Carlos Castaneda’s The Second Ring of Power
Don Juan’s Key Teachings from Castaneda’s 5th book
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January 22nd, 2024
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Anything is possible if one wants it with unbending
intent and you don't let your thoughts interfere.
Power comes only after we accept our fate without recriminations.
* * *
When one has nothing to lose, one becomes courageous. We are timid
only when there is something we can still cling to.
A warrior doesn't seek anything for his solace, nor can he possibly
leave anything to chance. A warrior actually affects the outcome of
events by the force of his awareness and his unbending
intent.
The reading of my compilation of Carlos Castaneda's books continues from here on this MP3
MP3 #5
You must lose your human form. You don't yet know about the human
mold and the human form. The human form is a force and the human mold
is ... well ... a mold.
Everything has a particular mold. Plants have molds, animals have
molds, worms have molds. Sorcerers have the avenue of their
dreaming to lead them to the mold. The mold of men is
definitely an entity, an entity which can be seen by some of us at
certain times when we are imbued with power, and by all of us for
sure at the moment of our death. The mold is the source, the origin
of man, since, without the mold to group together the force of life,
there is no way for that force to assemble itself into the shape of
man.
The human form is a sticky force that makes us the people we are. The
human form has no form. It's anything, but in spite of not having
form, it possesses us during our lives and doesn't leave us until we
die.
A warrior must drop the human form in order to change, to really
change. Otherwise there is only talk about change. One cannot change
one iota as long as one holds on to the human form. A warrior knows
that he cannot change, and yet he makes it his business to try to
change, even though he knows that he won't be able to. That's the
only advantage a warrior has over the average man. The warrior is
never disappointed when he fails to change.
The only thing that makes you think you are yourself is the form.
Once it leaves, you are nothing. A warrior without form begins to see
an eye. The formless warrior uses that eye to start
dreaming. If you don't have a form, you don't have to
go to sleep to do dreaming. The eye in front of you
pulls you every time you want to go.
Everything has to be sifted through our human form. When we have no
form, then nothing has form and yet everything is present.
* * *
The art of the dreamer is to hold the image of his
dream. Our art as ordinary people is that we know how
to hold the image of what we are looking at. We just do it; that is,
our bodies do it. In dreaming we have to do the same
thing, except that in dreaming we have to learn how to
do it. We have to struggle not to look but merely to glance and yet
hold the image.
Everything we say is a reflection of the world of people. You talk
and act the way you do because you're clinging to the human form.
Everything in a warrior's world depends on personal power and
personal power depends on impeccability. Part of being impeccable for
a warrior is never to hinder others with his thoughts.
You indulge in not trying to change. That's as wrong as feeling
disappointed with our failures. Warriors, must be impeccable in their
effort to change, in order to scare the human form and shake it away.
After years of impeccability a moment will come when the form cannot
stand it any longer and it leaves.
* * *
The art of a sorcerer is to be inconspicuous even in the midst of
people. Concentrate totally on trying not to be obvious. To learn to
become unnoticeable in the middle of all this is to know the art of
stalking.
* * *
Be calm and self-controlled and give others your undivided
attention.
* * *
The whole issue of sorcery is perception. A warrior must notice
everything, that's his trick, and there lies his advantage. * * *
It is an honor and a pleasure to be a warrior, and it is the
warrior's fortune to do what he has to do.
What is the art of stalking? A hunter just hunts, a
stalker stalks anything, including himself. An
impeccable stalker can turn anything into prey. We can
even stalk our own weaknesses. You do it in the same way you stalk
prey. You figure out your routines until you know all the
doing of your weaknesses and then you come upon them and
pick them up like rabbits inside a cage.
Any habit is, in essence, a doing , and a
doing needs all its parts in order to function. If some
parts are missing, a doing is disassembled.
* * *
A warrior eats quietly, and slowly, and very little at a time.
* * *
The only deterrent to our despair is the awareness of our death, the
key to the sorcerer's scheme of things. The awareness of our death is
the only thing that can give us the strength to withstand the duress
and pain of our lives and our fears of the unknown. Volition alone is
the deciding factor; in other words, one has to make up one's mind to
bring that awareness to bear witness to one's acts.
We are human creatures. Who knows what's waiting for us or what kind
of power we may have.
* * *
It doesn't matter what anybody says or does. You must be an
impeccable man yourself. The fight is right here in this chest. It
takes all the time and all the energy we have to conquer the idiocy
in us. And that's what matters. The rest is of no importance. To be
an impeccable warrior will give you vigor and youth and power.
I have taught you to be dispassionate. The world of people goes up
and down and people go up and down with their world; as sorcerers we
have no business following them in their ups and downs. The art of
sorcerers is to be outside everything and be unnoticeable. And more
than anything else, the art of sorcerers is never to waste their
power.
