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 "Tales of Power"

The self-confidence of the 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 infinity.

There are lots of things a warrior can do at a certain time which he couldn't do years before. Those things themselves did not change; what changed was his idea of himself.

The only possible course that a warrior has is to act consistently and without reservations. At a certain moment, he knows enough of the warriors' way to act accordingly, but his old habits and routines may stand in his way.

If a warrior is to succeed in anything, the success must come gently, with a great deal of effort but with no stress or obsession.

The internal dialogue is what grounds people in the daily world. The world is such and such or so and so, only because we talk to ourselves about its being such and such or so and so. The passageway into the world of shamans opens up after the warrior has learned to shut off his internal dialogue.

To change our idea of the world is the crux of shamanism. And stopping the internal dialogue is the only way to accomplish it.

When a warrior learns to stop the internal dialogue, everything becomes possible; the most far-fetched schemes become attainable.

A warrior takes his lot, whatever it may be, and accepts it in ultimate humbleness. He accepts in humbleness what he is, not as grounds for regret but as a living challenge.

The humbleness of a warrior is not the humbleness of the beggar.

The beggar falls to his knees at the drop of a hat, and scrapes the floor for anyone he deems to be higher; but at the same time, he demands that someone lower than him scrape the floor for him.

On the other hand, the warrior lowers his head to no one, and at the same time, he doesn't permit anyone to lower his head to him.

Solace, haven, fear: All of these are words which have created moods that we had learned to accept without ever questioning their value.

Our fellow men are black magicians, and whoever is with them is a black magician on the spot.

Think for a moment. Can you deviate from the path that your fellow men have lined up for you? If you remain with them, your thoughts and your actions are fixed forever in their terms. That is slavery.

The warrior, on the other hand, is free from all that. Freedom is expensive, but the price is not impossible to pay. So, fear your captors; your masters. Don't waste your time and your power fearing freedom.

The flaw with words is that they always make us feel enlightened, but when we turn around to face the world they always fail us and we end up facing the world as we always have, without enlightenment.

For this reason, a warrior seeks to act rather than to talk. As a result, he gets a new description of the world- a new description where talking is not that important, and where new acts have new reflections.

A warrior considers himself already dead, so there is nothing for him to lose. The worst has already happened to him. Therefore he's clear and calm. Judging him by his acts or by his words, one would never suspect that he has witnessed everything.

Knowledge is a most peculiar affair, especially for a warrior. Knowledge for a warrior is something that comes at once, engulfs him, and passes on.

Knowledge comes to a warrior, it might be descrived, floating like specks of gold dust; the same dust that covers the wings of moths. So for a warrior, knowledge is like being rained on by specks of golden dust.

Whenever the internal dialogue stops, the world collapses, and extraordinary facets of ourselves surface as though they had been kept heavily guarded by our words.

The world is unfathomable; as are we; as is every being that exists in the world.

Warriors do not win victories by beating their heads against walls, but by overtaking the walls. Warriors jump over walls: They don't demolish them.

A warrior must cultivate the feeling that he has everything needed for the extravagant journey that is his life. What counts for a warrior is being alive. Life in itself is sufficient, self-explanatory and complete. Therefore, one may say without being presumptuous that the experience of experiences is being alive.

An average man thinks that indulging in doubts and tribulations is the sign of sensitivity, and spirituality. The truth of the matter is that the average man is the farthest thing imaginable from being sensitive. His puny reason deliberately makes itself into a monster or a saint, but it is truthfully too little for such a big monster or saint mold.

To be a warrior is not a simple matter of wishing to be one. It is rather an endless struggle that will go on to the very last moment of our lives. Nobody is born a warrior, in exactly the same way that nobody is born an average man. We make ourselves into one or the other.

A warrior dies the hard way. His death must struggle to take him. A warrior does not give himself to death so easily.

Human beings are not objects. They have no solidity. They are round, luminous beings. They are boundless. The world of objects and solidity is only a description that was created to help them to make their passage on earth convenient.

