Explore Quotes by Carlos Castaneda

We have to balance the lineality of the known universe with the nonlineality of the unknown universe.

We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.

Leave Jesus on the cross. He's very happy there!

To compare Tensegrity with yoga or t'ai chi is not possible. It has a different origin and a different purpose. The origin is shamanic, the purpose is shamanic.

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 might never live to regret it

A path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you . . . Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself alone, one question . . . Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't it is of no use.

We hardly ever realize that we can cut anything out of our lives, anytime, in the blink of an eye.

Dwelling upon the self too much produces terrible fatigue. A man in that position is deaf and blind to everything else. The fatigue itself makes him cease to see the marvels all around.

If you were a warrior, you would know that the worst thing one can do is confront human beings directly.

Intent is what can make a man succeed when his thoughts tell him that he is defeated.

Challenges cannot possibly be good or bad. Challenges are simply challenges.

It isn't that a warrior learns shamanism as time goes by; rather, what he learns as time goes by is to save energy. This energy will enable him to handle some of the energy fields which are ordinarily inaccessible to him. Shamanism is a state of awareness, the ability to use energy fields that are not employed in perceiving the everyday-life world that we know.

Intent is a force that exists in the universe. When sorcerers (those who live of the source) beckon to intent, it comes to them and sets up the path for attainment, which means that sorcerers always accomplish what they set out to do.

Never take a path that has no heart in it. You can't lose if your heart is in your work, but you can't win if your heart is not in it.

Eventually I saw that the path of the heart requires a full gesture, a degree of abandon that can be terrifying. Only then is it possible to achieve a sparkling metamorphosis.

The things shamans deal with are extremely practical. They break down parameters of normal historical reality. Magical passes are just one aspect of that.

Burn your bridges every 2 years.

Intent is what sends a shaman through a wall, through space, to infinity.

The sorcerer's description of the world is perceivable. But our insistence on holding on to our standard version of reality renders us almost deaf and blind to it.

If your tendency is to make sense out of chaos, start chaos.

...the spirit reveals itself to everyone with the same intensity and consistency, but only warriors are consistently attuned to such revelations.