Teachings Of Don Juan Quotes

For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length--and there I travel looking, looking breathlessly.

A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war: wide-awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. Going to knowledge or going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and whoever makes it might never live to regret it

Seek and see all the marvels around you. You will get tired of looking at yourself alone, and that fatigue will make you deaf and blind to everything else. - Don Juan

Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow, you must not stay with it under any circumstances.

All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. ... Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.

I had been experiencing brief flashes of disassociation, or shallow states of non-ordinary reality.

Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow it, you must not stay with it under any conditions. To have such clarity you must lead a disciplined life. Only then will you know that any path is only a path and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition. I warn you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. This question is one that only a very old man asks. Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long long paths, but I am not anywhere. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you. Before you embark on any path ask the question: Does this path have a heart? If the answer is no, you will know it, and then you must choose another path. The trouble is nobody asks the question; and when a man finally realizes that he has taken a path without a heart, the path is ready to kill him. At that point very few men can stop to deliberate, and leave the path. A path without a heart is never enjoyable. You have to work hard even to take it. On the other hand, a path with heart is easy; it does not make you work at liking it.

Power rests on the kind of knowledge one holds. What is the sense of knowing things that are useless?

Remembering tires a person out. this is something they don't teach us. Exercising one's memory is an exhausting activity. It draws our energy and wears down our muscles.

Añadió que nada en este mundo era un regalo: todo cuanto hubiera que aprender debía aprenderse por el camino difícil.

No tienes que hacer nada para caer bien o mal. O te acepta o te tira de lado.

The journey by itself was sufficient; any hope of arriving at a permanent position was outside the boundaries of his knowledge.

The awakening to serious, sober consciousness, was genuinely shocking. I had forgotten I was a man! The sadness of such an irreconcilable situation was so intense that I wept.

The thing to do when you’re impatient,” he proceeded, “is to turn to your left and ask advice from your death. An immense amount of pettiness is dropped if your death makes a gesture to you, or if you catch a glimpse of it, or if you just have the feeling that your companion is there watching you.

A man is defeated only when he no longer tries, and abandons himself.

The hardest thing in the world is to assume the mood of a warrior,” he said. “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. “You are here, with me, because you want to be here. You should have assumed full responsibility by now, so the idea that you are at the mercy of the wind would be inadmissible.

Nothing so difficult as a beginning In poesy, unless perhaps the end; For oftentimes when Pegasus seems winning The race, he sprains a wing, and down we tend, Like Lucifer when hurled from Heaven for sinning; Our sin the same, and hard as his to mend, Being Pride, which leads the mind to soar too far, Till our own weakness shows us what we are. But Time, which brings all beings to their level, And sharp Adversity, will teach at last Man,—and, as we would hope,—perhaps the Devil, That neither of their intellects are vast: While Youth's hot wishes in our red veins revel, We know not this—the blood flows on too fast; But as the torrent widens towards the Ocean, We ponder deeply on each past emotion.

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

Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow it, you must not stay with it under any conditions.... Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.

The parallels to modern physics [with mysticism] appear not only in the Vedas of Hinduism, in the I Ching, or in the Buddhist sutras, but also in the fragments of Heraclitus, in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, or in the teachings of the Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan.

No!" he said emphatically. "Power rests on the kind of knowledge one holds. What is the sense of knowing things that are useless?

When a man starts to learn, he is never clear about his objectives. His purpose is faulty; his intent is vague. He hopes for rewards that will never materialise, for he knows nothing of the hardships of learning. He slowly begins to learn — bit by bit at first, then in big chunks. And his thoughts soon clash. What he learns is never what he pictured, or imagined, and so he begins to be afraid. Learning is never what one expects. Every step of learning is a new task, and the fear the man is experiencing begins to mount mercilessly, unyieldingly.

You are a serious person, but your seriousness is attached to what you do, not to what goes on outside you. You dwell upon yourself too much. That’s the trouble. And that produces a terrible fatigue." "But what else can anyone do, don Juan?" "Seek and see the marvels all around you. You will get tired of looking at yourself alone, and that fatigue will make you deaf and blind to everything else.

I really felt I had lost my body, don Juan." "You did." "You mean, I really didn't have a body?" "What do you think yourself?" "well, I don't know. All I can tell you is what I felt." That is all there is in reality - what you felt.

