Карлос Кастанеда. Искусство сновидения(engl)Оцените этот текст:Не читал10987654321СодержаниеFine HTMLPrinted versiontxt(Word,КПК)Lib.ru htmlКарлос Кастанеда. Искусство сновидения(engl)


Carlos Castaneda. The Art of Dreaming



     © Carlos Castaneda 1993

     Carlos Castaneda asserts the moral right to be identified as the author
of this work



CONTENTS

     Author's Note
     1 Sorcerers of Antiquity: An Introduction
     2 The First Gate of Dreaming
     3 The Second Gate of Dreaming
     4 The Fixation of the Assemblage Point
     5 The World of Inorganic Beings
     6 The Shadows' World
     7 The Blue Scout
     8 The Third Gate of Dreaming
     9 The New Area of Exploration
     10 Stalking the Stalkers
     11 The Tenant
     I2 The Woman in the Church 13 Flying on the Wings of Intent


AUTHOR'S NOTE

     Over the past twenty years, I  have  written a series of books about my
apprenticeship with a Mexican Yaqui Indian sorcerer, don Juan Matus.  I have
explained in those books that he taught me sorcery, but not as we understand
sorcery in  the  context  of our daily world: the use of supernatural powers
over others, or the calling of spirits through charms, spells, or rituals to
produce supernatural effects. For don Juan, sorcery was the act of embodying
some specialized theoretical and  practical premises  about  the nature  and
role of perception in molding the universe around us.
     Following don Juan's suggestion, I have refrained from using shamanism,
a category proper to anthropology, to classify  his knowledge. I have called
it all along what he himself called it: sorcery. On examination,  however, I
realized that  calling  it sorcery obscures even  more  the already  obscure
phenomena he presented to me in his teachings.
     In anthropological works, shamanism is  described as a belief system of
some native people of northern Asia--prevailing  also  among  certain native
North  American  Indian  tribes--which  maintains  that an  unseen world  of
ancestral  spiritual forces, good and  evil, is pervasive around us and that
these  spiritual  forces can be summoned or controlled  through  the acts of
practitioners,  who   are  the   intermediaries  between  the   natural  and
supernatural realms.
     Don  Juan  was  indeed  an intermediary  between  the  natural world of
everyday life and an unseen world,  which he called not the supernatural but
the second attention. His role  as a teacher was to make  this configuration
accessible to me. I have described in my previous work  his teaching methods
to this effect,  as well as the sorcery arts he  made me practice,  the most
important of which is called the art of dreaming.
     Don Juan contended that our world,  which  we believe  to be unique and
absolute, is only one in a cluster of  consecutive worlds, arranged like the
layers of an onion. He asserted that 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.
     Don Juan explained to me that, for us  to perceive those other  realms,
not only do we  have to covet them but  we need to have sufficient energy to
seize them. Their existence is constant and independent of our awareness, he
said, 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, don Juan
stated that 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.
     With the perspective time gives, I  now realize that the  most  fitting
statement don  Juan  made  about dreaming was to  call it  the  "gateway  to
infinity."  I remarked, at the time he said  it, that  the metaphor  had  no
meaning to me.
     "Let's then do  away  with metaphors," he  conceded.  "Let's  say  that
dreaming is the sorcerers' practical way of putting ordinary dreams to use."
     "But how can ordinary  dreams be put  to use?"  I asked. "We always get
tricked  by  words," he said.  "In  my  own case, my  teacher  attempted  to
describe  dreaming to me by saying  that it  is the  way sorcerers say  good
night to the world. He was,  of course, tailoring his description  to fit my
mentality. I'm doing the same with you."
     On  another  occasion  don  Juan  said  to me,  "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. 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."
     In the course  of his general  teachings, don Juan thoroughly explained
to me the principles,  rationales, and practices of the art of dreaming. His
instruction was  divided into two parts. One was about  dreaming procedures,
the other  about the purely abstract explanations of  these procedures.  His
teaching method was an interplay between enticing  my intellectual curiosity
with the abstract principles of dreaming and guiding me to seek an outlet in
its practices.
     I  have already described all this in as much detail as I was able  to.
And I have also described the sorcerers' milieu in which  don Juan placed me
in order to teach  me his arts. My interaction in this milieu was of special
interest to me because it took place  exclusively in the second attention. I
interacted  there  with the  ten women and  five  men who  were  don  Juan's
sorcerer companions and with the four young men and the four young women who
were his apprentices.
     Don Juan gathered them immediately after I came into his world. He made
it clear to me that they formed a traditional sorcerers' group--a replica of
his own party-and that I was supposed to lead them. However, working with me
he realized  that I  was  different  than  he expected.  He  explained  that
difference in  terms  of an energy  configuration  seen  only by  sorcerers:
instead of having four compartments of energy, as he himself had, I had only
three. Such a configuration, which he had mistakenly hoped was a correctable
flaw, made me so completely inadequate for interacting with or leading those
eight  apprentices that it became imperative for don  Juan to gather another
group of people more akin to my energetic structure.
     I  have  written extensively  about  those  events. Yet  I  have  never
mentioned the second group of apprentices;  don Juan did not permit me to do
so. He argued  that they were exclusively in my field and that the agreement
I had with him was to write about his field, not mine.
     The  second group of  apprentices was  extremely compact. It  had  only
three members: a  dreamer, Florinda Grau; a  stalker, Taisha  Abelar;  and a
nagual woman, Carol Tiggs.
     We interacted with one another solely  in  the second attention. In the
world of everyday life, we did not have  even a vague notion of one another.
In terms of our relationship with don Juan, however, there was no vagueness;
he put enormous effort into training all of us equally. Nevertheless, toward
the  end,  when  don  Juan's time  was  about to  finish, the  psychological
pressure of  his  departure started to collapse the rigid boundaries of  the
second attention. The result  was that our  interaction began to  lapse into
the world of everyday affairs, and we met, seemingly for the first time.
     None of us, consciously, knew about our deep and arduous interaction in
the second attention. Since all of us were involved in academic  studies, we
ended up more than shocked when we found out we had met before. This was and
still is, of  course, intellectually inadmissible to us, yet we know that it
was thoroughly within our experience. We have been left, therefore, with the
disquieting  knowledge that the human psyche is infinitely more complex than
our mundane or academic reasoning had led us to believe.
     Once we asked don Juan, in unison, to shed light on our predicament. He
said  that he had two  explanatory options.  One  was to  cater to our  hurt
rationality and patch it up, saying that the second  attention is a state of
awareness as illusory as elephants flying in the  sky and that everything we
thought we  had  experienced in that state was simply a product of  hypnotic
suggestions.  The other option was to  explain it the  way sorcerer dreamers
understand it: as an energetic configuration of awareness.
     During the fulfillment of my  dreaming tasks, however, the  barrier  of
the second attention remained unchanged. Every time I entered into dreaming,
I also entered into the  second attention, and waking up  from  dreaming did
not necessarily mean I had  left  the second  attention. 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 fifteen  years of uninterrupted
work, from  1973 to  1988,  to store enough  energy to rearrange  everything
linearly in my  mind. I remembered then sequences upon sequences of dreaming
events, and I was able to fill in, at last, some seeming  lapses of  memory.
In this manner  I captured the inherent continuity of  don Juan's lessons in
the art of  dreaming, a  continuity  that had been lost to me because of his
making me weave between the awareness of our everyday life and the awareness
of the second attention. This work is a result of that rearrangement.
     All this brings me  to the final part of my  statement: the  reason for
writing this book. Being  in possession  of most of the pieces of don Juan's
lessons in  the art of dreaming, I would like to explain,  in a future work,
the current position and interest of his last four students:  Florinda Grau,
Taisha  Abelar, Carol  Tiggs, and myself. But before I  describe and explain
the  results of don  Juan's guidance and influence on us, I must  review, in
light of what I know now, the parts of don  Juan's  lessons  in dreaming  to
which I did not have access before.
     The definitive reason for this work, however, was given by Carol Tiggs.
Her belief is that explaining the world that don Juan made us inherit is the
ultimate expression of our gratitude to him and our commitment to his quest.


