The Wheel of Time: Castaneda’s Teachings of Don Juan

by Carlos Castaneda

Introduction

This series of specially selected quotes was gathered from the first eight books I wrote about the world of the shamans of ancient Mexico. The quotes were taken directly from the explanations given to me, as an anthropologist, by my teacher and mentor don Juan Matus, a Yaqui Indian shaman from Mexico. He belonged to a lineage of shamans whose origin goes back to the shamans who lived in Mexico in ancient times. In the most effective way he could, don Juan introduced me to his world, which was, naturally, the world of those shamans of antiquity. Don Juan was therefore in a key position. He knew of the existence of another realm of reality, a realm that was neither illusory nor the product of bursts of fantasy. For don Juan and the rest of his fellow shamans—there were fifteen of them—the world of the shamans of antiquity was as real and as pragmatic as anything could be.

This work began as a very simple attempt to collect a series of vignettes, sayings, and ideas from the knowledge of those shamans that might be interesting to read and think about. But once the work was under way, an unforeseen change of direction took place: I realized that the quotes themselves were imbued with an extraordinary momentum. They revealed a hidden train of thought that had never been evident to me before. They pointed in the direction that don Juan’s explanations had taken during the thirteen years in which he guided me as an apprentice. Better than any kind of conceptualization, the quotes revealed an unsuspected and inflexible line of action that don Juan had followed to promote and facilitate my entry into his world. For me it became more than speculation that if don Juan had followed that line, it must also have been the way in which his own teacher had pushed him into the world of the shamans.

Don Juan Matus’s line of action was his deliberate attempt to draw me into what he said was another cognitive system. By cognitive system he meant the standard definition of cognition: the processes responsible for the awareness of everyday life; processes that include memory, experience, perception, and the skilled use of a given syntax. Don Juan’s opinion was that the shamans of ancient Mexico did in fact have a cognitive system different from that of ordinary man.

Following all the logic and reasoning available to me as a student of the social sciences, I had rejected his view. I told don Juan over and over that what he was claiming was preposterous. For me it was an intellectual aberration, to say the least.

It took thirteen years of work on his part and mine to demolish my confidence in the normal system of cognition that makes the world around us understandable to us. This maneuver drove me into a very strange state: a state of near distrust of the otherwise implicit acceptance of the cognitive events of the everyday world. After thirteen years of heavy assaults, I realized, against my own will, that don Juan Matus was really proceeding from another point of view. Therefore, the shamans of ancient Mexico must have had another system of cognition. Admitting this scorched my very being. I felt like a traitor. I felt as if I were upholding the most horrible heresy.

When he sensed that he had overcome my worst resistance, don Juan aimed as far and as deep into me as he could, and I had to admit, without reservations, that in the world of the shamans, practicing shamans judged the world from points of view that were indescribable by our resources of conceptualization. For example, they perceived energy as it flows freely in the universe; energy free from the bonds of socialization and syntax, pure vibratory energy. They called this act seeing. Don Juan’s main objective was to help me perceive energy as it flows in the universe. In the world of the shamans, perceiving energy in such a way was the mandatory first step toward a more encompassing, freer view of a different cognitive system. To awaken a seeing response in me, don Juan used other foreign units of cognition. One of the most important of these he called recapitulation, which consisted of a systematic examination of one’s life, piece by piece; an examination done not in the light of criticism or fault-finding, but in the light of an effort to understand one’s life and change its course. Don Juan’s claim was that once any practitioner has seen his life in the detached way that recapitulation requires, there is no way to return to the same life. Seeing energy as it flows in the universe means, for don Juan, the ability to see a human being as a luminous egg or luminous ball of energy, and to be able to distinguish, in that luminous ball of energy, certain features shared by ordinary men, such as a point of brightness on the already bright luminous ball of energy. The shamans’ claim was that it was at that point of brightness, which the shamans called the assemblage point, that perception was assembled. They could logically extend this thought to say that it was at that point of brightness that our perception of the world was manufactured. Odd as that may have seemed, don Juan Matus was right, in the sense that this is exactly what happens.

The perception of the shamans, therefore, was subject to a different process than the perception of ordinary man. The shamans claimed that perceiving energy directly led them to what they called energetic facts. By energetic facts they meant a vision obtained by seeing energy directly that led them to conclusions that were final and irreducible; they could not get entangled in speculation, or in trying to fit them into our standard system of interpretation.

Don Juan said that, for the shamans of his lineage, it was an energetic fact that the world around us is defined by processes of cognition, and that those processes are not unalterable; they are given to us. They are a matter of training, a matter of practicality and use. This thought was extended further, to another energetic fact: the standard processes of cognition are the product of our education, nothing more than that.

Don Juan knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that what he was telling me about the cognitive system of the shamans of ancient Mexico was a reality. Don Juan was, among other things, a nagual, which means, for practicing shamans, a natural leader, a person who was able to see energetic facts without detriment to his well-being. He was therefore qualified to lead his companions successfully along paths of thought and perception that are impossible to describe.

Considering all the facts that don Juan had taught me about his cognitive world, I came to the conclusion, which was the conclusion he himself shared, that the most important unit of that world was the idea of intent. For the shamans of ancient Mexico, intent was a force they could visualize when they saw energy as it flows in the universe. They considered that an all-pervading force intervened in every aspect of time and space. It was the impulse behind everything; but what was of inconceivable value to those shamans was that intent—a pure abstraction—was intimately attached to man. Man could always manipulate it. The shamans of ancient Mexico realized that the only way to affect this force was through impeccable behavior. Only the most disciplined practitioners could accomplish this feat.

Another stupendous unit of this strange cognitive system was the shamans’ understanding and use of the concepts of time and space. For them, time and space were not the same phenomena that form part of our lives by virtue of being an integral part of our normal cognitive system. For ordinary man, the standard definition of time is a nonspatial continuum in which events occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future. And space is defined as the infinite extension of the three-dimensional field in which the stars and galaxies exist; the universe.

For the shamans of ancient Mexico, time was something like a thought; a thought thought by something unrealizable in its magnitude. The logical argument for them was that man, being part of that thought, which was thought by forces inconceivable to his mentality, still retained a small percentage of that thought; a percentage that under certain circumstances of extraordinary discipline could be redeemed.

Space was, for those shamans, an abstract realm of activity. They called it the infinite, and referred to it as the sum total of all the endeavors of living creatures. Space was more accessible to them, something almost practical. It was as if they had a larger share in the abstract formulation of space. According to the accounts given by don Juan, the shamans of ancient Mexico never considered time and space to be obscure abstractions the way we do. For them, time and space, although incomprehensible in their formulations, were an integral part of man.

Those shamans had another cognitive unit called the wheel of time. The way they explained the wheel of time was by saying that time was like a tunnel of infinite length and width, a tunnel with reflecting furrows. Each furrow was infinite, and there was an infinite number of them. Living creatures were compulsively forced, by the force of life, to gaze into one furrow.

To gaze into a furrow simply means to be trapped by it, to live that furrow. A warrior’s goal is to focus, through an act of profound discipline, his unbending attention on the wheel of time in order to make it turn. Warriors who have succeeded in turning the wheel of time can gaze into any furrow and draw from it whatever they desire. To be free from the fascinating force of gazing into only one of those furrows means that warriors can look in any direction: while time retreats or while it advances upon them.

Seen in that way, the wheel of time is an overwhelming influence that extends through the warrior’s life and beyond, as is the case with the quotes in this book. They seem to have been strung together by a spiral that has a life of its own. That spiral, as explained by the cognition of the shamans, is the wheel of time. Under the impact of the wheel of time, the intent of this book became something that had not been part of the original plan. The quotes became the dominant factor, by themselves and in themselves, and the impulse they imposed on me was to keep them as close as I could to the spirit in which the quotes were given.

They were given in a spirit of utmost frugality and rectitude. Another thing I tried unsuccessfully to do with the quotes was to organize them into a series of categories that might make them easier to read. However, categorizing the quotes proved untenable. There was no way to establish meaningful categories that fit something as amorphous, as vast, as an entire cognitive world. The only thing to do was to follow the quotes, and let them create an outline of the framework of thoughts and feelings that the shamans of ancient Mexico had about life, death, the universe, and energy. They are reflections of how those shamans understood not only the universe but the processes of living and coexisting in our world. And, more important still, they point to the possibility of handling two systems of cognition at once without any detriment to the self.

I tried many times to analyze that feeling of fear, but I would immediately tire, grow bored, instantly find my search groundless and superfluous, and end up abandoning it. I asked don Juan about my state of being. I needed his advice, his encouragement. “You’re just scared,” he said. “That’s all there is to it. Don’t look for mysterious reasons for your fear. The mysterious reason is right there in front of you, within your reach. It is the intent of the shamans of ancient Mexico. You are dealing with their world. And that world shows you its face every now and then. Of course, you don’t have that vision. I didn’t have it in my time either. None of us did.” “You’re talking in riddles, don Juan!” “Yes, I am, for the moment. This will be clear to you someday. Right now, it’s idiotic to try to talk about it, or explain anything. Nothing I’m trying to show you would make sense. Some inconceivable banality would make infinitely more sense to you at this moment.”

He was absolutely right. All my fears were set off by some banality, which I was ashamed of then, and am ashamed of now. I was afraid of demonic possession. Such a fear had been embedded in my earliest life. Something that was inexplicable was, naturally, something bad, something evil that tended to destroy me.

The deeper don Juan’s explanations of the world of the ancient shamans went, the greater was my sense of needing to protect myself. This feeling was not something that could be put into words. It was, more than the need to protect something, the need to protect the truthfulness and undeniable worth of the world in which we human beings live. For me, my world was the only recognizable world. If it was threatened, there was an immediate reaction on my part, a reaction that showed up as some quality of fear that I will forever be unable to explain; this fear was something one has to feel to grasp its immensity. It was not the fear of dying or of being hurt. It was, rather, something immeasurably deeper than that. It was so deep that any practicing shaman would be unable even to try to conceptualize it.

