All material in this book is taken from the first four of Don Carlos Castaneda’s books of Toltec Knowledge. This has been done to isolate the teachings proper from the story of Castaneda's apprenticeship. Its use is intended to be supplemental and complementary to the original work. It should be noted that these teachings were specifically directed to Don Carlos, and were not necessarily taught as they would have been to another apprentice. Nonetheless, it is hoped they will provide useful guidance to the sincere student.
-Editor
CONTENTS
BALANCE……………………………………………………………………………………………………………
YOUR SPIRIT IS UNBALANCED……………………………………………………………………………
THE PATH OF KNOWLEDGE………………………………………………………………………………………
WARRIORS…………………………………………………………………………………………………………
THE PATH WITH A HEART………………………………………………………………………………………
HUNTERS……………………………………………………………………………………………………………
BALANCE
YOUR SPIRIT IS UNBALANCED
You dwell upon yourself too much. That's the trouble. That produces a terrible fatigue, and that fatigue will make you deaf and blind to everything else. Seek and see the marvels all around you. You will get tired of looking at yourself alone.
The way I see it you want to cling to your arguments, despite the fact that they bring nothing to you; you want to remain the same even at the cost of your well-being. I'm talking about the fact that you're not complete. You have no peace.
Well-being is a condition one has to groom, a condition one has to become acquainted with in order to seek it. You don't know what well-being is because you have never experienced it. The only thing you know how to seek is a sense of disorientation, ill-being and confusion.
In order to accomplish the feat of making yourself miserable you have to work in a most intense fashion, and it is absurd you have never realized you can work just the same in making yourself complete and strong. The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.
You indulge. You feel that indulging in doubts and tribulations is the sign of a sensitive man. Well, the truth of the matter is that you're the farthest thing from being sensitive. So why pretend? A warrior accepts in humbleness what he is.
You always insist on knowing things from the beginning, but there's no beginning; the beginning is only in your thought. You insist on explaining things as if the whole world were composed of things that can be explained. Why should the world be only as you think it is? Who gave you the authority to say so? To believe the world is only as you think it is is stupid. The world is a mysterious place.
THE PATH OF KNOWLEDGE
Let's say that a rule of thumb for you should be that when you come to see me you should come prepared to die. If you come ready to die, there shouldn't be any pitfalls or unwelcome surprises, or any unnecessary acts. Everything should gently fall into place because you're expecting nothing.
Man lives only to learn. And if he learns it is because that is the nature of his lot, for good or bad. We do confuse ourselves deliberately. All of us are aware of our doings. Our puny reason deliberately makes itself into the monster it fancies itself to be. It's too little for such a big mold though.
There are worlds upon worlds, right here in front of us. And they are nothing to laugh at. Every time one is careless in matters of sorcery, one is playing with an imminent and senseless death that could be averted by being thoughtful and aware. One goes to knowledge or to war with fear, with respect, aware that one is going to war, and with absolute confidence in oneself. Put your trust in yourself, not in me.
Out there, there is only knowledge. Knowledge is frightening, true; but if a warrior accepts the frightening nature of knowledge he cancels out its awesomeness. Knowledge is a most peculiar affair, especially for a warrior. Knowledge for a warrior is something that comes at once, engulfs him, and passes on.
Knowledge comes floating like specks of gold dust, the same dust that covers the wings of moths. So, for a warrior, knowledge is like taking a shower, or being rained on by specks of gold dust.
Think of this. The world doesn't yield to us directly, the description of the world stands in between. So, properly speaking, we are always one step removed and our experience of the world is always a recollection of the experience. We are perennially recollecting the instant that has just happened, just passed. We recollect, recollect, recollect.
There is no future. The future is only a way of talking. For a sorcerer there is only the here and now.
Solidity, corporealness are memories. Therefore, like everything else we feel about the world, they are memories we accumulate. Memories of the description. You have the memory of my solidity, therefore you feel me as being solid.
We are perceivers. We are an awareness; we are not objects; we have no solidity. We are boundless. The world of objects and solidity is a way of making our passage on earth convenient. It is only a description that was created to help us. We, or rather our reason, forget that the description and thus entrap the totality of ourselves in a vicious circle from which we rarely escape in our lifetime.
