This is a place for people to visit who have had their lives impacted by the writings of Carlos Castaneda. Castaneda has been called a charleton, sage, prankster, genius, new-ager, elusivist, storyteller, philosopher, among others. The real truth lies in the power of his words: For me there is only the traveling on the paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart.There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge for me is to traverse its full length.And there I travel—looking, looking, breathlessly... “A warrior must learn to make every act count, since he is going to be here in this world for only a short while, in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it.” A warrior must cultivate the feeling that he has everything needed 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 may say without being presumptuous that the experience of experiences is being alive. “We hardly ever realize that we can cut anything out of our lives, anytime, in the blink of an eye.” A warrior chooses a path with heart, any path with heart, and follows it; and then he rejoices and laughs. He knows because he sees that his life will be over altogether too soon. He sees that nothing is more important than anything else.” Churches are monuments to self importance. “There’s no emptiness in the life of a warrior. Everything is filled to the brim. Everything is filled to the brim, and everything is equal.” “The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.” “The warrior: silent in his struggle, undetainable because he has nothing to lose, functional and efficacious because he has everything to gain.” One must have something to die for in order to have something to live for. 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 else. If that is accomplished the road is clear. One thing will lead to another until the warrior realizes his full potential. Well being is a condition one has to groom, a condition one has to become acquainted with in order to seek it. There are lots of things a warrior can do at a certain time which he couldn’t do years before. Those things themselves did not change; what changed was his idea of himself. 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. A warrior must know first that his acts are useless, and yet, he must proceed as if he didnt know it. Nothing being more important than anything else, a warrior chooses any act, and acts it out as if it mattered to him. His controlled folly makes him say that what he does matters and makes him act as if it did, and yet he knows that it doesnt. So when he fulfills his acts, he retreats in peace. It is much easier for warriors to fare well under conditions of maximum stress than to be impeccable under normal circumstances. “The self-confidence of the warrior is not the self-confidence of the average man. The average man seeks certainty in the eyes of the onlooker and calls that self-confidence. The warrior seeks impeccability in his own eyes and calls that humbleness. The average man is hooked to his fellow men, while the warrior is hooked only to infinity.” “If a warrior is to succeed at anything, the success must come gently, with a great deal of effort but with no stress or obsession.” 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 doesnt use and squeeze people until they have shriveled to nothing, especially the people he loves. If his spirit is distorted he should simply fix it—purge it, make it perfect—because there is no other task in our entire lives which is more worthwhile…To seek the perfection of the warriors spirit is the only task worthy of our temporariness. Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore, a warrior must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if he feels that he should not follow it, he must not stay with it under any conditions. His decision to keep on that path or to 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, mandatorily: Does this path have a heart? A warrior lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, nor by thinking about what he will think when he has finished acting. Everything that surrounds us is an unfathomable mystery. We must try to unravel these mysteries, but without ever hoping to accomplish this. Aware of the unfathomable mystery that surrounds us, and aware of our duty to try to unravel it, take your rightful place among mysteries and regard yourself as one. Consequently, there is no end to the mystery of being, whether being means being a pebble, or an ant, or ones self. That is the Warriors humbleness. One is equal to everything. A warrior must focus his attention on the link between himself and his death. Without remorse or sadness or worrying, he must focus his attention on the fact that he does not have time and let his acts flow accordingly. He must let each of his acts 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. Only the idea of death makes a warrior sufficiently detached so that he is capable of abandoning himself to anything. He knows his death is stalking him and wont give him time to cling to anything, so he tries, without craving, all of everything. Think for a moment, can you deviate from the path that your fellow men have lined up for you? And if you remain with them, your thoughts and your actions are fixed forever in their terms. That is slavery. The warrior, on the other hand, is free from all that. Freedom is expensive, but the price is not impossible to pay. So, fear your captors, your masters. Dont waste your time and your power fearing freedom. Every living thing has been granted the power, if it so desires, to seek an opening to freedom and go through it. A warrior acknowledges his pain but he doesnt indulge in it. The mood of the warrior who enters into the unknown is not one of sadness; on the contrary, hes joyful because he feels humbled by his great fortune, confident that his spirit is impeccable, and above all, fully aware of his efficiency. A warriors joyfulness comes from having accepted his fate, and from having truthfully assessed what lies ahead of him. The spirit of a warrior is not geared to indulging and complaining, nor is it geared to winning or losing. The spirit of a warrior is geared only to struggle, and every struggle is a warriors last battle on earth. Thus the outcome matters very little to him. In his last battle on earth a warrior lets his spirit flow free and clear. And as he wages his battle, knowing that his intent is impeccable, a warrior laughs and laughs. The things that people do cannot under any conditions be more important than the world. And thus a warrior treats the world as an endless mystery and what people do as an endless folly. There is something you ought to be aware of by now. I call it the cubic centimeter of chance. All of us, whether or not we are warriors, have a cubic centimeter of chance that pops out in front of our eyes from time to time. The difference between an average man and a warrior is that the warrior is aware of this, and one of his tasks is to be alert, deliberately waiting, so that when his cubic centimeter pops out he has the necessary speed, the prowess to pick it up. Chance, good luck, personal power, or whatever you may call it, is a peculiar state of affairs. It is like a very small stick that comes out in front of us and invites us to pluck it. Usually we are too busy, or too preoccupied, or just too stupid and lazy to realize that that is our cubic centimeter of luck. A warrior, on the other hand, is always alert and tight and has the spring, the gumption necessary to grab it. A warrior doesnt know remorse for anything he has done, because to isolate ones acts as being mean, or ugly, or evil is to place an unwarranted importance on the self. The flaw with 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 have, without enlightenment. For this reason, a warrior seeks to act rather than to talk, and to this effect, he gets a new description of the world where talking is not that important, and where new acts have new reflections. (A warrior) knows his death is stalking him and won’t give him time to cling to anything… And thus with an awareness of his death,… and with the power of his decisions, a warrior sets his life in a strategic manner… and what he chooses is always strategically the best; and so he performs everything he has to with gusto and lusty efficiency. A warrior is a hunter. He calculates everything. Thats control. Once his calculations are over, he acts. He lets go. Thats abandon. A warrior is not a leaf at the mercy of the wind. No one can push him; no one 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 fashions. A warrior is always joyful because his love is unalterable and his beloved, the earth, embraces him and bestows upon him inconceivable gifts. The average man is aware of everything only when he thinks he should be; the condition of a warrior, however, is to be aware of everything at all times. A warrior is only a man; a humble man. He cannot change the designs of his death. But his impeccable spirit, which has stored power after stupendous hardships, can certainly hold his death for a moment; a moment long enough to let him rejoice for the last time in recalling his power. We may say that that is a gesture which death has with those who have an impeccable spirit. All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. However, a path without a heart is never enjoyable. On the other hand, a path with heart is easy—it does not make a warrior work at liking it; it makes for a joyful journey; as long as a man follows it, he is one with it. For an average man, the world is weird because if hes not bored with it, hes at odds with it. For a warrior, the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, and unfathomable. A warrior assumes responsibility for being here in this marvelous world in this marvelous time. The only thing that is real is the being in you that is going to die. Detached and at ease, I will dart past the Eagle to be free.
Posted on: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 00:32:31 +0000
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