“You have come, by an indirect path, to stand in front of the warrior,” don Juan said. At that time he stressed the concept of the warrior endlessly. He said that the warrior was in reality much more than a mere concept. It was a way of life, and that way of life was the only curb on fear, and the only channel a practitioner could use to let the flow of his activity move freely. Without the concept of the warrior, the obstacles on the path of knowledge were impossible to overcome.

Don Juan defined the warrior as the fighter par excellence. It was a mood made available by the intent of the shamans of antiquity; a mood that any man could enter. “The intent of those shamans,” don Juan said, “was so intense, so powerful, that it could solidify the structure of the warrior in anyone who used it, even if he might not be aware of it.”

In short, the warrior was, for the shamans of ancient Mexico, a combat unit so attuned to the struggle around him, so extraordinarily alert, that in its purest form it needed nothing superfluous to survive. There was no need to give a warrior gifts, or to support him with words or actions, or to try to give him comfort and incentive. All those things were included in the structure of the warrior itself. Since the structure was determined by the intent of the shamans of ancient Mexico, they were sure that nothing unforeseeable could be included. The end result was a fighter who fought alone and drew from his own silent convictions the impulse he needed to make his way, without complaint, without the need to be praised. Personally, I found the concept of the warrior fascinating, and at the same time one of the most terrible things I had ever encountered. I thought it was a concept that, if I adopted it, could bind me to a servitude, and might leave me no time or disposition to protest or examine or complain. Complaining had been my habit all my life and, certainly, I would have fought tooth and nail not to give it up. I thought that complaining was the sign of a sensitive, brave, frank man who has no scruples about expressing his acts, his likes and dislikes. If all that was going to turn into a fighting organism, I was in danger of losing more than I could afford. Those were my inner thoughts. And yet, I coveted the direction, the peace, the efficiency of the warrior. One of the great aids the shamans of ancient Mexico used in establishing the concept of the warrior was the idea of taking our death as a companion, a witness to our acts. Don Juan said that once the premise is accepted, even in a moderate form, a bridge is formed that extends across the gap between our world of everyday affairs and something that is in front of us but has no name; something that is lost in a mist and seems not to exist; something so terribly unclear that it cannot be used as a point of reference, and yet is there, undeniably present. Don Juan claimed that the only being on earth capable of crossing that bridge was the warrior: silent in his struggle, unstoppable because he has nothing to lose, functional and effective because he has everything to gain.

Quotes from The Teachings of Don Juan

Power rests in the kind of knowledge one has. What is the use of knowing things that are useless? They do not prepare us for our inevitable encounter with the unknown.

Nothing in the world is a gift. Whatever is to be learned must be learned the hard way.

A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war: wide awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. To go to knowledge or to war in any other way is a mistake, and whoever makes it will never live to regret it.

When a man has fulfilled those four requirements—being wide awake, having fear, respect, and absolute assurance—there are no mistakes for which he must account: under such conditions his acts lose the clumsy quality of a fool’s acts. If such a man fails, or suffers a defeat, he will have lost only a battle, and there will be no pitiful regrets over it.

Pouring yourself into the ego too much produces a terrible weariness. A man in that position is deaf and blind to everything else. The weariness itself makes him stop seeing the wonders around him.

Whenever a man sets out to learn, he has to work as hard as he can, and the limits of his learning are determined by his own nature. Therefore it is pointless to talk about knowledge. The fear of knowledge is natural: all of us experience it, and there is nothing we can do about it. But as terrible as learning may be, it is more terrible to think of a man without knowledge.

To be angry with people means that one considers their acts important. It is imperative to stop feeling that way. The acts of men cannot be important enough to counter our only viable alternative: our unchanging encounter with the infinite.

Anything is one path among a million paths. Therefore a warrior must always keep in mind that a path is only a path, and if he feels he should not follow it, he must not stay on it under any condition. His decision to keep on that path or leave it must be free of fear or ambition. He must look at every path closely and deliberately. There is a question that a warrior has to ask himself, mandatorily: Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. However, a path without a heart is never enjoyable. By contrast, a path with a heart is easy—it does not make a warrior work to like it; it leads to a joyful journey; as long as a man follows it, he is one with it.

There is a world of happiness where there is no difference between things because there is no one to ask about the differences. But that is not the world of man. Some men have the vanity to believe that they live in two worlds, but that is only their vanity. There is only one world for us. We are men, and we must follow the world of men contentedly.

A man has four natural enemies: fear, clarity, power, and old age. Fear, clarity, and power can be conquered, but not old age. Its effect can be postponed, but it can never be conquered.

Comments on the Teachings of Don Juan

The essence of what don Juan said at the beginning of my apprenticeship is encapsulated in the abstract nature of the quotes from the first book, The Teachings of Don Juan. At the time of the events described in that book, don Juan talked a great deal about allies, plants of power, Mescalito, the little smoke, the wind, the spirits of the rivers and the mountains, the spirit of the chaparral, and so on… Later, when I asked him about his emphasis on those elements, and why he no longer used them, he admitted without embarrassment that, at the beginning of my apprenticeship, he had gone into that pseudo-Indian shaman gibberish for my benefit.

I was stunned. I asked him how he could make such statements, which obviously weren’t true. He really meant what he was saying, and I was certainly the person who could attest to the truthfulness of his words and manner.

Don’t take it so seriously, he said, laughing. It was great fun for me to go into all that crap, and it was even more fun because I knew I was doing it for your benefit.

For my benefit, don Juan? What kind of aberration is that?

Yes, for your benefit. I tricked you into keeping your attention on the elements of your world that hold a deep fascination for you, and you swallowed the hook, line and all. All I needed was your complete attention. But how could I have gotten that when you have such an undisciplined spirit? You yourself told me over and over that you were with me because you found what I said about the world fascinating. What you didn’t know how to express was that the fascination you felt was based on the fact that you vaguely recognized every element I was talking about. You thought the vagueness was, of course, shamanism, and you got enthusiastic about it, believing yourself settled in.

Do you do this to everybody, don Juan?

Not to everybody, because not everybody comes to me, and above all, I’m not interested in everybody. I was and am interested in you, only in you. My teacher, the nagual Julián, tricked me in a similar way. He tricked me with my sensuality and greed. He promised to give me all the beautiful women around him, and promised to cover me with gold. He promised me a fortune and I bit. All the shamans of my lineage have been tricked that way, since time immemorial. The shamans of my lineage are not teachers or gurus. They don’t give a fig for teaching their knowledge; they want heirs to their knowledge, not people vaguely interested in their knowledge for intellectual reasons.

Don Juan was right when he said I had fallen for his maneuver completely. I believed I had found the perfect shaman anthropological informant. That was the time when, under don Juan’s auspices, I wrote diaries and collected old maps showing the locations of the Yaqui Indian towns over the centuries, beginning with the Jesuit chronicles from 1700 onward. I gathered all those locations and identified the subtlest changes, and I began to reflect and wonder why the towns shifted to other locations, and why they were organized in slightly different patterns each time they were set up again. Pseudo-speculations about the reason, and reasonable doubts, overwhelmed me. I collected thousands of sheets of abbreviated notes and possibilities, drawn from books and chronicles. I was a perfect anthropology student. Don Juan spurred on my fantasy in every way he could.

There are no volunteers on the warrior’s path, don Juan told me by way of explanation. A man has to be forced onto the warrior’s path against his will.

What do I do, don Juan, with the thousands of notes you have induced me to collect? I asked then.

His answer was a direct shock to me.

Write a book about them! he said. I’m sure that if you start writing it, you’ll never make use of those notes, in any way. They’re useless, but who am I to tell you that? Find out for yourself, but don’t try to write a book as a writer. Try to do it as a warrior, as a warrior shaman.

What do you mean by that, don Juan?

I don’t know. Find out for yourself.

He was absolutely right. I never used those notes. Instead I found myself writing, without realizing it, about the inconceivable possibilities of the existence of another system of cognition.

Quotes 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 hold on to all the things he would like to. But for him this is not a problem; it is only a pity.

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

When seen as fields of energy, human beings appear as fibers of light, like white cobwebs, very fine threads that circulate from the head to the toes. So to the eyes of a seer, a man appears as a luminous egg of circulating fibers. And his arms and legs are like luminous bristles, bursting out in all directions.

The seer sees that every man is in contact 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 maintain his balance; they give him stability.

When a warrior learns to see, he sees that a man is a luminous egg, whether he is a beggar or a king, and 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 nonsense, insignificant nonsense.

Only a crazy person would undertake the task of becoming a man of knowledge by his own decision. A sensible man has to be tricked into doing it. There are plenty of people who would gladly take on the task, but they don’t count. They are usually cracked. They are like gourds that look good on the outside and then leak as soon as you press them, as soon as you fill them with water.

When a man is not interested in seeing, things look exactly 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 each time he sees it, and yet it is the same. To the eyes 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 of allies to inexplicable forces that acted upon them. They called them allies because they thought they could use them as they pleased, an idea that proved to be almost fatal for those shamans, because what they called an ally is a being without corporeal substance that exists in the universe. Today’s modern 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. And the allies are here like us; and it may be that they were here before us.

The most effective way to live is as a warrior. A warrior may worry and think before making a decision, but once he makes it, he goes forward, free of worries and thoughts; there will be a million more decisions still awaiting him. That is the warrior’s style.

A warrior thinks about his death when things become unclear. The idea of death is the only thing that tempers our spirit.

