Impeccability

"A warrior must learn to make every act count, since he is going to be here in the world for only a short while, in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it."  Carlos Castaneda

Impeccability, a clean crisp word with no pretense.  Being a writer, words have energies to me and impeccability vibrates in a frequency all its own.  It is more than truth or integrity.  It truly is above reproach, faultless in both meaning and as a sound.  Don Juan Matus, the Yaqui Indian whose teachings Castaneda details in his books put impeccability as the work of life.  Only by conscious choice and total awareness of our personal powers which are formidable, boundless, can we hope to be truly alive and free ourselves from our fears and self-imposed limitations, which enslave us.

Impeccability to the Yaquis is about utilizing our personal power efficiently.  By reclaiming our power and storing it instead of expending it on all of the frivolous thoughts, emotions, opinions, positionalities, etc with which we consume ourselves, we are then able to focus our will and direct it towards extraordinary acts.  The art of the warrior is the ability to balance terror and wonder, to experience both unflinchingly, knowing that we are neither. We are the creator, the awareness, not the solid boundaries that we erroneously use to define our lives.  All that stuff that is on our resumes is just that, stuff, and has nothing at all to do with who we really are.  While it may give us "currency" in the world of the everyday, it has no more actual validity than monopoly money in the true reality of our energy being.

Buddha expresses the same concept when he states that rebirth as a human is extraordinarily precious because with its unique balance of pleasure and pain, it allows us the chance to develop virtue and wisdom to the degree needed to free us from endless cycles of rebirth.

Impeccability comes from being ruthless with ourselves by shutting off the constant internal dialogue.  Our infatuation with what we think we are thinking keeps us bound to the false stories that we constantly tell ourselves about what we think is real and who we think we are.  "A warrior takes his lot, whatever it may be, accepts it in utter humbleness. He accepts in humbleness what he is, not as grounds for regret but as a living challenge."*  When we with an act of our will shut off the internal dialogue, our puny constructed "world collapses and extraordinary facets of ourselves surface, as though they had been carefully guarded by our words." * With our thoughts and then our words, we construct our world.  We are the way that we are because we tell ourselves over and over again that that is the way we are.  Only by ruthlessly holding ourselves to impeccable standards can we stop the merry-go-round of nonsensical self-hypnotism.  E. Jean in Elle Magazine has two profound questions to ask ourselves: "Is this idea I'm acting on even true?  What would happen if everyone in the world believed this idea and behaved as I'm behaving now?"+  Good advice and profound questions to cut through our self-delusion.  Another excellent indicator of how much delusion we are operating under is the number of lemons that pop up in our lives.  As we carefully make lemonade out of them, we are engaging in the impeccability process of reclaiming more of our personal power.

"The self-confidence of a warrior is not the self-confidence of the average man.  The average man seeks certainty in the eyes of the onlooker and calls that self-confidence."*  To seek certainty from others is truly the blind leading the blind.  "The warrior seeks impeccability in his own eyes and calls that humbleness.  The average man is hooked to his fellow man, while a warrior is hooked only to himself. The difference between the two is remarkable."* 

When we are able to hold ourselves in impeccability, we are able to operate from an incredible power position.  Eternity surrounds us. When we stand in the silence of our minds, we are able to turn our will into a functioning unit.  We are luminous beings and the only thing that really matters is personal power because the more we are able to harness our power by directing our will, the more extraordinary the results we can achieve. 

Andrew Carnegie glimpsed this phenomenon as he harnessed his personal power in his rise from abject poverty to vast riches: " The average person puts only 25% of his energy into his work.  The world takes off its hat to those who put in more than 50% of their capacity, and stands on its head for those few and far between souls who devote 100%."  The secret to extraordinary results lies not in working harder or putting in more hours of blood, sweat and tears.  The true secret lies in working impeccably with our personal power by getting rid of all the draining thoughts, attitudes and counter productive postures that we employ as we delude ourselves into believing the nonsense in our heads.  "If one is to succeed in anything, the success must come gently, with a great deal of effort but without stress or obsession."*  The effort that needs to be expended is to keep the internal dialogue switch turned off so that all of our thoughts and actions flow from the true core of who we really are and not from some false fabrication of who we think we need to be.  Impeccability is the only path to extraordinary; all others lead down a distorted side road that results in disappointment and delusion.   

* Carlos Castaneda
+ October 12, 2010 issue of Elle Magazine