The Universal Shifts of Consciousness
Carlos Castaneda Information
You
are not Your Physical Body; You are Not the Physical Matter: You are
Energy! And Everything what happened to You, happened for One Good
Reason: to Merge Your Energy with the Energies of Others, with the
Energies of Earths, with the Energies of Universes! The Culmination of
this Mixing Process for this Universe will be in December 2013: the
Final Stage of the Universal Shift!
Sunrise above ocean, March 2010, Australia
Link
to Site Map listing other articles, books and useful websites:
SITE MAP
Any
material inc. pictures can be
taken from this website!
Invisible
to the eye Energy of the New Consciousness of Sun, of New Earth and
Advaced Humanity is building up above Elliott Heads rivermouth,
Australia, 17 Jan, 2010. The Sun is a way higher then this Ball of
Energy in the sky is.
Shifts of Consciousness in
Humans
Carlos
Castaneda wrote a
lot about constant Shifts of Consciousness that humans are experiencing
automatically, but Mexican sorcerers learned how to shift
their
consciousness themselves and get into another universe (mostly
Parallel) on another dimension, on
another wavelength. His
teacher Don Juan was teaching Carlos how to do it and Carlos wrote this
valuable information in his books. It is so much and it is so
interesting, that it would be impossible for me to select this info
from all his books, but you youself can find it in his books. All
C.Castaneda's books in electronic form are or will be available on this
website. But now I would like you to read a small passage about the
process of Shift of Consciousness in humans from one of Castaneda's
books:
"...By details I mean
particular ways of
treating the energy body in order to maintain the assemblage point
fixed on specific positions. Most of the shifts modern-day sorcerers
experience are mild shifts within a thin bundle of energetic luminous
filaments inside the luminous egg, a bundle called the band of man, or
the purely human aspect of the universe's energy. Beyond that band, but
still within the luminous egg, lies the realm of the grand shifts. When
the assemblage point shifts to any spot on that area, perception is
still comprehensible to us, but extremely detailed procedures are
required for perception to be total. Every grand shift has
different
inner workings which modern sorcerers could learn if they knew how to
fixate the assemblage point long enough at any grand shift.
The thought of evil cannot withstand examination. In
the universe
only energy exists; evil is merely a concatenation of the human mind,
overwhelmed by the fixation of the assemblage point on its habitual
position. Logically, there is really nothing to be afraid of. There is
no past or future in the universe. There is only the moment. Think for
a moment, in the universe there is only energy, and energy has only a
here and now, an endless and ever-present here and now.
You have been given an abstract gift: the possibility of
flying on the wings of intent."
The idea of a real, pragmatic journey, taken in dreams, is very
difficult to understand or to accept. The journey of the energy body
depends exclusively on the position of the assemblage point. Our
problem is our cynicism. Cynicism doesn't allow us to make drastic
changes in our understanding of the world."
*******************************
Petty Tyrants
("The Fire From Within")
"We have nothing to discuss about la Gorda or anybody else," he said.
"I told her that just to provoke her enormous self-importance. And it
worked. She is furious with us...Half-complaining, I told him that he
had made me feel very uncomfortable by refusing to talk to me for the
past two days. He looked at me and arched his brows. A smile played on
his lips and vanished. I realized that he was letting me know I was no
better than la Gorda.
"I was provoking your self-importance," he said with a frown.
"Self-importance is our greatest enemy. Think about it - what weakens
us is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of our
fellow
men. Our self-importance requires that we spend most of our lives
offended by someone.
"The new seers recommended that every effort should be made to
eradicate self-importance from the lives of warriors. I have followed
that recommendation, and much of my endeavors with you has been geared
to show you that without self-importance we are invulnerable." her
righteous indignation at having been refused and made to look like a
fool. I wouldn't be surprised if she barges in on us here, at the park
bench...
As I listened his eyes suddenly became very shiny. I was thinking to
myself that he seemed to be on the verge of laughter and there was no
reason for it when I was startled by an abrupt, painful slap on the
right side of my face.
I jumped up from the bench. La Gorda was standing behind me, her hand
still raised. Her face was flushed with anger.
"Now you can say what you like about me and with more justification,"
she shouted. "If you have anything to say, however, say it to my face!"
Her outburst appeared to have exhausted her, because she sat down on
the cement and began to weep. Don Juan was transfixed with
inexpressible glee. I was frozen with sheer fury. La Gorda glared at me
and then turned to don Juan and meekly told him that we had no right to
criticize her.
Don Juan laughed so hard he doubled over almost to the ground. He
couldn't even speak. He tried two or three times to say something to
me, then finally got up and walked away, his body still shaking with
spasms of laughter.
I was about to run after him, still glowering at la Gorda-at that
moment I found her despicable - when something extraordinary happened
to me. I realized what don Juan had found so hilarious. La Gorda and I
were horrendously alike. Our self-importance was monumental. My
surprise and fury at being slapped were just like la Gorda's feelings
of anger and suspicion. Don Juan was right. The burden of
self-importance is a terrible encumbrance.
I ran after him then, elated, the tears flowing down my cheeks. I
caught up with him and told him what I had realized. His eyes were
shining with mischievousness and delight. "What should I do about la
Gorda?" I asked. "Nothing," he replied. "Realizations are always
personal."..."Self-importance can't be fought with niceties,"...
He said that seers, old and new, are divided into two categories. The
first one is made up of those who are willing to exercise
self-restraint and can channel their activities toward pragmatic goals,
which would benefit other seers and man in general. The other category
consists of those who don't care about self-restraint or about any
pragmatic goals. It is the consensus among seers that the latter have
failed to resolve the problem of self-importance.
"Self-importance is not something simple and naive," he explained. "On
the one hand, it is the core of everything that is good in us, and on
the other hand, the core of everything that is rotten. To get rid of
the self-importance that is rotten requires a masterpiece of strategy.
Seers, through the ages, have given the highest praise to those who
have accomplished it."
I complained that the idea of eradicating self-importance, although
very appealing to me at times, was really incomprehensible; I told him
that I found his directives for getting rid of it so vague I could not
follow them.
"I've said to you many times," he said, "that in order to follow the
path of knowledge one has to be very imaginative. You see, in the path
of knowledge nothing is as clear as we'd like it to be."
Don Juan said then that in the strategic inventories of warriors,
self-importance figures as the activity that consumes the greatest
amount of energy, hence, their effort to eradicate it.
"One of the first concerns of warriors is to free that energy in order
to face the unknown with it," don Juan went on. "The action of
rechanneling that energy ? Impeccability."
He said that the most effective strategy was worked out by the seers of
the Conquest, the unquestionable masters of stalking. It consists of
six elements that interplay with one another. Five of them are called
the attributes of warriorship: control, discipline, forbearance,
timing, and will. They pertain to the world of the warrior who is
fighting to lose self-importance. The sixth element, which is perhaps
the most important of all, pertains to the outside world and is called
the petty tyrant...
"A petty tyrant is a tormentor," he replied. "Someone who either holds
the power of life and death over warriors or simply annoys them to
distraction."
Don Juan had a beaming smile as he spoke to me. He said that the new
seers developed their own classification of petty tyrants; although the
concept is one of their most serious and important findings, the new
seers had a sense of humor about it. He assured me that there was a
tinge of malicious humor in every one of their classifications, because
humor was the only means of counteracting the compulsion of human
awareness to take inventories and to make cumbersome classifications.
7. The Assemblage Point
...nagual, being a leader who has tremendous responsibilities, has to
have a physical point of reference, a place where an amenable
confluence of energies occurs. The Sonoran desert was such a place for
him. On entering into heightened awareness, I had noticed that there
was another person hiding in the semidarkness inside the house. I asked
don Juan if Genaro was with him. He replied that he was alone, that
what I had noticed was one of his allies, the one that guarded the
house.Over the years, he had insisted that I measure my body to the
hundredth of an inch and establish its exact midpoint, lengthwise as
well as in width.
He had always said that such a point is a true center of energy in all
of us.
As soon as I had focused my attention on that midpoint, the man let go
of me. At that instant I became aware that what I had thought was a
human being was something that only looked like one. The moment it lost
its human shape to me, the ally became an amorphous blob of opaque
light. It moved away. I went after it, moved by a great force that made
me follow that opaque light.
8. The Position of the Assemblage Point
..."The nagual woman has done that," don Juan said as if reading my
thoughts. "She gazes at these shadows in the afternoons."...
...Don Juan had defined the scope of that path when he said to me that
the new seers are the warriors of total freedom, that their only search
is the ultimate liberation that comes when they attain total
awareness...
...nagual woman when she said that to read poems out loud was the only
release that her spirit had.
...solitude of warriors who live to escape to total freedom...
"Is it possible that warriors are only preparing themselves for death?"
"No way," he said, gently patting my shoulder. "Warriors prepare
themselves to be aware, and full awareness comes to them only when
there is no more self-importance left in them. Only when they are
nothing do they become everything."
...self-importance is the motivating force for every attack of
melancholy. He added that warriors are entitled to have profound states
of sadness, but that sadness is there only to make them laugh. "It has
to do with the position of the assemblage point." Genaro immediately
began to walk around the corridor, arching his back and lifting his
thighs to his chest. ..."The nagual Julian showed him how to walk that
way," don Juan said in a whisper, "it's called the gait of power. I
imitated his gait. We walked once around the patio and stopped. While
walking, I had noticed the extraordinary lucidity that each step
brought to me. When we stopped, I was in a state of keen alertness. I
could hear every sound; I could detect every change in the light or in
the shadows around me. I became enthralled with a feeling of urgency,
of impending action. I felt extraordinarily aggressive, muscular,
daring. My breathing was deep and strangely accelerated, but not in an
abnormal way...they both examined me with great care. I knew what they
were searching for; they wanted to make sure that I had shifted my
assemblage point. I knew that I had because my mood had changed. They
obviously knew it too.
(It seems like this 'Gait of Power' is another way to get to another
dimension/Parallel Earth by shifting your own Assemblage Point, LM).
"Something out there is affecting our senses. This is the part that is
real. The unreal part is what our senses tell us is there. Take a
mountain, for instance. Our senses tell us that it is an object. It has
size, color, form. We even have categories of mountains, and they are
downright accurate. Nothing wrong with that; the flaw is simply that it
has never occurred to us that our senses play only a superficial role.
Our senses perceive the way they do because a specific feature of our
awareness forces them to do so."
He said that the old seers, risking untold dangers, actually saw the
indescribable force which is the source of all sentient beings. They
called it the Eagle, because in the few glimpses that they could
sustain, they saw it as something that resembled a black-and-white
eagle of infinite size.
They saw that it is the Eagle who bestows awareness. The Eagle creates
sentient beings so that they will live and enrich the awareness it
gives them with life. They also saw that it is the Eagle who devours
that same enriched awareness after making sentient beings relinquish it
at the moment of death.
"For the old seers," don Juan went on, "to say that the reason for
existence is to enhance awareness is not a matter of faith or
deduction. They saw it.
"They saw that the awareness of sentient beings flies away at the
moment of death and floats like a luminous cotton puff right into the
Eagle's beak to be consumed. For the old seers that was the evidence
that sentient beings live only to enrich the awareness that is the
Eagle's food."
(Robert Monroe
explained the same subject differently. He described
what he saw on his astral travels. The Emitter emanating beams of
Energy called (M) Field to keep our Universe alive; the function of our
Higher and Total Selves and it has nothing to do with Eagle of Eagle
emanations. Below you will find don Juan's final statement, that there
was no such
a thing like Eagle or Eagle's emanations and it's only man's
interpretation, "what is out there that no living creature can
grasp". Maybe 'Eagle emanations' means (M) Field used by all
living creatures for creating Holograms in our Universe?
R. Monroe wrote about billions of humans being kept in the storage in
one of the non-physical Inner Rings around Earth and you can read much
more about where humans go after the death of the physical body in "Far
Journeys", p. 238-247 in "Cruising the Rings". I advise you to read all
3 books by R.Monroe and they are on this website on 3 links in English)
and 3 links in Russian. There are also a few separate links, which are
discussing the subjects mentioned in his books, like Robert
Monroe info . There is also another thing
I noticed, that the concentration is either
on the warrior himself/
herself or the Mankind at best (not even on both
genders or the planet Earth). There is no desire in don Juan to fix the
attention to the Evolution of the whole Universe. He says nothing about
the Planetary Shift in 2012 and the End of Time and even Mayans knew
that, LM).
"A nagual is someone flexible enough to be anything,"
He went on to say that the new seers, being pragmatically oriented,
became immediately cognizant of the compelling power of the emanations.
They realized that all living creatures are forced to employ the
Eagle's emanations without ever knowing what they are. They also
realized that organisms are constructed to grasp a certain range of
those emanations and that every species has a definite range. The
emanations exert great pressure on organisms, and through that pressure
organisms construct their perceivable world.
"Genaro is the one who should be here telling you about the Eagle," he
said, "except that his versions are too irreverent. He thinks that the
seers who called that force the Eagle were either very stupid or were
making a grand joke, because eagles not only lay eggs, they also lay
turds (a dispeakable person)." Don Juan laughed and said that he found
Genaro's comments so appropriate that he couldn't resist laughter. He
added that if the new seers had been the ones to describe the Eagle the
description would certainly have been made half in fun.
"One of the greatest forces in the lives of warriors is fear," he said.
"It spurs them to learn."
He reminded me that the description of the Eagle came from the ancient
seers. The new seers were through with description, comparison, and
conjecture (evidence based on incomplete evidence) of any sort. They
wanted to get directly to the source of things and consequently risked
unlimited danger to get to it. They did see the Eagle's emanations. But
they never tampered with the description of the Eagle. They felt that
it took too much energy to see the Eagle, and that the ancient seers
had already paid heavily for their scant glimpse of the unknowable.
(Could the Eagle be interpreted as a part of Creative Force on some
higher level, which was trying to delay Earth Planetary Spirit's
Graduation for thousands of years and to hold Humanity on Earth or
around it in the Rings for the approaching Universal and Earth
Planetary Shifts? I would expect
the Eagle to look like a Sun of enormous size, LM).
*********************************
Humans
As Luminous Eggs
Skilled Sorcerers of modern and ancient times achieved the 5th density.
It mean they could live in 3rd, 4th, and 5th Density if they
wished to.
The fascinating information of how the Sorcerers achieved it
is on
this link and is taken from Carlos Castaneda's 10 books. The 1st one is
called "The Art
of Dreaming", written in 1993, especially interesting are the
extracts explaining
how sorcerers see us.
Like with every book, take only
what you need at current level of your development and remember : there
are no perfect writers and there are no perfect books. "The Art of
Dreaming" and "Separate Reality" in electronic form are now available
on this website, see C.Castaneda
Books 1 and C.Castaneda Books 2
links.
I find a strong connection between R.Monroe's, Alex Collier,
Dolores Cannon
and Carlos Castaneda's information.
"Our world is only one in
a cluster of consecutive worlds, arranged like the layers of an onion.
Even though we have been energetically conditioned to perceive solely
our world, we still have the capability of entering into those other
realms, which are as real, unique, absolute, and engulfing as our own
world is. For us to perceive those other realms, not only do we have to
covert them but we need to have sufficient energy to seize them. Their
existence is constant and independent of our awareness, but their
inaccessibility is entirely a consequence of our energetic
conditioning. In other words, simply and solely because of that
conditioning, we are compelled to assume that the world of daily life
is the one and only possible world. Believing that our energetic
conditioning is correctable, sorcerers of ancient times developed a set
of practices designed to recondition our energetic capabilities to
perceive. They called this set of practices the art of Dreaming "(R.Monroe
was using the same word when he was talking about the same subject with
his Inspec friend and here there is a good explanation of the word "Dreaming", LM).
" It's the Gateway to Infinity. Dreaming
can only be experienced. Dreaming is not just having dreams; neither is
it daydreaming or wishing or imagining. Through Dreaming we can
perceive other worlds, which we can certainly describe, but we can't
describe what makes us perceive them (yes, we can if we make a
connection to (M)Field, LM).
Yet we can feel how Dreaming opens up those other realms. Dreaming
seems to be a sensation - a process in our bodies, an awareness in our
minds...Through
Dreaming
we can perceive other
worlds, which we can certainly describe, but we can't describe what
makes us perceive them. Yet we can feel how dreaming opens up those
other realms. Dreaming seems to be a sensation - a process in our
bodies, an awareness in our minds. Dreaming instruction is divided into
two parts. One is about dreaming procedures, the other about the purely
abstract explanations of these procedures: an interplay between
enticing one's intellectual curiosity with the abstract principles of
dreaming and guiding one to seek an outlet in its practices...
...The human psyche is infinitely more complex than our
mundane or academic reasoning has led us to believe...
Every time I entered into Dreaming, I also entered into the second
attention (Astral
attention, LM), and
waking up from Dreaming did not necessarily mean I had left the second
attention (there
is a very interesting animated movie about Dreaming, called "Waking
Up", which could be connected to C.Castaneda books, LM), p. xi :
"For years I could remember only bits of my Dreaming experiences. The
bulk of what I did was energetically unavailable to me. It took me 15
years of uninterupted work, from 1973 to 1988, to store enough energy
to rearrange everything linearly in my mind
(same is with me and many others: our Dreaming experiences are
unavailable to us, because we don't have enough energy to remember
them. The energy has been constantly skimmed off us, LM).
I remember then
sequences upon
sequences of dreaming events, and I was able to feel in, at last, some
seeming lapses of memory. In this manner I captured the inherent
continuity that had been lost to me because of him making me weave
between the awareness of our everyday life and the awareness of the
second attention. This work is the result of that rearrangement."
The second attention is an energetic configuration of
awareness...
In order to appreciate the position of dreamers and dreaming
, one has to understand the struggle of modern-day sorcerers to steer
sorcery away from concreteness toward the abstract. Concreteness is the
practical part of sorcery. The obsessive fixation of the mind on
practices and techniques. And the unwarranted influence over people.
The abstract is the search for freedom, freedom to perceive, without
obsessions, all that's humanly possible. Present-day sorcerers seek the
abstract because they seek freedom; they have no interest in concrete
gains...
... after lifelong discipline and training, sorcerers acquire the
capacity to perceive the essence of things, a capacity they call seeing...
By separating the social part of perception, you'll
perceive the essence of everything. Whatever we are perceiving is
energy, but since we
can't
directly perceive energy, we process our perception to fit a mold. This
mold is the social part of perception, which you have to separate. You
have to separate it because it deliberately reduces the scope of what
can be perceived and makes us believe that the mold into which we fit
our perception is all that exists. For man to survive now,
his
perception must change at its social base. This social base of
perception is the physical certainty that the world is made of concrete
objects. I call this
a social
base because a serious and fierce effort is put out by everybody to
guide us to perceive the world the way we do. (We
are forced to create and reinforce mutually the same holograms of a
city or a village, roads and forests, rivers and oceans, LM).
Everything is energy. The whole universe is energy. The
social base of our perception should be the physical certainty that
energy is all there is. A mighty effort should be made to guide us to
perceive energy as energy, (to
accomodate us to the new conditions of the future: no physicality, the
5th Density, LM)...
This is first the world of energy, then it is the world of objects...
I am
teaching you a new way of perceiving, first, by making you realize we
process our perception to fit a mold and, second, by
fiercely guiding you to perceive energy directly. This
method is very much like the one used to teach us to perceive the world
of daily affairs. Our entrapment in processing our
perception to fit a social mold loses its power when we realize we have
accepted this mold, as an inheritance from our ancestors, without
bothering to examine it. To perceive a world of hard
objects
that had either a positive or a negative value must have been utterly
necessary for our ancestors' survival. After ages of perceiving in such
a manner, we are now forced to believe that the world is made up of
objects. It is unquestionably a world of objects. To prove it, all we
have to do is bump into them (because
they are multilayed holograms and the more layers, the harder the
object is, LM).
We are not arguing that. I
am
saying that this is first a world of energy; then it's a world of
objects. If we don't start with the premise that it is a world of
energy, we'll never be able to perceive energy directly.
We'll always be stopped by the physical certainty of the hardness of
objects. Our way of
perceiving is a predator's way, (the
reptillian part of the brain is responsible for perceiving the world
this way, LM).
There is another mode, the one I am familiarizing you with: the act of
perceiving the essence of everything, energy itself, directly.
To
perceive the essence of everything will make us understand, classify,
and describe the world in entirely new, more exciting, more
sophisticated terms. Terms that correspond to sorcery truths, which
have no rational foundation and no relation whatsoever to the facts of
our daily
world but which are self-evident truths for the sorcerers who perceive
energy directly and see the essence of everything. p. 5 :
"For such sorcerers,
the most significant act of sorcery is to see the essence of the
universe...
From seeing the essence of the
universe resembles incandescent stretched into
infinity in
every conceivable direction, luminous filaments that are conscious of
themselves in ways impossible for the human mind to comprehend. From
seeing the essence of the universe, sorcerers go on to see the energy
essence of human beings and depict human beings as bright shapes that
resemble giant eggs and call them luminous eggs
(and white, LM).
When sorcerers see a
human being they see a giant, luminous shape that floats, making, as it
moves, a deep furrow in the energy of the earth, just as if the
luminous shape had a taproot that was dragging.
Don Juan had impression
that our energy shape keeps on changing through time. He said that
every Seer he knew himself included, saw
that human beings are shaped more like balls or even tombstones than
eggs. But, once in a while , and for no reason known to them, sorcerers
see a person whose energy is shaped like an egg...more akin to people
of ancient times.
The decisive finding of
the sorcerers of antiquity and the crucial feature of human beings as
luminous balls, is a round spot of intense brilliance, the size of a
tennis ball, permanently lodged inside the luminous ball, flush with
its surface, about two feet back from the crest of a person's right
shoulder blade. The luminous ball is much larger than the human body.
The spot of intense brilliance is part of this ball of energy, and it
is located on a place at the height of the shoulder blades, an arm's
length from a person's back. The old sorcerers named it the assemblage
point after seeing what it does. It makes us perceive. In human beings,
perception is assembled there, on that point.
Seeing that all living
beings have such a point of brilliance, (a tiny 4th D Sun, an
assemblage point is like a tuner in the radio: you turn the knob and
get to a new radio station; you move the assemblage point and you'll
get to another world, another frequency, another Density, LM). The old sorcerers surmised that
perception in general must take place
on that spot, in whatever pertinent manner. What they saw that made
them conclude that perception takes place on the assemblage point was
first,
that out of the
millions of the universe's luminous energy filaments passing through
the entire luminous ball, only a small number pass directly through the
assemblage point, as should be expected since it is small in comparison
with the whole.
Next,
they saw that a
spherical extra glow, slightly bigger than the assemblage point, always
surrounds it, greatly intensifying the luminosity of the filaments
passing directly through that glow.
Finally, they
saw two things.
One,
that the assemblage points of human beings can dislodge themselves from
the spot where they are usually located. Two, that
when the assemblage point is on its habitual position, perception and
awareness seem to be normal, judging by the normal behavior of the
subjects being observed. But when their assemblage points and
surrounding glowing spheres are on a different position than the
habitual one, their unusual behavior seems to be the proof that their
awareness is different, that they are perceiving in an unfamiliar
manner.
The conclusion the old sorcerers drew from all this was that the
greater the displacement of the assemblage point from its customary
position, the more unusual the consequent behavior and, evidently, the
consequent awareness and perception. (This
is how MPDed people are created : by manipulating the
position of the Assemblage Point physically, electromagnetically,
chemically, psychologically and by other ways, LM).
Notice that when I talk about seeing , I always say "having
the
appearance of" or "seemed like." Everything one sees is so unique that
there is no way to talk about it except by comparing it to something
known to us. The
most adequate
example of this difficulty is the way sorcerers talk about the
assemblage point and the glow that surrounds it. They describe them as
brightness, yet it cannot be brightness, because seers see them without
their eyes. They have to fill out the difference, however, and say that
the assemblage point is a spot of light and that around it there is a
halo, a glow. We are so visual, so ruled by our predator's
perception, that everything we see must be rendered in terms of what
the predator's eye normally sees. After seeing what the assemblage
point and its surrounding glow seemed to be doing, the old sorcerers
advanced an explanation. They
proposed that in human beings the assemblage point, by focusing its
glowing sphere on the universe's filaments of energy that pass directly
through it, automatically and without premeditation assembles those
filaments into a steady perception of the world. How those filaments are
assembled into a steady
perception of the
world, no one can possibly know. Sorcerers see the movement of energy,
but just seeing the movement of energy cannot tell them how or why
energy moves, (it
is the
energy filaments of (M)Field are coming from Emitter and creating a
hologram in all Densities inc. 3rd Time-Space Density. Then this
(M)Field energy is collected by all living beings for creation of their
own holograms. This is how we are creating worlds, LM).
Seeing that millions of conscious
energy filaments pass through the assemblage point, the
old sorcerers postulated that in passing through it
they come together, amassed by the glow that surrounds it.
After seeing that the glow is extremely dim in people who have been
rendered unconscious or are about to die, and that it is totally absent
from corpses, they were convinced
that this glow is awareness.
"How about the Assemblage Point? Is it absent from a corpse?" He
answered that there is no trace of an Assemblage Point on a dead being,
because the assemblage Point and its surrounding glow are the mark of
life and consciousness.
p.19-20
Sorcerers have seen that there are two types of conscious
beings
roaming the earth, the organic (humans) and the inorganic (aliens). In
comparing one with the other, they have seen that both are luminous
masses crossed from every imaginable angle by millions of the
universe's energy filaments. They are different from each other in
their shape and in their degree of brightness. Inorganic beings are
long and candlelike but opaque, whereas organic beings (Simultaneous,
humans, LM) are round and by far the brighter. Another noteworthy
difference sorcerers have seen , is that the life and consciousness of
organic beings is short-lived, because they are made to hurry, whereas
the life of inorganic beings is infinitely longer and their
consciousness infinitely more calmand deeper. Sorcerers find no problem
interacting with them. Inorganic beings possess the crucial ingredient
for interaction, consciousness. For sorcerers, having life means having
consciousness. It means having an assemblage point and its surrounding
glow of awareness, a condition that points out to sorcerers that the
being in front of them, organic or inorganic, is thoroughly capable of
perceiving. Perceiving is understood by sorcerers as the precondition
of being alive. The inorganic beings must also die. They lose their
awareness just like we do, except that the length of their
consciousness is staggering to the mind. It's very difficult to tell
what is what with them.
The assemblage
point and its surrounding glow are the mark of life and consciousness.
The inescapable conclusion of the sorcerers of antiquity was that awareness and perception
go together and are tied to the assemblage point and the glow that
surrounds it.
...When the
assemblage point is
displaced to another position, a new conglomerate of millions of
luminous energy filaments come together on that point. The
sorcerers of antiquity saw this and concluded that since the glow of
awareness is always present wherever the assemblage point is,
perception is automatically assembled there.
Because of the different position of the assemblage point, the
resulting world, however, cannot be our world of daily affairs. The old
sorcerers were capable of distinguishing
two types of assemblage point displacement.
One
was a displacement to any position on the surface or in the
interior of the luminous ball; this displacement they
called a shift
of the assemblage point.
The other
was a displacement to a position outside the luminous ball;
they called this displacement a movement of the
assemblage point. They found out that the difference between a shift
and a movement was the nature of the perception each allows.
Since the shifts
of the assemblage point are displacements within
the luminous ball, the worlds engendered by them, no
matter how bizarre or wondrous or unbelievable they might be, are still
worlds within
the human domain. The human domain is the energy filaments
that pass through the entire luminous ball. By contrast,
movements of the assemblage point, since they are displacements to
positions outside the luminous ball, engage filaments of
energy that are beyond
the human realm.
Perceiving such filaments engenders worlds that are beyond
comprehension, inconceivable worlds with no trace of human antecedents (ancestors, LM)
in them... See the
assemblage point! It isn't that difficult to see. The difficulty is in
breaking the retaining wall we all have in our minds that holds us in
place. To break it,
all we need is energy. Once we have energy, seeing
happens to us by itself."..."It is just
a matter of having energy, believe me. The hard part is convincing
yourself that it can be done...The marvel of sorcery is that every
sorcerer has to prove everything with his own experience (and hers experience: there
were nagual women
as well; did you notice that most of the books have been written with
only a man on the author's mind, as if women didn't exist or were not
considered humans: like something between an animal and a human being;
I'm glad that the time is changing, LM).
...He (Don Juan) was called the nagual.
It
was explained to me that this concept refers to any person, male or female,
who possesses a
specific kind of energy
configuration, which to a SEER appears
as a
double luminous ball (p.10).
Seers believe that one of these people enters into the sorcerers' world
, that extra load of energy is turned into
a measure of strength and the capacity for leadership. Thus the nagual
is the natural guide, the leader of the party of sorcerers...
I
asked him once if the assemblage point had anything to do with the
physical body. "It has nothing to do with what we normally perceive as
the body. It's part of the luminous
egg, which is our energy self. It
is displaced through energy currents. Jolts of energy, originating
outside or inside our energy shape. These are usually unpredictable
currents that happen randomly, but with sorcerers they are very
predictable currents that obey the sorcerer's intent . Every sorcerer
feels them. Every human being does, for that matter, but
average
human beings are too busy with their own pursuits to pay any attention
to feelings like that (natural
and unnatural
disasters are also doing a lot of displacement of the habitual position
of our Assemblage Points, LM).
p.11 : "What
do those currents feel like?"
"Like
a mild discomfort, a
vague sensation of sadness followed immediately by euphoria. Since
neither the sadness nor the euphoria has any explainable cause, we
never regard them as veritable onslaughts of the unknown, but as
unexplainable, ill-founded moodiness."
When the assemblage
point moves outside the energy shape it pushes the contours of the
energy shape out, without breaking its energy boundaries.
The end result of a
movement of the assemblage point is a
total change in the energy shape of a human being. Instead of a ball or
an egg, he becomes something resembling a smoking pipe.
The tip
of the stem is the assemblage point, and the bowl of the pipe is what
remains of the luminous ball. If the assemblage point keeps on moving, a moment comes when the
luminous ball becomes a thin line of energy.
More About
Assemblage Point
"The
old sorcerers were the only ones who accomplished this feat of energy
shape transformation. And I asked him whether in their new energetic
shape those sorcerers were still men...In what way they were different?
In their concerns. Human endeavours and preoccupations had no meaning
whatsoever to them. They also had a definite new appearance...It's very
hard to tell what was about those sorcerers. They certainly looked like
men. What else would they look like? But they were not quite like what
you or I would expect...
Have you ever met one of
those men, don Juan? What did he look like?
Yes, I have met one. As far as looks , he looked like a
regular
person. Now it was his behaviour that was unusual...the behaviour of
the sorcerer I met is something that defies the imagination...It is
really something you must see to appreciate...those stories portray
them as being quite bizarre. Do
you mean monstrous?
Not at all. They say that they were very
likeable but extremely scary. They were more like unknown creatures.
What makes mankind homogeneous is the fact that we are all luminous
balls. And those sorcerers were no longer balls of energy, but lines of
energy that were trying to bend themselves into circles, which they
couldn't quite make."
Not
all humans have luminous balls. Aliens, who look like
humans, clones, minions and the old sorcerers, who are still
alive
don't usually have luminous ball. We know that reptilians have an
assemblage point which is displaced during sleep and they
return to
their original form: they learnt from experimenting on us how
manipulate their assemblage point to look human. By the way, the
luminous
balls look like an incomplete copy of our Higher Selves: white and
luminous, only human HS's are bigger and more powerful, LM.
What
finally happened to them, don Juan? Did they die?
Sorcerers'
stories say that
because they had succeeded in stretching their shapes, they had also
succeeded in stretching the duration of their consciousness. So they
are alive and
conscious to this day. There are stories about their periodic
appearances on the earth (one
of them was the woman, a death defier in the church, only HeShe had a
shell shaped energy body. To know more about it, read the whole book,
LM).
It is so bizaare for me. I want freedom. Freedom to retain my awareness
and yet disappear into the vastness. In my personal opinion, those old
sorcerers were extravagant, obsessive, capricious men who got pinned
down by their own machinations. But don't let my personal feelings sway
you. The old
sorcerers' accomplishment is unparalleled. If nothing else, they proved to us that man's
(and woman's, LM)
potentials are
nothing to sneeze at.
...Mankind (and womankind, LM) perceives
the world we know, in the terms we do, only because we share energetic
uniformity and cohesion...we automatically attain these two conditions
of energy in the course of our rearing and that they are so taken for
granted we do not realise their vital importance until we are faced
with the possibility of perceiving worlds other than the world we know.
At those moments, it becomes evident that we need a new appropriate
energetic uniformity and cohesion to perceive coherently and totally.
p.14.
...Man/woman's
energetic shape has uniformity in the sense that every human being on
earth has the form of a ball or an egg. And the fact that man's energy holds
itself together as a ball or an egg proves it has cohesion.
An example of a new uniformity and cohesion is the old sorcerers'
energetic shape when it became a line: every one of them uniformly
became a line and cohesively remained a line. Uniformity and cohesion
at a line level permitted those old sorcerers to perceive a homogeneous
new world. The
key to acquiring uniformity and cohesion is the position of the
assemblage point, or rather the fixation of the assemblage point.
Those old sorcerers could have reverted to being egglike but they did
not. And then the line cohesion set in and made it impossible for them
to go back. What really crystallized that line cohesion and prevented
them from making the journey back was a matter of choice and greed. The
scope of what those sorcerers were able to perceive and do as lines of
energy was astronomically greater than what an average man or any
average sorcerer can do or perceive (they
are, probably, those 600 human beings, described by R.Monroe. The
ones who was able to do anything imaginable and unimaginable, LM).
The human domain
when one is an energy ball is whatever energy filaments pass through
the space within the ball's boundaries.
Normally, we perceive not all the human domain but perhaps only one
thousandth of it. If we take this into consideration, the enormity of
what the old sorcerers did becomes apparent; they
extended themselves into a line a thousand times the size of a man as
an energy ball and perceived all the energy filaments that passed
through that line.
... I have no way of explaining what sorcerers
mean by filaments inside and outside the human shape. When seers see
the
human energy shape, they see one single ball of energy. If there is
another ball next to it, the other ball is seen again as a single ball
of energy. The idea of a multitude of luminous balls comes from our
knowledge of human crowds. In the universe of energy, there are only
single individuals, alone, surrounded by the boundless. You must see
that for yourself.
I argued with don Juan then that it was pointless to tell me to see it for myself
when he knew I couldn't. And he proposed that I borrow his energy and
use it to see. How can I do that? Borrow your
energy.
Very simple. I can make your assemblage point shift to another position
more suitable to perceiving energy directly.
This was the first time , in my memory that he deliberately talked
about something he had been doing all along: making me enter into some
incomprehensible state of awareness that defied my idea of the world
and myself, the state he called the
second attention, p.16.
So, to make my assemblage point shift to a position more suitable to
perceiving energy directly, don Juan slapped my back, between my
shoulder blades, with such a force that he made me lose my breath. I
thought that I must have fainted or that the blow had made me fall
asleep (as you can
see to move
the assemblage point, the physical force needed to be used. This way
new Alters are created in a Simultaneous human being, LM).
Suddenly, I was looking or I was dreaming I was looking at something
literally beyond words. Bright strings of light shot out from
everywhere, going everywhere, strings of light which were like nothing
that ever entered my thoughts.
When I recovered my breath, or when I woke up, don Juan expectantly
asked me :"What did you see?"
"Your blow made me see
see stars,"
he doubled up laughing:"I made your assemblage point shift, and for an
instant you were dreaming the filaments of the universe. But you don't
yet have the discipline or the energy to rearrange uniformity and
cohesion. The old sorcerers were the consummate masters of that
rearranging. That was how they saw
everything that can be seen
by man/woman. Rearrange uniformity and cohesion means to enter
into the second
attention
(other than the 3th
Density, LM) by retaining the assemblage point on
its new
position and keeping it from sliding back to its original spot.
Definition of Second
attention. The result of fixing the assemblage point on new
positions. And they treated the second attention
as an area of all-inclusive activity, just as the attention of the
daily world is. Sorcerers really have two complete areas for their
endeavors: a small one, called the first attention or the awareness of
our daily world or the fixation of the assemblage point on its habitual
position; and a much larger area, the second attention or the awareness
of other worlds or the fixation of the assemblage point on each of an
enormous number of new positions.
Don Juan helped me to experience inexplicable things in the second attention
by means of what he called a sorcerers' maneuver : tapping my back
gently or forcefully striking it at the hight of my shoulder blades. He
explained that with his blows he displaced my assemblage point. From my
experiential position, such displacements meant that my awareness used
to enter into a most disturbing stateof unequaled clarity, a state of
superconsciousness, which I enjoyed for short periods of time and in
which I could understand anything with minimal preambles. It was not
quite a pleasing state. Most of the time it was like a strange dream,
so intense that normal awareness paled by comparison...in normal
awareness a sorcerer teaches his apprentices basic conceptsand
procedures and in the second
attention
he gives them abstract and detailed explanations. Ordinarily,
apprentices do not remember these explanations at all, yet they somehow
store them, faithfully intact, in their memories. Sorcerers have used this seeming peculiarity
of memory, and the task of remembering everything that happens to
themin the second attention into one of the most difficult and complex
traditional tasks of sorcery (this
is compartmentalization of memory of Alters described by Cathy O'Brien
in her book "Trance-Formation in America", LM).
Sorcerers explain this seeming peculiarity of memory, and the task of
remembering, saying that every
time anyone enters into the
second attention, the assemblage point is on a different position. To
remember that experience, then, means to relocate the assemblage point
on the exact position it occupied at the time those entrances into the
second attention occurred. Not only do sorcerers have
total and
absolute recall but they relive every experience they had in the second
attention by this act of returning their assemblage point to each of
those specific positions. Sorcerers dedicate a lifetime to fulfilling
this task of remembering...
Learning something in the second attention is
just like learning when we were children. What we learn remains with us
for life.
Entering into the second attention forces you to sustain, for
long periods of time, new positions of your assemblage point and to
perceive coherently in them, that is to say, it forces you to rearrange
your uniformity and cohesion. The
assemblage point becomes very easily
displaced during sleep. Dreams are totally associated with that
displacement. The greater the displacement, the more unusual the dream
or vice versa: the more unusual the dream, the greater the
displacement. Sorcerers view dreaming as an extremely
sophisticated
art; the art of displacing the assemblage point at will from its
habitual position in order to enhance and enlarge the scope of what can
be perceived. The art of dreaming is anchored on five conditions in the
energy flow of human beings.
1. they saw that only the energy
filaments that pass directly through the assemblage point can be
assembled into coherent perception.
2. If the assemblage point is displaced to another position, no matter
how minute the displacement, different and unaccustomed energy
filaments begin to pass through it, engaging awareness and forcing the
assembling of these unaccustomed energy fields into a steady, coherent
perception.
3. In the course of ordinary dreams, the assemblage point becomes
easily displaced by itself to another position on the surface or in the
interior of the luminous egg.
4. The assemblage point can be made to move to positions outside the
luminous egg, into the energy filaments of the universe at large.
5. Through discipline it is possible to cultivate and perform, in the
course of sleep and ordinary dreams, a systematic displacement of the
assemblage point.
Being a by-product of a displacement of the assemblage point,
the
second attention does not happen naturally but must be intended,
beginning with intending it as an idea and ending up with intending it
as a steady and controlled awareness of the assemblage points
displacement.The first step to power is to set up dreaming . To set up
dreaming means to have a precise and practical command over the general
situation of a dream. This control is no different from the control we
have over any situation in our daily lives. Sorcerers are used to it
and get it every time they want or need to. In order for you to get
used to it yourself I taught you to look at your hands while dreaming .
Explanations always call for deep thought. But when you actually
dream, be as light as a feather. Dreaming has to be performed with
integrity and seriousness, but in the midst of laughter and with the
confidence of someone who doesn't have a worry in the world... There
are entrances and exits in the energy flow of the universe... the only
way to intend is by focusing your intent on
whatever you want to intend.
The difference between the dreaming attention and the second
attention
is that the second attention is like an ocean, and the dreaming
attention is like a river feeding into it. The second attention is the
condition of being aware of total worlds, total like our world is
total, while the dreaming attention is the condition of being aware of
the items of our dreams. Dreams are, if not a door, a
hatch into other worlds. As such, dreams are a two-way street. Our
awareness goes through that hatch into other realms, and those other
realms send scouts into our dreams. Those scouts are energy charges
that get mixed with the items of our normal dreams. They are bursts of
foreign energy that come into our dreams, and we interpret them as
items familiar or unfamiliar to us. Dreams are a hatch into other
realms of perception. Through that hatch, currents of unfamiliar energy
seep in. Then the mind or the brain or whatever takes those currents of
energy and turns them into parts of our dreams. Sorcerers are aware of
those currents of foreign energy. They notice them and strive to
isolate them from the normal items of their dreams. They isolate them
because they come from other realms. If we follow them to their source,
they serve us as guides into areas of such mystery that sorcerers
shiver at the mere mention of such a possibility...
The energy
body is the counterpart of the physical body. A ghostlike configuration
made of pure energy. The physical body also is made out of energy.The
difference is that the energy body has only appearance but no mass.
Since it's pure energy, it can perform acts that are beyond the
possibilities of the physical body; such as transporting itself in one
instant to the ends of the universe. And
dreaming is the
art of
tempering the energy body, of making it supple and coherent by
gradually exercising it. Through dreaming we condense the energy body
until it's a unit capable of perceiving. Its perception, although
affected by our normal way of perceiving the daily world, is an
independent perception. It has its own sphere. That sphere is energy.
The energy body deals with energy in terms of energy. There are three
ways in which it deals with energy in dreaming : it can perceive energy
as it flows, or it can use energy to boost itself like a rocket into
unexpected areas, or it can perceive as we ordinarily perceive the
world. To perceive energy as it flows means to see . It means that the
energy body sees energy directly as a light or as a vibrating current
of sorts or as a disturbance. Or It feels it directly as a jolt or as a
sensation that can even be pain. Since energy is its sphere, it is no
problem for the energy body to use currents of energy that exist in the
universe to propel itself. All it has to do is isolate
them, and off it
goes with them. Sorcerers isolate in their dreams scouts from other
realms. Their energy bodies do that.
Of all
the items in the sorcerers' way, the most effective is losing
self-importance . This is indispensable for everything sorcerers do,
and for this reason I put an enormous emphasis on guiding all my
students to fulfill this requirement. Self-importance is not only the
sorcerer's supreme enemy but the nemesis of mankind. Most of our energy
goes into upholding our importance. This is most obvious in our endless
worry about the presentation of the self, about whether or not we are
admired or liked or acknowledged. If we are capable of losing some
of
that importance, two extraordinary things happen to us. One, we free
our energy from trying to maintain the illusory idea of our grandeur;
and, two, we provide ourselves with enough energy to enter into the
second attention to catch a glimpse of the actual grandeur of the
universe.
We are not alone in this world. There are other worlds available
to dreamers , total worlds. From those other total worlds, energetic
entities sometimes come to us...
Life
and consciousness, being exclusively a matter of energy, are
not solely the property of organisms. Another noteworthy
difference sorcerers
have seen , is that the life and consciousness of organic beings is
short-lived, because they are made to hurry, whereas the life of
inorganic beings is infinitely longer and their consciousness
infinitely more calm and deeper. Sorcerers find no
problem interacting
with them. Inorganic beings possess the crucial ingredient for
interaction, consciousness. For sorcerers, having life means having
consciousness. It means having an assemblage point and its surrounding
glow of awareness, a condition that points out to sorcerers that the
being in front of them, organic or inorganic, is thoroughly capable of
perceiving. Perceiving is understood by sorcerers as the precondition
of being alive. The inorganic beings must also die. They lose their
awareness just like we do, except that the length of their
consciousness is staggering to the mind. It's very difficult to tell
what is what with them. Let's say that those beings are enticed by us
or, better yet, compelled to interact with us. The proper thing to do
is to suspend judgment and let things take their course, meaning that
you let the inorganic beings come to you. The difficulty with inorganic
beings is that their awareness is very slow in comparison with ours.
It
will take years for a sorcerer to be acknowledged by inorganic beings.
So, it is advisable to have patience and wait. Sooner or later they
show up. But not like you or I would show up. Theirs is a most peculiar
way to make themselves known.
... Send a feeling of power and confidence to them, a
feeling of strength, of detachment (I would send them a burst of
Laughter, LM). Avoid at any cost sending a feeling
of fear or morbidity. They are pretty morbid by themselves; to add your
morbidity to them is unnecessary, to say the least. They do, at times,
materialize themselves in the daily world, right in front of us. Most
of the time, though, their invisible presence is marked by a bodily
jolt, a shiver of sorts that comes from the marrow of the bones.
In
dreaming we have the total opposite. At times, we feel them as a jolt
of fear. Most of the time, they materialize themselves right in front
of us. Since at the beginning of dreaming we have no
experience
whatsoever with them, they might imbue us with fear beyond measure.
That is a real danger to us. Through the channel of fear, they can
follow us to the daily world, with disastrous results for us. Fear can
settle down in our lives, and we would have to be mavericks to deal
with it. Inorganic beings can be worse than a pest. Through fear they
can easily drive us raving mad. What sorcerers do with the inorganic
beings is mingle with them. They turn them into allies. They form
associations, create extraordinary friendships. I call them vast
enterprises, where perception plays the uppermost role. We are social
beings. We unavoidably seek the company of consciousness. With
inorganic beings, the secret is not to fear them
(now I laugh when I
see them, but not before, LM).
And this must be done
from the beginning. The intent one has to send out to them has to be of
power and abandon...
With a message like this, they'll get so
curious that they'll come for sure. Why should they come to seek you,
or why on earth should you seek them? Dreamers , whether they like it
or not, in their dreaming seek associations with other beings. This may
come to you as a shock, but dreamers automatically seek groups of
beings, nexuses of inorganic beings in this case. Dreamers seek them
avidly. Why would dreamers do that? The novelty for us is the inorganic
beings. And the novelty for them is one of our kind crossing the
boundaries of their realm. T
he thing you must bear in mind from now on
is that inorganic beings with their superb consciousness exert a
tremendous pull over dreamers and can easily transport them into worlds
beyond description. The sorcerers of antiquity used them, and they are
the ones who coined the name allies. Their allies taught them to move
the assemblage point out of the egg's boundaries into the nonhuman
universe. So when they transport a sorcerer, they transport him to
worlds beyond the human domain" (sometimes with their
physical body, LM).
" Dreaming brings down the barriers that surround and insulate
the second
attention (4th
Density and higher, LM).
