From my Carlos Castaneda compilation, Don Juan speaking: @saylor @JeffBooth @LynAlden @JackMallers  "Your concentration has to be total. To understand is of crucial importance. The new seers placed the highest value on deep, unemotional realizations. For instance, the other day, when you understood about your self-importance, you didn't understand anything really. You had an emotional outburst, that was all. I say this because the next day you were back on your high horse of self-importance as if you never had realized anything.       The same thing happened to the old seers. They were given to emotional reactions. But when the time came for them to understand what they had seen, they couldn't do it. To understand one needs sobriety, not emotionality. Beware of those who weep with realization, for they have realized nothing."   #Castaneda #DonJuan #Shamanism #Consciousness #Mysticism #Mindfulness #Philosophy #bitcoin #zap My compilation: prismagems.com/castaneda

From my Carlos Castaneda compilation, Don Juan speaking: @saylor @JeffBooth @LynAlden @JackMallers  "Seeing is to lay bare the core of everything, to witness the unknown and to glimpse into the unknowable. As such, it doesn't bring one solace. Seers ordinarily go to pieces on finding out that existence is incomprehensibly complex and that our normal awareness maligns it with its limitations."   #Castaneda #DonJuan #Shamanism #Consciousness #Mysticism #Mindfulness #Philosophy #bitcoin #zap My compilation: prismagems.com/castaneda

From my Carlos Castaneda compilation, Don Juan speaking: @saylor @JeffBooth @LynAlden @JackMallers  "The first truth about awareness is that the world out there is not really as we think it is. We think it is a world of objects and it's not.       You say you agree with me because everything could be reduced to being a field of energy. But you are merely intuiting a truth. To reason it out is not to verify it. I am not interested in your agreement or disagreement, but in your attempt to comprehend what is involved in this truth. You cannot witness fields of energy; not as an average man, that is. Now, if you were able to see them, you would be a seer, in which case you would be explaining the truths about awareness.       Conclusions arrived at through reasoning have very little or no influence in altering the course of our lives. Hence, the countless examples of people who have the clearest convictions and yet act diametrically against them time and time again; and have as the only explanation for their behavior the idea that to err is human.       The first truth is that the world is as it looks and yet it isn't. It's not as solid and real as our perception has been led to believe, but it isn't a mirage either. The world is not an illusion, as it has been said to be; it's real on the one hand, and unreal on the other. Pay close attention to this, for it must be understood, not just accepted. We perceive. This is a hard fact. But what we perceive is not a fact of the same kind, because we learn what to perceive.       Something out there is affecting our senses. This is the part that is real. The unreal part is what our senses tell us is there. Take a mountain, for instance. Our senses tell us that it is an object. It has size, color, form. We even have categories of mountains, and they are downright accurate. Nothing wrong with that; the flaw is simply that it has never occurred to us that our senses play only a superficial role. Our senses perceive the way they do because a specific feature of our awareness forces them to do so.       I've used the term "the world" to mean everything that surrounds us. I have a better term, of course, but it would be quite incomprehensible to you. Seers say that we think there is a world of objects out there only because of our awareness. But what's really out there are the Indescribable Force's emanations, fluid, forever in motion, and yet unchanged, eternal."   #Castaneda #DonJuan #Shamanism #Consciousness #Mysticism #Mindfulness #Philosophy #bitcoin #zap My compilation: prismagems.com/castaneda

