Topic: Don Juan's quotes

[nichi]

We don't need anyone to teach us sorcery, because there is really nothing to learn. What we need is a teacher to convince us that there is incalculable power at our fingertips. What a strange paradox! Every warrior on the path of knowledge thinks, at one time or another, that he's learning sorcery, but all he's doing is allowing himself to be convinced of the power hidden in his being, and that he can reach it.

The Power of Silence
Carlos Castaneda

[Jahn]

We don't need anyone to teach us sorcery, because there is really nothing to learn. What we need is a teacher to convince us that there is incalculable power at our fingertips. What a strange paradox! Every warrior on the path of knowledge thinks, at one time or another, that he's learning sorcery, but all he's doing is allowing himself to be convinced of the power hidden in his being, and that he can reach it.

The Power of Silence
Carlos Castaneda

I used a part of that quote in my book, like this.
"We don't need anyone to teach us sorcery, because there is really nothing to learn. What we need is a teacher to convince us that there is incalculable power at our fingertips."
"So it is this you have tried to convince me of, I asked."
Yes, said Don Juan, and I was as hard to convince as you are."

[SoulFire]

What we need is a teacher to convince us that there is incalculable power at our fingertips.[/i]"

what i need, moreso than someone to teach me
is to really believe it myself
(and to not forget)

[Jennifer-]

The self-confidence of a warrior is not the self-confidence of the average man. The average man seeks certainty in the eyes of the onlooker and calls that self-confidence. The warrior seeks impeccability in his own eyes and calls that humbleness. The average man is hooked to his fellow men, while the warrior is hooked only to himself. You're after the self-confidence of the average man, when you should be after the humbleness of a warrior. The difference between the two is remarkable. Self-confidence entails knowing something for sure; humbleness entails being impeccable in one's actions and feelings.


CC Tales of Power

[Jennifer-]

It doesn't matter what anybody says or does. You must be an impeccable man yourself. The fight is right here in this chest. It takes all the time and all the energy we have to conquer the idiocy in us. And that's what matters. The rest is of no importance. To be an impeccable warrior will give you vigor and youth and power.
      I have taught you to be dispassionate. The world of people goes up and down and people go up and down with their world; as sorcerers we have no business following them in their ups and downs. The art of sorcerers is to be outside everything and be unnoticeable. And more than anything else, the art of sorcerers is never to waste their power.


CC         Second Ring of Power

[Jennifer-]

A warrior is a hunter. He calculates everything. That’s control. Once his calculations are over, he acts. He lets go. That’s abandon. A warrior is not a leaf at the mercy of the wind. No one can push him; no one can make him do things against himself or against his better judgment. A warrior is tuned to survive, and he survives in the best of all possible fashions.”

CC~

[Jennifer-]

“Intent is not a thought, or an object, or a wish. Intent is what can make a man succeed when his thoughts tell him that he is defeated. It operates in spite of the warrior’s indulgence. Intent is what makes him invulnerable. Intent is what sends a shaman through a wall, through space, to infinity.”

CC~

[SoulFire]

The Power Of Silence


At various times don Juan attempted to name his knowledge for my benefit. He felt that the most appropriate name was nagualism, but that the term was too obscure. Calling it simply "knowledge" made it too vague, and to call it "witchcraft" was debasing. "The mastery of intent" was too abstract, and "the search for total freedom" too long and metaphorical. Finally, because he was unable to find a more appropriate name, he called it "sorcery," although he admitted it was not really accurate.

Over the years, he had given me different definitions of sorcery, but he had always maintained that definitions change as knowledge increases. Toward the end of my apprenticeship, I felt I was in a position to appreciate a clearer definition, so I asked him once more.
"From where the average man stands," don Juan said, "sorcery is nonsense or an ominous mystery beyond his reach. And he is right - not because this is an absolute fact, but because the average man lacks the energy to deal with sorcery."