Death is everywhere. It can be the headlights of a car on top of a hill far behind in the distance. They may stay visible for a while, and vanish into the darkness as if they had been swept away; to appear on another hill, and then disappear again.

Those are the lights on the head of death. Death puts them on the way a hat is put on, and gallops, gaining ground on us, closer and closer. Sometimes it turns off its lights. But death never stops.

A warrior must first know that his acts are useless, and yet he must proceed as if he did not know it. That is a shaman’s controlled folly.

Man’s eyes can perform two functions: one is to see energy as it flows in the universe and the other is to look at things in this world. Neither of those functions is better than the other; however, to train the eyes only to look is a shameful and unnecessary waste.

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; then he rejoices and laughs. He knows, because he sees, that his life will be over entirely too soon. He sees that nothing is more important than anything else.

A warrior has no honor, no dignity, no family, no country; he has only a life to live, and under those circumstances, his only tie to his fellow men is his controlled folly.

Since nothing is more important than anything else, a warrior chooses any act and performs it 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 does not; so when he finishes his acts, he withdraws in peace, and whether his acts were good or bad, or whether they worked or not, is not part of his concern in any way.

A warrior may choose to remain totally impassive and never act, and behave as if being impassive really mattered to him; he could be legitimately true in that too, because that could also be his controlled folly.

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

An ordinary man is too concerned with loving people or with being loved by them. A warrior loves, that’s all. He loves whatever or whomever he wants to, for the pleasure of doing so.

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

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

A warrior knows that he is waiting and what he is waiting for; and while he waits he wants nothing, and so whatever little thing he has 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 his pain will destroy him.

Denying oneself is a form of indulgence. The indulgence of denying oneself is by far the worst; it forces us to believe that we are doing great things, when in reality we are only fixated on ourselves.

Intent is not a thought, an object, or a wish. Intent is what can make a man succeed when his thoughts tell him he is defeated. It operates despite the 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 warrior’s path he becomes aware, gradually, that ordinary life has been left behind forever. The means of the ordinary world are no longer a buffer for him; and he must adopt a new way of life if he wants to survive.

Every bit of knowledge that becomes power has death as its central force. Death gives the final touch, and whatever is touched by death really becomes power.

Only the idea of death makes a warrior detached enough that he is able to abandon himself to anything. He knows that his death is stalking him and will not give him time to cling to anything, so he tastes, without craving, everything about 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 vision.

Death is a whirlwind; death is a luminous cloud on the horizon; death is me talking to you; death is you and your notebook; death is nothing. Nothing! It is here and yet it is not here at all.

A warrior’s spirit is not geared for indulging and complaining, nor for winning or losing. A warrior’s spirit is geared only for struggle, and every struggle is a warrior’s last battle on earth. Thus, the outcome matters very little to him. In this 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 dialogue. And when we finish talking to ourselves about ourselves and our world, the world is always the way it should be. We renew it, we rekindle it, we sustain it with our internal dialogue. 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 repeating the same internal dialogue over and over until the day we die. A warrior is aware of this and struggles to stop his internal dialogue.

The world is everything that is encompassed here: life, death, people, and all the things around us. The world is incomprehensible. We will never understand it; we will never unravel its secrets. Thus we must treat the world as what it is: an absolute mystery.

The things people do cannot, under any condition, be more important than the world. Thus a warrior treats the world as an endless mystery and what people do as an endless folly.

Comments on A Separate Reality

In the quotes taken from A Separate Reality, the mood that the shamans of ancient Mexico applied to all their intentional endeavors began to show itself with remarkable clarity. Don Juan himself pointed out to me, speaking about those ancient shamans, that the aspect of their world that was of supreme interest to modern practitioners was the extremely keen awareness those shamans had developed of the universal force they called intent.

They explained that the bond each of those men had with that force was so clear and clean that they could affect things at will. Don Juan said that the intent of those shamans, developed to such keen intensity, was the only aid modern practitioners had. He put it in more mundane terms, and said that today’s modern practitioners, if they were honest with themselves, would pay any price to live under the umbrella of such an intent.

Don Juan asserted that anyone who showed even the slightest interest in the world of the shamans of antiquity was immediately drawn into the circle of their extremely keen intent. Their intent was, for don Juan, something immeasurable, which none of us could manage to shake off. Moreover, he reasoned, there was no need to shake off such an intent, because that was the only thing that counted; that was the essence of the world of those shamans, the world that today’s modern practitioners coveted more than anything imaginable.

The mood of the quotes from A Separate Reality is not something I arranged on purpose. It is a mood that surfaced independently of my aims and wishes. I could even say that it was contrary to what I had in mind. It was the mysterious spiral of the wheel of time, hidden in the text of the book, that had suddenly been activated and lay dormant in a state of tension: a tension that dictated the direction of my efforts. At the time of writing A Separate Reality, as far as my feelings about my work were concerned, I could certainly say that I thought I was happily engaged in doing anthropological fieldwork, and my feelings and thoughts were as far from the world of the shamans of antiquity as anything could be. Don Juan had a different opinion. Being a veteran warrior, he knew that I could not free myself from the magnetic attraction that the intent of those shamans had created. I was immersed in it, whether I believed in it or not, whether I wanted it or not. This state of affairs caused a subliminal anxiety on my part. It was not an anxiety that I could define or pin down, or even one I was aware of. It shaped my actions without the possibility of consciously reflecting on it, or looking for an explanation. In retrospect, I can only say that I was mortally frightened, although I could not determine what I was frightened of.

Quotes from Journey to Ixtlan

We hardly realize that we can cut anything out of our lives, at any moment, in the blink of an eye.

One shouldn’t worry about taking photographs or making recordings. Those are superfluous things of placid lives. One should worry about the spirit, which is always slipping away.

A warrior doesn’t need personal history. One day he discovers that it is no longer necessary, and he drops it. Personal history must be constantly renewed by telling one’s parents, relatives, and friends everything one does. For the warrior who has no personal history, on the other hand, no explanations are necessary; nobody gets angry or disappointed with his acts. And above all, nobody pins him down with their thoughts and expectations.

When nothing is taken for granted we remain alert, perpetually on tiptoe. It is more exciting not to know which bush the rabbit is hiding behind than to behave as if 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, separate 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 advisor that a warrior has. Whenever he feels that everything is going wrong and he is 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 apart from its touch. His death will tell him: “I haven’t touched you yet.”

If 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 first know 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 accessible and inaccessible at just the right turn of the road. It is useless for a warrior to be inadvertently accessible at all times, just as it is useless for him to hide when everyone knows he is hiding.

For a warrior to be inaccessible means that he touches the world around him sparingly. And, above all, he deliberately avoids exhausting himself and others. He does not use and squeeze people until he reduces them to nothing, especially the people he loves.

Once a man worries, he clings to anything out of desperation; and once he clings, he is forced to exhaust himself or to exhaust whoever or whatever he has clung to. A warrior-hunter, on the other hand, knows that he will draw game to his traps again and again, so he does not worry. To worry is to make oneself accessible, unwittingly accessible.

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

To be a warrior-hunter is not just to catch 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 goes after, fixed by strong routines and predictable whims; he is free, fluid, unpredictable.

For an ordinary man the world is weird because if he is not bored with it, he is at odds with it. For a warrior, the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable. A warrior must take 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 only for a short while, in fact too short a while to witness all its marvels.

Acts have power. Especially when the warrior acts knowing that those acts are his last battle. There is a strange, overwhelming happiness in acting with the full knowledge that what he is doing may very well be his last act on earth. A warrior must focus his attention on the bond between himself and his death. Without remorse, or sadness, or worry, he must focus his attention on the fact that he has no time and let his acts flow accordingly. He must let each act be his last battle on earth. Only under those conditions will his acts have their rightful power; otherwise they will be, for as long as he lives, the acts of a fool.

A warrior-hunter knows that his death is waiting, and that even the 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 one act to another without any struggle or thought. A warrior-hunter, on the contrary, evaluates each act; and since he has an intimate knowledge of his death, he proceeds judiciously, as if each act were his last battle. Only a fool could fail to notice the advantage a warrior-hunter has over his fellow men. A warrior-hunter treats his last battle with due respect. It is only natural that his last act on earth should be the best of himself. That way it is pleasing. It blunts the edge of his fear.

A warrior is an impeccable hunter who hunts power; he is not drunk or mad, and he has neither the time nor the inclination to bluff, to lie to himself, or to make a wrong move. The stakes are too high for that. The stakes are his tightly ordered life, which has taken him so long to affirm and perfect. He is not going to throw that away by committing some stupid blunder, by mistaking one thing for another.

A man, any man, deserves everything that is the lot of man: joy, pain, sadness, and struggle. The nature of his acts is immaterial as long as he acts like a warrior. If his spirit is distorted he should simply fix it—purify it, make it perfect—because there is no other task in all our lives that is more worthwhile. Not to fix the spirit is to seek death, and that is the same as seeking 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 temporality and our manhood.

The hardest thing in the world is to adopt a warrior’s mood. 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 is control. Once his calculations are finished, he acts. He lets go. That is abandon. A warrior is not a leaf at the mercy of the wind. Nobody can push him; nobody 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 ways.

A warrior is only a man, a humble man. He cannot change the designs of his death. But his impeccable spirit, which has stored up power after formidable ordeals, can certainly hold back his death for a moment, a moment long enough to let him rejoice one last time in remembering his power. We can say that this is a gesture death has toward those who have an impeccable spirit.

It doesn’t matter how one was raised. What determines the way one does anything is one’s 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 can call it a state of mind. Personal power is something one acquires through a life of struggle.

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

A warrior knows no remorse for anything he has done, because singling out one’s acts as petty, ugly, or bad is placing unjustified importance on the ego. The trick is in what one emphasizes. Either we make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.

