## Carlos Castaneda Interviews and Articles

### Carlos Castaneda's
The Warriors' Way | Readers of Infinity
Number 2. Volume 1.

[page 1/4]
by Carlos Castaneda
"THE WARRIORS' WAY"
To be called "READERS OF INFINITY" starting next issue.
A Journal of Applied Hermeneutics
Number 2, Volume 1
Los Angeles, February, 1996

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Author's note :

For purposes of elucidation, it is necessary that language be used in this journal in its fullest permissible scope. Thus, philosophical discourse will be rendered as formally as it demands. Sorcerers' discourse, on the other hand, will be rendered as it was stated. The fullest permissible scope of language enters into play in this instance.

WHAT IS INTENTIONALITY ?

In the first issue of this journal, intentionality was defined as "the tacit act of filling out the empty spaces left by direct sensory perception, or the act of enriching the observable phenomena by means of intention." This definition is an attempt at staying away from the standard philosophical explanations of intentionality. The concept of intentionality is of key importance in elucidating the themes of sorcery, as bona fide topics for philosophical discourse. The slant proposed for this journal -- applied hermeneutics -- is expressed through the revision and reinterpretation of themes pertinent to the discipline of philosophy ; themes which are congruous with other themes pertinent to the discipline of sorcery.

In the discipline of philosophy, intentionality is a term first used by the Scholastics in the Middle Ages to define, in terms of natural and unnatural motion, the intent of God in relation to his creation and the free will of man to choose or reject a virtuous life ; Scholastics were Western European scholars who developed a system of theological and philosophical teachings based on the authority of the church fathers and of Aristotle and his commentators.

The term intentionality was restructured in the late 19th century by Franz Brentano, a German philosopher, whose main concern was to find a characteristic which separates mental from physical phenomena. He said, "Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional or the mental inexistence of an object, and what we would like to call the reference to a content, the directness toward an object, which in this context is not to be understood as something real. In the representation, something is represented, in the judgment, something is acknowledged or rejected, in the desiring, something is desired. This intentional inexistence is peculiar alone to mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon shows anything like it. And thus, we can define mental phenomena by saying that such phenomena contain objects in themselves byway of intentionality."

Brentano's understanding was that it is the property of all mental phenomena to contain objects as inexistents, combined with the property of referring to those objects. Therefore, for him, only mental phenomena encase intentionality. Thus, intentionality becomes the irreducible feature of mental phenomena. He argued that since no physical phenomena could encase intentionality, the mental (the mind) cannot stem from the brain.

In the discipline of sorcery, there is an entry called calling intent. It refers to the definition of intentionality that was given in this journal: "the tacit act of filling out the empty spaces left by direct sensory perception, or the act of enriching the observable phenomena by means of intention." Sorcerers maintain, as Brentano intuited, that the act of intending is not in the realm of the physical ; that is to say, it is not part of the physicality of the brain or any other organ. Intent, for sorcerers, transcends the world we know. It is something like an energetic wave, a beam of energy which attaches itself to us. A

QUERIES ABOUT THE WARRIORS' WAY

There are two questions that we would like to address ourselves to in this issue. The first is:

"When am I going to see?

".. I have been doing Tensegrity steadily, and I have been recapitulating as much as I can. What's next?"

To see energy as it flows in the universe has been the primary goal of sorcerers since the beginning of their quest. For thousands of years, according to don Juan, warriors have endeavored to break the effect of our interpretation system and be able to perceive energy directly. In order to accomplish this, they developed, over the millennia, very exigent steps. We don't want to call them "praxes" or "procedures," but rather, "maneuvers." The warriors' way, in this sense, is a sustained maneuver designed to buttress warriors so they might fulfill the goal of seeing energy directly.

As the various premises of the warriors' way are discussed in each issue of this journal in the section called The Warriors' Way Viewed as a Philosophical-Practical Paradigm, it will become obvious that the sorcerers' efforts have been and are directed at obliterating the predominance of self-importance, as the only means to suspend the effects of our interpretation system. Sorcerers have a description of suspending that effect ; they call it stopping the world. When they reach this state, they see energy directly.

The reason don Juan advised refraining from focusing on praxes and procedures is because, along with doing Tensegrity or recapitulating or following the warriors' path, practitioners must intend their change ; they must intend stopping the world. So, it is not merely following the steps that counts ; what is of supreme importance is intending the effect of following the steps.

"Are you doing something to me through Tensegrity?

".. Today, I felt something moving on my back and I am afraid. I have stopped doing Tensegrity until you clarify this point.

It has been our experience that the most rational people, such as lawyers, for instance, or psychologists, have asked this type of question. Some years ago, Florinda Donner-Grau made the following statement in Spanish to one of her friends, a very serious, cultured woman : "Eres tan linda que te queremos robar." "You are so darling that we want to steal you." In Spanish, this locution is thoroughly correct as an expression of endearment.