A phony sorcerer tries to explain everything in the world with explanations he is not sure about, and so everything is witchcraft. But then you're no better. You also want to explain everything your way but you're not sure of your explanation either.
The path of knowledge is a forced one. In order to learn we must be spurred. In the path of knowledge we are always fighting something, avoiding something, prepared for something; and that something is always inexplicable, greater, more powerful than us. The inexplicable forces will come to you, so there is nothing you can do now but prepare yourself for the struggle.
But there's no emptiness in the life of a man of knowledge, I tell you. Everything is filled to the brim. Everything is filled to the brim and everything is equal.
WARRIORS
If you really feel your spirit is distorted you should fix it-purge it, make it perfect, because there is no other task in our entire lives which is more worthwhile. Not to fix the spirit is to seek death, and that is the same as to seek nothing, since death is going to overtake us regardless of anything. To seek the perfection of the warrior's spirit is the only task worthy of our manhood.
My benefactor said that when a man embarks on the paths of sorcery he becomes aware, in a gradual manner, that ordinary life has been forever left behind. That knowledge is indeed a frightening affair; that the means of the ordinary world are no longer a buffer for him; and that he must adopt a new way of life if he is going to survive. The first thing he ought to do, at that point, is to want to become a warrior, a very important step and decision.
A warrior starts off with the certainty that his spirit is off balance; then by living in full control and awareness, but without hurry or compulsion, he does his ultimate best to gain his balance.
There is no flaw in the warrior's way. Follow it and your acts cannot be criticized by anyone.
The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge while an ordinary man takes everything either as a blessing or a curse. A warrior must be calm and collected and never lose his grip. Only as a warrior can one withstand the path of knowledge. A warrior cannot complain or regret anything. His life is an endless challenge, and challenges cannot possibly be good or bad. Challenges are simply challenges.
You hinge everything on the feeling that everything is too much for you. No matter how much you like to feel sorry for yourself, you have to change that. It doesn't jibe with the life of a warrior.
All of us go through the same shenanigans. The only way to overcome them is to persist in acting like a warrior. The rest comes of itself and by itself. The rest is knowledge and power. Men of knowledge have both. And yet none of them could tell how they got to have them, except that they kept on acting like warriors and at a given moment everything changed.
A warrior must be fluid and must shift harmoniously with the world around him whether it is the world of reason or the world of will.
The most dangerous part of that shifting comes forth every time the warrior finds that the world is neither the one nor the other. I was told that the only way to succeed in that crucial shifting was by proceeding in one's actions as if one believed. In other words the secret of a warrior is that he believes without believing. But obviously a warrior cannot just say he believes and let it go at that. That would be too easy. To just believe would exonerate him from examining his situation. A warrior, whenever he has to involve himself with believing, does it as a choice, as an _expression of his innermost predilection. A warrior doesn't believe, a warrior has to believe.
Only as a warrior can one survive the path of knowledge, because the art of a warrior is to balance the terror of being a man with the wonder of being a man.
Any warrior can become a man of knowledge. As I told you, a warrior is an impeccable hunter that hunts power. If he succeeds in his hunting he can be a man of knowledge.
But you want to find the meaning of life. A warrior doesn’t care about meanings. If Lucas lived like a warrior--and he had a chance to, as we all have a chance to--he would set his life strategically. Thus if he couldn't avoid an accident that crushed his ribs, he would have found means to offset that handicap, or avoid its consequences, or battle against them. If Lucas were a warrior he wouldn't be sitting in his dingy house dying of starvation. He would be battling to the end.
You must cultivate the feeling that a warrior needs nothing. You say you need help, help for what? You have everything needed for the extravagant journey that is your life. I have tried to teach you that the real experience is to be a man, and that what counts is being alive; life is the little detour that we are taking now. Life itself is sufficient, self-explanatory and complete.
A warrior understands this and lives accordingly; therefore one may say without being presumptuous that the experience of experiences is being a warrior.
If a warrior needs solace he simply chooses anyone and expresses to that person every detail of his turmoil. After all, the warrior is not seeking to be understood or helped; by talking he's merely relieving himself of his pressure. That is, providing that the warrior is given to talking; if he's not he tells no one. But you're not living like a warrior altogether. Not yet anyway. And the pitfalls that you encounter must be truly monumental. You have all my sympathy.
