Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan’s Teachings

Today, you may remember an event that sums up your total life. We are always faced with a situation that is the same as one that we never resolved. Infinity always puts us in this terrible position of having to choose. We want infinity, but at the same time, we want to run away from it. You want to tell me to go and jump in a lake, but at the same time you are compelled to stay. It would be infinitely easier for you to just be compelled to stay.

**

Something in you will begin to collapse for sure. It has been collapsing all along, but it repairs itself very quickly every time its supports fail. I’ve told you already, we have two minds, and only one of them is truly ours. There is a secret option to the recapitulation. Just like I told you that there is a secret option to dying, an option that only sorcerers take. In the case of dying, the secret option is that human beings could retain their life force and relinquish only their awareness, the product of their lives. In the case of the recapitulation, the secret option that only sorcerers take is to choose to enhance their true minds.

Any haunting memory of your recollections can come only from your true mind. The other mind that we all have and share is, I would say, a cheap model: economy strength, one size fits all. But this is a subject that we will discuss later. What is at stake now is the advent of a disintegrating force. But not a force that is disintegrating you&endash;I don’t mean it that way. It is disintegrating what the sorcerers call the foreign installation, which exists in you and in every other human being. The effect of the force that is descending on you, which is disintegrating the foreign installation, is that it pulls sorcerers out of their syntax.

I know how difficult it is for you to deal with this facet of your life. Every sorcerer that I know has gone through it. The males going through it suffer infinitely more damage than the females. I suppose it’s the condition of women to be more durable. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico acting as a group, tried their best to buttress the impact of this disintegrating force. In our day, we have no means of acting as a group so we must brace ourselves to face in solitude a force that will sweep us away from language, for there is no way to describe adequately what is going on.

Sorcerers face the unknown in the most common incidents one can imagine. When they are confronted with it, and cannot interpret what they are perceiving, they have to rely on an outside source for direction. I’ve called that source infinity, or the voice of the spirit. If sorcerers don’t try to be rational about what can’t be rationalized, the spirit unerringly tells them what’s what.

Infinity is a force that has a voice and is conscious of itself. Consequently, I have prepared you to be ready to listen to that voice and act efficiently always, but without antecedents, using as little as possible the railings of the a priori.

***

Infinity is a conscious force that deliberately intervenes in the lives of sorcerers. You will seek explanations with linear cause and effect. Each of your recollections will become more and more vivid, more and more maddening to you, because as I told you already, you have entered an irreversible process. Your true mind is emerging, waking up from a state of lifelong lethargy.

Infinity is claiming you. Whatever means it uses to point that out to you cannot have any other reason, any other cause, any other value than that. What you should do, however, is to be prepared for the onslaughts of infinity. You must be in a state of continuously bracing yourself for a blow of tremendous magnitude. That is the sane, sober way in which sorcerers face infinity.

Everything you do has to be an act of sorcery. An act free from encroaching expectations, fears of failure, hopes of success. Free from the cult of me; everything you do has to be impromptu, a work of magic where you freely open yourself to the impulses of the infinite.

The sorcerers of my lineage considered that one of the most coveted results of inner silence is a specific interplay of energy, which is always heralded by a strong emotion. Such an interplay manifests itself in terms of hues that are projected on any horizon in the world of everyday life, be it a mountain, the sky, a wall, or simply the palms of the hands. This interplay of hues begins with the appearance of a tenuous brushstroke of lavender on the horizon. In time, this lavender brushstroke starts to expand until it covers the visible horizon, like advancing storm clouds.

A dot of a peculiar, rich, pomegranate red shows up, as if bursting from the lavender clouds. As sorcerers become more disciplined and experienced, the dot of pomegranate expands and finally explodes into thoughts or visions, or in the case of a literate man, into written words; sorcerers either see visions engendered by energy, hear thoughts being voiced as words, or read written words.

There’s nothing gentle about sorcerers or sorcery. The first time that infinity descends on you it may be a total takeover of your faculties. Insofar as the speed of your visions is concerned, you yourself will have to learn to adjust it. For some sorcerers, that’s the job of a lifetime. Energy may appear to you as if it were being projected onto a movie screen. Whether or not you understand what’s projected is another matter. In order to make an accurate interpretation you need experience. My recommendation is that you shouldn’t be bashful, and you should begin now. Your true mind is emerging, and it has nothing to do with the mind that is a foreign installation . Let your true mind adjust the speed. Be silent, and don’t fret, no matter what happens.

Anyway, infinity chooses. The warrior-traveler simply acquiesces to that choice. But above all, don’t be overwhelmed by the event because you cannot describe it. It is an event beyond the syntax of our language.

**

We can speak a little more clearly now about inner silence. Dreaming is the act of changing the point of attachment with the dark sea of awareness. If you view it in this fashion, it’s a very simple concept, and a very simple maneuver. It takes all you have to realize it, but it’s not an impossibility, nor is it something surrounded with mystical clouds.

Dreaming is a term that weakens a very powerful act. It makes it sound arbitrary; it gives it a sense of being a fantasy, and this in the only thing it is not. I tried to change the term myself, but it’s too ingrained. Maybe someday you could change it yourself, although, as with everything else in sorcery, I am afraid that by the time you could actually do it, you won’t give a damn about it because it won’t make any difference what it is called anymore.

Dreaming is an art, discovered by the sorcerers of ancient Mexico, by means of which ordinary dreams are transformed into bona-fide entrances to other worlds of perception. Dreaming attention, is the capacity to pay a special kind of attention, or to place a special kind of awareness on the elements of an ordinary dream.

Don’t set out deliberately to have a desired dream, but fix your attention on the component elements of whatever dream presents itself.

The assemblage point is displaced very naturally during sleep. To see the displacement is a bit difficult because it requires an aggressive mood. Such an aggressive mood was the predilection of the sorcerers of ancient Mexico. Those sorcerers found all the premises of their sorcery by means of this mood

It is a very predatory mood. It’s not difficult at all to enter into it, because man is a predator by nature. You could see, aggressively, anybody around you, or perhaps someone far away, while they are asleep; anyone would do for the purpose at hand. What’s important is that you arrive at a complete sense of indifference. You are in search of something, and you are out to get it. You’re going to go out looking for a person, searching like a feline, like an animal of prey, for someone to descend on.

The difficulty with this technique is the mood. You can’t be passive in the act of seeing, for the sight is not something to watch but to act upon.

Sorcerers are divided into two groups: one group is dreamers; the other is stalkers. The dreamers are those who have a great facility for displacing the assemblage point. The stalkers are those who have a great facility for maintaining the assemblage point fixed on that new position. Dreamers and stalkers complement each other, and work in pairs, affecting one another with their given proclivities.