Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan’s Teachings

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Everyone can see , and yet we choose not to remember what we see .

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With our attention we can hold the images of a dream in the same way we hold the images of the world. The art of the dreamer is the art of attention.

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Your reason is the demon that keeps you chained. You have to vanquish it if you want to achieve the realization of my teachings. The issue, therefore, has been how to vanquish your reason . By reason I don’t mean the capacity for comprehending, inferring or thinking, in an orderly, rational way. To me reason means attention.

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The core of our being is the act of perceiving, and the magic of our being is the act of awareness. Perception and awareness can be a single, functional, inextricable unit with two domains. The first one is the attention of the tonal ; that is to say, the capacity of average people to perceive and place their awareness on the ordinary world of everyday life: our first ring of power; our awesome but taken-for-granted ability to impart order to our perception of our daily world.

The second domain is the attention of the nagual ; the capacity to place our awareness on the nonordinary world. It’s our second ring of power , or the altogether portentous ability all of us have, but only sorcerers use, to impart order to the nonordinary world.

What I have struggled to vanquish, or rather suppress in you, is not your reason as the capacity for rational thought, but your attention of the tonal , or your awareness of the world of common sense. The daily world exists because we know how to hold its images; consequently, if one drops the attention needed to maintain those images, the world collapses.

Practice is what counts. Once you get your attention on the images of your dream, your attention is hooked for good. In the end you can hold the images of any dream.

Our first ring of power is engaged very early in our lives and we live under the impression that that is all there is to us. Our second ring of power , the attention of the nagual , remains hidden for the immense majority of us, and only at the moment of our death is it revealed to us. There is a pathway to reach it, however, which is available to every one of us, but which only sorcerers take, and that pathway is through dreaming . Dreaming is in essence the transformation of ordinary dreams into affairs involving volition. Dreamers , by engaging their attention of the nagual and focusing it on the items and events of their ordinary dreams, change those dreams into dreaming.

There are no procedures to arrive at the attention of the nagual , only pointers. Finding your hands in your dreams is the first pointer; then the exercise of paying attention is elongated to finding objects, looking for specific features, such as buildings, streets and so on. From there the jump is to dream about specific places at specific times of the day. The final stage is drawing the attention of the nagual to focus on the total self.

That final stage is usually ushered in by a dream that many of us have had at one time or another, in which one is looking at oneself sleeping in bed. By the time a sorcerer has had such a dream, his attention has been developed to such a degree that instead of waking himself up, as most of us would do in a similar situation, he turns on his heels and engages himself in activity, as if he were acting in the world of everyday life.

From that moment on there is a breakage, a division of sorts in the otherwise unified personality. The result of engaging the attention of the nagual and developing it to the height and sophistication of our daily attention of the world is the other self, an identical being as oneself, but made in dreaming .

There are no definite standard steps for reaching that double, as there are no definite steps for us to reach our daily awareness. We simply do it by practicing. In the act of engaging our attention of the nagual , we find the steps. Practice dreaming without letting your fears make it into an encumbering production.

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There is a crack between the worlds and it is more than a metaphor. It is rather the capacity to change levels of attention. Don’t try to reason it out. Act like a warrior and follow what I’ve told you.

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We choose only once. We choose either to be warriors or to be ordinary men. A second choice does not exist. Not on this earth.

The only freedom warriors have is to behave impeccably. Not only is impeccability freedom but it is the only way to scare away the human form.

The second attention, or the attention of the nagual , is reached only after warriors have swept the top of their tables, their islands of the tonal , clean. Reaching the second attention makes the two attentions into a single unit, and that unit is the totality of oneself.

Diligence in an impeccable life is the only way to lose the human form. Losing the human form is the essential requirement for unifying the two attentions.

The attention under the table is the key to everything sorcerers do. In order to reach that attention I have taught you dreaming .

Another way to learn how to do dreaming is by learning gazing. If you gaze at a pile of leaves for hours your thoughts get quiet. Without thoughts the attention of the tonal wanes and suddenly your second attention hooks onto the leaves and the leaves become something else. The moment when the second attention hooks onto something is called stopping the world .

The difficulty in gazing is to learn to quiet down the thoughts. Once you can stop the world you are a gazer. And the only way of stopping the world is by trying. Combine gazing at dry leaves and looking for our hands in dreaming . Once you have trapped your second attention with dry leaves, you do gazing and dreaming to enlarge it. And that’s all there is to gazing. All we need to do in order to trap our second attention is to try and try.

Once dreamers know how to stop the world by gazing at leaves, they can gaze at other things; and finally when the dreamers lose their form altogether, they can gaze at anything.

First after leaves, gaze at small plants. Small plants are very dangerous. Their power is concentrated; they have a very intense light and they feel when dreamers are gazing at them; they immediately move their light and shoot it at the gazer. Dreamers have to choose one kind of plant to gaze at.

Next gaze at trees. Dreamers also have a particular kind of tree to gaze at. Next gaze at moving, living creatures. Small insects are by far the best subject. Their mobility makes them innocuous to the gazer, the opposite of plants which draw their light directly from the earth.

The next step is to gaze at rocks. Rocks are very old and powerful and have a specific light which is rather greenish in contrast with the white light of plants and the yellowish light of mobile, living beings. Rocks do not open up easily to gazers, but it is worthwhile for gazers to persist because rocks have special secrets concealed in their core, secrets that can aid sorcerers in their dreaming .

A second series in the order of gazing is to gaze at cyclic phenomena: rain and fog. Gazers can focus their second attention on the rain itself and move with it, or focus it on the background and use the rain as a magnifying glass of sorts to reveal hidden features. Places of power or places to be avoided are found by gazing through rain. Places of power are yellowish and places to be avoided are intensely green.

The position of the body is of great importance while one is gazing. One has to sit on the ground on a soft mat of leaves, or on a cushion made out of natural fibers. The back has to be propped against a tree, or a stump, or a flat rock. The body has to be thoroughly relaxed. The eyes are never fixed on the object, in order to avoid tiring them. The gaze consists in scanning very slowly the object gazed at, going counterclockwise but without moving the head. The idea is to let your perception play without analyzing it.

The effect you are after in gazing is to learn to stop the internal dialogue. To do that you can focus your view as gazers do or, as I’ve already told you, flood your awareness while walking by not focusing your sight on anything. That is, sort of feel with your eyes everything in the 180-degree range in front of you, while you keep your fixed and unfocused eyes just above the line of the horizon.