Thursday, April 8th, 2010
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One must assume responsibility for being in this weird world. For an 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. My interest has been to convince you that you must assume responsibility for being here, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous place, in this marvelous time. I want to convince you that you must learn to make every act count, since you are going to be here for only a short while, in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it.
When a warrior decides to do something he must go all the way, but he must take responsibility for what he does. No matter what he does, he must know first why he is doing it, and then he must proceed with his actions without having doubts or remorse about them.
In a world where death is the hunter, there is no time for regrets or doubts. There is only time for decisions. When you get angry you always feel righteous. You have been complaining all your life because you don't assume responsibility for your decisions. To assume the responsibility of one's decisions means that one is ready to die for them. It doesn't matter what the decisions are. Nothing could be more or less serious than anything else. In a world where death is the hunter, there are no small or big decisions. There are only decisions that a warrior makes in the face of his inevitable death.
Look at me, I have no doubts or remorse. Everything I do is my decision and my responsibility. The simplest thing I do, to take you for a walk in the desert for instance, may very well mean my death. Death is stalking me. Therefore, I have no room for doubts or remorse. If I have to die as a result of taking you for a walk, then I must die. You on the other hand, feel that you are immortal, and the decisions of an immortal man can be cancelled or regretted or doubted. In a world where death is the hunter, my friend, there is not time for regrets or doubts. There is only time for decisions.
A rule of thumb for a warrior is that he makes his decisions so carefully that nothing that may happen as a result of them can surprise him, much less drain his power. When a warrior makes the decision to take action, he should be prepared to die. If he is prepared to die, there shouldn't be any pitfalls, any unwelcome surprises, any unnecessary acts. Everything should gently fall into place because he is expecting nothing.
Once you decide something put all your petty fears away. Your decision should vanquish them. I will tell you time and time again, the most effective way to live is as a warrior. A warrior lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, nor by thinking about what he will think when he has finished acting. A warrior may worry and think before making any decision, but once he makes it, he goes on his way, free from worries or thoughts; there will be a million other decisions still awaiting him. That's the warriors' way. A warrior takes responsibility for his acts; for the most trivial of his acts.
The instant one begins to live like a warrior, one is no longer ordinary. It is meaningless to complain. What's important from this point on is the strategy of your life. You may go any place you wish, but if you do, you must assume the full responsibility for that act. A warrior lives his life strategically. When he has to act with his fellow men, a warrior follows the doing of strategy, and in that doing there are no victories or defeats. In that doing there are only actions. The doing of strategy entails that one is not at the mercy of people.
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Tags: act count, acting, assuming responsibility, average man, big decisions, death is the hunter, decisions, desert, doing it, effective way, fellow men, hunter, immortal man, inevitable death, instant, last battle, marvelous place, marvelous time, marvelous world, marvels, no doubts, odds, petty fears, regrets, remorse, righteous, room, simplest thing, small, stalking, strategy, thought, thumb, unnecessary acts, unwelcome surprises, victories, warrior, weird world, world, worries, your decision
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Thursday, April 8th, 2010
You have to be aware of the uselessness of your self-importance and of your personal history. If you really want to learn, you have to remodel most of your behaviour. You take yourself too seriously. You are too damn important in your own mind. That must be changed! You are so goddamn important that you feel justified to be annoyed with everything. You're so damn important that you can afford to leave if things don't go your way. I suppose you think that shows you have character. That's nonsense! You're weak, and conceited! In the course of your life you have not ever finished anything because of that sense of disproportionate importance that you attach to yourself.
Self-importance is another thing that must be dropped, just like personal history. The world around us is very mysterious. It doesn't yield its secrets easily. Now we are concerned with losing self-importance. It takes a very long time to clean out the garbage that a luminous being picks up in the world. We are so stiff and feel so self-important.
Self-importance is man's greatest enemy. What weakens him is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of his fellow men. Self-importance requires that one spend most of one's life offended by something or someone, because it also requires we also make what others do important to us. Don't let your self-importance run rampant. To be angry at people means that one considers their acts to be important. It is a projected form of self-importance. It is imperative to cease to feel that way, and we can only do this by shifting our perception. The acts of men cannot be important enough to offset our only viable alternative: our unchangeable encounter with infinity.
It doesn't matter what anybody says or does. You must be an impeccable warrior 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 vigour and youth and power.
You need to learn to be dispassionate. The world of people goes up and down and people go up and down with their world; warriors 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.
There is no need for us to say anything about others. There is no need for you or for me to regard other's actions in our thoughts one way or another. The worst thing we can do is to force people to agree with us. I mean that we shouldn't try to impose our will when people don't behave the way we want them to. The worst thing one can do is to confront human beings bluntly. A warrior proceeds strategically. If one wants to stop our fellow men one must always be outside the circle that presses them. That way one can always direct the pressure.
If you think about yourself too much it gives you a strange fatigue that makes you shut off the world around you and cling to your arguments. A light and amenable disposition is needed in order to withstand the impact and the strangeness of the knowledge I am teaching you. Feeling important makes one heavy, clumsy, and vain. To be a man of knowledge one needs to be light and fluid.
You are a serious person, but your seriousness is attached to what you do, not to what goes on outside you. You dwell upon yourself too much. That's the trouble. Dwelling upon the self too much produces a terrible fatigue. Seek and see the marvels all around you. You will get tired if you keep look at yourself alone, and that fatigue will make you deaf and blind to everything else.
As long as one feels that they're the most important thing in the world, they cannot really appreciate the world around them. They are like a horse with blinders; all it sees is itself, as apart from everything else. The distinction of self-importance separates them from their environment, preventing them from uniting with it.