He stopped for a moment before he continued. "Human beings are born with a finite amount of energy," don Juan said, "an energy that is systematically deployed, beginning at the moment of birth, in order that it may be used most advantageously by the modality of the time."
"What do you mean by the modality of the time?" I asked.

"The modality of the time is the precise bundle of energy fields being perceived," he answered. "I believe man's perception has changed through the ages. The actual time decides the mode; the time decides which precise bundle of energy fields, out of an incalculable number, are to be used. And handling the modality of the time - those few, selected energy fields - takes all our available energy, leaving us nothing that would help us use any of the other energy fields."

He urged me with a subtle movement of his eyebrows to consider all this.
"This is what I mean when I say that the average man lacks the energy needed to deal with sorcery," he went on. "If he uses only the energy he has, he can't perceive the worlds sorcerers do. To perceive them, sorcerers need to use a cluster of energy fields not ordinarily used. Naturally, if the average man is to perceive those worlds and understand sorcerers' perception he must use the same cluster they have used. And this is just not possible, because all his energy is already deployed."

He paused as if searching for the appropriate words to make his point.
"Think of it this way," he proceeded. "It isn't that as time goes by you're learning sorcery; rather, what you're learning is to save energy. And this energy will enable you to handle some of the energy fields which are inaccessible to you now. And that is sorcery: the ability to use energy fields that are not employed in perceiving the ordinary world we know. Sorcery is a state of awareness. Sorcery is the ability to perceive something which ordinary perception cannot.

[SoulFire]

(heh, I had forgotten I had this book on my PC.  Just found it. Yay! thanks R Looks like I'll be doing soem reading )

CARLOS CASTANEDA
THE WHEEL OF TIME THE SHAMANS OF ANCIENT MEXICO, THEIR THOUGHTS ABOUT LIFE, DEATH AND THE UNIVERSE


QUOTATIONS FROM THE TEACHINGS OF DON JUAN

Power rests on the kind of knowledge that one holds. What is the sense of knowing things that are useless? They will not prepare us for our unavoidable encounter with the unknown.

Nothing in this world is a gift. Whatever has to be learned must be learned the hard way.

A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war: wide-awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. Going to knowledge or going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and whoever makes it might never live to regret it. When a man has fulfilled all four of these requisites - to be wide awake, to have fear, respect, and absolute assurance - there are no mistakes for which he will have to account; under such conditions his actions lose the blundering quality of the acts of a fool. If such a man fails, or suffers a defeat, he will have lost only a battle, and there will be no pitiful regrets over that.

Dwelling upon the self too much produces a terrible fatigue. A man in that position is deaf and blind to everything else. The fatigue itself makes him cease to see the marvels all around him.

Every time a man sets himself to learn, he has to labor as hard as anyone can, and the limits of his learning are determined by his own nature. Therefore, there is no point in talking about knowledge. Fear of knowledge is natural; all of us experience it, and there is nothing we can do about it. But no matter how frightening learning is, it is more terrible to think of a man without knowledge.

To be angry at people means that one considers their acts to be important. It is imperative to cease to feel that way. The acts of men cannot be important enough to offset our only viable alternative: our unchangeable encounter with infinity.

Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore, a warrior must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if he feels that he should not follow it, he must not stay with it under any conditions. His decision to keep on that path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition. He must look at every path closely and deliberately. There is a question that a warrior has to ask, mandatory: Does this path have a heart?
All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. However, a path without a heart is never enjoyable. On the other hand, a path with heart is easy - it does not make a warrior work at liking it; it makes for a joyful journey; as long as a man follows it, he is one with it.
There is a world of happiness where there is no difference between things because there is no one there to ask about the difference. But that is not the world of men. Some men have the vanity to believe that they live in two worlds, but that is only their vanity. There is but one single world for us. We are men, and must follow the world of men contentedly.

A man has four natural enemies: fear. clarity, power, and old age. Fear, clarity, and power can be overcome, but not old age. Its effect can be postponed, but it can never be overcome.