If the inorganic beings single a dreamer out by reappearing
over and over again in his dreaming , it means that they seek an
association. I've mentioned to you that sorcerers form bonds of
friendship with them. Such a friendship consists of a mutual exchange
of energy. The inorganic beings supply their high awareness, and
sorcerers supply their heightened awareness and high energy. The
positive result is an even exchange. The negative one is
dependency on
both parties. Once they have singled a dreamer out, the
dreamer can
summon them in his normal daily awareness, size them up, and then
decide himself what to do. You summon them by holding your dream view
of them in your mind. The reason they would saturate a dreamer with
their presence in his dreams is that they want to create a memory of
their shape in his mind. You can then use that memory by closing your
eyes and visualize their shape until they are just like they are in
your dreams. When you have them in focus, open your eyes, then get up
and grab one of them and don't let go, no matter how it shakes you. You
drop it and you're done for! If
you feel the inorganic being's energy
like water you are not going to have helping friends among the
inorganic beings, but relationships of annoying dependency. Be, in that
case, extremely careful. Watery inorganic beings are more given
to
excesses. The old sorcerers believed that they were more
loving, more
capable of imitating, or perhaps even having feelings. As opposed to
the other kind, the fiery ones, who were thought to be more serious,
more contained than the others, but also more pompous. My
recommendation is that you vanquish fear from your dreams and from your
life, in order to safeguard your unity. In matters of the inorganic
beings, I am nearly a novice. I refused that part of the sorcerers'
knowledge on the ground that it is too cumbersome and capricious. I
don't want to be at the mercy of any entity, organic or inorganic. By
means of their dreaming contacts with inorganic beings, the old
sorcerers became immensely well-versed in the manipulation of the
assemblage point, a vast and ominous subject. The inorganic beings have
never been my cup of tea. My reason for that is the best reason in the
world: we are antithetical. They love slavery, and I love freedom. They
love to buy, and I don't sell. The best thing to do with inorganic
beings is deny their existence but visit with them regularly and
maintain that you are dreaming and in dreaming anything is possible.
This way you don't commit yourself. If one is to accept that inorganic
beings are as real as people, where, in the physicality of the
universe, is the realm in which they exist? That realm exists in a
particular position of the assemblage point. Just like our world exists
in the habitual position of the assemblage point. Upon
crossing the
first or second gate of dreaming , dreamers reach a
threshold of energy
and begin to see things or to hear voices. Not really plural voices,
but a singular voice. Sorcerers call it the voice of the dreaming
emissary...It's
alien energy. An impersonal force that we turn into a very personal one
because it has a voice. Some sorcerers swear by it. They even see it.
We see it or hear it because we maintain our assemblage points fixed on
a specific new position; the more intense this fixation, the more
intense our experience of the emissary.This force is capable of
materializing itself. It all depends on how fixed the assemblage point
is. But, rest assured, if you are capable of maintaining a degree of
detachment, nothing happens. The emissary remains what it is: an
impersonal force that acts on us because of the fixation of our
assemblage points. Is its advice safe and sound? It cannot be advice.
It only tells us what's what, and then we draw the inferences
ourselves. It's just like I said, the emissary doesn't tell you
anything new. Its statements are correct, but it only seems to be
revealing things to you. What the emissary does is merely repeat what
you already know. You know now infinitely more about the mystery of the
universe than what you rationally suspect. .. Let's say that the
dreaming
emissary is a force that comes from the realm of inorganic beings. This
is the reason dreamers always encounter it. Every dreamer hears or sees
the emissary though very few see it or feel it. I don't have any
explanation for this, besides, I really don't care about the emissary.
At one point in my life, I had to make a decision whether to
concentrate on the inorganic beings and follow in the footsteps of the
old sorcerers or to refuse it all. My teacher helped me make up my mind
to refuse it. I've never regretted that decision. The whole realm of
inorganic beings is always poised to teach. Perhaps because inorganic
beings have a deeper consciousness than ours, they feel compelled to
take us under their wings. I didn't see any point in becoming their
pupil--their price is to high--their price is our lives, our energy,
our devotion to them. In other words, our freedom. They teach things
pertinent to their world. The same way we ourselves would teach them,
if we were capable of teaching them, things pertinent to our world.
Their method, however, is to take our basic self as a gauge of what we
need and then teach us accordingly. A most dangerous affair.
If someone
was going to take your basic self as a gauge, with all your fears and
greed and envy, et cetera, et cetera, and teach you what fulfills that
horrible state of being, what doyou think the result would be? The
problem with the old sorcerers was that they learned wonderful things,
but on the basis of their unadulterated lower selves. The inorganic
beings became their allies, and, by means of deliberate examples, they
taught the old sorcerers marvels. Their allies performed the actions,
and the old sorcerers were guided step by step to copy those actions,
without changing anything about their basic nature. Involvements of
this nature curtail our search for freedom by consuming all our
available energy. If
a sorcerer wants to live in the realm of the
inorganic beings, the emissary is the perfect bridge; it speaks, and
its bent is to teach, to guide. I neither approve of that realm nor
like it. It belongs to another mood, the old sorcerers' mood. Besides,
its teachings and guidance in our world are nonsense. And for that
nonsense the emissary charges us enormities in terms of energy.
Sources of great
pride to us and assumed to be
a natural consequence of our worth--are merely the result of the
fixation of the assemblage point on its habitual place. The more rigid
and stationary it is, the greater our confidence in ourselves, the
greater our feeling of knowing the world, of being able to predict.What dreaming
does is give us the fluidity to enter into other worlds
by destroying our sense of knowing this world. Dreaming is a journey of
unthinkable dimensions, a journey that, after making us perceive
everything we can humanly perceive, makes the assemblage point jump
outside the human domain and perceive the inconceivable. We are back
again, harping on the most important topic of the sorcerers' world; the
position of the assemblage point. The old sorcerers' curse, as well as
mankind's thorn in the side. I say that because both, mankind in
general and the old sorcerers, fell prey to the position of the
assemblage point: mankind, because by not knowing that the assemblage
point exists we are obliged to take the by-product of its habitual
position as something final and indisputable. And the old sorcerers
because, although they knew all about the assemblage point, they fell
for its facility to be manipulated. You must avoid falling into those
traps. Different worlds exist in the position of the assemblage point.
You will have two choices. One, to follow mankind's rationales and be
faced with a predicament: your experience will tell you that other
worlds exist, but your reason will say that such worlds do not and
cannot exist. The other, to follow the old sorcerers' rationales, in
which case you will automatically accept the existence of other worlds,
and your greed alone will make your assemblage point hold on to the
position that creates those worlds. The result would be another kind of
predicament: that of having to move physically into visionlike realms,
driven by expectations of power and gain.
The dreaming
emissary's voice is an impersonal but constant force
from the realm of inorganic beings; thus, every dreamer experiences it,
in more or less the same terms. And if we choose to take its
words as
advice, we are incurable fools. (I don't know about you, but
I heard that voice and I didn't take his advice, I do it my way, like
in the song, LM)
It's the drive
sorcerers use to know, to discover, to be bewildered. Seeing
children's
assemblage points constantly fluttering, as if moved by tremors,
changing their place with ease, the old sorcerers came to the
conclusion that the assemblage points habitual location is not innate
but brought about by habituation. Seeing also that only in adults is it
fixed on one spot, they surmised that the specific location of the
assemblage point fosters a specific way of perceiving.
(an assemblage point
is like a
tuner in the radio: you turn the knob and get to a new radio station;
you move the assemblage point and you'll get to another world, LM).
Through usage,
this specific way of perceiving becomes a system of interpreting
sensory data. Since we are drafted into that system by being born into
it, from the moment of our birth we imperatively strive to adjust our
perceiving to conform to the demands of this system, a system that
rules us for life. Consequently, the old sorcerers were thoroughly
right in believing that the act of countermanding (canceling) it and
perceiving
energy directly is what transforms a person into a sorcerer. I am in
wonder at the greatest accomplishment of our human upbringing: to lock
our assemblage point on its habitual position.
Human
perception is universally homogeneous, because the assemblage points of
the whole human race are fixed on the same spot.
Sorcerers prove all
this to themselves when they see that at the moment the assemblage
point is displaced beyond a certain threshold, and new universal
filaments of energy begin to be perceived, there is no sense to what we
perceive. The immediate cause is that new sensory data has rendered our
system inoperative; it can no longer be used to interpret what we are
perceiving. Perceiving without our system is, of course, chaotic. But
strangely enough, when we think we have truly lost our bearings, our
old system rallies; it comes to our rescue and transforms our new
incomprehensible perception into athoroughly comprehensible new world.
Just like what happens to an apprentice when he gazes at the leaves of
a tree and his dreaming attention comes forth. His perception is
chaotic for a while; everything comes to him at once, and his system
for interpreting the world doesn't function. Then, the chaos clears up
and there he is, in front of a new world. That world exists in the
precise position of his assemblage point at that moment. In order to
perceive it, he needs cohesion, that is, he needs to maintain his
assemblage point fixed on that position. The result is that he totally
perceives a new world for a while.
The old sorcerers discovered, through practice, that
important
as it is to displace the assemblage point, it is even more important to
make it stay fixed on its new position, wherever that new position
might be. If the assemblage point does not become stationary, there is
no way that we can perceive coherently. We would experience then a
kaleidoscope of disassociated images (with
further evolvement and a change for faster and faster
overtones/frequencies of the 4th Density, it would be harder and harder
to have the assemblage point fixed, especially in the cases of mental
diseases and especially with men. In these cases females need to be
more gentle with males adults/children they love, LM).
Not only had the old sorcerers learned to
displace their assemblage points to thousands of positions on the
surface or on the inside of their energy masses but they had also
learned to fixate their assemblage points on those positions, and thus
retain their cohesiveness, indefinitely. We can't talk about the
benefits of that, we can talk only about end results. The cohesiveness
of the old sorcerers was such that it allowed them to become
perceptually and physically everything, for example, a jaguar, a bird,
an insect, et
cetera, et cetera. For them, it was nothing. The old
sorcerers had superb fluidity.
All they needed was the slightest shift of their assemblage points, the
slightest perceptual cue from their dreaming , and they would
instantaneously stalk their perception, rearrange their cohesiveness to
fit their new state of awareness, and be an animal, another person, a
bird, or anything. Sorcerers bring order to the chaos...
Sorcerers don't make up the world they are perceiving; they perceive
energy directly, and then they discover that what they are perceiving
is an unknown new world, which can swallow them whole, because it is as
real as anything we know to be real... But new worlds
exist! They are wrapped one around the other, like the skins of an
onion. The
world we exist in is but one of those skins.
The old sorcerers preferred the
shifts of the assemblage
point, so they were always on more or less known,
predictable ground.
We prefer the
movements of the assemblage point. The old sorcerers were
after the human
unknown. We are after the nonhuman unknown,
that is, freedom from being human.
Inconceivable
worlds that are outside the
band of man but that we still can perceive.
This is where modern sorcerers take the side road. Their predilection
is what's outside the human domain. And what are outside that domain
are all-inclusive worlds, not merely the realm of birds or the realm of
animals or the realm of man, even if it be the unknown man. What I am
talking about are worlds, like the one where we live; total worlds with
endless realms. Those worlds are in different positions of the
assemblage point. But positions sorcerers arrive at with a movement of
the assemblage point, not a shift. Entering into those
worlds is the
type of dreaming only sorcerers of today do. The old sorcerers stayed
away from it, because it requires a great deal of detachment and no
self-importance whatsoever. A price they couldn't afford to pay. For
the sorcerers who practice dreaming today, dreaming is freedom to
perceive worlds beyond the imagination. Freedom is an adventure with no
end, in which we risk our lives and much more for a few moments of
something beyond words, beyond thoughts or feelings. What can be the
driving force to do all this? To seek freedom is the only driving force
I know. Freedom to fly off into that infinity out there. Freedom to
dissolve; to lift off; to be like the flame of a candle, which, in
spite of being up against the light of a billion stars, remains intact,
because it never pretended to be more than what it is: a mere candle.
From time to time a projection from the realm of the inorganic beings,
a current of foreign energy, a scout, will be injected into your
dreams... Scouts
(the inorganic
beings, LM) are more numerous
when our dreams are average, normal ones... When they appear, they are
identifiable by
the strangeness and incongruity surrounding them. Their presence
doesn't make any sense.
Only in average dreams are things nonsensical.
I would say that this is so because more scouts are injected then,
because average people are subject to a greater barrage from the
unknown. In my opinion, what takes place is a balance of forces.
Average people have stupendously strong barriers to protect themselves
against those onslaughts. Barriers such as worries about the self. The
stronger the barrier, the greater the attack. Dreamers, by
contrast,
have fewer barriers and fewer scouts in their dreams...At that
point in your dreaming , scouts are reconnoiterers sent by the
inorganic realm. They are very fast, meaning that they don't stay long.
They come in search of potential awareness. They have consciousness and
purpose, although it is incomprehensible to our minds, comparable
perhaps to the consciousness and purpose of trees. The inner speed of
trees and inorganic beings is incomprehensible to us because it is
infinitely slower than ours. Both trees and inorganic beings last
longer than we do. They are made to stay put. They are immobile, yet
they make everything move around them. Inorganic beings are stationary
like trees. What one sees in dreaming as bright or dark sticks
are
their projections. What one hears as the voice of the dreaming emissary
is equally their projection. And so are their scouts.
The diabolical nature
of the inorganic beings'
realm is that it might very well be the only sanctuary dreamers have in
a hostile universe. It really is a haven for some dreamers. Not for
me... I know what I am. I am alone in a hostile universe, and I have
learned to say, So be it!
The inorganic beings are after our awareness. They'll give us
knowledge, but they'll extract a payment: our total being. Inorganic
beings can't force anyone to stay with them. To live in their world is
a voluntary affair. Yet they are capable of imprisoning any one of us
by catering to our desires, by pampering and indulging us.
Beware of
awareness that is immobile. Awareness like that has to
seek movement,
and it does this, as I've told you, by creating projections,
phantasmagorical projections at times. Inorganic beings hook onto
dreamers ' innermost feelings and play them mercilessly.
They create
phantoms to please dreamers or frighten them. Inorganic beings are
superb projectionists, who delight in projecting themselves like
pictures on the wall. The old sorcerers portrayed the inorganic beings'
world as a blob of
caverns and pores floating in some dark space. And
they portrayed the inorganic beings as hollow canes bound together,
like the cells of our bodies.
The inorganic beings create for dreamers the sense of being unique,
exclusive; plus a more pernicious sense yet: the sense of having power.
Power and uniqueness
are unbeatable as corrupting forces. Watch out!
You can avoid that danger by going to that world a few times, and then
never going back. In the opinion of sorcerers, the universe is
predatorial, and sorcerers more than anyone else have to take this into
account in their daily sorcery activities.
Consciousness
is
intrinsically compelled to grow, and the only way it can grow is
through strife, through life-or-death confrontations.
The awareness of
sorcerers grows when they do dreaming . And the moment it grows,
something out there acknowledges its growth, recognizes it and makes a
bid for it. The inorganic beings are the bidders for that new, enhanced
awareness. Dreamers have to be forever on their toes. They are prey the
moment they venture out in that predatorial universe. To be safe, you
must be on your toes every second! Don't let anything or anybody
decide
for you. That is to say, go to the inorganic beings' world
only when
you want to go. Once you isolate a scout, a tremendous pull may be
exerted on you to go to the inorganic beings' world. You can
consciously stop that pull of the scouts. Always remember, you can
change the course of your dreaming by intending that course. With
practice, your capacity to intend journeys into the inorganic beings'
realm will become extraordinarily keen. An increased capacity to intend
brings forth an increased control over your dreaming attention. This
additional control makes one more daring. Such confidence is very scary
because it is the confidence of a fool.
To be transported bodily is
possible. We are energy that is kept in a specific shape and position
by the fixation of the assemblage point on one location. If that
location is changed, the shape and position of that energy will change
accordingly. All the inorganic beings have to do is to place our
assemblage point on the right location, and off we go, like a bullet,
shoes, hat, and all. It is absurd to trust the inorganic beings. They
have their own rhythm, and it isn't human. Sorcerers' maneuvers are
deadly. I beseech you to be extraordinarily aware. Don't get involved
in having some idiotic confidence in yourself (nothing
would stay staitionary for long in our Universe after the 23rd of March 1994 :
everything is in the process of destruction, captive energy is getting
released and new things are been created. But it might be different in
the neighbouring Inorganic Beings' Universe, LM).
The
unavoidable reaction on the part of the inorganic beings is the attempt
to keep the dreamer in their world. The inorganic beings don't let
anyone go, not without a real fight.
... The
universe behind the second gate is the closest to our own, and our own
universe is pretty crafty and heartless.
So the two can't be
that
different. The universe of the inorganic beings is always ready to
strike. But so is our own universe. That's why you have to
go into
their realm exactly as if you were venturing into a war zone. I don't
mean that dreamers always have to be afraid of that world. Once a
dreamer goes through the universe behind the second gate, or once a
dreamer refuses to consider it as a viable option, there are no more
headaches. Only then are dreamers free to continue. The universe behind
the second gate is so powerful and aggressive that it serves as a
natural screen or a testing ground where dreamers are probed for their
weaknesses. If they survive the tests, they can proceed to
the next
gate;
if they do not, they remain forever trapped in that universe (not
forever, helpers in your cluster, would release them and join them to
the cluster when the time comes to graduate to the higher level, LM).
The inorganic beings are forever in search of awareness
and energy. The inorganic beings cannot lie.
The energy body is like a child who's been imprisoned all its life. The
moment it is free, it soaks up everything it can find, and I mean
everything. Every irrelevant, minute detail totally absorbs the energy
body.
The
position of the assemblage point is like a vault where sorcerers keep
their records. Sorcerers are capable of leaving accurate records of
their findings in the position of the assemblage point. When it comes
to getting to the essence of a written account, we have to use our
sense of sympathetic or imaginative participation to go beyond the mere
page into the experience itself. However, in the sorcerers' world,
since there are no written pages, total records, which can be relived
instead of read, are left in the position of the assemblage point.
With the inorganic beings, once you get to play with them, you
are hooked. They'll always be after you. Or, what's worse yet, you'll
always be after them.
*************************************
This
is an interesting info about the way aliens (both positive and
negative) transport our Physical bodies to higher densities, p. 103:
"He was
only going to tell me how they became lost in that world. He stated
that the nagual Rosendo's miscalculation was to
assume that the Inorganic Beings are not, in the slightest, interested
in women. His reasoning was correct and was guided by sorcerers'
knowledge that the Universe is markedly female and that maleness, being
an offshoot of femaleness, is almost scarce, thus, coveted (strongly
desired)." (Females
move
through densities with much more ease, can get out of traps of negative
worlds, more resilient and have less emotional side effects according
to Carlos Castaneda info, LM)
"Don Juan
made a digression and commented that perhaps that scarcity of males is
the reason for men's unwarranted
dominion on our planet...He said that the nagual Rosendo's plan was to
give instructions to Elias and Amalia exlusively in the second
attention (astral domain). And to that effect , he followed the old
sorcerers' precsribed technique. He engaged a scout, in dreaming, and
commanded it to transport his disciples into the second attention by
displacing their assemblage points on the proper position.
Theoretically, a
powerful
scout could displace their assemblage points on the proper
position with no effort at all. What the nagul Rosendo did not take
into consideration was the trickery of the Inorganic Beings. The scout
(alien) did displaced the assemblage points of his disciples, but it
displaced them on a position from which it was easy to transport them
bodily into the realm of the Inorganic Beings.
"Is it possible, to be transported bodily?" I asked.
"It
is possible," he (Don Juan) assured me." We are energy that is kept in
a specific shape and position by the fixation of the assemblage point
on one location. If that location is changed , the shape and position
of that energy will change accordingly. All the inorganic beings have
to do is to place our assemblage point on the right location, and off
we go, like a bullet, shoes, hat, and all."
"Can this
happen to anyone of us, don Juan?"
" Most certainly. Especially if our sum total of energy is right.
Obviously, the sum total of the combined energies of Elias and Amalia
was something the Inorganic beings couldn't overlook. It is absurd to
trust the Inorganic Beings. They have their own rhythm, and it isn't
human."
************************************
How to do
Recapitulation for
getting your energy back.
To
be ready for a true merging of your dreaming reality and your
daily reality you must recapitulate your life further. The
recapitulation of our lives never ends, no matter how well we've done
it once. The reason average people lack volition in their dreams is
that they have never recapitulated and their lives are filled to
capacity with heavily loaded emotions like memories, hopes, fears, et
cetera, et cetera. Sorcerers, in contrast, are relatively free from
heavy, binding emotions, because of their recapitulation. And if
something stops them, the assumption is that there still is something
in them that is not quite clear. Recapitulating and dreaming go hand in
hand. As we regurgitate our lives, we get more and more airborne. The
recapitulation consists of reliving the totality of one's life
experiences by remembering every possible minute detail of them. It's
the essential factor in a dreamer 's redefinition and redeployment of
energy. The recapitulation sets free energy imprisoned within us, and
without this liberated energy dreaming is not possible. Make a list of
all the people you have met in your life, starting at the present.
Arrange your list in an orderly fashion, breaking it down into areas of
activity, such as jobs you have had, schools you have attended. Then
go, without deviation, from the first person on your list to the last
one, reliving every one of your interactions with them. Recapitulating
an event starts with one's mind arranging everything pertinent to what
is being recapitulated. Arranging means reconstructing the event, piece
by piece, starting by recollecting the physical details of the
surroundings, then going to the person with whom one shared the
interaction, and then going to oneself, to the examination of one's
feelings. The recapitulation is coupled with a natural, rhythmical
breathing. Long exhalations are performed as the head moves gently and
slowly from right to left; and long inhalations are taken as the head
moves back from left to right. This act of moving the head from side to
side is called "fanning the event." The mind examines the event from
beginning to end while the body fans, on and on, everything the mind
focuses on. The sorcerers of antiquity, the inventors of the
recapitulation, viewed breathing as a magical, life-giving act and used
it, accordingly, as a magical vehicle; the exhalation, to eject the
foreign energy left in them during the interaction being recapitulated
and the inhalation to pull back the energy that they themselves left
behind during the interaction. It is more involved than an intellectual
psychoanalysis. The recapitulation is a sorcerer's ploy to induce a
minute but steady displacement of the assemblage point. The
assemblage point, under the impact of reviewing past actions and
feelings, goes back and forth between its present site and the site it
occupied when the event being recapitulated took place, (I
know from my personal experience that recapitulation does wonders and
don't be afraid that you would make a mistake; just follow the
instructions and see, LM). The old
sorcerers' rationale behind the recapitulation was their conviction
that there is an inconceivable dissolving force in the universe, which
makes organisms live by lending them awareness, (this force is (M)Field
energy, accumulated in all living beings for creating their own
holograms, LM).
Construct a jigsaw
puzzle by
recapitulating, without any apparent order, different events of your
life. It'll be a mess if you let your pettiness choose the events you
are going to recapitulate. Instead, let the spirit decide. Be silent,
and then get to the event the spirit points out. There are two basic
rounds to the recapitulation, the first is called formality and
rigidity, and the second fluidity.
When dreaming you are seeing your body you have to establish some
valid guide to find out whether you are actually seeing your body
asleep in your bed. Remember, you must be in your actual room, seeing
your actual body. Otherwise, what you are having is merely a dream. If
that's the case, control that dream, either by observing its detail or
by changing it. Figure out a way to validate the fact that you are
looking at yourself. Use your own judgment. Dreamers have to be
imaginative to move their energy bodies. Sorcerers say that at the
third gate the entire energy body can move like energy moves: fast and
directly. Their energy bodies know exactly how to move. They can move
as they move in the inorganic beings' world. When your energy body
learns
to move by itself, you'll be thoroughly out of the inorganic beings'
reach.
Be impeccable. I have told you this dozens of times. To be
impeccable means to put your life on the line in order to back up your
decisions, and then to do quite a lot more than your best to realize
those decisions. When you are not deciding anything, you are merely
playing roulette with your life in a helter-skelter way.
Sorcerers spend a lifetime consolidating the energy body by
letting it
sponge up everything possible. Until the energy body is complete and
mature, it is self-absorbed. It can't get free from the compulsion to
be absorbed by everything...
Sorcerers displace their assemblage
points through intending and fixate them, equally, through intending .
And there is no technique for intending . One intends through usage.
What
comes next is a sorcerer's gem, the real task; seeing energy in your
dreaming with your energy body. Dreamers have a rule of thumb. If their
energy body is complete, they see energy every time they gaze at an
item in the daily world. In
dreams, if they see the energy of an item,
they know they are dealing with a real world, no matter how distorted
that world may appear to their dreaming attention. If they can't see
the energy of an item, they are in an ordinary dream and not in a real
world. What is a real world? A world that generates energy; the
opposite of a phantom world of projections, where nothing generates
energy, like most of our dreams, where nothing has an energetic effect.
Another definition of dreaming is: a process by which dreamers isolate
dream conditions in which they can find energy-generating elements.
Dreaming is the process by which we intend to find adequate positions
of the assemblage point, positions that permit us to perceive
energy-generating items in dreamlike states... The energy body is also
capable of perceiving energy that is quite different from the energy of
our own world, as in the case of items of the inorganic beings' realm,
which the energy body perceives as sizzling energy. In our world
nothing sizzles; everything here wavers. Determine whether the items on
which you
focus your dreaming attention are energy generating, mere phantom
projections, or generators of foreign energy. Seeing
energy is the
gauge to determine whether or not you are observing your real body
asleep.
In
order to see in dreaming not only do you have to intend
seeing but you have to put your intent into words. You have to speak
up. There are other means to accomplish the same result, but voicing
one's intent is one of the simplest and most direct way. You need to
have patience. You
are learning to do something extraordinary, you are
learning to intend to see in your dreams. Someday you will not have to
voice your intent ; you'll simply will it, silently. If nothing happens
when you voice your intent to see it means that your dream is an
ordinary dream; phantom projections; images that have life only in your
dreaming attention. Don't give up or get discouraged. Keep on trying.
Sooner or later, you'll hit the right note. The drill for
the third
gate of dreaming is to make the energy body move on its own. In special
dreams, our dreaming attention focuses on the daily world, and it moves
instantly from one real object to another in the world. What makes this
movement possible is that the assemblage point is on the proper
dreaming position . From that position, the assemblage point gives the
dreaming attention such fluidity that it can move in a split second
over incredible distances, and in doing so it produces a perception so
fast, so fleeting that it resembles an ordinary dream. When your energy
body is complete and functioning, the implication that you see energy
in your dream is that you are perceiving a real world, through the veil
of a dream. Unless
we see in dreaming , we can't tell a real,
energy-generating thing from a phantom projection.
The world is
like an onion, it has many skins. The world we know
is but one of them. Sometimes, we cross boundaries and enter into
another skin: another world, very much like this one, but not the same.
In the view of sorcerers, the universe is constructed in layers, which
the energy body can cross. Do you know where the old sorcerers are
still existing to this day? In
another layer, in another skin of the onion.
The mystery of the assemblage point is everything in
sorcery. Or rather, everything in sorcery rests on the manipulation of
the assemblage point.
There is an enormous difference between the thoughts and deeds of
the men of antiquity and those of modern men. The men of ancient times
had a very realistic view of perception and awareness because their
view stemmed from their observations of the universe around them.
Modern men, in contrast, have an absurdly unrealistic view of
perception and awareness because their view stems from their
observations of the social order and from their dealings with it. You
are a modern man involved with the views and observations of men of
antiquity. And none of those views and observations are familiar to
you.
A moment
then comes when you are able just to intend seeing
, without saying a word, and actually experience the same result as
when you voice out loud your intent to see. The energy of our world
wavers. It
scintillates (sparkles).
Not only living beings but everything in our
world glimmers with an inner light of its own. The energy of our world
consists of layers of shimmering hues. The top layer is whitish;
another, immediately adjacent to it, is chartreuse; and another one,
more distant yet, is amber. You will see glimmers of them
whenever
items that you encounter in your dreamlike states change shapes.
However, a whitish
glow is always the initial impact of seeing anything
that generates energy. There is an endless number of different hues,
but for the purposes of a beginning order, you should be concerned with
those three. Later on, you can get as sophisticated as you want and
isolate dozens of hues, if you are able to do it. The whitish
layer
is
the hue of the present position of mankind's assemblage point. Let's
say that it is a modern hue. Sorcerers believe that
everything man does
nowadays is tinted with that whitish
glow. At another time, more
distant yet, it made it amber. The color of sorcerers' energy is amber,
which means that they are energetically associated with the men who
existed in a distant past. The
present whitish
hue
may change someday
if man is capable of evolving.
The grand task of sorcerers is to bring
forth the idea that, in order to evolve, man must first free his
awareness from its bindings to the social order. Once awareness is
free, intent will redirect it into a new evolutionary path. Sorcerers
have succeeded in that task. They themselves are the proof. To convince
others of the value and import of evolving is another matter. The other
kind of energy present in our world but alien to it is the scouts
energy, the energy that sizzles. Bear in mind that not every scout you
are going to find belongs to the realm of inorganic beings. Some of the
scouts you will encounter are going to be not from the inorganic
beings' realm but from other, even more distant levels of awareness.
Since scouts are aware of themselves, they make contact with us when we
are awake. But our great misfortune is to have our consciousness so
fully engaged that we don't have time to pay attention. In our sleep,
however, the two-way-traffic trapdoor opens: we dream. And in our
dreams, we make contact. The way to tell whether the scouts are from a
level besides the inorganic beings' world is: the greater their
sizzling, the farther they come from. It sounds simplistic, but you
have to let your energy body tell you what is what. I assure you, it'll
make very fine distinctions and unerring judgments when faced with
alien energy. Unless you know exactly what you are doing and what you
want out of alien energy, you have to be content with a brief glance.
Anything beyond a glance is as dangerous and as stupid as petting a
rattlesnake. Scouts are always very aggressive and extremely daring.
They have to be that way in order to prevail in their explorations.
Once they
focus their attention on us,
we are compelled to go with them. And that, of course, is the danger.
We may end up in worlds beyond our energetic possibilities. There are
many types of scouts, but at a beginning level of energy one can only
focus on three. The first two types are the easiest to spot. Their
disguises in our dreams are so outlandish, that they immediately
attract our dreaming attention. The scouts of the third type are the
most dangerous, in terms of aggressiveness and power, and because they
hide behind subtle disguises. One of the strangest things dreamers
find, which you yourself will find, is this third type of scout. The
most ferocious scout hides behind people in our dreams.
It's annoying
that they are always associated with the dream images of our parents or
close friends. Perhaps that's why we often feel ill at ease when we
dream of them. A rule of thumb for dreamers is to assume that the third
type of scout is present whenever they feel perturbed by their parents
or friends in a dream. Sound advice is to avoid those dream images.
They are sheer poison. Blue energy doesn't sizzle.
It is like ours; it
wavers, but it is blue instead of white.
Blue energy doesn't exist in a
natural state in our world (
what about the sky? LM).
The
deadly scouts of the third type are
bright orange
(I remember R.Monroe
was describing an encounter with an orange colored scout, LM)
The inorganic beings only show themselves at the beginning. After
their scouts take us to their world, there is no necessity for the
inorganic beings' projections. If we want to see the inorganic beings,
a scout takes us there. For no one, and I mean no one, can journey by
himself to their realm. Their world is sealed. No one can enter or
leave without the consent of the inorganic beings. The only thing you
can do by yourself once you are inside is, of course, voice your intent
to stay. To say it out loud means to set in motion currents of energy
that are irreversible. In olden times, words were incredibly powerful.
Now they are not. In the inorganic beings' realm, they haven't lost
their power. There is one last issue related to that world that we
haven't discussed. In the final analysis my aversion to the old
sorcerers' activities is very personal. As a nagual, I detest what they
did. They cowardly sought refuge in the inorganic beings' world. They
argued that in a predatorial universe, poised to rip us apart, the only
possible haven for us is in that realm (not after 23 March 1994, when
The Universal Shift started, LM). They believed that
because it's
true. Since the inorganic beings can't lie, the sales pitch of the
dreaming emissary is all true. That world can give us shelter and
prolong our awareness for nearly an eternity. When the emissary's sales
pitch, even if it's the truth, has no appeal to you, and you are ready
to chance a road that might rip you apart, you will be ready for this
one final statement about that world. The most dreadful statement I can
make. The energy necessary to move the assemblage points of sorcerers
comes from the realm of inorganic beings. This is the truth and the
legacy of the old sorcerers to us. The inorganic beings have us pinned
down to this day. This is the reason I don't like them. I resent having
to dip into one source alone. Personally, I refuse to do it. And I am
trying to steer you away from it. We can't have dealings with them. And
yet we can't stay away from them. My solution has been to take their
energy but not give into their influence. This is known as the ultimate
stalking . It is done by sustaining the unbending intent of freedom,
even though no sorcerer knows what freedom really is. The reason
sorcerers have to take energy from the realm of inorganic beings is
because there is no other viable energy for sorcerers. In order to
maneuver the assemblage point in the manner they do, sorcerers need an
inordinate amount of energy.
For those
maneuvers, sorcerers need loads
of dark, alien energy. They take it from the inorganic beings' world by
the mere act of going to that world... (the closer we coming to 5the
Density, the less sorcerers would need alien energy to visit a
neighbouring universe, LM).
In the
world of daily life, water is an element of the
environment that we use for traveling. Imagine awareness being a
similar element that can be used for traveling. Through the medium of
awareness, scouts from all over the universe come to us, and vice
versa; via awareness, sorcerers go to the ends of the universe.
In a pinch, your energy body is perfectly capable of taking care
of itself.
That means to be able to
add one's total physical mass to the energy body. Using awareness as a
medium to make the journey into another world is not the result of
applying any techniques but is the corollary of intending and having
enough energy to be energetically capable of pulling our physicality
and placing it on the energy body in order to make that
journey. In
order to enter into that
other world your total physical mass has to be
added to your energy body.
Stretch
your arms in front of you, to the sides, and then behind
you. It relaxes the body..."
All the books :
A Separate Reality
Journey to Ixtlan
Tales Of Power
The Second Ring of Power
The Eagle's Gift
The Fire From Within
The Power of Silence
The Art of Dreaming
The Active Side of Infinity
The Teachings of don Juan
You can reach 10 books of Castaneda on this website :
http://panworld.net/~rmace/castaneda/donjuan9.html
Below
you will find the extracts from 10 books of Carlos Castaneda, but on
separate links on this website there are almost all his books in full.
You
think about yourself too much and that gives you a strange fatigue that
makes you shut off the world around you and cling to your arguments. A
light and amenable disposition is needed in order to withstand the
impact and the strangeness of the knowledge I am teaching you. Feeling
important makes one heavy, clumsy, and vain. To be a man of knowledge
one needs to be light and fluid. One has to reduce to a minimum all
that is unnecessary in one's life. Once you decide something put all
your petty fears away. Your decision should vanquish them. I will tell
you time and time again, the most effective way to live is as a
warrior. Worry and think before you make any decision, but once you
make it, be on your way free from worries or thoughts; there will be a
million other decisions still awaiting you. That's the warrior's way. A
warrior thinks of his death when things become unclear. The idea of
death is the only thing that tempers our spirit. To be a warrior you
have to be crystal clear. My acts are sincere but they are only the
acts of an actor because everything I do is controlled folly.
Everything I do in regard to myself and my fellow men is folly, because
nothing matters. Certain things in your life matter to you because
they're important; your acts are certainly important to you, but for
me, not a single thing is important any longer, neither my acts nor the
acts of any of my fellow men. I go on living though, because I have my
will . Because I have tempered my will throughout my life until it's
neat and wholesome and now it doesn't matter to me that nothing
matters. My will controls the folly of my life.
Once a man learns to
see he finds himself alone in the world with nothing but folly. Your
acts, as well as the acts of your fellow men in general, appear to be
important to you because you have learned to think they are important.
We learn to think about everything, and then we train our eyes to look
as we think about the things we look at. We look at ourselves already
thinking that we are important. And therefore we've got to feel
important! But then when a man learns to see , he realizes that he can
no longer think about the things he looks at, and if he cannot think
about what he looks at everything becomes unimportant. Everything is
equal and therefore unimportant. We need to look with our eyes to
laugh. When our eyes see , everything is so equal that nothing is
funny. My laughter, as well as everything I do is real but it also is
controlled folly because it is useless; it changes nothing and yet I
still do it. One must always choose the path with heart in order to be
at one's best, perhaps so one can always laugh. You don't understand me
now because of your habit of thinking as you look and thinking as you
think. By "thinking" I mean the constant idea that we have of
everything in the world. Seeing dispels that habit and until you learn
to see you will not really understand what I mean. Our lot as men is to
learn. I have learned to see and I tell you that nothing really
matters. A man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about
acting, nor by thinking about what he will think when he has finished
acting. A man of knowledge chooses a path with heart and follows it;
and then he looks and rejoices and laughs; and then he sees and knows.
He knows that his life will be over altogether too soon; he knows that
he, as well as everybody else, is not going anywhere; he knows, because
he sees , that nothing is more important than anything else. In other
words, a man of knowledge has no honor, no dignity, no family, no name,
no country, but only life to be lived, and under these circumstances
his only tie to his fellow men is his controlled folly. Thus a man of
knowledge endeavors, and sweats, and puffs, and if one looks at him he
is just like any ordinary man, except that the folly of his life is
under control. Nothing being more important than anything else, a man
of knowledge chooses any act, and acts it out as if it matters to him.
His controlled folly makes him say that what he does matters and makes
him act as if it did, and yet he knows that it doesn't; so
when he
fulfills his acts he retreats in peace, and whether his acts were good
or bad, or worked or didn't, is in no way part of his concern. You
think about your acts, therefore you have to believe your acts are as
important as you think they are, when in reality nothing of what one
does is important. Nothing! But then if nothing really matters, as you
ask me, how can I go on living? It would be simple to die; that's what
you say and believe, because you're thinking about life, just as you're
thinking now what seeing would be like. You want me to describe it to
you so you can begin to think about it, the way you do with everything
else. In the case of seeing , however, thinking is not the issue at
all, so I cannot tell you what it is like to see . Now you want me to
describe the reasons for my controlled folly and I can only tell you
that controlled folly is very much like seeing ; it is something you
cannot think about. Our lot as men is to learn and, as I've said, one
goes to knowledge as one goes to war; with fear, with respect, aware
that one is going to war, and with absolute confidence in oneself. Put
your trust in yourself. There's no emptiness in the life of a man of
knowledge, everything is filled to the brim and everything is equal.
For me there is no victory, or defeat, or emptiness. Everything is
filled to the brim and everything is equal and my struggle is worth my
while. In order to become a man of knowledge one must be a warrior. One
must strive without giving up, without a complaint, without flinching,
until one sees , only to realize then that nothing matters. You're too
concerned with liking people or with being liked yourself. A man of
knowledge likes, that's all. He likes whatever or whoever he wants, but
he uses his controlled folly to be unconcerned about it. My controlled
folly applies only to myself and to the acts I perform while in the
company of my fellow men. You must talk to the plants you're going to
pick before you pick them. In order to see the plants you must talk to
them personally, you must get to know them individually; then the
plants can tell you anything you care to know about them. You fail to
understand that I am not joking. When a sorcerer attempts to see , he
attempts to gain power. You think everything in the world is simple to
understand because everything you do is a routine that is simple to
understand.
You have to have an unbending intent in order to become a man of
knowledge. * * A warrior takes responsibility for his acts; for the
most trivial of his acts. He waits patiently, knowing that he is
waiting, and knowing what he is waiting for. That is the warrior's way.
What makes us unhappy is to want. Yet if we would learn to cut our
wants to nothing, the smallest thing we'd get would be a true gift. To
be poor or wanting is only a thought; and so is to hate, or to be
hungry, or to be in pain. They are only thoughts for me now, I have
accomplished that feat. The power to do that is all we have, mind you,
to oppose the forces of our lives; without that power we are dregs,
dust in the wind. It is up to us as single individuals to oppose the
forces of our lives. Only a warrior can survive. A warrior knows that
he is waiting and what he is waiting for; and while he waits he wants
nothing and thus whatever little thing he gets is more than he can
take. If he needs to eat he finds a way, because he is not hungry; if
something hurts his body he finds a way to stop it, because he is not
in pain. To be hungry or to be in pain means that the man has abandoned
himself and is no longer a warrior; and the forces of his hunger and
pain will destroy him. * * * The countless paths one traverses in one's
life are all equal. Oppressors and oppressed meet at the end, and the
only thing that prevails is that life was altogether too short for
both. You must act like a warrior. One learns to act like a warrior by
acting, not by talking. A warrior has only his will and his patience
and with them he builds anything he wants. You have no more time for
retreats or for regrets. You only have time to live like a warrior and
work for patience and will . Will is something very special. It happens
mysteriously. There is no real way of telling how one uses it, except
that the results of using the will are astounding. Perhaps the first
thing that one should do is to know that one can develop the will . A
warrior knows that and proceeds to wait for it. A warrior knows that he
is waiting and knows what he is
waiting for. It is very difficult,
if not impossible, for the average man to know what he is waiting for.
A warrior, however, has no problems; he knows that he is waiting for
his will . Will is something very clear and powerful which can direct
our acts. Will is something a man uses, for instance, to win a battle
which he, by all calculations, should lose. It is not what we call
courage. Courage is something else. Men of courage are dependable men,
noble men perennially surrounded by people who flock around them and
admire them; yet very few men of courage have will . Usually they are
fearless men who are given to performing daring common-sense acts; most
of the time a courageous man is also fearsome and feared. Will , on the
other hand, has to do with astonishing feats that defy our common
sense. You may say that it is a kind of control. Will is not what one
calls "will power." Denying oneself certain things with "will power,"
is an indulgence and I don't recommend anything of the kind. The
indulgence of denying is by far the worst; it forces us to believe we
are doing great things, when in effect we are only fixed within
ourselves. Will is a power. And since it is a power it has to be
controlled and tuned and that takes time. When I was your age I was as
impulsive as you. Yet I have changed. Our will operates in spite of our
indulgence. For example your will is already opening your gap, little
by little. There is a gap in us; like the soft spot on the head of a
child which closes with age, this gap opens as one develops one's will
. It's an opening. It allows a space for the will to shoot out, like an
arrow. What a sorcerer calls will is a power within ourselves. It is
not a thought, or an object, or a wish. An act of "will power" is not
will because such an act needs thinking and wishing. Will is what can
make you succeed when your thoughts tell you that you're defeated. Will
is a force which is the true link between men and the world. The world
is whatever we perceive, in any manner we may choose to perceive.
Perceiving the world entails a process of apprehending whatever
presents itself to us. This particular perceiving is done with our
senses and with our will . Will is a relation between ourselves and the
perceived world. What the average man calls will is character and
strong disposition. What a sorcerer calls will is a force that comes
from within and attaches itself to the world out there. One can
perceive the world with the senses as well as with the will .
An
average man can "grab" the things of the world only with his hands, or
his senses, but a sorcerer can grab them also with his will . I cannot
really describe how it is done, but you yourself, for instance, cannot
describe to me how you hear. It happens that I am also capable of
hearing, so we can talk about what we hear, but not about how we hear.
A sorcerer uses his will to perceive the world. That perceiving,
however, is not like hearing. When we look at the world or when we hear
it, we have the impression that it is out there and that it is real.
When we perceive the world with our will we know that the world is not
as "out there" or as "real" as we think. Will is a force, a power.
Seeing is not a force, but rather a way of getting through things. A
sorcerer may have a very strong will and yet he may not see ; which
means that only a man of knowledge perceives the world with his senses
and with his will and also with his seeing . Now you know you are
waiting for your will . You still don't know what it is, or how it
could happen to you. So watch carefully everything you do. The very
thing that could help you develop your will is amidst all the little
things you do. * * * When a man embarks on the paths of sorcery he
becomes aware, in a gradual manner, that ordinary life has been forever
left behind; that knowledge is indeed a frightening affair; that the
means of the ordinary world are no longer a buffer for him; and that he
must adopt a new way of life if he is going to survive. The first thing
he ought to do, at that point, is to want to become a warrior. The
frightening nature of knowledge leaves one no alternative but to become
a warrior. By the time knowledge becomes a frightening affair the man
also realizes that death is the irreplaceable partner that sits next to
him on the mat. Every bit of knowledge that becomes power has death as
its central force. Death lends the ultimate touch and whatever is
touched by death indeed becomes power. A man who follows the paths of
sorcery is confronted with imminent annihilation every turn of the way,
and unavoidably he becomes keenly aware of his death. Without the
awareness of death he would be only an ordinary man involved in
ordinary acts. He would lack the necessary potency, the necessary
concentration that transforms one's ordinary time on earth into magical
power. Thus to be a warrior a man has to be, first of all, and
rightfully
so, keenly aware of his own death. But to be concerned with death would
force any one of us to focus on the self and that would be
debilitating. So the next thing one needs to be a warrior is
detachment. The idea of imminent death, instead of becoming an
obsession, becomes an indifference. Now you must detach yourself;
detach yourself from everything. Only the idea of death makes a man
sufficiently detached so he is incapable of abandoning himself to
anything. Only the idea of death makes a man sufficiently detached so
he can't deny himself anything. A man of that sort, however, does not
crave, for he has acquired a silent lust for life and for all things of
life. He knows his death is stalking him and won't give him time to
cling to anything, so he tries, without craving, all of everything. A
detached man, who knows he has no possibility of fencing off his death,
has only one thing to back himself with: the power of his decisions. He
has to be, so to speak, the master of his choices. He must fully
understand that his choice is his responsibility and once he makes it
there is no longer time for regrets or recriminations. His decisions
are final, simply because his death does not permit him time to cling
to anything. And thus with an awareness of his death, with his
detachment, and with the power of his decisions a warrior sets his life
in a strategical manner. The knowledge of his death guides him and
makes him detached and silently lusty; the power of his final decisions
makes him able to choose without regrets and what he chooses is always
strategically the best; and so he performs everything he has to with
gusto and lusty efficiency. When a man behaves in such a manner one may
rightfully say that he is a warrior and has acquired patience. When a
warrior has acquired patience he is on his way to will . He knows how
to wait. His death sits with him on his mat, they are friends. His
death advises him, in mysterious ways, how to choose, how to live
strategically. And the warrior waits! I would say that the warrior
learns without any hurry because he knows he is waiting for his will ;
and one day he succeeds in performing something ordinarily quite
impossible to accomplish. He may not even notice his extraordinary
deed. But as he keeps on performing impossible acts, or as impossible
things keep on happening to him, he becomes
aware that a sort of
power is emerging. A power that comes out of his body as he progresses
on the path of knowledge. He notices that he can actually touch
anything he wants with a feeling that comes out of his body from a spot
right below or right above his navel. That feeling is the will , and
when he is capable of grabbing with it, one can rightfully say that the
warrior is a sorcerer, and that he has acquired will . A man can go
still further than that; a man can learn to see . Upon learning to see
he no longer needs to live like a warrior, nor be a sorcerer. Upon
learning to see a man becomes everything by becoming nothing. He, so to
speak, vanishes and yet he's there. I would say that this is the time
when a man can be or can get anything he desires. But he desires
nothing, and instead of playing with his fellow men like they were
toys, he meets them in the midst of their folly. The only difference
between them is that a man who sees controls his folly, while his
fellow men can't. A man who sees has no longer an active interest in
his fellow men. Seeing has already detached him from absolutely
everything he knew before. Don't let the idea of being detached from
everything you know give you the chills. The thing which should give
you the chills is not to have anything to look forward to but a
lifetime of doing that which you have always done. Think of the man who
plants corn year after year until he's too old and tired to get up, so
he lies around like an old dog. His thoughts and feelings, the best of
him, ramble aimlessly to the only things he has ever done, to plant
corn. For me that is the most frightening waste there is. We are men
and our lot is to learn and to be hurled into inconceivable new worlds.
