Stalking The Petty Tyrant In spite of his explanations, the practical dimension of stalking continued, from my point of view, to be one of the darkest themes in the teachings. Over the years, I accomplished some of the other exercises, like recapitulation and inner silence; I even dreamt. But when I tried stalking, I only got ambiguous results, or wound up feeling ridiculous. Apparently, Carlos was aware of my efforts, because at one point he called me, and told me: Dont get complicated. You are making a caricature of the teachings. If you want to stalk, observe yourself. We are all excellent hunters, stalking is our natural gift. When hunger presses us, we sharpen ourselves; children cry and achieve what they want; women entrap men and men get even with each other, swindling in business. Stalking is to be able to get away with what you want. If you become aware of the world you live in, you will understand that simply staying attentive to it is a kind of stalking. Since we learned to do that long before our capacity to discriminate was developed, we feel it as something perfectly natural and hardly ever question it. But all our actions, even the most altruistic, are imbued with the hunters spirit. Ordinary man doesnt know he is stalking, because his character has been subjugated by socialization. He is convinced that his existence is important, so his actions are at the service of his self- importance, not the expansion of his awareness. He added that one of the characteristics of self-importance is that it betrays us. Important people dont flow, they give themselves airs, show off their attributes, and lack the necessary grace and the speed to hide. Their luminosity is too rigid, and can only achieve flexibility when they no longer have anything to defend. The method of sorcerers consists on focusing on the reality in which we live, but in a new way. Rather than just accumulating information, what they seek is to compact their energy. A warrior is someone who has learned to stalk himself, and is no longer burdened with a heavy image to present to others. Nobody can detect him if he doesnt want them to, because he doesnt have attachments. He is above the hunter, because he has learned to laugh at himself. He told me how his instructor Dona Florinda Matus taught him to be inconspicuous. Just at the time when my books transformed me into a rich man, she sent me to fry hamburgers in a highway restaurant! For years, I worked with my money in plain sight, without being able to spend it. She said that would teach me not to lose the appropriate perspective. And I learned my lesson! Some time after that, I was given another opportunity to be invisible. I had taken some cactuses to the house of a friend and began to plant them. Suddenly, two reporters from The Times, who had spent a long time trying to find me, appeared. They figured I was a peon and asked for the owner of the house. Knock there, I told them, and pointed at the door. My friend answered their questions: No, I havent seen him, and the reporters left, wondering where the hell Castaneda could be. He went on saying that since the problem of self-importance is a personal matter, each warrior should adapt the teachings to his own conditions. Therefore, the stalking techniques are extremely flexible. But the training is the same for everyone, and concerns getting rid of superfluous routines and acquiring enough discipline to recognize the signs of intent. Both achievements constitute true feats of character. The best way of acquiring that degree of discipline is to deal actively with a petty tyrant. In response to my queries, he explained that a petty tyrant is somebody who makes our life impossible. In past times, this kind of people could hurt us physically or even kill us; nowadays, that kind of petty tyrants practically dont exist. However, due to the high level of importance that we grant ourselves, anyone in a position of bothering us works as a petty tyrant. Far from avoiding it, we should face, not the petty tyrant, but our own stupidity. The petty tyrant is necessary because most of us are too lazy to change by ourselves. He moves the fixation of me, making our weaknesses appear. He makes us see the truth - that we are not important - and he is willing to demonstrate it with actions. To learn how to treat him is the only really effective way to refine stalking. A petty tyrant is so important for the task that it can become an obsession for an apprentice to look for one and get in touch with him. A sincere gratitude is the only appropriate feeling for a warrior who has found one to fit his measure. Petty tyrants are plentiful, what is not plentiful is the guts to look for them, establish a connection with them by means of stalking, and cause their anger, putting oneself within their reach and, at the same lime, scheming devastating strategies. Instead, we spend our life running away from situations that produce pain, irritation, fear, or confusion. In that way, we lose one of the most valuable tools that spirit has put in our path. What is the strategy to confront that kind of enemies? Above all, dont see them as enemies; they are involuntary allies in your own cause. Dont lose sight of the fact that the battle is not fought for the ego, but for energy. The important thing is to win, not that the other one loses. A petty tyrant doesnt know that, and that is his weakness. In my case, I had the privilege of dealing with several of those people, although I was never given an encounter of the exquisite quality that my teacher had. He told me that, when his apprenticeship began, his main impediment to approaching the art of stalking was impatience. To help him, Don Juan once demanded that he establish a friendship with a certain person who lived in an old age home. When I met him, he turned out to be an annoying old man who was in the habit of telling everyone how in his youth, in the 1920s, he had been witness to a spectacular event. He was sitting in an Italian coffee shop. Suddenly, a car stopped in front of the door, and out came several people armed with machine guns, and they began to shoot towards the establishment. Thanks to his lucky star, my friend could hide under some tables and was unhurt. The anecdote apparently constituted the only treasure in this old mans life. Unfortunately for us who knew him, the old man suffered from amnesia and was always forgetting whom he had told it to. I had to suffer through it again and again for years. Every time I arrived at the retirement home, he would invariably cling to my arm and wonder: Did I ever tell you how I was attacked by some gangsters? I felt pity for him, because somehow he made me think of my own uncertain future. But at the end I had enough; I returned to Don Juan and told him: I cant stand this old man anymore! He is really infuriating! What is the point of making me visit him? But Don Juan was inflexible; he ordered that, starting from that day, I had to go visit the old man every day, or give up my apprenticeship. Alarmed by this threat, I gathered all my patience and tried to complete the task. Sometimes I fantasized, thinking of the possibility that the old man was not the person he seemed to be. That gave me encouragement to continue with my task. One day, when I arrived at the retirement home and asked for my friend, they informed me that he had died.
Posted on: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 11:58:08 +0000
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