Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan’s Teachings

You say that that’s easy for me to say but that to carry it out is another matter, and that your tribulations are insoluble because they originate in the incapacity of your fellow men to be consistent.

It’s not the people around you who are at fault, they cannot help themselves. The fault is with you, because you can help yourself, but you are bent on judging them, at a deep level of silence. Any idiot can judge. If you judge them, you will only get the worst out of them. All of us human beings are prisoners, and it is that prison that makes us act in such a miserable way. Your challenge is to take people as they are! Leave people alone.

You may not understand what I’m talking about. If you’re not conscious of your desire to judge them you are in even worse shape. This is the flaw of warrior-travelers when they begin to resume their journeys. They get cocky, out of hand.

You admit to me that your complaints are petty in the extreme. You say that you are confronted with daily events, events that have the nefarious quality of wearing down all your resolve, and that you are embarrassed to relate to me the incidents that weigh heavily on your mind.

Come on, Out with it! Don’t have any secrets from me. I’m an empty tube. Whatever you say to me will be projected out into infinity.

You say that you have only complaints and that you are exactly like all the people you know. That there’s no way to talk to a single one of them without hearing an overt or a covert complaint.

In the ups and downs of daily living, you win, and you lose, and you don’t know when you win or when you lose. This is the price one pays for living under the rule of self-reflection. There is nothing that I can say to you, and there’s nothing that you can say to yourself. I could only recommend that you not feel guilty because you fail, but that you strive to end the dominion of self-reflection.

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Every human being has the potential to see energy directly. Every human being already sees energy directly but doesn’t know it.

***

Anything is possible if one departs from inner silence. The clear view, or losing the human form is the time when human pettiness vanishes, as if it had been a patch of fog looming over us, a fog that slowly clears up and dissipates.

The sorcerers’ world is not an immutable world like the world of everyday life, where they tell you that once you reach a goal, you remain a winner forever. In the sorcerers’ world, to arrive at a certain goal means that you have simply acquired the most efficient tools to continue your fight, which, by the way, will never end.

**

The energy body is a conglomerate of energy fields, the mirror image of the conglomerate of energy fields that makes up the physical body when it is seen as energy that flows in the universe. It is smaller, more compact, and of heavier appearance than the luminous sphere of the physical body. The body and the energy body are two conglomerates of energy fields compressed together by some strange agglutinizing force. The force that binds that group of energy fields together is according to the sorcerers of ancient Mexico, the most mysterious force in the universe. My personal estimation is that it is the pure essence of the entire cosmos, the sum total of everything there is.

The physical body and the energy body are the only counterbalanced energy configurations in our realm as human beings.

By means of discipline it is possible for anyone to bring the energy body closer to the physical body. Normally, the distance between the two is enormous. Once the energy body is within a certain range, which varies for each of us individually, anyone, through discipline, can forge it into the exact replica of their physical body&endash;that is to say, a three-dimensional, solid being. Hence the sorcerers’ idea of the other or the double. By the same token, through the same processes of discipline, anyone can forge their three-dimensional, solid physical body to be a perfect replica of their energy body&endash;that is to say, an ethereal change of energy invisible to the human eye, as all energy is.

I’ve not described a mythical proposition. There is nothing mythical about sorcerers. Sorcerers are practical beings, and what they describe is always something quite sober and down-to-earth. The difficulty in understanding what sorcerers do is that they proceed from a different cognitive system.

The energy body is of key importance in whatever has been taking place in your life. It is an energetic fact that your energy body, instead of moving away form you, as it normally happens, is approaching you with great speed. It means that something is going to knock the daylights out of you. A tremendous degree of control is going to come into your life, but not your control, the energy body’s control.

There are scores of outside forces controlling you at this moment. The control that I am referring to is something outside the domain of language. It is your control and at the same time it is not. It cannot be classified, but it can certainly be experienced. And above all, it can certainly be manipulated. Remember this: It can be manipulated, to your total advantage, of course, which again, is not your advantage, but the energy body’s advantage. However, the energy body is you, so we could go on forever like dogs biting their own tails, trying to describe this. Language is inadequate. All these experiences are beyond syntax.

If you pay close attention to the darkness of the foliage without focusing your eyes, but sort of look at it from the corner of your eye, you will see a fleeting shadow crossing your field of vision.

Early night is the appropriate time of day for doing what I am asking you to do. It takes a moment to engage the necessary attention in you to do it. Don’t stop until you catch that fleeting black shadow, fleeting black shadows all over the place. That’s the universe at large, incommensurable, nonlinear, outside the realm of syntax. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were the first ones to see those fleeting shadows, so they followed them around. They saw them as you will see them, and they saw them as energy that flows in the universe. And they did discover something transcendental. They discovered that we have a companion for life. We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The predator is our lord and master. It has rendered us docile, helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it demands that we don’t do so.

It’s pitch black around us, but if you look out of the corner of your eye, you will still see fleeting shadows jumping all around you.

You have arrived, by your effort alone, to what the shamans of ancient Mexico called the topic of topics. I have been beating around the bush all this time, insinuating to you that something is holding us prisoner. Indeed we are held prisoner! This was an energetic fact for the sorcerers of ancient Mexico.

There is an explanation which is the simplest explanation in the world. They took over because we are food for them, and they squeeze us mercilessly because we are their sustenance. Just as we rear chickens in chicken coops, the predators rear us in human coops. Therefore, their food is always available to them.

Well, you haven’t heart it all yet. Wait a bit longer and see how you feel. I’m going to subject you to a blitz. That is, I’m going to subject your mind to tremendous onslaughts, and you cannot get up and leave because you’re caught. Not because I’m holding you prisoner, but because something in you will prevent you from leaving, while another part of you is going to go truthfully berserk. So brace yourself!

I want to appeal to your analytical mind. Think for a moment, and tell me how you would explain the contradiction between the intelligence of man the engineer and the stupidity of his systems of beliefs, or the stupidity of his contradictory behavior. Sorcerers believe that the predators have given us our systems of beliefs, our ideas of good and evil, our social mores. They are the ones who set up our hopes and expectations and dreams of success or failure. They have given us covetousness, greed, and cowardice. It is the predators who make us complacent, routinary, and egomaniacal.

In order to keep us obedient and meek and weak, the predators engaged themselves in a stupendous maneuver&endash;stupendous, of course, from the point of view of a fighting strategist. A horrendous maneuver from the point of view of those who suffer it. They gave us their mind! Do you hear me? The predators give us their mind, which becomes our mind. The predators’ mind is baroque, contradictory, morose, filled with the fear of being discovered any minute now.