He said that I was a man. And like any man I deserved everything that was a man’s lot—joy, pain, sadness and struggle—and that the nature of one’s acts was unimportant as long as one acted as a warrior. Lowering his voice to almost a whisper, he said that if I really felt that my spirit was distorted I should simply fix it—purge it, make it perfect—because there was no other task in our entire lives which was more worthwhile. Not to fix the spirit was to seek death, and that was the same as to seek nothing, since death was going to overtake us regardless of anything. He paused for a long time and then he said with a tone of profound conviction, “To seek the perfection of the warrior’s spirit is the only task worthy of our manhood.

- Birds fly like birds and a man who has taken the devil's weed flies as such. - As birds do? - No, he flies as a man who has taken the weed.

I gather from Don Juan’s teachings that psychotropics are used to stop the flow of ordinary interpretations and to shatter certainty. CARLOS CASTANEDA, VOICES AND VISIONS Why

تو وقتی از مردم عصبانی می شوی که احساس کنی عملشان مهم است .v

Un hombre va al saber como a la guerra: bien despierto, con miedo, con respeto y con absoluta confianza.

Any path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do… Look at every path closely and deliberately… Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question… Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t, it is of no use. —Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan

For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length-and there I travel looking, looking breathlessly.

For me the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable; my interest has been to convince you that you must assume responsibility for being here, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous desert, in this marvelous time. I wanted to convince you that you must learn to make every act count, since you are going to be here for only a short while; in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it.” —Don Juan

Don Juan said that everybody that knew me had an idea about me, and that I kept feeding the idea with everything I did. “Don’t you see?” he asked dramatically. “You must renew your personal history by telling your parents, your relatives, and your friends everything you do. On the other hand, if you have no personal history, no explanations are needed; nobody is angry or disillusioned with your acts. And above all no one pins you down with their thoughts.

It’s funny the way you sometimes remind me of myself,” he went on. “I too did not want to take the path of a warrior. I believed that all that work was for nothing, and since we are all going to die what difference would it make to be a warrior? I was wrong. But I had to find that out for myself. Whenever you do realize that you are wrong, and that it certainly makes a world of difference, you can say that you are convinced. And then you can proceed by yourself. And by yourself you may even become a man of knowledge.

Are you angry at me, don Juan?" I asked when he returned. He seemed surprised at my question. "No! I'm never angry at anybody! No human being can do anything important enough for that. You get angry at people when you feel that their acts are important. I don't feel that way any longer.

You feel like a leaf at the mercy of the wind, don’t you?” he finally said, staring at me. That was exactly the way I felt. He seemed to empathize with me. He said that my mood reminded him of a song and began to sing in a low tone; his singing voice was very pleasing and the lyrics carried me away: “I’m so far away from the sky where I was born. Immense nostalgia invades my thoughts. Now that I am so alone and sad like a leaf in the wind, sometimes I want to weep, sometimes I want to laugh with longing.” (Que lejos estoy del cielo donde he nacido. Immensa nostalgia invade mi pensamiento. Ahora que estoy tan solo y triste cual hoja al viento, quisiera llorar, quisiera reir de sentimiento.) We did not speak for a long while. He finally broke the silence. “Since the day you were born, one way or another, someone has been doing something to you,” he said. “That’s correct,” I said. “And they have been doing something to you against your will.” “True.” “And by now you’re helpless, like a leaf in the wind.” “That’s correct. That’s the way it is.” I said that the circumstances of my life had sometimes been devastating. He listened attentively but I could not figure out whether he was just being agreeable or genuinely concerned until I noticed that he was trying to hide a smile. “No matter how much you like to feel sorry for yourself, you have to change that,” he said in a soft tone. “It doesn’t jibe with the life of a warrior.

In true, Taoist parlance, 'immortality' refers to a spiritual state, not a condition of physical permanence. In his books on the teachings of Don Juan, Carlos Casteneda refers to the primordial source of creation as the nagual, the vast ocean of emptiness in which material worlds take form and dissolve like drops of dew. Nagual refers to everything that cannot be expressed in words, which brings to mind the second line of the Tao Teh Ching: 'The name which can be named is not the real Name.' Don Juan's teachings are remarkably similar to Taoist alchemy, and they both cite our innate awareness as the only bridge between the awesome emptiness and power of the nagual and its material manifestation in the temporal world.

You are a serious person, but your seriousness is attached to what you do, not to what goes on outside you. You dwell upon yourself too much. That’s the trouble. And that produces a terrible fatigue." "But what else can anyone do, don Juan?" "Seek and see the marvels all around you. You will get tired of looking at yourself alone, and that fatigue will make you deaf and blind to everything else.

