Journey To Ixtlan (The Teachings of Don Juan Book 3)

by Carlos Castaneda

“Don’t you see?” he asked dramatically. “You must renew your personal history by telling your parents, your relatives, and your friends everything you do. On the other hand, if you have no personal history, no explanations are needed; nobody is angry or disillusioned with your acts. And above all no one pins you down with their thoughts.”

“It is best to erase all personal history,” he said slowly, as if giving me time to write it down in my clumsy way, “because that would make us free from the encumbering thoughts of other people.”

“You take yourself too seriously,” he said slowly. “You are too damn important in your own mind. That must be changed! You are so goddamn important that you feel justified to be annoyed with everything.

“Self-importance is another thing that must be dropped, just like personal history,”

As long as you feel that you are the most important thing in the world you cannot really appreciate the world around you. You are like a horse with blinders, all you see is yourself apart from everything else.”

“The thing to do when you’re impatient,” he proceeded, “is to turn to your left and ask advice from your death. An immense amount of pettiness is dropped if your death makes a gesture to you, or if you catch a glimpse of it, or if you just have the feeling that your companion is there watching you.”

“Death is the only wise adviser that we have. Whenever you feel, as you always do, that everything is going wrong and you’re about to be annihilated, turn to your death and ask if that is so. Your death will tell you that you’re wrong; that nothing really matters outside its touch. Your death will tell you, ‘I haven’t touched you yet.’ “

“When a man decides to do something he must go all the way,” he said, “but he must take responsibility for what he does. No matter what he does, he must know first why he is doing it, and then he must proceed with his actions without having doubts or remorse about them.”

In a world where death is the hunter, my friend, there is not time for regrets or doubts. There is only time for decisions.”

“To assume the responsibility of one’s decisions means that one is ready to die for them.”

In a world where death is the hunter there are no small or big decisions. There are only decisions that we make in the face of our inevitable death.”

“No one can tell you what you are supposed to feel. It is not heat, or light, or glare, or color. It is something else.”

He said that I was pimping for someone else. That I was not fighting my own battles but the battles of some unknown people. That I did not want to learn about plants or about hunting or about anything. And that his world of precise acts and feelings and decisions was infinitely more effective than the blundering idiocy I called “my life.”

“Being inaccessible is the point,” he declared. “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.”

“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. And 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.”

“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.”