To help you lose self-importance talk to little plants. It doesn't matter what you say to a plant, what's important is the feeling of liking it, and treating it as an equal. A man who gathers plants must apologize every time for taking them and must assure them that someday his own body will serve as food for them. So, all in all, the plants and ourselves are even. Neither we nor they are more or less important. From now on talk to the little plants, talk until you lose all sense of importance. Talk to them until you can do it in front of others. You must talk to them in a loud and clear voice if you want them to answer you. The world around us is a mystery, and men are no better than anything else. If a little plant is generous with us we must thank her, or perhaps she will not let us go.
You must talk to the plants you're going to pick before you pick them. In order to see the plants you must talk to them personally, you must get to know them individually; then the plants can tell you anything you care to know about them. You fail to understand that I am not joking. You think everything in the world is simple to understand because everything you do is a routine that is simple to understand.
The thrust of the warriors' way is to dethrone self-importance. And everything warriors do is directed toward accomplishing this goal. Self-importance can't be fought with niceties. Every effort should be made to eradicate self-importance from the lives of warriors. Without self-importance we are invulnerable. Warriors prepare themselves to be aware, and full awareness comes to them only when there is no more self-importance left in them. Only when they are nothing do they become everything.
Shamans have unmasked self-importance and found that it is self-pity masquerading as something else. No matter how much you like to feel sorry for yourself, you have to change that. It doesn't jibe with the life of a warrior. Self-
importance is the motivating force for every attack of melancholy. A warrior is someone who seeks freedom. Sad
ness is not freedom. We must snap out of it. Warriors are entitled to have profound states of sadness, but that sadness is there only to make them laugh.
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Thursday, April 8th, 2010
Change! If you do not respond to that challenge you are as good as dead. You have never taken the responsibility for being in this unfathomable world. Therefore, you were never an artist, and perhaps you'll never be a hunter. There is one simple thing wrong with you - you think you have plenty of time. You think your life is going to last forever. The countless paths one traverses in one's life are all equal. Oppressors and oppressed meet at the end, and the only thing that prevails is that life was altogether too short for both.
How often are you vehemently asserting some non-sense? You don't have time for this display. 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.
You have no time, my friend, no time. None of us have time. Don't just agree with me. Act upon it. What I recommend you to do is to notice that we do not have any assurance that our lives will go on indefinitely. Change comes suddenly and unexpectedly, and so does death. There are some people who are very careful about the nature of their acts. Their happiness is to act with the full knowledge that they don't have time; therefore, their acts have a peculiar power.
Acts have power. Especially when the person acting knows that those acts are his last battle. 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.
You don't have time my friend. That is the misfortune of human beings. None of us have sufficient time. Your acts cannot possibly have the flair, the power, the compelling force of the acts performed by a man who knows that he is fighting his last battle on earth.
We are all going to die. There is something out there waiting for me, for sure; and I will join it, also for sure. Use it. Focus your attention on the link between you and your death, without remorse or sadness or worrying. Focus your attention on the fact you don't have time and let your acts flow accordingly. Let each of your acts be your last battle on earth. Only under those conditions will your acts have their rightful power.
Otherwise they will be, for as long as you live, the acts of a timid man. There is no time for timidity, simply because timidity makes you cling to something that exists only in your thoughts. It soothes you while everything is at a lull, but then the awesome, mysterious world will open its mouth for you, as it will open for every one of us, and then you will realize that your sure ways were not sure at all. Being timid prevents us from examining and exploiting our lot as men.
A warrior-hunter knows that his death is waiting, and the very act he is performing now may well be his last battle on earth. I call it a battle because it is a struggle. Most people move from act to act without any struggle or thought. A hunter, on the contrary, assesses every act; and since he has an intimate knowledge of his death, he proceeds judiciously, as if every act were his last battle. Only a fool would fail to notice the advantage a hunter has over his fellow men. A hunter gives his last battle its due respect. It's only natural that his last act on earth should be the best of himself. It's pleasurable that way. It dulls the edge of his fright.
A warrior is only a man, a humble man. He cannot change the designs of his death. But his impeccable spirit, which has stored power after stupendous hardships, can certainly hold his death for a moment, a moment long enough to let him rejoice for the last time in recalling his power. We may say that that is a gesture which death has with those who have an impeccable spirit.
A warrior dies the hard way. His death must struggle to take him. A warrior does not give himself to death so easily. The spirit of the warrior is not geared to indulging and complaining, nor is it geared to winning or losing. The spirit of a warrior is geared only to struggle, and every struggle is a warrior's last battle on earth. Thus the outcome matters very little to him. In his last battle on earth a warrior lets his spirit flow free and clear. And as he wages his battle, knowing that his intent is impeccable, a warrior laughs and laughs.
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Tags: acting, acts, artist, change, compelling force, conditions, countless paths, death, fellow men, flair, fool, geared, gesture, happiness, hard way, human beings, humble man, hunter, idiot, impeccable, impeccable spirit, intimate knowledge, knowledge, last act, last battle, last battle on earth, link, misfortune, most people, mysterious world, natural, non-sense, oppressors, peculiar power, pleasurable, power, rightful power, simple thing, spirit flow, strange consuming happiness, struggle, stupendous hardships, stupid mood, sufficient time, sure ways, the spirit, thought, thoughts, time, timid man, timid prevents, timidity, traverses, unfathomable world, wages, warrior, warrior laughs, wasting, worrying, your last battle is now
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