Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan’s Teachings

The memorable events we are after have the dark touch of the impersonal. That touch permeates them. I don’t know how else to explain this.

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Don’t explain yourself to much. Sorcerers say that in every explanation there is a hidden apology. So, when you are explaining why you cannot do this or that, you’re really apologizing for your shortcomings, hoping that whoever is listening to you will have the kindness to understand them.

Every one of us, young and old alike, is making figures in front of a mirror in one way or another. Tally what you know about people. Think of any human being on this earth, and you will know, without a shadow of a doubt, that no matter who they are, or what they think of themselves, or what they do, the result of their actions is always the same: senseless figures in front of a mirror.

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Listen to your inner voice. Don’t listen to the superficial voice that makes you angry. Listen to that deeper voice that is going to guide you from now on, the voice that is laughing. Listen to it! And laugh with it. Laugh! Laugh!

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It is the nature of infinity, once we cross a certain threshold, to put a blueprint in front of us.

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Don’t waste your energy worrying about things. Everyone is locked in a vicious cycle. We all have our magic cure which we trust will cure everything, and resolve every one of our problems. At the moment, perhaps we can’t afford it, but we have great hopes that we eventually will be able to.

**

Sorcerers’ aspirations are to reach infinity, and to be conscious of it. The task of sorcerers is to face infinity. They plunge into it daily, as a fisherman plunges into the sea. It is such an overwhelming task that sorcerers have to state their names before venturing into it. In this manner, they assert their individuality in front of the infinite.

What makes human beings into sorcerers is their capacity to perceive energy directly as it flows in the universe. Human beings are not only capable of seeing energy directly as it flows in the universe, but they actually do see it, although they are not deliberately conscious of seeing it.

“Awareness” is energy and “energy” is constant flux, a luminous vibration that is never stationary, but always moving of its own accord.

***

The nagual Elias and The nagual Julian were astoundingly alike in that there was nothing inside them. They were empty. The nagual Elias was a collection of astounding, haunting stories of regions unknown. The nagual Julian was a collection of stories that would have anybody in stitches, sprawled on the ground laughing. Whenever I tried to pin down the man in them, the real man, the way I could pinpoint the man in my father, the man in everybody I know, I found nothing. Instead of a real person inside them, there was a bunch of stories about persons unknown. Each of the two men had his own flair, but the end result was just the same: emptiness, an emptiness that reflected not the world, but infinity.

The moment one crossed a peculiar threshold in infinity, either deliberately or, unwittingly, everything that happens to one from then on is no longer exclusively in one’s own domain, but enters into the realm of infinity.

Infinity is everything that surrounds us: the spirit, the dark sea of awareness. It is something that exists out there and rules our lives.

My steps and yours are guided by infinity. The circumstances that seem to be ruled by chance are in essence ruled by the active side of infinity: intent. What put you and me together was the intent of infinity. It is impossible to determine what this intent of infinity is, yet it is there, as palpable as you and I are. Sorcerers say that it is a tremor in the air. The advantage of sorcerers is to know that the tremor in the air exists, and to acquiesce to it without any further ado. For sorcerers, there’s no pondering, wondering, or speculating. They know that all they have is the possibility of merging with the intent of infinity, and they just do it.

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A nagual is empty. That emptiness doesn’t reflect the world, it reflects infinity.

A nagual has no boisterousness on his part, or assertions about the self. There is not a speck of a need to have either grievances or remorse. His is the emptiness of a warrior-traveler, seasoned to the point where he doesn’t take anything for granted. A warrior-traveler who doesn’t underestimate or overestimate anything. A quite, disciplined fighter whose elegance is so extreme that no one, no matter how hard they try to look, will ever find the seam where all that complexity has come together.

**

What’s happening to you is the workings of infinity. Your sensation of nervousness is due to the subliminal realization that your time is up. You are aware of it, but not deliberately conscious of it. You feel the absence of time, and that makes you impatient. I know this, for it happened to me and to all the sorcerers of my lineage. At a given time, a whole era in my life, or their lives, ended. Now it’s your turn. You have simply run out of time.

Your malady is a very simple one: your world is coming to an end. It is the end of an era for you. Do you think that the world you have known all your life is going to leave you peacefully, without any fuss or muss? No! It will wriggle underneath you, and hit you with its tail.

**

But an era doesn’t really come to an end until the king dies. You are the king.

**

Every one of us has an energetic fissure, an energetic crack below the navel. That crack, which sorcerers call the gap, is closed when a man is in his prime.

Normally, all that is discernible to the sorcerer’s eye is a tenuous discoloration in the otherwise whitish glow of the luminous sphere. But when a man is close to dying, that gap becomes quite apparent.

I once say a man’s gap that was wide open. The significance was a deadly one. The spirit was signaling to me that something was coming to an end. I thought it was my life that was coming to an end, and I accepted it as gracefully as I could. It dawned on me much, much later that it wasn’t my life that was coming to an end, but my entire lineage.

You bypass things like this. It’s youth. So many things to do, so many people around you. You are not alert. You never learned to be alert, anyway.

To be alert doesn’t mean to be watchful. For sorcerers, to be alert means to be aware of the fabric of the everyday world that seems extraneous to the interaction of the moment.

Don’t hide yourself behind banalities. Stand up, assume responsibility for what you know. Don’t get lost in the extraneous fabric of the world around you, extraneous to what’s going on. Don’t be so concerned with yourself and your problems. Watch the scenery around us: the mountains in the distance, or the riverbed, or the desert. Sorcerers do that and then nothing counts except what their eyes can absorb. In this way they unburden themselves of everything superfluous.

Sorcerers never say things idly. I am most careful about what I say to you or to anybody else. The difference between you and me is that I don’t have any time at all, and I act accordingly. You, on the other hand, believe that you have all the time in the world, and you act accordingly. The end result of our individual behaviors is that I measure everything I do and say, and you don’t.

You’re looking for a sorcerer’s medication to remove everything annoying from you, with no effort at all on your part. You want results&endash;­one potion and you’re cured.

Sorcerers face things in a different way. Since they don’t have any time to spare, they give themselves fully to what’s in front of them. Your turmoil is the result of your lack of sobriety.

As for your friend, you didn’t have the sobriety to thank him properly. That happens to every one of us. We never express what we feel, and when we want to, it’s too late, because we have run out of time. It’s not only your friend who ran out of time, you, too, ran out of it. You should have thanked him profusely. But the moment when you should have thanked him, you were angry with him&endash;you were judging him, he was nasty to you, whatever. And then you postponed seeing him. In reality, what you did was to postpone thanking him. Now you’re stuck with a ghost on your tail. You’ll never be able to pay what you owe him.