The lessons of Don Juan

by Carlos Castaneda

People hardly ever realize that we can cut anything from our lives, any time, just like that. He snapped his fingers,

A man can get agreements from everything around him.

ERASING PERSONAL HISTORY

There is only one thing which is indispensable for anything we did. He called it the "spirit."

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 is best to erase all personal history, because that would make us free from the encumbering thoughts of other people.

Begin with simple things, such as not revealing what you really do. Then you must leave everyone who knows you well.

What's wrong is that once they know you, you are an affair taken for granted and from that moment on you won't be able to break the tie of their thoughts. I personally like the ultimate freedom of being unknown.

You must simply show people whatever you care to show them, but without ever telling exactly how you've done it.

We only have two alternatives; we either take everything for sure and real, or we don't. If we follow the first, we end up bored to death with ourselves and with the world. If we follow the second and erase personal history, we create a fog around us, a very exciting and mysterious state in which nobody knows where the rabbit will pop out, not even ourselves.

LOOSING SELF IMPORTANCE

You take yourself too seriously, he said slowly. You are too damn important in your own mind. That must be changed! You are so goddamn important that you feel justified to be annoyed with everything. You're so damn important that you can afford to leave if things don't go your way. I suppose you think that shows you have character. That's nonsense! You're weak, and conceited!

As long as you feel that you are the most important thing in the world you cannot really appreciate the world around you.

I curled my fingers and strangely enough I was able to keep his tremendous pace without any effort.

DEATH IS AN ADVISER

The thing to do when you're impatient, he proceeded, is to turn to your left and ask advice from you 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.

Ask death's advice and drop the cursed pettiness that belongs to men that live their lives as if death will never tap them.

In view of my impending death my fears and annoyance were non-sense.

Think of your death now, don Juan said suddenly. It is at arm's length. It may tap you any moment, so really you have no time for crappy thoughts and moods. None of us have time for that.

ASSUMING RESPONSIBILITY

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.

If I have to die as a result , then I must die.

In a world where death is the hunter, my friend, there is not time for regrets or doubts. There is only time for decisions.

You have been complaining all your life because you don't assume responsibility for you decisions.

BEING INACCESSIBLE

You must learn to become deliberately available and unavailable.

At one time in my life I, like you, made myself available over and over again until there was nothing of me left for anything except perhaps crying.

You must take yourself away, he explained. You must retrieve yourself from the middle of a trafficked way. Being in the middle of the road means that everyone passing by watches your coming an goings.

You lost her because you were accessible; you were always within her reach and your life was a routine one.

The art of a hunter is to become inaccessible, he said. In the case of that blond girl it would've meant that you had to become a hunter and meet her sparingly. Not the way you did. You stayed with her day after day, until the only feeling that remained was boredom. True?

To be inaccessible means that you touch the world around you sparingly. You don't eat five quail; you eat one. You don't damage the plants just to make a barbecue pit. You don't expose yourself to the power of the wind unless it is mandatory. You don't use and squeeze people until they have shriveled to nothing, especially the people you love.

A hunter uses his world sparingly and with tenderness, regardless of whether the world might be things, or plants, or animal, or people, or power.

DISRUPTING THE ROUTINES OF LIFE

A hunter that is worth his salt does not catch game because he sets his traps, or because he knows the routines of his prey, but because he himself has no routines. This his advantage. He is not at all like the animals he is after, fixed by heavy routines and predictable quirks; he is free, fluid, unpredictable.

THE LAST BATTLE ON EARTH

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.

If you don't think you life is going to last forever, what are you waiting for? Why the hesitation to change?

I didn't like my life, I was tired of it, just like you. Now I don't have enough of it.

This, whatever you're doing now, may be your last act on earth. It may very well by your last battle. There is no power which could guarantee that you are gong to live one more minute.

If this were your last battle on earth, I would say that you are an idiot, he said calmly. You are wasting your last act on earth in some stupid mood.

The change I'm talking about never takes place by degrees: it happens suddenly.

Focus your attention on the fact you don't have time and let your acts flow accordingly. Let each of your acts be your last battle on earth. Only under those conditions will your acts have their rightful power. Otherwise they will be, for as long as you live, the acts of a timid man.

Timidity makes you cling to something that exists only in your thoughts.

Being timid prevents us from examining and exploiting our lot as men.

Most people move from act to act without any struggle or thought. hunter, on the contrary, assesses every act; and since he has an intimate knowledge of his death, he proceeds judiciously, as if every act were his last battle.

It's only natural that his last act no earth should be the best of himself.

It'll take years for you to convince yourself and then it'll take years for you to act accordingly. I only hope you have time left.

BECOMING ACCESSIBLE TO POWER

never carry anything in your hands when you walk.

You must understand that a warrior is not a fool. A warrior is an immaculate hunter who hunts power; he's not drunk, or crazed, and he has neither the time nor the disposition to bluff, or to lie to himself, or to make a wrong move. The stakes are too high for that. The stakes are his trimmed orderly life which he has taken so long to tighten and perfect. He is not going to throw that away by making some stupid miscalculation, by taking something for being something else.

Tonight in your dreams you must look at your hands.

Every time you look at anything in your dreams it changes shape, he said after a long silence. The trick in learning to set up dreaming is obviously not just to look at things but to sustain the sight of them. Dreaming is real when one has succeeded in bringing everything into focus.

That branch was a real animal and it was alive at the moment the power touched it . Since what kept it alive was power, the trick was, like in dreaming, to sustain the sight of it.

The gait of power: Don Juan's trunk was slightly bent forward, but his spine was straight. His knees were also slightly bent.

He walked slowly in front of me so I could take notice that he raised his knees almost to his chest every time he took a step. "The gait of power is for running at night, it is completely safe." He said that the key to it was to let one's personal power flow out freely, so it could merge with the power of the night, and that once that power took over, there was no chance for a slip-up.

He insisted I should first curl my fingers against my palms, stretching out the thumb and index of each hand. the gait of power required that one keep the eyes on the ground directly in front, because even a glance to either side would produce an alteration in the flow of movement. The steps have to be very short and safe.

NOT DOING

"to not do what I knew how to do" is the key to power.

In the case of looking at a tree, what I knew how to do was to focus immediately on the foliage. The shadows of the leaves in between the leaves were never my concern. His last admonitions were to start focusing on the shadows of the leaves on one single branch and then eventually work my way to the whole tree, and not to let my eyes go back to the leaves, because the first deliberate step to storing personal power was to show the body to "not-do."

In order to see one must learn to look at the world in some other fashion, and the only other fashion I know is the way of a sorcerer.

Seeing happens only when one sneaks between the worlds, the world of ordinary people and the world of sorcerers. Yesterday you believed the coyote talked to you. Any sorcerer who doesn't see would believe the same, but one who sees knows that to believe that is to be pinned down in the realm of sorcerers. By the same token, not to believe that coyotes talk is to be pinned down in the realm of ordinary men.

The world we look at every day is only a description.