From Walt: The Grapes of Wrath, Les Misérables, To Kill a Mockingbird, Moby-Dick, The Ox-Bow Incident, A Tale of Two Cities, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Three Musketeers, Don Quixote (where your nickname came from), The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and anything by Anton Chekhov. From Henry: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Cheyenne Autumn, War and Peace, The Things They Carried, Catch-22, The Sun Also Rises, The Blessing Way, Beyond Good and Evil, The Teachings of Don Juan, Heart of Darkness, The Human Comedy, The Art of War. From Vic: Justine, Concrete Charlie: The Story of Philadelphia Football Legend Chuck Bednarik, Medea (you’ll love it; it’s got a great ending), The Kama Sutra, Henry and June, The Onion Field, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Zorba the Greek, Madame Bovary, Richie Ashburn’s Phillies Trivia (fuck you, it’s a great book). From Ruby: The Holy Bible (New Testament), The Pilgrim’s Progress, Inferno, Paradise Lost, My Ántonia, The Scarlet Letter, Walden, Poems of Emily Dickinson, My Friend Flicka, Our Town. From Dorothy: The Gastronomical Me, The French Chef Cookbook (you don’t eat, you don’t read), Last Suppers: Famous Final Meals From Death Row, The Bonfire of the Vanities, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Something Fresh, The Sound and the Fury, The Maltese Falcon, Pride and Prejudice, Brides-head Revisited. From Lucian: Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, Band of Brothers, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Virginian, The Basque History of the World (so you can learn about your heritage you illiterate bastard), Hondo, Sackett, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Bobby Fischer: My 60 Memorable Games, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Quartered Safe Out Here. From Ferg: Riders of the Purple Sage, Kiss Me Deadly, Lonesome Dove, White Fang, A River Runs Through It (I saw the movie, but I heard the book was good, too), Kip Carey’s Official Wyoming Fishing Guide (sorry, kid, I couldn’t come up with ten but this ought to do).

¡la claridad! Esa claridad de mente, tan difícil de obtener, dispersa el miedo, pero también ciega. "Fuerza al hombre a no dudar nunca de sí. Le da la seguridad de que puede hacer cuanto se le antoje, porque todo lo ve con claridad. Y tiene valor porque tiene claridad, y no se detiene en nada porque tiene claridad. Pero todo eso es un error; es como si viera algo claro pero incompleto. Si el hombre se rinde a esa ilusión de poder, ha sucumbido a su segundo enemigo y será torpe para aprender. Se apurará cuando debía ser paciente, o será paciente cuando debería apurarse. Y tonteará con el aprendizaje, hasta que termine incapaz de aprender nada más.

Perhaps you're right," I said. "But how can one avoid the desire the genuine desire to help our fellow men?" "How do you think one can help them?" "By alleviating their burden. The lease one can do for our fellow men is to try to change them. You yourself are involved in doing that. Aren't you?" "No. I'm not. I don't know what to change or why to change anything in my fellow men." "What about me, don Juan? Weren't you teaching me so I could change?" "No. I'm not trying to change you. It may happen that one day you may become a man of knowledge--there's no way to know that--but that will not change you. Some day perhaps you'll be able to 'see' me in another mode and then you'll realize that there's no way to change anything about them.

No, seriously," Mark continued. "Once you've been involved for a while, do your charity work in some third world toilet, they start letting you in on some of the bigger secrets to Responsivism, and how the knowledge will save you." "Go on," Juan said to indulge him. Murph might be flakey, but he had a topflight mind. "Ever heard of 'brane theory?" He'd already talked with Eric about it so only Stone didn't return a blank stare. "It's right up there with string theory as a way of unifying all four forces in the universe, something Einstein couldn't do. In a nutshell, it says our four-dimensional universe is a single membrane, and that there are others existing in higher orders of space. These are so close to ours that zero-point matter and energy can pass between them and that gravitation forces in our universe can leak out. It's all cutting-edge stuff." "I'll take your word for it," Cabrillo said. "Anyway, "brane theory started to get traction among theoreti cal physicists in the mid-nineties, and Lydell Cooper glommed on to it, too. He took it a step further, though. It wasn't just quantum particles passing in and out of our universe. He believed that an intelligence from another 'brane was affecting people here in our dimension. This intelligence, he said, shaped our day-to-day lives in ways we couldn't sense. It was the cause of all our suffering. Just before his death, Cooper started to teach techniques to limit this influence, ways to protect ourselves from the alien power." "And people bought this crap?" Max asked, sinking deeper into depression over his son. "Oh yeah. Think about it from their side for a second. It's not a believer's fault that he is unlucky or depressed or just plain stupid. His life is being messed with across dimensional membranes It's an alien influence that cost you that promotion or prevented you from dating the girl of your dreams. It's a cosmic force holding you back, not your own ineptitude. If you believe that, then you don't have to take responsibility for your life. And we all know nobody takes responsibility for himself anymore. Responsivism gives you a ready-made excuse for your poor life choices.

