WAY OF THE PEACEFUL WARRIOR: A Book That Changes Lives

by Dan Millman

  The temptation to visit the gas station was agonizing, but I would not go until I was called. Besides, how could I go back? I had nothing at all to show for my years.

  I moved to Palo Alto and lived alone, as lonely as I had ever been. I thought of Joyce many times, but knew I had no right to call her; I still had unfinished business.

  I began my training anew. I exercised, read, meditated, and continued driving questions deeper and deeper into my mind, like a sword. In a matter of months, I started to feel a renewed sense of well-being that I hadn’t felt in years. During this time, I started writing, recording volumes of notes from my days with Socrates. I hoped my review of our time together would give me a fresh clue. Nothing had really changed — at least nothing I could see — since he had sent me away.

  One morning, I sat on the front steps of my small apartment, overlooking the freeway. I thought back over the past eight years. I had begun as a fool and had almost become a warrior. Then Socrates had sent me out into the world to learn, and I’d become a fool again.

  It seemed a waste — all eight years. So here I sat on the steps, gazing over the city to the mountains beyond. Suddenly my attention narrowed, and the mountains began to take on a soft glow. In that instant, I knew what I would do.

  I sold what few belongings I had left, strapped my pack to my back, and hitchhiked south toward Fresno, then headed east into the Sierra Nevada. It was late summer — a good time to get lost in the mountains.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE GATE OPENS

  On a narrow road somewhere near Edison Lake, I started hiking inward to an area Socrates had once mentioned — inward and upward, toward the heart of the wilderness. I sensed that here in the mountains I would find the answer — or die. In a way, I was right on both counts.

  I hiked up through alpine meadows, between granite peaks, winding my way through thick groves of pine and spruce, up into the high lake country, where people were scarcer than the puma, deer, and small lizards that scurried under rocks as I approached.

  I made camp just before dusk. The next day I climbed higher, across great fields of granite at the edge of the timber-line. I climbed over huge boulders, cut through canyons and ravines. In the afternoon I picked edible roots and berries, and lay down by a crystal spring. For the first time in years, it seemed, I was content.

  Later in the afternoon, I walked alone in the wilds, down through the shade of tangled forests, heading back to base camp. Then I prepared wood for the evening fire, ate another handful of food, and meditated beneath a towering pine tree, surrendering myself to the mountains. If they had anything to offer me, I was ready to accept it.

  After the sky turned black, I sat warming my hands and face over the crackling fire, when out of the shadows stepped Socrates.

  “I was in the neighborhood,” he said.

  In disbelief and delight, I hugged him and wrestled him to the ground, laughing and getting both of us thoroughly dirty. We brushed ourselves off and sat by the fire. “You look almost the same, old warrior — not a year over a hundred.” (He did look older, but his gray-speckled eyes still had their twinkle.)

  “You, on the other hand,” he grinned, looking me over, “look a lot older, and not much smarter. Tell me, did you learn anything?”

  I sighed, staring into the fire. “Well, I learned to make tea.” I put a small pot of water on my makeshift grill and prepared the spicy tea, using herbs I’d found on my hike that day. I hadn’t been expecting company; I handed him my cup, and poured my tea into a small bowl. Finally the words poured forth. As I spoke, the despair that I’d held for so long at last caved in on me.

  “I have nothing to bring you, Socrates. I’m still lost — no closer to the gate than I was when we first met. I’ve failed you, and life has failed me; life has broken my heart.”

  He was jubilant. “Yes! Your heart has been broken, Dan — broken open to reveal the gate, shining within. It’s the only place you haven’t looked. Open your eyes, buffoon — you’ve almost arrived!”

  Confused and frustrated, I could only sit there helplessly.

  Soc reassured me. “You’re almost ready — you’re very close.”

  I pounced on his words eagerly. “Close to what?”

  “To the end.” Fear crept up my spine for a moment. I crawled quickly into my sleeping bag, and Socrates unrolled his. My last impression that night was of my teacher’s eyes, shining, as if he were looking through me, through the fire, into another world.

