The Wheel Of Time Read Online Free PDF

one does anything is personal power. A man is only the sum of his personal power, and that sum determines how he lives and how he dies.
     
    Personal power is a feeling. Something like being lucky. Or one may call it a mood. Personal power is something that one acquires by means of a lifetime of struggle.
     
    A warrior acts as if he knows what he is doing, when in effect he knows nothing.
     
    A warrior doesn't know remorse for anything he has done, because to isolate one's acts as being mean, or ugly, or evil is to place an unwarranted importance on the self.
    The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.
     
    People tell us from the time we are born that the world is such and such and so and so, and naturally we have no choice but to accept that the world is the way people have been telling us it is.
     
    The art of a warrior is to balance the terror of being a man with the wonder of being a man.

Commentary
    By the time I was writing Journey to Ixtlan, a most mysterious mood was prevalent all around me. Don Juan Matus was applying some extremely pragmatic measures to my daily conduct. He had outlined some steps of action that he wanted me to follow rigorously. He had given me three tasks which had only the vaguest references to my world of everyday life, or to any other world. He wanted me to endeavor in my daily world to erase my personal history by any means conceivable. Then, he wanted me to stop my routines, and finally, he wanted me to dethrone my sense of self-importance.
    "How am I going to accomplish all this, don Juan?" I asked him.
    "I have no idea," he responded. "None of us has any idea of how to do that pragmatically and effectively. Yet, if we start the work, we will accomplish it without ever knowing what came to aid us.
    The difficulty that you encounter is the same difficulty that I encountered myself," he went on. "I assure you that our difficulty is born out of the total absence in our lives of the idea that would spur us to change. At the time that my teacher gave me this task, all I needed in order to make it work was the idea that it could be done. Once I had the idea, I accomplished it, without knowing how. I recommend that you do the same."
    I went into the most contorted complaints, alluding to the fact that I was a social scientist, accustomed to practical directions that had substance to them, not to something vague which was dependent on magical solutions rather than practical means.
    "Say whatever you want," don Juan responded, laughing. "Once you're through complaining, forget about your qualms and do what I have asked you to do."
    Don Juan was right. All that I needed, or rather, all that a mysterious part of me which was not overt needed, was the idea. The 'me' that I had known through all my life needed infinitely more than the idea. It needed coaching, spurring, direction. I became so intrigued by my success that the tasks of erasing my routines, losing my self-importance and dropping my personal history became a sheer delight.
    "You are smack in front of the warriors' way," don Juan said by way of explanation for my mysterious success.
    Slowly and methodically, he had guided my awareness to focus more and more intensely on an abstract elaboration of the concept of the warrior that he called the warriors' way, the warriors' path. He explained that the warriors' way was a structure of ideas established by the shamans of ancient Mexico. Those shamans had derived their construct by means of their ability to see energy as it flows freely in the universe. Therefore, the warriors' way was a most harmonious conglomerate of energetic facts, irreducible truths determined exclusively by the direction of the flow of energy in the universe. Don Juan categorically stated that there was nothing about the warriors' way that could be argued, nothing that could be changed. It was in itself and by itself a perfect