* * *
We hold the images of the world with our attention. Let your
attention go from the images of the world. If you don't focus your
attention on the world, the world collapses. Instead of fighting to
focus, let go of the images by gazing fixedly at distant hills, or by
gazing at water, like a river, or by gazing at the clouds.
If you gaze with your eyes open, you get dizzy and the eyes get
tired, but if you half-close them and blink a lot and move them from
mountain to mountain, or from cloud to cloud, you can look for
hours.
As I've told you, the tonal and the nagual
are two different worlds. In one you talk, in the other you act. At
first all of us secretly do not want the world of the
nagual. We are afraid and have second thoughts. Our
unbending intent and our impeccability gets us thru
that.
* * *
Everyone can see , and yet we choose not to remember
what we see.
* * *
With our attention we can hold the images of a dream in the same way
we hold the images of the world. The art of the dreamer
is the art of attention.
* * *
Your reason is the demon that keeps you chained. You
have to vanquish it if you want to achieve the realization of my
teachings. The issue, therefore, has been how to vanquish your
reason. By reason I don't mean the
capacity for comprehending, inferring or thinking, in an orderly,
rational way. To me reason means attention.
* * *
The core of our being is the act of perceiving, and the magic of our
being is the act of awareness. Perception and awareness can be a
single, functional, inextricable unit with two domains. The first one
is the attention of the tonal ; that is to say, the
capacity of average people to perceive and place their awareness on
the ordinary world of everyday life: our first ring of
power; our awesome but taken-for-granted ability to impart
order to our perception of our daily world.
The second domain is the attention of the nagual ; the
capacity to place our awareness on the nonordinary world. It's our
second ring of power , or the altogether portentous
ability all of us have, but only sorcerers use, to impart order to
the nonordinary world.
What I have struggled to vanquish, or rather suppress in you, is not
your reason as the capacity for rational thought, but
your attention of the tonal , or your awareness of the
world of common sense. The daily world exists because we know how to
hold its images; consequently, if one drops the attention needed to
maintain those images, the world collapses.
Practice is what counts. Once you get your attention on the images of
your dream, your attention is hooked for good. In the end you can
hold the images of any dream.
Our first ring of power is engaged very early in our
lives and we live under the impression that that is all there is to
us. Our second ring of power , the attention of
the nagual , remains hidden for the immense majority of us,
and only at the moment of our death is it revealed to us. There is a
pathway to reach it, however, which is available to every one of us,
but which only sorcerers take, and that pathway is through
dreaming. Dreaming is in essence the
transformation of ordinary dreams into affairs involving volition.
Dreamers , by engaging their
attention of the nagual and focusing it on the items and
events of their ordinary dreams, change those dreams into
dreaming.
There are no procedures to arrive at the attention of the
nagual , only pointers. Finding your hands in your
dreams is the first pointer; then the exercise of paying attention is
elongated to finding objects, looking for specific features, such as
buildings, streets and so on. From there the jump is to
dream about specific places at specific times of the
day. The final stage is drawing the attention of the
nagual to focus on the total self.
That final stage is usually ushered in by a dream that many of us
have had at one time or another, in which one is looking at oneself
sleeping in bed. By the time a sorcerer has had such a dream, his
attention has been developed to such a degree that instead of waking
himself up, as most of us would do in a similar situation, he turns
on his heels and engages himself in activity, as if he were acting in
the world of everyday life.
From that moment on there is a breakage, a division of sorts in the
otherwise unified personality. The result of engaging the
attention of the nagual and developing it to the height
and sophistication of our daily attention of the world is the other
self, an identical being as oneself, but made in
dreaming.
There are no definite standard steps for reaching that double, as
there are no definite steps for us to reach our daily awareness. We
simply do it by practicing. In the act of engaging our
attention of the nagual , we find the steps. Practice
dreaming without letting your fears make it into an
encumbering production.
* * *
There is a crack between the worlds and it is more than a metaphor.
It is rather the capacity to change levels of attention. Don't try to
reason it out. Act like a warrior and follow what I've told you.
* * *
We choose only once. We choose either to be warriors or to be
ordinary men. A second choice does not exist. Not on this earth.
The only freedom warriors have is to behave impeccably. Not only is
impeccability freedom but it is the only way to scare away the human
form.
The second attention, or the attention of the nagual ,
is reached only after warriors have swept the top of their tables,
their islands of the tonal , clean. Reaching the second
attention makes the two attentions into a single unit, and that unit
is the totality of oneself.
Diligence in an impeccable life is the only way to lose the human
form. Losing the human form is the essential requirement for unifying
the two attentions.