1. SORCERERS OF ANTIQUITY: AN INTRODUCTION

     -- Don  Juan  stressed, time and time again,  that  everything  he  was
teaching me had been  envisioned and worked  out by  men he  referred  to as
sorcerers of antiquity. He  made  it very clear  that  there was  a profound
distinction between those  sorcerers and the sorcerers of  modern times.  He
categorized sorcerers  of antiquity  as men  who  existed in Mexico  perhaps
thousands  of  years  before  the  Spanish  Conquest,  men   whose  greatest
accomplishment had been  to build  the structures  of  sorcery,  emphasizing
practicality and  concreteness. He rendered them as  men who were  brilliant
but lacking in wisdom. Modern sorcerers, by contrast, don Juan  portrayed as
men renowned for  their sound minds and their capacity to rectify the course
of sorcery if they deemed it necessary.
     Don  Juan  explained  to me  that the  sorcery  premises  pertinent  to
dreaming were naturally envisioned and  developed by sorcerers of antiquity.
Out of necessity--for those premises are key in explaining and understanding
dreaming--1 again have to write  about  and discuss them. The major  part of
this book is, therefore, a reintroduction and  amplification of what  I have
presented in my previous works.
     During one of  our  conversations, don Juan  stated  that, 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.
     "What do you call concreteness, don Juan?" I asked.
     "The practical part  of  sorcery," he said. "The obsessive  fixation of
the mind on practices and techniques, the unwarranted influence over people.
All of these were in the realm of the sorcerers of the past."
     "And what do you call the abstract?"
     "The search for  freedom, freedom to perceive, without obsessions,  all
that's humanly possible. I  say that present-day sorcerers seek the abstract
because they seek freedom; they  have no interest in  concrete gains.  There
are no social functions  for them,  as there  were for the sorcerers of  the
past. So you'll never catch  them  being the official seers or the sorcerers
in residence."
     "Do you mean,  don  Juan, that  the past  has no  value  to  modern-day
sorcerers?"
     "It  certainly has value.  It's the taste  of that past  which we don't
like. I personally detest the darkness and morbidity of the mind. I like the
immensity  of thought. However, regardless  of my likes and dislikes, I have
to give due credit to the sorcerers of antiquity, for they were the first to
find out and  do  everything we know and do today.  Don  Juan explained that
their  most  important attainment  was to perceive  the energetic essence of
things.  This insight was  of  such  importance that it  was turned into the
basic premise of sorcery. Nowadays, after lifelong discipline and  training,
sorcerers  do  acquire the  capacity to  perceive the essence  of things,  a
capacity they call seeing.
     "What would it mean to me to perceive the energetic essence of things?"
I once asked don Juan.
     "It would mean  that you  perceive energy  directly,"  he replied.  "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."
     "Why do I 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. I  am convinced that for  man  to survive now, his  perception  must
change at its social base."
     "What is this social base of perception, don Juan?"
     "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."
     "How then should we perceive the world?"
     "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.
Then we would have both alternatives at our fingertips."
     "Is it possible to train people in such a fashion?" I asked.
     Don Juan replied that it was possible and that this  was precisely what
he was doing with me and his other apprentices. He was teaching us a new way
of  perceiving, first, by making us realize we process our perception to fit
a mold and, second, by  fiercely guiding us to perceive energy  directly. He
assured  me that this method was very  much like the one used to teach us to
perceive the world of daily affairs.
     Don  Juan's  conception  was  that  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,"  don Juan said. '"After ages  of perceiving in  such a manner, we
are now forced to believe that the world is made up of objects."
     "I can't conceive  the world in any other way, don Juan," I complained.
"It is unquestionably a world of objects. To prove it, all we have to  do is
bump into them."
     "Of course it's a world of objects. We are not arguing that."
     "What are you saying then?"
     "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 what you've just pointed  out:  the hardness  of
objects."
     His  argument was  extremely mystifying  to me.  In those days, my mind
would simply refuse  to consider any way  to understand the world except the
one with which I was familiar. Don Juan's claims and the points he struggled
to raise were outlandish propositions that I could  not accept but could not
refuse either.
     "Our way  of  perceiving is  a predator's way," he said to  me  on  one
occasion. "A very efficient manner of appraising  and  classifying food  and
danger. But this  is not the only  way we  are  able  to perceive.  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." This was don Juan's claim.  And the more sophisticated
terms  to  which  he was  alluding  were those  he  had been  taught by  his
predecessors, 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.
     For such sorcerers, the most significant act of  sorcery is  to see the
essence of the  universe. Don  Juan's  version  was  that the  sorcerers  of
antiquity, the first ones to see  the essence of the universe,  described it
in the  best manner. They  said that  the  essence of the universe resembles
incandescent threads 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, the sorcerers  of antiquity
went on to see the energy essence of human beings. Don Juan stated that they
depicted human beings as bright shapes that resembled  giant eggs and called
them luminous eggs.
     "When  sorcerers see a human being," don Juan said,  "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 the  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.  Don Juan suggested that people who are
egglike in shape today are more akin to people of ancient times.
     In the  course  of  his  teachings, don Juan  repeatedly  discussed and
explained  what he  considered the  decisive finding  of  the  sorcerers  of
antiquity. He called  it  the  crucial feature  of human beings  as luminous
balls:  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.
     Since I had trouble visualizing this the first time don  Juan described
it to me, he explained that the luminous ball is much larger  than the human
body, that the spot of intense  brilliance is  part of  this ball of energy,
and  that  it is located on a place at the height of the shoulder blades, an
arm's  length from a person's back. He said that  the old sorcerers named it
the assemblage point after seeing what it does.
     "What does the assemblage point do?" I asked.
     "It makes us perceive,"  he  replied.  "The old sorcerers saw that,  in
human beings, perception is assembled  there, on that point. Seeing that all
living beings have such a point  of brilliance, the old  sorcerers  surmised
that  perception in  general  must  take  place  on  that spot,  in whatever
pertinent manner."
     "What did the old sorcerers see that made them conclude that perception
takes place on the assemblage point?" I asked.
     He  answered  that,  first,  they saw  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.
And, 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.
     "Notice  that  when  I  talk  about  seeing,  I always say 'having  the
appearance of' or 'seemed  like,'" don Juan warned me. "Everything one  sees
is so unique that there is no way to talk about it except by comparing it to
something known to us."
     He said that the most adequate example  of this difficulty was  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.  Don  Juan pointed out that  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, don Juan said  that 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  are  those  filaments you  talk  about assembled  into  a  Steady
perception of the world?" I asked.
     "No one can  possibly know  that," he emphatically  replied. "Sorcerers
see the movement of  energy, but just seeing  the  movement of energy cannot
tell them how or why energy moves.'
     Don  Juan  stated  that,  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?" I asked.
     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.  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.
     "Is  there a chance that those sorcerers might have been mistaken about
their seeing?" I asked.
     "I  can't explain  to you  why, but there is  no  way sorcerers can  be
mistaken  about their seeing," don Juan said,  in a  tone  that admitted  no
argument. "Now, the conclusions  they  arrive at from their seeing might  be
wrong, but that would be  because they are naive, uncultivated.  In order to
avoid this  disaster,  sorcerers have to cultivate their minds,  in whatever
form they can."
     He softened up then  and remarked that it certainly would be infinitely
safer for sorcerers to remain solely at  the level  of describing  what they
see, but  that  the temptation to  conclude and  explain,  even  if  only to
oneself, is far too great to resist.
     The  effect of the assemblage  point's  displacement was another energy
configuration  the sorcerers  of antiquity  were able  to see and study. Don
Juan said that 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.
     Don   Juan   explained  that   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 in them.
     The problem of validation always played a key  role in my mind in those
days. "Forgive  me, don Juan,"  I said  to  him on one  occasion, "but  this
business of  the assemblage point is an  idea so farfetched, so inadmissible
that I don't know how to deal with it or what to think of it."
     "There  is  only one thing  for  you  to  do," he  retorted.  "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. The trick  is  in abandoning our fort of  self-complacency and
false security."
     "It is obvious  to me, don  Juan, that it takes  a  lot of knowledge to
see. It isn't just a matter of having energy."
     "It is just a  matter of having  energy, believe me.  The  hard part is
convincing yourself that it  can be  done.  For this, you  need to trust the
nagual. The marvel of sorcery is that every sorcerer has to prove everything
with his own experience. I am  telling you about  the principles of  sorcery
not  with the hope that you will memorize  them but  with the hope  that you
will practice them."
     Don Juan was  certainly  right  about the  need for  trusting.  In  the
beginning  stages of my  thirteen-year  apprenticeship with him, the hardest
thing for me  was to affiliate myself with his world  and  his  person. This
affiliating meant that I had to learn to trust him implicitly and accept him
without bias as the nagual.
     Don Juan's  total role in  the  sorcerers' world was synthesized in the
title  accorded to  him by  his  peers;  he 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. Seers  believe  that  when  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 a party of sorcerers.
     At first, to feel such a trust for don Juan was quite disturbing to me,
if not  altogether odious. When I discussed it with  him, he assured me that
to trust his teacher in such a manner had been just as difficult for him.
     "I told  my teacher the same thing you are saying to  me now," don Juan
said.  "He replied  that without trusting the nagual there is no possibility
of  relief and thus no possibility of clearing  the debris from our lives in
order to be free."
     Don Juan reiterated how right his teacher had been. And I reiterated my
profound disagreement.  I told him that being reared in a stifling religious
environment  had  had  dreadful  effects  on  me,  and  that  his  teacher's
statements and his  own  acquiescence  to his teacher  reminded  me  of  the
obedience dogma  that  I had to learn as  a  child  and that I abhorred. "It
sounds  like  you're voicing a  religious  belief when  you  talk about  the
nagual," I said.
     "You may believe whatever you want," don Juan replied undauntedly. "The
fact remains, there is no game without the nagual. I know this and I say so.
And so did all the naguals who preceded me. But they didn't say it from  the
standpoint  of self-importance,  and neither  do 1. To  say there is no path
without the nagual is to refer totally to the fact that the man, the nagual,
is a nagual because he can  reflect  the abstract, the  spirit, better  than
others.  But  that's  all.  Our link  is with  the  spirit itself  and  only
incidentally with the man who brings us its message."
     I did learn to trust don Juan implicitly as the nagual, and this, as he
had stated it, brought me an  immense sense of relief and a greater capacity
to accept what he was striving to teach me.
     In his teachings, he put a great emphasis  on explaining and discussing
the assemblage point. 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," he
said. "It's part of the luminous egg, which is our energy self."
     "How is it displaced?" I asked.
     "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."
     "Can you yourself feel these currents?"
     "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."
     "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 an
explainable cause, we never  regard  them  as  veritable  onslaughts of  the
unknown but as unexplainable, ill-founded moodiness."
     "What happens when the assemblage point moves outside the energy shape?
Does it hang outside? Or is it attached to the luminous ball?"
     "It  pushes the contours of the  energy shape out, without breaking its
energy boundaries."
     Don Juan explained  that 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.
     Don Juan went  on to explain  that 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.
     "Of course they were still men," he said. "But I think what you want to
know  is  if they  were still  men of reason, trustworthy persons. Well, not
quite."
     "In what way were they different?"
     "In their  concerns. Human endeavors and preoccupations  had no meaning
whatsoever to them. They also had a definite new appearance."
     "Do you mean that they didn't look like men?"
     "It's  very  hard  to  tell what  was what 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. Yet if you pressed me to tell in what
way  they were  different, I  would go  in circles, like a dog  chasing  its
tail."
     "Have you ever met one of those men, don Juan?"
     "Yes, I have met one."
     "What did he look like?"
     "As  far as looks,  he looked  like a regular person.  Now, it was  his
behavior that was unusual."
     "In what way was it unusual?"
     "All  I  can tell  you is that the  behavior  of the  sorcerer I met is
something  that defies the  imagination. But to make it  a matter of  merely
behavior is misleading. It is really something you must see to appreciate."
     "Were all those sorcerers like the one you met?"
     "Certainly  not.  I don't  know  how the  others  were,  except through
sorcerers'  stories  handed down from generation  to  generation. And  those
stories portray them as being quite bizarre."
     "Do you mean monstrous?"
     "Not at  all. They say that they were very likable 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."
     "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."
     "What do you think of all this yourself, don Juan?"
     "It  is  too  bizarre  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 potentials are nothing to sneeze at."
     Another topic  of don Juan's  explanations was  the indispensability of
energetic uniformity  and  cohesion  for  the  purpose  of  perceiving.  His
contention was that mankind perceives the world we know, in the terms we do,
only because we share energetic uniformity  and  cohesion. He  said  that 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 realize 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.
     I asked him what uniformity  and cohesion were,  and  he explained that
man'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. He said that an
example  of a  new uniformity and cohesion  was 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.
     "How are uniformity and cohesion acquired?" I asked.
     "The  key  is  the  position  of the  assemblage point,  or rather  the
fixation of the assemblage point," he said.
     He did  not  want to elaborate any further at that time, so I asked him
if those old sorcerers could have reverted to being egglike. He replied that
at one  point  they could  have, but that  they did  not. And then the  line
cohesion set in and made it impossible for them to go back. He believed that
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.
     He  explained  that  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. He was  of  the  opinion that, 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.
     On his insistence, I made giant efforts to understand the new model  of
energy configuration he  was outlining for me. Finally, after much pounding,
I could follow the  idea  of  energy  filaments inside the luminous ball and
outside it.  But  if I thought  of a multitude of luminous balls,  the model
broke  down  in my mind. In  a multitude of luminous balls, I reasoned,  the
energy filaments that are  outside one of  them will perforce be  inside the
adjacent  one.  So  in  a multitude there could not possibly  be  any energy
filaments outside any luminous ball.
     "To understand all this certainly isn't  an exercise for your  reason,"
he replied after carefully listening to  my  arguments. "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  your  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  could  not. 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 of
myself,  a state he called the second attention.  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. 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 had ever entered my thoughts.
     When  I recovered  my breath, or when I woke  up, don Juan  expectantly
asked me, "What did you see?" And  when I  answered,  truthfully, "Your blow
made me see stars," he doubled up laughing.
     He  remarked  that  I  was not  ready  yet  to  comprehend  any unusual
perception I  might have had. "I made  your assemblage point shift," he went
on, "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 your 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."
     "What does it mean to rearrange uniformity and cohesion?"
     "It  means  to  enter  into  the  second  attention  by  retaining  the
assemblage point on its new position and keeping it from sliding back to its
original spot."
     Don Juan then gave me a traditional definition of the second attention.
He said that the old sorcerers called  the  result of fixing the  assemblage
point on new positions the second attention and that they treated the second
attention as an area of all-inclusive activity, just as the attention of the
daily world is. He pointed out that 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 sorcerer's maneuver:  tapping my back
gently or forcefully striking it at  the  height 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  state  of  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.
     Don Juan justified the indispensability of such a maneuver, saying that
in  normal awareness a sorcerer teaches his  apprentices basic concepts  and
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 have turned remembering
everything that happens to them in the second attention into one of the most
difficult and complex traditional tasks of sorcery.
     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, then, means to
relocate  the assemblage point on the exact position it occupied at the time
those entrances into the second attention occurred. Don Juan assured  me not
only that  sorcerers  have  total  and absolute recall but that they  relive
every experience they  had in the second  attention by this act of returning
their assemblage point to each of those  specific positions. He also assured
me   that  sorcerers   dedicate  a  lifetime  to  fulfilling  this  task  of
remembering.
     In the second attention, don Juan gave me very detailed explanations of
sorcery, knowing  that the accuracy and fidelity  of  such instruction  will
remain with me, faithfully intact, for the duration of my life.
     About this quality of faithfulness he  said, "Learning something in the
second attention  is just like learning when we were children. What we learn
remains with us for life. `It's second nature with me,' we say when it comes
to something we've learned very early in life."
     Judging from  where I stand today,  I  realize that  don  Juan made  me
enter, as  many times  as he could, into the  second  attention in order  to
force  me  to  sustain,  for  long  periods  of  time, new positions  of  my
assemblage point and  to  perceive coherently  in them, that is  to  say, he
aimed at forcing me to rearrange my uniformity and cohesion.
     I succeeded countless times  in perceiving everything as precisely as I
perceive in the daily world.  My problem was my incapacity to make  a bridge
between my actions in the  second  attention and my awareness  of the  daily
world. It took a great deal of effort and time for me to understand what the
second attention  is. Not so much because of  its intricacy and  complexity,
which are  indeed extreme,  but  because,  once  I  was  back in  my  normal
awareness, I  found  it  impossible to remember not only  that I had entered
into the second attention but that such a state existed at all.
     Another monumental breakthrough  that  the old sorcerers  claimed,  and
that don Juan carefully explained to me, was to find out that the assemblage
point becomes very easily displaced during sleep. This realization triggered
another one: that  dreams are totally associated with that displacement. The
old sorcerers  saw that the  greater the  displacement, the more unusual the
dream  or  vice   versa:  the  more  unusual  the  dream,  the  greater  the
displacement.  Don  Juan  said  that this observation  led  them  to  devise
extravagant techniques to force  the displacement of  the assemblage  point,
such as ingesting plants  that can produce altered states  of consciousness;
subjecting  themselves  to  states  of  hunger,  fatigue,  and  stress;  and
especially controlling  dreams. In this fashion,  and  perhaps  without even
knowing it, they created dreaming.
     One day, as we strolled around the  plaza  in the city of  Oaxaca,  don
Juan  gave me  the most coherent  definition  of dreaming from  a sorcerer's
standpoint.
     "Sorcerers view dreaming  as  an extremely sophisticated art," he said,
"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."
     He said  that the old sorcerers  anchored the  art of dreaming  on five
conditions they saw in the energy flow of human beings.
     One, they saw that only the energy filaments that pass directly through
the assemblage point can be assembled into coherent perception.
     Two, they  saw that 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.
     Three, they saw that, 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.
     Four, they saw  that  the  assemblage point  can  be  made  to  move to
positions  outside  the  luminous  egg,  into  the  energy  filaments of the
universe at large.
     And, five, they saw that through discipline it is possible to cultivate
and perform,  in  the  course  of sleep  and ordinary  dreams, a  systematic
displacement of the assemblage point.