When a man starts to learn, he is never clear about his objectives. His purpose is faulty. His intent is vague. He hopes for rewards that will never materialize, for he knows nothing of the hardships of learning. "He slowly begins to learn- bit by bit at first, then in big chunks. And his thoughts soon clash. What he learns is never what he pictured, or imagined, and so he begins to be afraid. Learning is never what one expects. Every step of learning is a new task, and the fear the man is experiencing begins to mount mercilessly, unyieldingly. His purpose becomes a battlefield. "And thus he has tumbled upon the first of his natural enemies: Fear! A terrible enemy- treacherous, and difficult to overcome. It remains concealed at every turn of the way, prowling, waiting. And if the man, terrified in its presence, runs away, his enemy will have put an end to his quest.

Don't get me wrong, don Juan," I protested. "I want to have an ally, but I also want to know everything I can. You yourself have said that knowledge is power." "No!" he said emphatically. "Power rests on the kind of knowledge one holds. What is the sense of knowing things that are useless?

Por eso debes tener siempre presente que un camino es sólo un camino y, si sientes que no debes seguirlo, no debes seguir en él bajo ningún concepto. Para tener esa claridad, debes llevar una vida disciplinada, sólo entonces sabrás que un camino es nada más que un camino y no hay afrenta, ni para ti ni para otros, en dejarlo, si eso es lo que tu corazón te dice. Todos los caminos son lo mismo: no llevan a ninguna parte […]Puedo decir que en mi vida he recorrido caminos largos, largos pero no estoy en ninguna parte. […] ¿Tiene corazón ese camino? Si tiene, el camino es bueno, si no, de nada sirve. Ningún camino lleva a ninguna parte, pero uno tiene corazón y el otro no. Uno hace gozoso el viaje; mientras lo sigas, eres uno con él. El otro hará maldeir tu vida. Uno te hace fuerte. El otro te debilita. Pero, ¿Cómo puedo estar seguro de si un camino tiene corazón? Cualquiera puede saber esto. El problema es que nadie se hace la pregunta y cuando uno por sin se da cuenta de que ha tomado un camino sin corazón, el camino está ya a punto de matarlo. En esas circunstancias muy pocos hombres pueden pararse a considerar, y más pocos aún pueden dejar el camino.

Influences I’d list would be J. P. S. Brown, the author of The Forests of the Night and Jim Kane, who is and always will be one of my favorite authors, along with Steinbeck (The Pearl), Carlos Castaneda (The Teachings of Don Juan), Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses), and Malcolm Lowry (Under the Volcano). There are other, nonfiction influences such as Shod with Iron by border patrolman C. M. Newsome, The Texas Sheriff: Lord of the County Line by Thad Sitton, and Bill Jordan’s No Second Place Winner.

I asked him if there was a way in which he could accept just my desire to learn, as if I were an Indian.

هرگاه انسان خودش را آماده ی یادگیری کند مجبور است سخت تلاش کند و محدودیت های یادگیری او توسط خود او معین می شوند .

مرد دانا کسی است که سختی یادگیری را صادقانه و براستی دنبال کرده باشد. مردی که بی شتاب و شبهه و تا آنجا که در توانایی داشته به دنبال رموز قدرت و دانش رفته است .

تو همیشه باید به یاد داشته باشی که مسیر فقط مسیر است اگر حس کنی که نباید آن را بپیمایی تحت هیچ شرایطی نباید با آن بمانی.

Poco sabía yo en ese tiempo que don Juan no me estaba dando solamente una descripción intelectual atractiva; me estaba describiendo algo que él llamaba un hecho energético. Para él, los hechos energéticos eran las conclusiones a las que él y los otros chamanes de su linaje llegaron a involucrarse en una función que llamaban ver: el acto de percibir energía directamente como fluye del universo.

