Carlos Castaneda’s The Eagle's Gift

Don Juan’s Key Teachings from Castaneda’s The Eagle's Gift

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      Our total being consists of two perceivable segments. The first is the familiar physical body, which all of us can perceive; the second is the luminous body, which is a cocoon that only seers can perceive, a cocoon that gives us the appearance of giant luminous eggs.
      One of the most important goals of sorcery is to reach the luminous cocoon; a goal which is fulfilled through the sophisticated use of dreaming and through a rigorous, systematic exertion called not-doing. I've defined not-doing as an unfamiliar act which engages our total being by forcing it to become conscious of its luminous segment.
      To explain these concepts I've made a three-part, uneven division of our consciousness. The smallest, the first attention, or the consciousness that every normal person has developed in order to deal with the daily world, encompasses the awareness of the physical body. Another larger portion, the second attention, is the awareness we need in order to perceive our luminous cocoon and to act as luminous beings. The second attention is brought forth through deliberate training or by an accidental trauma, and it encompasses the awareness of the luminous body. The last portion, which is the largest, is the third attention. It's an immeasurable consciousness which engages undefinable aspects of the awareness of the physical and the luminous bodies. The battlefield of warriors is the second attention, which is something like a training ground for reaching the third attention.
      * * *
      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.
      The dreaming body, sometimes called the "double" or the "Other," because it is a perfect replica of the dreamer's body, is inherently the energy of a luminous being, a whitish, phantomlike emanation, which is projected by the fixation of the second attention into a three-dimensional image of the body.
      The dreaming body is as real as anything we deal with in the world. The second attention is unavoidably drawn to focus on our total being as a field of energy, and transforms that energy into anything suitable. The easiest thing is, of course, the image of the physical body, with which we are already thoroughly familiar from our daily lives and the use of our first attention. What channels the energy of our total being to produce anything that might be within the boundaries of possibility is known as will.
      At the level of luminous beings the range is so broad that it is futile to try to establish limits--thus, the energy of a luminous being can be transformed through will into anything.
      We are not merely whatever our common sense requires us to believe we are. We are in actuality luminous beings, capable of becoming aware of our luminosity. As luminous beings aware of our luminosity, we are capable of unravelling different facets of our awareness, or our attention. That unravelling could be brought about by a deliberate effort, as we are doing ourselves, or accidentally, through a bodily trauma.
      The old sorcerers deliberately placed different facets of their attention on material objects. By unravelling another facet of our attention we might become receptors for the projections of ancient sorcerers' second attention. Those sorcerers were impeccable practitioners with no limit to what they could accomplish with the fixation of their second attention.
     
      Be fluid, at ease in whatever situation you find yourself. Your challenge is to deal with people with ease regardless of what they do to you. Remember what I have said, that 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 to a warrior.
      * * *
      You must let go of your desire to cling. The very same thing happened to me. I held on to things, such as the food I liked, the mountains where I lived, the people I used to enjoy talking to. But most of all I clung to the desire to be liked. Those things are our barriers to losing our human form. Our attention is trained to focus doggedly. That is the way we maintain the world. Now is the time to let go of all that. In order to lose your human form you should let go of all that ballast.
      * * *
      Dissipating a mood through overanalyzing it wastes our power.
     
      If you have the same vision in dreaming three times, pay extraordinary attention to it. When a dreamer dreams that he sees himself asleep he must avoid sudden jolts or surprises, and take everything with a grain of salt. The dreamer has to get involved in dispassionate experimentations. Rather than examining his sleeping body, the dreamer walks out of the room.
      In dreaming what matters is volition, the corporeality of the body has no significance. It is simply a memory that slows down the dreamer. If you do not stare at things but only glance at them, just as you do in the daily world, you can arrange your perception. That is, by taking your dreaming for granted, you then can use the perceptual biases of your everyday life.
      * * *
      Wait before revealing a finding. Wait for the most appropriate time to let go of something that you hold.
      * * *
      Losing the human form brings the freedom to remember your self. Losing the human form is like a spiral. It gives you the freedom to remember and this in turn makes you even freer.
     
      A warrior knows that he is waiting and knows also what he is waiting for, and while he waits he feasts his eyes on the world. The ultimate accomplishment of a warrior is joy.
     
      Accept your fate in humbleness. The course of a warrior's destiny is unalterable. The challenge is how far he can go within those rigid bounds, how impeccable he can be within those rigid bounds. If there are obstacles in his path, the warrior strives impeccably to overcome them. If he finds unbearable hardship and pain on his path, he weeps, but all his tears put together could not move the line of his destiny the breadth of one hair. Fulfill your fate as a warrior not as a petty person.
     
