Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan’s Teachings

You see, the flyers’ mind has no competitors, when it proposed something, it agrees with its own proposition, and it makes you believe that you’ve done something of worth. The flyers’ mind will say to you that whatever Juan Matus is telling you is pure nonsense, and then the same mind will agree with its own proposition, “Yes, of course, it is nonsense,” you will say. That’s the way they overcome us.

The flyers are an essential part of the universe and they must be taken as what they really are&endash;awesome, monstrous. They are the means by which the universe tests us.

We are energetic probes created by the universe, and it’s because we are possessors of energy that has awareness that we are the means by which the universe becomes aware of itself. The flyers are the implacable challengers. They cannot be taken as anything else. If we succeed in doing that, the universe allows us to continue.

It’s time for another kind of maneuver. I want to propose a weird idea to you. I have to stress that it’s a weird idea that will find endless resistance in you. I will tell you beforehand that you won’t accept it easily. But the fact that it’s weird should not be a deterrent. Your mind is always open to inquiry, isn’t that so?

The weird idea is that every human being on this earth seems to have exactly the same reactions, the same thoughts, the same feelings. They seem to respond in more or less the same way to the same stimuli. Those reactions seem to be sort of fogged up by the language they speak, but if we scrape that off, they are exactly the same reactions that besiege every human being on Earth. I would like you to become curious about this and see if you could formally account for such homogeneity.

A task for you one day will be to see the predator. It is one of the most mysterious things of sorcerer, something that goes beyond language, beyond explanations. The mystery of sorcerer must be cushioned in the mundane. It must stem from nothing, and go back again to nothing. That’s the art of warrior-travelers: to go through the eye of a needle unnoticed. Someday, when you are ready, sit and brace yourself by propping your back against something. Cross your legs and enter into inner silence. Enter into inner silence, but don’t fall asleep. This won’t be a journey through the dark sea of awareness, it will be seeing from inner silence.

When you can see from inner silence, the predator may appear as a gigantic shadow, leaping in the air and then landing with a silent thud. They are really heavy. Don’t be frightened. Keep your inner silence and it will move away.

The predator is not something benevolent. It is enormously heavy, gross, indifferent. You can feel its disregard for us. Doubtless, it has crushed us ages ago, making us weak, vulnerable, and docile. You have your unbending intent, not to let them eat you.

**

Soon you will be entering into infinity by the force or your personal power. Once you have entered into infinity, you can’t depend on anyone to bring you back. Your decision is needed then. Only you can decide whether or not to return. I must also warn you that few warrior-travelers survive this type of encounter with infinity. Infinity is enticing beyond belief. A warrior-traveler finds that to return to the world of disorder, compulsion, noise, and pain is a most unappealing affair. You must know that your decision to stay or to return is not a matter of a reasonable choice, but a matter of intending it.

If you choose not to return, you will disappear as if the earth has swallowed you. But if you choose to come back, you must tighten your belt and wait like a true warrior-traveler until you task, whatever it might be, is finished, either in success or in defeat.

Today you are going to fulfill a concrete task, the last link of a long chain; and you must do it in your utmost mood of reason.

The backbone of a warrior-traveler is humbleness and efficiency, acting without expecting anything and withstanding anything that lies ahead of him.

We are alone. That’s our condition, but to die alone is not to die in loneliness.

The great issue with us males is our frailty. When our awareness begins to grow, it grows like a column, right on the midpoint of our luminous being, from the ground up. That column has to reach a considerable height before we can rely on it. At this time in your life, as a sorcerer, you easily lose your grip on your new awareness. When you do that, you forget everything you have done and seen on the warrior-travelers’ path because your consciousness shifts back to the awareness of your everyday life. I have explained to you that the task of every male sorcerer is to reclaim everything he has done and seen on the warrior-travelers’ path while he was on new levels of awareness. The problem of every male sorcerer is that he easily forgets because his awareness loses its new level and falls to the ground at the drop of a hat.

Don’t worry about verbalizations. You’ll verbalize all you want in due time. Today, you must act on your inner silence, on what you know without knowing. You know to perfection what you have to do, but this knowledge is not quite formulated in your thoughts yet.

It is obligatory that a warrior-traveler say good-bye to all the people he leaves behind. He must say his good-bye in a loud and clear voice so that his shout and his feelings will remain forever recorded.

Warrior-travelers can’t owe anything to anyone. Warrior-travelers pay elegantly, generously, and with unequaled ease every favor, every service rendered to them. In this manner, they get rid of the burden of being indebted.

***

You have recapitulated your life thoroughly, but you are far from being free of indebtedness. You cannot confuse solitude with solitariness. Solitude for me is psychological, of the mind. Solitariness is physical. One is debilitating, the other comforting.

***

We must have something we could die for before we can think that we have something to live for. If you have nothing to die for, how can you claim that you have something to live for? The two go hand in hand, with death at the helm.

***

Loneliness is inadmissible in a warrior. Warrior-travelers can count on one being on which they can focus all their love, all their care: this marvelous Earth, the mother, the matrix, the epicenter of everything we are and everything we do; the very being to which all of us return; the very being that allows warrior-travelers to leave on their definitive journey.

Let’s put it this way. In order for me to leave this world and face the unknown, I need all my strength, all my forbearance, all my luck; but above all, I need every bit of a warrior-traveler’s guts of steel. To remain behind and fare like a warrior-traveler, you need everything of what I myself need. To venture out there, the way we are going to, is no joking matter, but neither is it to stay behind.

We will never be together again. You don’t need my help anymore; and I don’t want to offer it to you, because if you are worth your salt as a warrior-traveler, you’ll spit in my eye for offering it to you. Beyond a certain point, the only joy of a warrior-traveler is his aloneness. I wouldn’t like you to try to help me, either. Once I leave, I am gone. Don’t think about me, for I won’t think about you. If you are a worthy warrior-traveler, be impeccable! Take care of your world. Honer it; guard it with your life!

Forget the self and you will fear nothing, in whatever level of awareness you find yourself to be.

I hope you find love!

***

A male sorcerer who is the nagual perforce has to be fragmented because of the bulk of his energetic mass. Each fragment lives a specific range of a total scope of activity, and the events that he experiences in each fragment have to be joined someday to give a complete, conscious picture of everything that has taken place in his total life.

That unification takes years to accomplish. I have been told of cases of naguals who never reached the total scope of their activities in a conscious manner and lived fragmented.

The world of sorcerers is not an immutable world, where the world is final, unchanging, it’s a world of eternal fluctuation where nothing should be taken for granted.

How could all this be possible? Who are we really? Certainly not the people all of us have been led to believe we are.

A sorcerer weeps when he is fragmented. When he’s complete, he’s taken by a shiver that has the potential, because it is so intense, of ending his life.