2. THE FIRST GATE OF DREAMING

     As a  preamble to his  first lesson in  dreaming, don Juan talked about
the second attention as a progression: beginning as an idea that comes to us
more  like a curiosity than an actual  possibility;  turning  into something
that  can only be felt, as a sensation  is felt; and finally evolving into a
state of being, or  a realm of practicalities, or  a  preeminent  force that
opens for us worlds beyond our wildest fantasies.
     When explaining sorcery, sorcerers have two options. One is to speak in
metaphorical terms  and talk about a world  of magical dimensions. The other
is  to explain their business in abstract terms  proper  to  sorcery. I have
always preferred the latter, although  neither option will  ever satisfy the
rational mind of a Western man.
     Don  Juan told me that what he meant by his metaphorical description of
the  second attention as a  progression was  that,  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 point's displacement.
     "I am  going to  teach you the first  step  to  power," don  Juan said,
beginning his  instruction in the art of dreaming. "I'm  going  to teach you
how to set up dreaming."
     "What does it mean to set up dreaming?"
     "To set up  dreaming means to have a precise and practical command over
the general situation of a dream. For example, you may dream that you are in
your classroom. To set up  dreaming means that you don't let the dream  slip
into something else. You don't jump from the classroom to the mountains, for
instance. In  other words, you control  the view of the classroom  and don't
let it go until you want to."
     "But is it possible to do that?"
     "Of course it's possible. 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 to get used to it yourself,
you must start by doing something very  simple. Tonight, in your dreams, you
must look at your hands.".
     Not much more was said  about this in the awareness of our daily world.
In  my recollection of my experiences  in  the second attention,  however, I
found out that we had  a more  extensive exchange. For instance, I expressed
my feelings  about the absurdity of the task, and don Juan  suggested that I
should face it in terms of a quest that was entertaining, instead  of solemn
and morbid.
     "Get  as  heavy  as you want when we talk  about  dreaming,"  he  said.
"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. Only under these conditions  can our
dreams actually be turned into dreaming."
     Don  Juan  assured me  that  he  had selected my  hands  arbitrarily as
something  to look  for in  my dreams and that looking for anything else was
just as valid. The goal of the exercise was not finding a specific thing but
engaging my dreaming attention.
     Don  Juan described the dreaming attention as  the control one acquires
over one's dreams upon fixating the assemblage point on any new position  to
which it  has been displaced during dreams. In more general terms, he called
the dreaming attention an incomprehensible facet of awareness that exists by
itself, waiting for a moment when we would entice it, a moment when we would
give it purpose; it is a veiled faculty that every one  of us has in reserve
but never has the opportunity to use in everyday life.
     My first attempts at looking for my  hands in my dreams were  a fiasco.
After months of unsuccessful efforts,  I gave up and complained to  don Juan
again about the absurdity of such a task.
     "There  are seven gates," he  said as a way of answering, "and dreamers
have to open all seven of them, one at the time. You're up against the first
gate that must be opened if you are to dream."
     "Why didn't you tell me this before?"
     "It would've been  useless  to  tell  you  about the gates of  dreaming
before you smacked your head against the first one. Now you know  that it is
an obstacle and that you have to overcome it."
     Don  Juan explained that there  are  entrances and exits  in the energy
flow of the universe and that, in the specific case  of  dreaming, there are
seven entrances, experienced as obstacles, which sorcerers  call  the  seven
gates of dreaming.
     "The  first gate  is a threshold we must cross by becoming  aware of  a
particular sensation before deep sleep," he said. "A sensation which is like
a pleasant heaviness that doesn't let  us open our eyes. We  reach that gate
the instant we become aware that we're falling asleep, suspended in darkness
and heaviness."
     "How do I become aware that I am falling asleep? Are there any steps to
follow?"
     "No. There  are no steps to follow. One just intends to become aware of
falling asleep."
     "But how does one intend to become aware of it?"
     "Intent or intending  is something very  difficult to  talk about. I or
anyone else would sound idiotic trying to explain it. Bear that in mind when
you  hear  what  I have  to  say  next:  sorcerers intend  anything they set
themselves to intend, simply by intending it."
     "That doesn't mean anything, don Juan."
     "Pay  close attention.  Someday it'll  be your  turn  to  explain.  The
statement seems  nonsensical because you  are  not putting it in  the proper
context. Like  any rational man, you think that understanding is exclusively
the realm of our reason, of our mind.
     "For  sorcerers, because the  statement  I made pertains to  intent and
intending,  understanding it pertains  to  the  realm  of energy.  Sorcerers
believe that  if one would intend that statement for  the energy  body,  the
energy body  would understand  it in terms entirely different from those  of
the mind. The trick is to reach the energy body. For that you need energy."
     "In  what terms  would the energy  body  understand that statement, don
Juan?"
     "In terms of a bodily feeling, which it's hard to describe. You'll have
to experience it to know what I mean."
     I  wanted a more precise explanation, but don Juan  slapped my back and
made me enter into the second attention. At that time, what he did was still
utterly mysterious to me. I could have sworn that his touch hypnotized me. I
believed he had  instantaneously put me to sleep, and I  dreamt that I found
myself walking with him on a  wide  avenue lined with trees in some  unknown
city. It was such a vivid dream,  and I was so aware of  everything, that  I
immediately tried to orient myself  by reading  signs and looking at people.
It definitely was not any English- or Spanish-speaking  city, but  it was  a
Western   city.  The  people  seemed  to  be  northern   Europeans,  perhaps
Lithuanians. I became absorbed  in  trying  to read  billboards  and  street
signs.
     Don  Juan nudged me gently. "Don't bother  with that," he said. "We are
nowhere identifiable. I've  just lent you my energy  so you would reach your
energy body, and with it you've just  crossed into another world. This won't
last long, so use your time wisely.
     "Look at everything, but without being obvious. Don't let anyone notice
you."
     We walked in silence. It was a block-long walk,  which had a remarkable
effect on me. The  more we  walked,  the  greater  my sensation of  visceral
anxiety.  My  mind was curious, but  my body was alarmed. I had the clearest
understanding that I  was not in this  world. When we got to an intersection
and stopped walking, I saw that the trees on the  street  had been carefully
trimmed. They were short trees with hard-looking,  curled leaves. Each  tree
had  a big square space for watering. There were no weeds or  trash in those
spaces, as  one would find around  trees in  the city, only  charcoal black,
loose dirt.
     The moment I  focused my eyes on the curb, before I stepped off  it  to
cross the street,  I noticed that there were no cars. I tried desperately to
watch the people who milled around us, to discover something about them that
would explain  my anxiety. As I stared at them, they stared  back  at me. In
one instant a circle of hard blue and brown eyes had formed around us.
     A certainty hit me like a blow: this was not a dream at all; we were in
a reality beyond what I  know to be  real. I  turned to face don Juan. I was
about to realize what was different  about those people, but  a strange  dry
wind that went directly to my sinuses hit my face, blurred my view, and made
me forget what I wanted to tell don Juan. The next instant, I was back where
I had started from: don Juan's house. I was lying on a  straw mat, curled up
on my side.
     "I lent you my energy, and you reached your energy body," don Juan said
matter-of-factly.
     I heard him talk, but I was numb. An unusual itching on my solar plexus
kept my  breaths short and painful.  I knew that  I had been on the verge of
finding something transcendental about  dreaming and about the people I  had
seen, yet I could not bring whatever I knew into focus.
     "Where  were  we, don Juan?" I asked. "Was it all  a dream?  A hypnotic
state?"
     "It wasn't  a dream," he  replied. "It was dreaming. I helped you reach
the second attention so that you would understand intending as a subject not
for your reason but for your energy body.
     "At  this  point, you can't yet  comprehend the import of all this, not
only because  you  don't  have  sufficient  energy  but  because you're  not
intending  anything.  If  you  were,  your   energy  body  would  comprehend
immediately  that the  only way to intend is  by  focusing  your  intent  on
whatever you want to intend. This time I focused it for you on reaching your
energy body."
     "Is the goal of dreaming  to intend the energy body?" I asked, suddenly
empowered by some strange reasoning.
     "One  can certainly  put  it that way," he  said. "In  this  particular
instance, since we're  talking about the first gate of dreaming, the goal of
dreaming is to  intend that  your energy body  becomes  aware  that you  are
falling asleep. Don't try to force yourself to be  aware of  falling asleep.
Let your energy body do  it.  To  intend is to  wish without wishing,  to do
without doing.
     "Accept  the  challenge of  intending," he went  on.  "Put  your silent
determination, without a  single thought, into convincing  yourself that you
have  reached your energy body and that you  are  a dreamer. Doing this will
automatically  put  you in  the position  to be aware that  you are  falling
asleep."
     "How can I convince myself that I am a dreamer when I am not?"
     "When you hear  that you have to  convince yourself,  you automatically
become more rational. How can  you convince  yourself you are a dreamer when
you know you are not? Intending is  both: the act of convincing yourself you
are indeed a dreamer, although you have never dreamt before, and the  act of
being convinced."
     "Do  you mean I have to tell myself I am a dreamer  and  try my best to
believe it? Is that it?"
     "No,  it  isn't.  Intending  is  much  simpler  and, at  the same time,
infinitely  more complex than that. It requires imagination, discipline, and
purpose. In this case, to intend means that you get an unquestionable bodily
knowledge that you are  a dreamer.  You feel you are a dreamer with all  the
cells of your body."
     Don Juan added  in a joking tone that he did not have sufficient energy
to make me another loan for intending and that  the thing to do was to reach
my  energy body on my  own. He assured  me that intending the first  gate of
dreaming was  one of the means discovered by  the sorcerers of antiquity for
reaching the second attention and the energy body.
     After  telling me  this,  he  practically  threw me  out  of his house,
commanding me not  to  come back  until I had  intended  the first  gate  of
dreaming.
     I returned home, and every night for months I  went  to sleep intending
with all my might to  become aware that  I was  falling asleep and to see my
hands in  my  dreams.  The other part of the task--to convince myself that I
was a dreamer and that I  had reached my energy body--was totally impossible
for me.
     Then, one afternoon  while  taking a nap, I  dreamt I was looking at my
hands.  The shock was enough to wake me up. It proved to be a  unique  dream
that could not be repeated. Weeks went by, and I was unable either to become
aware that  I was  falling asleep or  to find  my  hands. I began to notice,
however,  that  I was having  in  my dreams a vague  feeling that  there was
something  I should have  been  doing but could  not remember.  This feeling
became so strong that it kept on waking me up at all hours of the night.
     When I told don Juan about my futile attempts  to cross the  first gate
of  dreaming,  he gave  me some  guidelines.  "To ask a  dreamer  to find  a
determined item in his dreams is a  subterfuge," he said. "The real issue is
to become  aware  that  one  is falling asleep. And, strange as it may seem,
that doesn't happen by commanding oneself  to be aware  that one  is falling
asleep  but  by  sustaining the sight  of  whatever  one is  looking at in a
dream."
     He  told me that dreamers  take quick, deliberate glances at everything
present  in a  dream.  If they focus  their dreaming attention  on something
specific, it is only as a point  of departure.  From there, dreamers move on
to look at other  items in the dream's content,  returning  to the point  of
departure as many times as possible.
     After a great effort, I indeed found hands in my dreams, but they never
were  mine. They were  hands that  only seemed  to belong to me,  hands that
changed shape, becoming quite nightmarish at times. The  rest of  my dreams'
content, nonetheless, was  always pleasantly steady.  I could almost sustain
the view of anything I focused my attention on.
     It  went on like this  for months, until one day  when  my  capacity to
dream  changed seemingly by itself.  I had  done nothing  special besides my
constant earnest determination to be aware that  I was falling asleep and to
find my hands.
     I dreamt I was visiting my hometown. Not  that the town I was  dreaming
about looked at all like my  hometown, but somehow I had the conviction that
it was the place  where I was  born. It all  began as an ordinary,  yet very
vivid dream. Then the light in the dream changed. Images became sharper. The
street where I was walking became noticeably more real than a moment before.
My feet began  to hurt. I  could  feel that  things  were absurdly hard. For
instance, on bumping into a door, not only did I experience pain on the knee
that hit the door but I also was enraged by my clumsiness.
     I realistically walked in that town until I was completely exhausted. I
saw everything  I could have  seen had I been a  tourist walking through the
streets of a city. And there was no difference whatsoever between that dream
walk and any  walk I  had actually taken on the streets of a city I  visited
for the first time.
     "I think you  went  a bit too far," don Juan said after listening to my
account. "All that was required was your  awareness of falling  asleep. What
you've done is equivalent to bringing a wall down just to  squash a mosquito
sitting on it."
     "Do you mean, don Juan, that I flubbed it?"
     "No. But apparently you're trying  to repeat  something you did before.
When  I made  your  assemblage  point shift and you  and I ended up  in that
mysterious city, you  were not  asleep. You were  dreaming,  but not asleep,
meaning that  your  assemblage point  didn't  reach that position  through a
normal dream. I forced it to shift.
     "You  certainly  can  reach the same position  through dreaming,  but I
wouldn't advise you to do that at this time."
     "Is it dangerous?"
     "And how! Dreaming has to be a very sober affair. No false movement can
be afforded. Dreaming  is  a process of  awakening,  of gaming  control. Our
dreaming attention must be systematically exercised, for  it is the door  to
the second attention."
     "What's  the difference  between the dreaming attention  and the second
attention?"
     "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."
     He heavily stressed that  the  dreaming  attention is  the key to every
movement in the sorcerers' world. He  said that among the multitude of items
in our dreams,  there exist real energetic  interferences,  things that have
been put in our dreams extraneously, by  an alien force. To be able to  find
them and follow them is sorcery.
     The emphasis he put on those statements was so pronounced that I had to
ask him to explain them. He hesitated for a moment before answering.
     "Dreams are, if not a door, a hatch  into  other worlds," he began. "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."
     "What are those scouts?"
     "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."
     "I am sorry,  don  Juan, but I can't  make heads  or tails  out of your
explanation."
     "You can't because  you're insisting on thinking about dreams  in terms
known  to you: what occurs to us during sleep. And I am insisting  on giving
you another version:  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."
     He  paused,  obviously to give  my  mind  time to take in  what he  was
telling me. "Sorcerers are  aware of  those currents of foreign  energy," he
continued.  "They  notice them and strive to  isolate  them  from the normal
items of their dreams."
     "Why do they isolate them, don Juan?"
     "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."
     "How do sorcerers isolate them from the normal items of their dreams?"
     "By  the  exercise  and control  of their  dreaming  attention.  At one
moment, our dreaming attention discovers them among the items of a dream and
focuses on them, then the total dream collapses,  leaving  only  the foreign
energy."
     Don Juan refused  to explain  the topic any  further.  He went back  to
discussing my dreaming experience and said that, all in all, he had  to take
my dream as being my  first genuine attempt at dreaming, and that this meant
I had succeeded in reaching the first gate of dreaming.
     During another discussion, at a different  time, he abruptly brought up
the subject again.  He  said, "I'm going to repeat  what you must do in your
dreams in order  to pass  the first gate  of dreaming. First  you must focus
your gaze on anything of your choice 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 glance only briefly, the images
don't shift. Then go back to the item you first looked at."
     "What does it mean to pass the first gate of dreaming?"
     "We  reach the first  gate  of  dreaming by becoming aware that  we are
falling asleep, or by having, like  you did, a gigantically real dream. Once
we reach the  gate,  we must cross it  by being able to sustain the sight of
any item of our dreams."
     "I  can  almost look  steadily  at the  items of  my  dreams, but  they
dissipate too quickly."
     "This is precisely what I am trying to tell you. In order to offset the
evanescent quality of dreams, sorcerers have devised the use of the starting
point  item. Every  time you isolate it and look at  it,  you get a surge of
energy, so at  the beginning  don't look at too many things  in your dreams.
Four items will  suffice. 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 starting point item  and start all
over again."
     '"Do  you believe that I really reached the first gate of dreaming, don
Juan?"
     "You did, and that's a  lot. You'll find out, as you go along, how easy
it'll be to do dreaming now."
     I  thought don Juan was either exaggerating or giving me incentive. But
he assured me he was being on the level.
     "The  most  astounding  thing  that happens to dreamers," he  said, "is
that, on reaching the first gate, they also reach the energy body."
     "What exactly is the energy body?"
     "It's the counterpart of the  physical body. A ghostlike  configuration
made of pure energy."
     "But isn't the physical body also made out of energy?"
     "Of  course it  is. 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 what for example, don Juan?"
     "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."
     "What is that sphere, don Juan?"
     "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."
     "What does it mean to perceive energy as it flows?"
     "It 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."
     "What about the other way you  talked about, don  Juan? The energy body
using energy as a boost."
     "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."
     He  stopped  talking and seemed to be undecided, as if he wanted to add
something  but was not sure  about it. He smiled at me, and,  just as I  was
beginning to ask him a question, he continued his explanation.
     "I've mentioned  to you  before that  sorcerers isolate in their dreams
scouts  from  other  realms," he  said. "Their energy  bodies  do that. They
recognize  energy and go  for  it.  But  it isn't  desirable for dreamers to
indulge  in  searching for scouts. I was  reluctant to tell  you  about  it,
because of the facility with which one can get swayed by that search."
     Don Juan then quickly went on to another subject. He carefully outlined
for me an entire block of practices. At the time, I found that  on one level
it was  all incomprehensible  to me, yet on another it was perfectly logical
and understandable.  He  reiterated that reaching,  with deliberate control,
the first gate of  dreaming is a way of arriving  at the energy body. But to
maintain that gain is  predicated on energy alone. Sorcerers get that energy
by  redeploying, in a more  intelligent manner, the energy they have and use
for perceiving the daily world.
     When I urged don Juan to explain it more clearly,  he added that we all
have a determined quantity of  basic energy. That quantity is all the energy
we have, and we use all of it for perceiving  and dealing with our engulfing
world. He  repeated  various times, to emphasize  it,  that there is no more
energy for us anywhere  and, since our available energy is already  engaged,
there  is not a single bit left in us for any extraordinary perception, such
as dreaming.
     "Where does that leave us?" I asked.
     "It  leaves  us  to scrounge energy for ourselves, wherever we can find
it," he replied.
     Don  Juan  explained  that  sorcerers have  a scrounging  method.  They
intelligently  redeploy their energy  by cutting down anything they consider
superfluous in their  lives. They call this  method the  sorcerers' way.  In
essence,  the sorcerers'  way, as don Juan put it, is a chain of  behavioral
choices for dealing with the world, choices much more intelligent than those
our progenitors taught us.  These sorcerers' choices are designed to  revamp
our lives by altering our basic reactions about being alive.
     "What are those basic reactions?" I asked.
     "There  are two ways of  facing our being alive," he said.  "One  is to
surrender to  it, either by acquiescing to  its demands or by fighting those
demands.  The other  is by molding our particular life  situation to fit our
own configurations."
     "Can we really mold our life situation, don Juan?"
     "One's  particular   life  situation   can  be  molded   to  fit  one's
specifications," don Juan insisted. "Dreamers do that. A wild statement? Not
really, if you consider how little we know about ourselves."
     He  said  that  his interest, as a teacher,  was to  get  me thoroughly
involved  with the  themes of life and being alive; that is to say, with the
difference between life, as a consequence  of biological forces, and the act
of being alive, as a matter of cognition.
     "When  sorcerers talk  about molding  one's life situation,"  don  Juan
explained, "they mean molding the awareness of being  alive. Through molding
this awareness,  we can get  enough energy to reach and sustain  the  energy
body, and with it we can certainly mold the total direction and consequences
of our lives." Don Juan ended our conversation about dreaming admonishing me
not merely to think about what he had told  me but to turn his concepts into
a viable way of life by a  process of repetition. He claimed that everything
new in  our lives, such as the sorcerers' concepts he was teaching  me, must
be repeated to us to the point of exhaustion before we open ourselves to it.
He pointed out that repetition is the way  our  progenitors socialized us to
function in the daily world.
     As I continued my dreaming practices, I gained the capability  of being
thoroughly aware  that I  was falling asleep  as  well as the  capability of
stopping  in  a  dream  to examine at will  anything that  was  part of that
dream's content. To experience this was for me no less than miraculous.
     Don  Juan stated  that as we tighten the  control over our  dreams,  we
tighten the mastery over our dreaming attention. He was right in saying that
the dreaming attention comes into play when it is called, when it is given a
purpose. Its coming into play is not really a process, as one would normally
understand a process: an ongoing system of operations or a series of actions
or functions that bring  about an end  result.  It  is rather  an awakening.
Something dormant becomes suddenly functional.


