juan matus

Sun 7.25.21

  If any human being has had major influence in my life it is surely the sorcerer Don Juan Matus.  A pseudonym for a man the anthropologist Carlos Castaneda wrote a number of books about.  Below are some quotes that Carlos collected during his years-long apprenticeship with the sorcerer.  No one knows what Don Juan looked like; Carlos was keen on protecting his privacy.  I imagine he had a strong and wise face like the man pictured above, but I doubt he had long hair as he moved in several worlds and accommodated himself to its customs.  Carlos met him as a Yaqui peasant only later to discover him in a three piece suit, an investor in the Mexican stock exchange.

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 as a blessing or a curse.

The hardest thing in the world is for a warrior to let others be.

 A warrior, or any man for that matter, cannot possibly wish he were somewhere else; a warrior because he lives by challenge, an ordinary man because he doesn't know where his death is going to find him.

 A warrior must focus his attention on the link between himself and his death . . .. He must let each of his acts be his last battle on earth. Only under those conditions will his acts have their rightful power.

Warriors have an ulterior purpose for their acts, which has nothing to do with personal gain. The average man acts only if there is a chance for profit. Warriors act not for profit, but for the spirit.

Impeccability begins with a single act that has to be deliberate, precise and sustained. If that act is repeated long enough, one acquires a sense of unbending intent which can be applied to anything else. If that is accomplished the road is clear. One thing will lead to another until the warrior realizes his full potential.

To discard everything that is unnecessary is the second principle of the art of stalking. A warrior doesn’t complicate things. He aims at being simple. He applies all the concentration he has to decide whether or not to enter into battle, for any battle is a battle for his 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.

Warriors compress time; this is the sixth principle of the art of stalking. 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 warrior acknowledges his pain but he doesn’t indulge in it. The mood of the warrior who enters into the unknown is not one of sadness; on the contrary, he’s joyful because he feels humbled by his great fortune, confident that his spirit is impeccable, and above all, fully aware of his efficiency. A warrior’s joyfulness comes from having accepted his fate, and from having truthfully assessed what lies ahead of him.

It is much easier for warriors to fare well under conditions of maximum stress than to be impeccable under normal circumstances.

What seems natural is to think that a warrior who can hold his own in the face of the unknown can certainly face petty tyrants with impunity. But that’s not necessarily so. What destroyed the superb warriors of ancient times was to rely on that assumption. 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 withstand the pressure of the unknowable.

A warrior is a hunter. He calculates everything. That’s control. 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.

Acts have power. Especially when the warrior acting knows that those acts are his last battle. There is a strange consuming happiness in acting with the full knowledge that whatever he is doing may very well be his last act on earth.

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.

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 to a warrior.

What we need to do to allow magic to get hold of us is to banish doubts from our minds. Once doubts are banished anything is possible.

For a seer, the truth is that all living beings are struggling to die. What stops death is awareness.