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 "A Separate Reality"

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.

Feeling important makes one heavy, clumsy and vain. To be a warrior one needs to be light and fluid.

When they are seen as fields of energy, human beings appear to be like fibers of light; like white cobwebs; very fine threads that circulate from the head to the toes. Thus to the eye of a seer, a person looks like an egg of circulating fibers. Arms and legs are like luminous bristles bursting out in all directions.

The seer sees that every man is in touch with everything else, not through his hands, but through a bunch of long fibers that shoot out in all directions from the center of his abdomen. Those fibers join a man to his surroundings: They keep his balance: They give him stability.

When a warrior learns to see, he sees that a human being is a luminous egg whether a beggar or a king. There is no way to change anything; or rather, what could be changed in that luminous egg? What?

A warrior never worries about his fear. Instead, he thinks about the wonders of seeing the flow of energy! The rest is frills, unimportant frills.

Only a crackpot would undertake the task of becoming a man of knowledge of his own accord. A sober-headed man has to be tricked into doing it. There are scores of people who would gladly undertake the task, but those don't count. They are usually cracked. They are like gourds that look fine from the outside and yet they would leak the minute you put pressure on them; the minute you filled them with water.

When a man is not concerned with seeing, things look very much the same to him every time he looks at the world. When he learns to see, on the other hand, nothing is ever the same every time he sees it, and yet it is the same.

To the eye of a seer, a man is like an egg. Every time he sees the same man he sees a luminous egg, yet it is not the same luminous egg.

The shamans of ancient Mexico gave the name 'allies' to inexplicable forces that acted upon them. They called them allies because they thought they could use them to their hearts' content. That notion nearly proved fatal to those shamans because what they called an ally is a being without corporeal essence that exists in the universe. Modern-day shamans call them inorganic beings.

To ask what function the allies have is like asking what we men do in the world. We are here: That's all. The allies are here like us, and maybe they were here before us.

The most effective way to live is as a warrior. A warrior may worry and think before making any decision, but once he makes it, he goes on his way free from worries or thoughts knowing there will be a million other decisions still awaiting him. That's the warriors' way.

Warriors thinks of our death when things become unclear. The idea of death is the only thing that tempers our spirit.

Death is everywhere. It may be the headlights of a car on a hilltop in the distance behind. They may remain visible for a while, and disappear into the darkness as if they had been scooped away; only to appear on another hilltop, and then disappear again. Those are the lights on the head of death. Death puts them on like a hat and then shoots off on a gallop, gaining on us, getting closer and closer. Sometimes it turns off its lights. But death never stops.

A warrior must know first that his acts are useless, and yet, he must proceed as if he didn't know it. That's a shaman's controlled Folly.

The eyes of man can perform two functions: one is seeing energy at large as it flows in the universe and the other is "looking at things in this world." Neither of these functions is better than the other; however to train the eyes only to look is a shameful and unnecessary loss.

A warrior lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, nor by thinking about what he will think when he has finished acting.

A warrior chooses a path with heart, any path with heart, and follows it; and then he rejoices and laughs. He knows, because he sees, that his life will be over altogether too soon. He sees that nothing is more important than anything else.

A warrior has no honor, no dignity, no family, no name, no country: He has only life to be lived. Under these circumstances, his only tie to his fellow men is his controlled folly.

Nothing being more important than anything else, a warrior chooses any act, and acts it out as if it mattered to him. His controlled folly makes him say that what he does matters and makes him act as if it did, and yet he knows that it doesn't. So when he fulfills his acts, he retreats in peace. Whether his acts were good or bad, or worked or didn't, is in no way part of his concern.

A warrior may also choose to remain totally impassive and never act, and behave as if being impassive really mattered to him. He would be rightfully true at that too, because that would also be his controlled folly.

There's no emptiness in the life of a warrior. Everything is filled to the brim, and everything is equal.

An average man is too concerned with liking people or with being liked himself. A warrior likes, that's all. He likes whatever or whomever he wants, for the hell of it.

A warrior takes responsibility for his acts; for the most trivial of his acts. An average man acts out his thoughts, and never takes responsibility for what he does.

The average man is either victorious or defeated and, depending on that, he becomes a persecutor or a victim. These two conditions are prevalent as long as one does not see. Seeing dispels the illusion of victory, or defeat, or suffering.

A warrior knows that he is waiting and what he is waiting for; and while he waits he wants nothing, and thus whatever little thing he gets is more than he can take.

If he needs to eat, he finds a way because he is not hungry. If something hurts his body, he finds a way to stop it because he is not in pain. To be hungry or to be in pain means that the man is not a warrior; and the forces of his hunger and pain will destroy him.

Denying oneself is an indulgence. The indulgence of denying is by far the worst. It forces us to believe that we are doing great things, when in effect we are only fixed within ourselves.

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 independent of any warrior's indulgence. Intent is what makes him invulnerable. Intent is what sends a shaman through a wall, through space, to infinity.

When a man embarks on the warriors' path he becomes aware, in a gradual manner, that ordinary life has been left forever behind. The means of the ordinary world are no longer a buffer for him; and he must adopt a new way of life if he is going to survive.

Every bit of knowledge that becomes power has death as its central force. Death lends the ultimate touch, and whatever is touched by death indeed becomes power.

Only the idea of death makes a warrior sufficiently detached so that he is capable of abandoning himself to anything. He knows his death is stalking him and won't give him time to cling to anything, so he tries, without craving, all of everything.

We are men and our lot is to learn and to be hurled into inconceivable new worlds. A warrior who sees energy knows that there is no end to the new worlds for our experiencing.

Don Juan told me, "Death is a twirl; death is a shiny cloud over the horizon; death is me talking to you; death is you and your writing pad; death is nothing. Nothing! It is here, yet it isn't here at all."

The spirit of a warrior is not geared to indulging and complaining, nor is it geared to winning or losing. The spirit of a warrior is geared only to struggle, and every struggle is a warrior's last battle on earth. Thus the outcome matters very little to him. In his last battle on earth a warrior lets his spirit flow free and clear. And as he wages his battle, knowing that his intent is impeccable, a warrior laughs and laughs.

We talk to ourselves incessantly about our world. In fact we maintain our world with our internal talk. And whenever we finish talking to ourselves about ourselves and our world, the world is always as it should be. We renew it, we rekindle it with life, we uphold it with our internal talk. Not only that, but we also choose our paths as we talk to ourselves. Thus we repeat the same choices over and over until the day we die because we keep on repeating the same internal talk over and over until the day we die.

A warrior is aware of this and strives to stop his internal talk.

The world is all that is encased here: life, death, people, and everything else that surrounds us. The world is incomprehensible. We won't ever understand it. We won't ever unravel its secrets. Thus we must treat the world as it is: a sheer mystery.

The things that people do cannot under any conditions be more important than the world. And thus a warrior treats the world as an endless mystery and what people do as an endless folly.