3. THE SECOND GATE OF DREAMING

     I found  out  by means of my dreaming practices that a dreaming teacher
must create  a didactic  synthesis in order to  emphasize a  given point. In
essence, what don Juan wanted with my first task was to exercise my dreaming
attention by focusing it on  the items of my dreams. To  this effect he used
as a spearhead the idea of being aware of falling asleep. His subterfuge was
to say  that the only  way to be aware of falling  asleep is  to examine the
elements of one's dreams.
     I realized, almost  as soon as I  had begun my dreaming practices, that
exercising the dreaming attention is the essential point in dreaming. To the
mind, however, it seems impossible that one can train oneself to be aware at
the level of dreams. Don Juan said that the active element  of such training
is persistence, and that the mind and all its  rational defenses cannot cope
with persistence. Sooner or later, he said, the mind's  barriers fall, under
its impact, and the dreaming attention blooms.
     As I practiced focusing and holding my dreaming attention on  the items
of my  dreams, I began to feel a peculiar self-confidence so remarkable that
I sought a comment from don Juan.
     "It's your entering into the second attention that gives you that sense
of  self-assurance,"  he said.  "This calls for even more  sobriety on  your
part. Go slowly, but don't stop, and above all, don't talk about it. Just do
it!"
     I told him that in practice I had corroborated what he had already told
me, that if one takes short glances at everything in a dream, the  images do
not dissolve. I commented  that the  difficult part is to break the  initial
barrier  that prevents us from bringing dreams to our conscious attention. I
asked  don  Juan to give  me his  opinion on  this  matter, for  I earnestly
believed  that  this   barrier  is   a  psychological  one  created  by  our
socialization, which puts a premium on disregarding dreams.
     "The barrier is more than socialization,"  he replied.  "It's the first
gate of dreaming. Now that you've overcome  it,  it seems stupid to you that
we can't stop at will and pay attention to the items of our dreams. That's a
false certainty. The  first gate  of dreaming  has  to do  with  the flow of
energy in the universe. It's a natural obstacle."
     Don Juan  made me agree then that we would  talk about dreaming only in
the second attention and as he saw fit. He encouraged me to practice in  the
meantime and promised no interference on his part.
     As  I   gained  proficiency  in  setting   up  dreaming,  I  repeatedly
experienced sensations  that  I  deemed  of  great  importance, such  as the
feeling  that I  was rolling into a ditch just as I  was falling asleep. Don
Juan never told me that they were nonsensical  sensations but let  me record
them in my notes.  I  realize now how absurd  I must  have  appeared to him.
Today, if I were teaching  dreaming,  I would  definitely discourage  such a
behavior. Don Juan merely  made fun of me, calling me a covert egomaniac who
professed  to   be  fighting   self-importance   yet   kept  a   meticulous,
superpersonal diary called "My Dreams."
     Every  time he had an opportunity, don Juan pointed out that the energy
needed to release our dreaming attention from its socialization prison comes
from redeploying  our existing  energy. Nothing could  have been truer.  The
emergence of  our dreaming attention is a direct corollary  of revamping our
lives.  Since we have,  as don Juan said, no  way  to plug into any external
source for a boost  of energy,  we must redeploy our existing energy, by any
means available.
     Don Juan insisted that the sorcerers' way is the best means  to oil, so
to speak, the wheels of energy redeployment,  and  that of all the  items in
the  sorcerers' way, the  most effective is "losing self-importance." He was
thoroughly convinced that this is indispensable for everything sorcerers do,
and for this reason  he put an enormous emphasis on guiding all his students
to fulfill this requirement. He  was of the opinion that self-importance  is
not only the sorcerers' supreme enemy but the nemesis of mankind.
     Don Juan's argument was that 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.
He reasoned that if we were capable of losing  some  of that importance, two
extraordinary things would happen  to us. One, we would free our energy from
trying to  maintain  the illusory idea of  our grandeur; and, two, we  would
provide ourselves with enough energy to enter into  the second attention  to
catch a glimpse of the actual grandeur of the universe.
     It  took me more  than  two  years  to be able  to focus my  unwavering
dreaming attention on anything I wanted. And I became  so proficient  that I
felt  as if I had been  doing  it all my  life.  The eeriest part was that I
could  not conceive of not having had that ability. Yet I could remember how
difficult it had been even to think of this as a possibility. It occurred to
me that the capability of examining the contents of one's dreams must be the
product  of  a natural configuration of  our  being, similar perhaps  to our
capability of walking. We  are physically conditioned  to  walk only in  one
manner, bipedally, yet it takes a monumental effort for us to learn to walk.
     This new  capacity of looking in glances at the items of my dreams  was
coupled  with  a most  insistent nagging to  remind myself  to  look at  the
elements of my dreams. I knew about  my compulsive bent of character, but in
my dreams my  compulsiveness was vastly augmented. It  became so  noticeable
that not only did I resent hearing  my nagging at myself but I also began to
question whether it was really my compulsiveness  or something else. I  even
thought I was losing my mind.
     "I  talk to myself endlessly in  my dreams, reminding myself to look at
things," I said to don Juan.
     I  had  all along  respected our  agreement  that we  would talk  about
dreaming  only when he brought up the  subject. However, I thought that this
was an emergency.
     "Does it sound to you like it's not you but someone else?" he asked.
     "Come to think of it, yes. I don't sound like myself at those times."
     "Then it's not you. It's not time yet to explain it. But let's say that
we  are not alone in this  world.  Let's say  that  there  are other  worlds
available  to  dreamers,  total  worlds.  From  those  other  total  worlds,
energetic entities  sometimes come  to us. The  next time you hear  yourself
nagging  at  yourself in  your dreams,  get really angry and yell a command.
Say, Stop it!"
     I entered into  another challenging  arena: to remember in my dreams to
shout that command. I  believe  that, perhaps, out of being  so tremendously
annoyed  at hearing  myself nagging, I did remember  to  shout, Stop it. The
nagging ceased instantly and never again was repeated.
     "Does every dreamer  experience  this?" I asked don Juan when I saw him
again.
     "Some do," he answered, uninterestedly.
     I  began to  rant about  how  strange it had all been.  He cut me  off,
saying, "You are ready now to get to the second gate of dreaming."
     I seized the opportunity to seek  answers for questions I  had not been
able to ask him. What  I had experienced the first time he made me dream had
been  foremost in my mind. I  told don Juan that I had observed the elements
of my own  dreams to my heart's content, and  never had I felt anything even
vaguely similar in terms of clarity and detail.
     "The  more I think about it," I said, "the more intriguing it  becomes.
Watching  those  people in  that dream,  I  experienced a fear and revulsion
impossible to forget. What was that feeling, don Juan?"
     "In my opinion, your energy body hooked onto the foreign energy of that
place and had the time of its life. Naturally, you felt afraid and revolted;
you were examining alien energy for the first time in your life.
     "You have a proclivity for  behaving  like the sorcerers of  antiquity.
The moment you have the chance, you  let your assemblage point go. That time
your  assemblage point shifted quite a  distance. The result was  that  you,
like the old sorcerers, journeyed beyond the world we know. A  most real but
dangerous journey."
     I bypassed the  meaning of  his statements in favor of my  own interest
and asked him, "Was that city perhaps on another planet?"
     "You can't  explain dreaming by  way of things you know or suspect  you
know," he said. "All I can  tell you is that the city you visited was not in
this world."
     "Where was it, then?"
     "Out  of this world, of course. You're not  that stupid.  That was  the
first thing you  noticed.  What  got you going in  circles is that you can't
imagine anything being out of this world."
     "Where is out of this world, don Juan?"
     "Believe  me,  the  most   extravagant  feature  of  sorcery  is   that
configuration called out of this world. For instance, you assumed that I was
seeing the same things you did. The proof is that you never  asked me what I
saw.  You  and  only you  saw a city and people  in  that city. I didn't see
anything  of  the sort. I saw  energy. So, out  of this  world was, for  you
alone, on that occasion, a city."
     "But then, don Juan, it wasn't a  real city. It existed only for me, in
my mind."
     "No.   That's  not  the  case.  Now   you  want   to  reduce  something
transcendental  to  something  mundane. You  can't do that. That journey was
real. You saw  it as a city.  I saw it as energy. Neither of  us is right or
wrong."
     "My confusion comes when  you talk  about things  being real.  You said
before that we reached a real place. But if it was real, how can we have two
versions of it?"
     "Very simple. We have two versions because  we had,  at that  time, two
different rates  of uniformity and  cohesion. I have  explained to  you that
those two attributes are the key to perceiving."
     "Do you think that I can go back to that particular city?"
     "You got me there. I don't know. Or perhaps I do know but can't explain
it. Or perhaps I can explain it but I don't want to. You'll have to wait and
figure out for yourself which is the case."
     He refused any further discussion.
     "Let's get on  with our business,"  he said. "You reach the second gate
of dreaming  when you wake up from a dream  into another dream. You can have
as many dreams as  you want or as many as  you are  capable of, but you must
exercise adequate control and not wake up in the world we know."
     I had a  jolt of panic. "Are you saying that I  should never wake up in
this world?" I asked.
     "No, I  didn't mean that. But now that you  have pointed it out, I have
to tell you that it is an alternative. The sorcerers of antiquity used to do
that, never wake up in the world we know. Some of  the  sorcerers of my line
have done it too. It certainly can be done, but I don't recommend it. What I
want is for you to wake up naturally when you are through with dreaming, but
while  you are dreaming, I want you to  dream that  you wake  up  in another
dream."
     I  heard myself asking the same question  I had asked the first time he
told me about setting up dreaming. "But is it possible to do that?"
     Don Juan obviously caught on to my mindlessness and laughingly repeated
the answer he had given me before. "Of course it's possible. This control is
no  different  from  the  control we have  over any  situation in  our daily
lives."
     I  quickly  got  over  my  embarrassment  and  was  ready to  ask  more
questions, but don Juan anticipated me  and began to  explain facets  of the
second gate of dreaming, an explanation that made me yet more uneasy.
     "There's one problem with the second  gate,"  he said. "It's a  problem
that can be serious,  depending on one's bent  of character. If our tendency
is to indulge in clinging to  things or situations, we are  in for a sock in
the jaw."
     "In what way, don Juan?"
     "Think  for a moment. You've already experienced the outlandish  joy of
examining your dreams' contents. Imagine yourself going from dream to dream,
watching everything, examining every detail. It's  very easy to realize that
one may sink to mortal depths. Especially if one is given to indulging."
     "Wouldn't the body or the brain naturally put a stop to it?"
     "If it's a natural sleeping situation, meaning normal, yes. But this is
not a  normal situation. This  is dreaming. A dreamer  on crossing the first
gate  has already reached the  energy body. So  what is really going through
the second gate, hopping from dream to dream, is the energy body."
     "What's the implication of all this, don Juan?"
     "The implication is that on crossing the second gate  you must intend a
greater and more sober control over your dreaming attention: the only safety
valve for dreamers."
     "What is this safety valve?"
     "You will find  out for yourself that  the true goal  of dreaming is to
perfect the  energy  body. A  perfect  energy body, among  other  things  of
course, has such a control over the dreaming attention that it makes it stop
when needed. This is the safety valve dreamers have. No matter how indulging
they might  be, at  a given  time, their  dreaming  attention must make them
surface."
     I started all  over again on another dreaming quest. This time the goal
was more elusive  and the difficulty even  greater. Exactly as with my first
task, I  could not begin  to figure out what to do. I  had  the discouraging
suspicion that all my practice was not going  to be of much  help this time.
After countless failures, I gave  up and settled down to simply continue  my
practice  of fixing my  dreaming  attention  on every  item  of  my  dreams.
Accepting my shortcomings seemed to give me a boost, and I became even  more
adept at sustaining the view of any item in my dreams.
     A year went by without any change. Then one day something changed. As I
was  watching a  window  in a dream, trying to find out if I could  catch  a
glimpse of the scenery outside the  room, some windlike force, which I  felt
as a buzzing  in my ears, pulled me through the window to the  outside. Just
before  that  pull,  my  dreaming  attention  had been caught by  a  strange
structure some  distance away. It looked like a  tractor.  The  next thing I
knew, I was standing by it, examining it.
     I  was perfectly aware that I was dreaming. I looked around to find out
if I could tell from what window I had been looking. The scene was that of a
farm  in the countryside.  No buildings were in  sight.  I wanted  to ponder
this. However, the quantity of farm machinery lying around, as if abandoned,
took  all  my  attention.  I   examined  mowing  machines,  tractors,  grain
harvesters,  disk plows,  thrashers. There were so  many  that  I forgot  my
original dream. What  I wanted  then was  to  orient myself  by watching the
immediate scenery. There was something in the distance  that  looked  like a
billboard and some telephone poles around it.
     The instant I focused my attention on that billboard, I was next to it.
The steel structure  of the billboard gave me a  fright. It was menacing. On
the billboard itself was a picture of a building. I read the text; it was an
advertisement for a  motel. I had a peculiar certainty that I was  in Oregon
or northern California.
     I looked  for  other features  in the  environment  of  my dream. I saw
mountains very far away  and some green,  round  hills not too far. On those
hills were clumps of what  I thought were California oak trees.  I wanted to
be pulled by the green hills, but what pulled me were the distant mountains.
I was convinced that they were the Sierras.
     All my dreaming energy left me on those mountains. But before it did, I
was pulled by every possible feature. My dream ceased to be a  dream. As far
as my capacity to perceive was concerned, I  was  veritably in  the Sierras,
zooming  into ravines, boulders,  trees, caves. I went  from scarp faces  to
mountain  peaks until I had no  more drive and  could not focus my  dreaming
attention  on anything. I felt myself losing control. Finally, there  was no
more scenery, just darkness.
     "You have reached the second gate  of dreaming,"  don  Juan said when I
narrated my  dream to him. "What you should do next is to cross it. Crossing
the second  gate is a very serious affair;  it  requires a most  disciplined
effort."
     I  was not sure I had  fulfilled the task he outlined for me, because I
had  not  really woken  up in another dream.  I asked don  Juan  about  this
irregularity. "The mistake was mine," he said. "I  told you that one  has to
wake up in another dream, but what I meant is that one  has to change dreams
in an orderly and precise manner, the way you have done it.
     "With the first gate, you wasted  a lot of time looking exclusively for
your hands. This time, you went  directly to the solution without  bothering
to follow the given command: to wake up in another dream."
     Don Juan said  that  there are two ways of properly crossing the second
gate of dreaming.  One is to  wake up in  another dream, that is  to say, to
dream that one  is having a dream and then dream that one wakes up from  it.
The  alternative  is to  use the items of a dream  to trigger another dream,
exactly as I had done.
     Just as he  had been doing all along, don Juan let me practice  without
any  interference on his  part.  And I corroborated the two alternatives  he
described. Either I dreamt that I was having a dream  from which I  dreamt I
woke up or I zoomed from a definite item accessible to my immediate dreaming
attention to another one, not quite accessible.  Or  I entered into a slight
variation  of  the second: I gazed  at any item of a dream,  maintaining the
gaze until  the  item changed shape  and,  by changing shape, pulled me into
another  dream through  a buzzing  vortex. Never was I  capable, however, of
deciding beforehand which of the three I would follow. My dreaming practices
always ended  by my running  out of dreaming attention and finally waking up
or by my falling into dark, deep slumber.
     Everything went smoothly in my  practices. The only  disturbance  I had
was  a  peculiar interference,  a  jolt of fear or discomfort I had begun to
experience with increasing frequency. My way of discarding it was to believe
that  it was related to my  ghastly  eating habits or  to  the fact that, in
those days, don Juan was giving me a  profusion of hallucinogenic plants  as