Florinda did not see her friend until a year later, when she announced to Florinda that she had to see her on her psychiatrist's advice. She wanted to confront Florinda and her cohorts, after a year of analysis spurred by obsessive, recurring dreams in which an inhuman force was trying to take her away from her family and her close friends. In her mind, that inhuman force was, of course, Florinda DonnerGrau and her cohorts.

Nothing of this is new to us. Every one of us has had the same feelings and asked the same question to don Juan Matus in varying degrees of coarseness. We all felt something moving on our backs. Don Juan said that it was a thankful muscle which had been fed with oxygen for the first time ever, after we had done the magical passes. He assured every one of us, self-important complainers, that he needed us as he needed a hole in the head. He reminded us that he had daily appointments with the infinite ; appointments that he had to attend in a state of profound ease and purity, and that influencing others was not in any way part of that needed ease and purity. He pointed out to us that the idea that we were being manipulated by some evil force that had us by the neck, like guinea pigs, was a product of our lifetime habit of relishing being victims. He used to chide us in a mocking tone of despair, "He's doing it to me, and I can't help myself."

Don Juan's recommendation to us, regarding our fears of being unduly influenced, was a sort of parody of the political turmoil of the sixties, when the following statement was an axiom of the political activists of the time: "In case of doubt, burn." Don Juan modified it to : "In case of doubt, be impeccable."

Nowadays, we understand don Juan's position when he said, "It is inconceivable to fulfill, loaded with misgivings, misconceptions and wrongdoings, the true goal of sorcery : a journey to infinity."

When we hear our old complaints voiced by someone else, our act of impeccability is to assure the complainer that we are in search of freedom and that freedom is free ; free in the sense that it is gratis and free in the sense of not having the staggering grip of unwarranted and obsessive self-importance.

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The Warriors' Way Viewed as a Philosophical-Practical Paradigm

In the previous issue of this journal, the first premise of the warriors' way was stated as : We Are Perceptors. Perceptors was used in place of perceivers. This was not an error, but the desire to extend the use of the Spanish language term perceptor which is very active, in order to connote in English the urgency of being a perceiver. In this journal of applied hermeneutics, the problem of enhancing the meaning of a term by propping it with a foreign cognate is going to arise quite often ; sometimes even to the point of forcing the creation of a new term ; not as a show of snobbery, but because of the inherent need to describe some sensation or experience or perception that has either never been described before, or if it has, it has escaped our knowledge. The implication is that our knowledge, no matter how adequate it might be, is limited.

The second premise of the warriors' way is called WE ARE WHAT OUR INCEPTION IS. This is one of the most difficult premises of the warriors' way ; not so much because of its complexity or rarity, but because it is nearly impossible for any of us to admit certain conditions pertaining to ourselves, conditions which sorcerers have been aware of over the millennia.

The first time don Juan Matus began to explain this premise, I thought he was joking, or that he was merely trying to shock me. He was teasing me at the time about my stated concern with finding love in life. He had asked me once what were my aims in life. Since I couldn't come up with any intelligible answer, I replied to him half jokingly that I wanted to find love.

"The search for love, for the people who reared you, meant having sex," don Juan had said to me on that occasion. "Why don't you call a spade a spade ? You are in search of sexual satisfaction, true ?"

I denied it, of course. But the topic remained with don Juan as a source for teasing me. Every time I saw him, he would find or construct the proper context to ask me about my search for love, i.e. sexual satisfaction.

The first time he discussed the second premise of the warriors' way he began by teasing me, but suddenly he became very serious.

"I recommend that you change venues," he said, and abstain totally from continuing your search. It will lead you nowhere at best ; at worst, it will lead you to your downfall."

"But why don Juan, why must I give up sex?" I asked in a plaintive voice.

"Because you are a bored fuck," he said.

"What is that, don Juan? What do you mean, bored fuck?"

"One of the most serious things warriors do," don Juan explained, "is to search, confirm, and realize the nature of their inception. Warriors must know as accurately as they can whether their parents were sexually excited when they conceived them, or whethertheywere merely fulfilling a conjugal function. Civilized lovemaking is very, very boring to the participants. Sorcerers believe, without a shadow of a doubt, that children conceived in a civilized fashion are the products of a very bored . . . fuck. I don't know what else to call it. If I used another word, it would be a euphemism, and it would lose its punch."

After being told this incessantly, I began to ponder seriously what he was talking about. I thought I had understood him. Then doubt crept up on me every time and I found myself asking the same question : "What is a bored fuck, don Juan ?" I suppose I unconsciously wanted him to repeat what he had already said dozens of times.