Seeing is for impeccable men. Temper your spirit now, become a warrior,
learn to see , and then you'll know that there is no end to the new
worlds for our vision. When you see there are no longer familiar
features in the world. Everything is new. Everything has never happened
before. The world is incredible! Everything you gaze at becomes
nothing! Things don't disappear they don't vanish, they simply became
nothing and yet they are still there. Seeing makes one realize the
unimportance of everything.
Seeing is learned by seeing. * * * A
warrior treats everything with respect and does not trample on anything
unless he has to. He does not abandon himself to anything, not even to
his death. He is not a willing partner and not available, and if he
involves himself with something, you can be sure that he is aware of
what he is doing. For a warrior there is nothing out of control. Life
for a warrior is an exercise in strategy. But you want to find the
meaning of life. A warrior doesn't care about meanings. He would set
his life strategically. Thus if he couldn't avoid an accident he would
find means to offset his handicap, or avoid its consequences, or battle
against them. He would be battling to the end. A warrior is never
available; never is he standing on the road waiting to be clobbered.
Thus he cuts to a minimum his chances of the unforeseen. A warrior is
never idle and never in a hurry. * * * When a man learns to see , not a
single thing he knows prevails. Not a single one. Nothing is known;
nothing remains as we used to know it when we didn't see . A warrior
lives strategically and never carries loads he cannot handle. * * *
Nothing is pending in the world, nothing is finished, yet nothing is
unresolved. * * * The path of knowledge is a forced one. In order to
learn we must be spurred. In the path of knowledge we are always
fighting something, avoiding something, prepared for something; and
that something is always inexplicable, greater, more powerful than us.
The inexplicable forces will come to you. Later on it'll be your own
ally, so there is nothing you can do now but to prepare yourself for
the struggle. The world is indeed full of frightening things and we are
helpless creatures surrounded by forces that are inexplicable and
unbending. The average man, in ignorance, believes that those forces
can be explained or changed; he doesn't really know how to do that, but
he expects that the actions of mankind will explain them or change them
sooner or later. A
sorcerer, on the other hand, does not think of
explaining or changing them; instead, he learns to use such forces by
redirecting himself and adapting to their direction. That's his trick.
There is very little to sorcery once you find out its trick. A
sorcerer, by opening himself to knowledge, falls prey to those forces
and has only one means of balancing himself, his will ; thus he must
feel and act like a warrior. I will repeat this once more: Only as a
warrior can one survive the path of knowledge. What helps a sorcerer
live a better life is the strength of being a warrior. It is my
commitment to teach you to see . I am compelled, therefore, to teach
you to feel and act like a warrior. To see without first being a
warrior would make you weak; it would give you a false meekness, a
desire to retreat; your body would decay because you would become
indifferent. It is my personal commitment to make you a warrior so you
won't crumble. A warrior should be prepared only to battle. His spirit
is not geared to indulging and complaining, nor is it geared to winning
or losing. The spirit of a warrior is geared only to struggle, and
every struggle is a warrior's last battle on earth. Thus the outcome
matters very little to him. In his last battle on earth a warrior lets
his spirit flow free and clear. And as he wages his battle, knowing
that his will is impeccable, a warrior laughs and laughs. A warrior
selects the items that make his world. He selects deliberately, for
every item he chooses is a shield that protects him from the onslaughts
of the forces he is striving to use. The average man who is equally
surrounded by those inexplicable forces is oblivious to them because he
has other kinds of special shields to protect himself. People are busy
doing that which people do. Those are their shields. Whenever a
sorcerer has an encounter with any of those inexplicable and unbending
forces we will talk about, his gap opens, making him more susceptible
to his death than he ordinarily is. We die through that gap, therefore
if it is open one should have his will ready to fill it; that is, if
one is a warrior. If one is not a warrior, like yourself, then one has
no other recourse but to use the activities of daily life to take one's
mind away from the fright of the encounter and thus to allow one's gap
to close. Act like a warrior and select the items of your world. You
cannot surround yourself with things helter-skelter any longer.
I
tell you this in a most serious vein. A warrior encounters those
inexplicable and unbending forces because he is deliberately seeking
them, thus he is always prepared for the encounter. The first thing you
must do, then, is be prepared. A warrior takes the responsibility of
protecting his life. Then if any of those forces tap him and open his
gap, he must deliberately strive to close it by himself. For that
purpose he must have a selected number of things that give him great
peace and pleasure, things which he can deliberately use to take his
thoughts from his fright and close his gap and make him solid. In his
day-to-day life a warrior chooses to follow the path with heart. It is
the consistent choice of the path with heart which makes a warrior
different from the average man. He knows that a path has heart when he
is one with it, when he experiences a great peace and pleasure
traversing its length. The things a warrior selects to make his shields
are the items of a path with heart. You must surround yourself with the
items of a path with heart and you must refuse the rest. * * * You must
stop talking to yourself. Every one of us does that. We carry on an
internal talk. We talk about our world. In fact we maintain our world
with our internal talk. Whenever we finish talking to ourselves the
world is always as it should be. We renew it, we kindle it with life,
we uphold it with our internal talk. Not only that, but we also choose
our paths as we talk to ourselves. Thus we repeat the same choices over
and over until the day we die, because we keep on repeating the same
internal talk over and over until the day we die. A warrior is aware of
this and strives to stop his talking. This is the last point you have
to know if you want to live like a warrior. First of all you must use
your ears to take some of the burden from your eyes. We have been using
our eyes to judge the world since the time we were born. We talk to
others and to ourselves mainly about what we see. A warrior is aware of
that and listens to the world; he listens to the sounds of the world.
He is aware that the world will change as soon as he stops talking to
himself and he must be prepared for that monumental jolt. The world is
such-and-such or so-and-so only because we tell ourselves that that is
the way it is. If we stop telling ourselves that the world is
so-and-so, the world will stop being
so-and-so. You must start
slowly to undo the world. Your problem is that you confuse the world
with what people do. The things people do are the shields against the
forces that surround us; what we do as people gives us comfort and
makes us feel safe; what people do is rightfully very important, but
only as a shield. We never learn that the things we do as people are
only shields and we let them dominate and topple our lives. In fact I
could say that for mankind, what people do is greater and more
important than the world itself. The world is all that is encased here;
life, death, people, the allies, and everything else that surrounds us.
The world is incomprehensible. We won't ever understand it; we won't
ever unravel its secrets. Thus we must treat it as it is, a sheer
mystery! An average man doesn't do this, though. The world is never a
mystery for him, and when he arrives at old age he is convinced he has
nothing more to live for. An old man has not exhausted the world. He
has exhausted only what people do. But in his stupid confusion he
believes that the world has no more mysteries for him. What a wretched
price to pay for our shields! A warrior is aware of this confusion and
learns to treat things properly. The things that people do cannot under
any conditions be more important than the world. And thus a warrior
treats the world as an endless mystery and what people do as an endless
folly. Focus all your attention on listening to sounds and do your best
to find the holes between the sounds. Stay in complete alertness.
Everything is meaningful for a sorcerer. The sounds have holes in them
and so does everything around you. Ordinarily a man does not have the
speed to catch the holes, and thus he goes through life without
protection. The worms, the birds, the trees, all of them can tell us
unimaginable things if only one could have the speed to grasp their
message. Fright is something one can never get over. A warrior cannot
indulge, thus he cannot die of fright. Your difficulty is that you want
to understand everything, and that is not possible. If you insist on
understanding you're not considering your entire lot as a human being.
Your stumbling block is
intact. Understanding is only a very small
affair, so very small--yet sober understanding is vital. * * * Only by
acting can one become a sorcerer. You now have the need to live like a
warrior.
There
is no need for us to say anything about others. There is no need for
you or for me to regard other's actions in our thoughts one way or
another. The worst thing we can do is to force people to agree with us.
I mean that we shouldn't try to impose our will when people don't
behave the way we want them to. The worst thing one can do is to
confront human beings bluntly. A warrior proceeds strategically. If one
wants to stop our fellow men one must always be outside the circle that
presses them. That way one can always direct the pressure. * * * Fright
never injures anyone. * * * What injures the spirit is having someone
always on your back, beating you, telling you what to do and what not
to do. People hardly ever realize that we can cut anything from our
lives, any time, just like that. For example, smoking and drinking are
nothing. Nothing at all if we want to drop them. Only one thing is
indispensable for anything we do; the spirit. One can't do without the
spirit. I have no routines or personal history. One day I found out
that they were no longer necessary for me and, like drinking, I dropped
them. One must have the desire to drop them and then one must proceed
harmoniously to chop them off, little by little. If you have no
personal history, no explanations are needed; nobody is angry or
disillusioned with your acts. And above all no one pins you down with
their thoughts. It is best to erase all personal history because that
makes us free from the encumbering thoughts of other people. I have,
little by little, created a fog around me and my life. And now nobody
knows for sure who I am or what I do. Not even I. How can I know who I
am, when I am all this? Little by little you must create a fog around
yourself; you must erase everything around you until nothing can be
taken
for granted, until nothing is any longer for sure, or real.
Your problem now is that you're too real. Your endeavors are too real;
your moods are too real. Don't take things so for granted. You must
begin to erase yourself. You've said that you want to learn about
plants. Let's put it this way then. If you want to learn about plants,
since there is really nothing to say about them, you must, among other
things, erase your personal history. Begin with simple things, such as
not revealing what you really do. What's wrong is that once people know
you, you are an affair taken for granted and from that moment on you
won't be able to break the tie of their thoughts. I personally like the
ultimate freedom of being unknown. No one knows me with steadfast
certainty, the way people know you, for instance. From now on you must
simply show people whatever you care to show them, but without ever
telling exactly how you've done it. You see, we only have two
alternatives; we either take everything for sure and real, or we don't.
If we follow the first, we end up bored to death with ourselves and
with the world. If we follow the second and erase personal history, we
create a fog around us, a very exciting and mysterious state in which
nobody knows where the rabbit will pop out, not even ourselves. When
nothing is for sure we remain alert, perennially on our toes. It is
more exciting not to know which bush the rabbit is hiding behind than
to behave as though we know everything. * * You have to curl your
fingers gently as you walk in order to keep your attention on the trail
and the surroundings. Your ordinary way of walking is debilitating and
you should never carry anything in your hands. If things have to be
carried one should use a knapsack or any sort of carrying net or
shoulder bag. By forcing the hands into a specific position one is
capable of greater stamina and greater awareness. If you really want to
learn, you have to remodel most of your behavior. You take yourself too
seriously. You are too damn important in your own mind. That must be
changed! You are so goddamn important that you feel justified to be
annoyed with everything. You're so damn important that you can afford
to leave if things don't go your way. I suppose you think that shows
you have character. That's nonsense! You're weak, and conceited! In the
course of your life you have not
ever finished anything because of
that sense of disproportionate importance that you attach to yourself.
Self-importance is another thing that must be dropped, just like
personal history. The world around us is very mysterious. It doesn't
yield its secrets easily. Now we are concerned with losing
self-importance. As long as you feel that you are the most important
thing in the world you cannot really appreciate the world around you.
You are like a horse with blinders, all you see is yourself apart from
everything else. To help you lose self-importance talk to little
plants. It doesn't matter what you say to a plant, what's important is
the feeling of liking it, and treating it as an equal. A man who
gathers plants must apologize every time for taking them and must
assure them that someday his own body will serve as food for them. So,
all in all, the plants and ourselves are even. Neither we nor they are
more or less important. From now on talk to the little plants, talk
until you lose all sense of importance. Talk to them until you can do
it in front of others. You must talk to them in a loud and clear voice
if you want them to answer you. The world around us is a mystery, and
men are no better than anything else. If a little plant is generous
with us we must thank her, or perhaps she will not let us go. You have
to be aware of the uselessness of your self-importance and of your
personal history. Your death can give you a little warning, it always
comes as a chill. Death is our eternal companion, it is always to our
left, at an arm's length. How can anyone feel so important when we know
that death is stalking us. The thing to do when you're impatient is to
turn to your left and ask advice from your death. An immense amount of
pettiness is dropped if your death makes a gesture to you, or if you
catch a glimpse of it, or if you just have the feeling that your
companion is there watching you. The issue of our death is never
pressed far enough. Death is the only wise adviser that we have.
Whenever you feel, as you always do, that everything is going wrong and
you're about to be annihilated, turn to your death and ask if that is
so. Your death will tell you that you're wrong; that nothing really
matters outside its touch. Your death will tell you, "I haven't touched
you yet." One of us here has to change, and fast. One of us here has
to
learn again that death is the hunter, and that it is always to one's
left. One of us here has to ask deaths advice and drop the cursed
pettiness that belongs to men that live their lives as if death will
never tap them. Think of your death now. It is at arm's length. It may
tap you any moment, so really you have no time for crappy thoughts and
moods. None of us have time for that. The only thing that counts is
action, acting instead of talking. * * * When a man decides to do
something he must go all the way, but he must take responsibility for
what he does. No matter what he does, he must know first why he is
doing it, and then he must proceed with his actions without having
doubts or remorse about them. Look at me, I have no doubts or remorse.
Everything I do is my decision and my responsibility. The simplest
thing I do, to take you for a walk in the desert for instance, may very
well mean my death. Death is stalking me. Therefore, I have no room for
doubts or remorse. If I have to die as a result of taking you for a
walk, then I must die. You on the other hand, feel that you are
immortal, and the decisions of an immortal man can be cancelled or
regretted or doubted. In a world where death is the hunter, my friend,
there is not time for regrets or doubts. There is only time for
decisions. When you get angry you always feel righteous. You have been
complaining all your life because you don't assume responsibility for
your decisions. To assume the responsibility of one's decisions means
that one is ready to die for them. It doesn't matter what the decision
is. Nothing could be more or less serious than anything else. In a
world where death is the hunter there are no small or big decisions.
There are only decisions that we make in the face of our inevitable
death. In order to find the proper place to rest all one has to do is
to cross the eyes. The technique takes years to perfect. It consists of
gradually forcing your eyes to see separately the same image. The lack
of image conversion entails a double perception of the world; this
double perception allows one the opportunity of judging changes in the
surroundings, which the eyes are ordinarily incapable of perceiving.
Looking in short glances allows the eyes to pick out
unusual sights.
They are not sights proper, they are more like feelings. If you look at
a bush or a tree or a rock where you may like to rest, your eyes can
make you feel whether or not that's the best resting place. I don't
care what you see. How you feel is the important issue. It takes a long
time to train the eyes properly. The trick is to feel with your eyes.
Your problem now is that you don't know what to feel. It'll come to
you, though, with practice. No one can tell you what you are supposed
to feel. It is not heat, or light, or glare, or color. It is something
else. Once you learn to separate the images and see two of everything
you must focus your attention in the area between the two images. Any
change worthy of notice would take place there, in that area. The
feeling that you get is what counts. I can't tell you how to feel. You
must learn that yourself. I hunt in order to live. I can live off the
land, anywhere. To be a hunter means that one can see the world in
different ways. In order to be a hunter one must be in perfect balance
with everything else, otherwise hunting would become a meaningless
chore. Today we took a little snake. I had to apologize to her for
cutting her life off so suddenly and so definitely; I did what I did
knowing that my own life will also be cut off someday in very much the
same fashion, suddenly and definitely. So, all in all, we and the
snakes are on a par. One of them fed us today. Hunters must be
exceptionally tight individuals. A hunter leaves very little to chance.
For your purposes it doesn't really matter whether you learn about
plants or about hunting. I am a hunter. I leave very little to chance.
Perhaps I should explain to you that I learned to be a hunter. I have
not always lived the way I do now. At one point in my life I had to
change. Now I'm pointing the direction to you. I'm guiding you. I know
what I'm talking about; someone taught me all this. I didn't figure it
out for myself. I'm having a gesture with you. Other people have had a
similar gesture with you; someday you yourself will have the same
gesture with others. Let's say that it is my turn. One day I found out
that if I wanted to be a hunter worthy of self-respect I had to change
my way of life. I used to whine and complain a great deal. I had good
reasons to feel shortchanged. I am an Indian and Indians are treated
like dogs. There was nothing I could do to remedy that, so all I was
left
with was my sorrow. But then my good fortune spared me and
someone taught me to hunt. And I realized that the way I lived was not
worth living ... so I changed it. * * I laugh a great deal because I
like to laugh, yet everything I say is deadly serious. * * * It is
getting dark. The world is very strange at this time of the day. We are
very noticeable here and something is coming to us. It may seem to be
wind to you, because wind is all you know. Here it comes. Look how it
is searching for us. It's something that hides in the wind and looks
like a whorl, a cloud, a mist, a face that twirls around. It moves in a
specific direction. It either tumbles or it twirls. A hunter must know
all that in order to move correctly. To believe that the world is only
as you think it is, is stupid. The world is a mysterious place.
Especially in the twilight. This can follow us. It can make us tired or
it might even kill us. At this time of the day, in the twilight, there
is no wind. At this time there is only power. If you would live out
here in the wilderness you would know that during the twilight the wind
becomes power. A hunter that is worth his salt knows that, and acts
accordingly. He uses the twilight and that power hidden in the wind. If
it is convenient to him, the hunter hides from the power by covering
himself and remaining motionless until the twilight is gone and the
power has sealed him into its protection. The protection of the power
seals you like in a cocoon. A hunter can stay out in the open and no
puma or coyote or slimy bug could bother him. A mountain lion could
come up to the hunters nose and sniff him, and if the hunter does not
move, the lion would leave. I can guarantee you that. If the hunter, on
the other hand, wants to be noticed all he has to do is to stand on a
hilltop at the time of the twilight and the power will nag him and seek
him all night. Therefore, if a hunter wants to travel at night or if he
wants to be kept awake he must make himself available to the wind.
Therein lies the secret of great hunters. To be available and
unavailable at the precise turn of the road. You must learn to become
deliberately available and unavailable. As your life goes now, you are
unwittingly available at all times. To be unavailable does not mean to
hide or to be secretive but to be inaccessible. It makes no
difference
to hide if everyone knows that you are hiding. We are fools, all of us,
and you cannot be different. At one time in my life I, like you, made
myself available over and over again until there was nothing of me left
for anything except perhaps crying. And that I did, just like yourself.
You must take yourself away. You must retrieve yourself from the middle
of the road. Your whole being is there, thus it is of no use to hide;
you would only imagine that you are hidden. Being in the middle of the
road means that everyone passing by watches your comings and goings.
The art of a hunter is to become inaccessible. To be inaccessible means
that you touch the world around you sparingly. You don't expose
yourself to the power of the wind unless it is mandatory. You don't use
and squeeze people until they have shriveled to nothing, especially the
people you love. To be unavailable means that you deliberately avoid
exhausting yourself and others. It means that you are not hungry and
desperate. A hunter knows he will lure game into his traps over and
over again, so he doesn't worry. To worry is to become accessible,
unwittingly accessible. And once you worry you cling to anything out of
desperation; and once you cling you are bound to get exhausted or to
exhaust whoever or whatever you are clinging to. I've told you already
that to be inaccessible does not mean to hide or to be secretive. It
doesn't mean that you cannot deal with people either. A hunter uses his
world sparingly and with tenderness regardless of whether the world
might be things, or plants, or animals, or people, or power. A hunter
deals intimately with his world and yet he is inaccessible to that same
world. He is inaccessible because he's not squeezing his world out of
shape. He taps it lightly, stays for as long as he needs to, and then
swiftly moves away leaving hardly a mark. * * A good hunter knows one
thing above all--he knows the routines of his prey. That's what makes
him a good hunter. A hunter that is worth his salt does not catch game
because he sets his traps, or because he knows the routines of his
prey, but because he himself has no routines. He is free, fluid,
unpredictable. In order to be a hunter you must disrupt the routines of
your life. I am concerned with the things animals do; the places they
eat; the place, the manner, the time they sleep;
where they nest;
how they walk. These are the routines I am pointing out to you so you
can become aware of them in your own being. All of us behave like the
prey we are after. That, of course, also makes us prey for something or
someone else. Now, the concern of a hunter, who knows all this, is to
stop being a prey himself. It takes time. You could begin by not eating
lunch every single day at twelve o'clock. A good hunter changes his
ways as often as he needs. A hunter must not only know about the habits
of his prey, he also must know that there are powers on this earth that
guide men and animals and everything that is living. Powers that guide
our lives and our deaths. All of us are fools. You always feel
compelled to explain your acts, as if you were the only man on earth
who's wrong. It's your old feeling of importance. You have too much of
it; you also have too much personal history. On the other hand, you
don't assume responsibility for your acts; you're not using your death
as an adviser, and above all you are too accessible. One must assume
responsibility for being in a weird world. For you the world is weird
because if you're not bored with it you're at odds with it. For me the
world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious,
unfathomable; my interest has been to convince you that you must assume
responsibility for being here, in this marvelous world, in this
marvelous desert, in this marvelous time. I want to convince you that
you must learn to make every act count, since you are going to be here
for only a short while, in fact, too short for witnessing all the
marvels of it. Change! If you do not respond to that challenge you are
as good as dead. You have never taken the responsibility for being in
this unfathomable world. Therefore, you were never an artist, and
perhaps you'll never be a hunter. There is one simple thing wrong with
you--you think you have plenty of time. You think your life is going to
last forever. Now you're vehemently asserting some non-sense. You don't
have time for this display. This, whatever you're doing now, may be
your last act on earth. It may very well be your last battle. There is
no power which could guarantee that you are going to live one more
minute. If this were your last battle on earth, I would say that you
are an idiot. You are wasting your last act on earth in some stupid
mood.
You have no time, my friend, no time. None of us have time.
Don't just agree with me. Act upon it. What I recommend you to do is to
notice that we do not have any assurance that our lives will go on
indefinitely. Change comes suddenly and unexpectedly, and so does
death. There are some people who are very careful about the nature of
their acts. Their happiness is to act with the full knowledge that they
don't have time; therefore, their acts have a peculiar power. Acts have
power. Especially when the person acting knows that those acts are his
last battle. There is a strange consuming happiness in acting with the
full knowledge that whatever one is doing may very well be one's last
act on earth. I recommend that you reconsider your life and bring your
acts into that light. You don't have time, my friend. That is the
misfortune of human beings. None of us have sufficient time. Your acts
cannot possibly have the flair, the power, the compelling force of the
acts performed by a man who knows that he is fighting his last battle
on earth. We are all going to die. There is something out there waiting
for me, for sure; and I will join it, also for sure. Use it. Focus your
attention on the link between you and your death, without remorse or
sadness or worrying. Focus your attention on the fact you don't have
time and let your acts flow accordingly. Let each of your acts be your
last battle on earth. Only under those conditions will your acts have
their rightful power. Otherwise they will be, for as long as you live,
the acts of a timid man. There is no time for timidity, simply because
timidity makes you cling to something that exists only in your
thoughts. It soothes you while everything is at a lull, but then the
awesome, mysterious world will open its mouth for you, as it will open
for every one of us, and then you will realize that your sure ways were
not sure at all. Being timid prevents us from examining and exploiting
our lot as men. Our death is waiting and this very act we're performing
now may well be our last battle on earth. I call it a battle because it
is a struggle. Most people move from act to act without any struggle or
thought. A hunter, on the contrary, assesses every act; and since he
has an intimate knowledge of his death, he proceeds judiciously, as if
every act were his last battle. Only a fool would fail to notice the
advantage a hunter has over his fellow men. A hunter gives his last
battle its due respect. It's only natural that his last act on earth
should be the
best of himself. It's pleasurable that way. It dulls
the edge of his fright. I've told you, this is a weird world. The
forces that guide men are unpredictable, awesome, yet their splendor is
something to witness. Call them forces, spirits, airs, winds, or
anything like that. At moments of power, the world of ordinary affairs
does not exist and nothing can be taken for granted. * * * I've told
you never to carry anything in your hands when you walk. Get a
knapsack. * * * Now it's time for you to become accessible to power,
and you are going to begin by tackling dreaming. A warrior seeks power,
and one of the avenues to power is dreaming . What you call dreams are
real for a warrior. You must understand that a warrior is not a fool. A
warrior is an immaculate hunter who hunts power; he's not drunk, or
crazed, and he has neither the time nor the disposition to bluff, or to
lie to himself, or to make a wrong move. The stakes are too high for
that. The stakes are his trimmed orderly life which he has taken so
long to tighten and perfect. He is not going to throw that away by
making some stupid miscalculation, by taking something for being
something else. Dreaming is real for a warrior because in it he can act
deliberately, he can choose and reject, he can select from a variety of
items those which lead to power, and then he can manipulate them and
use them, while in an ordinary dream he cannot act deliberately. In
dreaming you have power; you can change things; you may find out
countless concealed facts; you can control whatever you want.
YouÕre
going to learn how to make yourself accessible to power. Power is
something a warrior deals with. At first it's an incredible,
far-fetched affair; it is hard to even think about it. Then power
becomes a serious matter; one may not have it, or one may not even
fully realize that it exists, yet one knows that something is there,
something which was not noticeable before. Next power is manifested as
something uncontrollable that comes to oneself. It is not possible for
me to say how it comes or what it really is. It is nothing and yet it
makes marvels appear before your very eyes. And finally power is
something
in oneself, something that controls one's acts and yet obeys one's
command. I am going to teach you right here the first step to power. I
am going to teach you how to set up dreaming. To set up dreaming means
to have a concise and pragmatic control over the general situation of a
dream, comparable to the control one has over any choice in the desert
for instance, such as climbing up a hill or remaining in the shade of a
water canyon. You must start by doing something very simple. Tonight in
your dreams you must look at your hands. Don't think it's a joke.
Dreaming is as serious as seeing or dying or any other thing in this
awesome, mysterious world. Think of it as something entertaining and
don't get discouraged or stop trying if you don't succeed right away.
Imagine all the inconceivable things you could accomplish. A man
hunting for power has almost no limits in his dreaming. The trick in
learning to set up dreaming is obviously not just to look at things but
to sustain the sight of them. Dreaming is real when one has succeeded
in bringing everything into focus. Then there is no difference between
what you do when you sleep and what you do when you are not sleeping. A
warrior has to be perfect in order to deal with the powers he hunts.
Look at your hands. When they begin to change shape you must move your
sight away from them and pick something else, and then look at your
hands again. It takes a long time to perfect this technique. Any
warrior could become a man of knowledge. As I told you, a warrior is an
impeccable hunter that hunts power. If he succeeds in his hunting he
can be a man of knowledge. You are a man and like any man you deserve
everything that is a man's lot--joy, pain, sadness and struggle. The
nature of one's acts is unimportant as long as one acts as a warrior.
If you really feel that your spirit is distorted you should simply fix
it--purge it, make it perfect--because there is no other task in our
entire lives which is more worthwhile. Not to fix the spirit is to seek
death, and that is the same as to seek nothing, since death is going to
overtake us regardless of anything. To seek the perfection of the
warrior's spirit is the only task worthy of our manhood. No matter how
much you like to feel sorry for yourself, you have to change that. It
doesn't jibe with the life of a warrior.
The hardest thing in the
world is to assume the mood of a warrior. It is of no use to be sad and
complain and feel justified in doing so, believing that someone is
always doing something to us. Nobody is doing anything to anybody, much
less to a warrior. You are here, with me, because you want to be here.
You should have assumed full responsibility by now, so the idea that
you are at the mercy of the wind would be inadmissible. Self-pity
doesn't jibe with power. The mood of a warrior calls for control over
himself and at the same time it calls for abandoning himself. * * *
Ordinary dreams get very vivid as soon as you begin to set up dreaming.
That vividness and clarity is a formidable barrier. Don't be distracted
from the purpose of dreaming , which is control and power. I'm going to
remind you of all the techniques you must practice. First you must
focus your gaze on your hands as the starting point. Then shift your
gaze to other items and look at them in brief glances. Focus your gaze
on as many things as you can. Remember that if you only glance briefly
the images do not shift. Then go back to your hands. Every time you
look at your hands you renew the power needed for dreaming , so in the
beginning don't look at too many things. Four items will suffice every
time. Later on you may enlarge the scope until you can cover all you
want, but as soon as the images begin to shift and you feel you are
losing control go back to your hands. When you feel you can gaze at
things indefinitely you will be ready for a new technique. I'm going to
teach you this new technique now, but I expect you to put it to use
only when you are ready. The next step in setting up dreaming is to
learn to travel. The same way you have learned to look at your hands
you can will yourself to move, to go places. First you have to
establish a place you want to go to. Pick a well-known spot--perhaps
your school, or a park, a friend's house--then, will yourself to go
there. This technique is very difficult. You must perform two tasks:
you must will yourself to go to the specific locale; and then, when you
have mastered that technique, you have to learn to control the exact
time of your traveling. You are making yourself accessible to power;
you're hunting it and I'm
just guiding you. * * * Last night when
the lion let out a scream, you moved very well. Everything you did then
was done within a proper mood. You were controlled and at the same time
abandoned. You were not paralyzed with fear. To climb that bluff as you
did, in darkness, required that you hold on to yourself and let go of
yourself at the same time, that's what I call the mood of a warrior. I
wanted to show you that you can spur yourself beyond your limits if you
are in the proper mood. A warrior makes his own mood. You didn't know
that. Fear got you into the mood of a warrior, but now that you know
about it, anything can serve to get you into it. It's convenient to
always act in such a mood, it cuts through the crap and leaves one
purified. One needs the mood of a warrior for every single act,
otherwise one becomes distorted and ugly. There is no power in a life
that lacks this mood. A warrior is a hunter. He calculates everything.
That's control. But once his calculations are over, he acts. He lets
go. That's abandon. A warrior is not a leaf at the mercy of the wind.
No one can push him; no one can make him do things against himself or
against his better judgment. A warrior is tuned to survive, and he
survives in the best of all possible fashions. A warrior could be
injured but not offended. For a warrior there is nothing offensive
about the acts of his fellow men as long as he himself is acting within
the proper mood. The mood of a warrior is not so far-fetched for yours
or anybody's world. You need it in order to cut through all the guff.
To achieve the mood of a warrior is not a simple matter. It is a
revolution. To regard the lion and the water rats and our fellow men as
equals is a magnificent act of the warrior's spirit. It takes power to
do that. * * There's no plan when it comes to hunting power. Hunting
power or hunting game is the same. A hunter hunts whatever presents
itself to him. Thus he must always be in a state of readiness. You know
about the wind, and now you may hunt power in the wind by yourself. But
there are other things you don't know about which are, like the wind,
the center of power at certain times and at certain places.
Power is
a very peculiar affair. It is impossible to pin it down and say what it
really is. It is a feeling that one has about certain things. Power is
personal. It belongs to oneself alone. A hunter of power entraps it and
then stores it away as his personal finding. Thus, personal power
grows, and you may have the case of a warrior who has so much personal
power that he becomes a man of knowledge. If you store power your body
can perform unbelievable feats. On the other hand, if you dissipate
power you'll be a fat old man in no time at all. A hunter of power
watches everything and everything tells him some secret. How can one be
sure that things are telling secrets? you ask. The only way to be sure
is by following all the instructions I have been giving you, starting
from the first day you came to see me. In order to have power one must
live with power. There are worlds upon worlds, right here in front of
us. And they are nothing to laugh at. Power commands you and yet it is
at your command. Power is a very weird affair. In order to have it and
command it one must have power to begin with. It's possible, however,
to store it, little by little, until one has enough to sustain oneself
in a battle of power. The world is a mystery. This, what you're looking
at, is not all there is to it. There is much more to the world, so much
more, in fact, that it is endless. So when you're trying to figure it
out, all you're really doing is trying to make the world familiar. You
and I are right here, in the world that you call real, simply because
we both know it. You don't know the world of power, therefore you
cannot make it into a familiar scene. Once you know what it is like to
stop the world you realize there is a reason for it. You see, one of
the arts of the warrior is to collapse the world for a specific reason
and then restore it again in order to keep on living. Someday you will
live like a warrior, in spite of yourself. I have taught you nearly
everything a warrior needs to know in order to start off in the world,
storing power by himself. It takes a lifelong struggle to be by oneself
in the world of power. * * * A warrior never turns his back to power
without atoning for the favors received. When in places of power, you
have to act as if nothing is out of the ordinary, because they have the
potential
of draining people who are disturbed. You should try willing yourself
to go to a specific place in dreaming while you take a nap during the
daytime and find out if you can actually visualize the chosen place as
it is at the time you are dreaming . Otherwise the visions you might
have are not dreaming but ordinary dreams. In order to help yourself
you should pick a specific object that belongs to the place you want to
go and focus your attention on it. It is easier to travel in dreaming
when you can focus on a place of power. Perhaps the school where you go
is a place of power for you. Use it. Focus your attention on any object
there and then find it in dreaming . From the specific object you
recall, you must go back to your hands and then to another object and
so on. It doesn't matter how one was brought up, what determines the
way one does anything is personal power. A man is only the sum of his
personal power, and that sum determines how he lives and how he dies.
Personal power is a feeling, something like being lucky. Or one may
call it a mood. Personal power is something that one acquires
regardless of one's origin. A warrior is a hunter of power. I am
teaching you how to hunt and store it. The difficulty with you, which
is the difficulty with all of us, is to be convinced. You need to
believe that personal power can be used and that it is possible to
store it. To be convinced means that you can act by yourself. A man of
knowledge is one who has followed truthfully the hardships of learning;
a man who has, without rushing or faltering, gone as far as he can in
unraveling the secrets of personal power. Only be concerned with the
idea of storing personal power. Hunting power is a peculiar event. It
first has to be an idea, then it has to be set up, step by step, and
then, bingo! It happens. Hunting power is a very strange affair. There
is no way to plan it ahead of time. That's what's exciting about it. A
warrior proceeds as if he had a plan though, because he trusts his
personal power. He knows for a fact that it will make him act in the
most appropriate fashion. * * * I treat myself very well, therefore, I
have no reason to feel tired or ill at ease. The secret is not in what
you do to yourself
but rather in what you don't do. * * * This is a
place of power. Find a place for us to camp here on this hilltop. This
time just act for a change. It doesn't matter how long it takes you to
find a suitable place to rest. It might take you all night. It is not
important that you find the spot either; the important issue is that
you try to find it. You have to look without focusing on any particular
spot, squinting your eyes until your view is blurred, and don't let
your preference for routines take over. I screamed because abrupt
noises scare away unpleasant spirits. Power does not belong to anyone.
Some of us may gather it and then it could be given directly to someone
else. You see, the key to stored power is that it can be used only to
help someone else store power. Everything a man does hinges on his
personal power. Therefore, for one who doesn't have any, the deeds of a
powerful man are incredible. It takes power to even conceive what power
is. This is what I have been trying to tell you all along. The world is
a mystery and it is not at all as you picture it. Well, it is also as
you picture it, but that's not all there is to the world; there is much
more to it. You have been finding that out all along, and perhaps
tonight you will add one more piece. I don't plan anything. All is
decided by the same power that allowed you to find this spot. I'm
checking your carrying net to see if the food gourds and your writing
pads are secured. A warrior always makes sure that everything is in
proper order, not because he believes that he is going to survive the
ordeal he is about to undertake, but because that is part of his
impeccable behavior. Trust your personal power. That's all one has in
this whole mysterious world. Get hold of yourself, because the darkness
is like the wind, an unknown entity at large that could trick you if
you are not careful, and you have to be perfectly calm in order to deal
with it. You must let yourself go so your personal power will merge
with the power of the night. A warrior acts as if he knows what he is
doing, when in effect he knows nothing. A warrior is acting impeccably
when he trusts his personal power regardless of whether it is small or
enormous. * * *
I'm going to demonstrate a special way of walking in
the darkness; the gait of power. My trunk is slightly bent forward, but
my spine is straight. My knees are also slightly bent. Raise your knees
almost to your chest every time you take a step. The gait of power is
for running at night, and it is completely safe. This is the night! And
it is power! At night the world is different. My ability to run in the
darkness had nothing to do with my knowledge of these hills. The key to
it is to let one's personal power flow out freely, so it could merge
with the power of the night. Once that power takes over there is no
chance for a slip-up. You have to abandon yourself to the power of the
night and trust the little bit of personal power that you have or you
will never be able to move with freedom. The darkness is encumbering
only because you rely on your sight for everything you do, not knowing
that another way to move is to let power be the guide. Keep on moving
on the same spot and try to feel as if you are actually using the gait
of power. First curl your fingers against your palms, stretching out
the thumb and index of each hand. You can always see fairly well, no
matter how dark the night is, if you don't focus on anything but keep
scanning the ground right in front of you. The gait of power is similar
to finding a place to rest. Both entail a sense of abandon, and a sense
of trust. The gait of power requires that one keep the eyes on the
ground directly in front, because even a glance to either side will
produce an alteration in the flow of movement. Bending the trunk
forward is necessary in order to lower the eyes. The reason for lifting
the knees up to the chest is because the steps have to be very short
and safe. You are going to stumble a great deal at first but with
practice you will be able to run as swiftly and as safely as you can in
the daytime. * * * There are entities which are in the world, and which
act on people. They are here, around us at all times. In daylight,
however, it is more difficult to perceive them, simply because the
world is familiar to us, and that which is familiar takes precedence.
In the darkness, on the other hand, everything is equally strange and
very few things take precedence, so we are more susceptible to those
entities at night. There is only one way to learn, and that way is to
get
down to business. To only talk about power is useless. If you
want to know what power is, and if you want to stress it you must
tackle everything yourself. The road to knowledge and power is very
difficult and very long. Little by little you are plugging up all your
points of drainage. You don't have to be deliberate about it, because
power always finds a way. Take me as an example. I didn't know I was
storing power when I first began to learn the ways of a warrior. Just
like you, I thought I wasn't doing anything in particular, but that was
not so. Power has the peculiarity of being unnoticeable when it is
being stored. * * * You must stretch your body many times during the
day. The more times the better, but only after a long period of work or
a long period of rest. * * * Your body needs fright. It likes it. Your
body needs the darkness and the wind. Your body now knows the gait of
power and can't wait to try it. I've told you that the secret of a
strong body is not in what you do to it but what you don't do. Now it
is time for you not to do what you always do. Practice not-doing by
looking at a tree or bush; fix your attention not on the leaves but on
the shadows of the leaves. Running in the darkness does not have to be
spurred by fear but can be a very natural reaction of a jubilant body
that knows how to not-do. To not-do what you know how to do is the key
to power. In the case of looking at a tree or bush, what you know how
to do is to focus immediately on the foliage. The shadows of the leaves
or the spaces in between the leaves are never your concern. Start
focusing on the shadows of the leaves on one single branch and then
eventually work your way to the whole tree, and don't let your eyes go
back to the leaves, because the first deliberate step to storing
personal power is to allow the body to not-do. The body likes things
like this. You can stop the world using this technique. Once you have
succeeded, you must work as if nothing has happened to you and don't
mention or even be concerned with any of the events you have
experienced. * * * You should not have remorse for anything you have
done, because to isolate one's acts as being mean, or ugly, or evil is
to
place an unwarranted importance on the self. Well-being is a condition
one has to groom, a condition one has to become acquainted with in
order to seek it. You don't know what well-being is, because you have
never experienced it. Well-being is an achievement one has to
deliberately seek. In order to accomplish the feat of making yourself
miserable you have to work in a most intense fashion. It is absurd you
have never realized you could work just the same in making yourself
complete and strong. The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either
make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of
work is the same. * * * Today you must be perfectly calm and restored,
because you are going to learn not-doing in spite of the fact that
there is no way to talk about it, because it is the body that does it.
That rock over there is a rock because of doing. You say that you don't
understand what I mean. Your saying that is doing. Doing is what makes
that rock a rock and that bush a bush. Doing is what makes you yourself
and me myself. Take that rock for instance. To look at it is doing ,
but to see it is not-doing. You say my words are not making sense to
you. Oh yes they do. But you are convinced that they don't because that
is your doing. That is the way you act towards me and the world. That
rock is a rock because of all the things you know how to do to it. I
call that doing. A man of knowledge, for instance, knows that the rock
is a rock only because of doing , so if he doesn't want the rock to be
a rock all he has to do is not-doing. The world is the world because
you know the doing involved in making it so. If you didn't know its
doing , the world would be different. Without that certain doing there
would be nothing familiar in the surroundings. This is a pebble because
you know the doing involved in making it into a pebble. Now, in order
to stop the world you must stop doing. In the case of this little rock,
the first thing which doing does to it is to shrink it to this size. So
the proper thing to do, which a warrior does if he wants to stop the
world , is to enlarge a little rock, or any other thing, by not-doing.
Look at the holes and depressions in the pebble and try to pick out the
minute detail in them. If you can pick out the detail, the holes and
depressions will disappear and you will understand what not-doing
means. Doing makes you separate the pebble from the larger
boulder.
If you want to learn not-doing , let's say that you have to join them.
See the small shadow that the pebble cast on the boulder. It is not a
shadow but a glue which binds them together. A warrior can tell all
kinds of things from the shadows. A warrior always tries to affect the
force of doing by changing it into not-doing . Doing would be to leave
the pebble lying around because it is merely a small rock. Not-doing
would be to proceed with that pebble as if it were something far beyond
a mere rock. Is all this true? To say yes or no to that question is
doing. But since you are learning not-doing I have to tell you that it
really doesn't matter whether or not all this is true. It is here that
a warrior has a point of advantage over the average man. An average man
cares that things are either true or false, but a warrior doesn't. An
average man proceeds in a specific way with things that he knows are
true, and in a different way with things that he knows are not true. If
things are said to be true, he acts and believes in what he does. But
if things are said to be untrue, he doesn't care to act, or he doesn't
believe in what he does. A warrior, on the other hand, acts in both
instances. If things are said to be true, he would act in order to do
doing . If things are said to be untrue, he still would act in order to
do not-doing . Not-doing is only for very strong warriors. * * * There
are infinite numbers of lines that join us to things. They are real
lines. You can feel them. The most difficult part about the warrior's
way is to realize that the world is a feeling. When one is not-doing ,
one is feeling the world, and one feels the world through its lines.
Not-doing is very simple but very difficult. It is not a matter of
understanding but of mastering it. Seeing , of course, is the final
accomplishment of a man of knowledge, and seeing is attained only when
one has stopped the world through the technique of not-doing . Shadows
are peculiar affairs. Look at the shadow of that boulder. The shadow is
the boulder, and yet it isn't. To observe the boulder in order to know
what the boulder is, is doing , but to observe its shadow is not-doing
. Shadows are like doors, the doors of not-doing . A man of knowledge,
for example, can tell the innermost feelings of men by watching their
shadows. You may say that there is
movement in them, or you may say
that the lines of the world are shown in them, or you may say that
feelings come from them. To believe that shadows are just shadows is
doing. That belief is somehow stupid. Think about it this way: there is
so much more to everything in the world that obviously there must be
more to shadows too. After all, what makes them shadows is merely our
doing. When searching for a resting place one has to look without
focusing but in observing shadows one has to cross the eyes and yet
keep a sharp image in focus. The idea is to let one shadow be
superimposed on the other by crossing the eyes. Through this process
one can ascertain a certain feeling which emanates from shadows.
Dreaming is the not-doing of dreams, and as you progress in your
not-doing you will also progress in dreaming. The trick is not to stop
looking for your hands, even if you don't believe that what you are
doing has any meaning. In fact, as I have told you before, a warrior
doesn't need do believe, because as long as he keeps on acting without
believing he is not-doing . If you tackle not-doing directly, you
yourself will know what to do in dreaming . During the day shadows are
the doors of not-doing , but at night, since very little doing prevails
in the dark, everything is a shadow. I've already told you about this
when I taught you the gait of power. Everything I have taught you so
far has been an aspect of not-doing . A warrior applies not-doing to
everything in the world, and yet I can't tell you more about it than
what I have said today. You must let your own body discover the power
and the feeling of not-doing . * * * It is stupid for you to scorn the
mysteries of the world simply because you know the doing of scorn. * *
* The only thing that is real is the being in you that is going to die.
To arrive at that being is the not-doing of the self. When every one of
us is born we bring with us a little ring of power. That little ring is
almost immediately put to use. So every one of us is already hooked
from birth and our rings of power are joined to everyone else's. In
other words, our rings of power are hooked to the doing of the world in
order to
make the world. For instance, our rings of power, yours and
mine, are hooked right now to the doing in this room. We are making
this room. Our rings of power are spinning this room into being at this
very moment. A man of knowledge develops another ring of power. I would
call it the ring of not-doing , because it is hooked to not-doing .
With that ring, therefore, he can spin another world. Your difficulty
is that you haven't yet developed your extra ring of power and your
body doesn't know not-doing . We all have been taught to agree about
doing . You don't have any idea of the power that that agreement brings
with it. But, fortunately, not-doing is equally miraculous, and
powerful. There is no way to escape the doing of our world, so what a
warrior does is to turn his world into his hunting ground. As a hunter,
a warrior knows that the world is made to be used. So he uses every bit
of it. A warrior is like a pirate that has no qualms in taking and
using anything he wants, except that the warrior doesn't mind or he
doesn't feel insulted when he is used and taken himself. The instant
one begins to live like a warrior, one is no longer ordinary. It is
meaningless to complain. What's important from this point on is the
strategy of your life. You may go any place you wish, but if you do,
you must assume the full responsibility for that act. A warrior lives
his life strategically. When he has to act with his fellow men, a
warrior follows the doing of strategy, and in that doing there are no
victories or defeats. In that doing there are only actions. The doing
of strategy entails that one is not at the mercy of people. There is
something you ought to be aware of by now. I call it the cubic
centimeter of chance. All of us, whether or not we are warriors, have a
cubic centimeter of chance that pops out in front of our eyes from time
to time. The difference between an average man and a warrior is that
the warrior is aware of this, and one of his tasks is to be alert,
deliberately waiting, so that when his cubic centimeter pops out he has
the necessary speed, the prowess to pick it up. Chance, good luck,
personal power, or whatever you may call it, is a peculiar state of
affairs. It is like a very small stick that comes out in front of us
and invites us to pluck it. Usually
we are too busy, or too
preoccupied, or just too stupid and lazy to realize that that is our
cubic centimeter of luck. A warrior, on the other hand, is always alert
and tight and has the spring, the gumption necessary to grab it. You
maintain that your insistence on finding explanations for everything is
something so deeply ingrained in you that it overrules every other
consideration, that it's like a disease. There are no diseases, there
is only indulging. And you indulge yourself in trying to explain
everything. We both are beings who are going to die. There is no more
time for what we used to do. Now you must employ all the not-doing I
have taught you and stop the world. * * * People tell us from the time
we are born that the world is such and such and so and so, and
naturally we have no choice but to see the world the way people have
been telling us it is. Seeing happens only when one sneaks between the
worlds; the world of ordinary people and the world of sorcerers. The
real thing is when the body realizes that it can see. Only then is one
capable of knowing that the world we look at every day is only a
description. My intent has been to show you that. Only as a warrior can
one survive the path of knowledge, because the art of a warrior is to
balance the terror of being a man with the wonder of being a man. * * *
Nothing is gained by forcing an issue. If you want to survive you must
be crystal clear and deadly sure of yourself.