      Detachment does not automatically mean wisdom, but it is nonetheless, an advantage because it allows the warrior to pause momentarily to reassess situations, to reconsider positions. In order to use that extra moment consistently and correctly, however, a warrior has to struggle unyieldingly for a lifetime.
      A warrior is someone who seeks freedom. Sadness is not freedom. We must snap out of it. Having a sense of detachment entails having a moment's pause to reassess situations.
      Formlessness is, if anything, a detriment to sobriety and levelheadedness. An aspect of being detached, the capacity to become immersed in whatever one is doing, naturally extends to everything one does, including being inconsistent, and outright petty. The advantage of being formless is that it allows us a moment's pause, providing that we have the self-discipline and courage to utilize it.

      We unwittingly focus on fear and distrust, as if those were the only possible options available to us, while all along we have the alternative of deliberately centering our attention on the opposite, the mystery, the wonder of what is happening to us.
      * * *
      There are no steps to anything a warrior does. There is only personal power.
      * * *
      In the final analysis every dreamer is different. There are, however, general states. Restful vigil is the preliminary state, a state in which the senses become dormant and yet one is aware.
      The second state is dynamic vigil. In this state one is left looking at a scene, a tableau of sorts, which is static. One sees a three-dimensional picture, a frozen bit of something--a landscape, a street, a house, a person, a face, anything.
      The third state is passive witnessing. In it the dreamer is no longer viewing a frozen bit of the world but is observing, eyewitnessing, an event as it occurs. It is as if the primacy of the visual and auditory senses makes this state of dreaming mainly an affair of the eyes and ears.
      The fourth state is the one in which you are drawn to act. In it one is compelled to enterprise, to take steps, to make the most of one's time. This state is called dynamic initiative.
      * * *
      You have to look after someone and take care of them in a most selfish fashion--that is, as if they are your own self. Selfishness can be put to a grand use. To harness it is not impossible. The surest way to harness selfishness is through the daily activities of our lives.
      You are efficient in whatever you do because you have no one to bug the devil out of you. It is no challenge to you to soar like an arrow by yourself. If you are given the task of taking care of someone else, however, your independent effectiveness will go to pieces, and in order to survive you will have to extend your selfish concern for yourself to include the one under your care. You must honor them regardless of what they do to you, and you must train your body, through your interaction with them, to feel at ease in the face of the most trying situations.
      It is much easier to fare well under conditions of maximum stress than to be impeccable under normal circumstances, such as in the interplay with another under your care.
      Further, then, you cannot under any circumstances get angry with them, because they are indeed your benefactor; only through them will you be capable of harnessing your selfishness.
      You take care of them as a means of training yourself for the hardship of interaction with people. It is imperative that you internalize a mood of ease in the face of difficult social situations.
      * * *
      Dreaming begins as a unique state of awareness arrived at by focusing the residue of consciousness, which one still has when asleep, on the elements, or the features, of one's dreams.
      The residue of consciousness, called the second attention, is brought into action, or is harnessed, through exercises of not-doing. The essential aid to dreaming is a state of mental quietness, called "stopping the internal dialogue," or the "not-doing of talking to oneself." To teach you how to master it, I've made you walk for miles with your eyes held fixed and out of focus at a level just above the horizon so as to emphasize the peripheral view. This method is effective on two counts. It allows you to stop your internal dialogue, and it trains your attention. By forcing you to concentrate on the peripheral view, I reinforced your capacity to concentrate for long periods of time on one single activity.
      The best way to enter into dreaming is to concentrate on the area just at the tip of the sternum, at the top of the belly. The attention needed for dreaming stems from that area. The energy needed in order to move and to seek in dreaming stems from the area an inch or two below the belly button. That energy is the will, or the power to select, to assemble. In a woman both the attention and the energy for dreaming originate from the womb.
      Anything may suffice as a not-doing to help dreaming, providing that it forces the attention to remain fixed. The attention one needs in the beginning of dreaming has to be forcibly made to stay on any given item in a dream. Only through immobilizing our attention can one turn an ordinary dream into dreaming.
      In dreaming one has to use the same mechanisms of attention as in everyday life. Our first attention has been taught to focus on the items of the world with great force in order to turn the amorphous and chaotic realm of perception into the orderly world of awareness.
      The second attention serves the function of a beckoner, a caller of chances. The more it is exercised, the greater the possibility of getting the desired result. But that is also the function of attention in general, a function so taken for granted in our daily life that it has become unnoticeable; if we encounter a fortuitous occurrence we talk about it in terms of accident or coincidence, rather than in terms of our attention having beckoned the event.
      * * *
      The only thing that really counts in making the shift into the dreaming body is anchoring the second attention. Attention is what makes the world. What is important is to store attention in dreaming.
      The first attention, the attention that makes the world, can never be completely overcome; it can only be turned off for a moment and replaced with the second attention, providing that the body had stored enough of it. Dreaming is naturally a way of storing the second attention. In order to shift into your dreaming body when awake you have to practice dreaming until it comes out your ears.
      I have given you three tasks to train your second attention. First, to find your hands in dreaming. Next, to choose a locale, focus your attention on it, and then do daytime dreaming and find out if you can really go there. I've suggested that you place someone you know at the site in order to do two things: first to check subtle changes that might indicate that you were there in dreaming, and second, to isolate unobtrusive detail, which would be precisely what your second attention would zero in on.
      The most serious problem the dreamer has in this respect is the unbending fixation of the second attention on detail that would be thoroughly undetected by the attention of everyday life, creating in this manner a nearly insurmountable obstacle to validation. What one seeks in dreaming is not what one would pay attention to in everyday life.
      One strives to immobilize the second attention only in the learning period. After that, one has to fight the almost invincible pull of the second attention and give only cursory glances at everything. In dreaming one has to be satisfied with the briefest possible views of everything. As soon as one focuses on anything, one loses control.
      The last generalized task I gave you to train your second attention was to get out of your body. This task begins with a dream in which you find yourself looking at yourself asleep.
      To elucidate the control of the second attention, I've presented the idea of will. Will can be described as the maximum control of the luminosity of the body as a field of energy; or it can be described as a level of proficiency, as a state of being that comes abruptly into the daily life of a warrior at any given time. It is experienced as a force that radiates out of the middle part of the body following a moment of the most absolute silence, or a moment of sheer terror, or profound sadness. Those things afford the warrior the concentration needed to use the luminosity of the body and turn it into silence.
      For a human being sadness is as powerful as terror. Both can bring the moment of silence. Or the silence comes of itself, because the warrior tries for it throughout his life. It is a moment of blackness, a moment still more silent than the moment of shutting off the internal dialogue. That blackness, that silence, gives rise to the intent to direct the second attention, to command it, to make it do things. This is why it's called will. The intent and the effect are will; they are tied together.
      We don't feel our will because we think that it should be something we know for sure that we are doing or feeling, like getting angry, for instance. Will is very quiet, unnoticeable. Will belongs to the other self. We are in our other selves when we do dreaming.
      Will is such a complete control of the second attention that it is called the other self.
      * * *
      Intent is present everywhere. Intent is what makes the world. People, and all other living creatures for that matter, are the slaves of intent. We are in its clutches. It makes us do whatever it wants. It makes us act in the world. It even makes us die. When we become warriors, though, intent becomes our friend. It lets us be free for a moment; at times it even comes to us, as if it had been waiting around for us.
     
