It isn’t the biggest spiral in my life, that award has to go to the promise of the past. But it is a good second one (so far). A puzzle that occasional haunts my thoughts is, where did this journey begin? Perhaps it did start with that promise. Another starting point might be the times that Chris and I spent together discussing the works of Carlos Castaneda more than 20 years ago.
Be a paragon of patience and consistency by fighting for impeccability. Transform yourself daily, restraining yourself with the most excruciating effort. It is a rare opportunity for a warrior to be given a genuine chance to be impeccable in spite of his basic feelings. The act of giving freely and impeccably rejuvenates you and renews your wonder.
Having had an experience very recently that reminded me of that author and his teachings from Don Juan, I found myself immersed in his work once again. In this post, I just want to pull out contextual lines from his work that seem to have bearing on my journey. More as a reminder for me than anything else. The notes are taken from this website by the way.
Notes from Don Juan
When a sorcerer interprets an omen he knows its exact meaning without having any notion of how he knows it. This is one of the bewildering effects of the connecting link with intent. Sorcerers have a sense of knowing things directly. How sure they are depends on the strength and clarity of their connecting link.
The feeling everyone knows as “intuition” is the activation of our link with intent. And since sorcerers deliberately pursue the understanding and strengthening of that link, it could be said the they intuit everything unerringly and accurately. Reading omens is commonplace for sorcerers–mistakes happen only when personal feelings intervene and cloud the sorcerers’ connecting link with intent. Otherwise their direct knowledge is totally accurate and functional.
Intent creates edifices before us and invites us to enter them. This is the way sorcerers understand what is happening around them.
I want you to understand the underlying order of what I teach you. It means two things: both the edifice that intent manufactures in the blink of an eye and places in front of us to enter, and the signs it gives us so we won’t get lost once we are inside.
The crux of our difficulty in going back to the abstract is our refusal to accept that we can know without words or even without thoughts. Knowledge and language are separate.
Think about the proposition that knowledge might be independent of language, without bothering to understand it.
Volunteers are not welcome in the sorcerers’ world, because they already have a purpose of their own, which makes it particularly hard for them to relinquish their individuality.If the sorcerers’ world demands ideas and actions contrary to the volunteers’ purpose, volunteers simply refuse to change.
Stalking is an art applicable to everything. There are four steps to learning it: ruthlessness, cunning, patience, and sweetness. Ruthlessness should not be harshness, cunning should not be cruelty, patience should not be negligence, and sweetness should not be foolishness. These four steps have to be practiced and perfected until they are so smooth they are unnoticeable.
Sorcerers’ behavior is always impeccable. Sorcerers, though, have an ulterior purpose for their acts, which has nothing to do with personal gain. The fact that they enjoy their acts does not count as gain. Rather, it is a condition of their character. The average man acts only if there is the chance for profit. Warriors say they act not for profit but for the spirit. We have no thought of personal gain. Our acts are dictated by impeccability–we can’t be angry or disillusioned.
The real challenge for those sorcerer seers, was finding a system of behavior that was neither petty nor capricious, but that combined the morality and the sense of beauty which differentiates sorcerer seers from plain witches.
Anyone who succeeds in moving his assemblage point to a new position is a sorcerer. And from that new position, he can do all kinds of good and bad things to his fellow men. Being a sorcerer, therefore, can be like being a cobbler or a baker. The quest of sorcerer seers is to go beyond that stand. And to do that, they need morality and beauty.
For sorcerers, stalking is the foundation on which everything else they do is built. It is the art of controlled folly.
Sorcerers believe that until the very moment of the spirit’s descent, any of us could walk away from the spirit; but not afterwards.
The nature of ruthlessness is that it is the opposite of self-pity. All sorcerers are ruthless.
More later!