Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan’s Teachings

A warrior is someone who seeks freedom. Sadness is not freedom. We must snap out of it. Having a sense of detachment entails having a moment’s pause to reassess situations.

Formlessness is, if anything, a detriment to sobriety and levelheadedness. An aspect of being detached, the capacity to become immersed in whatever one is doing, naturally extends to everything one does, including being inconsistent, and outright petty. The advantage of being formless is that it allows us a moment’s pause, providing that we have the self-discipline and courage to utilize it.

We unwittingly focus on fear and distrust, as if those were the only possible options available to us, while all along we have the alternative of deliberately centering our attention on the opposite, the mystery, the wonder of what is happening to us.

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There are no steps to anything a warrior does. There is only personal power.

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In the final analysis every dreamer is different. There are, however, general states. Restful vigil is the preliminary state, a state in which the senses become dormant and yet one is aware.

The second state is dynamic vigil. In this state one is left looking at a scene, a tableau of sorts, which is static. One sees a three-dimensional picture, a frozen bit of something–a landscape, a street, a house, a person, a face, anything.

The third state is passive witnessing. In it the dreamer is no longer viewing a frozen bit of the world but is observing, eyewitnessing, an event as it occurs. It is as if the primacy of the visual and auditory senses makes this state of dreaming mainly an affair of the eyes and ears.

The fourth state is the one in which you are drawn to act. In it one is compelled to enterprise, to take steps, to make the most of one’s time. This state is called dynamic initiative.

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You have to look after someone and take care of them in a most selfish fashion–that is, as if they are your own self. Selfishness can be put to a grand use. To harness it is not impossible. The surest way to harness selfishness is through the daily activities of our lives.

You are efficient in whatever you do because you have no one to bug the devil out of you. It is no challenge to you to soar like an arrow by yourself. If you are given the task of taking care of someone else, however, your independent effectiveness will go to pieces, and in order to survive you will have to extend your selfish concern for yourself to include the one under your care. You must honor them regardless of what they do to you, and you must train your body, through your interaction with them, to feel at ease in the face of the most trying situations.

It is much easier to fare well under conditions of maximum stress than to be impeccable under normal circumstances, such as in the interplay with another under your care.

Further, then, you cannot under any circumstances get angry with them, because they are indeed your benefactor; only through them will you be capable of harnessing your selfishness.

You take care of them as a means of training yourself for the hardship of interaction with people. It is imperative that you internalize a mood of ease in the face of difficult social situations.

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Dreaming begins as a unique state of awareness arrived at by focusing the residue of consciousness, which one still has when asleep, on the elements, or the features, of one’s dreams.

The residue of consciousness, called the second attention, is brought into action, or is harnessed, through exercises of not-doing . The essential aid to dreaming is a state of mental quietness, called “stopping the internal dialogue,” or the “not-doing of talking to oneself.” To teach you how to master it, I’ve made you walk for miles with your eyes held fixed and out of focus at a level just above the horizon so as to emphasize the peripheral view. This method is effective on two counts. It allows you to stop your internal dialogue, and it trains your attention. By forcing you to concentrate on the peripheral view, I reinforced your capacity to concentrate for long periods of time on one single activity.

The best way to enter into dreaming is to concentrate on the area just at the tip of the sternum, at the top of the belly. The attention needed for dreaming stems from that area. The energy needed in order to move and to seek in dreaming stems from the area an inch or two below the belly button. That energy is the will , or the power to select, to assemble. In a woman both the attention and the energy for dreaming originate from the womb.

Anything may suffice as a not-doing to help dreaming , providing that it forces the attention to remain fixed. The attention one needs in the beginning of dreaming has to be forcibly made to stay on any given item in a dream. Only through immobilizing our attention can one turn an ordinary dream into dreaming.

In dreaming one has to use the same mechanisms of attention as in everyday life. Our first attention has been taught to focus on the items of the world with great force in order to turn the amorphous and chaotic realm of perception into the orderly world of awareness.

The second attention serves the function of a beckoner, a caller of chances. The more it is exercised, the greater the possibility of getting the desired result. But that is also the function of attention in general, a function so taken for granted in our daily life that it has become unnoticeable; if we encounter a fortuitous occurrence we talk about it in terms of accident or coincidence, rather than in terms of our attention having beckoned the event.

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The only thing that really counts in making the shift into the dreaming body is anchoring the second attention. Attention is what makes the world. What is important is to store attention in dreaming.

The first attention, the attention that makes the world, can never be completely overcome; it can only be turned off for a moment and replaced with the second attention, providing that the body had stored enough of it. Dreaming is naturally a way of storing the second attention. In order to shift into your dreaming body when awake you have to practice dreaming until it comes out your ears.

I have given you three tasks to train your second attention. First, to find your hands in dreaming . Next, to choose a locale, focus your attention on it, and then do daytime dreaming and find out if you can really go there. I’ve suggested that you place someone you know at the site in order to do two things: first to check subtle changes that might indicate that you were there in dreaming , and second, to isolate unobtrusive detail, which would be precisely what your second attention would zero in on.

The most serious problem the dreamer has in this respect is the unbending fixation of the second attention on detail that would be thoroughly undetected by the attention of everyday life, creating in this manner a nearly insurmountable obstacle to validation. What one seeks in dreaming is not what one would pay attention to in everyday life.

One strives to immobilize the second attention only in the learning period. After that, one has to fight the almost invincible pull of the second attention and give only cursory glances at everything. In dreaming one has to be satisfied with the briefest possible views of everything. As soon as one focuses on anything, one loses control.

The last generalized task I gave you to train your second attention was to get out of your body. This task begins with a dream in which you find yourself looking at yourself asleep.

To elucidate the control of the second attention, I’ve presented the idea of will . Will can be described as the maximum control of the luminosity of the body as a field of energy; or it can be described as a level of proficiency, as a state of being that comes abruptly into the daily life of a warrior at any given time. It is experienced as a force that radiates out of the middle part of the body following a moment of the most absolute silence, or a moment of sheer terror, or profound sadness. Those things afford the warrior the concentration needed to use the luminosity of the body and turn it into silence.

For a human being sadness is as powerful as terror. Both can bring the moment of silence. Or the silence comes of itself, because the warrior tries for it throughout his life. It is a moment of blackness, a moment still more silent than the moment of shutting off the internal dialogue. That blackness, that silence, gives rise to the intent to direct the second attention, to command it, to make it do things. This is why it’s called will . The intent and the effect are will ; they are tied together.