      Again, human beings are divided in two. The right side, which is called the tonal, encompasses everything the intellect can conceive of. The left side, called the nagual, is a realm of indescribable features: a realm impossible to contain in words. The left side is perhaps comprehended, if comprehension is what takes place, with the total body; thus its resistance to conceptualization. All the faculties, possibilities, and accomplishments of sorcery, from the simplest to the most astounding, are in the human body itself.
      * * *
      The power that governs the destiny of all living beings is called the Eagle or the Indescribable Force. Providing the luminous shell that comprises one's humanness has been broken, it is possible to find in the Indescribable Force the faint reflection of man. The Indescribable Force's irrevocable dictums can then be apprehended by seers, properly interpreted by them, and accumulated in the form of a governing body. Thus the rule was formed.
      The rule is not a tale. The rule states that every living thing has been granted the power, if it so desires, to seek an opening to freedom and to go through it.
      To cross over to freedom does not mean eternal life as eternity is commonly understood--that is, as living forever. What the rule states is that one can keep the awareness which is ordinarily relinquished at the moment of dying. I cannot explain what it means to keep that awareness. My benefactor told me that at the moment of crossing, one enters into the third attention, and the body in its entirety is kindled with knowledge. Every cell at once becomes aware of itself, and also aware of the totality of the body.