  In the first direct rays of the morning sun, Socrates was already up, sitting over by a nearby stream. I joined him for a while in silence, tossing pebbles into the running water and listening to the plop. Silent, he turned and watched me closely.

  That night, after a carefree day of hiking, swimming, and sunning, Socrates told me that he wanted to hear about everything I could remember feeling since I had seen him. I talked for three days and three nights — I’d exhausted my store of memories. Socrates had hardly spoken the whole time, except to ask a brief question.

  Just after the sun had set, he motioned for me to join him by the fire. We sat very still, the old warrior and I, our legs crossed on the soft earth, high in the Sierra Nevada.

  “Socrates, all my illusions have died, but there seems nothing left to take their place. You’ve shown me the futility of searching. But isn’t the way of the peaceful warrior a path, a search?”

  He laughed and shook me by my shoulders. “After all this time, you finally come up with a juicy question when the answer is right in front of your nose. From the start, I have shown you the way of the peaceful warrior, not the way to the peaceful warrior. As long as you tread the way, you are a warrior. These past eight years you have abandoned your “warriorship” so you could search for it. But the way is now; it always has been.”

  “So what do I do now? Where do I go from here?”

  “Who cares?” he yelled gleefully. “A fool is ‘happy’ when his cravings are satisfied. A warrior is happy without reason. That’s what makes happiness the ultimate discipline — above all else I have taught you. Happiness is not just something you feel — it is who you are.”

  As we climbed into our sleeping bags once more, Soc’s face shone at me in the red glow of the fire. “Dan,” he said softly, “this is the final task I will ever give you, and it goes on forever. Act happy, be happy, without a reason in the world. Then you can love, and do what you will.”

  I was growing drowsy. As my eyes closed, I said softly, “But Socrates, some things and people are very difficult to love; it seems impossible to always feel happy.”

  “Feelings change, Dan. Sometimes sorrow, sometimes joy. But beneath it all remember the innate perfection of your life unfolding. That is the secret of unreasonable happiness.” With these final words, I slept.

  Socrates shook me gently awake just after dawn. “We have a long hike ahead,” he said. Soon we set off into the high country.

  The only sign of Soc’s age or susceptible heart was the slowed pace of his climb. Once again I was reminded of my teacher’s vulnerability and his sacrifice. I could never again take my time with him for granted. As we climbed higher, I remembered a strange story that I had never understood until now.

  A saintly woman was walking along the edge of a cliff. Several hundred feet below her, she saw a dead mother lion, surrounded by crying cubs. Without hesitation, she leaped off the cliff so that they would have something to eat.

  Perhaps in another place, another time, Socrates would have done the same thing.

  We climbed higher and higher, mostly in silence, through sparsely wooded rocky ground, then up to the peaks above the timberline.

  “Socrates, where are we headed?” I asked as we sat for a brief rest.

  “We’re going to a special mound, a holy place, the highest plateau in many miles. It was a burial site for an early American tribe so small that the history books do not record its existence, but these people lived and worked in solitude and in peace.”


  “How do you know this?”

  “I had ancestors who lived among them. Let’s move on now; we must reach the plateau before dark.”

  At this point I was willing to trust Socrates with anything — yet I had an unsettling feeling that I was in grave danger and that he wasn’t telling me something.

  The sun was ominously low; Socrates increased his pace. We were breathing hard now, leaping and clambering from one huge boulder to the next, deep in shadow. Socrates disappeared into a crack between two boulders.

  I followed him down a narrow tunnel formed by the huge rocks, and out again in the open. “In case you come back alone, you’ll need to use this passageway,” Socrates told me. “It’s the only way in or out.” I started to question him, but he silenced me.

  The light was fading from the sky when we climbed over a final rise. There below us lay a bowl-shaped depression surrounded by soaring cliffs, now covered in shadow. We headed down into the bowl, straight for a jagged peak.

  “Are we near the burial site yet?” I asked nervously.

