he has joined the two together.

The ally is waiting for you, that’s for sure. It is right here, or there, or in any other place. The ally is waiting for you, just like death is waiting for you, everywhere and nowhere. It’s waiting for the same reason that death waits for you, because you were born. There is no possibility of explaining at this point what is meant by that. You must first experience the ally. You must perceive it in its full force.

The way one understands the ally is a personal matter. There’s no need to be confused. Confusion is a mood one enters into, but one can also get out of it. At this point there is no way of clarifying anything. Later we’ll consider these matters in detail. It’s up to your personal power, so work for impeccability.

I’ve told you that the true art of a warrior is to balance terror and wonder. Power can be met only with power. The crux of sorcery is the internal dialogue; that is the key to everything. When a warrior learns to stop it, everything becomes possible; the most farfetched schemes become attainable. We are a feeling and what we call our body is a cluster of luminous fibers that have awareness. As long as you think that you are a solid body you cannot conceive what I am talking about.

Warriors keep controlled and aloof. They don’t believe anything, but still act efficiently.

We are luminous beings. We are perceivers. We are an awareness; we are not objects; we have no solidity. We are boundless. The world of objects and solidity is a way of making our passage on earth convenient. It is only a description that was created to help us. We, or rather our reason , forget that the description is only a description and thus we entrap the totality of ourselves in a vicious circle from which we rarely emerge in our lifetime.

We are perceivers. The world that we perceive, though, was created by a description that was told to us since the moment we were born.

We, the luminous beings, are born with two rings of power, but we use only one to create the world. That ring, which is hooked very soon after we are born, is reason , and its companion is talking. Between the two they concoct and maintain the world. So, in essence, the world that your reason wants to sustain is the world created by a description and its dogmatic and inviolable rules, which the reason learns to accept and defend.

The secret of the luminous beings is that they have another ring of power which is never used, the will . The trick of the sorcerer is the same trick of the average man. Both have a description; one, the average man, upholds it with his reason ; the other, the sorcerer, upholds it with his will . Both descriptions have their rules and the rules are perceivable, but the advantage of the sorcerer is that will is more engulfing than reason . You must learn to let yourself perceive whether the description is upheld by your reason or by your will . That is the only way for you to use your daily world as a challenge and a vehicle to accumulate enough personal power in order to get to the totality of yourself.

Never dwell on past events except in reference. To emphasize them would mean to take away from the importance of what’s taking place now. A warrior cannot possibly afford to do that.

Only as a warrior can one withstand the path of knowledge. A warrior cannot complain about, or regret, anything. His life is an endless challenge, and challenges cannot possibly be good or bad. Challenges are simply challenges. As is always the case in the doings and not-doings of warriors, personal power is the only thing that matters. The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man takes everything either as a blessing or as a curse.

A warrior must be fluid and must shift harmoniously with the world around him, whether it is the world of reason , or the world of will . The most dangerous aspect of that shifting comes forth every time the warrior finds that the world is neither one nor the other. I was told that the only way to succeed in that crucial shifting was by proceeding in one’s actions as if one believed. In other words, the secret of a warrior is that he believes without believing. But obviously a warrior cannot just say he believes and let it go at that. That would be too easy. To just believe would exonerate him from examining his situation. A warrior, whenever he has to involve himself with believing, does it as a choice, as an expression of his innermost predilection. A warrior doesn’t believe, a warrior has to believe.

* * *

It is not so difficult to let the spirit of man flow and take over; to sustain it, however, is something that only a warrior can do.

* * *

Having to believe means that you accept the facts of something, consider all possibilities and possible outcomes, and then choose to believe in accordance with your innermost predilection. Believing is a cinch. Having to believe is something else. If you have to believe, you must use all of an event, account for all possibilities, and consider everything. Before deciding that you believe one way you must consider that it may well be another way.

* * *

A warrior, or any man for that matter, cannot possibly wish he were somewhere else; a warrior because he lives by challenge, an ordinary man because he doesn’t know where his death is going to find him.

* * *

Death is the indispensable ingredient in having to believe. Without the awareness of death everything is ordinary, trivial. It is only because death is stalking us that the world is an unfathomable mystery. Without an awareness of the presence of our death there is no power, no mystery.

Having to believe that the world is mysterious and unfathomable is the expression of a warrior’s innermost predilection. Without it he has nothing.

You are aware of everything only when you think you should be; the condition of a warrior, however, is to be aware of everything at all times.

* * *

Now it’s time to talk about the totality of oneself. Some of the things I am going to point out to you will probably never be clear. They are not supposed to be clear anyway. So don’t be embarrassed or discouraged. All of us are dumb creatures when we join the world of sorcery, and to join it doesn’t in any sense insure us that we will change. Some of us remain dumb until the very end. What I’m about to say is meant only to point out a direction.