From my Carlos Castaneda compilation, Don Juan speaking: @saylor @JeffBooth @LynAlden  "Seers are divided into two categories. Those who are willing to exercise self-restraint and can channel their activities toward pragmatic goals, which would benefit other seers and man in general, and those who don't care about self-restraint or about any pragmatic goals. The latter have failed to resolve the problem of self-importance.       Self-importance is not something simple and naive. On the one hand, it is the core of everything that is good in us, and on the other hand, the core of everything that is rotten. To get rid of the self-importance that is rotten requires a masterpiece of strategy.       In order to follow the path of knowledge one has to be very imaginative. In the path of knowledge nothing is as clear as we'd like it to be. Warriors fight self-importance as a matter of strategy, not principle.       Impeccability is nothing else but the proper use of energy. My statements have no inkling of morality. I've saved energy and that makes me impeccable. To understand this, you have to save enough energy yourself.       Warriors take strategic inventories. They list everything they do. Then they decide which of those things can be changed in order to allow themselves a respite, in terms of expending their energy.       The strategic inventory covers only behavioral patterns that are not essential to our survival and well-being.       In the strategic inventories of warriors, self-importance figures as the activity that consumes the greatest amount of energy, hence, their effort to eradicate it.       One of the first concerns of warriors is to free that energy in order to face the unknown with it. The action of rechanneling that energy is impeccability.       The most effective strategy for rechanneling that energy consists of six elements that interplay with one another. Five of them are called the attributes of warriorship: control, discipline, forbearance, timing, and will. They pertain to the world of the warrior who is fighting to lose self-importance. The sixth element, which is perhaps the most important of all, pertains to the outside world and is called the petty tyrant.       A petty tyrant is a tormentor. Someone who either holds the power of life and death over warriors or simply annoys them to distraction.       Petty tyrants teach us detachment. The ingredients of the new seers' strategy shows how efficient and clever is the device of using a petty tyrant. The strategy not only gets rid of self-importance; it also prepares warriors for the final realization that impeccability is the only thing that counts in the path of knowledge.       Usually, only four attributes are played. The fifth, will, is always saved for an ultimate confrontation, when warriors are facing the firing squad, so to speak.       Will belongs to another sphere, the unknown. The other four belong to the known, exactly where the petty tyrants are lodged. In fact, what turns human beings into petty tyrants is precisely the obsessive manipulation of the known.       The interplay of all the five attributes of warriorship is done only by seers who are also impeccable warriors and have mastery over will. Such an interplay is a supreme maneuver that cannot be performed on the daily human stage.       Four attributes are all that is needed to deal with the worst of petty tyrants, provided, of course, that a petty tyrant has been found. The petty tyrant is the outside element, the one we cannot control and the element that is perhaps the most important of them all. The warrior who stumbles on a petty tyrant is a lucky one. You're fortunate if you come upon one in your path, because if you don't you have to go out and look for one.       If seers can hold their own in facing petty tyrants, they can certainly face the unknown with impunity, and then they can even stand the presence of the unknowable.       Nothing can temper the spirit of a warrior as much as the challenge of dealing with impossible people in positions of power. Only under those conditions can warriors acquire the sobriety and serenity to stand the pressure of the unknowable.       The perfect ingredient for the making of a superb seer is a petty tyrant with unlimited prerogatives. Seers have to go to extremes to find a worthy one. Most of the time they have to be satisfied with very small fry. Then warriors develop a strategy using the four attributes of warriorship: control, discipline, forbearance, and timing.       On the path of knowledge there are four steps. The first step is the decision to become apprentices. After the apprentices change their views about themselves and the world they take the second step and become warriors, which is to say, beings capable of the utmost discipline and control over themselves. The third step, after acquiring forbearance and timing, is to become men of knowledge. When men of knowledge learn to see they have taken the fourth step and have become seers.       Control and discipline refer to an inner state. A warrior is self-oriented, not in a selfish way but in the sense of a total examination of the self.       Forbearance and timing are not quite an inner state. They are in the domain of the man of knowledge.       The idea of using a petty tyrant is not only for perfecting the warrior's spirit, but also for enjoyment and happiness. Even the worst tyrants can bring delight, provided, of course, that one is a warrior.       The mistake average men make in confronting petty tyrants is not to have a strategy to fall back on; the fatal flaw is that average men take themselves too seriously; their actions and feelings, as well as those of the petty tyrants, are all-important. Warriors, on the other hand, not only have a well-thought-out strategy, but are free from self-importance. What restrains their self-importance is that they have understood that reality is an interpretation we make.       Petty tyrants take themselves with deadly seriousness while warriors do not. What usually exhausts us is the wear and tear on our self-importance. Any man who has an iota of pride is ripped apart by being made to feel worthless.       To tune the spirit when someone is trampling on you is called control. Instead of feeling sorry for himself a warrior immediately goes to work mapping the petty tyrant's strong points, his weaknesses, his quirks of behavior.       To gather all this information while they are beating you up is called discipline. A perfect petty tyrant has no redeeming feature.       Forbearance is to wait patiently--no rush, no anxiety--a simple, joyful holding back of what is due.       A warrior knows that he is waiting and what he is waiting for. Right there is the great joy of warriorship.       Timing is the quality that governs the release of all that is held back. Control, discipline, and forbearance are like a dam behind which everything is pooled. Timing is the gate in the dam.       Forbearance means holding back with the spirit something that the warrior knows is rightfully due. It doesn't mean that a warrior goes around plotting to do anybody mischief, or planning to settle past scores. Forbearance is something independent. As long as the warrior has control, discipline, and timing, forbearance assures giving whatever is due to whoever deserves it.       To be defeated by a small-fry petty tyrant is not deadly, but devastating. Warriors who succumb to a small-fry petty tyrant are obliterated by their own sense of failure and unworthiness.       Anyone who joins the petty tyrant is defeated. To act in anger, without control and discipline, to have no forbearance, is to be defeated.       After warriors are defeated they either regroup themselves or they abandon the quest for knowledge and join the ranks of the petty tyrants for life."   #Castaneda #DonJuan #Shamanism #Consciousness #Mysticism #Mindfulness #Philosophy #bitcoin #zap My compilation: prismagems.com/castaneda