People tell us from the moment 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.

Comments on Journey to Ixtlan

By the time I was writing Journey to Ixtlan, a most mysterious disposition prevailed all around me. Don Juan Matus was applying some extremely pragmatic measures to my daily conduct. He had laid out some steps of action that he wanted me to follow rigorously. He had given me three tasks that had only the vaguest references to my world of daily life, or to any other world. He wanted me to strive, in my daily world, to erase my personal history by every conceivable means. Then, he wanted me to stop my routines and, finally, he wanted me to dethrone my sense of self-importance.

“How am I going to accomplish all this, don Juan?” I asked him. “I have no idea,” he answered. “None of us has any idea how to do that pragmatically and effectively. However, if we begin the work, we will accomplish it without ever knowing what came to help us.” “The difficulty you’re encountering is the same difficulty I encountered myself,” he went on. “I assure you that our difficulty comes from the total absence in our lives of the idea that could spur us to change. At the time my teacher gave me this task, all I needed to put it into practice was the idea that it could be done. Once I had the idea, I accomplished it without knowing how. I recommend that you do the same.” I launched into the most twisted complaints, alluding to the fact that I was a social scientist accustomed to practical guidelines that had solidity, not to something vague that depended on magical solutions rather than practical means.

“Say what you want,” don Juan answered, laughing. “Once you’ve finished complaining, forget your doubts and do what I’ve asked you to do.” Don Juan was right. All I needed, or rather, all that a mysterious part of me that was not open needed, was the idea. The “I” I had known throughout my life needed infinitely more than the idea. It needed training, encouragement, direction. I was so intrigued by my success that the tasks of erasing my routines, losing my self-importance, and letting go of my personal history became a pure delight.

“You have run head-on into the warrior’s way,” don Juan said by way of explaining my mysterious success.

Slowly and methodically he had guided my awareness to focus more and more intensely on an abstract elaboration of the concept of the warrior, which he called the warrior’s way, the path of the warrior. He explained that the warrior’s way was a structure of ideas established by the shamans of ancient Mexico. Those shamans had derived their construction by means of their ability to see energy as it flows freely in the universe. The warrior’s way, therefore, was the most harmonious conglomerate of energetic facts, irreducible truths determined exclusively by the direction of the flow of energy in the universe. Don Juan categorically asserted that there was nothing about the warrior’s way that could be argued, nothing that could be changed. It was in itself and by itself a perfect structure, and whoever followed it was cornered by energetic facts that admitted no argument or speculation about their function and value.

Don Juan said that those ancient shamans called it the warrior’s way because its structure encompassed every possibility of life that a warrior could encounter on the path of knowledge. Those shamans were absolutely thorough and methodical in their search for such possibilities. According to don Juan, they were indeed able to include in their abstract structure everything that is humanly possible.

Don Juan compared the warrior’s way to a building, with each element of that building being a supporting mechanism whose sole function was to sustain the psyche of the warrior, in his role as an initiated shaman, to make his movements easy and full of meaning. He unequivocally stated that the warrior’s way was the essential construction without which initiated shamans could founder in the immensity of the universe. Don Juan called the warrior’s way the supreme glory of the shamans of ancient Mexico. He saw it as their most important contribution, the essence of their sobriety. “Is the warrior’s way so overwhelmingly important, don Juan?” I asked him once. “Overwhelmingly important is an understatement. The warrior’s way is everything. It is the epitome of physical and mental health. I can’t explain it any other way. For the shamans of ancient Mexico to have created such a structure means to me that they were at the peak of their power, at the summit of their happiness, at the apex of their joy.” At the level of pragmatic acceptance or rejection in which I thought I was immersed then, embracing the warrior’s path, completely and impartially, was little short of an impossibility for me. The more don Juan explained the warrior’s path, the more intense was my feeling that he was really scheming to bring down my entire equilibrium. Don Juan’s direction was, therefore, covert. He nonetheless stated it with surprising clarity in the quotes taken from Journey to Ixtlan. Don Juan had advanced on me by leaps and bounds at tremendous speed, without my realizing it, and was suddenly breathing down my neck. I thought again and again that I was either one step away from accepting, faithfully, the existence of another cognitive system, or so completely indifferent that I didn’t care whether it happened one way or the other.

Of course, there was always the option of running away from all of it, but that was not sustainable. Somehow, don Juan’s care, or my intense use of the concept of the warrior, had hardened me to such a degree that I was no longer that frightened. I was trapped, but really, it made no difference. All I knew was that I was there with don Juan for as long as it lasted.

Quotes from Tales of Power

The warrior’s self-confidence is not the self-confidence of the ordinary man. The ordinary man seeks certainty in the eyes of the onlooker and calls it self-confidence. The warrior seeks impeccability in his own eyes and calls it humility. The ordinary man is hooked to his fellow men, while the warrior is hooked only to infinity.

There are a lot of things a warrior can do at a certain moment that he could not have done years before. The things themselves haven’t changed; what has changed is his idea of himself.

The only possible path a warrior has is to act consistently and without reservations. At a certain point, he knows enough of the warrior’s way to act in accordance with it, but his old habits and routines may stand in his way.

If a warrior wants to succeed at anything he must go slowly, with a great deal of effort, but without tension and 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 to the world of the shamans opens after the warrior has learned to cut off his internal dialogue.

Changing 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 his internal dialogue, everything becomes possible; the most far-fetched schemes become attainable.

A warrior accepts his lot, whatever it may be, and accepts it in utmost 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 warrior lowers his head to no one, but at the same time, he does not permit anyone to lower his head to him. The beggar, on the other hand, falls to his knees at the slightest provocation and crawls on the floor for anyone he considers higher; but at the same time, he demands that someone lower than him crawl for him.

Comfort, refuge, fear—these are all words that have created moods that one has learned to accept without ever questioning their worth.

Our fellow men are black sorcerers. And whoever is with them is a black sorcerer on the spot. Think for a moment. Can you deviate from the path your fellow men have laid out for you? And if you stay with them, your thoughts and your actions will be fixed forever in their terms. That is slavery. The warrior, on the other hand, is free of all that. Freedom is expensive, but the price is not impossible to pay. So fear your jailers, your masters. Don’t waste your time and your power fearing freedom.

The flaw of 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 do, without enlightenment. For this reason, a warrior always tries to act rather than talk, and to do this he obtains a new description of the world—a new description where talking is not what matters, and where new acts have new reflections.

A warrior considers himself already dead, so he has nothing to lose. The worst has already happened to him, therefore he is calm and serene; judging by his acts and his words, one would never suspect that he has witnessed it all.

Knowledge comes to a warrior floating, like specks of gold dust, the same dust that covers the wings of moths. So for a warrior, knowledge is like taking a shower, or as if specks of dark gold dust rained down on him.

Every time the internal dialogue stops, the world collapses, and extraordinary facets of ourselves surface, as if they had been tightly guarded by our words.

The world is unfathomable. And so are we, and so is every single thing that exists in this world.

Warriors do not win victories by banging their heads against walls, but by surmounting walls. Warriors leap over walls; they do not tear them down.

A warrior must cultivate the feeling that he has everything he needs 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 can say without being presumptuous that the experience of experiences is being alive.

An ordinary man thinks that giving in to doubts and tribulations is a sign of sensitivity, of spirituality. The truth of the matter is that the ordinary man is as far from being sensitive as imaginable. His feeble reason deliberately turns him into a monster or a saint, but it is truly too small for the grand mold of monster or saint.

Being a warrior is not a simple matter of wanting 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 ordinary 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 luminous, round beings; they have no limits. The world of objects and solidity is only a description that was created to help them, to make their passage on earth convenient.

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

Human beings are perceivers, but the world 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 grasp and defend.

The hidden advantage of luminous beings is that they have something that is never used: intent. The shamans’ maneuver is the same as the ordinary man’s. Both have a description of the world. The ordinary man sustains it with his reason, the shaman sustains it with his intent. Both descriptions have their rules, but the shaman’s advantage is that intent encompasses more than reason.

Only as a warrior can one endure the path of knowledge. A warrior cannot complain or regret anything. His life is an endless challenge, and challenges cannot be 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 either a blessing or a curse.

The warrior’s trump card is that he believes without believing. But obviously a warrior cannot just say that he believes and leave it at that. That would be too easy. Merely believing without any effort would spare him from examining his situation. A warrior, when he has to believe, does so as a choice. A warrior doesn’t believe, a warrior has to believe.

Death is the indispensable ingredient in having to believe. Without the awareness of death, everything is ordinary, trivial. Only because death is stalking him does a warrior have to believe that the world is an unfathomable mystery. Having to believe in such a way is the expression of the warrior’s most intimate predilection.

Power always makes a cubic centimeter of luck available to a warrior. The warrior’s art is to be permanently fluid in order to grab it.

The ordinary man is aware of everything only when he thinks he must be; a warrior’s condition, however, is to be aware of everything at every moment.

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

A basic rule 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 consume his power.

When a warrior makes the decision to act, he should be prepared to die. If he is prepared to die there should be no stumbles, no unexpected surprises, no unnecessary acts. Everything should fall smoothly into place because he is not expecting anything.

A warrior, as a teacher, must first of all teach the possibility of acting without believing, without expecting reward, of acting just for the sake of acting. His success as a teacher depends on how well and how harmoniously he guides his apprentices in this specific respect.

To help his apprentice erase personal history, the warrior as teacher teaches three techniques: losing self-importance, taking responsibility for one’s acts, and using death as an advisor. Without the beneficial effect of these three techniques, erasing personal history could imply being tricky, evasive, and needlessly doubtful about oneself and one’s actions.

