Blog 8

I really connected with this week’s reading and the book ending on a good note. For one, I thought it was really interesting how the “devils weed” was playing trick on Castaneda and I was surprised how Don Juan connected it with women in their ways of behaving or treating men. A further read in to the chapter got me critically thinking about Don Juan’s statement about paths that our heart wants us to follow and paths that we do not follow. He stated, (which I really liked and connected with) “A path without a heart is never enjoyable. You have to work hard even to take it. On the other hand, a path with heart is easy; it does not make you work at liking it (pg 128).” Juan’s statement literally made my ears stand straight, when I read this. I think we as human subconsciously do things to please other people and never really listen to our heart and what is it that “it’s” telling us. We deliberately chose a hard task to please someone else, but if the task is not executed, we blame our destiny or other influences. But the truth is that we never really listen to our heart in the first place. I think we somehow don’t really want to listen to our hearts in the first place.
Along with that I really linked with his statement that “To choose a path you must be free from fear and ambition (Pg 129).” I didn’t get the ambition connection at first but then when Castaneda also questioned him about the ambition aspect and Don Juan explaining to him that the desire to learn is not ambition and we as human want to know things for the sake of power and that is not ambition. Then it actually really made sense. It made sense in further explaining his first statement about the path with heart being easy. It’s easy because there is no power involved with it and no “flattery” and we as humans like to get attracted to flattery. Just like Castaneda been flattered by the “devil’s weed” and then tricked by it.
Furthermore the smoke which Castaneda get terrified by is the noblest power and has the purest heart because it doesn’t make anyone its prisoner nor does it hold any bias (129). This in someway portrays that something we might get terrified from is the real deal or the road to success. It is tied to our hearts, may be if we listen to our hearts (once in a blue moon) we might find the road to success or happiness. It like Castaneda being terrified from the smoke but not the “devil’s weed” and unlike the smoke the devil’s weed is feminine and attracts him and boggles his mind but he keep getting attracted towards it. Yet what he is terrified from (smoke) is what he really needs to put his attention towards. And for us is it listening to our hearts (which is clear, logical, and easy) and not what gives us more flattery or power and makes us go the other way.
When Castaneda followed his heart he was able to fly and in some aspects it connected with the Sufi teaching story about the bird. That sometimes you don’t need ambition, you need to follow your heart. Yet we suffer from what Don Juan calls “a loss of soul” in chapter 11.
Although, I didn’t understand his “severe conditions of seriousness” to overcome the loss of the soul, the book ended on an excellent message and the teaching were very helpful in connecting me with my subconscious and looking at things in a different way.