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In a previous article, I quoted the passage from The Teachings of Don Juan that relates the importance of defeating clarity, the second natural enemy of a "man of knowledge." The reward for refusing to embrace what is learned as absolute truth is the accrual of greater understanding, which eventually has such great value that it can be used for any conceivable purpose. Don Juan explains: "He will know at this point that the power he has been pursuing for so long is finally his. He can do with it whatever he pleases. His ally is at his command. His wish is the rule. He sees all that is around him. But he has also come across his third enemy: Power!" So power, like clarity, is not only the reward gained by defeating one of the enemies of knowledge, it can also become the instrument of one's undoing. "Power is the strongest of all enemies. And naturally the easiest thing to do is to give in; after all, the man is truly invincible. He commands; he begins by taking calculated risks and ends in making rules, because he is a master. "A man at this stage hardly notices his third enemy closing in on him. And suddenly, without his knowing, he will certainly have lost the battle. His enemy will have turned him into a cruel, capricious man." The senior executives of the fallen Enron Corporation are an example of business leaders who accumulated power and came to believe they were invincible. A decade ago, Republican Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House; I recall glibness, arrogance and, of course, his rapid undoing. Hitler. There are too many examples. Power can corrupt anyone who is strong enough to create a new paradigm, but who is too weak to deny the power offered him. "A man who is defeated by power dies without really knowing how to handle it. Power is only a burden upon his fate. Such a man has no command over himself, and cannot tell when or how to use his power." As before, Carlos asks don Juan how to prevent being defeated by Power, and his mentor explains: "He has to defy it, deliberately. He has to come to realize the power he has seemingly conquered is in reality never his. He must keep himself in line at all times, handling carefully and faithfully all that he has learned. If he can see that clarity and power, without his control over himself, are worse than mistakes, he will reach a point where everything is held in check. He will know then when and how to use his power. And thus he will have defeated his third enemy." Ironically, Carlos Castaneda himself obtained clarity through an amazing journey of learning, achieved power and was ultimately defeated by it. Twenty years ago, as his books became runaway bestsellers, the author gained enormous international celebrity status. Thousands of people wanted to be disciples. Realizing a business opportunity, he established Cleargreen, an organization that promotes and conducts workshops and sells educational materials based on his writings. In this setting he and his inner circle kept alive the premise that everything he wrote about actually happened. He claimed that this kind of mystical spirituality was possible for those who cultivated a warrior spirit. A cult formed, in which Castaneda wielded exactly the kind of capricious power that don Juan cautioned about in this first book. The story of his unseemly behavior, the sordid consequences among his followers and his eventual demise is told by a member of that inner circle, Amy Wallace, in The Sorcerer's Apprentice: My Life with Carlos Castaneda. There aren't many examples of people whose knowledge earned them power and who maintained humility, perspective and compassion. Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt come to mind, and I'm sure there are others. But even these people eventually had to deal with the fourth and final enemy...
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Dennis E. Coates is CEO of Performance Support Systems, author of MindFrames, a brain-based personality assessment system (www.initforlife.com) and co-founder of the Train-to-Ingrain alliance (www.train-to-ingrain.com, info@train-to-ingrain.com, 800-488-6463), which delivers a reinforcement-centered approach to learning and development that achieves permanent, measurable improvements in workplace behavior and positive impacts on business results.
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