part of my training. Those jolts became so prominent, however, that I had to
ask don Juan's advice.
     "You have entered now  into the most dangerous facet  of the sorcerers'
knowledge," he  began. "It  is  sheer dread, a veritable nightmare.  I could
joke  with you and say  that I didn't mention this possibility to you out of
regard  for  your  cherished rationality, but I can't. Every sorcerer has to
face it.  Here is  where, I fear, you might very well think you're going off
the deep end."
     Don Juan  very solemnly  explained that  life and consciousness,  being
exclusively a matter of energy, are not solely the property of organisms. He
said that  sorcerers have seen that there are two types  of conscious beings
roaming the earth, the organic and the inorganic, and that  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  are  round  and  by  far the  brighter. Another  noteworthy
difference, which don Juan  said 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," don Juan went on.
"Inorganic   beings   possess   the  crucial  ingredient   for  interaction,
consciousness."
     "But do these inorganic  beings really exist? Like you  and I exist?" I
asked.
     "Of  course  they  do," he replied.  "Believe  me,  sorcerers  are very
intelligent creatures; under no condition would they toy with aberrations of
the mind and then take them for real."
     "Why do you say they are alive?"
     "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."
     "Then the inorganic beings must also die. Is that true, don Juan?"
     "Naturally. They lose their awareness just like  we do, except that the
length of their consciousness is staggering to the mind."
     "Do these inorganic beings appear to sorcerers?"
     "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."
     Don Juan peered at me  most intently. "You're not taking in any of this
at all," he said with the tone of someone who has reached a conclusion.
     "It's nearly impossible for me to think about this rationally," I said.
     "I  warned you that the subject will tax your  reason. The proper thing
to do then is to suspend judgment and let things take their  course, meaning
that you let the inorganic beings come to you."
     "Are you serious, don Juan?"
     "Deadly serious.  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."
     "How do sorcerers entice them? Do they have a ritual?"
     "Well,  they certainly don't stand in the middle of the  road  and call
out to them with trembling voices at the stroke of midnight, if  that's what
you mean."
     "What do they do then?"
     "They entice them in dreaming. I said that what's involved is more than
enticing them; by the  act of dreaming,  sorcerers  compel  those  beings to
interact with them."
     "How do sorcerers compel them by the act of dreaming?"
     "Dreaming  is sustaining  the position  where the assemblage  point has
shifted  in  dreams. This  act  creates a distinctive  energy charge,  which
attracts  their  attention.  It's  like bait  to  fish;  they'll go for  it.
Sorcerers,  by reaching  and crossing the first  two  gates of dreaming, set
bait for those beings and compel them to appear.
     "By going through the two gates,  you have made your  bidding  known to
them. Now, you must wait for a sign from them."
     "What would the sign be, don Juan?"
     "Possibly the appearance of one of them, although  that seems too soon.
I am of the opinion that their sign will be simply some interference in your
dreaming. I believe that the jolts of fear you are experiencing nowadays are
not indigestion but energy jolts sent to you by the inorganic beings."
     "What should I do?"
     "You must gauge your expectations."
     I could not understand what  he  meant, and he carefully explained that
our  normal expectation when engaging in interaction with our fellow  men or
with other  organic beings is to get an immediate reply to our solicitation.
With inorganic beings, however, since they are separated  from us by  a most
formidable  barrier--energy  that moves at a different speed--sorcerers must
gauge their  expectations  and sustain  the solicitation for as  long as  it
takes to be acknowledged.
     "Do you  mean,  don  Juan, that the  solicitation is the  same  as  the
dreaming practices?"
     "Yes. But for a  perfect  result,  you  must add to your  practices the
intent  of  reaching those inorganic  beings. Send a  feeling  of power  and
confidence to them,  a feeling of strength, of detachment. 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."
     "I'm not clear, don Juan, about the way they appear to sorcerers.  What
is the peculiar way they make themselves known?"
     "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."
     "What about in dreaming, don Juan?"
     "In dreaming we have the total opposite. At times, we feel them the way
you  are feeling 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."
     "In what way, don Juan?"
     "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 do sorcerers do with inorganic beings?"
     "They  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. And this must
be done from the beginning. The intent one has to send out to them has to be
of power and abandon. In  that intent one must encode the  message `1  don't
fear you. Come to see me. If you do, I'll welcome you. If you don't want  to
come, I'll  miss you.' With a message like this, they'll get so curious that
they'll come for sure."
     "Why should they come to seek me, or why on earth should I 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."
     "This is very strange to me, don Juan. 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.  The 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 non-human universe. So when they transport
a sorcerer, they transport him to worlds beyond the human domain."
     As I  heard him talk, I was plagued by  strange fears  and  misgivings,
which he promptly realized.
     "You are a religious man to the  end." He laughed. "Now, you're feeling
the devil breathing  down your  neck. Think about  dreaming  in these terms:
dreaming  is  perceiving  more  than what  we  believe  it  is  possible  to
perceive."
     In my waking hours,  I worried  about  the  possibility  that inorganic
conscious beings really existed. When I was dreaming, however,  my conscious
worries did not have much effect. The jolts  of physical fear continued, but
whenever  they happened a strange calmness always trailed behind, a calmness
that took control of me and let me proceed as if I had no fear at all.
     It seemed  at that time that every breakthrough in dreaming happened to
me suddenly, without warning. The  presence of inorganic beings in my dreams
was no exception. It happened while I was dreaming about a  circus I knew in
my childhood. The setting looked like a  town in the mountains in Arizona. I
began  to  watch  people with the  vague  hope I always had that I would see
again  the people I had seen the first  time don Juan made me enter into the
second attention. As I watched them, I felt a sizable jolt of nervousness in
the pit of my stomach; it was  like a punch. The  jolt distracted me,  and I
lost sight of the people, the circus, and the  mountain  town in Arizona. In
their  place stood two strange-looking figures. They were thin,  less than a
foot wide, but long, perhaps  seven feet. They were looming over me like two
gigantic earthworms.
     I knew that it was a dream, but I also knew that I was seeing. Don Juan
had discussed seeing in my  normal awareness and in the  second attention as
well. Although  I was incapable  of experiencing it myself, I  thought I had
understood the idea of directly perceiving energy. In that dream, looking at
those  two strange apparitions,  I  realized that  I was seeing  the  energy
essence of something unbelievable.
     I remained very  calm. I did not move. The most  remarkable thing to me
was that  they  didn't  dissolve or  change into  something else.  They were
cohesive beings that retained their  candlelike shape. Something in them was
forcing  something in me to hold the view  of their shape. I knew it because
something was telling me that if I did not move, they would not move either.
     It all came to an end, at a given moment, when I woke up with a fright.
I was immediately besieged by fears. A deep preoccupation  took  hold of me.
It was not psychological worry but rather a bodily sense of anguish, sadness
with no apparent foundation.
     The two strange shapes appeared  to me from then on  in every one of my
dreaming sessions. Eventually, it was as if I dreamt only to encounter them.
They never  attempted to move toward me or to interfere with me in any  way.
They just  stood there, immobile, in front of  me, for as  long as my  dream
lasted. Not only did I never make any effort  to change my dreams but I even
forgot the original quest of my dreaming practices.
     When I finally discussed with don Juan what was happening to  me, I had
spent months solely viewing the two shapes.
     "You  are  stuck at a dangerous crossroad," don  Juan  said.  "It isn't
right  to chase these  beings away, but it  isn't right  either to let  them
stay. For the time being, their presence is a hindrance to your dreaming."
     "What can I do, don Juan?"
     "Face them, right now,  in  the world of  daily life,  and tell them to
come back later, when you have more dreaming power."
     "How do I face them?"
     "It's not simple, but it  can be  done. It requires  only that you have
enough guts, which of course you do."
     Without waiting for me to tell him that I had no  guts at all, he  took
me to  the hills. He lived then in northern Mexico, and he had  given me the
total  impression he  was  a  solitary  sorcerer,  an old  man  forgotten by
everybody and completely outside the main  current of human affairs.  I  had
surmised, however,  that he  was  intelligent beyond measure. And because of
this  I   was  willing  to  comply  with  what  I  half-believed  were  mere
eccentricities.
     The  cunningness  of sorcerers, cultivated through  the ages,  was  don
Juan's  trademark.  He made sure that I understood  all I could in my normal
awareness and, at the same time, he made sure that I entered into the second
attention,  where  I   understood  or  at  least  passionately  listened  to
everything he taught me. In this fashion, he divided me in two. In my normal
consciousness, I could not understand  why or how I was more than willing to
take his  eccentricities  seriously. In  the  second attention,  it all made
sense to me.
     His contention was that the second attention is available to all of us,
but, by willfully holding on to our half-cocked rationality, some of us more
fiercely than  others, keep the second attention  at arm's length. His  idea
was that  dreaming brings down the barriers  that surround  and insulate the
second attention. The day  he took  me to the hills of the Sonoran desert to
meet the  inorganic  beings, I was  in my  normal  state  of  awareness. Yet
somehow  I  knew  I had  to  do  something  that was certainly  going  to be
unbelievable.
     It had rained lightly in the desert. The red dirt was still wet, and as
I walked it got clumped up in the rubber soles of my shoes. I had to step on
rocks to  remove  the  heavy  chunks  of  dirt.  We  walked in  an  easterly
direction, climbing toward the hills. When we got to a narrow  gully between
two hills, don Juan stopped.
     "This is for sure an ideal place to summon your friends," he said.
     "Why do you call them my friends?"
     "They have singled you out themselves. When they do that, it means that
they seek an association. I've mentioned to you that sorcerers form bonds of
friendship with  them. Your case seems to be an example. And you  don't even
have to solicit them."
     "What does such a friendship consist of, don Juan?"
     "It  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.
     "The old sorcerers used to love their allies. In fact, they loved their
allies more  than they loved their  own kind. I can foresee terrible dangers
in that."
     "What do you recommend I do, don Juan?"
     "Summon them. Size them up, and then decide yourself what to do."
     "What should I do to summon them?"
     "Hold your  dream view of  them  in  your mind.  The  reason  they have
saturated you with their presence in your dreams is that they want to create
a memory  of their  shape in  your mind.  And this is the  time to  use that
memory."  Don  Juan forcefully  ordered me  to close  my eyes and keep  them
closed. Then he guided me to sit down on some rocks. I felt the hardness and
the coldness of the rocks. The rocks were slanted; it was  difficult to keep
my balance.
     "Sit here and visualize their shape until they are  just  like they are
in your dreams," don Juan said in my ear. "Let me know when you have them in
focus."
     It  took me very little  time  and  effort  to  have a  complete mental
picture of their shape, just  like in my dreams.  It did not surprise  me at
all  that I  could  do  it. What  shocked  me  was  that,  although I  tried
desperately to let don Juan know I had pictured them in my mind, I could not
voice  my words  or open  my  eyes.  I  was  definitely awake.  I could hear
everything.
     I  heard don Juan say, "You can open your eyes now." I opened them with
no difficulty.  I was sitting cross-legged on some rocks, which were not the
same ones I had felt under me when I sat down. Don  Juan was  just behind me
to my right.  I  tried to turn around to face him,  but he forced my head to
remain straight. And then I saw two dark figures, like two thin tree trunks,
right in front of me.
     I  stared at them openmouthed; they  were not as tall as in my  dreams.
They had shrunk to  half  their  size. Instead of  being  shapes  of  opaque
luminosity,  they  were now  two  condensed, dark,  almost  black,  menacing
sticks.
     "Get up and grab one of  them," don Juan ordered me, "and don't let go,
no matter how it shakes you."
     I definitely did not want to do anything of the  sort, but some unknown
drive made  me  stand up  against my  will.  I had at  that moment the clear
realization  that I would end up doing what he had ordered me to, although I
had no conscious intention of doing so.
     Mechanically,  I advanced toward the two  figures,  my  heart  pounding
nearly out of my chest. I  grabbed the one to my  right. What I felt  was an
electric discharge that almost made me drop the dark figure.
     Don  Juan's voice came to me as if he had been yelling from a  distance
away. "You drop it and you're done for," he said.
     I held on to the figure, which  twirled and shook.  Not  like a massive
animal would,  but like  something quite fluffy and light, although strongly
electrical. We  rolled and turned on the sand  of  the gully for quite  some
time.  It  gave me jolt after jolt of  some  sickening electric  current.  I
thought it  was  sickening because  I fancied  it to  be  different from the
energy I had always encountered in our daily world. When it  hit my body, it
tickled me and made me yell and growl like an animal, not  in anguish but in
a strange anger.
     It finally became a still, almost solid form under me.  It lay inert. I
asked don Juan if it was dead, but I did not hear my voice. I
     "Not  a  chance," said someone laughing, someone who was  not don Juan.
"You've just depleted  its energy  charge. But  don't get up yet.  Lie there
just a moment longer."
     I  looked at don Juan  with a question in my eyes. He  was examining me
with great  curiosity. Then he helped  me up. The I dark figure remained  on
the ground.  I wanted to ask  don Juan  if  the dark figure  was  all right.
Again, I could not  voice my question. Then I  did something extravagant.  I
took it all for real. Up to that moment something in my mind  was preserving
my rationality by taking what was happening as a dream, a I dream induced by
don Juan's machinations.
     I went to the figure on the ground and tried to lift it up. I could not
put my arms around it because it had no mass. I became disoriented. The same
voice, which was not don Juan's, told me to lie down on top of the inorganic
being. I did it, and both  of us got up in one  motion, the  inorganic being
like  a  dark  shadow  attached to  me.  It  gently  separated from  me  and
disappeared, leaving me with an extremely pleasant feeling of completeness.
     It took me more than twenty-four hours to regain  total control  of  my
faculties. I slept most of the time. Don Juan checked me  from time to  time
by asking me the same question, "Was the  inorganic being's energy like fire
or like water?"
     My throat seemed scorched. I could not tell him that the energy jolts I
had felt were  like jets  of electrified water. I  have never  felt jets  of
electrified  water  in  my life. I am  not sure if it is possible to produce
them or to feel them, but that was the  image playing in  my mind every time
don Juan asked his key question.
     Don Juan was  asleep  when  I  finally knew I was completely recovered.
Knowing that his question  was of  great importance, I  woke him up and told
him what I had felt.
     "You  are not going to have helping friends among the inorganic beings,
but relationships of annoying dependence," he stated. "Be 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  fiery ones, who were thought to be
more serious, more contained than the others, but also more pompous."
     "What's the meaning of all this for me, don Juan?"
     "The meaning is too vast to discuss  at this time. My recommendation is
that  you  vanquish fear from your dreams and  from your  life,  in order to
safeguard  your unity. The inorganic  being you depleted of  energy and then
recharged again was thrilled out of its candlelike shape with it. It'll come
to you for more."
     "Why didn't you stop me, don Juan?"
     "You didn't give me time. Besides, you  didn't even hear me shouting at
you to leave the inorganic being on the ground."
     "You  should have lectured me, beforehand, the way you always do, about
all the possibilities."
     "I  didn't  know all the  possibilities.  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."
     That was the end of our exchange. I should have been worried because of
his definitely negative reaction, but I was  not. I somehow was certain that
whatever I had done was all right.
     I continued  my  dreaming  practices without any interference  from the
inorganic beings.