From my Carlos Castaneda compilation, Don Juan speaking: @saylor @JeffBooth @LynAlden  "Seers are divided into two categories. Those who are willing to exercise self-restraint and can channel their activities toward pragmatic goals, which would benefit other seers and man in general, and those who don't care about self-restraint or about any pragmatic goals. The latter have failed to resolve the problem of self-importance.       Self-importance is not something simple and naive. On the one hand, it is the core of everything that is good in us, and on the other hand, the core of everything that is rotten. To get rid of the self-importance that is rotten requires a masterpiece of strategy.       In order to follow the path of knowledge one has to be very imaginative. In the path of knowledge nothing is as clear as we'd like it to be. Warriors fight self-importance as a matter of strategy, not principle.       Impeccability is nothing else but the proper use of energy. My statements have no inkling of morality. I've saved energy and that makes me impeccable. To understand this, you have to save enough energy yourself.       Warriors take strategic inventories. They list everything they do. Then they decide which of those things can be changed in order to allow themselves a respite, in terms of expending their energy.       The strategic inventory covers only behavioral patterns that are not essential to our survival and well-being.       In the strategic inventories of warriors, self-importance figures as the activity that consumes the greatest amount of energy, hence, their effort to eradicate it."   #Castaneda #DonJuan #Shamanism #Consciousness #Mysticism #Mindfulness #Philosophy #bitcoin #zap My compilation: prismagems.com/castaneda

From my Carlos Castaneda compilation, Don Juan speaking: @saylor @JeffBooth @LynAlden  "Self-importance is our greatest enemy. Think about it--what weakens us is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of our fellow men. Our self-importance requires that we spend most of our lives offended by someone.       Every effort should be made to eradicate self-importance from the lives of warriors. Without self-importance we are invulnerable."   #Castaneda #DonJuan #Shamanism #Consciousness #Mysticism #Mindfulness #Philosophy #bitcoin #zap My compilation: prismagems.com/castaneda