"Don't begrudge my repetition," don Juan used to say to me every time. "It'll take years of pounding before you admit that you are a bored fuck. So, I'll repeat to you again : If there is no excitation at the moment of conception, the child that comes out of such a union will be intrinsically, sorcerers say, just as he was conceived. Since there is no real excitation between the spouses, but perhaps merely mental desire, the child must bear the consequences of their act. Sorcerers assert that such children are needy, weak, unstable, dependent. Those, they say, are the children that never, ever leave home ; they stay put for life. The advantage of such beings is that they are extremely consistent in the midst of their weakness. They could do the same job for a lifetime without ever feeling the urge to change. If they happen to have a good, sturdy model as children, they grow to be very efficient, but if they fail to have a good pattern, there is no end to their anguish, turmoil and instability

"Sorcerers say with great sadness that the enormous bulk of humanity was conceived like that. This is the reason we hear endlessly about the urge to find something that we don't have. We search, for the duration of our lives, according to sorcerers, for that original excitation that we were deprived of. That's why I said that you are a bored fuck. I see anguish and discontent written all over you. But don't feel bad. I am also a bored fuck. There are very few people, in my knowledge, who are not."

"What does this mean to me, don Juan?" I asked him once, genuinely alarmed.

Somehow don Juan had hit my inner core directly with every one of his words. I was exactly what he had described as the bored fuck reared in a bad pattern. Finally one day, it all boiled down to a crucial statement and question.

"I admit I'm a bored fuck. What can I do?" I said.

Don Juan laughed uproariously, tears coming to his eyes. "I know, I know," he said, patting me on the back, trying to comfort me, I suppose. "To begin with, don't call yourself a bored fuck."

He looked at me with such a serious, concerned expression that I began to take notes.

"Write everything down," he said encouragingly. "The first positive step is to use just the initials : B.F."

I wrote this down before I realized the joke. I stopped and looked at him. He was veritably about to split his sides laughing. In Spanish, bored fuck is cojida aburrida, C. A., just like the initials of my birth name, Carlos Aranha.

When his laughter had subsided, don Juan seriously delineated a plan of action to offset the negative conditions of my inception. He laughed uproariously as he described me as not only an average B.F., but as one that had an extra charge of nervousness.

"In the warriors' path," he said, "nothing is finished. Nothing is forever. If your parents didn't make you as they should have, remake yourself."

He explained that the first maneuver of the sorcerers' kit is to become a miser of energy. Since a B.F does not have any energy, it is useless to waste the little bit that he has in patterns that are not adequate to the amount of energy available. Don Juan recommended that I abstain from engaging in patterns of behavior that demanded energy I did not have. Abstinence was the answer, not because this was morally correct or desirable, but because it was energetically the only way for me to store enough energy to be on par with those who were conceived under conditions of tremendous excitation.

The patterns of behavior he was talking about included everything that I did, from the way I tied my shoes, or ate, to the way I worried about my selfpresentation, or the way I pursued my daily activity, especially when it referred to courtship. Don Juan insisted that I abstain from sexual intercourse, because I had no energy for it.

"All you accomplish in your sexual foragings," he declared, "is to get yourself into states of profound dehydration. You get circles under your eyes ; your hair is falling off ; you have weird spots on your nails ; your teeth are yellow ; and your eyes are tearing all the time. Relationships with women cause you such nervousness that you devour your food without chewing it, so you're always plugged up."

Don Juan enjoyed himself immensely, telling me all this, which added enormously to my chagrin. His last remark was, however, like the act of throwing a lifesaver to me.

"Sorcerers say," he went on, "that it is possible to tuma B.F into something inconceivable. It is just a matter of intending it ; I mean, intending the inconceivable. To do this, to intend the inconceivable, one must use anything that is available, anything at all."

"What is 'anything at all,' don Juan ?" I asked, genuinely touched.

"Anything is anything. A sensation, a memory, a wish, an urge ; perhaps fear, desperation, hope ; perhaps curiosity"

I didn't quite understand this last part. But I understood it sufficiently to begin my struggle to get out from the underpinnings of a civilized conception. A lifetime later, the Blue Scout wrote a poem that explained it to me in full.

The Conception of a B.F

by the Blue Scout

She was made in an Arizonan trailer,

after a night of playing poker

and drinking beer with friends.

His foot got caught

in the torn lace of her nightie.

She smelled like a mixture of tobacco smoke

and Aqua Net hair spray.

He was thinking of his bowling score

when he found himself erect.

She was wondering how this life

could possibly last a lifetime.

She wanted to go to the bathroom

when she found herself pinned down.

He stifled a belch as she was conceived.

