Carlos Castañeda Quotes

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... Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. 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.

The compulsion to possess and hold on to things is not unique. Everyone who wants to follow the warrior's path has to rid himself of this fixation in order not to focus our dreaming body on the weak face of the second attention.

He was thoroughly convinced that this is indispensable for
everything sorcerers do, and for this reason he put an enormous emphasis on guiding all
his students to fulfill this requirement. He was of the opinion that self-importance is not
only the sorcerers' supreme enemy but the nemesis of mankind.
Don Juan's argument was that most of our energy goes into upholding our importance.
This is most obvious in our endless worry about the presentation of the self, about
whether or not we are admired or liked or acknowledged. He reasoned that if we were
capable of losing some of that importance, two extraordinary things would happen to us.
One, we would free our energy from trying to maintain the illusory idea of our grandeur;
and, two, we would provide ourselves with enough energy to enter into the second
attention to catch a glimpse of the actual grandeur of the universe.

To be angry at people means that one considers their acts to be important. It is imperative to cease to feel that way. The acts of men cannot be important enough to offset our only viable alternative: our unchangeable encounter with infinity.

He went on to say that conclusions arrived at through reasoning had very little or no influence in altering the course of our lives. Hence, the countless examples of people who have the clearest convictions and yet act diametrically against them time and time again, and have as the only explanation for their behavior the idea that to err is human.

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 want 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.

"The great issue with us males is our frailty," he went on. "When our awareness begins to
grow, it grows like a column, right on the midpoint of our luminous being, from the ground up. That column has to reach a considerable height before we can rely on it. At this time in your life, as a sorcerer, you easily lose your grip on your new awareness. When you do that, you forget everything you have done and seen on the warrior-travelers' path because your consciousness shifts back to the awareness of your everyday life. I have explained to you that the task of every male sorcerer is to reclaim everything he has done and seen on the warrior-travelers' path while he was on new levels of awareness. The problem of every male sorcerer is that he easily forgets because his awareness loses its new level and falls to the ground at the drop of a hat."

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 doesn't use and squeeze people until they have shriveled to nothing, especially the people he loves.

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

Who was I, anyway, to set myself up in judgment of anyone else?

It isn't that as time goes by you're learning sorcery; rather, what you're learning is to save energy. And this energy will enable you to handle some of the energy fields that are not employed in perceiving the ordinary world we know. Sorcery is a state of awareness.

Death is everywhere. It may be the headlights of a car on a hilltop in the distance behind. They may remain visible for a while, and disappear into the darkness as if they had been scooped away; only to appear on another hilltop, and then disappear again.

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.

Cuando estés impaciente, lo que debes hacer es voltear a la izquierda y pedir consejo a tu muerte. Una inmensa cantidad de mezquindad se pierde con solo que tu muerte te haga un gesto, o alcances a echarle un vistazo, o nada más con que tengas la sensación de que tu compañera está ahí vigilándote. Cada vez que sientas, como siempre lo haces, que todo te está saliendo mal y que estás a punto de ser aniquilado, vuélvete hacia tu muerte y pregúntale si es cierto. Tu muerte te dirá que te equivocas; que nada importa más que su toque. Tu muerte te dirá: todavía no te he tocado.

... that a warrior, aware of the unfathomable mystery that surrounds him and aware of his duty to try to unravel it, takes his rightful place among mysteries and regards himself as one. Consequently, for a warrior there is no end to the mystery of being, whether being means being a pebble, or an ant, or oneself. That is a warrior's humbleness. One is equal to everything.