THE FIXATION OF THE ASSEMBLAGE POINT

     Since our agreement  had been  to discuss  dreaming only when don  Juan
considered it necessary, I rarely asked him about it and  never  insisted on
continuing my  questions  beyond a certain  point.  I was  more than  eager,
therefore, to listen to him whenever  he decided to take up the subject. His
comments  or  discussions  on  dreaming were  invariably  cushioned in other
topics of his teachings,  and they were always suddenly and abruptly brought
in.
     We  were  engaged in  some  unrelated conversation once,  while  I  was
visiting with him in his house, when without any preamble  he said  that, 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.
     I immediately  grabbed  the opportunity  and  asked  don  Juan  for  an
estimate  of the time when the  old  sorcerers  might have lived. At various
opportunities before, I had  asked the same question, but he never gave me a
satisfactory answer. I was confident,  however,  that at the moment, perhaps
because he had brought up the subject himself, he might be willing to oblige
me.
     "A most trying subject," he said. The way he said it made me believe he
was discarding my question. I was quite surprised when he continued talking.
"It'll tax your rationality as much '  as the topic of inorganic beings.  By
the way, what do you think ' about them now?"
     "I have let my opinions rest," I said. "I can't afford to think one way
or another."
     My answer  delighted him. He laughed and commented on his  own fears of
and aversions to the inorganic beings.
     "They have  never been  my  cup of tea," he said. "Of course,  the main
reason was my fear of them. I was unable to get over it  when I  had to, and
then it became fixed."
     "Do you fear them now, don Juan?"
     "It's  not quite fear  I feel but revulsion. I  don't  want any part of
them."
     "Is there any particular reason for this revulsion?"
     "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."
     I became inexplicably agitated and brusquely  told him that the subject
was so farfetched for me that I could not take it seriously.
     He  stared at  me,  smiling, and  said,  "The  best thing  to  do  with
inorganic  beings is what you do: 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."
     I felt  strangely guilty,  although  I could not figure out why. I felt
compelled to ask, "What are you referring to, don Juan?"
     "To your visits with the inorganic  beings," he replied dryly. "Are you
kidding? What visits?"
     "I didn't want to discuss this,  but I think it's time I  tell you that
the nagging voice you heard, reminding you to fix your dreaming attention on
the items of your dreams, was the voice of an inorganic being."
     I thought  don  Juan was completely  irrational.  I became so irritated
that I even  yelled at him.  He laughed at me and asked me to tell him about
my  irregular  dreaming  sessions.  That request surprised  me. I  had never
mentioned to anyone that  every  so  often I  used to  zoom out  of a dream,
pulled by a given item, but instead of my changing dreams, as I should have,
the total  mood of the dream changed and  I would find myself in a dimension
unknown to me. I soared in it, directed  by some invisible guide, which made
me twirl around and around. I  always  awoke from one  of these dreams still
twirling, and I continued tossing and turning for a long time before I fully
woke up.
     "Those are bona fide meetings  you are having with your inorganic being
friends," don Juan said.
     I did not want to argue with him,  but  neither did I want to  agree. I
remained silent.  I had forgotten my  question about the  old sorcerers, but
don Juan picked up the subject again.
     "My understanding is that the old sorcerers existed perhaps as far back
as ten thousand years ago," he said, smiling and watching my reaction.
     Basing my response on current archaeological data on the  migration  of
Asiatic nomadic tribes to the Americas, I said that I believed his  date was
incorrect. Ten thousand years was too far back.
     "You have your  knowledge and  I have mine," he said. "My knowledge  is
that the old sorcerers ruled for four thousand years, from seven thousand to
three thousand years  ago. Three thousand years  ago, they  went to nothing.
And from  then on,  sorcerers have  been regrouping, restructuring what  was
left of the old ones."
     "How can you be so sure about your dates?" I asked.
     "How can you be so sure about yours?" he retorted.
     I told him that archaeologists have foolproof methods to  establish the
date  of past cultures.  Again  he  retorted that sorcerers  have  foolproof
methods of their own.
     "I'm  not trying to be contrary or  argue you down," he continued, "but
someday soon you may be able to ask someone who knows for sure."
     "No one can know this for sure, don Juan."
     "This is another of those impossible things to  believe, but  there  is
somebody who can verify all this. You'll meet that person someday."
     "Come on,  don  Juan,  you've got  to be  joking. Who can  verify, what
happened seven thousand years ago?"
     "Very simple,  one of  the old sorcerers we've been  talking about. The
one  I met. He's the one who told me all about the old sorcerers. I hope you
remember what I am going  to  tell you about that particular  man. He is the
key to many of our endeavors, and he's also the one you have to meet."
     "I told don  Juan  that I  was  hanging on every  word  he said, I even
though  I did not understand what  he was  saying. He accused me of humoring
him and not believing a word about the old  sorcerers. I admitted that in my
state of daily consciousness, of course, I had not believed those farfetched
stories. But neither had I in the second attention,  although there I should
have had a different reaction.
     "Only when you ponder what  I said does  it become a farfetched story,"
he  remarked. "If you don't  involve  your common sense, it remains purely a
matter of energy."
     "Why did you say, don Juan, that I am  going  to meet  one of  the  old
sorcerers?"
     "Because you are. It  is vital that the  two of you meet, someday. But,
for the  moment, just let me tell you another farfetched story about  one of
the naguals of my line, the nagual Sebastian."
     Don Juan told me then that the nagual Sebastian had been a  sexton in a
church in southern Mexico around the beginning of the eighteenth century. In
his account, don Juan stressed how sorcerers, past or present, seek and find
refuge in established institutions, such as the Church. It was his idea that
because of their superior  discipline, sorcerers are  trustworthy  employees
and that they are avidly sought by institutions that are always in dire need
of such persons. Don Juan maintained that  as long as no one is aware of the
sorcerers' doings, their lack of ideological sympathies makes them appear as
model workers.
     Don Juan continued his story and said that one day, while Sebastian was
performing his duties as a  sexton, a strange man came to the church, an old
Indian  who  seemed  to be ill. In a  weak voice he  told Sebastian  that he
needed help. The nagual thought that the Indian  wanted  the  parish priest,
but the man, making a  great effort, addressed  the nagual.  In a  harsh and
direct tone, he told him that he knew that Sebastian was not only a sorcerer
but a nagual.
     Sebastian,  quite  alarmed  by this  sudden turn of events, pulled  the
Indian aside and  demanded an apology. The man replied that he was not there
to apologize but to get specialized help. He needed, he said, to receive the
nagual's energy in order to maintain his life, which, he  assured Sebastian,
had spanned thousands of years but at the moment was ebbing away.
     Sebastian, who was a very  intelligent man, unwilling  to pay attention
to  such nonsense, urged the Indian  to stop  clowning around.  The old  man
became angry and threatened Sebastian with exposing him and his group to the
ecclesiastical authorities if he did not comply with his request.
     Don  Juan reminded me that those were the times when the ecclesiastical
authorities were brutally and systematically eradicating heretical practices
among the Indians of the New Worlds The man's threat was not something to be
taken  lightly;  the  nagual  and  his group were  indeed in  mortal danger.
Sebastian asked the Indian  how he could  give him energy. The man explained
that naguals, by means of their discipline, gain a peculiar energy that they
store in their  bodies and that he would get it painlessly  from Sebastian's
energy center on  his navel. In return for it, Sebastian would get not  only
the  opportunity  to continue his activities  unscathed but also a  gift  of
power.
     The knowledge that he was  being manipulated  by the old Indian did not
sit  right  with the nagual, but  the man was  inflexible and  left  him  no
alternative but to comply with his request.
     Don  Juan assured me that the old Indian was not exaggerating about his
claims at all. He turned out  to be  one of the sorcerers  of ancient times,
one of  those known as the death defiers. He had apparently  survived to the
present  by manipulating  his assemblage  point in  ways that  only he  knew
about.
     Don Juan said that what transpired between Sebastian and that man later
became  the  ground for  an  agreement that  had bound all  six  naguals who
followed Sebastian. The death defier, kept his word; in exchange  for energy
from every  one of  those men, he made  a  donation to the giver, a  gift of
power.  Sebastian had  to accept  such a  gift, although reluctantly; he had
been  cornered and had no  other choice. All the other  naguals who followed
him, however, gladly and proudly accepted their gifts.
     Don Juan  concluded  his story, saying that over time the death  defier
came to be known as the tenant. And  for over two hundred years, the naguals
of don  Juan's  line honored  that binding  agreement,  creating a symbiotic
relationship that changed the course and final goal of their lineage.
     Don Juan did not care  to explain the story any further, and I was left
with a strange  sensation of truthfulness, which was more  bothersome to  me
than I could have imagined.
     "How did he get to live that long?" I asked.
     "No  one knows,"  don  Juan replied. "All we've  known about  him,  for
generations, is what he tells us. The death defier is the one  I asked about
the old sorcerers,  and  he  told  me  that they were  at  their peak  three
thousand years ago."
     "How do you know he was telling you the truth?" I asked.
     Don Juan  shook  his head  in amazement, if not revulsion. "When you're
facing that inconceivable unknown out there," he  said,  pointing all around
him, "you don't fool around with petty  lies. Petty lies are only for people
who have never witnessed what's out there, waiting for them."
     "What's waiting for us out there, don Juan?"
     His answer,  a seemingly  innocuous  phrase,  was more terrifying to me
than if he had described the most horrendous thing.
     "Something utterly  impersonal,"  he said. He must have  noticed that I
was coming apart.  He  made me change levels of awareness  to make my fright
vanish.
     A  few months later, my dreaming practices took a strange turn. I began
to get, in my dreams, replies to questions I was planning  to ask  don Juan.
The most  impressive part of this  oddity was that it quickly lapsed into my
waking hours. And one day,  while I was sitting at my desk, I got a reply to
an  unvoiced  question  about the  realness  of inorganic beings. I had seen
inorganic beings in dreams so many times I  had  begun  to think of  them as
real. I reminded  myself I  had even  touched one, in a state of  seminormal
consciousness in  the  Sonoran desert. And my dreams  had been  periodically
deviated to views of worlds I seriously doubted could  have been products of
my  mentality. I wished to give don Juan my best shot, in terms of a concise
query, so I molded a question in my mind: 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?
     After formulating the question  to myself, I  heard a strange laughter,
just as  I had the day  I wrestled with  the inorganic  being. Then  a man's
voice  answered me. "That  realm exists  in a  particular  position  of  the
assemblage point," it said. "Just like  your world  exists  in  the habitual
position of the assemblage point."
     The last thing I wanted was to enter into a dialogue with a disembodied
voice, so I stood  up and ran out of  my house. The  thought occurred to  me
that I was losing my mind. Another worry to add to my collection of worries.
     The  voice  had  been  so  clear  and authoritative  that  it  not only
intrigued me but  terrified me. I waited with great trepidation for oncoming
barrages  of that  voice,  but the  event was never  repeated. At the  first
opportunity I had, I consulted with don Juan.
     He was not impressed  in the  least. "You must understand, once and for
all, that things like  this are very normal in the  life of a sorcerer,"  he
said.  "You  are  not  going mad;  you  are simply hearing the  voice of the
dreaming  emissary.  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."
     "What is the dreaming emissary?"
     "Alien  energy  that has conciseness. Alien energy that purports to aid
dreamers by telling them things. The problem  with  the dreaming emissary is
that it can  tell only what the sorcerers already know or  should know, were
they worth their salt."
     "To say that  it's alien energy that has conciseness doesn't help me at
all, don Juan. What kind of energy - benign, malignant, right, wrong, what?"
     "It's just what I said, alien  energy. An impersonal force that we turn
into a  very personal one because it  has voice. Some sorcerers swear by it.
They even  see  it. Or, as you yourself have done,  they simply hear it as a
man's or  a  woman's voice. And the  voice  can tell them about the state of
things, which most of the time they take as sacred advice."
     "Why do some of us hear it as a voice?"
     "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. Watch out! You may  see it and feel it as a
naked woman."
     Don Juan laughed at his own remark, but I was too scared for levity.
     "Is this force capable of materializing itself?" I asked.
     "Certainly,"  he  replied.  "And  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."
     I told don Juan then about what the voice had said to me.
     "It's  just like I said," don Juan  remarked. "The emissary didn't tell
you anything new.  Its statements were correct,  but  it  only seemed  to be
revealing things to you. What  the  emissary did was merely  repeat what you
already knew."
     "I'm afraid I can't claim that I knew all that, don Juan."
     "Yes, you can.  You know now infinitely  more  about the mystery of the
universe than what you rationally suspect. But that's our  human  malady, to
know more about the mystery of the universe than we suspect."
     Having  experienced  this incredible phenomenon all by  myself, without
don  Juan's coaching, made  me feel elated.  I wanted more information about
the emissary. I began to  ask don Juan whether he also heard  the emissary's
voice.
     He  interrupted me and with a broad smile said, "Yes, yes. The emissary
also talks to me. In my youth I used to see it as a friar with a black cowl.
A talking friar who used to scare the daylights out of me, every time. Then,
when my fear was more manageable, it became a disembodied voice, which tells
me things to this day."
     "What kinds of things, don Juan?"
     "Anything I focus my intent on, things I don't want to take the trouble
of following up  myself. Like, for example, details about the behavior of my
apprentices. What they do when  I  am not  around. It tells  me things about
you, in particular. The emissary tells me everything you do."
     At that point, I really did not care for the direction our conversation
had taken.  I frantically searched  my mind for questions about other topics
while he roared with laughter.
     "Is the dreaming emissary an inorganic being?" I asked.
     "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."
     "Do you mean, don Juan, that every dreamer hears or sees the emissary?"
     "Everyone hears the emissary; very few see it or feel it."
     "Do you have any explanation for this?"
     "No.  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, the nagual Julian, helped me make up my  mind to refuse it. I've
never regretted that decision."
     "Do you think I should refuse the inorganic beings myself, don Juan?"
     He did  not answer  me; instead,  he explained that  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," he added.  "Their
price is too high."
     "What is their price?"
     "Our  lives,  our energy, our devotion  to  them.  In other  words, our
freedom."
     "But what do 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!"
     "I don't see why it would be dangerous."
     "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 do you think the result would be?"
     I had no comeback.  I thought I  understood perfectly  well the reasons
for his rejection.
     "The problem with  the old sorcerers was  that  they  learned wonderful
things, but on the basis of their unadulterated lower selves," don Juan went
on. "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."
     "Do these relationships with inorganic beings exist today?"
     "I can't answer that truthfully. All I can say is that I can't conceive
of having a  relationship like  that  myself.  Involvements of  this  nature
curtail our search  for freedom by consuming  all  our available energy.  In
order to really follow their allies' example, the old sorcerers had to spend
their  lives  in  the realm of  the  inorganic  beings. The amount of energy
needed to accomplish such a sustained journey is staggering."
     "Do you mean, don Juan, that the  old sorcerers  were  able to exist in
those realms like we exist here?"
     "Not  quite like we exist here, but certainly they lived: they retained
their awareness, their individuality. The dreaming emissary became  the most
vital  entity for those sorcerers. 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."
     "Have you ever been in that realm, don Juan?"
     "Countless times.  And so have  you. But there is  no point in  talking
about  it  now. You  haven't cleared  all  the  debris  from  your  dreaming
attention yet. We'll talk about that realm some day."
     "Do  I  gather,  don  Juan,  that  you don't  approve of  or  like  the
emissary?"
     "I neither  approve of it 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. One day you will agree with me. You'll see."
     In  the tone of don Juan's words, I caught a veiled  implication of his
belief that I disagreed with him about the emissary. I was about to confront
him with it when I heard the emissary's  voice in my ears. "He's right," the
voice said. "You like  me because  you find nothing wrong with exploring all
possibilities.  You want knowledge;  knowledge  is  power. You don't want to
remain safe in the routines and beliefs of your daily world."
     The  emissary said  all  that in English  with  a marked Pacific  Coast
intonation. Then it shifted into Spanish. I heard a slight Argentine accent.
I had never heard the  emissary speaking like this before. It fascinated me.
The emissary  told me about fulfillment, knowledge; about how far away I was
from  my  birthplace; about  my craving for adventure and my  near obsession
with new things, new horizons. The  voice even  talked  to me in Portuguese,
with a definite inflection from the southern pampas.
     To hear that voice pouring out all this flattery not only scared me but
nauseated me.  I told don Juan, right on  the spot, that I  had to  stop  my
dreaming  training.  He looked  up at me,  caught  by surprise.  But when  I
repeated what I had heard, he agreed I should stop, although I sensed he was
doing it only  to appease me. A few  weeks  later, I found my reaction a bit
hysterical  and my decision to withdraw unsound.  I went back to my dreaming
practices. I was  sure  don Juan  was  aware  that  I  had canceled  out  my
withdrawal.
     On  one  of my visits to  him,  quite abruptly, he spoke about  dreams.
"Just because we haven't been taught to emphasize dreams as a  genuine field
for  exploration  doesn't  mean  they are  not one," he began.  "Dreams  are