  “We are standing on it,” he said, “standing among the ghosts of an ancient people, a tribe of warriors.”

  The wind began to buffet us, as if to add emphasis to his words. Then came the most eerie sound I’d ever heard — like a human voice, moaning.

  “What the hell kind of wind is that?”

  Without responding, Socrates stopped before a black hole in the face of the cliff and said, “Let’s go in.”

  My instincts were wildly signaling danger, but Soc had already entered. Clicking my flashlight on, I left the moaning wind behind me and followed his faint light deeper into the cave. The flickering beam of my light showed pits and crevices whose bottoms I couldn’t see.

  “Soc, I don’t like being buried this far back in the mountain.” He glared at me. But to my relief he headed out toward the mouth of the cave. Not that it mattered; it was as dark outside as inside. We made camp, and Socrates took a pile of small logs out of his pack. “Thought we might need these,” he said. The fire was soon crackling. Our bodies cast bizarre, twisted shadows, dancing wildly on the cave wall in front of us, as the flames consumed the logs.

  Pointing to the shadows, Socrates said, “These shadows in the cave are an essential image of illusion and reality, of suffering and happiness. Here is an ancient story popularized by Plato:

  “There once was a people who lived their entire lives within a Cave of Illusions. After generations, they came to believe that their own shadows, cast upon the walls, were the substance of reality. Only the myths and religious tales spoke of a brighter possibility.

  “Obsessed with the shadow play, the people became accustomed to and imprisoned by their dark reality.”

  I stared at the shadows and felt the heat of the fire upon my back as Socrates continued.

  “Throughout history, Dan, there have been blessed exceptions to the prisoners of the Cave. There were those who became tired of the shadow play, who began to doubt it, who were no longer fulfilled by shadows no matter how high they leaped. They became seekers of light. A fortunate few found a guide who prepared them and who took them beyond all illusion into the sunlight.”

  Captivated by his story, I watched the shadows dance against the granite walls in the yellow light. Soc continued: “All the peoples of the world, Dan, are trapped within the Cave of their own minds. Only those few warriors who see the light, who cut free, surrendering everything, can laugh into eternity. And so will you, my friend.”

  “It sounds unattainable, Soc — and somehow frightening.”

  “It is beyond attainment and beyond fear. Once it happens, you will see that it is obvious, simple, ordinary, awake, and happy. It is only reality, beyond the shadows.”

  We sat in a stillness broken only by the sound of crackling logs. I watched Socrates, who appeared to be waiting for something. I had an uneasy feeling, but the faint light of dawn, revealing the mouth of the cave, revived my spirits.

  Then the cave was again shrouded in darkness. Socrates stood quickly and walked to the entrance with me right behind. The air smelled of ozone as we stepped outside. I could feel the static electricity raise the hairs on the back of my neck. Then the thunderstorm struck.

  Socrates whirled around to face me. Lightning flashed. A bolt struck one of the cliffs in the distance. “Hurry!” Socrates said, with an urgency I’d not heard before. “There’s not much time left — eternity is not far away.” In that moment, the Feeling came to me — the feeling that had never been wrong — and it said, Beware! Death is stalking.

  Then Socrates spoke again, his voice ominous and strident. “Quickly, back into the cave!” I started to look in my pack for my flashlight, but he barked at me, “Move!”

  I retreated into the blackness and pressed against the wall. Hardly breathing, I waited for him to come get me, but he had disappeared.

  As I was about to call out to him, I was jarred almost unconscious as something viselike suddenly gripped me behind the neck with crushing force and dragged me back, deeper into the cave. “Socrates!” I screamed. “Socrates!”

  The grip on my neck released, but then a far more terrible pain began: my head was being crushed from behind. I screamed, and screamed again. Just before my skull shattered with the maddening pressure, I heard these words — unmistakably the voice of Socrates: “This is your final journey.”