Human beings' reason makes them forget that the description is only a description, and before they realize it, human beings have entrapped the totality of themselves in a vicious circle from which they rarely emerge in their lifetimes.

Human beings are perceivers, but the world that they perceive is an illusion: an illusion created by the description that was told to them from the moment they were born.

So in essence, the world that their reason wants to sustain is the world created by a description and its dogmatic and inviolable rules, which their reason learns to accept and defend.

Our concealed treasure as luminous beings is that we have something which is almost never used: intent.

The maneuver of shamans is similar to the maneuver of the average man. Both have a description of the world. The average man upholds it with his reason and the shaman upholds it with his intent. Both descriptions have their rules, but the advantage of the shaman is that intent is more engulfing than reason.

Only as a warrior can one withstand the path of knowledge. A warrior cannot complain or regret anything. His life is an endless challenge, and challenges cannot possibly be considered as good or bad. Challenges are simply challenges.

The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man takes everything as a blessing or as a curse.

The trump card of the warrior is that he believes without believing. But obviously a warrior can't just say he believes and let it go at that. That would be too easy. To just believe without any exertion would exonerate him from examining his situation.

Whenever a warrior has to involve himself in matters of believing, he chooses. It's not that a warrior simply chooses to believes. A warrior has to believe. Having to believe in such a fashion is the warrior's expression of his innermost predilection.

Death is an indispensable ingredient in having to believe. Without the awareness of death, we feel immortal, and everything becomes ordinary and trivial. Because of our awareness that death is stalking us, warriors come to see and realize that the world is an unfathomable mystery.

Power always makes a cubic centimeter of chance available to a warrior. The warrior's art is to be perennially fluid in order to pluck it.

The average man is aware of everything only when he thinks he should be. The condition of a warrior, however, is to be aware of everything at all times.

The totality of ourselves is a very mysterious affair. We need only a very small portion of it to fulfill the most complex tasks of life. Yet when we die, we die with the totality of ourselves.

A rule of thumb for a warrior is that he makes his decisions so carefully that nothing that may happen as a result of them can surprise him, much less drain his power.

When a warrior makes the decision to take action, he should be prepared to die. If he is prepared to die, there shouldn't be any pitfalls, any unwelcome surprises, any unnecessary acts. Everything should gently fall into place because he is expecting nothing.

A warrior, as a teacher, must first of all teach about the possibility of acting without believing; without expecting rewards- acting just for the hell of it. His success as a teacher depends on how well and how harmoniously he guides his wards in this specific respect.

In order to help his ward to erase personal history, the warrior as a teacher teaches three techniques: losing self-importance, assuming responsibility for one's acts, and using death as an adviser. Without the beneficial effect of these three techniques, erasing personal history would involve being shifty, evasive and unnecessarily dubious about oneself and one's actions.

There is no way to get rid of self-pity for good: It has a definite place and character in our lives; a definite facade which is recognizable. Thus, every time the occasion arises, the facade of self-pity becomes active. It has a history. But if one changes the facade, one shifts its place of prominence. One changes facades by shifting the component elements of the facade itself. Self-pity is useful to the user because he feels important and deserving of better conditions, better treatment, or because he is unwilling to assume responsibility for the acts that brought him to the state that elicited self-pity.

Changing the facade of self-pity means only that one has assigned a secondary place to a formerly important element. Self-pity is still a prominent feature, but it has now taken a position in the background.

In the same fashion, the idea of one's impending death, the idea of a warrior's humbleness, and the idea of taking responsibility for one's acts were all in the background at one time for a warrior without ever being used until the moment he became a warrior.

A warrior acknowledges his pain, but he doesn't indulge in it. The mood of the warrior who enters into the unknown is not one of sadness. On the contrary, he's joyful because he feels humbled by his great fortune, confident that his spirit is impeccable, and above all, is fully aware of his efficiency. A warrior's joyfulness comes from having accepted his fate, and from having truthfully assessed what lies ahead of him.