      This kind of awareness is meaningless to our compartmentalized minds. Therefore the crux of the warrior's struggle is not so much to realize that the crossing over, stated in the rule means crossing to the third attention, but rather to conceive that there exists such an awareness at all.
      There is a common error, that of overestimating the left-side awareness, of becoming dazzled by its clarity and power. To be in the left-side awareness does not mean that one is immediately liberated from one's folly--it only means an extended capacity for perceiving, and above all, a greater ability to forget.
     
      One has to be utterly humble and carry nothing to defend, not even one's person. One's person should be protected, but not defended.
      It takes a very long time to clean out the garbage that a luminous being picks up in the world. We are so stiff and feel so self-important.
      * * *
      Stalkers deal with people, with the world of ordinary affairs. Stalkers are the practitioners of controlled folly as the dreamers are the practitioners of dreaming. Controlled folly is the basis for stalking, as dreams are the basis for dreaming. Generally speaking, a warrior's greatest accomplishment in the second attention is dreaming, and in the first attention his greatest accomplishment is stalking.
      In the absence of self-importance, a warrior's only way of dealing with the social milieu is in terms of controlled folly.
      Deal with the world exclusively in terms of controlled folly.
      * * *
      A warrior never loses his mind under any circumstances.
      * * *
      A warrior is never under siege. To be under siege implies that one has personal possessions that could be blockaded. A warrior has nothing in the world except his impeccability, and impeccability cannot be threatened. Nonetheless, in a battle for one's life a warrior should strategically use every means available.
      * * *
      We must live our lives impeccably for no other reason than to be impeccable.
      * * *
      Although human beings appear to a seer as luminous eggs, the egglike shape is an external cocoon, a shell of luminosity that houses a most intriguing, haunting, mesmeric core made up of concentric circles of yellowish luminosity, the color of a candle's flame.
      Losing the human form is the only means of breaking that shell, the only means of liberating that haunting luminous core. To break the shell means remembering the other self, and arriving at the totality of oneself.
      * * *
      An unconquerable pessimism overtakes a warrior at a certain point on his path. A sense of defeat, or perhaps more accurately, a sense of unworthiness, comes upon him almost unawares. A warrior's resolution to live impeccably in spite of everything cannot be approached as a strategy to ensure success.
      The warrior enters into a state of unsurpassed humility; when the true poverty of his human resources becomes undeniable, the warrior has no recourse but to step back and lower his head.
      It is monstrous to think that the world is understandable or that we ourselves are understandable. What we are perceiving is an enigma, a mystery that one can only accept in humbleness and awe. The two sides of a human being are totally separate and it takes great discipline and determination to break that seal and go from one side to the other. We have been put together by forces incomprehensible to our reason. The only thing we do not have is time. Every minute might be our last; therefore, it has to be lived with the spirit.
     
      Perception suffers a profound jolt when we are placed in states of quietude in darkness. Our hearing takes the lead then, and the signals from all the living and existing entities around us can be detected--not with our hearing only, but with a combination of the auditory and visual senses, in that order. In darkness the eyes become subsidiary to the ears.
      * * *
      Power spots are actual holes in a sort of canopy that prevents the world from losing its shape. A power spot can be utilized as long as one has gathered enough strength in the second attention. The key to withstanding the Indescribable Force's presence is the potency of one's intent. Without intent there is nothing.
     
      Be impeccable and practice meticulously whatever you learn, and above all, be careful and deliberate in your actions so as not to exhaust your life force in vain.
      The prerequisite for entrance into any of the three stages of attention is the possession of life force, because without it warriors cannot have direction and purpose. Upon dying our awareness also enters into the third attention; but only for an instant, as a purging action, just before the Indescribable Force devours it.
      * * *
      Stalkers become lighthearted and jovial and enjoy their lives.
      * * *
      The second attention belongs to the luminous body, as the first attention belongs to the physical body.
      Dreaming is in fact a rational state. In dreaming, the right side, the rational awareness, is wrapped up inside the left side awareness in order to give the dreamer a sense of sobriety and rationality; but the influence of rationality has to be minimal and used only as an inhibiting mechanism to protect the dreamer from excesses and bizarre undertakings.
      Our first attention is hooked to the emanations of the earth, while our second attention is hooked to the emanations of the universe. A dreamer by definition is outside the boundaries of the concerns of everyday life.
      The dreamers ' power to focus on their second attention makes them into living slingshots. The stronger and the more impeccable the dreamers are, the farther they can project their second attention into the unknown and the longer their dreaming projection will last.