There is no way to be rid of self-pity forever: it has a definite place and character in our lives, a facade that is recognizable. Thus, every time the occasion arises, the facade of self-pity is activated. It has a history. But not if one changes facades by modifying the component elements of the facade itself. Self-pity is useful to the one who uses it because he feels important and deserving of better conditions, better treatment, or because he does not want to take responsibility for the acts that lead to the state that provokes self-pity.

Changing the facade of self-pity only means that one has assigned a secondary place to a formerly important element. Self-pity is still a prominent trait; but now it takes a background position, in the same way that the idea of one’s imminent death, the idea of a warrior’s humbleness, or the idea of responsibility for one’s acts were all once in the background for a warrior, never used until the moment he became a warrior.

A warrior acknowledges his pain but does not indulge in it. The mood of a warrior who enters the unknown is not one of sadness; on the contrary, he is joyful because he feels humbled by his great fortune, confident that his spirit is impeccable and, above all, fully aware of his efficiency. The warrior’s joy comes from having accepted his destiny, and from having truly appraised what lies ahead of him.

Comments on Tales of Power

Tales of Power is the mark of my last fall. At the time the events narrated in the book took place, I suffered a profound emotional shock, a warrior’s collapse. Don Juan Matus left this world, and left his four apprentices in it. Each of those apprentices was treated personally by don Juan, and a task was assigned to them. I considered that task a placebo that had no significance at all compared with the loss.

Never seeing don Juan again could not be eased by pseudo-tasks. My first argument with don Juan was, naturally, to tell him that I wanted to go with him.

“You’re not ready yet,” he said. “Be realistic.” “But I could be ready in the blink of an eye,” I assured him. “I don’t doubt that. You will be ready, but not for me. I demand perfect efficiency. I demand impeccable intent, impeccable discipline. You don’t have that yet. You will have it, you’re getting there, but you’re not there yet.” “You have the power to take me, don Juan, novice and imperfect as I am.” “I suppose I do, but I don’t want to, because it would be a shameful waste for you. You would risk losing everything, I assure you. Don’t insist. Insisting is not in the domain of warriors.”

That explanation was enough to stop me. Inwardly, however, I longed to go with him, to venture beyond everything I knew as normal and real.

When the moment came that don Juan actually left the world, he turned into a colored, vaporous luminosity. He was pure energy, flowing freely in the universe. My sense of loss was so immense at that moment that I wanted to die. I disregarded everything don Juan had said, and without any hesitation, I proceeded to hurl myself off a precipice. I reasoned that if I did that, in death, don Juan would have been obliged to take me with him, and save whatever bit of awareness remained in me. But for inexplicable reasons, whether I look at it from the premises of my normal cognition or from the cognition of the world of the shamans, I did not die. I was left alone in the world of daily life while my three cohorts were scattered around the world. I was a stranger to myself, which made my loneliness more intense than ever.

I saw myself as an agent provocateur, a mediocre spy, whom don Juan had left behind for obscure reasons. The quotes taken from the body of Tales of Power show the unfamiliar quality of the world; not the world of the shamans, but the world of daily life, which, according to don Juan, is as mysterious and rich as anything can be. All we need to pull the wonders out of this world of daily life is enough detachment. But more than detachment, we need enough affection and abandon.

“A warrior must love his world,” don Juan had warned me, “so that this world, which seems like such a common place, will open up and show its wonders.” We were, at the moment he made that statement, in the Sonoran desert. “It’s a sublime feeling,” he said, “to be in this marvelous desert, to see those craggy peaks of pseudo-mountains that were really formed by the flow of lava from remote volcanoes. It’s a glorious feeling to discover that some of those nuggets of obsidian were created at such a high temperature that they still preserve the mark of their origin. They have abundant power. To wander aimlessly among those craggy peaks and actually discover a piece of quartz that picks up radio waves is extraordinary. The only drawback to this marvelous picture is that, in order to enter the wonders of this world, or the wonders of another world, a man needs to be a warrior: serene, self-possessed, indifferent, hardened by the assaults of the unknown. You are not yet hardened in this way. Therefore, it is your duty to pursue that realization before you can talk about venturing into the infinite. I have spent thirty-five years of my life pursuing the maturity of a warrior. I have gone to places that defy all description, pursuing that feeling of being hardened for the assaults of the unknown. I went discreetly, unnoticed, and came back the same way. The works of warriors are silent and solitary, and when warriors come or go, they do so so inconspicuously that nobody notices. To pursue the maturity of a warrior in any other way would be ostentatious, and therefore inadmissible.” The quotes from Tales of Power were the most intense reminder to me that the intent of the shamans who lived in Mexico in ancient times was still acting impeccably. The wheel of time was moving inexorably around me, forcing me to investigate furrows about which one cannot speak and remain coherent. “Suffice it to say,” don Juan told me once, “that the immensity of this world, whether it is the world of the shamans or that of ordinary man, is so manifest that only an aberration could keep us from recognizing it. To try to explain to aberrant beings that this is like being lost in the furrows of the wheel of time is the most absurd thing a warrior can undertake. Therefore, he makes sure that his journeys are solely the property of his condition as a warrior.”

Quotes from The Second Ring of Power

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

A warrior would have no chance of leaving anything to luck. He in fact has no attachment to the outcome of events, by the force of his awareness and his unbending intent.

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

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

The human form is a conglomerate of energy fields that exists in the universe and is related exclusively to human beings. The shamans call it the human form because those energy fields have been molded and twisted by a life of habits and abuses.

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

Warriors must be impeccable in their effort to change, to drive off the human form and shake it loose. After years of impeccability a moment will come when the human form cannot remain and goes away. That is, a moment will come when the energy fields twisted by a life of habit are straightened out. A warrior is deeply affected, and may even die as a result of this straightening of energy fields, but an impeccable warrior always survives.

The only freedom warriors have is to behave impeccably. Impeccability is not just freedom: it is the only way to straighten out the human form.

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

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

The world of people rises and falls, and people rise and fall with their world. Warriors have no occupations that follow 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 one single, functional, inseparable unit.

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

The warrior’s path offers a man a new life, and that life has to be completely new. He cannot bring his ugly old ways into that new life.

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

Human beings love to be told what to do, but they love even more to fight and not do what they were told, and so they end up entangled in hating whoever told them in the first place.

Everybody has enough personal power for something. The trick for the warrior is to draw his personal power out of his weakness for his warrior’s purpose. Every one of us can see, and yet we choose not to remember what we see.

Comments on The Second Ring of Power

Years passed before I wrote The Second Ring of Power. Don Juan had long since gone, and the quotes from that book were recollections of what he had said, memories triggered by a new situation, a new development. Another player had appeared in my life. She was don Juan’s cohort Florinda Matus. All of don Juan’s apprentices understood that when don Juan left, Florinda would stay on to somehow round out the last part of our training. “Until you are able to take orders from a woman without detriment to your being, you will not be complete,” don Juan had said. “But that woman can’t be just any woman. She must be someone who has power, and a quality of ruthlessness that will not allow you to be the man-in-command that you imagine yourself to be.”

Of course, I laughed at his statements. I thought he was clearly joking. The truth of the matter was that he was not joking at all. One day, Florinda Donner-Grau and Taisha Abelar came back, and we went to Mexico. We went to a department store in the city of Guadalajara and there we found Florinda Matus, the most magnificent woman I had ever seen: extremely tall—six feet eleven—slender, angular, with a beautiful face, old, and yet very young.

“Ah, here they are!” she exclaimed when she saw us. “The Three Musketeers! The dynamic kids! Eenie, Meenie, and Mo! I’ve been looking for you everywhere!”

And without saying anything else, she took charge. Florinda Donner-Grau, of course, was immeasurably delighted, Taisha Abelar was extremely reserved, as usual, and I was mortified, almost furious. I knew the arrangement was not going to work. I was ready to clash with that woman the first time she opened her brazen mouth and came out with crap like “Eenie, Meenie, and Mo—the dynamic kids.” Unsuspected things I had in reserve came to my aid, and kept me from any reaction of anger or irritation, and I got along with Florinda superbly, better than I could have dreamed. She led us with an iron hand. She was the undisputed queen of our lives. She had the power, the detachment, to carry out her task of tuning us in the subtlest way. She did not allow us to fall into self-pity or to complain if something was not quite to our liking. She was not at all like don Juan. She lacked his sobriety, but she had another quality that balanced out her lack: she was as quick as anything could be. A glance was enough for her to understand an entire situation, and act instantly in accordance with what was expected of her. One of her favorite tactics, which I enjoyed immensely, was to ask an audience or a group of people she was talking to, quite formally, “Is there anyone here who knows anything about the pressure and displacement of gases?” She could ask such a question in all seriousness. And when the audience answered, “No, no, we don’t,” she would say, “Then I can say whatever I want, right?” and in fact would go on and say whatever she wanted. Sometimes she could say things so ridiculous that I would fall on the floor laughing. Her other classic question was, “Does anyone here know anything about the retina of chimpanzees? No?” and Florinda would say outrageous things about the retina of chimpanzees. I was her admirer and impartial follower. Once I had a fistula on the crest of my hip bone, the result of a fall I had taken years before into a ravine full of cactus spines. I had had the spines in my body for twenty-five years. One of them either hadn’t come out completely or had left a residue of dirt or debris that years later produced a fistula. My doctor said, “That’s nothing. It’s just a pocket of pus that has to be lanced. It’s a very simple operation. It will take a few minutes to clean it out.” I went on to Florinda, and she said, “You are the nagual. You heal yourself or you die. No shades of meaning, no double behavior. A nagual getting lanced by a doctor, you must have lost your power. A nagual dying of a fistula? How shameful.” Except for Florinda Donner-Grau and Taisha Abelar, the rest of don Juan’s apprentices felt no affection at all for Florinda. She was a threatening figure. She was someone who never allowed them the freedom they felt was owed them. They never celebrated her pseudo-feats of shamanism, and she stopped their activities whenever they strayed from the warrior’s path.