To
be sensitive is a natural condition of certain people. In the final
analysis sensitivity matters very little. What matters is that a
warrior be impeccable. What matters to a warrior is arriving at the
totality of oneself. * * * It is not advisable for you to indulge in
focusing your attention on past events. We may touch on them, but only
in reference. * * * You can arrive at the sorcerers' explanation by
accumulating personal power. Personal power will make you slide with
great ease into the sorcerers' explanation. * * * 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. The warrior seeks impeccability in his own eyes and
calls that humbleness. The average man is hooked to his fellow men,
while the warrior is hooked only to himself. You're after the
self-confidence of the average man, when you should be after the
humbleness of a warrior. The difference between the two is remarkable.
Self-confidence entails knowing something for sure; humbleness entails
being impeccable in one's actions and feelings. * * * You must push
yourself beyond your limits, all the time. The only possible course
that a warrior has is to act consistently and without reservations. You
know enough of the warrior's way to act accordingly, but your old
habits and routines stand in your way. * * * You say you've heard that
the masters of Eastern esoteric doctrines demand absolute secrecy about
their teachings. Perhaps those masters are just indulging in being
masters. I'm not a master, I'm only a warrior. So I really don't know
what a master feels like. It doesn't matter what one reveals or what
one keeps to
oneself. Everything we do, everything we are, rests on
our personal power. If we have enough of it, one word uttered to us
might be sufficient to change the course of our lives. But if we don't
have enough personal power, the most magnificent piece of wisdom can be
revealed to us and that revelation won't make a damn bit of difference.
I'm going to utter perhaps the greatest piece of knowledge anyone can
voice. Let me see what you can do with it. Do you know that at this
very moment you are surrounded by eternity? And do you know that you
can use that eternity, if you so desire? There! Eternity is there! All
around! Do you know that you can extend yourself forever in any of the
directions I have pointed to? Do you know that one moment can be
eternity? This is not a riddle; it's a fact, but only if you mount that
moment and use it to take the totality of yourself forever in any
direction. You didn't have this knowledge before, now you do. I have
revealed it to you, but it doesn't make a bit of difference, because
you don't have enough personal power to utilize my revelation. Yet if
you did have enough power, my words alone would serve as the means for
you to round up the totality of yourself and to get the crucial part of
it out of the boundaries in which it is contained. Your body is the
boundary I'm talking about. One can get out of it. We are a feeling, an
awareness encased here. We are luminous beings and for a luminous being
only personal power matters. * * * Dreaming entails cultivating a
peculiar control over one's dreams to the extent that the experiences
undergone in them and those lived in one's waking hours acquire the
same pragmatic valence. The sorcerers' allegation is that under the
impact of dreaming the ordinary criteria to differentiate a dream from
reality becomes inoperative. The early stage of the preparatory facet,
called setting up dreaming , consists of a deadly game that one's mind
plays with itself. Some part of yourself is going to do everything it
can to prevent the fulfillment of your task. As soon as the sight of
your hands begins to dissolve or change into something else, you have
to shift your view from your hands to any other element in the
surroundings of your dream.
Something in us is threatened by our
activities in dreaming . Each warrior has his own way of dreaming .
Each way is different. The only thing which we all have in common is
that we play tricks in order to force ourselves to abandon the quest.
The counter-measure is to persist in spite of all the barriers and
disappointments. The sorcerers' explanation of how to select a topic
for dreaming , is that a warrior chooses the topic by deliberately
holding an image in his mind while he shuts off his internal dialogue.
If he is capable of not talking to himself for a moment and then holds
the image or the thought of what he wants in dreaming , even if only
for an instant, then the desired topic will come to him. * * * If one
is to succeed in anything, the success must come gently, with a great
deal of effort but with no stress or obsession. * * * You must learn
how to stop your internal dialogue at will. At the beginning of our
association I delineated another procedure: walking for long stretches
without focusing the eyes on anything. My recommendation was to not
look at anything directly but, by slightly crossing the eyes, to keep a
peripheral view of everything that presented itself to the eyes. If one
keeps one's unfocused eyes fixed at a point just above the horizon, it
is possible to notice, at once, everything in almost the total
180-degree range in front of one's eyes. That exercise is the only way
of shutting off the internal dialogue. The internal dialogue is what
grounds us. The world is such and such or so and so, only because we
talk to ourselves about its being such and such or so and so. The
passageway into the world of sorcerers opens up after the warrior has
learned to shut off the internal dialogue. To change our idea of the
world is the crux of sorcery, and stopping the internal dialogue is the
only way to accomplish it. The rest is just padding. Nothing of what we
do, with the exception of stopping the internal dialogue, can by itself
change anything in us, or in our idea of the world. The provision is,
of course, that that change should not be deranged. Therefore a teacher
doesn't clamp down on his apprentice. That would only breed obsession
and morbidity. * * * A warrior takes his lot, whatever it may be, and
accepts it
in ultimate humbleness. He accepts in humbleness what he
is, not as grounds for regret but as a living challenge. The humbleness
of a warrior is not the humbleness of a beggar. The warrior lowers his
head to no one, but at the same time, he doesn't permit anyone to lower
his head to him. I know only the humbleness of a warrior, and that will
never permit me to be anyone's master. * * * Things are real only after
one has learned to agree on their realness. * * * You're afraid of me,
you say, of the awesomeness of my knowledge, that there is no solace
for you, no haven to go to. I represent the warrior's freedom. Solace,
haven, fear, all of them are moods that you have learned without ever
questioning their value. * * * Seeing is a special capacity that one
can develop which allows one to apprehend the ultimate nature of
things. * * * The world had to conform to its description; that is, the
description reflects itself. We have learned to relate ourselves to our
description of the world in terms of what sorcerers call habits or
intentionality, that is, the property of human consciousness whereby an
object is referred to, or is intended. Persist in acting like a
warrior. The rest comes of itself and by itself. The rest is knowledge
and power. Men of knowledge have both. And yet none of them could tell
how they got to have them, except that they had kept on acting like
warriors and at a given moment everything changed. A warrior must be
calm and collected and must never lose his grip. * * * The flaw with
words is that they always force us to feel enlightened, but when we
turn around to face the world they always fail us and we end up facing
the world as we always have, without enlightenment. For this reason, a
sorcerer seeks to act rather than to talk and to this effect he gets a
new description of the world--a new description where talking is not
that important, and where new acts have new reflections. We are
luminous beings and everything we are or everything we feel shows in
our fibers. Humans have a brightness peculiar only to them. That's the
only way to tell them apart from other luminous living beings.
* * *
Seeing happens only when the warrior is capable of stopping the
internal dialogue. * * * A warrior starts off with the certainty that
his spirit is off balance; then by living in full control and
awareness, but without hurry or compulsion, he does his ultimate best
to gain this balance. In your case, as in the case of every man, your
imbalance is due to the sum total of all your actions. There is nothing
in this world that a warrior cannot account for. You see, a warrior
considers himself already dead, so there is nothing for him to lose.
The worst has already happened to him, therefore he's clear and calm;
judging him by his acts or by his words, one would never suspect that
he has witnessed everything. Knowledge is frightening, but if a warrior
accepts the frightening nature of knowledge he cancels out its
awesomeness. Knowledge is a most peculiar affair, especially for a
warrior. Knowledge for a warrior is something that comes at once,
engulfs him, and passes on. * * * I urge you to feel at ease and
confident and trust your personal power. * * * Any thought that one
holds in mind in a state of silence is properly a command, since there
are no other thoughts to compete with it. * * * Feelings are the gauge
that assesses the state of being of the subject you are seeing . * * *
We are dealing with that immensity out there. To turn that magnificence
out there into reasonableness doesn't do anything for you. Here,
surrounding us, is eternity itself. To engage in reducing it to a
manageable nonsense is petty and outright disastrous. Whenever the
internal dialogue stops, the world collapses and extraordinary facets
of ourselves surface, as though they had been kept heavily guarded by
our words. You are like you are, because you tell yourself that you are
that way. You are too heavy and self-important. Let go! * * * I'm going
to begin telling you about the "double" or the
"Other." The double
is the sorcerer himself developed thru his dreaming . The double is an
act of power to a sorcerer but only a tale of power to you. The double
is the self; that explanation should suffice. For a sorcerer who sees ,
the double is brighter. Don't take things so seriously. I've told you
time and time again that the world is unfathomable, and so are we, and
so is every being that exists in this world. It is impossible,
therefore, to reason out the double. A sorcerer can double up, that's
all one can say. No sorcerer knows where his Other is. A sorcerer has
no notion that he is in two places at once. To be aware of that would
be the equivalent of facing his double, and the sorcerer that finds
himself face to face with himself is a dead sorcerer. That is the rule.
That is the way power has set things up. No one knows why. By the time
a warrior has conquered dreaming and seeing and has developed a double,
he must have also succeeded in erasing personal history,
self-importance, and routines. So doing is the means for removing the
impracticality of having a double in the ordinary world, by making the
self and the world fluid, and by placing them outside the bounds of
prediction. A fluid warrior can no longer make the world chronological,
and for him, the world and himself are no longer objects. He's a
luminous being existing in a luminous world. The double is a simple
affair for a sorcerer because he knows what he's doing. A sorcerer may
certainly notice afterwards that he has been in two places at once. But
this is only bookkeeping and has no bearing on the fact that while he's
acting he has no notion of his duality. Think of this, the world
doesn't yield to us directly, the description of the world stands in
between. So, properly speaking, we are always one step removed and our
experience of the world is always a recollection of the experience. We
are perennially recollecting the instant that has just happened, just
passed. We recollect, recollect, recollect. If our entire experience of
the world is recollection, then it's not so outlandish to conclude that
a sorcerer can be in two places at once. This is not the case from the
point of view of his own perception, because in order to experience the
world, a sorcerer, like every other man, has to recollect the act he
has just performed, the event he has just witnessed, the experience
he
has just lived. In his awareness there is only a single recollection.
The sorcerer, however, recollects two separate single instants, because
the glue of the description of time is no longer binding him. We're
always one jump behind. Does the double have corporealness? Certainly.
Solidity, corporealness are memories. Therefore, like everything else
we feel about the world, they are memories we accumulate, memories of
the description. The only way to counteract the devastating effect of
the sorcerers' world is to laugh at it. It's your duty to put your mind
at ease. Warriors do not win victories by beating their heads against
walls but by overtaking the walls. Warriors jump over the walls; they
don't demolish them. There are three kinds of bad habits which we use
over and over when confronted with unusual life situations. First, we
may disregard what's happening or has happened and feel as if it had
never occurred. That one is the bigot's way. Second, we may accept
everything at its face value and feel as if we know what's going on.
That's the pious man's way. Third, we may become obsessed with an event
because either we cannot disregard it or we cannot accept it
wholeheartedly. That's the fool's way. There is a fourth, the correct
one, the warrior's way. A warrior acts as if nothing had ever happened,
because he doesn't believe in anything, yet he accepts everything at
its face value. He accepts without accepting and disregards without
disregarding. He never feels as if he knows, neither does he feel as if
nothing had ever happened. He acts as if he is in control, even though
he might be shaking in his boots. To act in such a manner dissipates
obsession. You must cultivate the feeling that a warrior needs nothing.
You have everything needed for the extravagant journey that is your
life. I have tried to teach you that the real experience is to be a
man, and that what counts is being alive; life is the little detour
that we are taking now. Life in itself is sufficient, self-explanatory
and complete. A warrior understands this and lives accordingly;
therefore, one may say without being presumptuous that the experience
of experiences is being a warrior. If a warrior needs solace, he simply
chooses anyone and expresses to that person every detail of his
turmoil. After all, the warrior is not seeking to be understood or
helped; by talking he's merely relieving himself of his pressure. That
is,
providing that the warrior is given to talking; if he's not, he
tells no one. You indulge. You feel that indulging in doubts and
tribulations is the sign of a sensitive man. Well, the truth of the
matter is that you're the farthest thing from being sensitive. So why
pretend? I've told you, a warrior accepts in humbleness what he is. We
confuse ourselves deliberately. All of us are aware of our doings. Our
puny reason deliberately makes itself into the monster it fancies
itself to be. It's too little for such a big mold, though. No one
develops a double. That's only a way of talking about it. All of us
luminous beings have a double. All of us! A warrior learns to be aware
of it, that's all. There are seemingly insurmountable barriers
protecting that awareness. But that's expected; those barriers are what
makes arriving at that awareness such a unique challenge. You are
afraid of it because you're thinking that the double is what the word
says. A double, or another you. I chose those words in order to
describe it. The double is oneself and cannot be faced in any other
way. The double is not a matter of personal choice. Neither is it a
matter of personal choice who is selected to learn the sorcerers'
knowledge that leads to that awareness. Have you ever asked yourself,
why you in particular? I don't mean that you should ask it as a
question that begs an answer, but in the sense of a warrior's pondering
on his great fortune, the fortune of having found a challenge. To make
it into an ordinary question is the device of a conceited ordinary man
who wants to be either admired or pitied for it. I have no interest in
that kind of question, because there is no way of answering it. The
decision of picking you was a design of power; no one can discern the
designs of power. Now that you've been selected, there is nothing that
you can do to stop the fulfillment of that design. A warrior is in the
hands of power and his only freedom is to choose an impeccable life.
You're in a terrible spot. It's too late for you to retreat but too
soon to act. All you can do is witness. For you there is only
witnessing acts of power and listening to tales, tales of power. The
double is one of those tales. You know that, and that's why your reason
is so taken by it. You are beating your head
against a wall if you
pretend to understand. All that I can say about it, by way of
explanation, is that the double, although it is arrived at through
dreaming , is as real as it can be. It is the self. It is the awareness
of our state as luminous beings. It can do anything, and yet it chooses
to be unobtrusive and gentle. * * * A man of knowledge cannot possibly
act towards his fellow men in injurious terms. * * * A warrior is
always ready for anything. To be a warrior is not a simple matter of
wishing to be one. It is rather an endless struggle that will go on to
the very last moment of our lives. Nobody is born a warrior, in exactly
the same way that nobody is born a reasonable being. We make ourselves
into one or the other. * * * Jog on this spot, facing the west. The
idea is to draw power from the impending twilight by raising one's arms
to the sky with the fingers stretched, like a fan, and then clasp them
forcefully when the arms are in the mid point between the horizon and
the zenith. * * * I'm going to tell you about the dreamer and the
dreamed. The double begins in dreaming . The double is a dream. I am
referring to the first emergence of the awareness that we are luminous
beings. Each one of us is different, and thus the details of our
struggles are different. The steps that we follow to arrive at the
double are the same, though. Especially the beginning steps, which are
muddled and uncertain. A dream in which one is watching oneself asleep
is the time of the double. Rather than wasting power in wondering and
asking questions, one should use the opportunity to act. When you have
the chance you should be prepared. * * * A warrior never lets his guard
down. What matters is what can you use as a shield? A warrior must use
everything available to him to close his mortal gap once it opens. So,
it's of no importance that you really don't like to be suspicious or
ask questions. That's your only shield now. There is no flaw it the
warrior's way. Question without fear, without suspicion and without
draining yourself. Assemble what you learn, without presumptuousness and
without
piousness. The self dreams the double. Once it has learned to dream the
double, the self arrives at this weird crossroad and a moment comes
when one realizes that it is the double who dreams the self. Your
double is dreaming you. No one knows how it happens. We only know that
it does happen. That's the mystery of us as luminous beings. You can
awaken in either one. Storing sufficient personal power will enable you
to turn your will into a functioning unit. As I've said, will is a
force that emanates from the umbilical region through an unseen opening
below the navel, an opening called the gap . Will is cultivated only by
sorcerers and gives them the capacity to perform extraordinary acts.
The will develops in a warrior in spite of every opposition of the
reason. You are the one who's learning, therefore you yourself must
claim knowledge as power. You must find out whether or not your will
works. You must prove to yourself that you are in the position to claim
knowledge as power. In other words, you yourself have to be convinced
that you can exercise your will . The body must be perfection before
the will is a functioning unit. * * * You feel irked with yourself
because you are so helpless, you say. There is nothing wrong with the
feeling of being helpless. But to indulge in protesting and complaining
is another matter. * * * What exactly is an ally? There is no way of
saying, just as there is no way of saying what exactly a tree is. Just
like in the case of a tree, the only way to know what an ally is, is by
experiencing it. Your reason cannot accept the possibility of such a
thing to begin with. Fortunately, it is not the reason which puts ally
together. It is the body. An ally is perceived in many degrees. Each of
those perceptions is stored in one's body. The sum of those pieces is
the ally. I don't know any other way of describing it. Our reason is
petty and it is always at odds with our body. This, of course, is only
a way of talking, but the triumph of a man of knowledge is that he has
joined the two together.
The ally is waiting for you, that's for
sure. It is right here, or there, or in any other place. The ally is
waiting for you, just like death is waiting for you, everywhere and
nowhere. It's waiting for the same reason that death waits for you,
because you were born. There is no possibility of explaining at this
point what is meant by that. You must first experience the ally. You
must perceive it in its full force. The way one understands the ally is
a personal matter. There's no need to be confused. Confusion is a mood
one enters into, but one can also get out of it. At this point there is
no way of clarifying anything. Later we'll consider these matters in
detail. It's up to your personal power, so work for impeccability. I've
told you that the true art of a warrior is to balance terror and
wonder. Power can be met only with power. The crux of sorcery is the
internal dialogue; that is the key to everything. When a warrior learns
to stop it, everything becomes possible; the most farfetched schemes
become attainable. We are a feeling and what we call our body is a
cluster of luminous fibers that have awareness. As long as you think
that you are a solid body you cannot conceive what I am talking about.
Warriors keep controlled and aloof. They don't believe anything, but
still act efficiently. We are luminous beings. We are perceivers. We
are an awareness; we are not objects; we have no solidity. We are
boundless. The world of objects and solidity is a way of making our
passage on earth convenient. It is only a description that was created
to help us. We, or rather our reason , forget that the description is
only a description and thus we entrap the totality of ourselves in a
vicious circle from which we rarely emerge in our lifetime. We are
perceivers. The world that we perceive, though, was created by a
description that was told to us since the moment we were born. We, the
luminous beings, are born with two rings of power, but we use only one
to create the world. That ring, which is hooked very soon after we are
born, is reason , and its companion is talking. Between the two they
concoct and maintain the world. So, in essence, the world that your
reason wants to sustain is the world created by a description and its
dogmatic and inviolable rules, which the reason learns to accept and
defend.
The secret of the luminous beings is that they have another
ring of power which is never used, the will . The trick of the sorcerer
is the same trick of the average man. Both have a description; one, the
average man, upholds it with his reason ; the other, the sorcerer,
upholds it with his will . Both descriptions have their rules and the
rules are perceivable, but the advantage of the sorcerer is that will
is more engulfing than reason . You must learn to let yourself perceive
whether the description is upheld by your reason or by your will . That
is the only way for you to use your daily world as a challenge and a
vehicle to accumulate enough personal power in order to get to the
totality of yourself. Never dwell on past events except in reference.
To emphasize them would mean to take away from the importance of what's
taking place now. A warrior cannot possibly afford to do that. Only as
a warrior can one withstand the path of knowledge. A warrior cannot
complain about, or regret, anything. His life is an endless challenge,
and challenges cannot possibly be good or bad. Challenges are simply
challenges. As is always the case in the doings and not-doings of
warriors, personal power is the only thing that matters. The basic
difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior
takes everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man takes everything
either as a blessing or as a curse. A warrior must be fluid and must
shift harmoniously with the world around him, whether it is the world
of reason , or the world of will . The most dangerous aspect of that
shifting comes forth every time the warrior finds that the world is
neither one nor the other. I was told that the only way to succeed in
that crucial shifting was by proceeding in one's actions as if one
believed. In other words, the secret of a warrior is that he believes
without believing. But obviously a warrior cannot just say he believes
and let it go at that. That would be too easy. To just believe would
exonerate him from examining his situation. A warrior, whenever he has
to involve himself with believing, does it as a choice, as an
expression of his innermost predilection. A warrior doesn't believe, a
warrior has to believe. * * * It is not so difficult to let the spirit
of man flow and take over; to sustain it, however, is something that
only a warrior
can do. * * * Having to believe means that you accept
the facts of something, consider all possibilities and possible
outcomes, and then choose to believe in accordance with your innermost
predilection. Believing is a cinch. Having to believe is something
else. If you have to believe, you must use all of an event, account for
all possibilities, and consider everything. Before deciding that you
believe one way you must consider that it may well be another way. * *
* A warrior, or any man for that matter, cannot possibly wish he were
somewhere else; a warrior because he lives by challenge, an ordinary
man because he doesn't know where his death is going to find him. * * *
Death is the indispensable ingredient in having to believe. Without the
awareness of death everything is ordinary, trivial. It is only because
death is stalking us that the world is an unfathomable mystery. Without
an awareness of the presence of our death there is no power, no
mystery. Having to believe that the world is mysterious and
unfathomable is the expression of a warrior's innermost predilection.
Without it he has nothing. You are aware of everything only when you
think you should be; the condition of a warrior, however, is to be
aware of everything at all times. * * * Now it's time to talk about the
totality of oneself. Some of the things I am going to point out to you
will probably never be clear. They are not supposed to be clear anyway.
So don't be embarrassed or discouraged. All of us are dumb creatures
when we join the world of sorcery, and to join it doesn't in any sense
insure us that we will change. Some of us remain dumb until the very
end. What I'm about to say is meant only to point out a direction. I'm
going to tell you about the tonal (pronounced, toh-na'hl) and the
nagual (pronounced, nah-wa'hl). Every human being has two sides, two
separate entities, two counterparts which become operative at the
moment of birth; one is called the "tonal" and the other the "nagual."
The tonal is the social person. The tonal is, rightfully so, a
protector,
a guardian--a guardian that most of the time turns into a guard. The
tonal is the organizer of the world. Perhaps the best way of describing
its monumental work is to say that on its shoulders rests the task of
setting the chaos of the world in order. It is not farfetched to
maintain, as sorcerers do, that everything we know and do as men is the
work of the tonal . At this moment, for instance, what is engaged in
trying to make sense out of our conversation is your tonal ; without it
there would be only weird sounds and grimaces and you wouldn't
understand a thing of what I'm saying. I would say then that the tonal
is a guardian that protects something priceless, our very being.
Therefore, an inherent quality of the tonal is to be cagey and jealous
of its doings. And since its doings are by far the most important part
of our lives, it is no wonder that it eventually changes, in every one
of us, from a guardian into a guard. A guardian is broad-minded and
understanding. A guard, on the other hand, is a vigilante,
narrow-minded and most of the time despotic. I say, then, that the
tonal in all of us has been made into a petty and despotic guard when
it should be a broad-minded guardian. The tonal is everything we are.
Anything we have a word for is the tonal . Since the tonal is its own
doings, everything, obviously, has to fall under its domain. Remember,
I've said that there is no world at large but only a description of the
world which we have learned to visualize and take for granted. The
tonal is everything we know. I think this in itself is enough reason
for the tonal to be such an overpowering affair. The tonal is
everything we know, and that includes not only us, as persons, but
everything in our world. It can be said that the tonal is everything
that meets the eye. We begin to groom it at the moment of birth. The
moment we take the first gasp of air we also breathe in power for the
tonal . So, it is proper to say that the tonal of a human being is
intimately tied to his birth. You must remember this point. It is of
great importance in understanding all this. The tonal begins at birth
and ends at death. The tonal is what makes the world. However, the
tonal makes the world only in a manner of speaking. It cannot create or
change anything, and yet is makes the world because its function is to
judge, and assess, and witness. I say that the
tonal makes the world
because it witnesses and assesses it according to tonal rules. In a
very strange manner the tonal is a creator that doesn't create a thing.
In other words, the tonal makes up the rules by which it apprehends the
world. So, in a manner of speaking, it creates the world. The tonal is
like the top of a table--an island. And on this island we have
everything. This island is, in fact, the world. There is a personal
tonal for every one of us, and there is a collective one for all of us
at any given time, which we can call the tonal of the times. It's like
the rows of tables in a restaurant, every table has the same
configuration. Certain items are present on all of them. They are,
however, individually different from each other; some tables are more
crowded than others; they have different food on them, different
plates, different atmosphere, yet we have to admit that all the tables
are very alike. The same thing happens with the tonal . We can say that
the tonal of the times is what makes us alike, in the same way it makes
all the tables in a restaurant alike. Each table separately,
nevertheless, is an individual case, just like the personal tonal of
each of us. But the important factor to keep in mind is that everything
we know about ourselves and about our world is on the island of the
tonal . What, then, is the nagual ? The nagual is the part of us which
we do not deal with at all. The nagual is the part of us for which
there is no description--no words, no names, no feelings, no knowledge.
It is not mind, it is not soul, it is not the thoughts of men, it is
not a state of grace or Heaven or pure intellect, or psyche, or energy,
or vital force, or immortality, or life principle, or the Supreme
Being, the Almighty, God--all of these are items on the island of the
tonal. The tonal is, as I've already said, everything we think the
world is composed of, including God, of course. God has no more
importance other than being a part of the tonal of our time. The nagual
is at the service of the warrior. It can be witnessed, but it cannot be
talked about. The nagual is there, surrounding the island of the tonal
. There, where power hovers. We sense, from the moment we are born,
that there are two parts to us. At the time of birth, and for a while
after, we are all nagual. We sense, then, that in order to function we
need
a counterpart to what we have. The tonal is missing and that gives us,
from the very beginning, a feeling of incompleteness. Then the tonal
starts to develop and it becomes utterly important to our functioning,
so important that it opaques the shine of the nagual , it overwhelms
it. From the moment we become all tonal we do nothing else but to
increment that old feeling of incompleteness which accompanies us from
the moment of our birth, and which tells us constantly that there is
another part to give us completeness. From the moment we become all
tonal we begin making pairs. We sense our two sides, but we always
represent them with items of the tonal. We say that the two parts of us
are the soul and the body. Or mind and matter. Or good and evil. God
and Satan. We never realize, however, that we are merely paring things
on the island, very much like paring coffee and tea, or bread and
tortillas, or chili and mustard. I tell you, we are weird animals. We
get carried away and in our madness we believe ourselves to be making
perfect sense. What can one specifically find in that area beyond the
island? There is no way of answering that. If I would say, Nothing, I
would only make the nagual part of the tonal . All I can say is that
there, beyond the island, one finds the nagual. But then you say, when
I call it the nagual , aren't I also placing it on the island? No. I
named it only because I wanted to make you aware of it. I have named
the tonal and the nagual as a true pair. That is all I have done. We
sense that there is another side to us. But when we try to pin down
that other side the tonal gets hold of the baton, and as a director it
is quite petty and jealous. It dazzles us with its cunningness and
forces us to obliterate the slightest inkling of the other part of the
true pair, the nagual. The nagual has consciousness. It is aware of
everything. In order to talk about it we must borrow from the island of
the tonal , therefore it is more convenient not to explain it but to
simply recount its effects. Are the nagual and the tonal within
ourselves? you ask. You yourself would say that they are within
ourselves. I myself would say that they are not, but neither of us
would be right. The tonal of your time calls for you to maintain that
everything dealing with your feelings and thoughts takes place within
yourself. The sorcerers' tonal says the opposite,
everything is
outside. Who's right? No one. Inside, outside, it doesn't really
matter. To explain all this is not that simple. No matter how clever
the checkpoints of the tonal are the fact of the matter is that the
nagual surfaces. Its coming to the surface is always inadvertent,
though. The tonal 's great art is to suppress any manifestation of the
nagual in such a manner that even if its presence should be the most
obvious thing in the world, it is unnoticeable. Let's say that the
tonal , since it is keenly aware of how taxing it is to speak of
itself, has created the terms "I," "myself," and so forth as a balance
and thanks to them it can talk with other tonals , or with itself,
about itself. Now when I say that the tonal forces us to do something,
I don't mean that there is a third party there. Obviously it forces
itself to follow its own judgments. On certain occasions, however, or
under certain special circumstances, something in the tonal itself
becomes aware that there is more to us. It is like a voice that comes
from the depths, the voice of the nagual . You see, the totality of
ourselves is a natural condition which the tonal cannot obliterate
altogether, and there are moments, especially in the life of a warrior,
when the totality becomes apparent. At those moments one can surmise
and assess what we really are. When we die, we die with the totality of
ourselves. A sorcerer asks the question. "If we're going to die with
the totality of ourselves, why not, then, live with that totality?" * *
* A warrior treats his tonal in a very special manner. Life can be
merciless with you if you are careless with your tonal . To see a man
as a tonal entails that one cease judging him in a moral sense, or
excusing him on the grounds that he is like a leaf at the mercy of the
wind. In other words, it entails seeing a man without thinking that he
is hopeless or helpless. You know exactly what I am talking about. One
can assess people without condemning or forgiving them. Youth is in no
way a barrier against the deterioration of the tonal . You say you
think there might be a great many reasons for one's condition. I find
that there is only one, our tonal . It is not that our tonal is weak
because, for example, we drink; it is the other way around, one drinks
because one's tonal is weak. That weakness forces one to be what he is.
This happens to all of us, in one form or another.
But aren't I also
justifying our behavior by saying that it's our tonal ? No, I'm giving
you an explanation that you have never encountered before. It is not a
justification or a condemnation, though. Our tonals are weak and timid.
All of us are more or less in the same boat. There is no need to treat
the body in an awful manner, but the fact is that all of us have
learned to perfection how to make our tonal weak. I have called that
indulging. Only a warrior has a "proper tonal." The average man, at
best, can have a "right tonal." The nagual is not experience or
intuition or consciousness. Those terms and everything else you may
care to say are only items on the island of the tonal . The nagual , on
the other hand, is only effect. The tonal begins at birth and ends at
death, but the nagual never ends. The nagual has no limit. I've said
that the nagual is where power hovers; that was only a way of alluding
to it. By reasons of its effect, perhaps the nagual can be best
understood in terms of power. * * * One of the acts of a warrior is
never to let anything affect him. Thus, a warrior may be seeing the
devil himself, but he won't let anyone know that. The control of a
warrior has to be impeccable. * * * A proper tonal is a tonal that is
just right, balanced and harmonious. There are, roughly speaking, two
sides to every tonal. One is the outer part, the fringe, the surface of
the island. That's the part related to action and acting, the rugged
side. The other part is the decision and judgment, the inner tonal ,
softer, more delicate and more complex. The proper tonal is a tonal
where the two levels are in perfect harmony and balance. * * * You say
you are puzzled because I have never talked about women in relation to
my knowledge. You're a man, therefore I use the masculine gender when I
talk to you. That's all. The rest is the same. * * * For a proper tonal
everything on the island of the tonal is a challenge. Another way of
saying it is that for a warrior everything in this world is a
challenge. The greatest challenge of all, of course, is his bid for
power. But power comes from the nagual , and when a warrior finds
himself at the edge of
the day it means that the hour of the nagual
is approaching, the warrior's hour of power. One bids for power and
that bidding is irreversible. I wouldn't say that at the time power
comes, that one is about to fulfill his destiny, because there is no
destiny. The only thing that can be said then is that, at that point,
one is about to fulfill his power. * * * The best of us always comes
out when we are against the wall, when we feel the sword dangling
overhead. Personally, I wouldn't have it any other way. Men are very
frail creatures, who make themselves even more frail with their
indulging. * * * Seeing must be direct, for a warrior can't use his
time to unravel what he himself is seeing . Seeing is seeing because it
cuts through all that nonsense. In the beginning seeing is confusing
and it's easy to get lost in it. As the warrior gets tighter, however,
his seeing becomes what it should be, a direct knowing. A warrior asks
a question, and through his seeing he gets an answer, but the answer is
simple. A rule of thumb for a warrior is that he makes his decisions so
carefully that nothing that may happen as a result of them can surprise
him, much less drain his power. To be a warrior means to be humble and
alert. When you come to see me you should come prepared to die. If you
come here ready to die, there shouldn't be any pitfalls, or any
unwelcome surprises, or any unnecessary acts. Everything should gently
fall into place because you're expecting nothing. It's not that you
have to live with all this. You are all this. A warrior doesn't ever
leave the island of the tonal . He uses it. This is your world. You
can't renounce it. It is useless to get angry and feel disappointed
with oneself. All that that proves is that one's tonal is involved in
an internal battle; a battle within one's tonal is one of the most
inane contests I can think of. The tight life of a warrior is designed
to end that struggle. From the beginning I have taught you to avoid
wear and tear. The warrior's way is harmony--the harmony between
actions and decisions, at first, and then the harmony between tonal and
nagual. It is the tonal that has to relinquish control. The tonal is
made to give up unnecessary things like self-importance and indulging,
which only plunge it into boredom. The whole
trouble is that the
tonal clings to those things when it should be glad to rid itself of
that crap. The task then is to convince the tonal to become free and
fluid. That's what a sorcerer needs before anything else, a strong,
free tonal . The stronger it gets the less it clings to its doings, and
the easier it is to shrink it. The tonal shrinks at given times,
especially when it is embarrassed. Once the tonal has shrunk, the
nagual , if it is already in motion, no matter how small that motion
is, will take over and achieve extraordinary deeds. The affairs of the
nagual can be witnessed only with the body, not the reason. We are
fluid, luminous beings made out of fibers. The agreement that we are
solid objects is the tonal 's doings. When the tonal shrinks,
extraordinary things are possible. But they are only extraordinary for
the tonal . The nagual , once it learns to surface, may cause great
damage to the tonal by coming out without any control. Your tonal has
to be convinced about all of this with reasons, your nagual with
actions, until one props the other. As I have told you, the tonal
rules, and yet it is very vulnerable. The nagual , on the other hand,
never, or almost never, acts out; but when it does, it terrifies the
tonal . The tonal must be protected at any cost. The crown has to be
taken away from it, but it must remain as the protected overseer. Any
threat to the tonal always results in its death. And if the tonal dies,
so does the whole man. Because of its inherent weakness the tonal is
easily destroyed, and thus one of the balancing arts of the warrior is
to make the nagual emerge in order to prop up the tonal . I say it is
an art, because sorcerers know that only by boosting the tonal can the
nagual emerge. That boosting is called personal power. My advantage
over you at this moment is that I know how to get to the nagual , and
you don't. But once I have gotten there I have no more advantage and no
more knowledge than you. * * * In moments of great danger, fear, or
stress, push your belly down by pushing the diaphragm down while taking
four sharp gasps of air through the mouth, followed by four deep
inhalations and exhalations through the nose. The gasps of air have to
be felt as jolts in the middle part of the body. Keeping
the hands
tightly clasped, covering the navel, gives strength to the midsection
and helps to control the gasps and the deep inhalations, which have to
be held for a count of eight as one presses the diaphragm down. The
exhalations are done twice through the nose and twice through the mouth
in a slow or accelerated fashion, depending on one's preference. * * *
The nagual is only for witnessing. When one is dealing with the nagual
, one should never look into it directly. The only way to look at the
nagual is as if it were a common affair. One must blink in order to
break the fixation. Our eyes are the eyes of the tonal , or perhaps it
would be more accurate to say that our eyes have been trained by the
tonal , therefore the tonal claims them. One of the sources of an
apprentice's bafflement and discomfort is that his tonal doesn't let go
of his eyes. The day it does, his nagual will have won a great battle.
Your obsession or, better yet, everyone's obsession is to arrange the
world according to the tonal 's rules; so every time we are confronted
with the nagual , we go out of our way to make our eyes stiff and
intransigent. I must appeal to the part of your tonal which understands
this dilemma and you must make an effort to free your eyes. The point
is to convince the tonal that there are worlds that can pass in front
of the same windows. Let your eyes be free; let them be true windows.
The eyes can be the windows to peer into boredom or to peek into that
infinity. All you have to do is to set up your intent as a customs
house. Whenever you are in the world of the tonal , you should be an
impeccable tonal ; no time for irrational crap. But whenever you are in
the world of the nagual , you should also be impeccable; no time for
rational crap. For the warrior, intent is the gate in between. It
closes completely behind him when he goes either way. Another thing one
should do when facing the nagual is to shift the line of the eyes from
time to time, in order to break the spell of the nagual . Changing the
position of the eyes always eases the burden of the tonal . This
shifting should be done only as a relief, though, not as another way of
palisading yourself to safeguard the order to the tonal . * * * If
there are too many unnecessary items on your island you won't be able
to sustain the encounter with the nagual . No one is capable of
surviving a deliberate encounter with the
nagual without a long
training. It takes years to prepare the tonal for such an encounter.
Ordinarily, if an average man comes face to face with the nagual the
shock would be so great that he would die. The goal of the warrior's
training then is not to teach him to hex or to charm, but to prepare
his tonal not to crap out. A most difficult accomplishment. A warrior
must be taught to be impeccable and thoroughly empty before he could
even conceive witnessing the nagual . The island of the tonal has to be
swept clean and maintained clean. That's the only alternative that a
warrior has. A clean island offers no resistance; it is as if there
were nothing there. Nothing that we may have gained in the course of
our lives can reveal to us the designs of power. A warrior must
struggle like a demon to shrink his tonal ; and yet at the very moment
the tonal shrinks, the warrior must reverse all that struggle to
immediately halt that shrinking. After the tonal shrinks, the warrior
is closing the gate from the other side. As long as his tonal is
unchallenged and his eyes are tuned only for the tonal 's world, the
warrior is on the safe side of the fence. He's on familiar ground and
knows all the rules. But when his tonal shrinks, he is on the windy
side, and that opening must be shut tight immediately, or he would be
swept away. As a rule the tonal must defend itself, at any cost, every
time it is threatened; so it is of no real consequence how the tonal
reacts in order to accomplish its defense. The only important matter is
that the tonal of a warrior must become acquainted with other
alternatives. What a teacher aims for, in this case, is the total
weight of those possibilities. It is the weight of those new
possibilities which helps to shrink the tonal . By the same token, it
is the same weight which helps stop the tonal from shrinking out of the
picture. The nagual can perform extraordinary things, things that do
not seem possible, things that are unthinkable for the tonal . But the
extraordinary thing is that the performer has no way of knowing how
those things happen. The secret of the sorcerer is that he knows how to
get to the nagual , but once he gets there, your guess is as good as
his as to what takes place. Let's say that the warrior learns to tune
his will , to direct it to a pinpoint, to focus it wherever he wants.
It is as if his will , which comes from the midsection of his body, is
one single
luminous fiber, a fiber that he can direct at any
conceivable place. That fiber is the road to the nagual . Or I could
also say that the warrior sinks into the nagual through that single
fiber. Once he has sunk, the expression of the nagual is a matter of
his personal temperament. One of the aims of the warrior's training is
to cut the bewilderment of the tonal , until the warrior is so fluid
that he can admit everything without admitting anything. * * * The yell
of a warrior is one of the most important issues of sorcery. You can
focus on your yell, using it as a vehicle. A warrior follows the
dictums of power. * * * The only way to fend off the nagual is to
remain unaltered. The nagual is only for witnessing. So, we can talk
about what we witness and about how we witness it. You want to take on
the explanation of how it is all possible, though, and that is an
abomination. You want to explain the nagual with the tonal . That is
stupid. We make sense in talking only because we stay within certain
boundaries, and those boundaries are not applicable to the nagual. To
be a perfect tonal means to be aware of everything that takes place on
the island of the tonal . It takes a gigantic struggle to clean the
island of the tonal. We interpret any unknown expression of the nagual
as something we know. The nagual might be interpreted as a breeze
shaking the leaves, or even as some strange light, perhaps a lightning
bug of unusual size. If a man who doesn't see is pressed, he would say
that he thought he saw something but could not remember what. This is
only natural. The man would be talking sense. After all, his eyes would
have judged nothing extraordinary; being the eyes of the tonal they
have to be limited to the tonal 's world, and in that world there is
nothing staggeringly new, nothing which the eyes cannot apprehend and
the tonal cannot explain. In order to be an average tonal a man must
have unity. His whole being must belong to the island of the tonal .
Without that unity the man would go berserk; a sorcerer, however, has
to break that unity, but without endangering his being. A sorcerer's
goal is to last; that is, he doesn't take unnecessary risks, therefore
he spends years sweeping his island until a moment when he could, in a
manner of speaking, sneak off it.
The whispering of the nagual will
come at times and then vanish. Don't be afraid of it, or of any unusual
sensation that you may have from now on. But above all, don't indulge
and become obsessed with those sensations. A warrior is, let's say, a
prisoner of power; a prisoner who has one free choice: the choice to
act either like an impeccable warrior, or to act like an ass. In the
final analysis, perhaps the warrior is not a prisoner but a slave of
power, because that choice is no longer a choice for him. He cannot act
in any other way but impeccably. To act like an ass would drain him and
cause his demise. An immortal being has all the time in the world for
doubts and bewilderment and fears. A warrior, on the other hand, cannot
cling to the meanings made under the tonal 's order, because he knows
for a fact that the totality of himself has but a little time on this
earth. A warrior cannot be helpless, or bewildered or frightened, not
under any circumstances. For a warrior there is time only for his
impeccability; everything else drains his power, impeccability
replenishes it. Impeccability is to do your best in whatever you're
engaged in. The key to all these matters of impeccability is the sense
of having or not having time. As a rule of thumb, when you feel and act
like an immortal being that has all the time in the world you are not
impeccable; at those times you should turn, look around, and then you
will realize that your feeling of having time is an idiocy. There are
no survivors on this earth! Turn off your internal dialogue and let
something in you flow out and expand. That something is your
perception, but don't try to figure out what I mean. Just let the
whispering of the nagual guide you. * * * There's no future. The future
is only a way of talking. For a sorcerer there is only the here and
now. Everything that I've done with you was done to accomplish one
single task, the task of cleaning and reordering your island of the
tonal . I've told you countless times that a most drastic change is
needed if you want to succeed in the path of knowledge. That change is
not a change of mood, or attitude, or outlook; that change entails the
transformation
of the island of the tonal . Once that transformation has been
accomplished a teacher would usually say to his disciple that he has
arrived at a final crossroad. To say such a thing is misleading,
though. In my opinion there is no final crossroad, no final step to
anything. And since there is no final step to anything, there shouldn't
be any secrecy about any part of our lot as luminous beings. Personal
power decides who can or who cannot profit by a revelation; my
experiences with my fellow men have proven to me that very, very few of
them would be willing to listen; and of those few who listen even fewer
would be willing to act on what they have listened to; and of those who
are willing to act even fewer have enough personal power to profit by
their acts. So, the matter of secrecy about the sorcerers' explanation
boils down to a routine, perhaps a routine as empty as any other
routine. At any rate, you know now about the tonal and the nagual ,
which are the core of the sorcerers' explanation. To know about them
seems to be quite harmless. We are talking innocently about them as if
they were just an ordinary topic of conversation. But before we venture
beyond this point a fair warning is required; a teacher is supposed to
speak in earnest terms and warn his disciple that the harmlessness and
placidity of this moment are a mirage, that there is a bottomless abyss
in front of him, and that once the door opens there is no way to close
it again. The years of hard training are only a preparation for the
warrior's devastating encounter with whatever lies out there, beyond
this point. What will happen in that encounter depends on whether or
not you have enough personal power to focus your unwavering attention
on the wings of your perception, so let's review what we've done. The
first act of a teacher is to introduce the idea that the world we think
we see is only a view, a description of the world. Accepting that seems
to be one of the hardest things one can do; we are complacently caught
in our particular view of the world, which compels us to feel and act
as if we know everything about the world. A teacher, from the very
first act he performs, aims at stopping that view. Sorcerers call it
stopping the internal dialogue, and they are convinced that it is the
single most important technique that an apprentice can learn. In order
to stop the view of the world which one has held
since the cradle,
it is not enough to just wish or make a resolution. One needs a
practical task; that practical task is called the right way of walking.
It seems harmless and nonsensical. As everything else which has power
in itself or by itself, the right way of walking does not attract
attention. Walking in that specific manner saturates the tonal , it
floods it. You see, the attention of the tonal has to be placed on its
creations. In fact, it is that attention that creates the order of the
world in the first place; so, the tonal must be attentive to the
elements of its world in order to maintain it, and must, above all,
uphold the view of the world as internal dialogue. The right way of
walking is a subterfuge. The warrior, first by curling his fingers,
draws attention to the arms; and then by looking fixedly, without
focusing his eyes, at any point directly in front of him on the arc
that starts at the tip of his feet and ends above the horizon,
literally floods his tonal with information. The tonal , without its
one-to-one relation with the elements of its description, is incapable
of talking to itself, and thus one becomes silent. The position of the
fingers does not matter at all. The only consideration is to draw
attention to the arms by clasping the fingers in various unaccustomed
ways. The important thing is the manner in which the eyes, by being
kept unfocused, detect an enormous number of features of the world
without being clear about them. The eyes in that state are capable of
picking out details which are too fleeting for normal vision. Together
with the right way of walking, a teacher must teach his apprentice
another possibility, which is even more subtle: the possibility of
acting without believing, without expecting rewards--acting just for
the hell of it. I wouldn't be exaggerating if I told you that the
success of a teacher's enterprise depends on how well and how
harmoniously he guides his apprentice in this specific respect.