A warrior makes his own mood. You didn't know that.
The hardest thing in the world is to assume the mood of a warrior. It is of no use to be sad and complain and feel justified in doing so, believing that someone is always doing something to us. Nobody is doing anything to anybody, much less a warrior.
Self-pity doesn't jibe with power. The mood of a warrior calls for control over himself and at the same time it calls for abandoning himself. It's a difficult technique. It is required that you hold onto yourself and let go of yourself at the same time. That's what I call the mood of a warrior. It's convenient to always act in such a mood. It cuts through the crap and leaves one purified. One needs the mood of a warrior for every single act. Otherwise one becomes distorted.
There is no power in life that lacks this mood. Look at yourself. Everything offends and upsets you. You whine and complain and feel that everyone is making you dance to their tune. You are a leaf at the mercy of the wind. There is no power in your life. What an ugly feeling that must be.
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 himself. Perhaps you are chasing rainbows. You're after the self-confidence of the average man, when you should be after the humbleness of a warrior. The difference between the two is remarkable. Self-confidence entails knowing something for sure; humbleness means being impeccable in one's actions and feelings.
A warrior cannot be helpless, or bewildered, not under any circumstances. For a warrior there is time only for his impeccability; everything else drains his power, impeccability replenishes it.
Impeccability is to do your best in whatever you're engaged in.
The key to all these matters of impeccability is the sense of having or not having time. As a rule of thumb, when you feel and act like an immortal being that has all the time in the world you are not impeccable; at those times you should turn, look around, and then you will realize that your feeling of having time is an idiocy. There are no survivors on this earth.
A warrior is never idle and never in a hurry.
A warrior knows that he is waiting and what he is waiting for; and while he waits he wants nothing, and thus whatever little thing he gets is more than he can take. If he needs to eat he finds a way, because he is not hungry; if something hurts his body he finds a way to stop it, because he is not in pain. To be hungry or to be in pain means that the man has abandoned himself and is no longer a warrior; and the forces of his hunger and pain will destroy him.
A rule of thumb for a warrior is that he makes his decisions so carefully that nothing that may happen as a result of them can surprise him, much less drain his power. Worry and think before you make any decision, but once you make it, be on your way free from worries or thoughts. There will be a million other decisions still awaiting you. That's the warrior's way.
Life for a warrior is an exercise in strategy.
You are aware of everything only when you think you should be; the condition of a warrior, however, is to be aware of everything at all times. A warrior is never available; never is he standing in the road, waiting to be clobbered. Thus he cuts to a minimum his chances of the unforeseen. What you call accidents are, most of the time, very easy to avoid, except for fools who are living helter-skelter.
A warrior, on the other hand, is a hunter. He calculates everything. That's control. But once his calculations are over, he acts. He lets go! That's 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.
The mood of a warrior is not so far-fetched for yours or anybody's world. You need it in order to cut through all the guff.
To achieve the mood of a warrior is not a simple matter. It is a revolution. To regard the lion and the water rats and our fellow men as equals is a magnificent act of the warrior spirit. It takes power to do that.
A warrior takes his lot, whatever it may be, and accepts it in ultimate humbleness. He accepts in humbleness what he is, not as grounds for regret, but as a living challenge.
It takes time for every one of us to understand that point and fully live it. I, for instance, hated the mere mention of the word "humbleness." I'm an Indian and we Indians have always been humble and have done nothing else but lower our heads. I thought humbleness was not in the warrior's way. I was wrong! I know now that the humbleness of a warrior is not the humbleness of a beggar. The warrior lowers his head to no one, but at the same time, he doesn't permit anyone to lower his head to him. The beggar, on the other hand, falls to his knees at the drop of a hat and scrapes the floor for anyone he deems to be higher; but at the same time he demands that someone lower than him scrape the floor for him.
That's why I don't understand what masters feel like. I know only the humbleness of a warrior, and that will never permit me to be anyone's master.
You like the humbleness of a beggar. You bow your head to reason.