The important fittings were the coffee mugs and the ashtrays, but books were the true furnishings. They were the soul of a room. They defined the identity of the person who lived there in a series of announcements: Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. Charles Reich’s The Greening of America. Richard Neville’s Playpower. Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. Carlos Castañeda’s The Teachings of Don Juan.

Solo allora saprai che qualsiasi strada è solo una strada, e che non c'è nessun affronto, a se stessi o agli altri, nel lasciarla andare se questo è ciò che il tuo cuore ti dice di fare. Ma il tuo desiderio di insistere sulla strada o di abbandonarla deve essere libero dalla paura e dall'ambizione. Ti avverto. Guarda ogni strada attentamente e deliberatamente. Mettila alla prova tutte le volte che lo ritieni necessario. Quindi poni a te stesso, e a te stesso soltanto, una domanda. Questa è una domanda posta solo da un uomo molto vecchio. Il mio benefattore me l'ha detta una volta quando ero giovane, e il mio sangue era troppo vigoroso perché la comprendessi. Ora la comprendo. Ti dirò cosa è: questa strada ha un cuore? Tutte le strade sono uguali; non portano da nessuna parte. Sono strade che passano attraverso la boscaglia o che vanno nella boscaglia. Nella mia vita posso dire di aver percorso strade lunghe, molto lunghe, ma io non sono da nessuna parte. La domanda del mio benefattore ha adesso un significato. Questa strada ha un cuore? Se lo ha, la strada è buona. Se non lo ha, non serve a niente. Entrambe le strade non portano da nessuna parte; ma una ha un cuore e l'altra no. Una porta a un viaggio lieto; finché la segui sei una sola cosa con essa. L'altra ti farà maledire la tua vita. Una ti rende forte. L'altra ti indebolisce.

What is the sense of knowing things that are useless?

Cuando me disponía a partir, decicí preguntarle por los enemigos de un hombre de conocimiento (...). Cuando un hombre empieza a aprender, nunca sabe lo que va a encontrar (...) Sus pensamientos se dan de topetazos y se hunden en la nada. Lo que se aprende no es nunca lo que uno creía. Y así se comienza a tener miedo. (...) Y así ha tropezado con el primero de sus enemigos naturales: ¡el miedo! Un enemigo terrible: traicionero y enredado como los cardos. Se queda oculto en cada recodo, achechando, esperando. Y si el hombre, aterrado en su presencia, echa a correr, su enemigo habrá puesto fin a su búsqueda (...) No debe correr. Debe desafiar a su miedo, y pese a él debe dar el siguiente paso en su aprendizaje, y el siguiente, y el siguiente. Debe estar lleno de miedo, pero no debe deternerse ¡Esa es la regla!. Y llega un momento en que su primer enemigo se retira. El hombre empieza a estar seguro de sí. Su propósito se fortalece. Aprender ya no es una tarea aterradora. Una vez que un hombre ha conquistado el miedo, está libre de él por el resto de su vida, porque a cambio del miedo ha adquirido la claridad (...) Y así ha encontrado a su segundo enemigo: ¡la claridad! Esa claridad de mente tan difícil de obtener, dispersa el miedo pero también lo ciega. (...) Debe hacer lo que hizo con el miedo: debe desafiar su claridad y usarla solo para ver, y esperar con paciencia y medir con tiento antes de dar otros pasos. (...) Y así habrá vencido a su segundo enemigo, y llegará a una posición donde nada puede ya dañarlo (...) Sabrá entonces que el poder tanto tiempo perseguido es suyo por fin (...) Pero también ha tropezado con su tercer enemigo: ¡el poder! El poder es el más fuerte de todos los enemigos. Y naturalmente lo más fácil es rendirse; después de todo el hombre es de veras invencible (...) Su enemigo lo habrá transformado en un hombre cruel, caprichoso. (...) Tiene que llegar a darse cuenta de que el poder que aparentemente ha conquistado nunca es suyo de verdad. (...) Si puede ver que, sin control sobre si mismo, la claridad y el poder son peores que los errores, llegará un punto en el que todo se domina. Entonces sabrá cómo y cuándo usar su poder. Y así habrá vencido a su tercer enemigo. El hombre estará, para entonces, al fin de su travesía por el camino del conocimiento, y casi sin advertencia tropezará con su último enemigo: ¡la vejez! Este enemigo es el más cruel de todos, el único al que no se puede vencer por completo. (...) Este es el tiempo en que un hombre ya no tiene miedos, ya no tiene claridad impaciente; un tiempo en que todo su poder está bajo control, pero también el tiempo en que siente un deseo constante de descansar. Si se rinde por entero a su deseo de de acostarse y olvidar, si se arrulla en la fatiga, habrá perdido su último asalto, y su enemigo lo reducirá a una débil criatura vieja. Su deseo de retirarse vencerá toda su claridad, su poder y su conocimiento. Pero si el hombre se sacude el cansancio y vive su destino hasta el final, puede entonces ser llamado hombre de conocimiento.