Stopping the internal dialogue is, however, the key to the sorcerers'
world. The rest of the activities are only props; all they do is
accelerate the effect of stopping the internal dialogue. There are two
major activities or techniques used to accelerate the stopping of the
internal dialogue: erasing personal history and dreaming . The secret
of all this is one's attention. All of this exists only because of our
attention. This very rock where we're sitting is a rock because we have
been forced to give our
attention to it as a rock. Erasing personal
history and dreaming should only be a help. What any apprentice needs
to buffer him is temperance and strength. That's why a teacher
introduces the warrior's way, or living like a warrior. This is the
glue that joins together everything in a sorcerer's world. Bit by bit a
teacher must forge and develop it. Without the sturdiness and
levelheadedness of the warrior's way there is no possibility of
withstanding the path of knowledge. In order to help erase personal
history three other techniques are taught. They are: losing
self-importance, assuming responsibility, and using death as an
adviser. Without the beneficial effect of those three techniques,
erasing personal history would involve the apprentice in being shifty,
evasive and unnecessarily dubious about himself and his actions. By now
there is no way for you to recollect the immense effort that you needed
to establish self-pity as a feature of your island. Self-pity bore
witness to everything you did. It was just at your fingertips, ready to
advise you. Death is considered by a warrior to be a more amenable
adviser, which can also be brought to bear witness on everything one
does, just like self-pity, or wrath. Obviously, after an untold
struggle you have learned to feel sorry for yourself. But you can also
learn, in the same way, to feel your impending end, and thus you can
learn to have the idea of your death at your fingertips. As an adviser,
self-pity is nothing in comparison to death. There is seemingly a
contradiction in the idea of change; on the one hand, the sorcerers'
world calls for a drastic transformation, and on the other, the
sorcerers' explanation says that the island of the tonal is complete
and not a single element of it can be removed. Change, then, does not
mean obliterating anything but rather altering the use assigned to
those elements. Take self-pity for instance. There is no way to get rid
of it for good; it has a definite place and character in your island, a
definite facade which is recognizable. Thus, every time the occasion
arises, self-pity becomes active. It has history. If you then change
the facade of self-pity, you would have shifted its place of
prominence. One changes the facade by altering the use of the elements
of the island. Take self-pity again. It is useful to you because you
either feel important and deserving of better conditions,
better
treatment, or because you are unwilling to assume responsibility for
the acts that brought you to the state that elicited self-pity, or
because you are incapable of bringing the idea of your impending death
to witness your acts and advise you. Erasing personal history and its
three companion techniques are the sorcerers' means for changing the
facade of the elements of the island. For instance, by erasing your
personal history, you deny use to self-pity; in order for self-pity to
work you have to feel important, irresponsible, and immortal. When
those feelings are altered in some way, it is no longer possible for
you to feel sorry for yourself. Your self-pity will still be a feature
of your island; it will be there in the back in the same way that the
idea of your impending death, or your humbleness, or your
responsibility for your acts has been there, without ever being used.
Once all those techniques have been presented, the apprentice arrives
at a crossroad. Depending on his sensibility, the apprentice does one
of two things. He either takes the recommendations and suggestions made
by his teacher at their face value, acting without expecting rewards;
or he takes everything as a joke or an aberration. If you use those
four techniques to clear and reorder your island of the tonal they lead
you to the nagual . Power provides according to your impeccability. If
you seriously use those four techniques, you will store enough personal
power, you will be impeccable, and power will open all the necessary
avenues. That is the rule. * * * We function at the center of reason
exclusively, regardless of who we are or where we come from. Reason can
naturally account in one way or another for everything that happens
within its view of the world. Sorcerers have learned after generations
to account in their views for everything that is accountable about
them. I would say that sorcerers, by using their will , have succeeded
in enlarging their views of the world. Some though are not man of
knowledge. They never brake the bounds of their enormous views and thus
never arrive at the totality of themselves. Only if one pits two views
against each other can one weasel between them to arrive at the real
world. That is, one can arrive at the totality of oneself only when one
fully understands that the world is merely a view, regardless of
whether
that view belongs to an ordinary man or to a sorcerer. What matters is
not to learn a new description but to arrive at the totality of
oneself. One should get to the nagual without maligning the tonal , and
above all, without injuring one's body. * * * The tonal doesn't know
that decisions are in the realm of the nagual . When we think we
decide, all we're doing is acknowledging that something beyond our
understanding has set up the frame of our so-called decision, and all
we do is to acquiesce. * * * In the life of a warrior there is only one
thing, one issue alone which is really undecided: how far one can go on
the path of knowledge and power. That is an issue which is open and no
one can predict its outcome. I once told you that the freedom a warrior
has is either to act impeccably or to act like a nincompoop.
Impeccability is indeed the only act which is free and thus the true
measure of a warrior's spirit. I've taught you the three techniques
that help dreaming : disrupting the routines of life, the gait of
power, and not-doing . Disrupting routines, the gait of power, and
not-doing are avenues for learning new ways of perceiving the world,
and they give a warrior an inkling of incredible possibilities of
action. The knowledge of a separate and pragmatic world of dreaming is
made possible through the use of those three techniques. Dreaming is a
practical aid devised by sorcerers. They were not fools; they knew what
they were doing and sought the usefulness of the nagual by training
their tonal to let go for a moment, so to speak, and then grab again.
This statement may not make sense to you. But that's what you're doing:
training yourself to let go without losing your marbles. Dreaming , of
course, is the crown of the sorcerers' efforts, the ultimate use of the
nagual . We're at the end of our review. All in all, then, you have
been being led into the nagual . But here we have a strange question.
What is being led into the nagual ? Not reason . Reason is meaningless
there. Reason craps out in an instant when it is out of its safe narrow
bounds. Your tonal ? No, the tonal and the nagual are the two inherent
parts of ourselves. They cannot be led into each other. Your
perception! We're coming now to the sorcerers' explanation. It won't
explain
anything and yet... Sorcerers say that we are inside a bubble. It is a
bubble into which we are placed at the moment of our birth. At first
the bubble is open, but then it begins to close until it has sealed us
in. That bubble is our perception. We live inside that bubble all of
our lives. And what we witness on its round walls is our own
reflection. If what we witness on the walls is our own reflection, then
the thing that's being reflected must be the real thing. The thing
reflected is our view of the world. That view is first a description,
which is given to us from the moment of our birth until all our
attention is caught by it and the description becomes a view. The
teacher's task is to rearrange the view, to prepare the luminous being
for the time when the spirit opens the bubble. The bubble is opened in
order to allow the luminous being a view of his totality. Naturally
this business of calling it a bubble is only a way of talking, but in
this case it is an accurate way. The delicate maneuver of leading a
luminous being into the totality of himself requires that the teacher
reorder the view of the world. I have called that view the island of
the tonal . I've said that everything that we are is on that island.
The sorcerers' explanation says that the island of the tonal is made by
our perception, which has been trained to focus on certain elements;
each of those elements and all of them together form our view of the
world. The job of a teacher, insofar as the apprentice's perception is
concerned, consists of reordering all the elements of the island on one
half of the bubble. By now you must have realized that cleaning and
reordering the island of the tonal means regrouping all its elements on
the side of reason . My task has been to disarrange your ordinary view,
not to destroy it but to force it to rally on the side of reason . The
art of a teacher is to force his disciple to group his view of the
world on the right half of the bubble. That's the side of the tonal .
The teacher always addresses himself to that side. By presenting his
apprentice with the warrior's way he forces him into reasonableness,
and sobriety, and strength of character and body. The other half of the
bubble, the one that has been cleared, can then be claimed by something
sorcerers call will . We can better explain this by saying that the
task of the
teacher is to wipe clean one half of the bubble and to
reorder everything on the other half. The spirit then opens the bubble
on the side that has been cleaned. Once the seal is broken, the warrior
is never the same. He has then the command of his totality. Half of the
bubble is the ultimate center of reason , the tonal . The other half is
the ultimate center of will , the nagual . That is the order that
should prevail; any other arrangement is nonsensical and petty, because
it goes against our nature; it robs us of our magical heritage and
reduces us to nothing. We have one single issue left. Sorcerers call it
the secret of the luminous beings, and that is the fact that we are
perceivers. We men and all the other luminous beings on earth are
perceivers. That is our bubble, the bubble of perception. Our mistake
is to believe that the only perception worthy of acknowledgment is what
goes through our reason . * * * To be ready for the sorcerers'
explanation is a very difficult accomplishment. It shouldn't be, but we
insist on indulging in our lifelong view of the world. The mystery, or
the secret, of the sorcerers' explanation is that it deals with
unfolding the wings of perception. The nagual by itself is of no use,
it has to be tempered by the tonal . The sorcerers' secret in using the
nagual is in our perception. There's no way to get to the sorcerers'
explanation unless one has willingly used the nagual , or rather,
unless one has willingly used the tonal to make sense out of one's
actions in the nagual . Another way of making all this clear is to say
that the view of the tonal must prevail if one is going to use the
nagual the way sorcerers do. Order in our perception is the exclusive
realm of the tonal ; only there can our actions have a sequence; only
there are they like stairways where one can count the steps. There is
nothing of that sort in the nagual . Therefore, the view of the tonal
is a tool, and as such it is not only the best tool but the only one
we've got. This is the sorcerers' explanation. The nagual is the
unspeakable. All the possible feelings and beings and selves float in
it like barges, peaceful, unaltered, forever. Then the glue of life
binds some of them together. When the glue of life binds those feelings
together a being
is created, a being that loses the sense of its
true nature and becomes blinded by the glare and clamor of the area
where beings hover, the tonal . The tonal is where all the unified
organization exists. A being pops into the tonal once the force of life
has bound all the needed feelings together. I said to you that the
tonal begins at birth and ends at death; I said that because I know
that as soon as the force of life leaves the body all those single
awarenesses disintegrate and go back again to where they came from, the
nagual . What a warrior does in journeying into the unknown is very
much like dying, except that his cluster of single feelings do not
disintegrate but expand a bit without losing their togetherness. At
death, however, they sink deeply and move independently as if they had
never been a unit. There is no way to refer to the unknown, one can
only witness it. The sorcerers' explanation says that each of us has a
center from which the nagual can be witnessed, the will . A warrior can
venture into the nagual and let his cluster arrange and rearrange
itself in any way possible. I have called that cluster the bubble of
perception. I have also said that it is sealed, closed tightly, and
that it never opens until the moment of our death. Yet it could be made
to open. Sorcerers have obviously learned that secret, and although not
all of them arrive at the totality of themselves, they know about the
possibility of it. They know that the bubble opens only when one
plunges into the nagual . The secret of the double is in the bubble of
perception. The cluster of feelings can be made to assemble instantly
anywhere. In other words, one can perceive the here and the there at
once. You are a nameless cluster of feelings. There is another center
of assemblage, the will , through which it is possible to judge or
assess and use the extraordinary effects of the nagual . One can
reflect the nagual through the will , although one can never explain
it. The conviction that there is a real you is a result of the fact
that you have rallied everything you've got around your reason . At
this point your reason admits that the nagual is the indescribable, not
because the evidence has convinced it, but because it is safe to admit
that. Your reason is on safe ground, all the elements of the tonal are
on its side. To make reason feel safe is always the task of the
teacher. The teacher tricks the apprentice's reason into believing that
the
tonal is accountable and predictable. I have labored to give you the
impression that only the nagual is beyond the scope of explanation; the
proof that the tricking was successful is that at this moment it seems
to you that there is still a core that you can claim as your own, your
reason . That's a mirage. Your precious reason is only a center of
assemblage, a mirror that reflects something which is outside of it.
The last piece of the sorcerers' explanation says that reason is merely
reflecting an outside order, and that reason knows nothing about that
order; it cannot explain it, in the same way it cannot explain the
nagual . Reason can only witness the effects of the tonal , but never
ever could it understand it, or unravel it. The very fact that we are
thinking and talking points out an order that we follow without ever
knowing how we do that, or what the order is. Sorcerers say that
through the will they can witness the effects of the nagual . I can add
now that through reason , no matter what we do with it, or how we do
it, we are merely witnessing the effects of the tonal . In both cases
there is no hope, ever, to understand or to explain what it is that we
are witnessing. The wings of perception can take us to the most
recondite confines of the nagual or to inconceivable worlds of the
tonal . The tonal of every one of us is but a reflection of that
indescribable unknown filled with order; the nagual of every one of us
is but a reflection of that indescribable void that contains
everything. You have nothing except the force of your life that binds
that cluster of feelings. Turn off your internal dialogue; gather the
power needed to unfold the wings of your perception and fly to that
infinitude. You need nothing except impeccability. What really matters
is being an impeccable warrior. Your only chance is your impeccability.
You must wait without regrets. You must wait without expecting rewards.
If you don't act impeccably, if you begin to fret and get impatient and
desperate, you'll be cut down mercilessly by the sharpshooters from the
unknown. If, on the other hand, your impeccability and personal power
are such that you are capable of fulfilling your task, you will then
achieve the promise of power. And what's that promise? you ask. It is a
promise that power makes to men as
luminous beings. Each warrior has
a different fate, so there is no way of telling what that promise will
be for you. You have learned that the backbone of a warrior is to be
humble and efficient. You have learned to act without expecting
anything in return. Now I tell you that in order to withstand what lies
ahead of you beyond this day, you'll need your ultimate forbearance. A
warrior must be always ready. The fate of all of us here has been to
know that we are the prisoners of power. No one knows why us in
particular, but what a great fortune. We are all alone, that's our
condition. We are alone. But to die alone is not to die in loneliness.
What a wonderful thing it is to be in this beautiful world! In this
marvelous time! A warrior acknowledges his pain but he doesn't indulge
in it. Thus the mood of a warrior who enters into the unknown is not
one of sadness; on the contrary, he's joyful because he feels humbled
by his great fortune, confident that his spirit is impeccable, and
above all, fully aware of his efficiency. A warrior's joyfulness comes
from having accepted his fate, and from having truthfully assessed what
lies ahead of him. * * * I am going to disclose to you a warrior's
secret. Perhaps you can call it a warrior's predilection. The life of a
warrior cannot possibly be cold and lonely and without feelings because
it is based on his affection, his devotion, his dedication to his
beloved. And who, you ask, is his beloved? I will show you now. His
love is the world. He embraces this enormous earth. The earth knows
that he loves it and it bestows on him its care. That's why his life is
filled to the brim and his state, wherever he'll be, will be plentiful.
He roams on the paths of his love and, wherever he is, he is complete.
This is the predilection of a warrior. This earth, this world. For a
warrior there can be no greater love. Only if one loves this earth with
unbending passion can one release one's sadness. A warrior is always
joyful because his love is unalterable and his beloved, the earth,
embraces him and bestows upon him inconceivable gifts. The sadness
belongs only to those who hate the very thing that gives shelter to
their beings. This lovely being, which is alive to its last recesses
and understands every feeling, soothed me, it cured me of my pains, and
finally when I had fully understood my love for it,
it taught me
freedom. Listen to that dog's barking. That is the way my beloved earth
is helping me now to bring this last point to you. That barking is the
saddest thing one can hear. That dog's barking is the nocturnal voice
of a man. It comes from a house in that valley towards the south. A man
is shouting through his dog, since they are companion slaves for life,
his sadness, his boredom. He's begging his death to come and release
him from the dull and dreary chains of his life. That barking, and the
loneliness it creates, speaks of the feelings of men, men for whom an
entire life was like one Sunday afternoon, an afternoon which was not
altogether miserable, but rather hot and dull and uncomfortable. They
sweated and fussed a great deal. They didn't know where to go, or what
to do. That afternoon left them only with the memory of petty
annoyances and tedium, and then suddenly it was over; it was already
night. The antidote that kills that poison is here; this earth. The
sorcerers' explanation cannot at all liberate the spirit. Look at
yourself, you have gotten to the sorcerers' explanation, but it doesn't
make any difference that you know it. You're more alone than ever,
because without an unwavering love for the being that gives you
shelter, aloneness is loneliness. Only the love for this splendorous
being can give freedom to a warrior's spirit; and freedom is joy,
efficiency, and abandon in the face of any odds.
Anything
is possible if one wants it with unbending intent and you don't let
your thoughts interfere. Power comes only after we accept our fate
without recriminations. * * * When one has nothing to lose, one becomes
courageous. We are timid only when there is something we can still
cling to. A warrior doesn't seek anything for his solace, nor can he
possibly leave anything to chance. A warrior actually affects the
outcome of events by the force of his awareness and his unbending
intent . * * * You must lose your human form. You don't yet know about
the human mold and the human form. The human form is a force and the
human mold is ... well ... a mold. Everything has a particular mold.
Plants have molds, animals have molds, worms have molds. Sorcerers have
the avenue of their dreaming to lead them to the mold. The mold of men
is definitely an entity, an entity which can be seen by some of us at
certain times when we are imbued with power, and by all of us for sure
at the moment of our death. The mold is the source, the origin of man,
since, without the mold to group together the force of life, there is
no way for that force to assemble itself into the shape of man. The
human form is a sticky force that makes us the people we are. The human
form has no form. It's anything, but in spite of not having form, it
possesses us during our lives and doesn't leave us until we die. A
warrior must drop the human form in order to change, to really change.
Otherwise there is only talk about change. One cannot change one iota
as long as one holds on to the human
form. A warrior knows that he
cannot change, and yet he makes it his business to try to change, even
though he knows that he won't be able to. That's the only advantage a
warrior has over the average man. The warrior is never disappointed
when he fails to change. The only thing that makes you think you are
yourself is the form. Once it leaves, you are nothing. A warrior
without form begins to see an eye. The formless warrior uses that eye
to start dreaming . If you don't have a form, you don't have to go to
sleep to do dreaming . The eye in front of you pulls you every time you
want to go. Everything has to be sifted through our human form. When we
have no form, then nothing has form and yet everything is present. * *
* The art of the dreamer is to hold the image of his dream . Our art as
ordinary people is that we know how to hold the image of what we are
looking at. We just do it; that is, our bodies do it. In dreaming we
have to do the same thing, except that in dreaming we have to learn how
to do it. We have to struggle not to look but merely to glance and yet
hold the image. Everything we say is a reflection of the world of
people. You talk and act the way you do because you're clinging to the
human form. Everything in a warrior's world depends on personal power
and personal power depends on impeccability. Part of being impeccable
for a warrior is never to hinder others with his thoughts. You indulge
in not trying to change. That's as wrong as feeling disappointed with
our failures. Warriors, must be impeccable in their effort to change,
in order to scare the human form and shake it away. After years of
impeccability a moment will come when the form cannot stand it any
longer and it leaves. * * * The art of a sorcerer is to be
inconspicuous even in the midst of people. Concentrate totally on
trying not to be obvious. To learn to become unnoticeable in the middle
of all this is to know the art of stalking . * * * Be calm and
self-controlled and give others your
undivided attention. * * * The
whole issue of sorcery is perception. A warrior must notice everything,
that's his trick, and there lies his advantage. * * * It is an honor
and a pleasure to be a warrior, and it is the warrior's fortune to do
what he has to do. What is the art of stalking ? A hunter just hunts, a
stalker stalks anything, including himself. An impeccable stalker can
turn anything into prey. We can even stalk our own weaknesses. You do
it in the same way you stalk prey. You figure out your routines until
you know all the doing of your weaknesses and then you come upon them
and pick them up like rabbits inside a cage. Any habit is, in essence,
a doing , and a doing needs all its parts in order to function. If some
parts are missing, a doing is disassembled. * * * A warrior eats
quietly, and slowly, and very little at a time. * * * The only
deterrent to our despair is the awareness of our death, the key to the
sorcerer's scheme of things. The awareness of our death is the only
thing that can give us the strength to withstand the duress and pain of
our lives and our fears of the unknown. Volition alone is the deciding
factor; in other words, one has to make up one's mind to bring that
awareness to bear witness to one's acts. We are human creatures. Who
knows what's waiting for us or what kind of power we may have. * * * It
doesn't matter what anybody says or does. You must be an impeccable man
yourself. The fight is right here in this chest. It takes all the time
and all the energy we have to conquer the idiocy in us. And that's what
matters. The rest is of no importance. To be an impeccable warrior will
give you vigor and youth and power. I have taught you to be
dispassionate. The world of people goes up and down and people go up
and down with their world; as sorcerers we have no business following
them in their ups and downs. The art of sorcerers is to be outside
everything and be unnoticeable. And more than anything else, the art of
sorcerers is never to waste their power.
* * * We hold the images of
the world with our attention. Let your attention go from the images of
the world. If you don't focus your attention on the world, the world
collapses. Instead of fighting to focus, let go of the images by gazing
fixedly at distant hills, or by gazing at water, like a river, or by
gazing at the clouds. If you gaze with your eyes open, you get dizzy
and the eyes get tired, but if you half-close them and blink a lot and
move them from mountain to mountain, or from cloud to cloud, you can
look for hours. As I've told you, the tonal and the nagual are two
different worlds. In one you talk, in the other you act. At first all
of us secretly do not want the world of the nagual . We are afraid and
have second thoughts. Our unbending intent and our impeccability gets
us thru that. * * * Everyone can see , and yet we choose not to
remember what we see . * * * With our attention we can hold the images
of a dream in the same way we hold the images of the world. The art of
the dreamer is the art of attention. * * * Your reason is the demon
that keeps you chained. You have to vanquish it if you want to achieve
the realization of my teachings. The issue, therefore, has been how to
vanquish your reason . By reason I don't mean the capacity for
comprehending, inferring or thinking, in an orderly, rational way. To
me reason means attention. * * * The core of our being is the act of
perceiving, and the magic of our being is the act of awareness.
Perception and awareness can be a single, functional, inextricable unit
with two domains. The first one is the attention of the tonal ; that is
to say, the capacity of average people to perceive and place their
awareness on the ordinary world of everyday life: our first ring of
power; our awesome but taken-for-granted ability to impart order to our
perception of our daily world. The second domain is the attention of
the nagual ; the capacity to place our awareness on the nonordinary
world. It's our second ring of power , or the altogether portentous
ability all of us have, but only sorcerers use, to impart order to the
nonordinary
world. What I have struggled to vanquish, or rather suppress in you, is
not your reason as the capacity for rational thought, but your
attention of the tonal , or your awareness of the world of common
sense. The daily world exists because we know how to hold its images;
consequently, if one drops the attention needed to maintain those
images, the world collapses. Practice is what counts. Once you get your
attention on the images of your dream, your attention is hooked for
good. In the end you can hold the images of any dream. Our first ring
of power is engaged very early in our lives and we live under the
impression that that is all there is to us. Our second ring of power ,
the attention of the nagual , remains hidden for the immense majority
of us, and only at the moment of our death is it revealed to us. There
is a pathway to reach it, however, which is available to every one of
us, but which only sorcerers take, and that pathway is through dreaming
. Dreaming is in essence the transformation of ordinary dreams into
affairs involving volition. Dreamers , by engaging their attention of
the nagual and focusing it on the items and events of their ordinary
dreams, change those dreams into dreaming. There are no procedures to
arrive at the attention of the nagual , only pointers. Finding your
hands in your dreams is the first pointer; then the exercise of paying
attention is elongated to finding objects, looking for specific
features, such as buildings, streets and so on. From there the jump is
to dream about specific places at specific times of the day. The final
stage is drawing the attention of the nagual to focus on the total
self. That final stage is usually ushered in by a dream that many of us
have had at one time or another, in which one is looking at oneself
sleeping in bed. By the time a sorcerer has had such a dream, his
attention has been developed to such a degree that instead of waking
himself up, as most of us would do in a similar situation, he turns on
his heels and engages himself in activity, as if he were acting in the
world of everyday life. From that moment on there is a breakage, a
division of sorts in the otherwise unified personality. The result of
engaging the attention of the nagual and developing it to the height
and sophistication of our daily attention of the world is the other
self, an identical being as oneself, but made in
dreaming . There
are no definite standard steps for reaching that double, as there are
no definite steps for us to reach our daily awareness. We simply do it
by practicing. In the act of engaging our attention of the nagual , we
find the steps. Practice dreaming without letting your fears make it
into an encumbering production. * * * There is a crack between the
worlds and it is more than a metaphor. It is rather the capacity to
change levels of attention. Don't try to reason it out. Act like a
warrior and follow what I've told you. * * * We choose only once. We
choose either to be warriors or to be ordinary men. A second choice
does not exist. Not on this earth. The only freedom warriors have is to
behave impeccably. Not only is impeccability freedom but it is the only
way to scare away the human form. The second attention, or the
attention of the nagual , is reached only after warriors have swept the
top of their tables, their islands of the tonal , clean. Reaching the
second attention makes the two attentions into a single unit, and that
unit is the totality of oneself. Diligence in an impeccable life is the
only way to lose the human form. Losing the human form is the essential
requirement for unifying the two attentions. The attention under the
table is the key to everything sorcerers do. In order to reach that
attention I have taught you dreaming . Another way to learn how to do
dreaming is by learning gazing. If you gaze at a pile of leaves for
hours your thoughts get quiet. Without thoughts the attention of the
tonal wanes and suddenly your second attention hooks onto the leaves
and the leaves become something else. The moment when the second
attention hooks onto something is called stopping the world . The
difficulty in gazing is to learn to quiet down the thoughts. Once you
can stop the world you are a gazer. And the only way of stopping the
world is by trying. Combine gazing at dry leaves and looking for our
hands in dreaming . Once you have trapped your second attention with
dry leaves,
you do gazing and dreaming to enlarge it. And that's all
there is to gazing. All we need to do in order to trap our second
attention is to try and try. Once dreamers know how to stop the world
by gazing at leaves, they can gaze at other things; and finally when
the dreamers lose their form altogether, they can gaze at anything.
First after leaves, gaze at small plants. Small plants are very
dangerous. Their power is concentrated; they have a very intense light
and they feel when dreamers are gazing at them; they immediately move
their light and shoot it at the gazer. Dreamers have to choose one kind
of plant to gaze at. Next gaze at trees. Dreamers also have a
particular kind of tree to gaze at. Next gaze at moving, living
creatures. Small insects are by far the best subject. Their mobility
makes them innocuous to the gazer, the opposite of plants which draw
their light directly from the earth. The next step is to gaze at rocks.
Rocks are very old and powerful and have a specific light which is
rather greenish in contrast with the white light of plants and the
yellowish light of mobile, living beings. Rocks do not open up easily
to gazers, but it is worthwhile for gazers to persist because rocks
have special secrets concealed in their core, secrets that can aid
sorcerers in their dreaming . A second series in the order of gazing is
to gaze at cyclic phenomena: rain and fog. Gazers can focus their
second attention on the rain itself and move with it, or focus it on
the background and use the rain as a magnifying glass of sorts to
reveal hidden features. Places of power or places to be avoided are
found by gazing through rain. Places of power are yellowish and places
to be avoided are intensely green. The position of the body is of great
importance while one is gazing. One has to sit on the ground on a soft
mat of leaves, or on a cushion made out of natural fibers. The back has
to be propped against a tree, or a stump, or a flat rock. The body has
to be thoroughly relaxed. The eyes are never fixed on the object, in
order to avoid tiring them. The gaze consists in scanning very slowly
the object gazed at, going counterclockwise but without moving the
head. The idea is to let your perception play without analyzing it. The
effect you are after in gazing is to learn to stop the internal
dialogue. To do that you can focus your view as gazers do or, as I've
already told you, flood your awareness while walking by not focusing
your sight on anything. That is,
sort of feel with your eyes
everything in the 180-degree range in front of you, while you keep your
fixed and unfocused eyes just above the line of the horizon. The
essential feature of sorcery is shutting off the internal dialogue.
Stopping the internal dialogue is an operational way of describing the
act of disengaging the attention of the tonal . Once we stop our
internal dialogue we also stop the world . That is an operational
description of the inconceivable process of focusing our second
attention. Part of us is always kept under lock and key because we are
afraid of it. And to our reason, that part of us is like an insane
relative that we keep locked in a dungeon. That part is our second
attention, and when it finally can focus on something the world stops.
Since we, as average man, know only the attention of the tonal , it is
not too farfetched to say that once that attention is canceled, the
world indeed has to stop. The focusing of our wild, untrained second
attention is, perforce, terrifying. The only way to keep that insane
relative from bursting in on us is by shielding ourselves with our
endless internal dialogue. * * * Dreamers can gaze in order to do
dreaming and then they can look for their dreams in their gazing. For
example you can gaze at the shadows of rocks and then, in your dreaming
, you might find out that those shadows have light. You can then, while
gazing, look for the light in the shadows until you find it. Gazing and
dreaming go together. * * * A warrior has no compassion for anyone. To
have compassion means that you wish the other person to be like you, to
be in your shoes, and you lend a hand just for that purpose. The
hardest thing in the world is for a warrior to let others be. The
impeccability of a warrior is to let them be and to support them in
what they are. That means, of course, that you trust them to be
impeccable warriors themselves. If they are not then it's your duty to
be impeccable yourself and not say a word. Only a sorcerer who sees and
is formless can afford to help anyone. Every effort to help on our part
is an arbitrary act guided by our own self-interest alone. * * * The
problem for you as a challenge is whether or not you will be capable of
developing your will , or the power of your second attention to focus
indefinitely on anything you want.
Our
total being consists of two perceivable segments. The first is the
familiar physical body, which all of us can perceive; the second is the
luminous body, which is a cocoon that only seers can perceive, a cocoon
that gives us the appearance of giant luminous eggs. One of the most
important goals of sorcery is to reach the luminous cocoon; a goal
which is fulfilled through the sophisticated use of dreaming and
through a rigorous, systematic exertion called not-doing . I've defined
not-doing as an unfamiliar act which engages our total being by forcing
it to become conscious of its luminous segment. To explain these
concepts I've make a three-part, uneven division of our consciousness.
The smallest, the first attention, or the consciousness that every
normal person has developed in order to deal with the daily world,
encompasses the awareness of the physical body. Another larger portion,
the second attention, is the awareness we need in order to perceive our
luminous cocoon and to act as luminous beings. The second attention is
brought forth through deliberate training or by an accidental trauma,
and it encompasses the awareness of the luminous body. The last
portion, which is the largest, is the third attention. It's an
immeasurable consciousness which engages undefinable aspects of the
awareness of the physical and the luminous bodies. The battlefield of
warriors is the second attention, which is something like a training
ground for reaching the third attention. * * * The compulsion to
possess and hold on to things is not unique. Everyone who wants to
follow the warrior's path has to rid himself of this fixation in order
not to focus our dreaming body on the weak face of the second
attention. The dreaming body , sometimes called the "double" or the
"Other," because it is a perfect replica of the dreamer 's body, is
inherently the energy of a luminous being, a whitish, phantomlike
emanation, which is projected by the fixation of the second attention
into a three-dimensional image of the
body. The dreaming body is as
real as anything we deal with in the world. The second attention is
unavoidably drawn to focus on our total being as a field of energy, and
transforms that energy into anything suitable. The easiest thing is of
course the image of the physical body, with which we are already
thoroughly familiar from our daily lives and the use of our first
attention. What channels the energy of our total being to produce
anything that might be within the boundaries of possibility is known as
will . At the level of luminous beings the range is so broad that it is
futile to try to establish limits--thus, the energy of a luminous being
can be transformed through will into anything. We are not merely
whatever our common sense requires us to believe we are. We are in
actuality luminous beings, capable of becoming aware of our luminosity.
As luminous beings aware of our luminosity, we are capable of
unraveling different facets of our awareness, or our attention. That
unraveling could be brought about by a deliberate effort, as we are
doing ourselves, or accidentally, through a bodily trauma. The old
sorcerers deliberately placed different facets of their attention on
material objects. By unraveling another facet of our attention we might
become receptors for the projections of ancient sorcerers' second
attention. Those sorcerers were impeccable practitioners with no limit
to what they could accomplish with the fixation of their second
attention. Be fluid, at ease in whatever situation you find yourself.
Your challenge is to deal with people with ease regardless of what they
do to you. Remember what I have said, that it is of no use to be sad
and complain and feel justified in doing so, believing that someone is
always doing something to us. Nobody is doing anything to anybody, much
less to a warrior. * * * You must let go of your desire to cling. The
very same thing happened to me. I held on to things, such as the food I
liked, the mountains where I lived, the people I used to enjoy talking
to. But most of all I clung to the desire to be liked. Those things are
our barriers to losing our human form. Our attention is trained to
focus doggedly. That is the way we maintain the world. Now is the time
to let go of all that. In order to lose your human form you should let
go of all that ballast.
* * * Dissipating a mood through
overanalyzing it wastes our power. If you have the same vision in
dreaming three times, pay extraordinary attention to it. When a dreamer
dreams that he sees himself asleep he must avoid sudden jolts or
surprises, and take everything with a grain of salt. The dreamer has to
get involved in dispassionate experimentations. Rather than examining
his sleeping body, the dreamer walks out of the room. In dreaming what
matters is volition, the corporeality of the body has no significance.
It is simply a memory that slows down the dreamer . If you do not stare
at things but only glance at them, just as you do in the daily world,
you can arrange your perception. That is, by taking your dreaming for
granted, you then can use the perceptual biases of your everyday life.
* * * Wait before revealing a finding. Wait for the most appropriate
time to let go of something that you hold. * * * Losing the human form
brings the freedom to remember your self. Losing the human form is like
a spiral. It gives you the freedom to remember and this in turn makes
you even freer. A warrior knows that he is waiting and knows also what
he is waiting for, and while he waits he feasts his eyes on the world.
The ultimate accomplishment of a warrior is joy. Accept your fate in
humbleness. The course of a warrior's destiny is unalterable. The
challenge is how far he can go within those rigid bounds, how
impeccable he can be within those rigid bounds. If there are obstacles
in his path, the warrior strives impeccably to overcome them. If he
finds unbearable hardship and pain on his path, he weeps, but all his
tears put together could not move the line of his destiny the breadth
of one hair. Fulfill your fate as a warrior not as a petty person.
Detachment does not automatically mean wisdom, but it is nonetheless,
an advantage because it allows the warrior to
pause momentarily to
reassess situations, to reconsider positions. In order to use that
extra moment consistently and correctly, however, a warrior has to
struggle unyieldingly for a lifetime. A warrior is someone who seeks
freedom. Sadness is not freedom. We must snap out of it. Having a sense
of detachment entails having a moment's pause to reassess situations.
Formlessness is, if anything, a detriment to sobriety and
levelheadedness. An aspect of being detached, the capacity to become
immersed in whatever one is doing, naturally extends to everything one
does, including being inconsistent, and outright petty. The advantage
of being formless is that it allows us a moment's pause, providing that
we have the self-discipline and courage to utilize it. We unwittingly
focus on fear and distrust, as if those were the only possible options
available to us, while all along we have the alternative of
deliberately centering our attention on the opposite, the mystery, the
wonder of what is happening to us. * * * There are no steps to anything
a warrior does. There is only personal power. * * * In the final
analysis every dreamer is different. There are, however, general
states. Restful vigil is the preliminary state, a state in which the
senses become dormant and yet one is aware. The second state is dynamic
vigil. In this state one is left looking at a scene, a tableau of
sorts, which is static. One sees a three-dimensional picture, a frozen
bit of something--a landscape, a street, a house, a person, a face,
anything. The third state is passive witnessing. In it the dreamer is
no longer viewing a frozen bit of the world but is observing,
eyewitnessing, an event as it occurs. It is as if the primacy of the
visual and auditory senses makes this state of dreaming mainly an
affair of the eyes and ears. The fourth state is the one in which you
are drawn to act. In it one is compelled to enterprise, to take steps,
to make the most of one's time. This state is called dynamic
initiative. * * * You have to look after someone and take care of them
in a
most selfish fashion--that is, as if they are your own self.
Selfishness can be put to a grand use. To harness it is not impossible.
The surest way to harness selfishness is through the daily activities
of our lives. You are efficient in whatever you do because you have no
one to bug the devil out of you. It is no challenge to you to soar like
an arrow by yourself. If you are given the task of taking care of
someone else, however, your independent effectiveness will go to
pieces, and in order to survive you will have to extend your selfish
concern for yourself to include the one under your care. You must honor
them regardless of what they do to you, and you must train your body,
through your interaction with them, to feel at ease in the face of the
most trying situations. It is much easier to fare well under conditions
of maximum stress than to be impeccable under normal circumstances,
such as in the interplay with another under your care. Further, then,
you cannot under any circumstances get angry with them, because they
are indeed your benefactor; only through them will you be capable of
harnessing your selfishness. You take care of them as a means of
training yourself for the hardship of interaction with people. It is
imperative that you internalize a mood of ease in the face of difficult
social situations. * * * Dreaming begins as a unique state of awareness
arrived at by focusing the residue of consciousness, which one still
has when asleep, on the elements, or the features, of one's dreams. The
residue of consciousness, called the second attention, is brought into
action, or is harnessed, through exercises of not-doing . The essential
aid to dreaming is a state of mental quietness, called "stopping the
internal dialogue," or the "not-doing of talking to oneself." To teach
you how to master it, I've made you walk for miles with your eyes held
fixed and out of focus at a level just above the horizon so as to
emphasize the peripheral view. This method is effective on two counts.
It allows you to stop your internal dialogue, and it trains your
attention. By forcing you to concentrate on the peripheral view, I
reinforced your capacity to concentrate for long periods of time on one
single activity. The best way to enter into dreaming is to concentrate
on
the area just at the tip of the sternum, at the top of the belly.
The attention needed for dreaming stems from that area. The energy
needed in order to move and to seek in dreaming stems from the area an
inch or two below the belly button. That energy is the will , or the
power to select, to assemble. In a woman both the attention and the
energy for dreaming originate from the womb. Anything may suffice as a
not-doing to help dreaming , providing that it forces the attention to
remain fixed. The attention one needs in the beginning of dreaming has
to be forcibly made to stay on any given item in a dream. Only through
immobilizing our attention can one turn an ordinary dream into
dreaming. In dreaming one has to use the same mechanisms of attention
as in everyday life. Our first attention has been taught to focus on
the items of the world with great force in order to turn the amorphous
and chaotic realm of perception into the orderly world of awareness.
The second attention serves the function of a beckoner, a caller of
chances. The more it is exercised, the greater the possibility of
getting the desired result. But that is also the function of attention
in general, a function so taken for granted in our daily life that it
has become unnoticeable; if we encounter a fortuitous occurrence we
talk about it in terms of accident or coincidence, rather than in terms
of our attention having beckoned the event. * * * The only thing that
really counts in making the shift into the dreaming body is anchoring
the second attention. Attention is what makes the world. What is
important is to store attention in dreaming. The first attention, the
attention that makes the world, can never be completely overcome; it
can only be turned off for a moment and replaced with the second
attention, providing that the body had stored enough of it. Dreaming is
naturally a way of storing the second attention. In order to shift into
your dreaming body when awake you have to practice dreaming until it
comes out your ears. I have given you three tasks to train your second
attention. First, to find your hands in dreaming . Next, to choose a
locale, focus your attention on it, and then do daytime dreaming and
find out if you can really go there. I've suggested that you place
someone you know at the site in
order to do two things: first to
check subtle changes that might indicate that you were there in
dreaming , and second, to isolate unobtrusive detail, which would be
precisely what your second attention would zero in on. The most serious
problem the dreamer has in this respect is the unbending fixation of
the second attention on detail that would be thoroughly undetected by
the attention of everyday life, creating in this manner a nearly
insurmountable obstacle to validation. What one seeks in dreaming is
not what one would pay attention to in everyday life. One strives to
immobilize the second attention only in the learning period. After
that, one has to fight the almost invincible pull of the second
attention and give only cursory glances at everything. In dreaming one
has to be satisfied with the briefest possible views of everything. As
soon as one focuses on anything, one loses control. The last
generalized task I gave you to train your second attention was to get
out of your body. This task begins with a dream in which you find
yourself looking at yourself asleep. To elucidate the control of the
second attention, I've presented the idea of will . Will can be
described as the maximum control of the luminosity of the body as a
field of energy; or it can be described as a level of proficiency, as a
state of being that comes abruptly into the daily life of a warrior at
any given time. It is experienced as a force that radiates out of the
middle part of the body following a moment of the most absolute
silence, or a moment of sheer terror, or profound sadness. Those things
afford the warrior the concentration needed to use the luminosity of
the body and turn it into silence. For a human being sadness is as
powerful as terror. Both can bring the moment of silence. Or the
silence comes of itself, because the warrior tries for it throughout
his life. It is a moment of blackness, a moment still more silent than
the moment of shutting off the internal dialogue. That blackness, that
silence, gives rise to the intent to direct the second attention, to
command it, to make it do things. This is why it's called will . The
intent and the effect are will ; they are tied together. We don't feel
our will because we think that it should be something we know for sure
that we are doing or feeling, like getting angry, for instance. Will is
very quiet, unnoticeable. Will belongs to the other self. We are in our
other selves when
we do dreaming . Will is such a complete control
of the second attention that it is called the other self. * * * Intent
is present everywhere. Intent is what makes the world. People, and all
other living creatures for that matter, are the slaves of intent . We
are in its clutches. It makes us do whatever it wants. It makes us act
in the world. It even makes us die. When we become warriors, though,
intent becomes our friend. It lets us be free for a moment; at times it
even comes to us, as if it had been waiting around for us. Again, human
beings are divided in two. The right side, which is called the tonal ,
encompasses everything the intellect can conceive of. The left side,
called the nagual , is a realm of indescribable features: a realm
impossible to contain in words. The left side is perhaps comprehended,
if comprehension is what takes place, with the total body; thus its
resistance to conceptualization. All the faculties, possibilities, and
accomplishments of sorcery, from the simplest to the most astounding,
are in the human body itself. * * * The power that governs the destiny
of all living beings is called the Eagle or the Indescribable Force .
Providing the luminous shell that comprises one's humanness has been
broken, it is possible to find in the Indescribable Force the faint
reflection of man. The Indescribable Force 's irrevocable dictums can
then be apprehended by seers, properly interpreted by them, and
accumulated in the form of a governing body. Thus the rule was formed.
The rule is not a tale. The rule states that every living thing has
been granted the power, if it so desires, to seek an opening to freedom
and to go through it. To cross over to freedom does not mean eternal
life as eternity is commonly understood--that is, as living forever.
What the rule states is that one can keep the awareness which is
ordinarily relinquished at the moment of dying. I cannot explain what
it means to keep that awareness. My benefactor told me that at the
moment of crossing, one enters into the third attention, and the body
in its entirety is kindled with knowledge. Every cell at once becomes
aware of itself, and also aware of the totality of the body. This kind
of awareness is meaningless to our
compartmentalized minds.
Therefore the crux of the warrior's struggle is not so much to realize
that the crossing over stated in the rule means crossing to the third
attention, but rather to conceive that there exists such an awareness
at all. There is a common error, that of overestimating the left-side
awareness, of becoming dazzled by its clarity and power. To be in the
left-side awareness does not mean that one is immediately liberated
from one's folly--it only means an extended capacity for perceiving,
and above all, a greater ability to forget. One has to be utterly
humble and carry nothing to defend, not even one's person. One's person
should be protected, but not defended. It takes a very long time to
clean out the garbage that a luminous being picks up in the world. We
are so stiff and feel so self-important. * * * Stalkers deal with
people, with the world of ordinary affairs. Stalkers are the
practitioners of controlled folly as the dreamers are the practitioners
of dreaming . Controlled folly is the basis for stalking , as dreams
are the basis for dreaming . Generally speaking, a warrior's greatest
accomplishment in the second attention is dreaming , and in the first
attention his greatest accomplishment is stalking. In the absence of
self-importance, a warrior's only way of dealing with the social milieu
is in terms of controlled folly. Deal with the world exclusively in
terms of controlled folly. * * * A warrior never loses his mind under
any circumstances. * * * A warrior is never under siege. To be under
siege implies that one has personal possessions that could be
blockaded. A warrior has nothing in the world except his impeccability,
and impeccability cannot be threatened. Nonetheless, in a battle for
one's life a warrior should strategically use every means available. *
* * We must live our lives impeccably for no other reason than to be
impeccable. * * *
Although human beings appear to a seer as luminous
eggs, the egglike shape is an external cocoon, a shell of luminosity
that houses a most intriguing, haunting, mesmeric core made up of
concentric circles of yellowish luminosity, the color of a candle's
flame. Losing the human form is the only means of breaking that shell,
the only means of liberating that haunting luminous core. To break the
shell means remembering the other self, and arriving at the totality of
oneself. * * * An unconquerable pessimism overtakes a warrior at a
certain point on his path. A sense of defeat, or perhaps more
accurately, a sense of unworthiness, comes upon him almost unawares. A
warrior's resolution to live impeccably in spite of everything cannot
be approached as a strategy to ensure success. The warrior enters into
a state of unsurpassed humility; when the true poverty of his human
resources becomes undeniable, the warrior has no recourse but to step
back and lower his head. It is monstrous to think that the world is
understandable or that we ourselves are understandable. What we are
perceiving is an enigma, a mystery that one can only accept in
humbleness and awe. The two sides of a human being are totally separate
and it takes great discipline and determination to break that seal and
go from one side to the other. We have been put together by forces
incomprehensible to our reason. The only thing we do not have is time.
Every minute might be our last; therefore, it has to be lived with the
spirit. Perception suffers a profound jolt when we are placed in states
of quietude in darkness. Our hearing takes the lead then, and the
signals from all the living and existing entities around us can be
detected--not with our hearing only, but with a combination of the
auditory and visual senses, in that order. In darkness the eyes become
subsidiary to the ears. * * * Power spots are actual holes in a sort of
canopy that prevents the world from losing its shape. A power spot can
be utilized as long as one has gathered enough strength in the second
attention. The key to withstanding the Indescribable Force 's presence
is the potency of one's intent . Without intent there is nothing.
Be
impeccable and practice meticulously whatever you learn, and above all,
be careful and deliberate in your actions so as not to exhaust your
life force in vain. The prerequisite for entrance into any of the three
stages of attention is the possession of life force, because without it
warriors cannot have direction and purpose. Upon dying our awareness
also enters into the third attention; but only for an instant, as a
purging action, just before the Indescribable Force devours it. * * *
Stalkers become lighthearted and jovial and enjoy their lives. * * *
The second attention belongs to the luminous body, as the first
attention belongs to the physical body. Dreaming is in fact a rational
state. In dreaming , the right side, the rational awareness, is wrapped
up inside the left side awareness in order to give the dreamer a sense
of sobriety and rationality; but the influence of rationality has to be
minimal and used only as an inhibiting mechanism to protect the dreamer
from excesses and bizarre undertakings. Our first attention is hooked
to the emanations of the earth, while our second attention is hooked to
the emanations of the universe. A dreamer by definition is outside the
boundaries of the concerns of everyday life. The dreamers ' power to
focus on their second attention makes them into living slingshots. The
stronger and the more impeccable the dreamers are, the farther they can
project their second attention into the unknown and the longer their
dreaming projection will last. Dreaming is no illusion. It's a step
toward the control of the second attention; in other words, you are
learning the perceptual bias of that other realm. There is no way on
earth that we can order anyone or ourselves to rally knowledge. It is
rather a slow affair; the body, at the right time and under the proper
circumstances of impeccability, rallies its knowledge without the
intervention of desire. * * * The first principle of the art of
stalking is that warriors choose their battleground. A warrior never
goes into battle
without knowing what the surroundings are. To
discard everything that is unnecessary is the second principle of the
art of stalking . Warriors don't have the world to cushion them, so
they must have the rule. Yet the rule of stalkers applies to everyone.
The first precept of the rule is that everything that surrounds us is
an unfathomable mystery. The second precept of the rule is that we must
try to unravel these mysteries, but without ever hoping to accomplish
this. The third, that a warrior, aware of the unfathomable mystery that
surrounds him and aware of his duty to try to unravel it, takes his
rightful place among mysteries and regards himself as one.