But luckily for her

the two were in the desert,

and at that moment

a coyote howled;

sending a chill of longing

through the woman's womb.

That chill was all

she brought into this world.

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THE TENSEGRITY LOG
WHAT ARE WARRIOR GUARDIANS?

It was stated in the previous issue, that for don Juan and other practitioners like him, a sorcerer was any person who, through discipline and purpose, was capable of interrupting the effect of the interpretation system we use to construct the world that we know. Sorcerers maintain that energy at large is transformed into sensorial data and these sensorial data are interpreted as the world of everyday life. Sorcery is, therefore, a maneuver of interference ; a maneuver by means of which a flow is interrupted. For sorcerers, sorcery has nothing to do with incantations or rituals, which are mere concatenations designed to obscure purposefully its true nature and goal : the enlargement of the parameters of normal perception.

For don Juan Matus, the practitioners of sorcery were fighters who struggled to return their perceiving attributes to an origin that was more engulfing than the perceiving accomplished in daily living. He called this kind of fighter, warrior guardian, and said that all the practitioners like him were warrior guardians. Warrior guardian was for him a synonym for sorcerer.

The only thing that differentiates some warrior guardians from others is the fact that a specific goal or purpose has been designated for some of them, and not for others. A case in question is, for example, the three Chacmools, known to the attendants of the Tensegrity seminars and workshops. Their specific purpose was to guard the other warrior guardians and, as a unit, teach Tensegrity.

Circumstances beyond anybody's control appeared on the scene, and the reactions of those three warrior guardians made it imperative to dissolve their configuration. Don Juan had already warned his disciples that whoever takes the warriors' path is subject to the effects of energy, which opens the way or closes it. He insisted that his disciples have the prowess to obey the dictums of energy and not try to command it by imposing their wills.

When a state of profound sobriety is reached by a practitioner, there is no mistake whatsoever when reading the commands of energy. It is as if energy is conscious and alive, and it gives manifestations of its will. To go against it means an unnecessary risk which practitioners pay for dearly when, due to ignorance, or willfulness, they refuse to follow energy indications.

The present format of warrior guardians that has replaced the Chacmools, has been selected by energy itself. This new format is called the Energy Trackers. At the beginning, when the formulation presented itself, the Energy Trackers were called, for a moment, the Pathfinders. The belief was that the Pathfinders would find new paths, new procedures, new solutions. In the act of working together, it became apparent that what they were doing was tracking energy.

The explanation of tracking energy that don Juan Matus gave was somewhat confusing at the beginning. It became more and more clear as time went by, until it reached a level of being obvious to the point of redundancy.

"To track energy is to be able to follow the tenuous trail that energy leaves as it flows," don Juan explained. "Not every one of us is an energy tracker ; however, a moment comes in the life of every practitioner when he can follow the flow of energy, even if he does it in a clumsy manner. So I could say that some warriors are more elegant energy trackers than others, because their proclivity is to track energy."

The sparseness of his explanation made it very difficult for me even to conceive what he was referring to. Later on I became more acutely cognizant of what don Juan had in mind. My change of awareness was at first a vague sensation, derived mostly from a curious intellect, which affirmed that it is reasonable to assume that energy, although I didn't know what energy was, must leave a trail. As my involvement with don Juan Matus' world became super-intense, I became convinced that all of his concepts were based on direct observations made at a level incomprehensible to my daily awareness.

Don Juan explained my queries and sensations as a natural consequence of an inner silence I had gradually learned to attain.

"What you are feeling is the flow of energy," don Juan told me. "It is like a very mild electric charge, or a weird itching on your solar plexus, or above your kidneys. It is not a visual effect, yet every sorcerer I know speaks of it as seeing energy. I'll tell you a secret. I have never seen energy. I only feel it. My advantage is that I have never tried to explain what I feel. I just feel whatever I feel, end of the story."

His statements were a revelation to me. I happened to feel what he was describing. From there, I passed to the acceptance of those new feelings as events in my life without trying to explain them by finding a relationship of cause and fect [fact].

On the topic of tracking energy, don Juan also said that a nexus of warrior guardians could be formed, because of their close proximity to one other ; and that the members of such a nexus that could very well show a remarkable capacity for tracking energy. Such an event took place among us after the Chacmools' collapse. And a new format emerged ; a group of warrior guardians became, quite suddenly, strangely capable of tracking energy. This was manifested by their unusual nervousness and their agility to grab onto new situations with uncanny certainty.

If the modern jargon were to be used, it could be said that energy trackers are "channelers" par excellence. But the idea of channeling implies a certain degree of will on the part of the practitioner, who as the term describes, channels things into himself or herself. Energy trackers, on the other hand, do not impose their volition. They simply allow energy to show itself to them.