From my Carlos Castaneda compilation, Don Juan speaking: @saylor @JeffBooth @LynAlden  "Our way of perceiving is a predator's way. There is another mode, the one I am familiarizing you with: the act of perceiving the essence of everything, energy itself, directly.       To perceive the essence of everything will make us understand, classify, and describe the world in entirely new, more exciting, more sophisticated terms. Terms that correspond to sorcery truths, which have no rational foundation and no relation whatsoever to the facts of our daily world but which are self-evident truths for the sorcerers who perceive energy directly and see the essence of everything."   #Castaneda #DonJuan #Shamanism #Consciousness #Mysticism #Mindfulness #Philosophy #bitcoin #zap My compilation: prismagems.com/castaneda

From my Carlos Castaneda compilation, Don Juan speaking: @saylor  "The abstract is the search for freedom, freedom to perceive, without obsessions, all that's humanly possible. Present-day sorcerers seek the abstract because they seek freedom; they have no interest in concrete gains.       After lifelong discipline and training, sorcerers acquire the capacity to perceive the essence of things, a capacity they call seeing.       To perceive the energetic essence of things means that you perceive energy directly. By separating the social part of perception, you'll perceive the essence of everything. Whatever we are perceiving is energy, but since we can't directly perceive energy, we process our perception to fit a mold. This mold is the social part of perception, which you have to separate.       You have to separate it because it deliberately reduces the scope of what can be perceived and makes us believe that the mold into which we fit our perception is all that exists. For man to survive now, his perception must change at its social base.       This social base of perception is the physical certainty that the world is made of concrete objects. I call this a social base because a serious and fierce effort is put out by everybody to guide us to perceive the world the way we do.       Everything is energy. The whole universe is energy. The social base of our perception should be the physical certainty that energy is all there is. A mighty effort should be made to guide us to perceive energy as energy. Then we would have both alternatives at our fingertips."   #Castaneda #DonJuan #Shamanism #Consciousness #Mysticism #Mindfulness #Philosophy #bitcoin #zap My compilation: prismagems.com/castaneda

From my Carlos Castaneda compilation, Don Juan speaking:  " You say you've heard that the masters of Eastern esoteric doctrines demand absolute secrecy about their teachings. Perhaps those masters are just indulging in being masters. I'm not a master, I'm only a warrior. So I really don't know what a master feels like.       It doesn't matter what one reveals or what one keeps to oneself. Everything we do, everything we are, rests on our personal power. If we have enough of it, one word uttered to us might be sufficient to change the course of our lives. But if we don't have enough personal power, the most magnificent piece of wisdom can be revealed to us and that revelation won't make a damn bit of difference.       I'm going to utter perhaps the greatest piece of knowledge anyone can voice. Let me see what you can do with it.       Do you know that at this very moment you are surrounded by eternity? And do you know that you can use that eternity, if you so desire?       There! Eternity is there! All around! Do you know that you can extend yourself forever in any of the directions I have pointed to? Do you know that one moment can be eternity? This is not a riddle; it's a fact, but only if you mount that moment and use it to take the totality of yourself forever in any direction.       You didn't have this knowledge before, now you do. I have revealed it to you, but it doesn't make a bit of difference, because you don't have enough personal power to utilize my revelation. Yet if you did have enough power, my words alone would serve as the means for you to round up the totality of yourself and to get the crucial part of it out of the boundaries in which it is contained.       Your body is the boundary I'm talking about. One can get out of it. We are a feeling, an awareness encased here. We are luminous beings and for a luminous being only personal power matters."   Zap if you find value! Even one sat! That way I'll keep posting in this new world for me of Nostr! Here is a link to the second 45 minutes of my Castaneda compilaton: #Castaneda #DonJuan #Shamanism #Consciousness #Mysticism #Mindfulness #Philosophy #bitcoin #zap My compilation: prismagems.com/castaneda

From my Carlos Castaneda compilation:       The self-confidence of a 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. 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 entails being impeccable in one's actions and feelings.     #Castaneda #DonJuan #Shamanism #Consciousness #Mysticism #Mindfulness #Philosophy #bitcoin #zap My compilation: prismagems.com/castaneda

