Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan’s Teachings

You are dealing with a new type of continuity. It takes time to get used to it. Warriors spend years in limbo where they are neither average men nor sorcerers. The difficulty is that the mirror of self-reflection is extremely powerful and only lets its victims go after a ferocious struggle.

* * *

There is something called a silent protector. It is a lifesaver, a surge of inexplicable energy that comes to a warrior when nothing else works. Sorcerers’ options are silent protectors. They are positions of the assemblage point. The infinite number of positions which the assemblage point can reach. In each and every one of those shallow or deep shifts, a sorcerer can strengthen his new continuity.

The effect of those shifts of the assemblage point is cumulative. It weighs on you whether you understand it or not.

* * *

Don’t wish for death, just wait until it comes. Don’t try to imagine what it’s like. Just be there to be caught in its flow.

* * *

The sorcerers’ struggle for assuredness is the most dramatic struggle there is. It’s painful and costly. Many, many times it has actually cost sorcerers their lives.

In order for any sorcerer to have complete certainty about his actions, or about his position in the sorcerers’ world, or to be capable of utilizing intelligently his new continuity, he must invalidate the continuity of his old life. Only then can his actions have the necessary assuredness to fortify and balance the tenuousness and instability of his new continuity.

The sorcerer seers of modern times call this process of invalidation the ticket to impeccability, or the sorcerers’ symbolic but final death.

* * *

Sorcerers have a peculiar bent. They live exclusively in the twilight of a feeling best described by the words “and yet…” When everything is crumbling down around them, sorcerers accept that the situation is terrible, and then immediately escape to the twilight of “and yet…”

* * *

Warriors do their utmost, and then, without any remorse or regrets, they relax and let the spirit decide the outcome. The decision of the spirit is another basic core. Sorcery stories are built around it.

* * *

A sorcerer’s ticket to freedom is his death. I myself have paid with my life for that ticket to freedom, as has everyone else in my household. And now we are equals in our condition of being dead.

You too are dead. The sorcerers’ grand trick, however, is to be aware that they are dead. Their ticket to impeccability must be wrapped in awareness. In that wrapping, sorcerers say, their ticket is kept in mint condition.

Explanations are never wasted, because they are imprinted in us for immediate or later use or to help prepare our way to reaching silent knowledge.

Silent knowledge is a general position of the assemblage point. Ages ago it was man’s normal position, but, for reasons which would be impossible to determine, man’s assemblage point moved away from that specific location and adopted a new one called “reason.”

The place of no pity, being another position of the assemblage point, is the forerunner of silent knowledge, and yet another position of the assemblage point called “the place of concern,” is the forerunner of reason.

* * *

Death is painful only when it happens in one’s bed, in sickness. In a fight for your life, you feel no pain. If you feel anything, it’s exultation.

One of the most dramatic differences between civilized men and sorcerers is the way in which death comes to them. Only with sorcerer-warriors is death kind and sweet. They could be mortally wounded and yet would feel no pain. And what is even more extraordinary is that death holds itself in abeyance for as long as the sorcerers need it to do so. The greatest difference between an average man and a sorcerer is that a sorcerer commands his death with his speed.

In the world of everyday life our word or our decisions can be reversed very easily. The only irrevocable thing in our world is death. In the sorcerers’ world, on the other hand, normal death can be countermanded, but not the sorcerers’ word. In the sorcerers’ world decisions cannot be changed or revised. Once they have been made, they stand forever.

* * *

For a seer human beings are either oblong or spherical luminous masses of countless, static, yet vibrant fields of energy, and only sorcerers are capable of injecting movement into those spheres of static luminosity. In a millisecond they can move their assemblage points to any place in their luminous mass. That movement and the speed with which it is performed entails an instantaneous shift into the perception of another totally different universe. Or they can move their assemblage points, without stopping, across their entire fields of luminous energy. The force created by such movement is so intense that it instantly consumes their whole luminous mass.

* * *

Possibly every human being under normal living conditions has had at one time or another the opportunity to break away from the bindings of convention. I don’t mean social convention, but the conventions binding our perception. A moment of elation would suffice to move our assemblage points and break our conventions. So, too, a moment of fright, ill health, anger, or grief. But ordinarily, whenever we have the chance to move our assemblage points we become frightened. Our religious, academic, social backgrounds come into play. They assure our safe return to the flock; the return of our assemblage points to the prescribed position of normal living.

All the mystics and spiritual teachers you know of have done just that: their assemblage points moved, either through discipline or accident, to a certain point; and then they returned to normalcy carrying a memory that lasted them a lifetime.

The average man, incapable of finding the energy to perceive beyond his daily limits, calls the realm of extraordinary perception sorcery, witchcraft, or the work of the devil, and shies away from it without examining it further.

Turn everything into what it really is: the abstract, the spirit, the nagual . There is no witchcraft, no evil, no devil. There is only perception.

Your assemblage point can move beyond the place of no pity into the place of silent knowledge. To manipulate it yourself means you have enough energy to move between reason and silent knowledge at will. If a sorcerer has enough energy–or even if he does not have sufficient energy but needs to shift because it is a matter of life and death–he can fluctuate between reason and silent knowledge.

At this stage in your development, any movement of your assemblage point will still be a mystery. Your challenge at the beginning of your apprenticeship is maintaining your gains, rather than reasoning them out. At some point everything will make sense to you.

You have to be able to explain knowledge to yourself before you can claim that it makes sense to you. For a movement of your assemblage point to make sense, you will need to have energy to fluctuate from the place of reason to the place of silent knowledge.

Your assemblage point can move by itself. You can intend the movement by manipulating certain feelings and in so doing your assemblage point can reach the position of silent knowledge.

One way to talk about the perception attained in the place of silent knowledge is to call it “here and here.”

* * *

Intending the movement of the assemblage point is a great accomplishment. But accomplishment is something personal. It’s necessary, but it’s not the important part. It is not the residue sorcerers look forward to. The idea of the abstract, the spirit, is the only residue that is important. The idea of the personal self has no value whatsoever. Every time I’ve had the chance, I have made you aware of the need to abstract. You have always believed that I meant to think abstractly. No. To abstract means to make yourself available to the spirit by being aware of it.

One of the most dramatic things about the human condition is the macabre connection between stupidity and self-reflection.

It is stupidity that forces us to discard anything that does not conform with our self-reflective expectations. For example, as average men, we are blind to the most crucial piece of knowledge available to a human being: the existence of the assemblage point and the fact that it can move.

For a rational man it’s unthinkable that there should be an invisible point where perception is assembled.

For the rational man to hold steadfastly to his self-image insures his abysmal ignorance. He ignores, for instance, the fact that sorcery is not incantations and hocus-pocus, but the freedom to perceive not only the world taken for granted, but everything else that is humanly possible.

Here is where the average man’s stupidity is most dangerous; he is afraid of sorcery. He trembles at the possibility of freedom. And freedom is at his fingertips. It’s called the third point. And it can be reached as easily as the assemblage point can be made to move.