A warrior is always ready. To be a warrior is not a simple matter of wishing to be one. It is rather an endless struggle that will go on to the very last moment of our lives. Nobody is born a warrior, in exactly the same way that nobody is born a reasonable being. We make ourselves into the one or the other.
It's your duty to put your mind at ease. Warriors do not win victory by beating their heads against the walls, but by overtaking the walls. Warriors jump over the walls; they don't demolish them.
The spirit of the 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 warrior's 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 will is impeccable, a warrior laughs and laughs.
This is your world. You are a man of that world. And out there, in that world is your hunting ground. As a hunter, a warrior knows that the world is made to be used. So he uses every bit of it. A warrior is like a pirate that has no qualms in taking and using anything he wants, except that the warrior doesn't mind, or he doesn't feel insulted when he is used and taken himself.
A warrior selects the items that make his world. He selects deliberately, for every item he chooses is a shield that protects him from the onslaughts of the forces he is striving to use. A warrior would use his shields to protect himself from his ally, for instance.
The average man, who is equally surrounded by those inexplicable forces, is oblivious to them because he has other kinds of special shields to protect himself. Look around you. People are doing that which people do. Those are their shields. Whenever a sorcerer has an encounter with any of those inexplicable and unbending forces we have talked about, his gap opens, making him more susceptible to his death than he ordinarily is; we die through that gap, therefore if it is open one should have his will ready to fill it; that is if one is a warrior. If one is not a warrior, like yourself, then one has no other recourse but to use the activities of daily life to take one's mind away from the fright of the encounter and thus allow one's gap to close.
A warrior encounters those inexplicable and unbending forces because he is deliberately seeking them, thus he is always prepared for the encounter.
I personally believe that to be a warrior is more suitable than anything else. Therefore I have endeavored to show you those forces as a sorcerer perceives them, because only under their terrifying impact can one become a warrior. To see without first being a warrior would make you weak; it would give you a false meekness, a desire to retreat; your body would decay because you would become indifferent. It is my personal commitment to make you a warrior so you won't crumble.
I have heard you say time and time again that you are always prepared to die. I don't regard that feeling as necessary. I think it is a useless indulgence. A warrior should be prepared only to battle. I have also heard you say that your parents injured your spirit. I think the spirit of man is something that can be injured very easily, although not by the same acts you yourself call injurious. I believe your parents did injure you by making you indulgent and soft and given to dwelling.
There is nothing in this world that a warrior cannot account for. You see, a warrior considers himself already dead, so there is nothing for him to lose. The worst has already happened to him, therefore he's clear and calm; judging him by his acts or by his words, one would never suspect that he has witnessed everything.
A warrior treats everything with respect and does not trample on anything unless he has to. A warrior never turns his back to power without atoning for the favors received. In order to become a man of knowledge one must be a warrior, not a whimpering child. One must strive without giving up, without a complaint, without flinching, until one sees, only to realize that nothing matters.
THE PATH WITH A HEART
It is the consistent choice of the path with heart which makes a warrior different from the average man. He knows that a path has heart when he is one with it, when he experiences a great peace and pleasure in traversing its length.
Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow it, you must not stay with it under any conditions. To have such clarity you must lead a disciplined life. Only then will you know that 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 to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition. I warn you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. This question is one that only a very old man asks. My benefactor told me about it once when I was young, and my blood was too vigorous for me to understand it. Now I understand it. I will tell you what it is; does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart and the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it you are one with it. The other makes you curse your life. One makes you strong. The other weakens you.
Today I am neither a warrior or a diablero. For me there is only the traveling on the paths that have a heart, on any path that may have a heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge for me is to traverse its full length. And there I travel, looking, looking breathlessly.
HUNTERS
If you would live out here in the wilderness you would know that during the twilight the wind becomes power. A hunter that is worth his salt knows that, and acts accordingly. He used the twilight and that power hidden in the wind.
If it is convenient to him, the hunter hides from the power by covering himself and remaining motionless until the twilight is gone and the power has sealed him into its protection. The protection of the power seals you like a cocoon. A hunter can stay out in the open and no puma or coyote or slimy bug would bother him. A mountain lion could come up to the hunter's nose and sniff him, and if the hunter does not move, the lion would leave. I can guarantee you that.