From my Carlos Castaneda compilation, this is the audio of my reading (thirty some years ago) the first 45 minutes of my compilation :     https://www.prismagems.com/castaneda/donjuan11.mp3                 "To be sensitive is a natural condition of certain people. In the final analysis sensitivity matters very little. What matters is that a warrior be impeccable. What matters to a warrior is arriving at the totality of oneself." #Castaneda #DonJuan #Shamanism #Consciousness #Mysticism #Mindfulness #Philosophy #bitcoin #zap My compilation: prismagems.com/castaneda

From my Carlos Castaneda compilation:                      Our lot as men is to learn and, as I've said, one goes to knowledge as one goes to war; with fear, with respect, aware that one is going to war, and with absolute confidence in oneself. Put your trust in yourself. There's no emptiness in the life of a man of knowledge, everything is filled to the brim and everything is equal. For me there is no victory, or defeat, or emptiness. Everything is filled to the brim and everything is equal and my struggle is worth my while.       In order to become a man of knowledge one must be a warrior. One must strive without giving up, without a complaint, without flinching, until one sees, only to realize then that nothing matters. You're too concerned with liking people or with being liked yourself. A man of knowledge likes, that's all. He likes whatever or whoever he wants, but he uses his controlled folly to be unconcerned about it.       My controlled folly applies only to myself and to the acts I perform while in the company of my fellow men. #Castaneda #DonJuan #Shamanism #Consciousness #Mysticism #Mindfulness #Philosophy #bitcoin #zap My compilation: prismagems.com/castaneda

From my Carlos Castaneda compilation:                 We need to look with our eyes to laugh. When our eyes see, everything is so equal that nothing is funny. My laughter, as well as everything I do is real but it also is controlled folly because it is useless; it changes nothing and yet I still do it.       One must always choose the path with heart in order to be at one's best, perhaps so one can always laugh.       You don't understand me now because of your habit of thinking as you look and thinking as you think. By "thinking" I mean the constant idea that we have of everything in the world. Seeing dispels that habit and until you learn to see you will not really understand what I mean.       Our lot as men is to learn. I have learned to see and I tell you that nothing really matters. A man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, nor by thinking about what he will think when he has finished acting. A man of knowledge chooses a path with heart and follows it; and then he looks and rejoices and laughs; and then he sees and knows. He knows that his life will be over altogether too soon; he knows that he, as well as everybody else, is not going anywhere; he knows, because he sees, that nothing is more important than anything else. In other words, a man of knowledge has no honor, no dignity, no family, no name, no country, but only life to be lived, and under these circumstances his only tie to his fellow men is his controlled folly. Thus a man of knowledge endeavors, and sweats, and puffs, and if one looks at him he is just like any ordinary man, except that the folly of his life is under control. Nothing being more important than anything else, a man of knowledge chooses any act, and acts it out as if it matters to him. His controlled folly makes him say that what he does matters and makes him act as if it did, and yet he knows that it doesn't; so when he fulfills his acts he retreats in peace, and whether his acts were good or bad, or worked or didn't, is in no way part of his concern.       You think about your acts, therefore you have to believe your acts are as important as you think they are, when in reality nothing of what one does is important. Nothing! But then if nothing really matters, as you ask me, how can I go on living? It would be simple to die; that's what you say and believe, because you're thinking about life, just as you're thinking now what seeing would be like. You want me to describe it to you so you can begin to think about it, the way you do with everything else. In the case of seeing, however, thinking is not the issue at all, so I cannot tell you what it is like to see. Now you want me to describe the reasons for my controlled folly and I can only tell you that controlled folly is very much like seeing; it is something you cannot think about. #Castaneda #DonJuan #Shamanism #Consciousness #Mysticism #Mindfulness #Philosophy #bitcoin #zap My compilation: prismagems.com/castaneda