      Dreaming is no illusion. It's a step toward the control of the second attention; in other words, you are learning the perceptual bias of that other realm.
     
      There is no way on earth that we can order anyone or ourselves to rally knowledge. It is rather a slow affair; the body, at the right time and under the proper circumstances of impeccability, rallies its knowledge without the intervention of desire.
      * * *
      The first principle of the art of stalking is that warriors choose their battleground. A warrior never goes into battle without knowing what the surroundings are.
      To discard everything that is unnecessary is the second principle of the art of stalking.
      Warriors don't have the world to cushion them, so they must have the rule. Yet the rule of stalkers applies to everyone.
      The first precept of the rule is that everything that surrounds us is an unfathomable mystery.
      The second precept of the rule is that we must try to unravel these mysteries, but without ever hoping to accomplish this.
      The third, 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.
      * * *
      Apply all the concentration you have to decide whether or not to enter into battle, for any battle is a battle for one's life. This is the third principle of the art of stalking. A warrior must be willing and ready to make his last stand here and now. But not in a helter-skelter way.
      The fourth principle of the art of stalking is; relax, abandon yourself, fear nothing. Only then will the powers that guide us open the road and aid us. Only then.
      The fifth principle is; when faced with odds that cannot be dealt with, warriors retreat for a moment. They let their minds meander. They occupy their time with something else. Anything would do.
      The sixth principle: warriors compress time; even an instant counts. In a battle for your life, a second is an eternity; an eternity that may decide the outcome. Warriors aim at succeeding, therefore they compress time. Warriors don't waste an instant.
      * * *
      A recapitulation is the forte of stalkers as the dreaming body is the forte of dreamers. It consists of recollecting one's life down to the most insignificant detail.
      The first stage is a brief recounting of all the incidents in our lives that in an obvious manner stand out for examination.
      The second stage is a more detailed recollection, which starts systematically at a point that could be the moment prior to the stalker sitting, and theoretically could extend to the moment of birth.


The reading of my compilation of Carlos Castaneda's books continues from here on this MP3
MP3 #6

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      A perfect recapitulation can change a warrior as much, if not more, than the total control of the dreaming body. In this respect, dreaming and stalking lead to the same end, the entering into the third attention. It is important for a warrior, however, to know and practice both.
      The key element in recapitulating is breathing. Recollecting is easy if one can reduce the area of stimulation around the body. Theoretically, stalkers have to remember every feeling that they have had in their lives, and this process begins with a breath.
      Write down a list of the events to be relived. The procedure starts with an initial breath. Stalkers begin with their chin on the right shoulder and slowly inhale as they move their head over a hundred and eighty degree arc. The breath terminates on the left shoulder. Once the inhalation ends, the head goes back to a relaxed position. They exhale looking straight ahead.
      The stalker then takes the event at the top of the list and remains with it until all the feelings expended in it have been recounted. As stalkers remember the feelings they invested in whatever it is that they are remembering, they inhale slowly, moving their heads from the right shoulder to the left. The function of this breathing is to restore energy. The luminous body is constantly creating cobweblike filaments, which are projected out of the luminous mass, propelled by emotions of any sort. Therefore, every situation of interaction, or every situation where feelings are involved, is potentially draining to the luminous body. By breathing from right to left while remembering a feeling, stalkers, through the magic of breathing, pick up the filaments they left behind. The next immediate breath is from left to right and it is an exhalation. With it stalkers eject filaments left in them by other luminous bodies involved in the event being recollected.
      These are the mandatory preliminaries of stalking. Unless stalkers have gone through the preliminaries in order to retrieve the filaments they have left in the world, and particularly in order to reject those that others have left in them, there is no possibility of handling controlled folly, because those foreign filaments are the basis of one's limitless capacity for self-importance.
      In order to practice controlled folly, since it is not a way to fool or chastise people or feel superior to them, one has to be capable of laughing at oneself. One of the results of a detailed recapitulation is genuine laughter upon coming face to face with the boring repetition of one's self-esteem, which is at the core of all human interactions.
      The rule defines stalking and dreaming as arts; therefore they are something that one performs. The life-giving nature of breath is what also gives it its cleansing capacity. It is this capacity that makes a recapitulation into a practical matter.
      A profound recapitulation is the most expedient means to lose the human form. Thus it is easier for stalkers, after recapitulating their lives, to make use of all the not-doings of the self, such as erasing personal history, losing self-importance, breaking routines and so forth.
      * * *
      A stalker never pushes himself to the front. In order to apply this seventh principle of the art of stalking, one has to apply the other six. Only a master stalker can be a master of controlled folly. Controlled folly doesn't mean to con people. It means, as my benefactor explained it, that warriors apply the seven basic principles of the art of stalking to whatever they do, from the most trivial acts to life and death situations.
      Applying these principles brings about three results. The first is that stalkers learn never to take themselves seriously; they learn to laugh at themselves. If they're not afraid of being a fool, they can fool anyone. The second is that stalkers learn to have endless patience. Stalkers are never in a hurry; they never fret. And the third is that stalkers learn to have an endless capacity to improvise.
      * * *
      Stalkers face the oncoming time. Normally we face time as it recedes from us. Only stalkers can change that and face time as it advances on them. They see time as something concrete, yet incomprehensible.
      * * *
      We're warriors, and warriors have only one thing in mind--their freedom. To die and be consumed by the Indescribable Force is no challenge. On the other hand, to sneak around the Indescribable Force and be free is the ultimate audacity.
     