Consequently, for a warrior there is no end to the mystery of being,
whether being means being a pebble, or an ant, or oneself. That is a
warrior's humbleness. One is equal to everything. * * * Apply all the
concentration you have to decide whether or not to enter into battle,
for any battle is a battle for one's life. This is the third principle
of the art of stalking . A warrior must be willing and ready to make
his last stand here and now. But not in a helter-skelter way. The
fourth principle of the art of stalking is; relax, abandon yourself,
fear nothing. Only then will the powers that guide us open the road and
aid us. Only then. The fifth principle is; when faced with odds that
cannot be dealt with, warriors retreat for a moment. They let their
minds meander. They occupy their time with something else. Anything
would do. The sixth principle: warriors compress time; even an instant
counts. In a battle for your life, a second is an eternity; an eternity
that may decide the outcome. Warriors aim at succeeding, therefore they
compress time. Warriors don't waste an instant. * * * A recapitulation
is the forte of stalkers as the dreaming body is the forte of dreamers
. It consists of recollecting one's life down to the most insignificant
detail. The first stage is a brief recounting of all the incidents in
our lives that in an obvious manner stand out for examination. The
second stage is a more detailed recollection, which
starts
systematically at a point that could be the moment prior to the stalker
sitting, and theoretically could extend to the moment of birth. A
perfect recapitulation can change a warrior as much, if not more, than
the total control of the dreaming body . In this respect, dreaming and
stalking lead to the same end, the entering into the third attention.
It is important for a warrior, however, to know and practice both. The
key element in recapitulating is breathing. Recollecting is easy if one
can reduce the area of stimulation around the body. Theoretically,
stalkers have to remember every feeling that they have had in their
lives, and this process begins with a breath. Write down a list of the
events to be relived. The procedure starts with an initial breath.
Stalkers begin with their chin on the right shoulder and slowly inhale
as they move their head over a hundred and eighty degree arc. The
breath terminates on the left shoulder. Once the inhalation ends, the
head goes back to a relaxed position. They exhale looking straight
ahead. The stalker then takes the event at the top of the list and
remains with it until all the feelings expended in it have been
recounted. As stalkers remember the feelings they invested in whatever
it is that they are remembering, they inhale slowly, moving their heads
from the right shoulder to the left. The function of this breathing is
to restore energy. The luminous body is constantly creating cobweblike
filaments, which are projected out of the luminous mass, propelled by
emotions of any sort. Therefore, every situation of interaction, or
every situation where feelings are involved, is potentially draining to
the luminous body. By breathing from right to left while remembering a
feeling, stalkers , through the magic of breathing, pick up the
filaments they left behind. The next immediate breath is from left to
right and it is an exhalation. With it stalkers eject filaments left in
them by other luminous bodies involved in the event being recollected.
These are the mandatory preliminaries of stalking . Unless stalkers
have gone through the preliminaries in order to retrieve the filaments
they have left in the world, and particularly in order to reject those
that others have left in them, there is no possibility of handling
controlled folly, because those foreign filaments are the basis of
one's limitless capacity for self-importance.
In order to practice
controlled folly, since it is not a way to fool or chastise people or
feel superior to them, one has to be capable of laughing at oneself.
One of the results of a detailed recapitulation is genuine laughter
upon coming face to face with the boring repetition of one's
self-esteem, which is at the core of all human interactions. The rule
defines stalking and dreaming as arts; therefore they are something
that one performs. The life-giving nature of breath is what also gives
it its cleansing capacity. It is this capacity that makes a
recapitulation into a practical matter. A profound recapitulation is
the most expedient means to lose the human form. Thus it is easier for
stalkers , after recapitulating their lives, to make use of all the
not-doings of the self, such as erasing personal history, losing
self-importance, breaking routines and so forth. * * * A stalker never
pushes himself to the front. In order to apply this seventh principle
of the art of stalking , one has to apply the other six. Only a master
stalker can be a master of controlled folly. Controlled folly doesn't
mean to con people. It means, as my benefactor explained it, that
warriors apply the seven basic principles of the art of stalking to
whatever they do, from the most trivial acts to life and death
situations. Applying these principles brings about three results. The
first is that stalkers learn never to take themselves seriously; they
learn to laugh at themselves. If they're not afraid of being a fool,
they can fool anyone. The second is that stalkers learn to have endless
patience. Stalkers are never in a hurry; they never fret. And the third
is that stalkers learn to have an endless capacity to improvise. * * *
Stalkers face the oncoming time. Normally we face time as it recedes
from us. Only stalkers can change that and face time as it advances on
them. They see time as something concrete, yet incomprehensible. * * *
We're warriors, and warriors have only one thing in mind--their
freedom. To die and be consumed by the Indescribable Force is no
challenge. On the other hand, to sneak around the Indescribable Force
and be free is the ultimate audacity. What's needed to enter fully into
the other self is to abandon the intent of our first attention.
* *
* Be frugal and utilize every bit of your energy without wasting any of
it. * * * When I talk about time, I am not referring to something which
is measured by the movement of a clock. Time is the essence of
attention; the Indescribable Force 's emanations are made out of time;
and properly, when one enters into any aspect of the other self, one is
becoming acquainted with time. The wheel of time is like a state of
heightened awareness which is part of the other self, as the left side
awareness is part of the self of everyday life. It can physically be
described as a tunnel of infinite length and width; a tunnel with
reflective furrows. Every furrow is infinite, and there are infinite
numbers of them. Living creatures are compulsorily made, by the force
of life, to gaze into one furrow. To gaze into it means to be trapped
by it, to live that furrow. Will belongs to the wheel of time. It is
something like the runner of a vine, or an intangible tentacle which
all of us possess. A warrior's final aim is to learn to focus it on the
wheel of time in order to make it turn. Warriors who have succeeded in
turning the wheel of time can gaze into any furrow and draw from it
whatever they desire. To be trapped compulsorily in one furrow of time
entails seeing the images of that furrow only as they recede. To be
free from the spellbinding force of those grooves means that one can
look in either direction, as images recede or as they approach. * * *
Warriors have no life of their own. From the moment they understand the
nature of awareness, they cease to be persons and the human condition
is no longer part of their view. You have your duty as a warrior and
nothing else is important. So do your best. The challenge of a warrior
is to arrive at a very subtle balance of positive and negative forces.
This challenge does not mean that a warrior should strive to have
everything under control, but that a warrior should strive to meet any
conceivable situation, the expected and the unexpected, with equal
efficiency. To be perfect under perfect circumstances is to be a paper
warrior. I will give you a formula, an incantation for times when your
task is greater than your strength;
I am already given to the power
that rules my fate. And I cling to nothing, so I will have nothing to
defend. I have no thoughts, so I will see. I fear nothing, so I will
remember myself. Detached and at ease, I will dart past the Eagle to be
free. It takes an enormity of strength to let go of the intent of
everyday life. One must place one's attention on the luminous shell. A
warrior must evoke intent . The glance is the secret. The eyes beckon
intent . The reason why seeing seems to be visual is because we need
the eyes to focus on intent . Our eyes can catch another aspect of
intent and that's called seeing . The true function of the eyes is to
be the catchers of intent . * * * You should trust yourself. On the
left side there are no tears. A warrior can no longer weep. The only
expression of anguish is a shiver that comes from the very depths of
the universe. It is as if one of the Indescribable Force 's emanations
is anguish. The warrior's shiver is infinite. * * * The act of
remembering the other self is thoroughly incomprehensible. In actuality
it is the act of remembering oneself, which does not stop at
recollecting the interaction warriors perform in their left side
awareness, but goes on to recollect every memory that the luminous body
has stored from the moment of birth. This act of remembering, although
it seems to be only associated with warriors, is something that is
within the realm of every human being; every one of us can go directly
to the memories of our luminosity with unfathomable results.
There
is no completeness without sadness and longing, for without them there
is no sobriety, no kindness. Wisdom without kindness and knowledge
without sobriety are useless. Seeing is a peculiar feeling of knowing,
of knowing something without a shadow of doubt. Self-importance is our
greatest enemy. Think about it--what weakens us is feeling offended by
the deeds and misdeeds of our fellow men. Our self-importance requires
that we spend most of our lives offended by someone. Every effort
should be made to eradicate self-importance from the lives of warriors.
Without self-importance we are invulnerable. * * * Self-importance
can't be fought with niceties. * * * Seers are divided into two
categories. Those who are willing to exercise self-restraint and can
channel their activities toward pragmatic goals, which would benefit
other seers and man in general, and those who don't care about
self-restraint or about any pragmatic goals. The latter have failed to
resolve the problem of self-importance. Self-importance is not
something simple and naive. On the one hand, it is the core of
everything that is good in us, and on the other hand, the core of
everything that is rotten. To get rid of the self-importance that is
rotten requires a masterpiece of strategy. In order to follow the path
of knowledge one has to be very imaginative. In the path of knowledge
nothing is as clear as we'd like it to be. Warriors fight
self-importance as a matter of strategy, not principle. Impeccability
is nothing else but the proper use of energy. My statements have no
inkling of morality. I've saved energy and that makes me impeccable. To
understand this, you have to save enough energy yourself.
Warriors
take strategic inventories. They list everything they do. Then they
decide which of those things can be changed in order to allow
themselves a respite, in terms of expending their energy. The strategic
inventory covers only behavioral patterns that are not essential to our
survival and well-being. In the strategic inventories of warriors,
self-importance figures as the activity that consumes the greatest
amount of energy, hence, their effort to eradicate it. One of the first
concerns of warriors is to free that energy in order to face the
unknown with it. The action of rechanneling that energy is
impeccability. The most effective strategy for rechanneling that energy
consists of six elements that interplay with one another. Five of them
are called the attributes of warriorship: control, discipline,
forbearance, timing, and will . They pertain to the world of the
warrior who is fighting to lose self-importance. The sixth element,
which is perhaps the most important of all, pertains to the outside
world and is called the petty tyrant. A petty tyrant is a tormentor.
Someone who either holds the power of life and death over warriors or
simply annoys them to distraction. Petty tyrants teach us detachment.
The ingredients of the new seers' strategy shows how efficient and
clever is the device of using a petty tyrant. The strategy not only
gets rid of self-importance; it also prepares warriors for the final
realization that impeccability is the only thing that counts in the
path of knowledge. Usually, only four attributes are played. The fifth,
will , is always saved for an ultimate confrontation, when warriors are
facing the firing squad, so to speak. Will belongs to another sphere,
the unknown. The other four belong to the known, exactly where the
petty tyrants are lodged. In fact, what turns human beings into petty
tyrants is precisely the obsessive manipulation of the known. The
interplay of all the five attributes of warriorship is done only by
seers who are also impeccable warriors and have mastery over will .
Such an interplay is a supreme maneuver that cannot be performed on the
daily human stage. Four attributes are all that is needed to deal with
the worst of petty tyrants, provided, of course, that a petty tyrant
has been found. The petty tyrant is the outside element, the one we
cannot control and the element that is perhaps the most
important of
them all. The warrior who stumbles on a petty tyrant is a lucky one.
You're fortunate if you come upon one in your path, because if you
don't you have to go out and look for one. If seers can hold their own
in facing petty tyrants, they can certainly face the unknown with
impunity, and then they can even stand the presence of the unknowable.
Nothing can temper the spirit of a warrior as much as the challenge of
dealing with impossible people in positions of power. Only under those
conditions can warriors acquire the sobriety and serenity to stand the
pressure of the unknowable. The perfect ingredient for the making of a
superb seer is a petty tyrant with unlimited prerogatives. Seers have
to go to extremes to find a worthy one. Most of the time they have to
be satisfied with very small fry. Then warriors develop a strategy
using the four attributes of warriorship: control, discipline,
forbearance, and timing. On the path of knowledge there are four steps.
The first step is the decision to become apprentices. After the
apprentices change their views about themselves and the world they take
the second step and become warriors, which is to say, beings capable of
the utmost discipline and control over themselves. The third step,
after acquiring forbearance and timing, is to become men of knowledge.
When men of knowledge learn to see they have taken the fourth step and
have become seers. Control and discipline refer to an inner state. A
warrior is self-oriented, not in a selfish way but in the sense of a
total examination of the self. Forbearance and timing are not quite an
inner state. They are in the domain of the man of knowledge. The idea
of using a petty tyrant is not only for perfecting the warrior's
spirit, but also for enjoyment and happiness. Even the worst tyrants
can bring delight, provided, of course, that one is a warrior. The
mistake average men make in confronting petty tyrants is not to have a
strategy to fall back on; the fatal flaw is that average men take
themselves too seriously; their actions and feelings, as well as those
of the petty tyrants, are all-important. Warriors, on the other hand,
not only have a well-thought-out strategy, but are free from
self-importance. What restrains their self-importance is that they have
understood that reality is an interpretation we make.
Petty tyrants
take themselves with deadly seriousness while warriors do not. What
usually exhausts us is the wear and tear on our self-importance. Any
man who has an iota of pride is ripped apart by being made to feel
worthless. To tune the spirit when someone is trampling on you is
called control. Instead of feeling sorry for himself a warrior
immediately goes to work mapping the petty tyrant's strong points, his
weaknesses, his quirks of behavior. To gather all this information
while they are beating you up is called discipline. A perfect petty
tyrant has no redeeming feature. Forbearance is to wait patiently--no
rush, no anxiety--a simple, joyful holding back of what is due. A
warrior knows that he is waiting and what he is waiting for. Right
there is the great joy of warriorship. Timing is the quality that
governs the release of all that is held back. Control, discipline, and
forbearance are like a dam behind which everything is pooled. Timing is
the gate in the dam. Forbearance means holding back with the spirit
something that the warrior knows is rightfully due. It doesn't mean
that a warrior goes around plotting to do anybody mischief, or planning
to settle past scores. Forbearance is something independent. As long as
the warrior has control, discipline, and timing, forbearance assures
giving whatever is due to whoever deserves it. To be defeated by a
small-fry petty tyrant is not deadly, but devastating. Warriors who
succumb to a small-fry petty tyrant are obliterated by their own sense
of failure and unworthiness. Anyone who joins the petty tyrant is
defeated. To act in anger, without control and discipline, to have no
forbearance, is to be defeated. After warriors are defeated they either
regroup themselves or they abandon the quest for knowledge and join the
ranks of the petty tyrants for life. There are a series of truths about
awareness that have been arranged in a specific sequence for purposes
of comprehension. The mastery of awareness consists in internalizing
the total sequence of such truths. The first truth is that our
familiarity with the world we perceive compels us to believe that we
are surrounded by
objects, existing by themselves and as themselves,
just as we perceive them, whereas, in fact, there is no world of
objects, but a universe of the Indescribable Force 's emanations.
Before I can explain the Indescribable Force 's emanations, I have to
talk about the known, the unknown, and the unknowable. The unknown is
something that is veiled from man, shrouded perhaps by a terrifying
context, but which, nonetheless, is within man's reach. The unknown
becomes the known at a given time. The unknowable, on the other hand,
is the indescribable, the unthinkable, the unrealizable. It is
something that will never be known to us, and yet it is there, dazzling
and at the same time horrifying in its vastness. There is a simple rule
of thumb: in the face of the unknown, man is adventurous. It is a
quality of the unknown to give us a sense of hope and happiness. Man
feels robust, exhilarated. Even the apprehension that it arouses is
very fulfilling. The new seers saw that man is at his best in the face
of the unknown. The unknown and the known are really on the same
footing, because both are within the reach of human perception. Seers,
can leave the known at a given moment and enter into the unknown.
Whatever is beyond our capacity to perceive is the unknowable. And the
distinction between it and the knowable is crucial. Confusing the two
would put seers in a most precarious position whenever they are
confronted with the unknowable. Most of what's out there is beyond our
comprehension. * * * The first truth about awareness is that the world
out there is not really as we think it is. We think it is a world of
objects and it's not. You say you agree with me because everything
could be reduced to being a field of energy. But you are merely
intuiting a truth. To reason it out is not to verify it. I am not
interested in your agreement or disagreement, but in your attempt to
comprehend what is involved in this truth. You cannot witness fields of
energy; not as an average man, that is. Now, if you were able to see
them, you would be a seer, in which case you would be explaining the
truths about awareness.
Conclusions arrived at through reasoning
have very little or no influence in altering the course of our lives.
Hence, the countless examples of people who have the clearest
convictions and yet act diametrically against them time and time again;
and have as the only explanation for their behavior the idea that to
err is human. The first truth is that the world is as it looks and yet
it isn't. It's not as solid and real as our perception has been led to
believe, but it isn't a mirage either. The world is not an illusion, as
it has been said to be; it's real on the one hand, and unreal on the
other. Pay close attention to this, for it must be understood, not just
accepted. We perceive. This is a hard fact. But what we perceive is not
a fact of the same kind, because we learn what to perceive. Something
out there is affecting our senses. This is the part that is real. The
unreal part is what our senses tell us is there. Take a mountain, for
instance. Our senses tell us that it is an object. It has size, color,
form. We even have categories of mountains, and they are downright
accurate. Nothing wrong with that; the flaw is simply that it has never
occurred to us that our senses play only a superficial role. Our senses
perceive the way they do because a specific feature of our awareness
forces them to do so. I've used the term "the world" to mean everything
that surrounds us. I have a better term, of course, but it would be
quite incomprehensible to you. Seers say that we think there is a world
of objects out there only because of our awareness. But what's really
out there are the Indescribable Force 's emanations, fluid, forever in
motion, and yet unchanged, eternal. * * * The reason for the existence
of all sentient beings is to enhance awareness. The old seers, risking
untold dangers, actually saw the Indescribable Force which is the
source of all sentient beings. They called that indescribable force the
Eagle, because in the few glimpses that they could sustain, they saw it
as something that resembled a black-and-white eagle of infinite size.
They saw that it is the Indescribable Force that bestows awareness and
creates sentient beings so that they will live and enrich the awareness
it gives them with life. They also saw that it is the Indescribable
Force , that devours that same enriched awareness after making sentient
beings relinquish it at the moment of death. For the old seers to say
that
the reason for existence is to enhance awareness is not a matter of
faith or deduction. They saw it. * * * A nagual man or woman is someone
flexible enough to be anything. To be a nagual, among other things,
means to have no points to defend. The description of the Indescribable
Force as the Eagle, and what it does, are not truths to defend
passionately. Those truths were put together for the delight and
enlightenment of warriors, not to engage any proprietary sentiments.
When I told you that a nagual has no points to defend, I meant, among
other things, that a nagual has no obsessions. The Indescribable Force
is as real for seers as gravity and time are for you, and just as
abstract and incomprehensible. The Indescribable Force and its
emanations are as corroboratable as gravity and time and the discipline
of the new seers is dedicated to doing just that. The Indescribable
Force 's emanations are an immutable thing-in-itself, which engulfs
everything that exists, the knowable and the unknowable. There is no
way to describe in words what the Indescribable Force 's emanations
really are. A seer must witness them. They are a presence, almost a
mass of sorts, a pressure that creates a dazzling sensation. One can
catch only a glimpse of them, as one can catch only a glimpse of the
Indescribable Force itself. There is nothing visual about the
Indescribable Force . The entire body of a seer senses the
Indescribable Force . There is something in all of us that can make us
witness with our entire body. Seers explain the act of seeing the
Indescribable Force in very simple terms: because man is composed of
the Indescribable Force 's emanations, man need only revert back to his
components. The problem arises with man's awareness; it is his
awareness that becomes entangled and confused. At the crucial moment
when it should be a simple case of the emanations acknowledging
themselves, man's awareness is compelled to interpret. The result is a
vision of the Eagle, and the Eagle's emanations. But there is no Eagle
and no Eagle's emanations. What is out there is something that no
living creature can grasp. The characteristic of miserable seers is
that they are willing to forget the wonder of the world. They become
overwhelmed by the fact that they see and believe that it's
their
genius that counts. A seer must be a paragon in order to override the
nearly invincible laxness of our human condition. More important than
seeing itself is what seers do with what they see. The Indescribable
Force attracts our consciousness, much as a magnet attracts iron
shavings. At the moment of dying, all of our being disintegrates under
the attraction of that immense force. * * * Seers who see the
Indescribable Force 's emanations often call them commands. That's what
they really are, commands. Everything is made out of the Indescribable
Force 's emanations. Only a small portion of those emanations is within
reach of human awareness, and that small portion is still further
reduced, to a minute fraction, by the constraints of our daily lives.
That minute fraction of the Indescribable Force 's emanations is the
known; the small portion within possible reach of human awareness is
the unknown, and the incalculable rest is the unknowable. The new
seers, being pragmatically oriented, became immediately cognizant of
the compelling power of the emanations. They realized that all living
creatures are forced to employ the Indescribable Force 's emanations
without ever knowing what they are. They also realized that organisms
are constructed to grasp a certain range of those emanations and that
every species has a definite range. The emanations exert great pressure
on organisms, and through that pressure organisms construct their
perceivable world. In our case, as human beings, we employ those
emanations and interpret them as reality. But what man senses is such a
small portion of the Indescribable Force 's emanations that it's
ridiculous to put much stock in our perceptions, and yet it isn't
possible for us to disregard our perceptions. I want you to be very
aware of what we are doing. We are discussing the mastery of awareness.
The truths we're discussing are the principles of that mastery. * * *
One of the greatest forces in the lives of warriors is fear, it spurs
them to learn. * * * The Indescribable Force 's emanations cannot be
rendered at all in a language of comparisons. Individual seers may feel
the urge to make comments about certain emanations, but that
will
remain personal. The new seers were terrible practical men. They
weren't involved in concocting rational theories. The new seers, imbued
with practicality, were able to see a flux of emanations and to see how
man and other living beings utilize them to construct their perceivable
world. The way those emanations are utilized by man is so simple it
sounds idiotic. For a seer, men are luminous beings. Our luminosity is
made up of that portion of the Indescribable Force 's emanations which
is encased in our egglike cocoon. That particular portion, that handful
of emanations that is encased, is what makes us men. To perceive is to
match the emanations contained inside our cocoon with those that are
outside. Seers can see , for instance, the emanations inside any living
creature and can tell which of the outside emanations would match them.
The emanations are something indescribable. My personal comment would
be to say that they are like filaments of light. What's
incomprehensible to normal awareness is that the filaments are aware. I
can't tell you what that means, because I don't know what I am saying.
All I can tell you with my personal comments is that the filaments are
aware of themselves, alive and vibrating, that there are so many of
them that numbers have no meaning and that each of them is an eternity
in itself. Perception is a condition of alignment; the emanations
inside the cocoon become aligned with those outside that fit them.
Alignment is what allows awareness to be cultivated by every living
creature. Seers make these statements because they see living creatures
as they really are: luminous beings that look like bubbles of whitish
light. The emanations inside and the emanations outside are the same
filaments of light. Sentient beings are minute bubbles made out of
those filaments, microscopic points of light, attached to the infinite
emanations. The luminosity of living beings is made by the particular
portion of the Indescribable Force 's emanations they happen to have
inside their luminous cocoons. When seers see perception, they witness
that the luminosity of the Indescribable Force 's emanations outside
those creatures' cocoons brightens the luminosity of the emanations
inside
their cocoons. The outside luminosity attracts the inside
one; it traps it, so to speak, and fixes it. That fixation is the
awareness of every specific being. Seers can also see how the
emanations outside the cocoon exert a particular pressure on the
portion of emanations inside. This pressure determines the degree of
awareness that every living being has. The Indescribable Force 's
emanations are more than filaments of light. Each one of them is a
source of boundless energy. Think of it this way: since some of the
emanations outside the cocoon are the same as the emanations inside,
their energies are like a continuous pressure. But the cocoon isolates
the emanations that are inside its web and thereby directs the
pressure. I've mentioned to you that the old seers were masters of the
art of handling awareness. What I can add now is that they were the
masters of that art because they learned to manipulate the structure of
man's cocoon. I've said to you that they unraveled the mystery of being
aware. By that I meant that they saw and realized that awareness is a
glow in the cocoon of living beings. They rightly called it the glow of
awareness. The old seers saw that man's awareness is a glow of amber
luminosity more intense than the rest of the cocoon. That glow is on a
narrow, vertical band on the extreme right side of the cocoon, running
along its entire length. The mastery of the old seers was to move that
glow, to make it spread from its original setting on the surface of the
cocoon inward across its width. * * * Seeing is to lay bare the core of
everything, to witness the unknown and to glimpse into the unknowable.
As such, it doesn't bring one solace. Seers ordinarily go to pieces on
finding out that existence is incomprehensibly complex and that our
normal awareness maligns it with its limitations. * * * Your
concentration has to be total. To understand is of crucial importance.
The new seers placed the highest value on deep, unemotional
realizations. For instance, the other day, when you understood about
your self-importance, you didn't understand anything really. You had an
emotional outburst, that was all. I say this because the next day you
were back on your high horse of self-importance as if you never had
realized
anything. The same thing happened to the old seers. They were given to
emotional reactions. But when the time came for them to understand what
they had seen , they couldn't do it. To understand one needs sobriety,
not emotionality. Beware of those who weep with realization, for they
have realized nothing. There are untold dangers in the path of
knowledge for those without sober understanding. I am outlining the
order in which the new seers arranged the truths about awareness, so it
will serve you as a map, a map that you have to corroborate with your
seeing , but not with your eyes. Everybody falls pray to the mistake
that seeing is done with the eyes. Seeing is not a matter of the eyes.
Seeing is alignment and perception is alignment. The alignment of the
Indescribable Force 's emanations used routinely is the perception of
the day-to-day world, but the alignment of emanations that are never
used ordinarily is seeing . When such an alignment occurs one sees .
Seeing , therefore, being produced by alignment out of the ordinary,
cannot be something one could merely look at. So, don't succumb to the
way seeing is labeled and described. When seers see , something
explains everything as the new alignment takes place. It's a voice that
tells them in their ear what's what. If that voice is not present, what
the seer is engaged in isn't seeing . It is equally fallacious to say
that seeing is hearing, because it is infinitely more than that, but
seers have opted for using sound as a gauge of a new alignment. The
voice of seeing is a most mysterious inexplicable thing. My personal
conclusion is that the voice of seeing belongs only to man. It may
happen because talking is something that no one else besides man does.
The old seers believed it was the voice of an overpowering entity
intimately related to mankind, a protector of man. The new seers found
out that that entity, which they called the mold of man, doesn't have a
voice. The voice of seeing for the new seers is something quite
incomprehensible; they say it's the glow of awareness playing on the
Indescribable Force 's emanations as a harpist plays on a harp. * * *
The pressure that the emanations outside the cocoon, which are called
emanations at large, exert on the emanations
inside the cocoon is
the same in all sentient beings. Yet the results of that pressure are
vastly different among them, because their cocoons react to that
pressure in every conceivable way. There are, however, degrees of
uniformity within certain boundaries. Now, when seers see that the
pressure of the emanations at large bears down on the emanations
inside, which are always in motion and makes them stop moving, they
know that the luminous being at that moment is fixated by awareness. To
say that the emanations at large bear down on those inside the cocoon
and make them stop moving means that seers see something indescribable,
the meaning of which they know without a shadow of doubt. It means that
the voice of seeing has told them that the emanations inside the cocoon
are completely at rest and match some of those which are outside. Seers
maintain, naturally, that awareness always comes from outside
ourselves, that the real mystery is not inside us. Since by nature the
emanations at large are made to fixate what is inside the cocoon, the
trick of awareness is to let the fixating emanations merge with what is
inside us. Seers believe that if we let that happen we become what we
really are--fluid, forever in motion, eternal. The degree of awareness
of every individual sentient being depends on the degree to which it is
capable of letting the pressure of the emanations at large carry it. *
* * Seers have seen that from the moment of conception awareness is
enhanced, enriched, by the process of being alive. The awareness of an
individual insect or that of an individual man grows from the moment of
conception in astoundingly different ways, but with equal consistency.
Awareness develops from the moment of conception. Sexual energy is
something of ultimate importance and it has to be controlled and used
with great care. Don't resent or applaud what I say, thinking that I am
speaking of control in terms of morality; I mean it in terms of saving
and rechanneling energy. I recommend, therefore, that one control
oneself and understand the Indescribable Force 's command that sex is
for bestowing the glow of awareness. It is the Indescribable Force 's
command that sexual energy be used for creating life. Through sexual
energy, the Indescribable Force bestows awareness. So when sentient
beings are engaged in sexual intercourse, the emanations inside their
cocoons
do their best to bestow awareness to the new sentient being they are
creating. During the sexual act, the emanations encased inside the
cocoon of both partners undergo a profound agitation, the culminating
point of which is a merging, a fusing of two pieces of the glow of
awareness, one from each partner, that separate from their cocoons.
Sexual intercourse is always a bestowal of awareness even though the
bestowal may not be consolidated. Warriors know that the only real
energy we possess is a life-bestowing sexual energy. This knowledge
makes them permanently conscious of their responsibility. If warriors
want to have enough energy to see , they must become misers with their
sexual energy. You needn't think this a puritanical attitude toward
sex. There is nothing wrong with man's sensuality. It's man's ignorance
of and disregard for his magical nature that is wrong. It's a mistake
to waste recklessly the life-bestowing force of sex and not have
children, but it's also a mistake not to know that in having children
one taxes the glow of awareness. Seers have seen that on having a
child, the parents' glow of awareness diminishes and the child's
increases. In some supersensitive, frail parents, the glow of awareness
almost disappears. As children enhance their awareness, a big dark spot
develops in the luminous cocoon of the parents, on the very place from
which the glow was taken away. It is usually on the midsection of the
cocoon. Sometimes those spots can even be seen superimposed on the body
itself. Nothing can be done to give people a more balanced
understanding of the glow of awareness. At least, there is nothing that
seers can do. Seers aim to be free, to be unbiased witnesses incapable
of passing judgment; otherwise they would have to assume the
responsibility for bringing about a more adjusted cycle. No one can do
that. The new cycle, if it is to come, must come of itself. The
consciousness of adult human beings, matured by the process of growth,
can no longer be called awareness, because it has been modified into
something more intense and complex, which seers call attention. At a
given time in the growth of human beings a band of the emanations
inside their cocoons becomes very bright; as human beings accumulate
experience, it begins to glow. In some instances, the glow of this band
of emanations increases
so dramatically that it fuses with the
emanations from the outside. Seers, witnessing an enhancement of this
kind, had to surmise that awareness is the raw material and attention
the end product of maturation. Attention is the harnessing and
enhancing of awareness through the process of being alive. The danger
of definitions is that they simplify matters to make them
understandable; in this case, in defining attention, one runs the risk
of transforming a magical, miraculous accomplishment into something
commonplace. Attention is man's greatest single accomplishment. It
develops from raw animal awareness until it covers the entire gamut of
human alternatives. Seers perfect it even further until it covers the
whole scope of human possibilities. Human alternatives are everything
we are capable of choosing as persons. They have to do with the level
of our day-to-day range, the known; and owing to that fact, they are
quite limited in number and scope. Human possibilities belong to the
unknown. They are not what we are capable of choosing but what we are
capable of attaining. An example of human alternatives is our choice to
believe that the human body is an object among objects. An example of
human possibilities is the seers' achievement in viewing man as an
egglike luminous being. With the body as an object one tackles the
known, with the body as a luminous egg one tackles the unknown; human
possibilities have, therefore, nearly an inexhaustible scope. Seers say
that there are three types of attention. When they say that, they mean
it just for human beings, not for all the sentient beings in existence.
But the three are not just types of attention, they are rather three
levels of attainment. They are the first, second, and third attention,
each of them an independent domain, complete in itself. The first
attention in man is animal awareness, which has been developed, through
the process of experience, into a complex, intricate, and extremely
fragile faculty that takes care of the day-to-day world in all its
innumerable aspects. In other words, everything that one can think
about is part of the first attention. The first attention is everything
we are as average men. By virtue of such an absolute rule over our
lives, the first attention is the most valuable asset that the average
man has. Perhaps it is even our only asset.
Taking into account its
true value, the new seers started a rigorous examination of the first
attention through seeing . In order to examine and explain the first
attention, one must see it. Only seers can do that. But to examine what
seers see in the first attention is essential. It allows the first
attention the only opportunity it will ever have to realize its own
workings. The first attention is the glow of awareness developed to an
ultra shine. But it is a glow fixed on the surface of the cocoon, so to
speak. It is a glow that covers the known. The second attention, on the
other hand, is a more complex and specialized state of the glow of
awareness. It has to do with the unknown. It comes about when unused
emanations inside man's cocoon are utilized. The reason I called the
second attention specialized is that in order to utilize those unused
emanations, one needs uncommon, elaborate tactics that require supreme
discipline and concentration. The concentration needed to be aware that
one is having a dream is the forerunner of the second attention. That
concentration is a form of consciousness that is not in the same
category as the consciousness needed to deal with the daily world. The
second attention is also called the left-side awareness; and it is the
vastest field that one can imagine, so vast in fact that it seems
limitless. It is a quagmire so complex and bizarre that sober seers go
into it only under the strictest conditions. The new seers let the
mastery of awareness develop to its natural end, which is to extend the
glow of awareness beyond the bounds of the luminous cocoon in one
single stroke. The third attention is attained when the glow of
awareness turns into the fire from within: a glow that kindles not one
band at a time but all the Indescribable Force 's emanations inside
man's cocoon. The supreme accomplishment of human beings is to attain
that level of attention while retaining the lifeforce. * * * Don't let
your self-importance run rampant. * * * Usually anger is very sobering,
or sometimes fear is, or humor. * * * Awareness begins with the
permanent pressure that the emanations at large exert on the emanations
trapped inside the
cocoon. This pressure produces the first act of
consciousness; it stops the motion of the trapped emanations, which are
fighting to break the cocoon, fighting to die. For a seer, the truth is
that all living beings are struggling to die. What stops death is
awareness. The new seers were profoundly disturbed by the fact that
awareness forestalls death and at the same time induces it by being
attracted by the Indescribable Force . Since they could not explain it,
for there is no rational way to understand existence, seers realized
that their knowledge is composed of contradictory propositions. For
example, seers have to be methodical, rational beings, paragons of
sobriety, and at the same time they must shy away from all of those
qualities in order to be completely free and open to the wonders and
mysteries of existence. Only a feeling of supreme sobriety can bridge
the contradictions. You may call the bridge between contradictions
anything you want--art, affection, sobriety, love, or even kindness. In
examining the first attention, the new seers realized that all organic
beings, except man, quiet down their agitated trapped emanations so
that those emanations can align themselves with their matching ones
outside. Human beings do not do that; instead, their first attention
takes an inventory of the Indescribable Force 's emanations inside
their cocoons. Human beings take notice of the emanations they have
inside their cocoons, no other creatures do that. The moment the
pressure from the emanations at large fixates the emanations inside,
the first attention begins to watch itself. It notes everything about
itself, or at least it tries to, in whatever aberrant ways it can. This
is the process seers call taking an inventory. I don't mean to say that
human beings choose to take an inventory, or that they can refuse to
take it. To take an inventory is the Indescribable Force 's command.
What is subject to volition, however, is the manner in which the
command is obeyed. Although I dislike calling the emanations commands,
that is what they are: commands that no one can disobey. Yet the way
out of obeying the commands is in obeying them. In the case of the
inventory of the first attention, seers take it, for they can't
disobey. But once they have taken it they throw it away. The
Indescribable Force doesn't command us to worship our inventory; it
commands us to take it, that's all.
The emanations inside the cocoon
of man are not quieted down for purposes of matching them with those
outside. This is evident after seeing what other creatures do. On
quieting down, some of them actually merge themselves with the
emanations at large and move with them. But human beings quiet down
their emanations and then reflect on them. The emanations focus on
themselves. Human beings carry the command of taking an inventory to
its logical extreme and disregard everything else. Once they are deeply
involved in the inventory, two things may happen. They may ignore the
impulses of the emanations at large, or they may use them in a very
specialized way. The end result of ignoring those impulses after taking
an inventory is a unique state known as reason. The result of using
every impulse in a specialized way is known as self-absorption. * * *
The first attention works very well with the unknown. It blocks it; it
denies it so fiercely that in the end, the unknown doesn't exist for
the first attention. Taking an inventory makes us invulnerable. That is
why the inventory came into existence in the first place. The first
attention consumes all the glow of awareness that human beings have,
and not an iota of energy is left free. So, the new seers proposed that
warriors, since they have to enter into the unknown, have to save their
energy. But where are they going to get energy, if all of it is taken?
They'll get it from eradicating unnecessary habits. Eradicating
unnecessary habits detaches awareness from self-reflection and allows
it the freedom to focus on something else. The unknown is forever
present, but it is outside the possibility of our normal awareness. The
unknown is the superfluous part of the average man. And it is
superfluous because the average man doesn't have enough free energy to
grasp it. * * * Their is a force that is present throughout everything
there is. It is called will , the will of the Indescribable Force 's
emanations, or intent . One of the most worthwhile findings of the
ancient seers was the discovery that organic life is not the only form
of life present on this earth.
For seers, to be alive means to be
aware. For the average man, to be aware means to be an organism. This
is where seers are different. For them, to be aware means that the
emanations that cause awareness are encased inside a receptacle.
Organic living beings have a cocoon that encloses the emanations. But
there are other creatures whose receptacles don't look like a cocoon to
a seer. Yet they have the emanations of awareness in them and
characteristics of life other than reproduction and metabolism; such as
emotional dependency, sadness, joy, wrath, and so forth and so on. And
the best yet, love; a kind of love man can't even conceive. If we take
as our clue what seers see , life is indeed extraordinary. Those beings
make themselves known to man all the time. And not only to seers but
also to the average man. The problem is that all the energy available
is consumed by the first attention. Man's inventory not only takes it
all, but it also toughens the cocoon to the point of making it
inflexible. Under those circumstances there is no possible interaction.
* * * In the life of warriors it is extremely natural to be sad for no
overt reason. Seers say that the luminous egg, as a field of energy,
senses its final destination whenever the boundaries of the known are
broken. A mere glimpse of the eternity outside the cocoon is enough to
disrupt the coziness of our inventory. The resulting melancholy is
sometimes so intense that it can bring about death. The best way to get
rid of melancholy is to make fun of it. There is nothing more lonely
than eternity. And nothing is more cozy for us than to be a human
being. This indeed is another contradiction--how can man keep the bonds
of his humanness and still venture gladly and purposefully into the
absolute loneliness of eternity? Whenever you resolve this riddle,
you'll be ready for the definitive journey. The new seers have found
that the only thing that counts is impeccability. That is, freed
energy. Pull yourself together and don't fight your fear, roll with it.
Be afraid without being terrified. Put all your concentration on the
midpoint of your body--a true center of energy in all of us. Fear does
not exist as soon as the glow of awareness moves beyond a certain
threshold inside man's cocoon.
* * * I'll briefly outline the truths
about awareness which I have discussed. 1) There is no objective world,
but only a universe of energy fields which seers call the Indescribable
Force 's emanations. 2) Human beings are made of the Indescribable
Force 's emanations and are in essence bubbles of luminescent energy;
each of us is wrapped in a cocoon that encloses a small portion of
these emanations. 3) Awareness is achieved by the constant pressure
that the emanations outside our cocoon, which are called emanations at
large, exert on those inside our cocoon. 4) Awareness gives rise to
perception, which happens when the emanations inside our cocoons align
themselves with the corresponding emanations at large. The next truth
is that perception takes place because there is in each of us an agent
called the assemblage point that selects internal and external
emanations for alignment. The particular alignment that we perceive as
the world is the product of the specific spot where our assemblage
point is located on our cocoon. In order to corroborate the truths
about awareness, you need energy. Dealing with petty tyrants helps
seers accomplish a sophisticated maneuver: that maneuver is to move
their assemblage points. * * * In order for our first attention to
bring into focus the world that we perceive, it has to emphasize
certain emanations selected from the narrow band of emanations where
man's awareness is located. The discarded emanations are still within
our reach but remain dormant, unknown to us for the duration of our
lives. The new seers call the emphasized emanations the right side,
normal awareness, the tonal , this world, the known, the first
attention. The average man calls it reality, rationality, common sense.
The emphasized emanations compose a large portion of man's band of
awareness, but a very small piece of the total spectrum of emanations
present inside the cocoon of man. The disregarded emanations within
man's band are thought of as a sort of preamble to the unknown, the
unknown proper consisting of the bulk of emanations which are not part
of the human band and which are never emphasized. Seers call them the
left-side awareness, the nagual , the other world, the unknown, the
second attention.
Normally the glow of awareness is seen on the
surface of the cocoon of all sentient beings. After man develops
attention, however, the glow of awareness acquires depth. In other
words, it is transmitted from the surface of the cocoon to quite a
number of emanations inside the cocoon. A state of heightened awareness
is seen not only as a glow that goes deeper inside the egglike shape of
human beings, but also as a more intense glow on the surface of the
cocoon. Yet it is nothing in comparison to the glow produced by a state
of total awareness, which is seen as a burst of incandescence in the
entire luminous egg. It is an explosion of light of such a magnitude
that the boundaries of the shell are diffused and the inside emanations
extend themselves beyond anything imaginable. Seers who deliberately
attain total awareness are a sight to behold. That is the moment when
they burn from within. The fire from within consumes them. And in full
awareness they fuse themselves to the emanations at large, and glide
into eternity. * * * I've explained to you that the new seers aim to be
free. And freedom has the most devastating implications. Among them is
the implication that warriors must purposely seek change. Your
predilection is to live the way you do. You stimulate your reason by
running through your inventory and pitting it against your friends'
inventories. Those maneuvers leave you very little time to examine
yourself and your fate. You will have to give up all that. * * * Human
beings repeatedly choose the same emanations for perceiving because of
two reasons. First, and most important, because we have been taught
that those emanations are perceivable, and second because our
assemblage points select and prepare those emanations for being used.
Every living being has an assemblage point which selects emanations for
emphasis. Seers can see whether sentient beings share the same view of
the world, by seeing if the emanations their assemblage points have
selected are the same. One of the most important breakthroughs for the
new seers was to find that the spot where that point is located on the
cocoon of all living creatures is not a permanent feature, but is
established on that specific spot by habit. Hence the
tremendous
stress the new seers put on new actions, on new practicalities. They
want desperately to arrive at new usages, new habits. A matter of great
importance is the proper understanding of the truths about awareness in
order to realize that that point can be moved from within. The
unfortunate truth is that human beings always lose by default. They
simply don't know about their possibilities. The new seers say that
realization is the technique. They say that, first of all, one must
become aware that the world we perceive is the result of our assemblage
points being located on a specific spot on the cocoon. Once that is
understood, the assemblage point can move almost at will, as a
consequence of new habits. The assemblage point of man appears around a
definite area of the cocoon, because the Indescribable Force commands
it. But the precise spot is determined by habit, by repetitious acts.
First we learn that it can be placed there and then we ourselves
command it to be there. Our command becomes the Indescribable Force 's
command and that point is fixated at that spot. Consider this very
carefully; our command becomes the Indescribable Force 's command. I've
mentioned to you that sorcery is something like entering a dead-end
street. What I meant was that sorcery practices have no intrinsic
value. Their worth is indirect, for their real function is to make the
assemblage point shift by making the first attention release its
control on that point. The new seers realized the true role those
sorcery practices played and decided to go directly into the process of
making their assemblage points shift, avoiding all the other nonsense
of rituals and incantations. Yet rituals and incantations are indeed
necessary at one time in every warrior's life. But only for purposes of
luring one's first attention away from the power of self-absorption,
which keeps his assemblage point rigidly fixed. The obsessive
entanglement of the first attention in self-absorption or reason is a
powerful binding force, and ritual behavior, because it is repetitive,
forces the first attention to free some energy from watching the
inventory, as a consequence of which the assemblage point loses its
rigidity. When that happens, if you are not a warrior, you think you're
losing your mind. If you are a warrior, you know you've gone crazy, but
you patiently wait. You see, to be
healthy and sane means that the
assemblage point is immovable. When it shifts, it literally means that
one is deranged. Two options are opened to warriors whose assemblage
points have shifted. One is to acknowledge being ill and to behave in
deranged ways, reacting emotionally to the strange worlds that their
shifts force them to witness; the other is to remain impassive,
untouched, knowing that the assemblage point always returns to its
original position. If the assemblage point doesn't return to its
original position, then those people are lost. They are either
incurably crazy, because their assemblage points could never assemble
the world as we know it, or they are peerless seers who have begun
their movement toward the unknown. What determines it is energy!
Impeccability! Impeccable warriors don't lose their marbles. They
remain untouched. I've said to you many times that impeccable warriors
may see horrifying worlds and yet the next moment they are telling a
joke, laughing with their friends or with strangers. The mind, for a
seer, is nothing but the self-reflection of the inventory of man. If
you lose that self-reflection, but don't lose your underpinnings, you
actually live an infinitely stronger life than if you had kept it. The
flaw is in our emotional reaction, which prevents us from realizing
that the oddity of our sensorial experiences is determined by the depth
to which our assemblage point has moved into man's band of emanations.
Man's band of emanations is not like a ribbon, but rather like a disc.
The luminous shape of man is like a ball with a thick disk inserted
into it. If the ball were transparent you would have the perfect
replica of man's cocoon. The disc goes all the way inside the ball.
It's a disk that goes from the surface on one side to the surface on
the other side. The assemblage point of man is located high up,
three-fourths of the way toward the top of the egg on the surface of
the cocoon. Heightened awareness comes about when the intense glow of
the assemblage point lights up dormant emanations way inside the disk.
To see the glow of the assemblage point moving inside that disk gives
the feeling that it is shifting toward the left on the surface of the
cocoon. The transparency of the luminous egg creates the impression of
a movement toward the left, when in fact every movement of the
assemblage point is in depth, into the center
of the luminous egg
along the thickness of man's band. Man is not the unknowable. Man's
luminosity can be seen almost as if one were using the eyes alone. The
old seers saw the movement of the assemblage point but it never
occurred to them that it was a movement in depth; instead they followed
their seeing and coined the phrase "shift to the left," which the new
seers retained although they knew that it was erroneous to call it a
shift to the left. The contention of the new seers is that in the
course of our growth, once the glow of awareness focuses on man's band
of emanations and selects some of them for emphasis, it enters into a
vicious circle. The more it emphasizes certain emanations, the more
stable the assemblage point gets to be. This is equivalent to saying
that our command becomes the Indescribable Force 's command. It goes
without saying that when our awareness develops into the first
attention the command is so strong that to break that circle and make
the assemblage point shift is a genuine triumph. The assemblage point
is also responsible for making the first attention perceive in terms of
clusters. An example of a cluster of emanations that receive emphasis
together is the human body as we perceive it. Another part of our total
being, our luminous cocoon, never receives emphasis and is relegated to
oblivion; for the effect of the assemblage point is not only to make us
perceive clusters of emanations, but also to make us disregard
emanations. The assemblage point radiates a glow that groups together
bundles of encased emanations. These bundles then become aligned, as
bundles, with the emanations at large. Clustering is carried out even
when seers deal with the emanations that are never used. Whenever they
are emphasized, we perceive them just as we perceive the clusters of
the first attention. One of the greatest moments the new seers had was
when they found out that the unknown is merely the emanations discarded
by the first attention. It's a huge affair, but an affair, mind you,
where clustering can be done. The unknowable, on the other hand, is an
eternity where our assemblage point has no way of clustering anything.