In the body of The Second Ring of Power that struggle among the apprentices is more than evident. Don Juan’s other apprentices were a bunch of misfits, full of egomaniacal outbursts, each one pulling in his own direction, each one asserting himself or his worth. Everything that took place in our lives from that moment on was profoundly influenced by Florinda Matus and yet she never took the front position. She was always a figure in the background, wise, funny, ruthless. Florinda Donner-Grau and I learned to love her as we had never loved before, and when she left, she bequeathed to Florinda Donner-Grau her name, her jewels, her money, her grace, her know-how. I felt that I could not write a book about Florinda Matus; if anyone else did, it had to be Florinda Donner-Grau, her true heir, her daughter of daughters. I was, like Florinda Matus, only a figure in the background, placed there by don Juan Matus to break the loneliness of a warrior, and to enjoy my passage on earth.

Quotes from The Eagle’s Gift

The art of dreaming is the capacity to use ordinary dreams and transform them into controlled awareness by virtue of a specialized form of attention called dreaming attention.

The art of stalking is a set of procedures and attitudes that enables a warrior to get the best out of any conceivable situation.

The recommendation for warriors is not to have material things on which to focus their power, but to focus it on the spirit, on the true flight into the unknown, not on trivialities. Everyone who wants to follow the warrior’s path has to free himself from the compulsion to possess and to get hooked on things.

Seeing is a knowledge of the body. The predominance of visual sensation in us influences this bodily knowledge and makes it seem related to the eyes.

Losing the human form is like a spiral. It gives the warrior the freedom to remember himself as straightened energy fields, and this in turn makes him even freer.

A warrior knows that he is waiting and knows what he is waiting for, and while he waits, he feasts his eyes on the world. The ultimate accomplishment of a warrior is to enjoy the joy of infinity.

The course of a warrior’s destiny is unalterable. The challenge is how far he can go and how impeccable he can be within those rigid limits.

People’s actions no longer affect a warrior when he has no expectations of any kind. A strange peace becomes the dominant force in his life. He has adopted one of the warrior’s life concepts—detachment.

Detachment doesn’t automatically mean wisdom, but it is, nonetheless, an advantage, because it allows the warrior to pause momentarily to weigh situations, to reconsider positions. To use that extra moment consistently and correctly, however, a warrior has to struggle incorruptibly all his life.

I have already given myself to the power that rules my destiny.

I no longer cling to anything, so that I will have nothing to defend.

I have no thoughts, so that I can see.

I fear nothing, so that I can remember myself.

Detached and serene.

The Eagle will let me be free.

It is much easier for warriors to behave well under conditions of maximum stress than to be impeccable under normal circumstances.

We human beings have two sides. The right side encompasses everything the intellect can conceive. The left side is a domain of indescribable features, a domain impossible to contain in words. The left side is perhaps understood, if understanding is what takes place with the totality of the body, hence its resistance to conceptualization.

All the faculties, possibilities, and accomplishments of shamanism, from the simplest to the most astonishing, are found in the human body itself.

The power that governs the destiny of all living beings is called the Eagle, not because it is an eagle or has anything to do with an eagle, but because it appears to the eyes of the seer as an immeasurable jet-black eagle, standing erect the way eagles do, reaching its height to infinity.

The Eagle devours the awareness of all the creatures that, alive on earth a moment before and now dead, have floated up to the Eagle’s beak like a swarm of fireflies, to meet their owner. Their reason for having had life. The Eagle unravels those minuscule flames, spreads them out, as a tanner stretches a hide, and then consumes them; for awareness is the Eagle’s food.

The Eagle, that power which governs the destinies of all living things, reflects equally and at once all those living things. There is no possibility, therefore, for man to pray to the Eagle, asking for favors, hoping for grace. The human part of the Eagle is too insignificant to move the whole.

Every living thing has been granted the power, if it so desires, to seek an opening to freedom and to pass through it. It is evident to the seer who sees the opening, and to the creatures who pass through it, that the Eagle has granted that gift in order to perpetuate awareness.

Crossing into freedom does not mean eternal life as eternity is commonly understood, that is, as living forever. Rather, warriors can keep their awareness, which is ordinarily surrendered at the moment of death. At the moment of crossing, the body as a whole is lit up with knowledge. Every cell instantly becomes aware of itself and also aware of the totality of the body.

The Eagle’s gift of freedom is not a handout, but an opportunity to have an opportunity.

A warrior is never under siege. To be under siege implies that one has personal possessions that could be blockaded. A warrior has nothing in the world except his impeccability, and impeccability cannot be threatened.

The first principle of the art of stalking is that warriors choose their battleground. A warrior never goes into battle without knowing what surrounds him.

Eliminating everything that is unnecessary is the second principle of the art of stalking. A warrior doesn’t complicate things. He aspires to be simple. He applies all the concentration he has to deciding whether or not to enter battle, for any battle is a battle for his life. This is the third principle of the art of stalking. A warrior must be willing and ready to make his last stand here and now. But not recklessly.

A warrior relaxes and abandons himself; he fears nothing. Only then will the powers that guide human beings open the way for a warrior and help him. Only then. That is the fourth principle of the art of stalking.

When confronted with superior forces they cannot deal with, warriors retreat for a moment. They let their minds wander. They occupy their time with something else. Anything will do. That is the fifth principle of the art of stalking.

Warriors compress time; this is the sixth principle of the art of stalking. Even an instant counts. In a battle for his life, a second is an eternity, an eternity that can decide the outcome. Warriors aspire to triumph, therefore they compress time. Warriors don’t waste an instant.

To apply the seventh principle of the art of stalking, one has to apply the other six: a stalker never puts himself in front. He is always watching the scenes from behind.

Applying these six principles produces three results. The first is that stalkers learn never to take themselves seriously; they learn to laugh at themselves. If they are not afraid of being a fool, they can make a fool of anyone. The second is that stalkers learn to have infinite patience. Stalkers are never in a hurry, never get irritated. And the third is that stalkers learn to have an infinite capacity for improvisation.

Warriors face the time that is coming. Normally we face time as it leaves us. Only warriors can change that and face time as it advances upon them.

Warriors have only one thing in mind: their freedom. To die and be eaten by the Eagle is not a challenge. To slip away from the Eagle and be free, on the other hand, is the ultimate audacity.

When warriors talk about time, they don’t mean something measured by the movement of a clock. Time is the essence of attention; the Eagle’s emanations are made of time; and properly speaking, when a warrior enters other aspects of the self, he begins to become familiar with time.

A warrior can no longer cry, and his only expression of anguish is a shudder that comes from the very depths of the universe. It is as if one of the Eagle’s emanations were made of pure anguish, and when it strikes a warrior, the warrior’s shudder is infinite.

Comments on The Eagle’s Gift

It was a remarkable sensation for me to examine the quotes taken from The Eagle’s Gift. I immediately felt the strong spiral of the intent of the shamans of ancient Mexico acting as vividly as ever. I knew then, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the quotes in this book were governed by their wheel of time. Moreover, I knew that this had been the case with everything I had done in the past, such as writing The Eagle’s Gift, and that it is so with everything I do, as in writing the present book.

Since I find myself unable to clarify this matter, the only option left to me is to accept it with humility. The shamans of ancient Mexico had another cognitive system in operation, and from the units of that cognitive system, they could affect me today in the most positive and inspiring way.

Thanks to the efforts of Florinda Matus, who committed me to learning the most elaborate variations of the usual shamanic techniques designed by the shamans of ancient times, such as recapitulation, I was able to see, for example, my experiences with don Juan Matus with a force I had never been able to imagine. The body of my book The Eagle’s Gift is the result of such visions that I had of don Juan Matus.

For don Juan Matus, to recapitulate meant to relive and reorganize everything in one’s life in a single sweep. He never bothered with the minutiae of elaborate variations of that ancient technique. Florinda, on the other hand, had a completely different meticulousness. She spent months training me to enter aspects of recapitulation that to this day I find impossible to explain.

“It’s the immensity of the warrior that you have experienced,” she explained. “The techniques are there. Big deal. What is of supreme importance is the man using them, and his desire to go all the way with them.”

Recapitulating don Juan in Florinda’s terms resulted in visions of don Juan of the most vivid detail and meaning. It was infinitely more intense than talking with don Juan himself. It was Florinda’s pragmatism that gave me astonishing insights into practical possibilities that were in no way of interest to the nagual Juan Matus. Florinda, being a truly pragmatic woman, had no illusions about herself, no dreams of grandeur. She said she was a plowman who could not afford to miss a single turn of the road. “A warrior must go very slowly,” she recommended, “and make use of every available element of the warrior’s path. One of the most remarkable elements is the capacity we all have, as warriors, to focus our attention with unbending force on lived events. Warriors can focus it even on people they have never met. The resulting end of this deep focus is always the same. Reconstructing the scene. Entire chunks of behavior, forgotten or totally new, become available to a warrior. Try it.” I followed her advice and, of course, I focused on don Juan, and remembered everything that had happened at any given moment. I remembered details I had not set out to remember. Thanks to Florinda’s work, I was able to reconstruct enormous chunks of activity with don Juan, as well as details of tremendous importance that had completely escaped me. The spirit of the quotes from The Eagle’s Gift was more striking to me because the quotes revealed the profound emphasis that don Juan had placed on the elements of his world, on the warrior’s way as the epitome of human fulfillment. That impulse had outlived his person and was as alive as ever. I honestly felt that don Juan had never gone away. I reached the point of actually hearing him move around the house. I asked Florinda about this. She said, “Oh, that’s nothing. It’s only the void of the nagual Juan Matus reaching out to touch you, no matter where his awareness is at this moment.”

