Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan’s Teachings

The Indescribable Force attracts our consciousness, much as a magnet attracts iron shavings. At the moment of dying, all of our being disintegrates under the attraction of that immense force.

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Seers who see the Indescribable Force ‘s emanations often call them commands. That’s what they really are, commands.

Everything is made out of the Indescribable Force ‘s emanations. Only a small portion of those emanations is within reach of human awareness, and that small portion is still further reduced, to a minute fraction, by the constraints of our daily lives. That minute fraction of the Indescribable Force ‘s emanations is the known; the small portion within possible reach of human awareness is the unknown, and the incalculable rest is the unknowable.

The new seers, being pragmatically oriented, became immediately cognizant of the compelling power of the emanations. They realized that all living creatures are forced to employ the Indescribable Force ‘s emanations without ever knowing what they are. They also realized that organisms are constructed to grasp a certain range of those emanations and that every species has a definite range. The emanations exert great pressure on organisms, and through that pressure organisms construct their perceivable world.

In our case, as human beings, we employ those emanations and interpret them as reality. But what man senses is such a small portion of the Indescribable Force ‘s emanations that it’s ridiculous to put much stock in our perceptions, and yet it isn’t possible for us to disregard our perceptions.

I want you to be very aware of what we are doing. We are discussing the mastery of awareness. The truths we’re discussing are the principles of that mastery.

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One of the greatest forces in the lives of warriors is fear, it spurs them to learn.

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The Indescribable Force ‘s emanations cannot be rendered at all in a language of comparisons. Individual seers may feel the urge to make comments about certain emanations, but that will remain personal.

The new seers were terrible practical men. They weren’t involved in concocting rational theories.

The new seers, imbued with practicality, were able to see a flux of emanations and to see how man and other living beings utilize them to construct their perceivable world.

The way those emanations are utilized by man is so simple it sounds idiotic. For a seer, men are luminous beings. Our luminosity is made up of that portion of the Indescribable Force ‘s emanations which is encased in our egglike cocoon. That particular portion, that handful of emanations that is encased, is what makes us men. To perceive is to match the emanations contained inside our cocoon with those that are outside.

Seers can see , for instance, the emanations inside any living creature and can tell which of the outside emanations would match them.

The emanations are something indescribable. My personal comment would be to say that they are like filaments of light. What’s incomprehensible to normal awareness is that the filaments are aware. I can’t tell you what that means, because I don’t know what I am saying. All I can tell you with my personal comments is that the filaments are aware of themselves, alive and vibrating, that there are so many of them that numbers have no meaning and that each of them is an eternity in itself.

Perception is a condition of alignment; the emanations inside the cocoon become aligned with those outside that fit them. Alignment is what allows awareness to be cultivated by every living creature. Seers make these statements because they see living creatures as they really are: luminous beings that look like bubbles of whitish light.

The emanations inside and the emanations outside are the same filaments of light. Sentient beings are minute bubbles made out of those filaments, microscopic points of light, attached to the infinite emanations.

The luminosity of living beings is made by the particular portion of the Indescribable Force ‘s emanations they happen to have inside their luminous cocoons. When seers see perception, they witness that the luminosity of the Indescribable Force ‘s emanations outside those creatures’ cocoons brightens the luminosity of the emanations inside their cocoons. The outside luminosity attracts the inside one; it traps it, so to speak, and fixes it. That fixation is the awareness of every specific being.

Seers can also see how the emanations outside the cocoon exert a particular pressure on the portion of emanations inside. This pressure determines the degree of awareness that every living being has.

The Indescribable Force ‘s emanations are more than filaments of light. Each one of them is a source of boundless energy. Think of it this way: since some of the emanations outside the cocoon are the same as the emanations inside, their energies are like a continuous pressure. But the cocoon isolates the emanations that are inside its web and thereby directs the pressure.

I’ve mentioned to you that the old seers were masters of the art of handling awareness. What I can add now is that they were the masters of that art because they learned to manipulate the structure of man’s cocoon. I’ve said to you that they unraveled the mystery of being aware. By that I meant that they saw and realized that awareness is a glow in the cocoon of living beings. They rightly called it the glow of awareness.

The old seers saw that man’s awareness is a glow of amber luminosity more intense than the rest of the cocoon. That glow is on a narrow, vertical band on the extreme right side of the cocoon, running along its entire length. The mastery of the old seers was to move that glow, to make it spread from its original setting on the surface of the cocoon inward across its width.

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Seeing is to lay bare the core of everything, to witness the unknown and to glimpse into the unknowable. As such, it doesn’t bring one solace. Seers ordinarily go to pieces on finding out that existence is incomprehensibly complex and that our normal awareness maligns it with its limitations.

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Your concentration has to be total. To understand is of crucial importance. The new seers placed the highest value on deep, unemotional realizations. For instance, the other day, when you understood about your self-importance, you didn’t understand anything really. You had an emotional outburst, that was all. I say this because the next day you were back on your high horse of self-importance as if you never had realized anything.

The same thing happened to the old seers. They were given to emotional reactions. But when the time came for them to understand what they had seen , they couldn’t do it. To understand one needs sobriety, not emotionality. Beware of those who weep with realization, for they have realized nothing.

There are untold dangers in the path of knowledge for those without sober understanding. I am outlining the order in which the new seers arranged the truths about awareness, so it will serve you as a map, a map that you have to corroborate with your seeing , but not with your eyes.

Everybody falls pray to the mistake that seeing is done with the eyes. Seeing is not a matter of the eyes.

Seeing is alignment and perception is alignment. The alignment of the Indescribable Force ‘s emanations used routinely is the perception of the day-to-day world, but the alignment of emanations that are never used ordinarily is seeing . When such an alignment occurs one sees . Seeing , therefore, being produced by alignment out of the ordinary, cannot be something one could merely look at. So, don’t succumb to the way seeing is labeled and described.

When seers see , something explains everything as the new alignment takes place. It’s a voice that tells them in their ear what’s what. If that voice is not present, what the seer is engaged in isn’t seeing .

It is equally fallacious to say that seeing is hearing, because it is infinitely more than that, but seers have opted for using sound as a gauge of a new alignment.

The voice of seeing is a most mysterious inexplicable thing. My personal conclusion is that the voice of seeing belongs only to man. It may happen because talking is something that no one else besides man does. The old seers believed it was the voice of an overpowering entity intimately related to mankind, a protector of man. The new seers found out that that entity, which they called the mold of man, doesn’t have a voice. The voice of seeing for the new seers is something quite incomprehensible; they say it’s the glow of awareness playing on the Indescribable Force ‘s emanations as a harpist plays on a harp.

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The pressure that the emanations outside the cocoon, which are called emanations at large, exert on the emanations inside the cocoon is the same in all sentient beings. Yet the results of that pressure are vastly different among them, because their cocoons react to that pressure in every conceivable way. There are, however, degrees of uniformity within certain boundaries.