The attention under the table is the key to everything sorcerers do.
In order to reach that attention I have taught you
dreaming.
Another way to learn how to do dreaming is by learning
gazing. If you gaze at a pile of leaves for hours your
thoughts get quiet. Without thoughts the attention of the
tonal wanes and suddenly your second attention hooks
onto the leaves and the leaves become something else. The moment when
the second attention hooks onto something is called stopping
the world.
The difficulty in gazing is to learn to quiet down the thoughts. Once
you can stop the world you are a gazer. And the only way
of stopping the world is by trying. Combine gazing at
dry leaves and looking for our hands in dreaming. Once
you have trapped your second attention with dry leaves, you do gazing
and dreaming to enlarge it. And that's all there is to
gazing. All we need to do in order to trap our second attention is to
try and try.
Once dreamers know how to stop the world by
gazing at leaves, they can gaze at other things; and finally when the
dreamers lose their form altogether, they can gaze at
anything.
First after leaves, gaze at small plants. Small plants are very
dangerous. Their power is concentrated; they have a very intense
light and they feel when dreamers are gazing at them;
they immediately move their light and shoot it at the gazer.
Dreamers have to choose one kind of plant to gaze
at.
Next gaze at trees. Dreamers also have a particular kind
of tree to gaze at. Next gaze at moving, living creatures. Small
insects are by far the best subject. Their mobility makes them
innocuous to the gazer, the opposite of plants which draw their light
directly from the earth.
The next step is to gaze at rocks. Rocks are very old and powerful
and have a specific light which is rather greenish in contrast with
the white light of plants and the yellowish light of mobile, living
beings. Rocks do not open up easily to gazers, but it is worthwhile
for gazers to persist because rocks have special secrets concealed in
their core, secrets that can aid sorcerers in their
dreaming.
A second series in the order of gazing is to gaze at cyclic
phenomena: rain and fog. Gazers can focus their second attention on
the rain itself and move with it, or focus it on the background and
use the rain as a magnifying glass of sorts to reveal hidden
features. Places of power or places to be avoided are found by gazing
through rain. Places of power are yellowish and places to be avoided
are intensely green.
The position of the body is of great importance while one is gazing.
One has to sit on the ground on a soft mat of leaves, or on a cushion
made out of natural fibers. The back has to be propped against a
tree, or a stump, or a flat rock. The body has to be thoroughly
relaxed. The eyes are never fixed on the object, in order to avoid
tiring them. The gaze consists in scanning very slowly the object
gazed at, going counterclockwise but without moving the head. The
idea is to let your perception play without analyzing it.
The effect you are after in gazing is to learn to stop the internal
dialogue. To do that you can focus your view as gazers do or, as I've
already told you, flood your awareness while walking by not focusing
your sight on anything. That is, sort of feel with your eyes
everything in the 180-degree range in front of you, while you keep
your fixed and unfocused eyes just above the line of the horizon.
The essential feature of sorcery is shutting off the internal
dialogue. Stopping the internal dialogue is an operational way of
describing the act of disengaging the attention of the
tonal.
Once we stop our internal dialogue we also stop the
world. That is an operational description of the
inconceivable process of focusing our second attention. Part of us is
always kept under lock and key because we are afraid of it. And to
our reason, that part of us is like an insane relative that we keep
locked in a dungeon. That part is our second attention, and when it
finally can focus on something the world stops. Since we, as average
man, know only the attention of the tonal , it is not
too farfetched to say that once that attention is canceled, the world
indeed has to stop. The focusing of our wild, untrained second
attention is, perforce, terrifying. The only way to keep that insane
relative from bursting in on us is by shielding ourselves with our
endless internal dialogue.
* * *
Dreamers can gaze in order to do dreaming
and then they can look for their dreams in their gazing. For example
you can gaze at the shadows of rocks and then, in your
dreaming , you might find out that those shadows have
light. You can then, while gazing, look for the light in the shadows
until you find it. Gazing and dreaming go together.
* * *
A warrior has no compassion for anyone. To have compassion means that
you wish the other person to be like you, to be in your shoes, and
you lend a hand just for that purpose. The hardest thing in the world
is for a warrior to let others be. The impeccability of a warrior is
to let them be and to support them in what they are. That means, of
course, that you trust them to be impeccable warriors themselves. If
they are not then it's your duty to be impeccable yourself and not
say a word. Only a sorcerer who sees and is formless can
afford to help anyone. Every effort to help on our part is an
arbitrary act guided by our own self-interest alone.
* * *
The problem for you as a challenge is whether or not you will be
capable of developing your will , or the power of your
second attention to focus indefinitely on anything you want.
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