Her answer left me more confused, more intrigued, and more dejected than ever. Although Florinda was the person closest to the nagual Juan Matus, they were astonishingly different. One thing they both shared was the emptiness of their persons. They were no longer people. Don Juan Matus did not exist as a person. But what existed in place of his person was a collection of stories, each one apropos of the situation he was dealing with; didactic stories and jokes that bore the mark of his sobriety and his frugality.

Florinda was the same; she had stories. But her stories were about people. They were like a high form of gossip, or elevated gossip, raised by its impersonality to inconceivable heights of effectiveness and enjoyment. “I want you to examine a man who bears an enormous resemblance to you,” she told me one day. “I want you to recapitulate him as if you had known him all your life. This man was transcendental in the formation of our lineage. His name was Elias, the nagual Elias. I call him the nagual who lost heaven.”

“The story is that the nagual Elias was raised by a Jesuit priest, who taught him to read and write, and to play the clavichord. He taught him Latin. The nagual Elias could read the scriptures in Latin as fluently as any scholar. His destiny was to be a priest, but he was an Indian, and Indians in those days didn’t fit into the clerical hierarchies. They looked too imposing, too dark-skinned, too Indian. Priests came from the upper social classes, descendants of Spaniards, fair-skinned, blue-eyed; they were distinguished, presentable. The nagual Elias was a bear by comparison, but he struggled hard, fired up by his mentor’s promise that God would see to it that he was accepted into the priesthood.”

“He was the sacristan of the church where his mentor was parish priest, and one day, a real witch walked into it. Her name was Amalia. They say she was a wild card. Be that as it may, she ended up seducing the poor sacristan, who fell so deeply, so desperately in love with Amalia that he ended up in a nagual’s hut. In time, he became the nagual Elias, a figure to be reckoned with; cultured, learned. It seemed that the position of nagual was made for him. It gave him the anonymity and effectiveness that the world denied him.”

“He was a dreamer, and so good at it that he reached the most remote places in the universe in a bodiless state. Sometimes he even brought back objects that had caught his eye because of the lines of their destiny; objects that were incomprehensible. He called them inventions. He had a whole collection of them.”

“I want you to focus your recapitulating attention on those inventions,” Florinda ordered me. “I want you to end up smelling them, feeling them with your hands, even though you have never seen them except through what I am telling you now. Making this focus means establishing a reference point, as in an algebraic equation in which something is calculated by playing with a third element. You will be able to see the nagual Juan Matus with infinite clarity, using someone else as a point of corroboration.”

The body of the book The Eagle’s Gift is an in-depth review of what don Juan had done to me while he was in the world. The visions I had of don Juan thanks to my new technique of recapitulation—using the nagual Elias as a point of corroboration—were infinitely more intense than any of the visions I had had of him while he was alive.

The recapitulation visions I was immersed in lacked the warmth of the living, but had instead the precision and exactness of inanimate objects that one can examine at leisure.

Quotes from The Fire from Within

There is no fulfillment without sadness and longing, for without them there is no sobriety, no elegance. Wisdom without elegance and knowledge without sobriety are useless.

Self-importance is man’s greatest enemy. What weakens him is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of his fellow men. Self-importance requires that one spend most of one’s life offended by something or someone.

To follow the path of knowledge, one has to be very imaginative. On the path of knowledge nothing is as clear as we would like it to be.

If seers can face petty tyrants, they can certainly face the unknown with impunity, and then they can even withstand the presence of the unknowable.

What seems natural is to think that a warrior who can face the unknown can certainly face petty tyrants with impunity. But that is not necessarily so. What destroyed the arrogant warriors of ancient times was trusting in that assumption. Nothing can temper a warrior’s spirit as much as the challenge of dealing with impossible people in positions of power. Only under those conditions can warriors acquire the sobriety and serenity to withstand the pressure of the unknowable.

The unknown is something that is veiled to man, perhaps wrapped in a terrifying context, but that is, nonetheless, within man’s reach. The unknown becomes the known at a given moment. The unknowable, on the other hand, is the indescribable, the unthinkable, the unrealizable. It is something that will never be known to us, and yet it is there, dazzling and at the same time terrifying in its immensity.

We perceive. This is an undeniable fact. But what we perceive is not a fact of the same kind, because we learn what to perceive.

Warriors say that we think there is a world of objects out there only because of our awareness. But what is really out there are the Eagle’s emanations, fluid, always in motion, and yet unchangeable, eternal.

The deepest failing of inexperienced warriors is that they are willing to forget the wonder of what they see. They are overwhelmed by the fact that they see and believe that it is their talent that counts. An expert warrior must be a paragon of discipline to overcome the almost invincible slackness of our human condition. More important than seeing itself is what warriors do with what they see.

One of the greatest forces in warriors’ lives is fear, because it spurs them to learn.

For a seer, the truth is that all living beings are struggling to die. What holds death back is awareness.

The unknown is eternally present, but it is outside the possibilities of our normal awareness. The unknown is the superfluous part of ordinary man. And it is superfluous because ordinary man does not have enough free energy to grasp it.

The greatest flaw of human beings is getting stuck in the inventory of reason. Reason deals with instruments that create energy, but it has never seriously occurred to reason that we are better than instruments: we are organisms that create energy. We are bubbles of energy.

Warriors who deliberately reach total awareness are a sight worth beholding. That is the moment when they burn from within. The inner fire consumes them. And in full awareness they fuse with the Eagle’s emanations in general, and slip into eternity.

Once internal silence is reached, everything is possible. The way to stop talking to ourselves is to use exactly the same method that was used to teach us to talk to ourselves; we were taught compulsively and unbendingly, and that is the way we must stop it: compulsively and unbendingly. Impeccability begins with a single act that has to be deliberate, precise, and sustained. If that act is repeated long enough, one acquires a sense of unbending intent, which can be applied to anything. If that is achieved, the way is clear. One thing will lead to another until the warrior employs his entire potential.

The mystery of awareness is darkness. Human beings are steeped in that mystery, in things that are inexplicable. To consider ourselves in other terms is madness. So a warrior does not dishonor the mystery of man by trying to rationalize it.

There are two kinds of understanding. One is just animated talk, big outbursts of emotion and nothing more. The other is the product of a shift of the assemblage point; it is not paired with an emotional outburst, but with action. Emotional understandings come years later, after warriors have solidified, through use, the new position of their assemblage point.

The worst that could happen to us is that we have to die, and since that is already our unalterable destiny, we are free; those who have lost everything have nothing left to fear.

Warriors do not venture into the unknown out of greed. Greed works only in the world of ordinary affairs. To venture into that terrifying solitude of the unknown, one must have something greater than greed: love. One needs love for life, for intrigue, for mystery. One needs insatiable curiosity and a lot of guts.

A warrior thinks only of the mysteries of awareness; mystery is all that matters. We are living beings, we have to die and give up our awareness. But if we could change just one shade of that, what mysteries must await us! What mysteries!

Comments on The Fire from Within

The Fire from Within, as a book, was one of the results of Florinda Matus’s influence on my life. She guided me to focus this time on don Juan’s teacher, the nagual Julian. Both Florinda and my detailed focus on the man revealed to me that the nagual Julian Osorio had been an actor of some merit—but more than an actor, he had been a licentious man, interested exclusively in seducing women; women of every kind with whom he came into contact during his theatrical performances. He was so extremely licentious that, finally, his health weakened, and he became infected with tuberculosis. His teacher, the nagual Elias, found him one afternoon in an open field on the outskirts of the city of Durango, seducing the daughter of a wealthy landowner. Because of the exertion, the actor suffered a hemorrhage, and the hemorrhage became so severe that he was on the verge of death. Florinda said that the nagual Elias saw that there was no way to help him. Curing the actor was impossible, and the only thing he could do as a nagual was stop the bleeding, which he did. He thought it advisable to make the actor a proposition.

“I’m leaving at five in the morning for the mountains,” he said. “It’s at the edge of town. Don’t fail me. If you don’t come, you will die; sooner than you think. Your only recourse is to come with me. I will never be able to cure you, but I will be able to divert your inexorable course toward the abyss that marks the end of life. All of us human beings go inexorably to that abyss sooner or later. I will guide you to avoid the enormous width of that chasm, well to the left or to the right of it. As long as you don’t fall, you will live. You will never be well, but you will live.”

The nagual Elias had no great expectations of the actor, who was lazy, carefree, self-indulgent, perhaps even a coward. He was quite surprised when the next day at five in the morning he found the actor waiting for him on the outskirts of the city. He took him to the mountains, and in time he became the nagual Julian—a tubercular man who was never cured, but who lived to be perhaps one hundred and seven years old, always walking along the edge of the abyss. “Of course, it is of enormous importance for you,” Florinda told me once, “to examine the nagual Julian’s walk along the edge of the abyss. The nagual Juan Matus never bothered to know anything about that. For him all of that was superfluous. You are not as talented as the nagual Juan Matus. Nothing can be superfluous for you, as a warrior. You must let the thoughts, the feelings, the ideas of the shamans of ancient Mexico come to you freely.” Florinda was right. I don’t have the splendor of the nagual Juan Matus. As she had said, nothing could be superfluous for me. I needed every support, every peculiarity. I couldn’t afford to overlook any vision or idea of the shamans of ancient Mexico, no matter how far-fetched it might have seemed to me.