Las drogas, las prácticas ascéticas y los ejercicios de meditación no son fines sino medios. Si el medio se vuelve fin, se convierte en agente de destrucción. El resultado no es la liberación interior sino la esclavitud, la locura y no la sabiduría, la dregadación y no la visión. Esto es lo que ha ocurrido en los últimos años. Las drogas alucinógenas se han vuelto potencias destructivas porque han sido arrancadas de su contexto teológico y ritual. Lo primero les daba sentido, trascendencia; lo segundo, al introducir períodos de abstinencia y de uso, minimizaba los trastornos psíquicos y fisiológicos. El uso moderno de los alucinógenos es la profanación de un antiguo sacramento, como la promiscuidad contemporánea es la profanación del cuerpo (prólogo de Octavio Paz a la edición en español)

«Понимание всего этого не является упражнением для разума, — сказал дон Хуан, внимательно выслушав мои доводы. — Вряд ли я смогу объяснить, что именно имеют в виду маги, говоря о волокнах внутри и вне человеческой формы. Когда видящий видит человеческую форму, он видит один-единственный шар энергии. Твое представление относительно множества шаров продиктовано привычкой воспринимать людей как толпу. Но в энергетической вселенной толп не существует. Там есть только отдельные индивидуумы, одинокие, окруженные безграничностью. Ты должен увидеть все это сам.»

So when you’re trying to figure it out, all you’re really doing is trying to make the world familiar. You and I are right here, in the world that you call real, simply because we both know it.

I wanted to examine the surroundings because I had no idea where I was.

They are not rocks.” he said. “They are strings. They will hold your spot suspended.

Somehow, words seemed to be inaccurate and their meanings difficult to pinpoint.

A hunter knows he will lure game into his traps over and over again, so he doesn’t worry. To worry is to become accessible, unwittingly accessible. And once you worry you cling to anything out of desperation; and once you cling you are bound to get exhausted or to exhaust whoever or whatever you are clinging to.

I asked him if each of the two spots had a special name. He said that the good one was called the sitio and the bad one the enemy; he said these two places were the key to a man's wellbeing, especially for a man who was pursuing knowledge. The sheer act of sitting on one's spot created superior strength; on the other hand, the enemy weakened a man and could even cause his death. He said I had replenished my energy, which I had spent lavishly the night before, by taking a nap on my spot.

Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long, long paths, but I am not anywhere. My benefactor's question has meaning now. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.

death,

You are a serious person, but your seriousness is attached to what you do, not to what goes on outside you. You dwell upon yourself too much. That’s the trouble. And that produces a terrible fatigue.” "But what else can anyone do, don Juan?" "Seek and see the marvels all around you. You will get tired of looking at yourself alone, and that fatigue will make you deaf and blind to everything else.

me. “I’m going to remind you of all the techniques you must practice.” he said. “First you must focus your gaze on your hands as the starting point. Then shift your gaze to other items and look at them in brief glances. Focus your gaze on as many things as you can. Remember that if you only glance briefly the images do not shift. Then go back to your hands. “Every time you look at your hands you renew the power needed for dreaming, so in the beginning don’t look at too many things. Four items will suffice every time. Later on, you may enlarge the scope until you can cover all you want, but as soon as the images begin to shift and you feel you are losing control go back to your hands. “When you feel you can gaze at things indefinitely you will be ready for a new technique. I’m going to teach you this new technique now, but I expect you to put it to use only when you are ready.” He was quiet for about fifteen minutes. Finally he sat up and looked at me. “The next step in setting up dreaming is to learn to travel,” he said. “The same way you have learned to look at your hands you can will yourself to move, to go places. First you have to establish a place you want to go to. Pick a well-known spot—perhaps your school, or a park, a friend’s house—then, will yourself to go there. “This technique is very difficult. You must perform two tasks: You must will yourself to go to the specific locale; and then, when you have mastered that technique, you have to learn to control the exact time of your traveling.

No hay nada malo en tener miedo. Cuando uno teme,ve las cosas en forma distinta.