Carlos Castañeda Quotes

What makes us unhappy is to want. Yet if we would learn to cut our wants to nothing, the smallest thing we’d get would be a true gift.

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.

The trick is in what one emphasizes.
We either make ourselves miserable,
or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.

Discipline, as understood by a warrior, is creative, open, and produces freedom. It is the ability to face the unknown, transforming the feeling of knowing into reverent astonishment; of considering things that exceed the scope of our habits, and daring to face the only war that is worthwhile: The battle for awareness.

The art of a warrior is to balance the terror of being a man with the wonder of being a man.

I had been reared, perhaps like everyone else, to have a readiness to accept man as an essentially weak and fallible creature.

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.

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.

Every warrior on the path of knowledge thinks, at one time or another, that he's learning sorcery, but all he's doing is allowing himself to be convinced of the power hidden in his being, and that he can reach it.

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.

Self-pity is the real enemy and the source of man's misery. Without a degree of pity for himself, man could not afford to be as self-important as he is. However, once the force of self-importance is engaged, it develops its own momentum. And it is this seemingly independent nature of self-importance which gives it its fake sense of worth.

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.

Warriors are incapable of feeling compassion because they no longer feel sorry for themselves. Without the driving force of self-pity, compassion is meaningless.

perceiving the world” entails a process of apprehending whatever presents itself to us. This particular “perceiving” is done with our senses and with our will.

There is no beginning, the beginning is only in your thought.