Carlos Castaneda

"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."

"I very much believe in the influence of magic and the subconscious on the literary process...I think that magic has to do with the subconscious, much as the ancient sorcerers believed. The identification of man with his material surroundings and his active participation in that world are detailed in the books of Carlos Castañeda, for example, as well as, on a different level, with the books of sociologists like Lévy-Bruhl and Ernest Cassirer, or Lévi-Strauss. The magical identification has a lot to do with literature, this alternate way of viewing the world."

"The relationship between the counterculture and Indian country was complicated from the beginning. Desiring a deeper connection with the Earth and a more meaningful form of spirituality, hippies made pilgrimages to reservations searching for the mystical Indian wisdom they had read about in books like John Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks and Carlos Castaneda's wildly successful but fraudulent series about the Yaqui shaman Don Juan Matus."

"Sich etwas zu versagen ist bei weitem die schlimmste Form des Sichgehenlassens; es zwingt uns zu glauben wir täten große Dinge, während wir in Wirklichkeit auf uns selbst fixiert sind."