analyzed  for  their meaning or are  taken as portents,  but  never are they
taken as a realm of real events."
     "To my  knowledge, only the old sorcerers  did that," don Juan went on,
"but at the end they flubbed it. They  got greedy, and  when they came to  a
crucial crossroads, they took the wrong fork. They put all their eggs in one
basket: the fixation  of the assemblage point on  the thousands of positions
it can adopt."
     Don Juan expressed  his  bewilderment at the fact that out of  all  the
marvelous  things  the old sorcerers  learned exploring  those  thousands of
positions,  only  the art of dreaming and the  art of  stalking  remain.  He
reiterated that the  art  of dreaming is concerned with  the displacement of
the assemblage point.  Then he defined  stalking as the art that deals  with
the  fixation of  the  assemblage  point on any  location  to  which  it  is
displaced.
     "To  fixate  the  assemblage point  on any new  spot  means  to acquire
cohesion,"  he said.  "You  have  been  doing  just that  in  your  dreaming
practices."
     "I thought I was perfecting my energy body," I said,  somehow surprised
at his statement.
     "You are doing  that and much more, you  are learning to have cohesion.
Dreaming  does it by forcing dreamers  to fixate the  assemblage  point. The
dreaming attention, the energy body, the second  attention, the relationship
with  inorganic  beings,  the  dreaming  emissary  are  but  by-products  of
acquiring cohesion; in other words, they are all by-products of fixating the
assemblage point on a number of dreaming positions."
     "What is a dreaming position, don Juan?"
     "Any  new  position  to which  the assemblage  point has been displaced
during sleep."
     "How do we fixate the assemblage point on a dreaming position?"
     "By sustaining  the view  of any item in  your  dreams, or by  changing
dreams at  will. Through your dreaming practices, you are  really exercising
your capacity  to  be  cohesive;  that is  to say, you  are  exercising your
capacity  to  maintain a new  energy shape by  holding the assemblage  point
fixed on the position of any particular dream you are having."
     "Do I really maintain a new energy shape?"
     "Not exactly,  and not because  you  can't  but  only  because  you are
shifting the assemblage point instead of moving it. Shifts of the assemblage
point  give rise to minute changes, which are practically unnoticeable.  The
challenge  of  shifts  is that they  are  so small and so  numerous that  to
maintain cohesiveness in all of them is a triumph."
     "How do we know we are maintaining cohesion?"
     "We know it by the clarity of our  perception. The clearer the view  of
our dreams, the greater our cohesion."
     He said then that it was time for me to have a practical application of
what I had  learned in dreaming. Without giving me a chance to ask anything,
he urged me to focus my attention, as if I were  in a  dream, on the foliage
of a desert tree growing nearby:  a mesquite tree. "Do you  want  me to just
gaze at it?" I asked. "I don't want you to just gaze at it; I want you to do
something very special with that foliage," he said.  "Remember that, in your
dreams, once you  are able  to  hold the  view of any  item, you are  really
holding the  dreaming position of your assemblage point.  Now, gaze at those
leaves as  if you were  in  a dream, but with a  slight yet most  meaningful
variation: you are going to hold  your  dreaming attention on the  leaves of
the mesquite tree in the awareness  of our daily world." My nervousness made
it  impossible  for me to follow his line of thought. He patiently explained
that by staring at the foliage, I would accomplish a minute  displacement of
my  assemblage  point.  Then,  by  summoning my dreaming  attention  through
staring   at  individual  leaves,  I   would  actually  fixate  that  minute
displacement, and my cohesion would make me perceive  in terms of the second
attention. He added, with a  chuckle, that the process  was so simple it was
ridiculous.
     Don Juan was right.  All  I needed was to focus my sight on the leaves,
maintain it, and  in one  instant I was drawn into a  vortex-like sensation,
extremely like  the vortexes in my dreams. The foliage  of the mesquite tree
became a universe of sensory  data. It was  as  if the foliage had swallowed
me,  but it was not only my sight that was engaged; if I touched the leaves,
I  actually felt them. I could  also smell them.  My dreaming attention  was
multisensorial instead of solely visual, as in my regular dreaming.
     What had begun as gazing at the foliage of the mesquite tree had turned
into a dream.  I believed I was in a dreamt  tree, as I had been in trees of
countless dreams. And, naturally, I behaved  in  this dreamt tree  as I  had
learned to behave  in  my dreams; I moved from item to  item, pulled  by the
force of a vortex that took  shape on whatever part of the tree I focused my
multisensorial dreaming attention. Vortexes were formed not only  on  gazing
but also on touching anything with any part of my body.
     In the midst  of  this  vision  or  dream, I  had an attack of rational
doubts. I began to wonder if I had really climbed the tree in a daze and was
actually hugging the leaves, lost in the foliage, without knowing what I was
doing. Or perhaps I had fallen asleep, possibly mesmerized by the fluttering
of leaves in the wind, and was having a dream. But  just like in dreaming, I
didn't have enough energy to ponder for too long. My thoughts were fleeting.
They lasted an instant; then  the force of direct  experience blanketed them
out completely. A  sudden motion  around me shook  everything and  virtually
made  me  emerge  from a clump of leaves, as  if I  had broken away from the
tree's  magnetic pull.  I  was  facing then, from an  elevation,  an immense
horizon. Dark mountains and green vegetation surrounded  me. Another jolt of
energy made me shake from my bones out; then I was somewhere else.  Enormous
trees loomed everywhere.  They  were bigger than the  Douglas firs of Oregon
and Washington State.  Never had I  seen a forest like that. The scenery was
such  a contrast to the aridness of the Sonoran desert that it left  me with
no doubt that I was having a dream.
     I held on to that extraordinary view, afraid to let go, knowing that it
was  indeed  a dream  and would disappear  once  I had  run out of  dreaming
attention. But the images lasted, even when I thought I should have  run out
of dreaming attention. A horrifying thought crossed  my  mind then:  what if
this was neither a dream nor the daily world?
     Frightened, as  an  animal must  experience fright, I recoiled into the
clump of leaves I had emerged from. The momentum of my backward  motion kept
me going through the tree foliage and around the hard branches. It pulled me
away from the tree, and in one split second I was standing next to don Juan,
at the door of his house, in the desert in Sonora.
     I instantly realized  I had entered again into a state in which I could
think  coherently,  but I could not talk. Don Juan told  me not to worry. He
said that our speech faculty is extremely flimsy and attacks of muteness are
common among sorcerers who venture beyond the limits of normal perception.
     My  gut feeling was that don Juan had taken pity on me  and had decided
to  give  me a pep  talk.  But the voice  of the dreaming emissary,  which I
clearly heard at that instant, said that in a  few hours and after some rest
I was going to be perfectly well.
     Upon awakening  I gave don Juan, at his request, a complete description
of what I had  seen and done. He warned me  that it was not possible to rely
on  my rationality to  understand  my experience, not because my rationality
was in any way impaired but because  what  had taken place was a  phenomenon
outside the parameters of reason.
     I, naturally, argued that nothing can be outside the limits  of reason;
things can be obscure, but sooner or later reason always finds a way to shed
light on anything. And I really believed this.
     Don Juan,  with  extreme patience, pointed out  that  reason  is only a
by-product  of the habitual  position  of  the assemblage  point; therefore,
knowing what is going on, being of sound mind, having our feet on the ground
- 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.
     He added  that what dreaming does is give us the fluidity to enter into
other  worlds  by destroying  our  sense of  knowing this  world. He  called
dreaming 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,"  he went on,  "the  position of the assemblage point. The
old sorcerers' curse, as well as mankind's thorn in the side."
     "Why do you say that, don Juan?"
     "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," he  continued. "It'd be
really disgusting if you sided with mankind, as if you didn't know about the
existence of  the assemblage point. But  it'd be  even more insidious if you
sided with the old sorcerers  and cynically manipulate the assemblage  point
for gain."
     "I still don't understand. What is the connection of all this with what
I experienced yesterday?"
     "Yesterday, you were in a different world. But if you ask me where that
world is, and I tell you that it is in the position of the assemblage point,
my answer won't make any sense to you."
     Don Juan's argument was  that  I had  two  choices.  One was  to follow
mankind's rationales  and  be faced with a predicament: my  experience would
tell me that other worlds exist, but my reason would say that such worlds do
not  and cannot exist. The  other  choice  was  to follow the old sorcerers'
rationales,  in  which case I  would automatically  accept the  existence of
other worlds,  and my greed  alone would make my 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.
     I  was too numb to follow his argument,  but then I  realized I did not
have to  follow  it  because I agreed with him completely, despite  the fact
that  I did not have a total  picture of what I was agreeing about. Agreeing
with him was rather a feeling that came from far away,  an ancient certainty
I had lost, which was now slowly finding its way back to me.
     The return  to  my dreaming  practices  eliminated  these turmoils, but
created  new ones. For example,  after months of hearing it daily, I stopped
finding the dreaming emissary's voice an annoyance  or a wonder. It became a
matter of course for me. And I made so  many mistakes influenced by  what it
said that I almost understood don Juan's reluctance  to take it seriously. A
psychoanalyst would have had a field day interpreting the emissary according
to all the possible permutations of my intrapersonal dynamics.
     Don Juan maintained a  steadfast view  on  it: it 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 was  definitely  one of  them. There was no way I could have remained
impassive being in direct contact with  such an extraordinary event: a voice
that  clearly and concisely told me in  three  languages hidden things about
anything or anyone I focused  my attention on. Its  only drawback, which was
of  no consequence to  me,  was that we were  not synchronized. The emissary
used to tell  me things about people or events when I had honestly forgotten
I had been interested in them.
     I asked don Juan about this  oddity, and he said that it had to do with
the rigidity  of my assemblage point. He explained that I had been reared by
old adults and that they had imbued me with old people's views; therefore, I
was dangerously righteous.  His  urge to give  me potions of  hallucinogenic
plants was but an effort, he said, to shake my assemblage point and allow it
to have a minimal margin of fluidity.
     "If  you don't  develop this margin," he went on, "either you'll become
more  righteous  or you'll  become  a hysterical  sorcerer.  My interest  in
telling you about the old sorcerers is not to bad-mouth them but to pit them
against you. Sooner or later, your assemblage point will  be more fluid, but
not  fluid  enough to offset your  facility to be  like them: righteous  and
hysterical."
     "How can I avoid all that, don Juan?"
     "There is only  one way. Sorcerers call it sheer understanding. I  call
it a  romance  with knowledge. It's  the  drive  sorcerers  use  to know, to
discover, to be bewildered."
     Don Juan changed the subject and continued to  explain  the fixation of
the  assemblage  point.  He  said that 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 point's
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  fetters  a  specific  way  of
perceiving. Through usage, this specific way of perceiving becomes  a system
of interpreting sensory data.
     Don Juan  pointed  out that, 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 it  and perceiving energy
directly is what transforms a person into a sorcerer.
     Don Juan expressed wonder at what he called the greatest accomplishment
of  our  human  upbringing: to  lock  our  assemblage point on  its habitual
position. For, once it  is immobilized there, our perception  can be coached
and  guided to interpret what we perceive. In  other words,  we can then  be
guided to perceive more in terms of our system than  in terms of our senses.
He assured me that human perception  is universally homogeneous, because the
assemblage points of the whole human race are fixed on the same spot.
     He went on to say that 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,"  don  Juan
continued. "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 a thoroughly comprehensible new world.
Just like what happened to  you when you gazed at the leaves of the mesquite
tree."
     "What exactly happened to me, don Juan?"
     "Your perception was  chaotic  for a while;  everything came  to you at
once, and your system for interpreting the world didn't  function. Then, the
chaos cleared up, and there you were in front of a new world."
     "We are  again,  don Juan, at the same place we were before. Does  that
world exist, or is it merely my mind that concocted it?"
     "We certainly are back, and the answer is still the same. It  exists in
the precise position your  assemblage  point was at that moment. In order to
perceive it,  you  needed cohesion,  that  is, you needed  to  maintain your
assemblage point fixed on that position, which you did. The  result was that
you totally perceived a new world for a while."
     "But would others perceive that same world?"
     "If  they  had  uniformity  and cohesion, they would. Uniformity  is to
hold,  in  unison,  the  same position  of  the  assemblage  point.  The old
sorcerers called the entire act of acquiring uniformity and cohesion outside
the normal world stalking perception.
     "The art  of stalking,"  he continued,  "as I have  already said, deals
with the  fixation  of the  assemblage point.  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."
     He explained that 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. This is the  reason the  old sorcerers
put  as  much  emphasis on dreaming as they did on stalking.  One art cannot
exist without the other, especially for the kinds of activities in which the
old sorcerers were involved.
     "What were those activities, don Juan?"
     "The old sorcerers called  them the intricacies of the second attention
or the grand adventure of the unknown."
     Don Juan  said that these activities stem from the displacements of the
assemblage  point. 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.
     "What was the benefit of that, don Juan?"
     "We can't talk about benefits. We can talk only about end results."
     He explained that the cohesiveness  of the old  sorcerers was such that
it  allowed  them  to  become  perceptually  and  physically everything  the
specific position of their assemblage  points dictated. They could transform
themselves  into  anything  for which  they had  a  specific  inventory.  An
inventory is, he said, all the details of perception  involved  in becoming,
for example, a jaguar, a bird, an insect, et cetera, et cetera.
     "It's very  hard for  me to  believe that  this  transformation can  be
possible," I said.
     "It is possible,"  he assured me. "Not  so much for you and me, but for
them. For them, it was nothing."
     He said that 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.
     "But isn't that  what mentally ill people do? Make up their own reality
as they go along?" I said.
     "No,  it  isn't the same. Insane people imagine a reality of their  own
because they don't have any preconceived purpose at all. Insane people bring
chaos into the chaos. Sorcerers, on the contrary, bring order  to the chaos.
Their  preconceived,  transcendental purpose  is to free  their  perception.
Sorcerers don't make lip 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."
     Don Juan  then  gave  me a new version of what had happened  to me as I
gazed at the mesquite tree. He said that I began by perceiving the energy of
the  tree. On  the subjective  level,  however,  I  believed I was  dreaming
because I employed dreaming techniques to  perceive energy. He asserted that
to use  dreaming techniques in the world of everyday life was one of the old
sorcerers'  most  effective  devices. It  made  perceiving  energy  directly
dreamlike,  instead  of  totally  chaotic,  until  a  moment when  something
rearranged perception  and  the  sorcerer found himself facing a new world -
the very thing that had happened to me.
     I told him  about the  thought I'd had, which I  had  barely  dared  to
think: that the scenery I was viewing was not a dream, nor was  it our daily
world.
     "It wasn't," he said. "I've been  saying this to you over and over, and
you think that I am merely  repeating myself. I know how difficult it is for
the mind to allow mindless  possibilities  to  become 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."
     "Do you mean, don Juan, that the goal of your teaching is to prepare me
to go into those worlds?"
     "No.  I don't mean  that. We go into those worlds only as  an exercise.
Those journeys are the antecedents of the sorcerers of today. We do the same
dreaming  that the  old  sorcerers used  to do, but at one moment we deviate
into new ground.  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."
     "I haven't gotten to that yet, have I?"
     "No.  You are only  beginning. And at the beginning everyone has to  go
through the old sorcerers' steps. After all, they were the ones who invented
dreaming."
     "At what point will I  then begin to learn the new sorcerers'  brand of
dreaming?"
     "You  have enormous  ground  yet  to  cover. Years  from  now  perhaps.
Besides, in your  case, I  have to be extraordinarily careful. In character,
you are  definitely  linked to the  old sorcerers.  I've  said  this to  you
before, but you always manage  to avoid  my probes. Sometimes I  even  think
that some alien energy is advising you, but then I discard the idea. You are
not devious."
     "What are you talking about, don Juan?"
     "You've done, unwittingly,  two things  that  worry the hell out of me.
You traveled  with  your energy body to a place outside this world the first
time  you dreamt. And  you  walked there! And  then  you traveled  with your
energy  body to  another place  outside  this world,  but parting  from  the
awareness of the daily world."
     "Why would that  worry you, don  Juan?" '"Dreaming is too easy for you.
And that is a damnation if we don't watch it. It leads to the human unknown.
As I  said  to  you, modern-day  sorcerers  strive to  get  to  the nonhuman
unknown."
     "What can the nonhuman unknown be?"
     "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."
     "Where are  those  worlds,  don Juan?  In different  positions  of  the
assemblage point?"
     "Right. 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."
     "But, what's the point of perceiving all that?"
     "You already asked  me, today, the same question. You speak like a true
merchant.  What's the risk?  you  ask.  What's  the percentage  gain  to  my
investment? Is it going to better me?"
     "There is  no way to answer  that. The merchant mind does commerce. But
freedom  cannot  be an investment. 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."
     "I didn't  ask that question  in that spirit,  don Juan. What I want to
know is  what  can be the driving force to  do all this for a lazy  bum like
myself?"
     "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."