[SoulFire]

A warrior knows that he is only a man. His only regret is that his life is so short that he can't grab onto all the things that he would like to. But for him, this is not an issue; it's only a pity.

ASR

[Jahn]

The self-confidence of a warrior is not the self-confidence of the average man. The average man seeks certainty in the eyes of the onlooker and calls that self-confidence. The warrior seeks impeccability in his own eyes and calls that humbleness. The average man is hooked to his fellow men, while the warrior is hooked only to himself.

Hooked only to himself is another way of saying that my focus is on Me - the real Self.
Self-confidence is trust and trust is another side of power.

[Josh]

He described the specific problems of sorcerers as twofold.  One is the impossibility of restoring a shattered continuity; the other is the impossibility of using the continuity dictated by the new position of their assemblage points.  That new continuity is always too tenous, too unstable, and does not offer sorcerers the assuredness they need to function as if they were in the world of everyday life.

"How do sorcerers resolve this problem?" I asked.

"None of us resolves anything." he replied.  "The spirit either resolves it for us or it doesnt.  If it does, a sorcerer finds himself acting in the sorcerers' world without knowing how.  This is the reason why I have insisted from the day I found you that impeccability is all that counts.  A sorcerer lives an impeccable life, and that seems to beckon the solution.  Why?  No one knows."

Don Juan remained quiet for a moment.  And then, as if I had voiced it, he commented on a thought I was having.  I was thinking impeccability always made me think of religious morality.

"Impeccability, as I have told you so many times, is not morality," he said.  "It only resembles morality.  Impeccability is simply the best use of our energy level.  Naturally, it calls for frugality, thoughtfulness, simplicity, innocence, and above all, it calls for a lack of self-reflection.  All of this makes it sound like a manual for a monastic life, but it isnt.

"Sorcerers say that in order to command the spirit, and by that they mean to command the movement of the assemblage point, one needs energy.  The only thing that stores energy for us is our impeccability."

from The Power of Silence

[niamhspark]

"It is a revolution. To regard the lion and the water rats and our fellow men as equals is a magnificent act of a warrior's spirit. It takes power to do that." ~CC

[niamhspark]

"The path of knowledge is a forced one. In order to learn we must be spurred. In the path of knowledge we are always fighting something, avoiding something, prepared for something; and that something is always inexplicable, greater, more powerful than us. The inexplicable forces will come to you. Now it is the spirit of the water hole, later on it'll be your own ally, so there is nothing you can do now but to prepare yourself for the struggle. Years ago la Catalina spurred you, she was only a sorceress, though, and that was a beginner's trick.

"The world is indeed full of frightening things and we are helpless creatures surrounded by forces that are inexplicable and unbending. The average man, in ignorance, believes that those forces can be explained or changed; he doesn't really know how to do that, but he expects that the actions of mankind will explain them or change them sooner or later.

The sorcerer, on the other hand, does not think of explaining or changing them; instead, he learns to use such forces by redirecting himself and adapting to their direction. That's his trick. There is very little to sorcery once you find out its trick. A sorcerer is only slightly better off than the average man. Sorcery does not help him to live a better life; in fact I should say that sorcery hinders him; it makes his life cumbersome, precarious. By opening himself to knowledge a sorcerer becomes more vulnerable than the average man.

On the one hand his fellow men hate him and fear him and will strive to end his life; on the other hand the inexplicable and unbending forces that surround every one of us, by right of our being alive, are for a sorcerer a source of even greater danger. To be pierced by a fellow man is indeed painful, but nothing in comparison to being touched by an ally. A sorcerer, by opening himself to knowledge, falls prey to such forces and has only one means of balancing himself, his will; thus he must feel and act like a warrior. I will repeat this once more: Only as a warrior can one survive the path of knowledge. What helps a sorcerer live a better life is the strength of being a warrior. "

CC/DJ ASR

[erik]

Super, Joshua!