      What's needed to enter fully into the other self is to abandon the intent of our first attention.
      * * *
      When I talk about time, I am not referring to something which is measured by the movement of a clock. Time is the essence of attention; the Indescribable Force's emanations are made out of time; and properly, when one enters into any aspect of the other self, one is becoming acquainted with time.
      The wheel of time is like a state of heightened awareness which is part of the other self, as the left side awareness is part of the self of everyday life. It can physically be described as a tunnel of infinite length and width; a tunnel with reflective furrows. Every furrow is infinite, and there are infinite numbers of them. Living creatures are compulsorily made, by the force of life, to gaze into one furrow. To gaze into it means to be trapped by it, to live that furrow.

      Will belongs to the wheel of time. It is something like the runner of a vine, or an intangible tentacle which all of us possess. A warrior's final aim is to learn to focus it on the wheel of time in order to make it turn. Warriors who have succeeded in turning the wheel of time can gaze into any furrow and draw from it whatever they desire. To be trapped compulsorily in one furrow of time entails seeing the images of that furrow only as they recede. To be free from the spellbinding force of those grooves means that one can look in either direction, as images recede or as they approach.
      * * *
      Warriors have no life of their own. From the moment they understand the nature of awareness, they cease to be persons and the human condition is no longer part of their view. You have your duty as a warrior and nothing else is important. So do your best.
      The challenge of a warrior is to arrive at a very subtle balance of positive and negative forces. This challenge does not mean that a warrior should strive to have everything under control, but that a warrior should strive to meet any conceivable situation, the expected and the unexpected, with equal efficiency. To be perfect under perfect circumstances is to be a paper warrior.
      I will give you a formula, an incantation for times when your task is greater than your strength;
     
      I am already given to the power that rules my fate.
      And I cling to nothing, so I will have nothing to defend.
      I have no thoughts, so I will see.
      I fear nothing, so I will remember myself.
      Detached and at ease,
      I will dart past the Eagle to be free.
     
      It takes an enormity of strength to let go of the intent of everyday life. One must place one's attention on the luminous shell. A warrior must evoke intent. The glance is the secret. The eyes beckon intent.
      The reason why seeing seems to be visual is because we need the eyes to focus on intent. Our eyes can catch another aspect of intent and that's called seeing. The true function of the eyes is to be the catchers of intent.
      * * *
      You should trust yourself. On the left side there are no tears. A warrior can no longer weep. The only expression of anguish is a shiver that comes from the very depths of the universe. It is as if one of the Indescribable Force's emanations is anguish. The warrior's shiver is infinite.
      * * *
      The act of remembering the other self is thoroughly incomprehensible. In actuality it is the act of remembering oneself, which does not stop at recollecting the interaction warriors perform in their left side awareness, but goes on to recollect every memory that the luminous body has stored from the moment of birth.
      This act of remembering, although it seems to be only associated with warriors, is something that is within the realm of every human being; every one of us can go directly to the memories of our luminosity with unfathomable results.

Introduction


1. The Teachings of don Juan


2. A Separate Reality


3. Journey to Ixtlan


4. Tales Of Power


5. The Second Ring of Powerr


6. The Eagle's Gift


7. The Fire From Within


8. The Power of Silence


9. The Art of Dreaming


12. The Active Side of Infinity

13. Appendix A thru E

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