Wisdom of the Shaman…

Power rests on the kind of knowledge one holds. What is the sense of knowing things that are useless?

Fear is the first natural enemy a man must overcome on his path to knowledge.

…You will learn in spite of yourself; that’s the rule.

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.

Learning is never what one expects.

A man who is defeated by power dies without really knowing how to handle it. Power is only a burden upon his fate. Such a man has no command over himself, and cannot tell when or how to use his power.

Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow it, you must not stay with it under any conditions. To have such clarity you must lead a disciplined life.

Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question. This question is one that only a very old man asks. My benefactor told me about it once when I was young, and my blood was too vigorous for me to understand it. Now I do understand it. I will tell you what it is: Does this path have a heart?

For me there is only the traveling on the paths that have a heart, on any path that may have a heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge for me is to traverse its full length. And there I travel–looking, looking breathlessly.

There is a crack between the two worlds, the world of diableros and the world of living men. There is a place where the two worlds overlap. The crack is there. It opens and closes like a door int he wind. To get there a man must exercise his will. He must, I should say, develop an indomitable desire for it, a single-minded dedication. But he must do it without the help of any power or any man.

Why must you think that every person in a moving crowd is a human being?

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.

Once a man learns to see he finds himself alone in the world with nothing but folly.

I choose to live, and to laugh, not because it matters, but because that choice is the bent of my nature.

You should know by now that 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.

Put your trust in yourself, not in me.

What else can a man have, except his life and his death?

Oppressors and oppressed meet at the end, and the only thing that prevails is that life was altogether too short for both.

Will is something very special. It happens mysteriously. There is no real way of telling how one uses it, except that the results of using the will are astounding. Perhaps the first thing that one should do is to know that one can develop the will.

The indulgence of denying is by far the worst; it forces us to believe we are doing great things, when in effect we are only fixed within ourselves.

Will is a power…What a sorcerer calls will is a force that comes from within and attached itself to the world out there. It comes out through the belly…

When we look at the world or when we hear it, we have the impression that it is out there and that it is real. When we perceive the world with our will we know that it is not as “out there” or “as real” as we think.

The very thing that could help you develop your will is admist all the little things you do.

A detached man, who knows he has no possibility of fencing off his death, has only one thing to back himself with: the power of his decisions. He has to be, so to speak, the master of his choices.

A fine power is always heralded by great pain.

Upon learning to see a man becomes everything by becoming nothing. He, so to speak, vanishes and yet he’s there.

The thing which should give you the chills is not to have anything to look forward to but a lifetime of doing that which you have always done.

When you see there are no longer familiar features in the world. Everything is new. Everything has never happened before. The world is incredible!

One must overcome everything.

A man who sees is everything; in comparison, the sorcerer is a sad fellow.

When a man is facing the ally, the giver of secrets, he has to muster up all his courage and grab it before it grabs him, or chase it before it chases him. The chase must be relentless and then comes the struggle. The man must wrestle the spirit to the ground and keep it there until it gives him power.

Understanding is only a very small affair, so very small.

Nobody knows my personal history. Nobody knows who I am or what I do. Not even I.

Don’t take things so for granted. You must begin to erase yourself.

When nothing is for sure we remain alert, perennially on our toes.

You’re very violent. You’re taking yourself too seriously.

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.

How can anyone feel so important when we know that death is stalking us?

The thing to do when you’re impatient 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.

Everything I do is my decision and my responsibility.

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

There is a strange consuming happiness in acting with the full knowledge that whatever one is doing may very well be one’s last act on earth. I recommend that you reconsider your life and bring your acts into that light.

We are as mysterious and as awesome as this unfathomable world, so who can tell what you’re capable of?

It doesn’t matter how one was brought up. What determines the way one does anything is personal power.

Trust your personal power. That’s all one has in this whole mysterious world.

Whenever your hand remains warm you can actually feel the lines of the world with it.

The art of a benefactor is to take us to the brink.

…What matters to a warrior is arriving at the totality of oneself.

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 don’t have any time, and yet you’re surrounded by eternity. What a paradox for your reason!

To change our idea of the world is the crux of sorcery. And stopping the internal dialogue is the only way to accomplish it. The rest is just padding.

A man of knowledge cannot possibly act toward his fellow men in injurious terms, hypothetically or otherwise.

– Don Juan Matus, Toltec Sorceror.

~ by revolutionwithin on May 3, 2009.