The wisdom of Don Juan

My first blog post ever. (A historical day indeed... with 2011 only a few minutes away. )

I've recently come across some interesting quotes from . I thought I should post them all together in some place where they don't escape my own attention. If it hadn't been for this blog space I would probably have saved them as a Word file on my comp, perhaps never to be read again. That has been the fate of many an interesting thing that I've saved from the internet to my hard drive; they all get lost in the jumble. It truly is a case of out of sight, out of mind, for me. One of the good things about logging into Historum on a regular basis is I can at a glance access all the saved material and refresh my memory regarding it. I plan to save a lot of stuff in form of blogs this way.

Anyhow, moving on. More than the warriors themselves I'm interested in the philosophy of warriors. Researching this topic online I stumbled onto websites that had "culled" a collection of quotes regarding Don Juan as found in books by . (Sources: http://alignment2012.com/warrior.html; Carlos Castaneda's don Juan's Teachings)

So from the aforementioned sources here are some of the quotes that appealed to me the most.

1) "A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war, wide awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance."

2) "Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path..."

3) "I will tell you time and time again, the most effective way to live is as a warrior. 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. That's the warrior's way."

4) "For the average man, the world is weird because if he's not bored with it, he's at odds with it. For a warrior, the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable. A warrior must assume responsibility for being here, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous time."

5) "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."

6) "Your difficulty is that you want to understand everything, and that is not possible. If you insist on understanding you're not considering your entire lot as a human being. Your stumbling block is intact.
Understanding is only a very small affair..."

7) "What injures the spirit is having someone always on your back, beating you, telling you what to do and what not to do."

8) "You have to be aware of the uselessness of your self-importance and of your personal history."

9) "I laugh a great deal because I like to laugh, yet everything I say is deadly serious."

10) "This, whatever you're doing now, may be your last act on earth. It may very well be your last battle. There is no power which could guarantee that you are going to live one more minute. If this were your last battle on earth, I would say that you are an idiot. You are wasting your last act on earth in some stupid mood."

to be contd. Possibly...