  With a horrible crack, the pain vanished. I crumpled, and hit the floor of the cavern with a soft thud. Lightning flashed, and in its momentary glare I could see Socrates standing over me, staring down. Then came the sound of thunder from another world. That’s when I knew I was dying.

  One of my legs hung limp over the edge of a deep hole. Socrates pushed me over the precipice, into the abyss, and I fell, bouncing, smashing against the rocks, down into the bowels of the earth; then, dropping through an opening, I was released by the mountain out into the sunlight, where my shattered body spun downward, finally landing in a heap in a wet green meadow far, far below.

  The body was now a broken, twisted piece of meat. Carrion birds, rodents, insects, and worms came to feed on the decomposing flesh that I had once imagined to be “me.” Time passed faster and faster. The days flashed by and the sky became a rapid blinking, an alternation of light and darkness, flickering faster and faster into a blur; then the days turned to weeks, and the weeks became months.

  The seasons changed, and the remains of the body began to dissolve into the soil, enriching it. The frozen snows of winter preserved my bones for a moment in time, but as the seasons flashed by in ever more rapid cycles, even the bones became dust. From the nourishment of my body, flowers and trees grew and died in that meadow. Finally even the meadow disappeared.

  I had become part of the carrion birds that had feasted on my flesh, part of the insects and rodents, and part of their predators in a great cycle of life and death. I became their ancestors, until ultimately they, too, were returned to the earth.

  The Dan Millman who had lived long ago was gone forever, a flashing moment in time — but I remained unchanged through all the ages. I was now Myself, the Consciousness that observed all, was all. All my separate parts would continue forever; forever changing, forever new.

  I realized now that the Grim Reaper, the Death Dan Millman had so feared, had been his great illusion. And so his life, too, had been an illusion, a problem, nothing more than a humorous incident when Consciousness had forgotten Itself.

  While Dan had lived, he had not passed through the gate; he had not realized his true nature; he had lived in mortality and fear, alone.

  But I knew. If he had only known then what I know now.

  I lay on the floor of the cave, smiling. I sat up against the wall then gazed into the darkness, puzzled, but without fear.

  My eyes began to adjust, and I saw a white-haired man sitting near me, smiling. Then, from thousands of years away, it all came back, and I felt momentarily saddened by my return to mortal form. Then I rea
lized that it didn’t matter — nothing could possibly matter!

  This struck me as very funny; everything did, and so I started to laugh. I looked at Socrates; our eyes gleamed ecstatically. I knew that he knew what I knew. I leaped forward and hugged him. We danced around the cavern, laughing wildly at my death.

  Afterward, we packed and headed down the mountainside. We cut through the passageway, down through ravines and across fields of boulders toward our base camp.

  I didn’t speak much, but I laughed often, because every time I looked around — at the earth, the sky, the sun, the trees, the lakes, the streams — I realized that it was all Me — that no separation existed at all.

  All these years Dan Millman had grown up, struggling to “be a somebody.” Talk about backward! Dan had been a somebody in a fearful mind and a mortal body.

  Well, I thought, now I am playing Dan Millman again, and I might as well get used to it for a few more seconds in eternity, until this, too, passes. But now I know that I am not only the single piece of flesh — and that secret makes all the difference!

  There was no way to describe the impact of this knowledge. I was simply awake.

  And so I awoke to reality, free of any meaning or any search. What could there possibly be to search for? All of Soc’s words had come alive with my death. This was the paradox of it all, the humor of it all, and the great change. All searches, all achievements, all goals, were equally enjoyable, and equally unnecessary.

  Energy coursed through my body. I overflowed with happiness and burst with laughter; it was the laugh of an unreasonably happy man.

  And so we walked down, past the highest lakes, past the edge of the timberline, and into the thick forest, heading down to the stream where we’d camped two days — or a thousand years — ago.

  I had lost all my rules, all my morals, all my fear back there on the mountain. I could no longer be controlled. What punishment could possibly threaten me? Although I had no code of behavior, I sensed what was balanced, appropriate, and loving. I was finally capable of kindness. He had said it; what could be a greater power?