The assemblage point is like a luminous magnet that picks emanations
and groups them together wherever it moves within the bounds of man's
band of emanations. This discovery was the glory of the new seers, for
it put the unknown in a new light. The new seers noticed that some of
the
obsessive visions of seers, the ones that were almost impossible to
conceive, coincided with a shift of the assemblage point to the region
of man's band which is diametrically opposed to where it is ordinarily
located. Those were visions of the dark side of man. It is somber and
foreboding. It's not only the unknown, but the who-cares-to-know-it.
The emanations that are inside the cocoon but out of the bounds of
man's band can be perceived, but in really indescribable ways. They're
not the human unknown, as is the case with the unused emanations in the
band of man, but the nearly immeasurable unknown where human traits do
not figure at all. It is really an area of such an overpowering
vastness that the best of seers would be hard put to describe it. The
mystery is outside us. Inside us we have only emanations trying to
break the cocoon. And this fact aberrates us, one way or another,
whether we're average men or warriors. Only the new seers get around
this. They struggle to see . And by means of the shifts of their
assemblage points, they get to realize that the mystery is perceiving.
Not so much what we perceive, but what makes us perceive. The new seers
believe that our senses are capable of detecting anything. They believe
this because they see that the position of the assemblage point is what
dictates what our senses perceive. If the assemblage point aligns
emanations inside the cocoon in a position different from its normal
one, the human senses perceive in inconceivable ways. The new seers are
the warriors of total freedom, and their only search is the ultimate
liberation that comes when they attain total awareness. Warriors
prepare themselves to be aware, and full awareness comes to them only
when there is no more self-importance left in them. Only when they are
nothing do they become everything. * * * Self-importance is the
motivating force for every attack of melancholy. Warriors are entitled
to have profound states of sadness, but that sadness is there only to
make them laugh. * * * The articulation point of everything seers do is
stopping the internal dialogue. The internal dialogue is what keeps the
assemblage
point fixed to its original position. Once silence is attained,
everything is possible. You stop talking to yourself by willing it, and
thus you set a new intent , a new command. Then your command becomes
the Indescribable Force 's command. This is one of the most
extraordinary things that the new seers found out: that our command can
become the Indescribable Force 's command. The internal dialogue stops
in the same way it begins: by an act of will . After all, we are forced
to start talking to ourselves by those who teach us. As they teach us,
they engage their will and we engage ours, both without knowing it. As
we learn to talk to ourselves, we learn to handle will . We will
ourselves to talk to ourselves. The way to stop talking to ourselves is
to use exactly the same method: we must will it, we must intend it.
Infants are taught by everyone around them to repeat an endless
dialogue about themselves. The dialogue becomes internalized, and that
force alone keeps the assemblage point fixed. The internal dialogue is
a process that constantly strengthens the position of the assemblage
point, because that position is an arbitrary one and needs steady
reinforcement. I have profound admiration for the human capacity to
impart order to the chaos of the Indescribable Force 's emanations.
Every one of us, in his own right, is a masterful magician and our
magic is to keep our assemblage point unwaveringly fixed. The force of
the emanations at large makes our assemblage point select certain
emanations and cluster them for alignment and perception. That's the
command of the Indescribable Force , but all the meaning that we give
to what we perceive is our command, our gift of magic. The new seers
say that since the exact position of the assemblage point is an
arbitrary position chosen for us by our ancestors, it can move with a
relatively small effort; once it moves, it forces new alignments of
emanations, thus new perceptions. Power plants have that effect; but
hunger, tiredness, fever, and other things like that can have a similar
effect. The flaw of the average man is that he thinks the result of a
shift is purely mental. It isn't. On both edges of man's band of
emanations there is a strange storage of refuse, an incalculable pile
of human junk.
Any person can reach that storehouse by simply
stopping his internal dialogue. If the shift is minimal, the results
are explained as fantasies of the mind. If the shift is considerable,
the results are called hallucinations. One of the most mysterious
aspects of the seers' knowledge is the incredible effects of inner
silence. Once inner silence is attained, the bonds that tie the
assemblage point to the particular spot where it is placed begin to
break and the assemblage point is free to move. If the assemblage point
moves beyond a crucial threshold, the world vanishes; it ceases to be
what it is to us at man's level. I've explained to you that man has an
assemblage point and that that assemblage point aligns emanations for
perception. We've also discussed that that point moves from its fixed
position. Now, the last truth is that once that assemblage point moves
beyond a certain limit, it can assemble worlds entirely different from
the world we know. Without enough energy, the force of alignment is
crushing. You have to have energy to sustain the pressure of alignments
which never take place under ordinary circumstances. Warriors are in
the world to train themselves to be unbiased witnesses, so as to
understand the mystery of ourselves and relish the exultation of
finding what we really are. This is the highest of the new seers'
goals. And not every warrior attains it. To be a peerless nagual, one
has to love freedom, and one has to have supreme detachment. What makes
the warrior's path so very dangerous is that it is the opposite of the
life situation of modern man. Modern man has left the realm of the
unknown and the mysterious, and has settled down in the realm of the
functional. He has turned his back to the world of the foreboding and
the exulting and has welcomed the world of boredom. To be given a
chance to go back again to the mystery of the world is sometimes too
much for warriors, and they succumb; they are waylaid by what I've
called the high adventure of the unknown. They forget the quest for
freedom; they forget to be unbiased witnessed. They sink into the
unknown and love it. In order to be unbiased witnesses, we begin by
understanding
that the fixation or the movement of the assemblage point is all there
is to us and the world we witness, whatever that world might be. * * *
The new seers say that when we were taught to talk to ourselves, we
were taught the means to dull ourselves in order to keep the assemblage
point fixed on one spot. * * * I'll tell you what my teacher said to me
when I got to a certain point. He told me that I had been evicted from
the home where I had lived all my live. A result of having saved energy
had been the disruption of my cozy but utterly limiting and boring nest
in the world of everyday life. My depression, he told me, was not so
much the sadness of having lost my nest, but the annoyance of having to
look for new quarters. "The new quarters are not as cozy," he said,
"but they are infinitely more roomy." My eviction notice came in the
form of a great depression, a loss of the desire to live. When I told
my teacher that I didn't want to live, he couldn't help laughing. * * *
The position of the assemblage point on man's cocoon is maintained by
the internal dialogue, and because of that, it is a flimsy position at
best. We are going to talk about the great bands of emanations. It is
another key discovery that the old seers made, but in their aberration
they relegated it to oblivion until it was rescued by the new seers.
The Indescribable Force 's emanations are always grouped in clusters.
The old seers called those clusters the great bands of emanations. They
aren't really bands, but the name stuck. For instance, there is an
immeasurable cluster that produces organic beings. The emanations of
that organic band have a sort of fluffiness. They are transparent and
have a unique light of their own, a peculiar energy. They are aware,
they jump. That's the reason why all organic beings are filled with a
peculiar consuming energy. The other bands are darker, less fluffy.
Some of them have no light at all, but a quality of opaqueness. Organic
beings belong to the same great band. Think of it as an enormously wide
band of luminous filaments, luminous strings with no end. Organic
beings are bubbles that grow
around a group of luminous filaments.
Imagine that in this band of organic life some bubbles are formed
around the luminous filaments in the center of the band, others are
formed close to the edges; the band is wide enough to accommodate every
kind of organic being with room to spare. In such an arrangement,
bubbles that are close to the edges of the band miss altogether the
emanations that are in the center of the band, which are shared only by
bubbles that are aligned with the center. By the same token, bubbles in
the center miss the emanations from the edges. As you can understand,
organic beings share the emanations of one band; yet seers see that
within that organic band beings are as different as they can be. There
are as many of these great bands as infinity itself. Seers have found
out, however, that in the earth there are only forty-eight such bands.
For seers, that means there are forty-eight types of organizations on
the earth, forty-eight types of clusters or structures. Organic life is
one of them. The old seers counted seven bands that produced inorganic
bubbles of awareness. In other words, there are forty bands that
produce bubbles without awareness; those are bands that generate only
organization. Think of the great bands as being like trees. All of them
bear fruit; they produce containers filled with emanations; yet only
eight of those trees bear edible fruit, that is, bubbles of awareness.
Seven have sour fruit, but edible nonetheless, and one has the most
juicy, luscious fruit there is. What makes those eight bands produce
awareness is the Indescribable Force ; which bestows awareness through
its emanations. To say that the Indescribable Force bestows awareness
through its emanations is like what a religious man would say about
God, that God bestows life through love. However, the two statements
are not made from the same point of view. And yet I think they mean the
same thing. The difference is that seers see how the Indescribable
Force bestows awareness through its emanations and religious men don't
see how God bestows life through his love. The Indescribable Force
bestows awareness by means of three giant bundles of emanations that
run through eight great bands. These bundles are quite peculiar,
because they make seers feel a hue. One bundle gives the feeling of
being beige-pink, something like the glow of pink-colored street lamps;
another
gives the feeling of being peach, like buff neon lights; and the third
bundle gives the feeling of being amber, like clear honey. So, it is a
matter of seeing a hue when seers see that the Indescribable Force
bestows awareness through its emanations. Religious men don't see God's
love, but if they would see it, they would know that it is either pink,
peach, or amber. Man, for example, is attached to the amber bundle, but
so are other beings. To know which beings share those emanations with
man is something you will have to find out for yourself through your
own seeing . There is no point in my telling you which ones; you would
only be making another inventory. Suffice it to say that finding that
out for yourself will be one of the most exciting things you'll ever
do. The pink and peach bundles belong to other living beings. I've told
you that the glow of awareness in man has different colors. They are
not really colors but casts of amber. The amber bundle of awareness has
an infinitude of subtle variants, which always denote differences in
quality of awareness. Pink and pale-green amber are the most common
casts. Blue amber is more unusual, but pure amber is by far the most
rare. Seers say that the amount of energy that one saves and stores
determines the cast. Countless numbers of warriors have begun with an
ordinary pink amber cast and have finished with the purest of all
ambers. The three bundles with all their casts crisscross the eight
bands. In the organic band, the pink bundle belongs mainly to plants,
the peach band belongs to insects, and the amber band belongs to man
and other animals. The same situation is prevalent in the inorganic
bands. The three bundles of awareness produce specific kinds of
inorganic beings in each of the seven great bands. You may want me to
elaborate on the kinds of inorganic beings that exist, however, that is
another thing that you must see for yourself. The seven bands and what
they produce are indeed inaccessible to human reason, but not to human
seeing . The great bands are neither flat nor round, but indescribably
clustered together, like a pile of hay, which is held together in
midair by the force of the hand that pitched it. Thus, there is no
order to the emanations; to say that there is a
central part or that
there are edges is misleading, but necessary to understanding.
Inorganic beings produced by the seven other bands of awareness are
characterized by having a container that has no motion; it is rather a
formless receptacle with a low degree of luminosity. It does not look
like the cocoon of organic beings. It lacks the tautness, the inflated
quality that makes organic beings look like luminous balls bursting
with energy. The only similarity between inorganic and organic beings
is that all of them have the awareness-bestowing pink or peach or amber
emanations. Those emanations, under certain circumstances make possible
the most fascinating communication between the beings of those eight
great bands. Usually the organic beings, with their greater fields of
energy, are the initiators of communication with inorganic beings, but
a subtle and sophisticated follow-up is always the province of the
inorganic beings. Once the barrier is broken, inorganic beings change
and become what seers call allies. From that moment inorganic beings
can anticipate the seers most subtle thoughts or moods or fears. The
old seers became mesmerized by such devotion from their allies. Stories
are that the old seers could make their allies do anything they wanted.
That was one of the reasons they believed in their own invulnerability.
They got fooled by their self-importance. The allies have power only if
the seer who sees them is the paragon of impeccability; and those old
seers just weren't. Inorganic beings are not as plentiful as organic
ones, but this is offset by the greater number of bands of inorganic
awareness. Also, the differences among the inorganic beings themselves
are more vast than the differences among organisms, because organisms
belong to only one band while inorganic beings belong to seven bands.
Besides, inorganic beings live infinitely longer than organisms. The
old seers also came to realize that it is the high energy of organisms
and the subsequent high development of their awareness that make them
delectable morsels for the Indescribable Force . In the old seers'
view, gluttony was the reason the Indescribable Force produced as many
organisms as possible. The product of the other forty great bands is
not awareness at all, but a configuration of inanimate energy. The old
seers
chose to call whatever is produced by those bands, vessels.
While cocoons and containers are fields of energetic awareness, which
accounts for their independent luminosity, vessels are rigid
receptacles that hold emanations without being fields of energetic
awareness. Their luminosity comes only from the energy of the encased
emanations. You must bear in mind that everything on the earth is
encased. Whatever we perceive is made up of portions of cocoons or
vessels with emanations. Ordinarily, we don't perceive the containers
of inorganic beings at all. The total world is made of the forty-eight
bands. The world that our assemblage point assembles for our normal
perception is made up of two bands; one is the organic band, the other
is a band that has only structure, but no awareness. The other
forty-six great bands are not part of the world we normally perceive.
There are other complete worlds that our assemblage points can
assemble. The old seers counted seven such worlds, one for each band of
awareness. I'll add that two of those worlds, besides the world of
everyday life, are easy to assemble; the other five are something else.
* * * A shift of the assemblage point to the area below its customary
position allows the seer a detailed and narrow view of the world we
know. So detailed is that view that it seems to be an entirely
different world. It is a mesmerizing view that has a tremendous appeal,
especially for those seers who have an adventurous but somehow indolent
and lazy spirit. The change of perspective is very pleasant. Minimal
effort is required, and the results are staggering. If a seer is driven
by quick gain, there is no better maneuver than the shift below. The
only problem is that in those positions of the assemblage point, seers
are plagued by death, which happens even more brutally and more quickly
than in man's position. My teacher thought it was a great place for
cavorting, but that's all. A true change of worlds happens only when
the assemblage point moves into man's band, deep enough to reach a
crucial threshold, at which stage the assemblage point can use another
of the great bands. How? It's a matter of energy. The force of
alignment hooks another band, provided that the seer has enough energy.
Our normal energy allows our assemblage points to use the force of
alignment of one great band of emanations. And we
perceive the world
we know. But if we have a surplus of energy, we can use the force of
alignment of other great bands, and consequently we perceive other
worlds. This may seem like an oddity to you, but trees, for instance,
are closer to man than ants. I've told you that trees and man can
develop a great relationship; that's so because they share emanations.
The cocoon of a giant tree is not much larger than the tree itself. The
interesting part is that some tiny plants have a cocoon almost as big
as a man's body and three times its width. Those are power plants. They
share the largest amount of emanations with man, not the emanations of
awareness, but other emanations in general. Another thing unique about
plants is that their luminosities have different casts. They are
pinkish in general, because their awareness is pink. Poisonous plants
are a pale yellow pink and medicinal plants are a bright violet pink.
The only ones that are white pink are power plants; some are murky
white, others are brilliant white. But the real difference between
plants and other organic beings is the location of their assemblage
points. Plants have it on the lower part of their cocoon, while other
organic beings have it on the upper part of their cocoon. With the
inorganic beings, some have it on the lower part of their containers.
Those are thoroughly alien to man, but akin to plants. Others have it
anywhere on the upper part of their containers. Those are close to man
and other organic creatures. The old seers were convinced that plants
have the most intense communication with inorganic beings. They
believed that the lower the assemblage point, the easier for plants to
break the barrier of perception; very large trees and very small plants
have their assemblage points extremely low in their cocoon. Because of
this, a great number of the old seers' sorcery techniques were means to
harness the awareness of trees and small plants in order to use them as
guides to descend to what they called the deepest levels of the dark
regions. You understand, of course, that when they thought they were
descending to the depths, they were, in fact, pushing their assemblage
points to assemble other perceivable worlds with those seven great
bands. They taxed their awareness to the limit and assembled worlds
with five great bands that are
accessible to seers only if they
undergo a dangerous transformation. In their aberration they believed
it was worth their while to break all the barriers of perception, even
if they had to become trees to do that. It is very easy in the path of
knowledge to get lost in intricacies and morbidity. Seers are up
against great enemies that can destroy their purpose, muddle their
aims, and make them weak; enemies created by the warrior's path itself
together with the sense of indolence, laziness, and self-importance
that are integral parts of the daily world. The mistakes the ancient
seers made as a result of indolence, laziness, and self-importance were
so enormous and so grave that the new seers had no option but to scorn
and reject their own tradition. The most important thing the new seers
needed was practical steps in order to make their assemblage points
shift. Since they had none, they began by developing a keen interest in
seeing the glow of awareness, and as a result they worked out three
sets of techniques that became their cornerstone. With these three
sets, the new seers accomplished a most extraordinary and difficult
feat. They succeeded in systematically making the assemblage point
shift away from its customary position. The old seers had also
accomplished that feat, but by means of capricious, idiosyncratic
maneuvers. What the new seers saw in the glow of awareness resulted in
the sequence in which they arranged the old seers' truths about
awareness. This is known as the mastery of awareness. From that, they
developed the three sets of techniques. The first is the mastery of
stalking , the second is the mastery of intent , and the third is the
mastery of dreaming . I taught you these three sets from the very first
day we met. Stalking had very humble and fortuitous origins. It started
from an observation the new seers made that when warriors steadily
behave in ways not customary for them, the unused emanations inside
their cocoons begin to glow. And their assemblage points shift in a
mild, harmonious, barely noticeable fashion. Stimulated by this
observation, the new seers began to practice the systematic control of
their behavior. They called this practice the art of stalking . The
name, although objectionable, is appropriate, because stalking entails
a specific kind of behavior with people, behavior that can be
categorized
as surreptitious. The new seers, armed with this technique, tackled the
known in a sober and fruitful way. By continual practice, they made
their assemblage points move steadily. Stalking is one of the two
greatest accomplishments of the new seers. And stalking is merely
behavior with people. You can now understand that shifting the
assemblage point was the reason why the new seers placed such a high
value on the interaction with petty tyrants. Petty tyrants force seers
to use the principles of stalking and, in doing so, help seers to move
their assemblage points. Stalking belongs exclusively to the new seers.
They are the only seers who have to deal with people. The old ones were
so wrapped up in their sense of power that they didn't even know that
people existed, until people started clobbering them on the head. The
mastery of intent together with the mastery of stalking are the new
seers' two masterpieces, which mark the arrival of the modern-day
seers. In their efforts to gain an advantage over their oppressors the
new seers pursued every possibility. They knew that their predecessors
had accomplished extraordinary feats by manipulating a mysterious and
miraculous force, which they could only describe as power. The new
seers had very little information about that force, so they were
obliged to examine it systematically through seeing . Their efforts
were amply rewarded when they discovered that the energy of alignment
is that force. They began by seeing how the glow of awareness increases
in size and intensity as the emanations inside the cocoon are aligned
with the emanations at large. They used that observation as a
springboard, just as they had done with stalking , and went on to
develop a complex series of techniques to handle that alignment of
emanations. At first they referred to those techniques as the mastery
of alignment. Then they realized that what is involved is much more
than alignment; what is involved is the energy that comes out of the
alignment of emanations. They called that energy will . Will became the
second basis. The new seers understood it as a blind, impersonal,
ceaseless burst of energy that makes us behave in the ways we do. Will
accounts for our perception of the world of ordinary affairs, and
indirectly, through the force of that perception, it accounts for the
placement of the
assemblage point in its customary position. The new
seers examined how the perception of the world of everyday life takes
place and saw the effects of will . They saw that alignment is
ceaselessly renewed in order to imbue perception with continuity. To
renew alignment every time with the freshness that it needs to make up
a living world, the burst of energy that comes out of those very
alignments is automatically rerouted to reinforce some choice
alignments. This new observation served the new seers as another
springboard that helped them reach the third basis of the set. They
called it intent , and they described it as the purposeful guiding of
will , the energy of alignment. As time passed and the new seers
established their practices, they realized that under the prevailing
conditions of life, stalking only moved the assemblage points
minimally. For maximum effect, stalking needed an ideal setting; it
needed petty tyrants in positions of great authority and power. It
became increasingly difficult for the new seers to place themselves in
such situations; the task of improvising them or seeking them out
became an unbearable burden. The new seers deemed it imperative to see
the Indescribable Force 's emanations in order to find a more suitable
way to move the assemblage point. As they tried to see the emanations
they were faced with a very serious problem. They found out that there
is no way to see them without running a mortal risk, and yet they had
to see them. That was the time when they used the old seers' technique
of dreaming as a shield to protect themselves from the deadly blow of
the Indescribable Force 's emanations. And in doing so, they realized
that dreaming was in itself the most effective way to move the
assemblage point. One of the strictest commands of the new seers was
that warriors have to learn dreaming while they are in their normal
state of awareness. Following that command, I began teaching you
dreaming almost from the first day we met. Dreaming has to be taught in
normal awareness because dreaming is so dangerous and dreamers so
vulnerable. It is dangerous became it has inconceivable power; it makes
dreamers vulnerable because it leaves them at the mercy of the
incomprehensible force of alignment. The new seers realized that in our
normal state of awareness, we have countless defences that can
safeguard us against the force of unused emanations that suddenly become
aligned
in dreaming . Dreaming , like stalking , began with a simple
observation. The old seers became aware that in dreams the assemblage
point shifts slightly to the left side in a most natural manner. That
point indeed relaxes when man sleeps and all kinds of unused emanations
begin to glow. The old seers became immediately intrigued with that
observation and began to work with that natural shift until they were
able to control it. They called that control dreaming , or the art of
handling the dreaming body. There is hardly a way of describing the
immensity of their knowledge about dreaming . Very little of it,
however, was of any use to the new seers. So when the time of
reconstruction came, the new seers took for themselves only the bare
essentials of dreaming to aid them in seeing the Indescribable Force 's
emanations and to help them move their assemblage points. Seers, old
and new, understand dreaming as being the control of the natural shift
that the assemblage point undergoes in sleep. To control that shift
does not mean in any way to direct it, but to keep the assemblage point
fixed at the position where it naturally moves in sleep, a most
difficult maneuver that took the old seers' enormous effort and
concentration to accomplish. Dreamers have to strike a very subtle
balance, for dreams cannot be interfered with, nor can they be
commanded by the conscious effort of the dreamer , and yet the shift of
the assemblage point must obey the dreamer 's command--a contradiction
that cannot be rationalized but must be resolved in practice. After
observing dreamers while they slept, the old seers hit upon the
solution of letting dreams follow their natural course. They have seen
that in some dreams, the assemblage point of the dreamer would drift
considerably deeper into the left side than in other dreams. This
observation posed to them the question of whether the content of the
dream makes the assemblage point move, or the movement of the
assemblage point by itself produces the content of the dream by
activating unused emanations. They soon realized that the shifting of
the assemblage point into the left side is what produces dreams. The
farther the movement, the more vivid and bizarre the dream. Inevitably,
they attempted to command their dreams, aiming
to make their
assemblage points move deeply into the left side. Upon trying it, they
discovered that when dreams are consciously or semiconsciously
manipulated, the assemblage point immediately returns to its usual
place. Since what they wanted was for that point to move, they reached
the unavoidable conclusion that interfering with dreams was interfering
with the natural shift of the assemblage point. From there the old
seers went on to develop their astounding knowledge on the subject--a
knowledge which had a tremendous bearing on what the new seers aspired
to do with dreaming , but was of little use to them in its original
form. Thus far you have understood dreaming as being the control of
dreams, and every one of the exercised I have given you to perform,
such as finding your hands in your dreams, was not, although it might
seem to be, aimed at teaching you to command your dreams. Those
exercises were designed to keep your assemblage point fixed at the
place where it had moved in your sleep. It is here that the dreamers
have to strike a subtle balance. All they can direct is the fixation of
their assemblage points. Seers are like fishermen equipped with a line
that casts itself wherever it may; the only thing they can do is keep
the line anchored at the place where it sinks. Wherever the assemblage
point moves in dreams is called the dreaming position. The old seers
became so expert at keeping their dreaming position that they were even
able to wake up while their assemblage points were anchored there. The
old seers called that state the dreaming body , because they controlled
it to the extreme of creating a temporary new body every time they woke
up at a new dreaming position . I have to make it clear to you that
dreaming has a terrible drawback. It belongs to the old seers. It's
tainted with their mood. I've been very careful in guiding you through
it, but still there is no way to make sure. I'm warning you about the
pitfalls of dreaming , which are truly stupendous. In dreaming , there
is really no way of directing the movement of the assemblage point; the
only thing that dictates that shift is the inner strength or weakness
of dreamers . Right there we have the first pitfall. At first the new
seers were hesitant to use dreaming . It was their belief that dreaming
, instead of fortifying, made warriors weak, compulsive, capricious.
The old seers were all like that. In order to offset the nefarious
effect of dreaming , since they had no other option but to use it, the
new seers
developed a complex and rich system of behavior called the
warrior's way, or the warrior's path. With that system, the new seers
fortified themselves and acquired the internal strength they needed to
guide the shift of the assemblage point in dreams. The strength that I
am talking about is not conviction alone. No one could have had
stronger convictions than the old seers, and yet they were weak to the
core. Internal strength means a sense of equanimity, almost of
indifference, a feeling of being at ease, but, above all, it means a
natural and profound bent for examination, for understanding. The new
seers called all these traits of character sobriety. The conviction
that the new seers have is that a life of impeccability by itself leads
unavoidably to a sense of sobriety, and this in turn leads to the
movement of the assemblage point. I've said that the new seers believed
that the assemblage point can be moved from within. They went one step
further and maintained that impeccable men need no one to guide them,
that by themselves, through saving their energy, they can do everything
that seers do. All they need is a minimal chance, just to be cognizant
of the possibilities that seers have unraveled. All that is required is
impeccability, energy, and that begins with a single act that has to be
deliberate, precise, and sustained. If that act is repeated long
enough, one acquires a sense of unbending intent , which can be applied
to anything else. If that is accomplished the road is clear. One thing
will lead to another until the warrior realizes his full potential.
When a warrior understands all of that, it will indeed be a godsent
example of the strength that I am talking about. At that point his
assemblage point will have shifted, it will have been moved by sobriety
to a position that fosters understanding, instead of being moved by
capriciousness, to a position that only enhances self-importance. * * *
The name dreaming body means a feeling, a surge of energy that is
transported by the movement of the assemblage point to any place in
this world, or to any place in the seven worlds available to man. The
procedure for getting to the dreaming body starts with an initial act
which by the fact of being sustained breeds unbending intent .
Unbending intent leads to internal silence,
and internal silence to
the inner strength needed to make the assemblage point shift in dreams
to suitable positions. This sequence is the groundwork. The development
of control comes after the groundwork has been completed; it consists
of systematically maintaining the dreaming position by doggedly holding
on to the vision of the dream. Steady practice results in a great
facility to hold new dreaming positions with new dreams, not so much
because one gains deliberate control with practice, but because every
time this control is exercised the inner strength gets fortified.
Fortified inner strength in turn makes the assemblage point shift into
dreaming positions which are more and more suitable to fostering
sobriety; in other words, dreams by themselves become more and more
manageable, even orderly. The development of dreamers is indirect.
That's why the new seers believed we can do dreaming by ourselves,
alone. Since dreaming uses a natural, built-in shift of the assemblage
point, we should need no one to help us. What we badly need is
sobriety, and no one can give it to us or help us get it except
ourselves. Without it, the shift of the assemblage point is chaotic, as
our ordinary dreams are chaotic. So, all in all, the procedure to get
to the dreaming body is impeccability in our daily life. Once sobriety
is acquired and the dreaming positions become increasingly stronger,
the next step is to wake up at any dreaming position . That maneuver,
although made to sound simple, is really a very complex affair--so
complex that it requires not only sobriety but all the attributes of
warriorship as well, especially intent . Intent , being the most
sophisticated control of the force of alignment, is what maintains,
through the dreamer 's sobriety, the alignment of whatever emanations
have been lit up by the movement of the assemblage point. There is one
more formidable pitfall of dreaming : the very strength of the dreaming
body . For example, it is very easy for the dreaming body to gaze at
the Indescribable Force 's emanations uninterruptedly for long periods
of time, but it is also very easy in the end for the dreaming body to
be totally consumed by them. Seers who gazed at the Indescribable Force
's emanations without their dreaming bodies died, and those who gazed
at them with their dreaming bodies burned with the fire from within.
The new seers solved the problem by seeing in teams. While one seer
gazed at the emanations,
others stood by ready to end the seeing .
It's perfectly possible for a group of seers to activate the same
unused emanations. And in this case also, there are no known steps, it
just happens; there is no technique to follow. In dreaming together ,
something in us takes the lead and suddenly we find ourselves sharing
the same view with other dreamers . What happens is that our human
condition makes us focus the glow of awareness automatically on the
same emanations that other human beings are using; we adjust the
position of our assemblage points to fit the others around us. We do
that on the right side, in our ordinary perception, and we also do it
on the left side, while dreaming together. Any warrior can be
successful with people provided that he moves his assemblage point to a
position where it is immaterial whether people like him, dislike him,
or ignore him. * * * The two basic qualities of warriors are sustained
effort and unbending intent . * * * It goes without saying that the
most difficult thing in the warrior's path is to make the assemblage
point move. That movement is the completion of the warrior's quest. To
go on from there is another quest; it is the seers' quest proper. In
the warrior's way, the shift of the assemblage point is everything. The
old seers absolutely failed to realize this truth. They thought the
movement of the point was like a marker that determined their positions
on a scale of worth. They never conceived that it was that very
position which determined what they perceived. The position of the
assemblage point dictates how we behave and how we feel. The way to
move that point is to establish new habits, to will it to move. * * *
The only way to deal with peerless warriors is not to have
self-importance, so that one can celebrate them unbiasedly. * * *
Realizations are of two kinds. One is just pep talk, great outbursts of
emotion and nothing more. The other is the product of a shift of the
assemblage point; it is not coupled with an emotional outburst but with
action. The emotional realizations come years later after warriors have
solidified, by
usage, the new position of their assemblage points. *
* The earth itself is a living being. The old seers saw that the earth
has a cocoon. They saw that there is a ball encasing the earth, a
luminous cocoon that entraps the Indescribable Force 's emanations. The
earth is a gigantic sentient being subjected to the same forces we are.
The old seers, on discovering this, became immediately interested in
the practical uses of that knowledge. The result of their interest was
that the most elaborate categories of their sorcery had to do with the
earth. They considered the earth to be the ultimate source of
everything we are. The old seers were not mistaken in this respect,
because the earth is indeed our ultimate source. It was the old seers
who, on discovering that perception is alignment, stumbled onto
something monumental. That the magic key that opens the earth's doors
is made of internal silence plus anything that shines. Just cut off the
internal dialogue. The key to everything is the firsthand knowledge
that the earth is a sentient being and as such can give warriors a
tremendous boost; it is an impulse that comes from the awareness of the
earth itself at the instant in which the emanations inside warriors'
cocoons are aligned with the appropriate emanations inside the earth's
cocoon. Since both the earth and man are sentient beings, their
emanations coincide, or rather, the earth has all the emanations
present in man and all the emanations that are present in all sentient
beings, organic and inorganic for that matter. When a moment of
alignment takes place, sentient beings use that alignment in a limited
way and perceive their world. Warriors can use that alignment either to
perceive, like everyone else, or as a boost that allows them to enter
unimaginable worlds. The unknown is not really inside the cocoon of man
in the emanations untouched by awareness, and yet it is there, in a
manner of speaking. When I say that we can assemble seven worlds
besides the one we know, don't take it as being an internal affair. The
portion of emanations inside man's cocoon is in there only for
awareness, and awareness is matching that portion of emanations with
the same portion of emanations at large. They are called emanations at
large because they are immense; and to say that outside man's cocoon is
the
unknowable is to say that within the earth's cocoon is the
unknowable. However, inside the earth's cocoon is also the unknown, and
inside man's cocoon the unknown is the emanations untouched by
awareness. When the glow of awareness touches them, they become active
and can be aligned with the corresponding emanations at large. Once
that happens the unknown is perceived and becomes the known. * * * A
nagual never lets anyone know that he is in charge. A nagual comes and
goes without leaving a trace. That freedom is what makes him a nagual.
* * * When man's assemblage point moves beyond a crucial limit, the
results are always the same for every man. The techniques to make it
move may be as different as they can be, but the results are always the
same, meaning that the assemblage point assembles other worlds, aided
by the boost from the earth. The boost from the earth is the same for
every man. The difficulty for the average man is the internal dialogue.
Only when a state of total silence is attained can one use the boost.
You will corroborate that truth the day you try to use that boost by
yourself. It takes years to become an impeccable warrior. In order to
withstand the impact of the earth's boost you must be better than you
are now. The speed of that boost will dissolve everything about you.
Under its impact we become nothing. Speed and the sense of individual
existence don't go together. There's one thing you haven't understood
yet about the earth's being a sentient being; that the supreme
awareness of the earth is what makes it possible for us to change into
other great bands of emanations. We living beings are perceivers. And
we perceive because some emanations inside man's cocoon become aligned
with some emanations outside. Alignment, therefore, is the secret
passageway, and the earth's boost is the key. Alignment has to be a
very peaceful, unnoticeable act. The sobriety needed to let the
assemblage point assemble other worlds is something that cannot be
improvised. Sobriety has to mature and become a force in itself before
warriors can break the barrier of perception with impunity. The
position of the assemblage point is everything, and the
world it
makes us perceive is so real that it does not leave room for anything
except realness. When the assemblage point assembles a world, that
world is total. This is the marvel that the old seers stumbled upon and
never realized what it was; the awareness of the earth can give us a
boost to align other great bands of emanations, and the force of that
new alignment makes the world vanish. Every time the old seers made a
new alignment, they believed they had descended to the depths below or
ascended to the heavens above. They never knew that the world
disappears like a puff of air when a new total alignment makes us
perceive another total world. To see the Indescribable Force 's
emanations you must first move your assemblage point until you see the
cocoon of man. Alignment is a unique force because it either helps the
assemblage point shift, or it keeps it glued to its customary position.
The aspect of alignment that keeps the point stationary is will ; and
the aspect that makes it shift is intent . One of the most haunting
mysteries is how will , the impersonal force of alignment, changes into
intent , the personalized force, which is at the service of each
individual. The strangest part of this mystery is that the change is so
easy to accomplish. But what is not so easy is to convince ourselves
that it is possible. There, right there, is our safety catch. We have
to be convinced. And none of us wants to be. It is possible for you to
intend your assemblage point to shift deeper into your left side, to a
dreaming position . Warriors should never attempt seeing unless they
are aided by dreaming . To move the assemblage point away from its
natural setting and to keep it fixed at a new location is to be asleep;
with practice, seers learn to be asleep and yet behave as if nothing is
happening to them. * * * For purposes of seeing the cocoon of man, one
has to gaze at people from behind, as they walk away. It is useless to
gaze at people face to face, because the front of the egglike cocoon of
man has a protective shield, which seers call the front plate. It is an
almost impregnable, unyielding shield that protects us throughout our
lives against the onslaught of a peculiar force that stems from the
emanations themselves called the rolling
force, or the tumbler. The
tumbler is a force from the Indescribable Force 's emanations. A
ceaseless force that strikes us every instant of our lives. It is
lethal when seen , but otherwise we are oblivious to it, in our
ordinary lives, because we have protective shields. We have consuming
interests that engage all our awareness. We are permanently worried
about our station, our possessions. These shields, however, do not keep
the tumbler away, they simply keep us from seeing it directly,
protecting us in this way from getting hurt by the fright of seeing the
balls of fire hitting us. Shields are a great help and a great
hindrance to us. They pacify us and at the same time fool us. They give
us a false sense of security. A moment will come in your life when you
will be without any shields, uninterruptedly at the mercy of the
tumbler. It is an obligatory stage in the life of a warrior known as
losing the human form. Seers describe the human form as the compelling
force of alignment of the emanations lit by the glow of awareness on
the precise spot on which normally man's assemblage point is fixated.
It is the force that makes us into persons. Thus, to be a person is to
be compelled to affiliate with that force of alignment and consequently
to be affiliated with the precise spot where it originates. By reason
of their activities, at a given moment the assemblage point of warriors
drift toward the left. It is a permanent move, which results in an
uncommon sense of aloofness, or control, or even abandon. That drift of
the assemblage point entails a new alignment of emanations. It is the
beginning of a series of greater shifts. Seers very aptly called this
initial shift losing the human form, because it marks an inexorable
movement of the assemblage point away from its original setting,
resulting in the irreversible loss of our affiliation to the force that
makes us persons. * * * Seeing is a euphemism for moving the assemblage
point. * * * There are balls of fire that are of crucial importance to
human beings because they are the expression of a force that pertains
to all details of life and death, something that the new seers called
the rolling force. The rolling force is the means through which the
Indescribable Force distributes live and awareness for
safekeeping.
But it also is the force that, let's say, collects the rent. It makes
all living beings die. The ancient seers describe the tumbler as an
eternal line of iridescent rings, or balls of fire, that roll onto
living beings ceaselessly. Luminous organic beings meet to rolling
force head on, until the day when the force proves to be too much for
them and the creatures finally collapse. By becoming familiar with the
rolling force through the mastery of intent , the new seers, at a given
moment, open their own cocoons and the force floods them rather than
rolling them up like a curled-up sowbug. The final result is their
total and instantaneous disintegration. Move your assemblage point,
first by setting up your unbending intent to move it, and second by
letting the context of the situation dictate where it should move.
Don't worry about procedures, because most of the really unusual things
that happen to seers, or to the average man for that matter, happen by
themselves, with only the intervention of intent . You are not
consciously refusing to let your assemblage point move. Every human
being does that automatically. Something is going to scare the living
daylights out of you. Don't give up, because if you do, you'll die.
Warriors live with death at their side, and from the knowledge that
death is with them they draw the courage to face anything. The worst
that could happen to us is that we have to die, and since that is
already our unalterable fate, we are free; those who have lost
everything no longer have anything to fear. * * * Your first attention
doesn't want to give up control. * * * A shift of the assemblage point
is marked by a change in light. In the daytime, light becomes very
dark; at night, darkness becomes twilight. Don't indulge in fear,
especially after you have realized that warriors have nothing to fear.
When fear disappears all the ties that bind us dissolve. * * * The
earth's boost is the force of alignment of only the amber emanations.
It is a boost that heightens awareness to unthinkable degrees. To the
new seers it is a blast of unlimited consciousness, which they call
total freedom. The tumbler's boost, on the other hand, is the force of
death. Under the impact of the tumbler, the assemblage point moves to
new, unpredictable positions.
Technically, as soon as the assemblage
point shifts, we are asleep. You are absolutely asleep without having
to be stretched out. During normal sleep, the shift of the assemblage
point runs along either edge of man's band. Such shifts are always
coupled with slumber. Shifts that are induced by practice occur along
the midsection of man's band and are not coupled with slumber, yet a
dreamer is asleep. The new seers maintain their assemblage points along
the midsection of man's band. If the shift is a shallow one, like the
shift into heightened awareness, the dreamer is almost like anyone else
in the street, except for a slight vulnerability to emotions, such as
fear and doubt. But at a certain degree of depth, the dreamer who is
shifting along the midsection becomes a blob of light. A blob of light
is the dreaming body of the new seers. Such an impersonal dreaming body
is conducive to understanding and examination, which are the basis of
all that the new seers do. I have given you a detailed account of the
two forces that aid our assemblage points to move: the earth's boost
and the rolling force; plus the three techniques worked out by the new
seers--stalking , intent , and dreaming --and their effects on the
movement of the assemblage point. Now, the only thing left for you to
do before the explanation of the mastery of awareness is complete is to
break the barrier of perception by yourself. You must move your
assemblage point, unaided by anyone, and align another great band of
emanations. Not to do this will turn everything you've learned and done
with me into merely talk, just words. And words are fairly cheap. When
the assemblage point is moving away from its customary position and
reaches a certain depth, it breaks a barrier that momentarily disrupts
its capacity to align emanations. We experience it as a moment of
perceptual blankness. The old seers called that moment the wall of fog,
because a bank of fog appears whenever the alignment of emanations
falters. There are three ways of dealing with it. It can be taken
abstractly as a barrier of perception; it can be felt as the act of
piercing a tight paper screen with the entire body; or it can be seen
as a wall of fog. There is great comfort and ease in seeing it as a
wall of
fog, but there is also the grave danger of turning something
incomprehensible into something somber and foreboding; hence, my
recommendation is to keep incomprehensible things incomprehensible
rather than making them part of the inventory of the first attention.
Exercises of assembling other worlds allow the assemblage point to gain
experience in shifting. The initial boost to dislodge your assemblage
point from its usual position comes from intent . Since alignment is
the force that is involved in everything, intent is what makes the
assemblage point move. The mastery of awareness is what gives the
assemblage point its boost. After all, there is really very little to
us human beings; we are, in essence, an assemblage point fixed at a
certain position. Our enemy and at the same time our friend is our
internal dialogue, our inventory. Be a warrior; shut off your internal
dialogue; make your inventory and then throw it away. The new seers
make accurate inventories and then laugh at them. Without the inventory
the assemblage point becomes free. * * * The mold of man is a huge
cluster of emanations in the great band of organic life. It is called
the mold of man because the cluster appears only inside the cocoon of
man. The mold of man is the portion of the Indescribable Force 's
emanations that seers can see directly without any danger to
themselves. To break the barrier of perception is the last task of the
mastery of awareness. In order to move your assemblage point to that
position you must gather enough energy. Anger is a natural reaction to
the hesitation of the assemblage point to move on command. It will be a
long time before you can apply the principle that your command is the
Indescribable Force 's command. That's the essence of the mastery of
intent . In the meantime, make a command now not to fret, not even at
the worst moments of doubt. It will be a slow process until that
command is heard and obeyed as if it were the Indescribable Force 's
command. There is an unmeasurable area of awareness in between the
customary position of the assemblage point and the position where there
are no more doubts, which is almost the place where the barrier of
perception makes its appearance. In that unmeasurable area, warriors
fall prey to every
conceivable misdeed. Be on the lookout and don't
lose confidence, for you will unavoidably be struck at one time or
another by gripping feelings of defeat. The new seers recommend a very
simple act when impatience, or despair, or anger, or sadness comes
their way. They recommend that warriors roll their eyes. Any direction
will do; I prefer to roll mine clockwise. The movement of the eyes
makes the assemblage point shift momentarily. In that movement, you
will find relief. This is in lieu of true mastery of intent . To see
the mold of man on your own, unaided by anyone, is an important step,
because all of us have certain ideas that must be broken before we are
free; the seer who travels into the unknown to see the unknowable must
be in an impeccable state of being. To be in an impeccable state of
being is to be free of rational assumptions and rational fears. The old
seers as well as the mystics of our world have one thing in
common--they have been able to see the mold of man but not understand
what it is. Mystics, throughout the centuries, have given us moving
accounts of their experiences. But these accounts, however beautiful,
are flawed by the gross and despairing mistake of believing the mold of
man to be an omnipotent, omniscient creator; and so is the
interpretation of the old seers, who called the mold of man a friendly
spirit, a protector of man. The new seers are the only ones who have
the sobriety to see the mold of man and understand what it is; the
pattern of every human attribute we can think of and some we cannot
even conceive. We are what it stamps us with. Anyone who sees the mold
of man automatically assumes that it is God. The new seers have seen
that what we call God is a static prototype of humanness without any
power. We are simply the product of its stamp; we are its impression.
The mold of man is exactly what its name tells us it is, a pattern, a
form, a cast that groups together a particular bunch of fiberlike
elements, which we call man. * * * Real affection cannot be an
investment. * * * There are two ways of seeing the mold of man. You can
see it as a man or you can see it as a light. That depends on the shift
of the assemblage point. If the shift is lateral, the mold is a human
being; if the shift is in the midsection of man's band,
the mold is
a light. The position where one sees the mold of man is very close to
that where the dreaming body and the barrier of perception appear. That
is the reason the new seers recommend that the mold of man be seen and
understood. Freedom is like a contagious disease. It is transmitted;
its carrier is an impeccable nagual. People might not appreciate that,
and that's because they don't want to be free. Freedom is frightening.
Remember that. But not for us. * * * The dreaming body and the barrier
of perception are positions of the assemblage point, and that knowledge
is as vital to seers as knowing how to read and write is to modern man.
Both are accomplishments attained after years of practice. The dreaming
body is known by different names. The name I like the best is, the
Other. We can be in two places at once, we can experience a sort of
perceptual dualism. There is no end to the mystery of man and to the
mystery of the world. The only thing that soothes those who journey
into the unknown, is oblivion. What a relief to be in the ordinary
world! For warriors, there are two positions of the assemblage point
where there are no more doubts. In one you have no more doubts because
you know everything. In the other, which is normal awareness, you have
no doubts because you don't know anything. No rational assumptions
should interfere with the actions of a seer. Rationality is a condition
of alignment, merely the result of the position of the assemblage
point. You have to understand this when you are in a state of great
vulnerability. To understand it when your assemblage point has reached
the position where there are no doubts is useless, because realizations
of that nature are commonplace in that position. It is equally useless
to understand it in a state of normal awareness; in that state, such
realizations are emotional outbursts that are valid only for as long as
the emotion lasts. You can travel by waking up at a distant dreaming
position. By moving your assemblage point from normal awareness all the
way to the position where the dreaming body appears, your dreaming body
can actually fly over incredible distances in the blink of an eyelid.
The mystery is
in the dreaming position. If it is strong enough to
pull you, you can go to the ends of this world or beyond it, just as
the old seers did. They disappeared from this world because they woke
up at a dreaming position beyond the limits of the known. There is no
way of knowing how it is done. Strong emotion or unbending intent , or
great interest serves as a guide; then the assemblage point gets
powerfully fixed at the dreaming position , long enough to drag there
all the emanations that are inside the cocoon. * * * Now you need to
have one last clarification: the coherent but irrational realization
that everything in the world we have learned to perceive is
inextricably tied to the position where the assemblage point is
located. If the assemblage point is displaced from that position, the
world will cease to be what it is to us. A displacement of the
assemblage point beyond the midline of the cocoon of man makes the
entire world we know vanish from our view in one instant, as if it had
been erased--for the stability, the substantiality, that seems to
belong to our perceivable world is just the force of alignment. Certain
emanations are routinely aligned because of the fixation of the
assemblage point on one specific spot; that is all there is to our
world. The soundness of the world is not the mirage. The mirage is the
fixation of the assemblage point on any spot. When seers shift their
assemblage points, they are not confronted with an illusion, they are
confronted with another world; that new world is as real as the one we
are watching now, but the new fixation of their assemblage points,
which produces that new world, is as much of a mirage as the old
fixation. There is probably no way to soothe anyone who realizes the
journey of the dreaming body. * * * You say that you feel terribly sad.
