Version 2006.05.20

## "The Wheel of Time: The Shamans of Ancient Mexico, Their Thoughts about Life, Death and the Universe" - ©1998 by Carlos Castaneda

### Quotations from "The Second Ring of Power"

When one has nothing to lose, one becomes courageous. We are timid only when there is something we can still cling to.

A warrior could not possibly leave anything to chance. He actually affects the outcome of events by the force of his awareness and his unbending intent.

If a warrior wants to pay back for all the favors he has received, and he has no one in particular to address his payment to, he can address it to the spirit of man. That's always a very small account, and whatever one puts in it is more than enough.

After arranging the world in a most beautiful and enlightened manner, the scholar goes back home at five o'clock in the afternoon in order to forget his beautiful arrangement.

The human form is a conglomerate of energy fields which exists in the universe, and which is related exclusively to human beings. Shamans call it the human form because those energy fields have been bent and contorted by a lifetime of habits and misuse.

A warrior knows that he cannot change, and yet he makes it his business to try to change. The warrior is never disappointed when he fails to change. That's the only advantage a warrior has over the average man.

Warriors must be impeccable in their effort to change in order to scare and shake the human form away. After years of impeccability, a moment will come when the human form cannot stand it any longer and leaves. That is to say, a moment will come when the energy fields contorted by a lifetime of habit are straightened out. A warrior gets deeply affected, and can even die as a result of this straightening out of energy fields, but an impeccable warrior always survives.

The only freedom warriors have is to behave impeccably. Not only is impeccability freedom; it is the only way to straighten out the human form.

Any habit needs all its parts in order to function. If some parts are missing, the habit is disassembled.

The fight is right here on this earth. We are human creatures. Who knows what's waiting for us, or what kind of power we may have?

The world of people goes up and down and people go up and down with their world; warriors have no business following the ups and downs of their fellow men.

The core of our being is the act of perceiving, and the magic of our being is the act of awareness. Perception and awareness are a single, functional, inextricable unit.

We choose only once. We choose either to be warriors or to be ordinary men. A second choice does not exist. Not on this earth.

The warriors' way offers a man a new life and that life has to be completely new. He can't bring to that new life his ugly old ways.

Warriors always take a first event of any series as the blueprint or the map of what is going to develop for them subsequently.

Human beings love to be told what to do, but they love even more to fight and not do what they are told, and thus they get entangled in hating the one who told them in the first place.

Everybody has enough personal power for something. The trick for the warrior is to pull his personal power away from his weaknesses to his warrior's purpose.

Everyone can see, and yet we choose not to remember what we see.