The Importance of Silence for Warriors

Silence is a passageway between worlds. When our mind stays silent, incredible aspects of our being emerge. Starting from that moment, a person becomes a vehicle of intent, and all his acts begin to ooze power. ~ Carlos Castaneda, Encounters with the Nagual

Don Juan affirmed that we spend our lives regurgitating an endless list of opinions on almost everything. We receive thoughts in clusters; one connects with the other one, until the entire space of the mind is packed full. That noise has no use, because, practically in its entirety, it is devoted to the enlargement of the ego.

Most people are no longer willing to be silent. They want to fill their lives with noise and activity, to listen to something or to say something or to do something. Cell phones, computers, iPods, video games, noisy cars, trains, airports, television, night-clubs, shopping malls, the endless drone of incessant chatter, email, social networks; all contribute to the constant bombardment of incoming stimuli. External stimulation is taking its toll and serving to disconnect people from the power of silence and the source of all things.

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Toltec Warriors

To be a warrior is not a simple matter of wishing to be one. It is rather an endless struggle that will go on to the very last moment of our lives. Nobody is born a warrior, in exactly the same way that nobody is born an average man. We make ourselves into one or the other. ~ Carlos Castaneda, The Wheel of Time

Toltec is a Nahuatl word meaning ‘master craftsman’ and this craftsmanship extends to all phases of a warriors existence whether it is through gardening, building, artwork, honing awareness, connecting to silent knowledge, writing books or creating the bridge that facilitates awareness between that which we know and that which we have limited access to.

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The Evolution of the Path

Our vision of a world of objects. That vision has been very useful, but at the same time the worst among our calamities. Modern man’s concerns are the same as those of an animal: Use, possess, annihilate. But this animal has been domesticated, and is condemned to live inside a material inventory. Since every one of the objects he uses has a long history, modern man lives his life lost inside his own creation. ~ Carlos Castaneda, Encounters with the Nagual

Encounters with the Nagual is a wonderful paper published by Armando Torres in 2004 and compiled from his personal conversations with Carlos Castaneda. Carlos spoke of many things with Armando but to me the most compelling is Carlos’ desire to ensure that the path of sorcery and nagualism continues to evolve. Carlos said that the goal of modern seers is, more than ever, total freedom and in order to attain it, it becomes necessary that the strategies are continually refined. Evolving, evolution, conscious evolution.

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Losing Human Form

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. ~ Don Juan, The Power of Silence

The dominant paradigm is a by-product of the foreign installation. It challenges humans to comply with a prescribed mode of behavior that does not inherently belong to them. It has been ingrained since the time of conception and is cultivated throughout the lifetime of each human, dictating to them how to act, speak, and conduct themselves in alignment with the unconscious culture, the people that keep the wheel spinning, each of them a mere cog in the wheel.

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Ritual Habitual

Ritual can trap our attention better than anything I can think of. But it also demands a very high price. That high price is morbidity; and morbidity could have the heaviest liens and mortgages on our awareness. ~ The Power of Silence

Don Juan said, in The Fire from Within, that rituals are necessary at one time in every warrior’s life but only for purposes of luring one’s first attention away from the power of self-absorption, which keeps his assemblage point rigidly fixed. The obsessive entanglement of the first attention in self-absorption or reason is a powerful binding force, and ritual behavior, because it is repetitive, forces the first attention to free some energy from watching the inventory, as a consequence of which the assemblage point loses its rigidity.

The downside of ritual, however, is that it can trap the attention and over time the assemblage point becomes fixated on the ritual instead of seeing the ritual as, perhaps, a means of shifting the assemblage point. As a result, the ritual becomes empty and meaningless and freedom is further hindered as a result of the amount of energy spent performing the habitual ritual.

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