From my Carlos Castaneda compilation:           My acts are sincere but they are only the acts of an actor because everything I do is controlled folly. Everything I do in regard to myself and my fellow men is folly, because nothing matters.       Certain things in your life matter to you because they're important; your acts are certainly important to you, but for me, not a single thing is important any longer, neither my acts nor the acts of any of my fellow men. I go on living though, because I have my will. Because I have tempered my will throughout my life until it's neat and wholesome and now it doesn't matter to me that nothing matters. My will controls the folly of my life.       Once a man learns to see he finds himself alone in the world with nothing but folly. Your acts, as well as the acts of your fellow men in general, appear to be important to you because you have learned to think they are important.       We learn to think about everything, and then we train our eyes to look as we think about the things we look at. We look at ourselves already thinking that we are important. And therefore we've got to feel important! But then when a man learns to see, he realizes that he can no longer think about the things he looks at, and if he cannot think about what he looks at everything becomes unimportant. Everything is equal and therefore unimportant. #Castaneda #DonJuan #Shamanism #Consciousness #Mysticism #Mindfulness #Philosophy #bitcoin #zap My compilation: prismagems.com/castaneda

From my Carlos Castaneda compilation:           You think about yourself too much and that gives you a strange fatigue that makes you shut off the world around you and cling to your arguments.       A light and amenable disposition is needed in order to withstand the impact and the strangeness of the knowledge I am teaching you. Feeling important makes one heavy, clumsy, and vain. To be a man of knowledge one needs to be light and fluid.             One has to reduce to a minimum all that is unnecessary in one's life.             Once you decide something put all your petty fears away. Your decision should vanquish them. I will tell you time and time again, the most effective way to live is as a warrior. 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.       A warrior thinks of his death when things become unclear. The idea of death is the only thing that tempers our spirit.             To be a warrior you have to be crystal clear. #Castaneda #DonJuan #Shamanism #Consciousness #Mysticism #Mindfulness #Philosophy #bitcoin #zap My compilation: prismagems.com/castaneda

From my Carlos Castaneda compilation:     "A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war, wide awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. Going to knowledge or going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and whoever makes it will live to regret his steps.       When a man has fulfilled those four requisites there are no mistakes for which he will have to account; under such conditions his acts lose the blundering quality of a fool's acts. If such a man fails, or suffers a defeat, he will have lost only a battle, and there will be no pitiful regrets over that." #Castaneda #DonJuan #Shamanism #Consciousness #Mysticism #Mindfulness #Philosophy #bitcoin My compilation: prismagems.com/castaneda

And this next is my compilation's version of what I just posted: " For a sorcerer, reality, or the world we all know, is only a description that has been pounded into you from the moment you were born. The reality of our day-to-day life, then, consists of an endless flow of perceptual interpretations which we have learned to make in common. I am teaching you how to see as opposed to merely looking, and stopping the world is the first step to seeing. The sorcerer's description of the world is perceivable. But our insistence on holding on to our standard version of reality renders us almost deaf and blind to it. When you begin this teaching, there is another reality, that is to say, there is a sorcery description of the world, which you do not know. As a sorcerer and a teacher, I am teaching you that description. What I am doing with you consists, therefore, in setting up that unknown reality by unfolding its description, adding increasingly more complex parts as you go along. In order to arrive at seeing one first has to stop the world. Stopping the world is indeed an appropriate rendition of certain states of awareness in which the reality of everyday life is altered because the flow of interpretation, which ordinarily runs uninterruptedly, has been stopped by a set of circumstances alien to that flow. In this case the set of circumstances alien to our normal flow of interpretations is the sorcery description of the world. The precondition for stopping the world is that one has to be convinced; in other words, one has to learn the new description in a total sense, for the purpose of pitting it against the old one, and in that way break the dogmatic certainty, which we all share, that the validity of our perceptions, or our reality of the world, is not to be questioned. After stopping the world the next step is seeing. By that I mean what could be categorized as responding to the perceptual solicitations of a world outside the description we have learned to call reality." #Castaneda #DonJuan #Nagual #ToltecWisdom #Shamanism #Consciousness #Mysticism #Mindfulness #philosophy My compilation: prismagems.com/castaneda