Examining the nagual Julian’s walk along the edge of the abyss meant that my ability to focus my memories could extend to the feelings the nagual Julian had about his extraordinary struggle to stay alive. I was moved to the marrow of my bones to discover that this man’s struggle was a fight from second to second, with his terrible habits of indulgence and his extraordinary sensuality set against his rigid adherence to survival. His fight was not sporadic; it was the most sustained and disciplined struggle to remain balanced. Walking along the edge of the abyss means a warrior’s battle intensified to such a degree that every second counted. A single moment of weakness could have hurled the nagual Julian into the abyss. Yet, if he kept his vision, his emphasis, his interest focused on what Florinda called the edge of the abyss, the pressure eased. What he was seeing was not as desperate as what he was seeing when his old habits began to take hold of him. It seemed to me that when I looked at the nagual Julian in those moments, I was recapitulating a different man; a more appeased, more detached, calmer man.

Quotes from The Power of Silence

It is not that a warrior learns shamanism as time goes by; rather, what he learns as time goes by is to save energy. This energy will enable him to handle some of the energy fields that are ordinarily inaccessible to him. Shamanism is a state of awareness; the capacity to use energy fields that are not employed in perceiving the world of everyday life that we know.

In the universe there is an immeasurable, indescribable force that shamans call intent, and absolutely everything that exists in the cosmos is attached to intent by a connecting link. Warriors are interested in studying, understanding, and employing that connecting link. They are especially interested in cleansing it of the numbing effects produced by the ordinary concerns of their everyday lives. Shamanism, at this level, can be defined as the process of cleansing the connecting link to intent.

Shamans are vitally interested in their past, but not their personal past. For shamans, their past is what other shamans of other times accomplished. They consult their past in order to obtain a point of reference. Only shamans authentically seek a point of reference in their past. For them, establishing a point of reference means an opportunity to examine intent.

Ordinary man also examines the past, but it is his personal past that he examines, for personal reasons. He compares himself with the past; his personal past or the past knowledge of his era, in order to find justifications for his present or future behavior, or to establish a model for himself.

The spirit manifests itself to a warrior at every step. Yet this is not the whole truth. The truth is that the spirit reveals itself to everyone with the same intensity and constancy, but only warriors are constantly attuned to such revelations.

Warriors speak of shamanism as a magical, mysterious bird that has paused in its flight for a moment in order to give man hope and purpose; warriors live under the wing of that bird, which they call the bird of wisdom, the bird of freedom.

For a warrior, spirit is abstract only because he knows it without words or even thoughts. It is abstract because he cannot conceive what spirit is. Yet, without the slightest likelihood or desire of comprehending it, a warrior handles spirit. He recognizes it, calls it, beckons it, becomes familiar with it, and expresses it with his acts.

The connecting link of ordinary man to intent is practically dead, and warriors begin with a link that is useless, because it does not respond willingly. In order to revive that link, warriors need a rigorous, fierce purpose, a special state of mind called unbending intent.

Man’s power is incalculable; death exists only because we have intended it from the moment of our birth. The intent of death can be suspended by making the assemblage point shift position.

The art of stalking is to learn all the peculiarities of your disguise, and to learn them so well that no one knows you are disguised. For that you need to be ruthless, cunning, patient, and sweet. Having no compassion should not be harshness, cunning should not be cruelty, patience should not be negligence, and sweetness should not be stupidity.

Warriors have an ulterior purpose for their acts, which has nothing to do with personal gain. Ordinary man acts only if there is a likelihood of profit. Warriors do not act for profit, but for the spirit.

The seer shamans of ancient times, through their seeing, noticed first that any unusual behavior produced a tremor in the assemblage point. They soon discovered that if unusual behavior is practiced systematically and wisely directed, it eventually forces the assemblage point to move.

Silent knowledge is nothing more than direct contact with intent.

Shamanism is a journey of return. A warrior returns victorious to the spirit, having descended into hell. And from hell he brings trophies. Understanding is one of these trophies.

Warriors, because they are stalkers, understand human behavior perfectly. They understand, for example, that human beings are creatures of inventory. Knowing the details of a particular inventory is what makes a man a scholar or an expert in his field.

Warriors know that when an ordinary person’s inventory fails, that person either extends his inventory or his world of self-reflection collapses. The ordinary person is able to incorporate new elements into his inventory. But if the elements contradict that order, the person’s mind collapses. Inventory is the mind. Warriors count on this when they try to break the mirror of self-reflection.

Warriors can never build a bridge to join the people of the world. But if people want to, they have to build a bridge to join the warriors.

In order for the mysteries of shamanism to be available to anyone, the spirit must descend upon whoever is interested. The spirit lets its mere presence move the assemblage point to a specific position. This precise spot is known to shamans as the place where there is no pity.

There are really no procedures for making the assemblage point move to the place where there is no pity. The spirit touches the person and his assemblage point moves. It is as simple as that.

What we need in order to let magic take hold of us is to banish doubts from our minds. Once doubts are banished, anything is possible.

The possibilities of man are so vast and mysterious that warriors, rather than think about them, have chosen to explore them, without hope of ever understanding them.

Everything warriors do is done as a consequence of a movement of their assemblage points, and such movements are governed by the amount of energy warriors have at their disposal.

Any movement of the assemblage point means a movement away from an excessive concern with the individual self. Shamans believe that this is the position of the assemblage point that makes modern man a homicidal egotist, a being totally absorbed in his self-image. Having lost hope of returning to the source of everything, ordinary man seeks refuge in his selfishness.

The idea of the warrior’s path is to dethrone self-importance, and everything warriors do is aimed at achieving that goal.

Shamans have unmasked self-importance and discovered that it is self-pity disguised as something else.

In the world of everyday life, one’s word or one’s decisions can be revoked very easily. The only irrevocable thing in the everyday world is death. In the world of shamans, on the other hand, normal death can be countermanded, but not a shaman’s word. In the world of shamans, decisions cannot be changed or revised. Once made, they stand forever.

One of the most dramatic things about the human condition is the macabre connection between stupidity and self-reflection. Stupidity is what forces ordinary man to discard anything that does not conform to his expectations of self-reflection. For example, as ordinary men, we are blind to the most crucial piece of knowledge available to a human being: the existence of the assemblage point and the fact that it can move.

By stubbornly clinging to his self-image, rational man ensures his abysmal ignorance. He ignores the fact that shamanism is not spells and abracadabra, but the freedom to perceive not only the world that is taken for granted, but everything that is humanly possible to achieve. He trembles at the possibility of freedom. And freedom is at his fingertips.

Man’s predicament is that he intuits his hidden resources, but doesn’t dare to use them. That is why warriors say that man’s ailment is the counterpoint between his stupidity and his ignorance. Man needs now, more than ever, to learn new ideas that have to do exclusively with his inner world—ideas of shamans, not social ideas, ideas that belong to man in the face of the unknown, in the face of his personal death. Now, more than anything else, he needs to learn the secrets of the assemblage point.

The spirit listens only when the one who speaks to it speaks with gestures. And gestures do not mean signals or body movements, but acts of true abandon, acts of generosity, of humor. As a gesture to the spirit, shamans take the best of themselves and silently offer it to the abstract.

Comments on The Power of Silence

The last book I wrote about don Juan as a direct result of Florinda Matus’s guidance was called The Power of Silence, a title chosen by my editor; my title had been Internal Silence. At the time I was working on the book, the visions of the shamans of ancient Mexico had become extremely abstract for me.

Florinda did what she could to divert me from my absorption in the abstract. She tried to redirect my attention to different aspects of ancient shamanic techniques, or tried to amuse me by impressing me with her outrageous behavior. But nothing was enough to divert me from my seemingly inexorable direction.

The Power of Silence is an intellectual review of the thoughts of the shamans of ancient Mexico, in their most abstract form. While I worked alone on the book, I was contaminated by the disposition of those men, by their desire to know more in an almost rational way. Florinda explained that in the end, those shamans had become extremely cold and detached. Nothing warm existed for them anymore. They dug in on their quest: their coldness as men was an effort to match the coldness of infinity. They had managed to change their human eyes to match the cold eyes of the unknown. I felt this in myself, and desperately tried to change the tendency. I did not succeed, however. My thoughts became more and more like the thoughts of those men at the end of their quest. Infinity will swallow me, and I want to be ready for it. I don’t want infinity to dissolve me into nothingness because I retain human desires, warm affection, attachments, no matter how vague. More than anything else in the world, I want to be like those men. I never knew them. The only shamans I knew were don Juan and his cohorts, and what they expressed was the farthest thing from the coldness I intuited in those unknown men.

Because of the influence Florinda had on my life, I brilliantly managed to learn to focus my unbending attention on the disposition of people I never knew. I focused my recapitulating attention on the disposition of those shamans, and I was caught by it with no hope of ever freeing myself from its pull. Florinda did not believe in the finality of my state. She mocked me, and laughed about it openly. “Your state only seems to be final,” she would tell me, “but it isn’t. A moment will come when you change scenery. Perhaps you will abandon all thought of the shamans of ancient Mexico. Perhaps you may even abandon the thoughts and visions of the very shamans you have worked so closely with, such as the nagual Juan Matus. You could reject their being. You’ll see. The warrior has no limits. His sense of improvisation is so keen that he will make constructions out of nothing, but not merely empty constructions; on the contrary, something that works, something pragmatic. You’ll see. It’s not that you will forget them, but that at a certain moment, before you plunge into the abyss, if you have the guts to walk along its edge, if you have the daring not to stray from it, you will arrive at a warrior’s conclusions, of an order and a stability infinitely better suited to you than the fixation on the shamans of ancient Mexico.”

Florinda’s words were like a beautiful, hopeful prophecy. Perhaps she was right. She was certainly right in asserting that a warrior’s resources have no limits. The only flaw is that in order to have an orderly different vision of the world and of myself, a vision even better suited to my temperament, I have to walk along the edge of the abyss, and I doubt that I have the daring and the strength to achieve that feat.

But who can say?

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