If the hunter, on the other hand, wants to be noticed all he has to do is stand on a hilltop at the time of the twilight and the power will nag him and seek him all night. Therefore if a hunter wants to travel all night or if he wants to be kept awake he must make himself available to the wind.
Therein lies the secret of the great hunters. To be available and unavailable at the precise turn of the road.
You must learn to become deliberately available and unavailable. As your life goes now, you are unwittingly available at all times. Let me put it another way. It makes no difference to hide if everyone knows you are hiding.
Your problems right now stem from that. When you are hiding everyone knows that you are hiding, and when you are not, you are available for everyone to take a poke at you. We are fools, all of us, and you cannot be different. 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. And that I did, just like yourself. I was younger than you though, but one day I had enough and I changed. Let's say that one day, when I was becoming a hunter, I learned the secret of being available and unavailable.
You must take yourself away. You must retrieve yourself from the middle of a trafficked way. Your whole being is there, thus it is of no use to hide; you would only imagine that you are hidden. Being in the middle of the road means that everyone passing by watches your comings and goings.
Hey! Whatever happened to your friend? That girl you used to really like. You once had a woman, a very dear woman, and then one day you lost her. Why isn't she with you?
There are not so many reasons. There is only one. You made yourself too available.
Being inaccessible is the point. I brought up the memory of this person only as a means to show you directly what I couldn't show you with the wind.
You lost her because you were accessible; you were always within her reach and your life was a routine one. It was and it is a routine. It is an unusual routine and that gives you the impression that it is not a routine, but I assure you that it is.
The art of a hunter is to become inaccessible. In the case of that 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 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. 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.
I've told you already that to be inaccessible does not mean to hide or to be secretive. It doesn't mean that you can't deal with people either. A hunter uses his world sparingly and with tenderness, regardless of whether the world might be things, or plants, or animals, or people, or power. A hunter deals intimately with his world and yet he is inaccessible to that same world.
He is inaccessible because he's not squeezing his world out of shape. He taps it lightly, stays for as long as he needs to, and then swiftly moves away leaving hardly a mark.
You worry about eating every day around noontime, and around six in the evening, and around eight in the morning. You worry about eating at those times even if you're not hungry.
It'll be easy for you to realize that a good hunter knows one thing above all--he knows the routines of his prey. That's what makes him a good hunter.
To be a hunter is not just to trap game. 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 is his advantage. He is not at all like the animals he is after, fixed by heavy routines and predictable quirks. He is free, fluid and unpredictable.
As I told you before, in my eyes you behave like your prey. Once in my life someone pointed out the same thing to me, so you're not unique in that. All of us behave like the prey we are after. That, of course, also makes us prey for something or someone else. Now the concern of a hunter, who knows all this, is to stop being a prey himself. Do you see what I mean?
A good hunter changes his ways as often as he needs.
A hunter must not only know about the habits of his prey, he also must know that there are powers on this earth that guide men and animals and everything that is living. Powers that guide our lives and our deaths.
To be a hunter means that one knows a great deal. It means that one can see the world in different ways. In order to be a hunter one must be in perfect balance with everything else, otherwise hunting would become a meaningless chore. For instance, today we took a little snake. I had to apologize to her for cutting her life off so suddenly and definitely; I did knowing that my own life will also be cut off someday in very much the same fashion; suddenly and definitely. So, all in all, we and the snakes are on a par. One of them fed us today.
I am a hunter. I leave very little to chance. Perhaps I should explain to you that I learned to be a hunter. I have not always lived the way I do now. At one point in my life I had to change. Now I'm pointing the direction to you. I'm guiding you. I know what I'm talking about; someone taught me all this. I didn't figure it out for myself.
I'm having a gesture with you. Other people have had a similar gesture; someday you yourself will have the same gesture with others. Let's say that it is my turn. One day I found out that if I wanted to be a hunter worthy of self respect I had to change my way of life. I used to whine and complain a great deal. I had good reason to feel shortchanged. I am an Indian and Indians are treated like dogs. There was nothing I could do to remedy that, so all I was left with was my sorrow. But then my good fortune spared me and someone taught me to hunt. And I realized that the way I lived was not living…so I changed it.
