The Wheel Of Time by Carlos Castaneda Read Free Book Online Page A

impeccability, a moment will come when the human form cannot stand it any longer and leaves. That is to say, a moment will come when the energy fields contorted by a lifetime of habit are straightened out. A warrior gets deeply affected, and can even die as a result of this straightening out of energy fields, but an impeccable warrior always survives.
     
    The only freedom warriors have is to behave impeccably. Not only is impeccability freedom; it is the only way to straighten out the human form.
     
    Any habit needs all its parts in order to function. If some parts are missing, the habit is disassembled.
     
    The fight is right here on this earth. We are human creatures. Who knows what's waiting for us, or what kind of power we may have?
     
    The world of people goes up and down and people go up and down with their world; warriors have no business following the ups and downs of their fellow men.
     
    The core of our being is the act of perceiving, and the magic of our being is the act of awareness. Perception and awareness are a single, functional, inextricable unit.
     
    We choose only once. We choose either to be warriors or to be ordinary men. A second choice does not exist. Not on this earth.
     
    The warriors' way offers a man a new life and that life has to be completely new. He can't bring to that new life his ugly old ways.
     
    Warriors always take a first event of any series as the blueprint or the map of what is going to develop for them subsequently.
     
    Human beings love to be told what to do, but they love even more to fight and not do what they are told, and thus they get entangled in hating the one who told them in the first place.
     
    Everybody has enough personal power for something. The trick for the warrior is to pull his personal power away from his weaknesses to his warrior's purpose.
     
    Everyone can see, and yet we choose not to remember what we see.

Commentary
    Years went by before I wrote The Second Ring of Power. Don Juan was long gone, and the quotations from that book are memories of what he had said, memories triggered by a new situation, a new development. Another player had appeared in my life. It was don Juan's cohort, Florinda Matus. All of don Juan's apprentices understood that when don Juan left, Florinda was left behind to somehow round up the last part of our training.
    "Not until you are capable of taking orders from a woman without detriment to your being will you be complete," don Juan had said. "But that woman cannot be any woman. It must be somebody special, somebody who has power, and a quality of ruthlessness that will not allow you to be the man-in-charge that you fancy yourself to be."
    Of course, I laughed off his statements. I thought he was definitely joking. The truth of the matter was that he wasn't joking at all. One day, Florinda Donner-Grau and Taisha Abelar returned, and we went to Mexico. We went to a department store in the city of Guadalajara, and there, we found Florinda Matus, the most gorgeous woman I had ever seen: extremely tall – five feet eleven, lean, angular, with a beautiful face, old, and yet very young.
    "Ah! There you are!" she exclaimed, when she saw us. "The Three Musketeers! The Pep Boys – Eenie, Meenie and Mo! I've been looking for you all over!"
    And without any more to say, she took over. Florinda Donner-Grau, of course, was delighted beyond measure. Taisha Abelar was extremely reserved, as usual, and I was mortified, almost furious. I knew that the arrangement was not going to work. I was ready to clash with this woman the first time she opened her daring mouth and came up with shit like "Eenie, Meenie and Mo – the Pep Boys."
    Unsuspected things that I had in reserve, however, came to my aid, and prevented me from any reaction of wrath or annoyance, and I got along with Florinda superbly, better than I could have dreamed. She ruled us with an iron hand. She was the undisputed queen of our lives. She had the power, the detachment, to