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 "Journey to Ixtlan"

We hardly ever realize that we can cut anything out of our lives, anytime, in the blink of an eye.

One shouldn't worry about taking pictures or making tape recordings. Those are superfluities of sedate lives. One should worry about the spirit, which is always present.

Personal history must be constantly renewed by telling parents, relatives, and friends everything one does. On the other hand, for the warrior who has no personal history, no explanations are needed; nobody is angry or disillusioned with his acts. And above all, on one pins him down with their thoughts and their expectations.

When nothing is for sure we remain alert; perennially on our toes. It is more exciting not to know which bush the rabbit is hiding behind than to behave as though we knew everything.

As long as a man feels that he is the most important thing in the world, he cannot really appreciate the world around him. He is like a horse with blinders; all he sees is himself, apart from everything else.

Death is our eternal companion. It is always to our left, an arm's length behind us. Death is the only wise adviser that a warrior has. Whenever he feels that everything is going wrong and he's about to be annihilated, he can turn to his death and ask if that is so.

His death will tell him that he is wrong; that nothing really matters outside its touch. His death will tell him, 'I haven't touched you yet.'

Whenever a warrior decides to do something, he must go all the way, but he must take responsibility for what he does. No matter what he does, he must know first why he is doing it, and then he must proceed with his actions without having doubts or remorse about them.

In a world where death is the hunter, there is no time for regrets or doubts. There is only time for decisions.

It doesn't matter what the decisions are. Nothing could be more or less serious than anything else. In a world where death is the hunter, there are no small or big decisions. There are only decisions that a warrior makes in the face of his inevitable death.

A warrior must learn to be available and unavailable at the precise turn of the road. It is useless for a warrior to be unwittingly available at all times, as it is useless for him to hide when everybody knows that he is hiding.

For a warrior, to be inaccessible means that he touches the world around him sparingly, then moves away. He deliberately avoids exhausting himself and others. He doesn't use and squeeze people until they have shriveled to nothing, especially the people he loves.

Once a man worries, he clings to anything out of desperation; and once he clings he is bound to get exhausted or to exhaust whomever or whatever he is clinging to. A warrior-hunter, on the other hand, knows he will lure game into his traps over and over again, so he doesn't worry. To worry is to become accessible; unwittingly accessible.

A warrior-hunter deals intimately with his world, and yet he is inaccessible to that same world. He taps it lightly, stays for as long as he needs to, and then swiftly moves away, leaving hardly a mark.

To be a warrior-hunter is not just to trap game. A warrior-hunter does not catch game because he sets his traps, or because he knows the routines of his prey, but because he himself has no routines. This is his advantage. He is not at all like the animals he is after. They are fixed by heavy routines and predictable quirks. He is free, fluid, and unpredictable.

For an average man, the world is weird because if he's not bored with it, he's at odds with it. For a warrior, the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, and unfathomable. A warrior assumes responsibility for being here in this marvelous world in this marvelous time.

A warrior must learn to make every act count, since he is going to be here in this world for only a short while, in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it.

Acts have power. Especially when the warrior acting knows that those acts are his last battle. There is a strange consuming happiness in acting with the full knowledge that whatever he is doing may very well be his last act on earth.

A warrior focuses his attention on the link between himself and his death. Without remorse or sadness or worrying, he focuses his attention on the fact that he does not have time and let his acts flow accordingly. He lets each of his acts be his last battle on earth. Under those conditions, his acts have their rightful power.

Otherwise his acts would be, for as long as he lives, the acts of a fool.

A warrior-hunter knows that his death is waiting, and the very act he is performing now may well be his last battle on earth. He calls it a battle because it is a struggle.

Most people move from act to act without any struggle or thought.

A warrior-hunter, on the contrary, assesses every act. He has an intimate awareness of his death, so he proceeds judiciously as if every act were his last battle.

Only a fool would fail to notice the advantage a warrior-hunter has over his fellow men.

A warrior-hunter gives his last battle its due respect. It's only natural that his last act on earth should be the best of himself. It's pleasurable that way. It dulls the edge of his fright.

A warrior is an immaculate hunter who hunts power. He's not drunk or crazed, and he has neither the time nor the disposition to bluff or to lie to himself; or to make a wrong move. The stakes are too high for that. The stakes are his trimmed orderly life which he has taken so long to tighten and perfect. He is not going to throw that away by making some stupid miscalculation; by mistaking something for something else.

A man, any man, deserves everything that is a man's lot: joy, pain, sadness, and struggle.

The nature of his acts is unimportant as long as he acts as a warrior. If his spirit is distorted he should simply fix it- purge it, make it perfect- because there is no other task in our entire lives which is more worthwhile. Not to fix the spirit is to seek death, and that is the same as to seek nothing, since death is going to overtake us regardless of anything.

To seek the perfection of the warrior's spirit is the only task worthy of our temporariness, and our manhood.

The hardest thing in the world is to assume the mood of a warrior. It is of no use to be sad and complain and feel justified in doing so; believing that someone is always doing something to us.

Nobody is doing anything to anybody, much less to a warrior.

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.

A warrior is only a man; a humble man. He cannot change the designs of his death. But his impeccable spirit, which has stored power after stupendous hardships, can certainly hold his death for a moment; a moment long enough to let him rejoice for the last time in recalling his power. We may say that that is a gesture which death has with those who have an impeccable spirit.

It doesn't matter how one was brought up. What determines the way one does anything is personal power. A man is only the sum of his personal power, and that sum determines how he lives and how he dies.

Personal power is a feeling. Something like being lucky. Or one may call it a mood. Personal power is something that one acquires by means of a lifetime of struggle.

A warrior acts as if he knows what he is doing, when in effect he knows nothing.

A warrior doesn't know remorse for anything he has done because to isolate one's acts as being mean, or ugly, or evil is to place an unwarranted importance on the self.

The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.

People tell us from the time we are born that the world is such and such and so and so, and naturally we have no choice but to accept that the world is the way people have been telling us it is.

The art of a warrior is to balance the terror of being a man with the wonder of being a man.