The following is from Carlos Castaneda's introduction at the beginning of Journey to Ixtlan. "All the conversations that don Juan and I have had throughout the apprenticeship were conducted in Spanish, and only because of his thorough command of that language was I capable of obtaining complex explanations of his system of beliefs. I have maintained the practice of referring to that system as sorcery and I have also maintained the practice of referring to don Juan as a sorcerer, because these were categories he himself used. Since I was capable of writing down most of what was said in the beginning of my apprenticeship, and everything that was said in the later phases of it, I gathered voluminous field notes. In order to render those notes readable and still preserve the dramatic unity of don Juan's teachings, I have had to edit them, but what I have deleted is, I believe, immaterial to the points I want to raise. In the case of my work with don Juan I have limited my efforts solely to viewing him as a sorcerer and to acquiring membership in his knowledge. For the purpose of presenting my argument I must first explain the basic premise of sorcery as don Juan presented it to me. He said that for a sorcerer, the world of everyday life is not as real, or out there, as we believe it is. For a sorcerer, reality, or the world we all know, is only a description. For the sake of validating this premise don Juan concentrated the best of his efforts into leading me to a genuine conviction that what I held in mind as the world at hand was merely a description of the world; a description that had been pounded into me from the moment I was born. He pointed out that everyone who comes into contact with a child is a teacher who incessantly describes the world to him, until the moment when the child is capable of perceiving the world as it is described. According to don Juan, we have no memory of that portentous moment, simply because none of us could possibly have had any point of reference to compare it to anything else. From that moment on, however, the child is a member. He or she knows the description of the world; and their membership becomes full-fledged, I suppose, when they are capable of making all the proper perceptual interpretations which, by conforming to that description, validate it. For don Juan, then, the reality of our day-to-day life consists of an endless flow of perceptual interpretations which we, the individuals who share a specific membership, have learned to make in common. The idea that the perceptual interpretations that make up the world have a flow is congruous with the fact that they run uninterruptedly and are rarely, if ever, open to question. In fact, the reality of the world we know is so taken for granted that the basic premise of sorcery, that our reality is merely one of many descriptions, could hardly be taken as a serious proposition. Fortunately, in the case of my apprenticeship, don Juan was not concerned at all with whether or not I could take his proposition seriously, and he proceeded to elucidate his points, in spite of my opposition, my disbelief, and my inability to understand what he was saying. Thus, as a teacher of sorcery, don Juan endeavoured to describe the world to me from the very first time we talked. My difficulty in grasping his concepts and methods stemmed from the fact that the units of his description were alien and incompatible with those of my own. His contention was that he was teaching me how to see as opposed to merely "looking", and that stopping the world was the first step to seeing. For years I had treated the idea of stopping the world as a cryptic metaphor that really did not mean anything. It was only during an informal conversation that took place towards the end of my apprenticeship that I came fully to realize its scope and importance as one of the main propositions of don Juan's knowledge. " #Castaneda #DonJuan #Nagual #ToltecWisdom #Shamanism #Consciousness #Mysticism #Mindfulness #philosophy My compilation: prismagems.com/castaneda

As long as I'm into self aggrandizement here, I'll tell you that I'm the ultimate master of clay on the potter's wheel. Potters tend to be artists and I've never claimed to be such (much to my chagrin)! But NO potter I've ever known has acknowledged my perfect control of the clay on the potter's wheel! Yeah, I can't paint and have little sense for being artistic, but NO ONE on earth that I've seen can reproduce my PERFECT wheel thrown 'S' curve pottery forms. You think that sounds too bold? Then you find them and tell me about them! prismagems.com/pottery

Seeking enlightenment by turning off your thinking is the way! Remember Plato's famous words (I think it was Plato) "If at first you don't frick-a-freed, fry fry a hen." Yeah! right up there with the American philosopher, Tom McAn, who said "if the shoe fits,wear it."