Who cares about sadness? Think only of the mysteries; mystery is all
that matters. We are living beings; we have to die and relinquish our
awareness. But if we could change just a tinge of that, what mysteries
must await us! What mysteries! Warriors end their training when they
are capable of breaking the barrier of perception, unaided, starting
from a
normal state of awareness. The only force that can
temporarily cancel out alignment is alignment. By intending a new
position for your assemblage point and by intending to keep it fixed
their long enough, you will assemble another of the seven worlds and
escape this one. You'll be separated from your normal world by the very
barrier that you have broken: the barrier of perception. But you will
remain. That is the mystery. The wall of fog, the plain with yellow
dunes, the world of the apparitions--all are lateral alignments that
our assemblage points make as they approach a crucial position. To
assemble other worlds is not only a matter of practice, but a matter of
intent . And it isn't merely an exercise of bouncing out of those
worlds, like being pulled by a rubber band. You see, a seer has to be
daring. Once you break the barrier of perception, you don't have to
come back to the same place in the world. See what I mean. For warriors
the danger of assembling other worlds is that those worlds are as
possessive as our world. The force of alignment is such that once the
assemblage point breaks away from its normal position, it becomes fixed
at other positions, by other alignments, and warriors run the risk of
getting stranded in inconceivable aloneness. Breaking the barrier of
perception is the culmination of everything seers do. From the moment
that barrier is broken, man and his fate take on a different meaning
for warriors. What you are going to do is to make this world vanish.
But you are going to remain somewhat yourself. This is the ultimate
bastion of awareness, the one the new seers count on. They know that
after they burn with consciousness, they somewhat retain the sense of
being themselves. This street, like all others, leads to eternity. All
you have to do is follow it in total silence. Intend the movement of
your assemblage point. You must remember that intent begins with a
command. If warriors are going to have an internal dialogue, they
should have the proper dialogue. That's the detached manipulation of
intent through sober commands. The manipulation of intent begins with a
command given to oneself; the command is then repeated until it becomes
the Indescribable Force 's command, and then the assemblage point
shifts, accordingly, the moment warriors reach inner
silence. The
fact that such a maneuver is possible is something of the most singular
importance to seers. It means escaping the Indescribable Force by
moving their assemblage points to a particular dreaming position called
total freedom. The old seers discovered that it is possible to move the
assemblage point to the limit of the known and keep it fixed there in a
state of prime heightened awareness. From that position, they saw the
feasibility of slowly shifting their assemblage points permanently to
other positions beyond that limit--a stupendous feat fraught with
daring but lacking sobriety, for they could never retract the movement
of their assemblage points, or perhaps they never wanted to.
Adventurous men, faced with the choice of dying in the world of
ordinary affairs or dying in unknown worlds, will unavoidably choose
the latter. The new seers, realizing that their predecessors had chosen
merely to change the locale of their death, came to understand the
futility of it all; The futility of struggling to control their fellow
men, the futility of assembling other worlds, and, above all, the
futility of self-importance. One of the most fortunate decisions that
the new seers made was never to allow their assemblage points to move
permanently to any position other than heightened awareness. From that
position, they actually resolved their dilemma of futility and found
out that the solution is not simply to choose an alternate world in
which to die, but to choose total consciousness, total freedom. By
choosing total freedom, the new seers unwittingly continued in the
tradition of their predecessors and became the quintessence of the
death defiers. The new seers discovered that if the assemblage point is
made to shift constantly to the confines of the unknown, but is made to
return to a position at the limit of the known, then when it is
suddenly released it moves like lightning across the entire cocoon of
man, aligning all the emanations inside the cocoon at once. The new
seers burn with the force of alignment, with the force of will , which
they have turned into the force of intent through a life of
impeccability. Intent is the alignment of all the amber emanations of
awareness, so it is correct to say that total freedom means total
awareness. Freedom is the Indescribable Force 's gift to man.
Unfortunately,
very few men understand that all we need, in order to accept such a
magnificent gift, is to have sufficient energy. If that's all we need,
then, by all means, we must become misers of energy in order to accept
the Indescribable Force 's gift ourselves.
At
various times I've attempted to name my knowledge for your benefit.
I've said that the most appropriate name is nagualism, but that that
term is too obscure. Calling it simply "knowledge" makes it too vague,
and to call it "witchcraft" is debasing. "The mastery of intent " is
too abstract, and "the search for total freedom" too long and
metaphorical. Finally, because I've been unable to find a more
appropriate name, I've called it "sorcery," although I admit it is not
really accurate. I've given you different definitions of sorcery, but I
have always maintained that definitions change as knowledge increases.
Now you are in a position to appreciate a clearer definition. From
where the average man stands, sorcery is nonsense or an ominous mystery
beyond his reach. And he is right--not because this is an absolute
fact, but because the average man lacks the energy to deal with
sorcery. Human beings are born with a finite amount of energy, an
energy that is systematically deployed, beginning at the moment of
birth, in order that it may be used most advantageously by the modality
of the time. The modality of the time is the precise bundle of energy
fields being perceived. I believe man's perception has changed through
the ages. The actual time decides the mode; the time decides which
precise bundle of energy fields, out of an incalculable number, are to
be used. And handling the modality of the time--those few, selected
energy fields--takes all our available energy, leaving us nothing that
would help us use any of the other energy fields. The average man, if
he uses only the energy he has, can't perceive the worlds sorcerers do.
To perceive them, sorcerers need to use a cluster of energy fields not
ordinarily used. Naturally, if the average man is to perceive those
worlds and understand sorcerers' perception he must use the same
cluster they have used. And this is just not possible, because all his
energy is already deployed. Think of it this way. It isn't that as time
goes by you're
learning sorcery; rather, what you're learning is to
save energy. And this energy will enable you to handle some of the
energy fields which are inaccessible to you now. And that is sorcery:
the ability to use energy fields that are not employed in perceiving
the ordinary world we know. Sorcery is a state of awareness. Sorcery is
the ability to perceive something which ordinary perception cannot.
Everything a teacher puts his apprentice through, each of the things he
shows him is only a device to convince him that there's more to us than
meets the eye. We don't need anyone to teach us sorcery, because there
is really nothing to learn. What we need is a teacher to convince us
that there is incalculable power at our fingertips. What a strange
paradox! Every warrior on the path of knowledge thinks, at one time or
another, that he's learning sorcery, but all he's doing is allowing
himself to be convinced of the power hidden in his being, and that he
can reach it. I'm trying to convince you that you can reach that power.
I went through the same thing. And I was as hard to convince as you
are. Once we have reached it, it will, by itself, make use of energy
fields which are available to us but inaccessible. And that, as I have
said, is sorcery. We begin then to see --that is, to
perceive--something else; not as imagination, but as real and concrete.
And then we begin to know without having to use words. And what any of
us does with that increased perception, with that silent knowledge,
depends on our own temperament. Now, I'm going to give you a different
and more precise definition of sorcery. In the universe there is an
unmeasurable, indescribable force which sorcerers call intent.
Absolutely everything that exists in the entire cosmos is attached to
intent by a connecting link. Sorcerers, warriors, are concerned with
discussing, understanding, and employing that connecting link. They are
especially concerned with cleaning it of the numbing effects brought
about by the ordinary concerns of their everyday lives. Sorcery at this
level could be defined as the procedure of cleaning one's connecting
link to intent. The task of sorcery is to take this seemingly
incomprehensible knowledge and make it understandable by the standards
of awareness of everyday life. The guide in the lives of sorcerers is
called "the nagual." The nagual is a man or a woman with extraordinary
energy, a
teacher who has sobriety, endurance, stability; someone
seers see as a luminous sphere having four compartments, as if four
luminous balls have been compressed together. Naguals are responsible
for supplying what sorcerers call "the minimal chance": the awareness
of one's connection with intent . Naguals school their apprentices
toward three areas of expertise: the mastery of awareness , the art of
stalking , and the mastery of intent . These three areas of expertise
are the three riddles sorcerers encounter in their search for
knowledge. The mastery of awareness is the riddle of the mind; the
perplexity sorcerers experience when they recognize the astounding
mystery and scope of awareness and perception. The art of stalking is
the riddle of the heart; the puzzlement sorcerers feel upon becoming
aware of two things: first that the world appears to us to be
unalterably objective and factual, because of peculiarities of our
awareness and perception; second, that if different peculiarities of
perception come into play, the very things about the world that seem so
unalterably objective and factual change. The mastery of intent is the
riddle of the spirit, or the paradox of the abstract--sorcerers'
thoughts and actions projected beyond our human condition. The art of
stalking and the mastery of intent depend upon instruction on the
mastery of awareness, which consists of the following basic premises:
1.
The universe is an infinite agglomeration of energy fields, resembling
threads of light.
2.
These
energy fields, called the Eagle's, or the Indescribable Force 's
emanations, radiate from a source of inconceivable proportions
metaphorically called the Eagle--the Indescribable Force .
3.
Human
beings are also composed of an incalculable number of the same
threadlike energy fields. These Indescribable Force 's emanations form
an encased agglomeration that manifests itself as a ball of light the
size of the person's body with the arms extended laterally, like a
giant luminous egg.
4.
Only a very small group of the energy
fields inside this luminous ball are lit up by a point of intense
brilliance located on the ball's surface.
5.
Perception occurs
when the energy fields in that small group immediately surrounding the
point of brilliance extent their light to illuminate identical energy
fields outside the ball. Since the only energy fields perceivable are
those lit by the point of brilliance, that point is named "the point
where perception is assembled" or simply "the assemblage point."
6.
The
assemblage point can be moved from its usual position on the surface of
the luminous ball to another position on the surface, or into the
interior. Since the brilliance of the assemblage point can light up
whatever energy field it comes in contact with, when it moves to a new
position it immediately brightens up new energy fields, making them
perceivable. This perception is known as seeing .
7.
When the
assemblage point shifts, it makes possible the perception of an
entirely different world--as objective and factual as the one we
normally perceive. Sorcerers go into that other world to get energy,
power, solutions to general and particular problems, or to face the
unimaginable.
8.
Intent is the pervasive force that causes us to
perceive. We do not become aware because we perceive; rather, we
perceive as a result of the pressure and intrusion of intent .
9.
The
aim of sorcerers is to reach a state of total awareness in order to
experience all the possibilities of perception available to man. This
state of awareness even implies an alternative way of dying. * * * A
level of practical knowledge is included as part of teaching the
mastery of awareness. On this practical level are taught the procedures
necessary to move the assemblage point. The two great systems devised
by the sorcerer seers of ancient times to accomplish this
are
dreaming , the control and utilization of dreams; and stalking , the
control of behavior. Moving one's assemblage point is an essential
maneuver that every sorcerer has to learn.
Sorcerers consult their
past in order to obtain a point of reference. Establishing a point of
reference means getting a chance to examine intent and nothing can give
sorcerers a better view of intent than examining stories of other
sorcerers battling to understand the same force. In sorcery there are
abstract cores, and then, based on those abstract cores, there are
scores of sorcery stories about the naguals of our lineage battling to
understand the spirit. * * * The only way to know intent is to know it
directly through a living connection that exists between intent and all
sentient beings. Sorcerers call intent the indescribable, the spirit,
the abstract. * * Every act performed by sorcerers, especially by the
naguals, is either performed as a way to strengthen their link with
intent or as a response triggered by the link itself. Sorcerers, and
specifically the naguals, therefore have to be actively and permanently
on the lookout for manifestations of the spirit. Such manifestations
are called gestures of the spirit or, more simply, indications or
omens. When a sorcerer interprets an omen he knows its exact meaning
without having any notion of how he knows it. This is one of the
bewildering effects of the connecting link with intent . Sorcerers have
a sense of knowing things directly. How sure they are depends on the
strength and clarity of their connecting link. The feeling everyone
knows as "intuition" is the activation of our link with intent . And
since sorcerers deliberately pursue the understanding and strengthening
of that link, it could be said the they intuit everything unerringly
and accurately. Reading omens is commonplace for sorcerers--mistakes
happen only when personal feelings intervene and cloud the sorcerers'
connecting link with intent . Otherwise their direct knowledge is
totally accurate and functional. The spirit manifests itself to a
sorcery, especially to a
nagual, at every turn. However, this is not
the entire truth. The entire truth is that the spirit reveals itself to
everyone with the same intensity and consistency, but only sorcerers,
and naguals in particular, are attuned to such revelations. Naguals
make decisions. With no regard for the consequences they take action or
choose not to. Imposters ponder and become paralyzed. * * * Sorcerers
speak of sorcery as a magical, mysterious bird which has paused in its
flight for a moment in order to give man hope and purpose. Sorcerers
live under the wing of that bird, which they call the bird of wisdom,
the bird of freedom. They nourish it with their dedication and
impeccability. The bird of freedom can do only two things, take
sorcerers along, or leave them behind. Don't forget, even for an
instant, that the bird of freedom has very little patience with
indecision, and when it flies away, it never returns. When you have
been afraid or upset, don't lie down to sleep, sleep sitting up on a
soft chair. To give your body healing rest take long naps, lying on
your stomach with your face turned to the left and your feet over the
foot of the bed. In order to avoid being cold, put a soft pillow over
your shoulders, away from your neck, and wear heavy socks, or just
leave your shoes on. Follow my suggestions to the letter without
bothering to believe or disbelieve me. * * * Intent creates edifices
before us and invites us to enter them. This is the way sorcerers
understand what is happening around them. I want you to understand the
underlying order of what I teach you. It means two things: both the
edifice that intent manufactures in the blink of an eye and places in
front of us to enter, and the signs it gives us so we won't get lost
once we are inside. * * * At a certain stage, an apprentice enters into
heightened awareness all by himself. Heightened awareness is a mystery
only for our reason. In practice, it's very simple. As with everything
else, we complicate matters by trying to make the immensity that
surrounds us reasonable. * * * The Manifestations of the Spirit is the
name for the first
abstract core in the sorcery stories. Sorcerers
know this as the edifice of intent , or the silent voice of the spirit,
or the ulterior arrangement of the abstract. Ulterior means knowledge
without words, outside our immediate comprehension, not beyond our
ultimate possibilities for understanding. The ulterior arrangement of
the abstract is knowledge without words or the edifice of intent . The
ulterior arrangement of the abstract is to know the abstract directly,
without the intervention of language. The abstract is the element
without which there could be no warrior's path, nor any warriors in
search of knowledge. * * * Warriors are incapable of feeling compassion
because they no longer feel sorry for themselves. Without the driving
force of self-pity, compassion is meaningless. For a warrior everything
begins and ends with himself. However, his contact with the abstract
causes him to overcome his feeling of self-importance. Then the self
becomes abstract and impersonal. * * * Dreaming is a sorcerer's jet
plane. They can create and project what sorcerers know as the dreaming
body , or the Other, and be in two distant places at the same time. The
spirit makes adjustments in our capacity for awareness. That's a
statement of fact. You can say that it's an incomprehensible fact for
the moment, but the moment will change. While we dream the assemblage
point moves very gently and naturally. Mental balance is nothing but
the fixing of the assemblage point on one spot we're accustomed to.
Dreams make that point move, and dreaming is used to control that
natural movement. There are two different issues. One, the need to
understand indirectly what the spirit is, and the other, to understand
the spirit directly. Once you understand what the spirit is, the second
issue will be resolved automatically, and vice versa. If the spirit
speaks to you, using its silent words, you will certainly know
immediately what the spirit is. The difficulty is our reluctance to
accept the idea that knowledge can exist without words to explain it.
Accepting this proposition is not as easy as saying you accept it. The
whole of humanity has moved away from the abstract. It takes
years
for an apprentice to be able to go back to the abstract, that is, to
know that knowledge and language can exist independent of each other.
The crux of our difficulty in going back to the abstract is our refusal
to accept that we can know without words or even without thoughts.
Knowledge and language are separate. I told you there is no way to talk
about the spirit because the spirit can only be experienced. Sorcerers
try to explain this condition when they say that the spirit is nothing
you can see or feel. But it's there looming over us always. Sometimes
it comes to some of us. Most of the time it seems indifferent. The
spirit in many ways is a sort of wild animal. It keeps its distance
from us until a moment when something entices it forward. It is then
that the spirit manifests itself. For a sorcerer an abstract is
something with no parallel in the human condition. For a sorcerer, the
spirit is an abstract simply because he knows it without words or even
thoughts. It's an abstract because he can't conceive what the spirit
is. Yet without the slightest chance or desire to understand it, a
sorcerer handles the spirit. He recognizes it, beckons it, entices it,
becomes familiar with it, and expresses it with his acts. Think about
the proposition that knowledge might be independent of language,
without bothering to understand it. Consider this. It was not the act
of meeting me that mattered to you. The day I met you, you met the
abstract. But since you couldn't talk about it, you didn't notice it.
Sorcerers meet the abstract without thinking about it or seeing it or
touching it or feeling its presence. The second abstract core of the
sorcery stories is called the Knock of the Spirit. The first core, the
Manifestations of the Spirit, is the edifice that intent builds and
places before a sorcerer, then invites him to enter. It is the edifice
of intent seen by a sorcerer. The Knock of the Spirit is the same
edifice seen by the beginner who is invited--or rather forced--to
enter. A nagual can be a conduit for the spirit only after the spirit
has manifested its willingness to be used--either almost imperceptibly
or with outright commands. After a lifetime of practice, sorcerers,
naguals in particular, know if the spirit is inviting them to enter the
edifice being flaunted before them. They have learned to discipline
their connecting links to intent . So they are always
forewarned,
always know what the spirit has in store for them. Progress along the
sorcerers' path is, in general, a drastic process the purpose of which
is to bring one's connecting link to order. In order to revive that
link sorcerers need a rigorous, fierce purpose--a special state of mind
called unbending intent . An apprentice is someone who is striving to
clear and revive his connecting link with the spirit. Once the link is
revived, he is no longer an apprentice, but until that time, in order
to keep going he needs a fierce purpose which, of course, he doesn't
have. So he allows the nagual to provide the purpose and to do that he
has to relinquish his individuality. That's the difficult part.
Volunteers are not welcome in the sorcerers' world, because they
already have a purpose of their own, which makes it particularly hard
for them to relinquish their individuality. If the sorcerers' world
demands ideas and actions contrary to the volunteers' purpose,
volunteers simply refuse to change. Reviving an apprentice's link is a
nagual's most challenging and intriguing work. And one of his biggest
headaches too. Depending, of course, on the apprentice's personality,
the designs of the spirit are either sublimely simple or the most
complex labyrinths. * * * The power of man is incalculable. Death
exists only because we have intended it since the moment of our birth.
The intent of death can be suspended by making the assemblage point
change positions. * * * I have given you different versions of what the
sorcery task consists. It would not be presumptuous of me to disclose
that, from the spirit's point of view, the task consists of clearing
our connecting link with it. The edifice that intent flaunts before us
is, then, a clearinghouse, within which we find not so much the
procedures to clear our connecting link as the silent knowledge that
allows the clearing process to take place. Without that silent
knowledge no process could work, and all we would have would be an
indefinite sense of needing something. The events unleashed by
sorcerers as a result of silent knowledge are so simple and yet so
abstract that sorcerers decided long ago to speak of those events only
in symbolic
terms. The manifestations and the knock of the spirit
are examples. For instance, a description of what takes place during
the initial meeting between a nagual and a prospective apprentice from
the sorcerers' point of view, would be absolutely incomprehensible. It
would be nonsense to explain that the nagual, by virtue of his lifelong
experience, is focusing something we couldn't imagine, his second
attention--the increased awareness gained through sorcery training--on
his invisible connection with some indefinable abstract. He is doing
this to emphasize and clarify someone else's invisible connection with
that indefinable abstract. Each of us is barred from silent knowledge
by natural barriers, specific to each individual. The most impregnable
of my barriers was the drive to disguise my complacency as
independence. We as average men do not know, nor will we ever know,
that it is something utterly real and functional--our connecting link
with intent --which gives us our hereditary preoccupation with fate.
During our active lives we never have the chance to go beyond the level
of mere preoccupation, because since time immemorial the lull of daily
affairs has made us drowsy. It is only when our lives are nearly over
that our hereditary preoccupation with fate begins to take on a
different character. It begins to make us see through the fog of daily
affairs. Unfortunately, this awakening always comes hand in hand with
loss of energy caused by aging, when we have no more strength left to
turn our preoccupation into a pragmatic and positive discovery. At this
point, all there is left is an amorphous, piercing anguish, a longing
for something indescribable, and simple anger at having missed out. The
third abstract core is called the trickery of the spirit, or the
trickery of the abstract, or stalking oneself, or dusting the link. * *
* Perception is the hinge for everything man is or does, and perception
is ruled by the location of the assemblage point. Therefore, if that
point changes positions, man's perception of the world changes
accordingly. The sorcerer who knows exactly where to place his
assemblage point can become anything he wants. * * *
The art of
stalking is learning all the quirks of your disguise. To learn them so
well no one will know you are disguised. For that you need to be
ruthless, cunning, patient, and sweet. Stalking is an art applicable to
everything. There are four steps to learning it: ruthlessness, cunning,
patience, and sweetness. Ruthlessness should not be harshness, cunning
should not be cruelty, patience should not be negligence, and sweetness
should not be foolishness. These four steps have to be practiced and
perfected until they are so smooth they are unnoticeable. Knowing what
intent is means that one can, at any time, explain that knowledge or
use it. A nagual by the force of his position is obliged to command his
knowledge in this manner. * * * A warrior needs focus. Heightened
awareness is like a springboard. From it one can jump into infinity.
When the assemblage point is dislodged, it either becomes lodged again
at a position very near its customary one or continues moving on into
infinity. People have no idea of the strange power we carry within
ourselves. At this moment, for instance, you have the means to reach
infinity. * * * Egomania is a real tyrant. We must work ceaselessly to
dethrone it. You can learn to be ruthless, cunning, patient, and sweet.
Ruthlessness, cunning, patience, and sweetness are the essence of
stalking . They are the basics that with all their ramifications have
to be taught in careful, meticulous steps. * * * Sorcerers' behavior is
always impeccable. Sorcerers, though, have an ulterior purpose for
their acts, which has nothing to do with personal gain. The fact that
they enjoy their acts does not count as gain. Rather, it is a condition
of their character. The average man acts only if there is the chance
for profit. Warriors say they act not for profit but for the spirit. We
have no thought of personal gain. Our acts are dictated by
impeccability--we can't be angry or disillusioned. The two masteries:
stalking and intent , are the crowning glory of sorcerers old and new.
Stalking is the beginning. Before anything can be attempted on the
warrior's path, warriors must learn to stalk ; next they must learn to
intend ,
and only then can they move their assemblage point at will.
* * * Words are tremendously powerful and important and are the magical
property of whoever has them. Sorcerers have a rule of thumb: they say
that the deeper the assemblage point moves, the greater the feeling
that one has knowledge and no words to explain it. Sometimes the
assemblage point of average persons can move without a known cause and
without their being aware of it, except that they become tongue-tied,
confused, and evasive. * * * The very first principle of stalking is
that a warrior stalks himself. He stalks himself ruthlessly, cunningly,
patiently, and sweetly. Stalking is the art of using behavior in novel
ways for specific purposes. Normal human behavior in the world of
everyday life is routine. Any behavior that brakes from routine causes
an unusual effect on our total being. That unusual effect is what
sorcerers seek, because it is cumulative. The sorcerer seers of ancient
times, through their seeing , first noticed that unusual behavior
produced a tremor in the assemblage point. They soon discovered that if
unusual behavior was practiced systematically and directed wisely, it
eventually forced the assemblage point to move. The real challenge for
those sorcerer seers, was finding a system of behavior that was neither
petty nor capricious, but that combined the morality and the sense of
beauty which differentiates sorcerer seers from plain witches. Anyone
who succeeds in moving his assemblage point to a new position is a
sorcerer. And from that new position, he can do all kinds of good and
bad things to his fellow men. Being a sorcerer, therefore, can be like
being a cobbler or a baker. The quest of sorcerer seers is to go beyond
that stand. And to do that, they need morality and beauty. For
sorcerers, stalking is the foundation on which everything else they do
is built. It is the art of controlled folly. * * * Sorcerers say that
heightened awareness is the portal of intent . And they use it as such.
Think about it. You must reach the point where you understand what
intent is. And, above all, you must understand that that knowledge
cannot be turned into words. That knowledge is there for everyone. It
is there to be felt, to be used, but not to
be explained. One can
come into it by changing levels of awareness, therefore, heightened
awareness is an entrance. But even the entrance cannot be explained.
One can only make use of it. The natural knowledge of intent is
available to anyone, but the command of it belongs to those who probe
it. Sorcerers believe that until the very moment of the spirit's
descent, any of us could walk away from the spirit; but not afterwards.
The fourth abstract core is called the descent of the spirit or being
moved by intent . It is the full brunt of the spirit's descent. The
fourth abstract core is an act of revelation. The spirit reveals itself
to us. Sorcerers describe it as the spirit lying in ambush and then
descending on us, its prey. Sorcerers say that the spirit's descent is
always shrouded. It happens and yet it seems not to have happened at
all. There is a threshold that once crossed permits no retreat. Every
sorcerer should have a clear memory of crossing that threshold so he
can remind himself of the new state of his perceptual potential. One
does not have to be an apprentice of sorcery to reach this threshold,
and the only difference between an average man and a sorcerer, in such
cases, is what each emphasizes. A sorcerer emphasizes crossing this
threshold and uses the memory of it as a point of reference. An average
man does not cross the threshold and does his best to forget all about
it. Sorcerers say that the fourth abstract core happens when the spirit
cuts our chains of self-reflection. Cutting our chains is marvelous,
but also very undesirable, for nobody wants to be free. What a strange
feeling: to realize that everything we think, everything we say depends
on the position of the assemblage point. The secret of our chains is
that they imprison us, but by keeping us pinned down on our comfortable
spot of self-reflection, they defend us from the onslaughts of the
unknown. Once our chains are cut, we are no longer bound by the
concerns of the daily world. We are still in the daily world, but we
don't belong there anymore. In order to belong we must share the
concerns of people. And without chains we can't. What distinguishes
normal people is that we share a
metaphorical dagger: the concerns
of our self-reflection. With this dagger, we cut ourselves and bleed;
and the job of our chains of self-reflection is to give us the feeling
that we are bleeding together, that we are sharing something wonderful:
our humanity. But if we were to examine it, we would discover that we
are bleeding alone; that we are not sharing anything; that all we are
doing is toying with our manageable, unreal, man-made reflection.
Sorcerers are no longer in the world of daily affairs because they are
no longer prey to their self-reflection. * * * The universe is made up
of energy fields which defy description or scrutiny. They resemble
filaments of ordinary light, except that light is lifeless compared to
the Indescribable Force 's emanations, which exude awareness. Normal
perception occurs when intent , which is pure energy, lights up a
portion of the luminous filaments inside our cocoon, and at the same
time brightens a long extension of the same luminous filaments
extending into infinity outside our cocoon. Extraordinary perception,
seeing , occurs when by the force of intent , a different cluster of
energy fields energizes and lights up. When a crucial number of energy
fields are lit up inside the luminous cocoon, a sorcerer is able to see
the energy fields themselves. Awareness takes place when the energy
fields inside our luminous cocoon are aligned with the same energy
fields outside. Only a very small portion of the total number of
luminous filaments inside the cocoon are energized while the rest
remain unaltered. The filaments do not need to be aligned to be lit up,
because the ones inside our cocoon are the same as those outside.
Whatever energizes them is definitely an independent force. We can't
call it awareness because awareness is the glow of the energy fields
being lit up. The force that lites up the fields is named will . Will
is the force that keeps the Indescribable Force 's emanations separated
and is not only responsible for our awareness, but also for everything
in the universe. This force has total consciousness and it springs from
the very fields of energy that make the universe. Intent is a more
appropriate name for it than will . In the long run, however, the name
proves disadvantageous, because it does not describe its overwhelming
importance nor the living connection it has
with everything in the
universe. Our great collective flaw is that we live our lives
completely disregarding that connection. The busyness of our lives, our
relentless interests, concerns, hopes, frustrations, and fears take
precedence, and on a day-to-day basis we are unaware of being linked to
everything else. Being cast out from the Garden of Eden sounds like an
allegory for losing our silent knowledge, our knowledge of intent .
Sorcery, then, is a going back to the beginning, a return to paradise.
The spirit is the force that sustains the universe. Intent is not
something one might use or command or move in any way--nevertheless,
one could use it, command it, or move it as one desires. This
contradiction is the essence of sorcery. To fail to understand it has
brought generations of sorcerers unimaginable pain and sorrow.
Modern-day naguals, in an effort to avoid paying this exorbitant price
in pain, have developed a code of behavior called the warrior's way, or
the impeccable action, which prepares sorcerers by enhancing their
sobriety and thoughtfulness. Sorcerers concern themselves exclusively
with the capacity that their individual connecting link with intent has
to set them free to light the fire from within. All modern-day
sorcerers have to struggle fiercely to gain soundness of mind. Sorcery
is an attempt to reestablish our knowledge of intent and regain use of
it without succumbing to it. The abstract cores of the sorcerer stories
are shades of realization, degrees of our being aware of intent . * * *
It does not matter what our specific fate is as long as we face it with
ultimate abandon. A warrior is on permanent guard against the roughness
of human behavior. A warrior is magical and ruthless, a maverick with
the most refined taste and manners, whose worldly task is to sharpen,
yet disguise, his cutting edges so that no one would be able to suspect
his ruthlessness. Sorcerers constantly stalk themselves. The sensation
of being bottled up is experienced by every human being. It is a
reminder of our existing connection with intent . For sorcerers this
sensation is even more acute, precisely because their goal is to
sensitize their connecting link until they can make it function at will.
When
the pressure of their connecting link is too great, sorcerers relieve
it by stalking themselves. Stalking is a procedure, a very simple one.
Stalking is special behavior that follows certain principles. It is
secretive, furtive, deceptive behavior designed to deliver a jolt. And,
when you stalk yourself you jolt yourself, using your own behavior in a
ruthless, cunning way. When a sorcerer's awareness becomes bogged down
with the weight of his perceptual input, the best, or even perhaps the
only, remedy is to use the idea of death to deliver that stalking jolt.
The idea of death therefore is of monumental importance in the life of
a sorcerer. I have shown you innumerable things about death to convince
you that the knowledge of our impending and unavoidable end is what
gives us sobriety. Our most costly mistake as average men is indulging
in a sense of immortality. It is as though we believe that if we don't
think about death we can protect ourselves from it. Not thinking about
death protects us from worrying about it. But that purpose is an
unworthy one for average men and a travesty for sorcerers. Without a
clear view of death, there is no order, no sobriety, no beauty.
Sorcerers struggle to gain this crucial insight in order to help them
realize at the deepest possible level that they have no assurance
whatsoever their lives will continue beyond the moment. That
realization gives sorcerers the courage to be patient and yet take
action, courage to be acquiescent without being stupid. The idea of
death is the only thing that can give sorcerers courage. Strange, isn't
it? It gives sorcerers the courage to be cunning without being
conceited, and above all it gives them courage to be ruthless without
being self-important. Sorcerers stalk themselves in order to break the
power of their obsessions. There are many ways of stalking oneself. If
you don't want to use the idea of your death, you can use poems to
stalk yourself. I stalk myself with them. I deliver a jolt to myself
with them. I listen, and shut off my internal dialogue and let my inner
silence gain momentum. Then the combination of the poem and the silence
delivers the jolt. See if you can feel what I'm talking about with this
poem by José Gorostiza. ...this incessant stubborn dying,
this living
death,
that slays you, oh God, in your rigorous handiwork, in the
roses, in the stones, in the indomitable stars and in the flesh that
burns out, like a bonfire lit by a song, a dream, a hue that hits the
eye. ...and you, yourself, perhaps have died eternities of ages out
there, without us knowing about it, we dregs, crumbs, ashes of you; you
that still are present, like a star faked by its very light, an empty
light without star that reaches us, hiding its infinite catastrophe. As
I hear the words, I feel that that man is seeing the essence of things
and I can see with him. I care only about the feeling the poets longing
brings me. I borrow his longing, and with it I borrow the beauty. And
marvel at the fact that he, like a true warrior, lavishes it on the
recipients, the beholders, retaining for himself only his longing. This
jolt, this shock of beauty, is stalking . Death is not an enemy,
although it appears to be. Death is not our destroyer, although we
think it is. Sorcerers say death is the only worthy opponent we have.
Death is our challenger. We are born to take that challenge, average
men or sorcerers. Sorcerers know about it; average men do not. Life is
the process by means of which death challenges us. Death is the active
force. Life is the arena. And in that arena there are only two
contenders at any time: oneself and death. We are passive. Think about
it. If we move, it's only when we feel the pressure of death. Death
sets the pace for our actions and feelings and pushes us relentlessly
until it breaks us and wins the bout, or else we rise about all
possibilities and defeat death. Sorcerers defeat death and death
acknowledges the defeat by letting the sorcerers go free, never to be
challenged again.
Death stops challenging them. It means thought has
taken a somersault into the inconceivable. A somersault of thought into
the inconceivable is the descent of the spirit; the act of breaking our
perceptual barriers. It is the moment in which man's perception reaches
its limits. Sorcerers practice the art of sending scouts, advance
runners, to probe our perceptual limits. This is another reason I like
poems. I take them as advance runners. But poets don't know as exactly
as sorcerers what those advance runners can accomplish. * * * As the
energy that is ordinarily used to maintain the fixed position of the
assemblage point becomes liberated, it focuses automatically on that
connecting link. There are no techniques or maneuvers for a sorcerer to
learn beforehand to move energy from one place to the other. Rather it
is a matter of an instantaneous shift taking place once a certain level
of proficiency has been attained. The level of proficiency is pure
understanding. In order to attain that instantaneous shift of energy,
one needs a clear connection with intent , and to get a clear
connection one needs only to intend it through pure understanding. Pure
understanding is a sorcerer's advance runner probing that immensity out
there. The nature of ruthlessness is that it is the opposite of
self-pity. All sorcerers are ruthless. * * * As I have said, the fourth
abstract core of the sorcery stories is called the descent of the
spirit, or being moved by intent . In order to let the mysteries of
sorcery reveal themselves it is necessary for the spirit to descend.
The spirit chooses a moment when a man is distracted, unguarded, and,
showing no pity, the spirit lets its presence by itself move the man's
assemblage point to a specific position. This spot is known to
sorcerers as the place of no pity. Ruthlessness becomes, in this way,
the first principle of sorcery. The first principle should not be
confused with the first effect of sorcery apprenticeship, which is the
shift between normal and heightened awareness. To all appearances,
having the assemblage point shift is the first thing that actually
happens to a sorcery apprentice.
So, it is only natural for an
apprentice to assume that this is the first principle of sorcery. But
it is not. Ruthlessness is the first principle of sorcery. What we need
to do to allow magic to get hold of us is to banish doubt from our
minds. Once doubts are banished, anything is possible. * * * Stop
thinking by intending the movement of your assemblage point. Intent is
beckoned with the eyes. * * * The place of no pity is the site of
ruthlessness. Let's say that ruthlessness, being a specific position of
the assemblage point, is shown in the eyes of sorcerers. It's like a
shimmering film over the eyes. The eyes of sorcerers are brilliant. The
greater the shine, the more ruthless the sorcerer is. When the
assemblage point moves to the place of no pity, the eyes begin to
shine. The firmer the grip of the assemblage point on its new position,
the more the eyes shine. A recapitulation of their lives, which
sorcerers do, is the key to moving their assemblage points. Sorcerers
start their recapitulation by thinking, by remembering the most
important acts of their lives. From merely thinking about them they
then move on to actually being at the site of the event. When they can
do that--be at the site of the event--they have successfully shifted
their assemblage point to the precise spot it was when the event took
place. Bringing back the total event by means of shifting the
assemblage point is known as sorcerers' recollection. Recollecting is
not the same as remembering. Remembering is dictated by the day-to-day
type of thinking, while recollecting is dictated by the movement of the
assemblage point. Our assemblage points are constantly shifting;
imperceptible shifts. In order to make our assemblage points shift to
precise spots we must engage intent . Since there is no way of knowing
what intent is, sorcerers let their eyes beckon it. * * * What you feel
and interpret as longing is in fact the sudden movement of your
assemblage point. Ruthlessness makes sorcerers' eyes shine, and that
shine beckons intent . Each spot to which their assemblage points move
is indicated by a specific shine of their eyes. Since their
eyes
have their own memory, they can call up the recollection of any spot by
calling up the specific shine associated with that spot. The reason
sorcerers put so much emphasis on the shine of their eyes and on their
gaze is because the eyes are directly connected to intent .
Contradictory as it might sound, the truth is that the eyes are only
superficially connected to the world of everyday life. Their deeper
connection is to the abstract. Man's possibilities are so vast and
mysterious that sorcerers, rather than thinking about them, have chosen
to explore them, with no hope of ever understanding them. The only
advantages sorcerers may have over average men is that they have stored
their energy, which means a more precise, clearer connecting link with
intent . Naturally, it also means they can recollect at will, using the
shine of their eyes to move their assemblage points. * * * Be a paragon
of patience and consistency by fighting for impeccability. Transform
yourself daily, restraining yourself with the most excruciating effort.
It is a rare opportunity for a warrior to be given a genuine chance to
be impeccable in spite of his basic feelings. The act of giving freely
and impeccably rejuvenates you and renews your wonder. * * * The eyes
of all living beings can move someone else's assemblage point,
especially if their eyes are focused on intent . Under normal
conditions, however, peoples eyes are focused on the world, looking for
food... looking for shelter... For sorcerers to use the shine of their
eyes to move their own or anyone else's assemblage point they have to
be ruthless. That is, they have to be familiar with that specific
position of the assemblage point called the place of no pity. This is
especially true for the naguals. Each nagual develops a brand of
ruthlessness specific to him alone. Naguals mask their ruthlessness
automatically, even against their will. I'm not a rational man, I only
appear to be because my mask is so effective. What you perceive as
reasonableness is my lack of pity, because that's what ruthlessness is:
a total lack of pity. Move your assemblage point to the precise spot
where pity disappears. That spot is known as the place of no pity. The
problem that sorcerers have to solve is that the place of no pity
has
to be reached with only minimal help. Everything sorcerers do is done
as a consequence of a movement of their assemblage points, and such
movements are ruled by the amount of energy sorcerers have at their
command. Inside every human being is a gigantic, dark lake of silent
knowledge which each of us could intuit. Sorcerers are the only beings
on earth who deliberately go beyond the intuitive level by training
themselves to do two transcendental things: first, to conceive the
existence of the assemblage point, and second, to make that assemblage
point move. The most sophisticated knowledge sorcerers possess is of
our potential as perceiving beings, and the knowledge that the content
of perception depends on the position of the assemblage point. * * *
Enjoy things with no expectation. * * * When the assemblage point moves
and reaches the place of no pity, the position of rationality and
common sense becomes weak. Silent knowledge is something that all of us
have, something that has complete mastery, complete knowledge of
everything. But it cannot think, therefore, it cannot speak of what is
know. Sorcerers believe that when man became aware that he knew, and
wanted to be conscious of what he knew, he lost sight of what he knew.
This silent knowledge, which you cannot describe, is, of course, intent
--the spirit, the abstract. Man's error was to want to know it
directly, the way he knew everyday life. The more he wanted, the more
ephemeral it became. Man gave up silent knowledge for the world of
reason. The more he clings to the world of reason, the more ephemeral
intent becomes. * * * The origin of the anxiety that overtakes an
apprentice with the speed of wildfire is the sudden movement of his
assemblage point. Get used to the idea of recurrent attacks of anxiety,
because your assemblage point is going to keep moving. Any movement of
the assemblage point is like dying. Everything in us gets disconnected,
then reconnected again to
a source of much greater power. That
amplification of energy is felt as a killing anxiety. When this
happens, just wait. The outburst of energy will pass. What's dangerous
in not knowing what is happening to you. Once you know, there is no
real danger. Ancient man knew, in the most direct fashion, what to do
and how best to do it. But, because he performed so well, he started to
develop a sense of selfness, which gave him the feeling that he could
predict and plan the actions he was used to performing. And thus the
idea of an individual "self" appeared; an individual self which began
to dictate the nature and scope of man's actions. As the feeling of the
individual self became stronger, man lost his natural connection to
silent knowledge. Modern man, being heir to that development, therefore
finds himself so hopelessly removed from the source of everything that
all he can do is express his despair in violent and cynical acts of
self-destruction. The reason for man's cynicism and despair is the bit
of silent knowledge left in him, which does two things: one, it gives
man an inkling of his ancient connection to the source of everything;
and two, it makes man feel that without this connection, he has no hope
of peace, of satisfaction, of attainment. War is the natural state for
a warrior, and peace is an anomaly. But war, for a warrior, doesn't
mean acts of individual or collective stupidity or wanton violence.
War, for a warrior, is the total struggle against that individual self
that has deprived man of his power. Ruthlessness is the most basic
premise of sorcery. Any movement of the assemblage point means a
movement away from the excessive concern with the individual self.
Self-importance is the force generated by man's self-image. It is that
force which keeps the assemblage point fixed where it is at present.
For this reason, the thrust of the warrior's way is to dethrone
self-importance. And everything sorcerers do is toward accomplishing
this goal. Sorcerers have unmasked self-importance and found that it is
self-pity masquerading as something else. It doesn't sound possible,
but that is what it is. Self-pity is the real enemy and the source of
man's misery. Without a degree of pity for himself, man could not
afford to be as self-importance as he is. However, once the force of
self-importance is engaged, it develops its own momentum. And it is
this seemingly
independent nature of self-importance which gives it
its fake sense of worth. Sorcerers are absolutely convinced that by
moving our assemblage points away from their customary position we
achieve a state of being which could only be called ruthlessness.
Sorcerers know, by means of their practical actions, that as soon as
their assemblage points move, their self-importance crumbles. Without
the customary position of their assemblage points, their self-image can
no longer be sustained. And without the heavy focus on that self-image,
they lose their self-compassion, and with it their self-importance.
Sorcerers are right, therefore, in saying that self-importance is
merely self-pity in disguise. * * * A nagual in his role as leader or
teacher has to behave in the most efficient, but at the same time most
impeccable, way. Since it is not possible for him to plan the course of
his actions rationally, the nagual always lets the spirit decide his
course. * * * The position of self-reflection forces the assemblage
point to assemble a world of sham compassion, but of very real cruelty
and self-centeredness. In that world the only real feelings are those
convenient for the one who feelings them. For a sorcerer, ruthlessness
is not cruelty. Ruthlessness is the opposite of self-pity or
self-importance. Ruthlessness is sobriety. Sorcerers' increased energy,
derived from the curtailment of their self-reflection, allows their
senses a greater range of perception. The only worthwhile course of
action, whether for sorcerers or average men, is to restrict our
involvement with our self-image. What a nagual aims at with his
apprentices is the shattering of their mirror of self-reflection. Each
of us has a different degree of attachment to his self-reflection. And
that attachment is felt as need. It is possible for sorcerers, or
average men, to need no one, to get peace, harmony, laughter,
knowledge, directly from the spirit--to need no intermediaries. For you
and for me, its different. I'm your intermediary and my teacher was
mine. Intermediaries, besides providing a minimal chance--the awareness
of intent --help shatter peoples mirrors of self-reflection.
The
only concrete help you ever get from me is that I attack your
self-reflection. If it weren't for that, you would be wasting your
time. This is the only real help you've gotten from me. I've taught you
all kinds of things in order to trap your attention. You'll swear,
though, that that teaching has been the important part. It hasn't.
There is very little value in instruction. Sorcerers maintain that
moving the assemblage point is all that matters. And that movement
depends on increased energy and not on instruction. Any human being who
would follow a specific and simple sequence of actions can learn to
move his assemblage point. The sequence of actions I am talking about
is one that stems from being aware. The nagual provides a minimal
chance, but that minimal chance is not instruction, like the
instruction you need to learn to operate a machine. The minimal chance
consists of being made aware of the spirit. The specific sequence I
have in mind calls for being aware that self-importance is the force
which keeps the assemblage point fixed. When self-importance is
curtailed, the energy it requires is no longer expended. That increased
energy then serves as the springboard that launches the assemblage
point, automatically and without premeditation, into an inconceivable
journey. Once the assemblage point has moved, the movement itself
entails moving from self-reflection, and this, in turn, assures a clear
connecting link with the spirit. After all, it is self-reflection that
has disconnected man from the spirit in the first place. As I have
already said to you, sorcery is a journey of return. We return
victorious to the spirit, having descended into hell. And from hell we
bring trophies. Understanding is one of our trophies. Our difficulty
with this simple progression is that most of us are unwilling to accept
that we need so little to get on with. We are geared to expect
instruction, teaching, guides, masters. And when we are told that we
need no one, we don't believe it. We become nervous, then distrustful,
and finally angry and disappointed. If we need help, it is not in
methods, but in emphasis. If someone makes us aware that we need to
curtail our self-importance, that help is real. Sorcerers say we should
need no one to convince us that the world is infinitely more complex
than our wildest
fantasies. So, why are we dependent? Why do we
crave someone to guide us when we can do it ourselves? Big question,
eh? The spirit moves the assemblage point. I have insisted to the point
of exhaustion that there are no procedures in sorcery. There are no
methods, no steps. The only thing that matters is the movement of the
assemblage point. And no procedure can cause that. It's an effect that
happens all by itself. The nagual entices the assemblage point into
moving by helping to destroy the mirror of self-reflection. But that is
all the nagual can do. The actual mover is the spirit, the abstract;
something that cannot be seen or felt; something that does not seem to
exist, and yet does. For this reason, sorcerers report that the
assemblage point moves all by itself. Because the spirit has no
perceivable essence, sorcerers deal rather with the specific instances
and ways in which they are able to shatter the mirror of
self-reflection. The world of our self-reflection or of our mind is
very flimsy and is held together by a few key ideas that serve as its
underlying order. When those ideas fail, the underlying order ceases to
function. Continuity is the key idea. Continuity is the idea that we
are a solid block. In our minds, what sustains our world is the
certainty that we are unchangeable. * * * I've described to you in the
past the concept of stopping the world and that it is as necessary for
sorcerers as reading and writing are for the average man. It consists
of introducing a dissonant element into the fabric of everyday behavior
for purposes of halting the otherwise smooth flow of ordinary
events--events which are catalogued in our minds by our reason. The
dissonant element is called not-doing , or the opposite of doing .
Doing is anything that is part of a whole for which we have a cognitive
account. Not-doing is an element that does not belong in that charted
whole. Sorcerers, because they are stalkers , understand human behavior
to perfection. They understand, for instance, that human beings are
creatures of inventory. Knowing the ins and outs of a particular
inventory is what makes a man a scholar or an expert in his field.
Sorcerers know that when an average person's inventory fails, the
person either enlarges his inventory or his world of
self-reflection
collapses. The average person is willing to incorporate new items into
his inventory if they don't contradict the inventory's underlying
order. But if the items contradict that order, the person's mind
collapses. The inventory is the mind. Sorcerers count on this when they
attempt to break the mirror of self-reflection. * * * Intent is
intended with the eyes