"Of course, there is a dark side to us," he said. "We kill wantonly, don't we? We burn people

in the name of God. We destroy ourselves; we obliterate life on this planet; we destroy the earth.

And then we dress in robes and the Lord speaks directly to us. And what does the Lord tell us?

He says that we should be good boys or he is going to punish us. The Lord has been threatening

us for centuries and it doesn't make any difference. Not because we are evil, but because we are

dumb. Man has a dark side, yes, and it's called stupidity."

Don Juan said that human awareness was like an immense haunted house. The awareness of

everyday life was like being sealed in one room of that immense house for life. We entered the

room through a magical opening: birth. And we exited through another such magical opening:

death.

Sorcerers, however, were capable of finding still another opening and could leave that sealed

room while still alive. A superb attainment. But their astounding accomplishment was that when

they escaped from that sealed room they chose freedom. They chose to leave that immense,

haunted house entirely instead of getting lost in other parts of it.

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