5. THE WORLD OF INORGANIC BEINGS

     Faithful to my  agreement to wait for don Juan to initiate any  comment
on  dreaming,  only  in  cases  of  necessity  did  I  ask him  for  advice.
Ordinarily,  though, he not only  seemed reluctant to  touch the subject but
was somehow displeased with me about it. In my estimation, a confirmation of
his  disapproval was  the fact that  whenever  we talked  about my  dreaming
activities, he always minimized the import of anything I had accomplished.
     For  me, at that  time, the animate existence  of  inorganic beings had
become the most crucial aspect  of my dreaming practices. After encountering
them in  my  dreams, and  especially after my bout with  them  in the desert
around  don Juan's  house,  I  should  have been more willing to  take their
existence as a serious affair.  But all these events had quite the  opposite
effect on me. I became adamant and doggedly denied the possibility that they
existed.
     Then I  had  a  change of heart  and  decided to conduct  an  objective
inquiry about them. The method of this inquiry required that I first compile
a  record of everything that transpired in my  dreaming  sessions, then  use
that  record as  a matrix  to find  out if my dreaming proved  or  disproved
anything about the inorganic beings. I actually wrote down hundreds of pages
of meticulous but meaningless details, when it should  have been clear to me
that the evidence of their existence had been gathered almost as soon  as  I
had started my inquiry.
     It took but a few sessions for me to discover that what I thought to be
don Juan's casual recommendation - to suspend judgment and let the inorganic
beings come to me - was, in fact,  the  very procedure used by the sorcerers
of  antiquity to attract them. By leaving me to find it out for myself,  don
Juan was simply  following his  sorcery  training. He had remarked  time and
time  again  that  it is  very  difficult  to  make  the  self  give  up its
strongholds  except through practice. One of  the  self's strongest lines of
defense is indeed  our rationality, and this  is not only  the  most durable
line  of defense when it comes to sorcery actions and explanations but  also
the  most threatened.  Don  Juan believed that  the existence  of  inorganic
beings is a foremost assailant of our rationality.
     In my dreaming practices, I had an established course, which I followed
every single  day  without  deviation.  I aimed  first  at  observing  every
conceivable  item of  my  dreams, then  at  changing dreams. I  can  say  in
sincerity  that I  observed  universes of detail in dreams upon dreams. As a
matter of course, at one  given moment my  dreaming attention began to wane,
and  my  dreaming sessions  ended  either  in my  falling asleep and  having
regular dreams, in which I  had  no dreaming attention whatsoever,  or in my
waking up and not being able to sleep at all.
     From time to time, however, as don Juan  had described it, a current of
foreign energy, a scout, as he called it, was injected into my dreams. Being
forewarned helped  me to adjust  my  dreaming attention and be on the alert.
The first time I noticed foreign  energy, I was dreaming about shopping in a
department store. I was going from counter to  counter looking for antiques.
I  finally  found  one.  The  incongruence  of  looking  for  antiques in  a
department store was  so  obvious that it made me chuckle, but  since  I had
found one, I forgot about that incongruence. The antique was the handle of a
walking stick. The  salesman told  me that it was  made of iridium, which he
called one of the  hardest substances in the world. It was  a  carved piece:
the head and shoulders of a monkey. It looked like jade  to me. The salesman
was insulted when I insinuated that it might be jade, and to prove his point
he hurled the object, with  all  his  strength, against the cement floor. It
did  not break but bounced like a ball and then sailed away, spinning like a
Frisbee. I followed it. It  disappeared behind some trees. I ran to look for
it, and I found it,  stuck on  the ground. It had  been  transformed into an
extraordinarily beautiful, deep green and black, full-length walking stick.
     I coveted  it. I grabbed it and struggled to pull it out of  the ground
before anyone  else came  along. But,  hard as  I tried, I could not make it
budge.  I  was afraid I  would break it  if I  attempted  to pry it loose by
shaking  it back and  forth. So I began to dig around it with my bare hands.
As I kept on digging, it kept on melting, until only a puddle of green water
was left in its place. I stared at the water; it suddenly seemed to explode.
It turned into a white bubble, and then it was gone. My dream continued into
other  images  and details,  which  were not outstanding, although they were
crystal clear.
     When I told don  Juan about this dream, he said, "You isolated a scout.
Scouts are more  numerous  when our  dreams are average,  normal  ones.  The
dreams of dreamers are strangely  free from scouts. When they  appear,  they
are identifiable by the strangeness and incongruity surrounding them."
     "Incongruity, in what manner, don Juan?"
     "Their presence doesn't make any sense."
     "Very few things make sense in a dream."
     "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."
     "Do you know why is that so, don Juan?"
     "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.  It seems that in dreamers'  dreams  nonsensical  things  disappear,
perhaps to ensure that dreamers catch the presence of scouts."
     Don Juan advised me to  pay  close attention and remember every  single
possible detail  of  the dream  I had had. He even made me repeat what I had
told him.
     "You  baffle me," I  said. "You don't want to hear  anything  about  my
dreaming,  and  then  you  do. Is  there  any order  to  your  refusals  and
acceptances?"
     "You bet there is order behind all this," he said. "Chances are, you'll
do the same  someday to another dreamer. Some items are  of  key  importance
because they are associated with the spirit. Others are entirely unimportant
by reason of being associated with our indulging personality."
     "The first scout you isolate will always  be present, in any form, even
iridium. By the way, what's iridium?"
     "I don't really know," I said in total sincerity.
     "There you are! And what will you say if it turns out to be one  of the
strongest substances in the world?"
     Don  Juan's  eyes shone with delight, while I nervously laughed at that
absurd possibility, which, I learned later, is true.
     I began to notice from then  on the presence of incongruous items in my
dreams.  Once I  had accepted don Juan's categorization of foreign energy in
dreams,  I  totally agreed with  him  that incongruous  items  were  foreign
invaders  of  my dreams. Upon  isolating them, my  dreaming attention always
focused on  them with  an  intensity  that  did not  occur  under any  other
circumstances.
     Another thing I  noticed was that every time  foreign energy invaded my
dreams,  my  dreaming attention had to work  hard to turn  it  into  a known
object.  The  handicap  of  my  dreaming  attention  was  its  inability  to
accomplish fully  such a  transformation; the  end result  was a bastardized
item, nearly unknown to me. The foreign energy then dissipated quite easily,
the bastardized  item vanished,  turning  into  a blob of  light, which  was
quickly absorbed by other pressing details of my dreams.
     When I asked don Juan to comment on  what was happening to me, he said,
"At this point in  your  dreaming,  scouts are  reconnoiterers sent  by  the
inorganic realm. They are very fast, meaning that they don't stay long."
     "Why do you say that they are reconnoiterers, don Juan?"
     "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."
     "What makes you say that, don Juan?"
     "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."
     "Do  you mean,  don Juan, that  inorganic  beings  are stationary  like
trees?"
     "Certainly. What you see in dreaming as bright or dark sticks are their
projections. What you hear as the voice of the dreaming emissary  is equally
their projection. And so are their scouts."
     For some unfathomable reason, I was overwhelmed  by these statements. I
was  suddenly  filled  with  anxiety.  I asked don  Juan if trees  also  had
projections like that."
     "They do," he said. "Their projections are, however, even less friendly
to us than those of the inorganic beings. Dreamers  never seek  them, unless
they  are  in a  state  of  profound  amenity with trees,  which  is  a very
difficult state to  attain. We have no friends on this  earth, you know." He
chuckled and added, "It's no mystery why."
     "It may not be a mystery to you, don Juan, but it certainly is to me."
     "We  are destructive. We have antagonized every  living being  on  this
earth. That's why we have no friends."
     I  felt  so  ill  at  ease  that  I  wanted  to stop  the  conversation
altogether. But a compulsive urge made me return to the subject of inorganic
beings. "What do you think I should do to follow the scouts?" I asked.
     "Why in the world would you want to follow them?"
     "I am conducting an objective inquiry about inorganic beings."
     "You're  pulling my leg, aren't you?  I  thought you  were unmovable on
your stand that inorganic beings don't exist."
     His scoffing tone and cackling laughter told me  what his thoughts  and
feelings about my objective inquiry were.
     "I've  changed  my  mind,  don Juan. Now I  want  to  explore all those
possibilities."
     "Remember, the realm of inorganic beings was  the old sorcerers' field.
To  get there, they tenaciously fixed their dreaming attention on the  items
of their dreams. In that fashion, they  were able to isolate the scouts. And
when they had the scouts in focus, they shouted their intent to follow them.
The instant the  old sorcerers  voiced that intent, off they went, pulled by
that foreign energy."
     "Is it that simple, don Juan?"
     He did not answer. He just laughed at me as if daring me to do it.
     At home,  I tired of  searching  for  don  Juan's  true meanings. I was
thoroughly unwilling to consider that  he  might  have described  an  actual
procedure. After  running out of ideas and patience, one day I let my  guard
down. In a  dream I  was  having  then,  I  was baffled by a fish  that  had
suddenly jumped out  of a pond I was walking  by. The  fish twitched  by  my
feet, then flew like a  colored bird,  perching on a branch,  still  being a
fish. The scene was so outlandish that my dreaming attention was galvanized.
I instantly knew it was a scout. A second  later,  when the fish-bird turned
into a point of light,  I shouted my intent to  follow it, and, just as  don
Juan had said, off I went into another world.
     I flew through a seemingly dark tunnel as if I were a weightless flying
insect. The sensation of a tunnel ended abruptly. It was exactly as if I had
been  spewed out of  a tube and  the  impulse had left me smack  against  an
immense physical mass; I was almost touching it. I could  not see the end of
it  in  any direction  I looked. The  entire  thing  reminded  me so much of
science fiction movies that I  was utterly convinced I was  constructing the
view of that mass myself, as one constructs a dream. Why  not? The thought I
had was that, after all, I was asleep, dreaming.
     I settled down to observe the details of my dream.  What I  was viewing
looked very  much like a  gigantic sponge.  It  was porous  and cavernous. I
could  not feel its texture, but it looked  rough and  fibrous. It  was dark
brownish  in color.  Then I had a momentary jolt of doubt about that  silent
mass being just a dream. What I was facing did not change shape. It  did not
move either. As I  looked at  it fixedly,  I had the complete  impression of
something  real but stationary; it was planted somewhere, and it had such  a
powerful attraction that  I was incapable of deviating my dreaming attention
to examine anything else, including myself.  Some strange force, which I had
never before encountered in my dreaming, had me riveted down.
     Then I  clearly felt that the mass  released my dreaming attention; all
my awareness focused on the  scout that had taken me there. It looked like a
firefly in  the darkness, hovering over me, by my side. In its realm, it was
a blob of sheer energy. I was able  to see its energetic sizzling. It seemed
to be conscious of me. Suddenly, it lurched onto me and tugged me or prodded
me. I did not feel its touch, yet I knew it  was touching me. That sensation
was startling and new, it was as if a part of me that was not there had been
electrified  by  that  touch,  ripples of  energy went through it, one after
another.
     From that moment on, everything in my dreaming became much more real. I
had a very difficult time keeping the idea that I  was dreaming  a dream. To
this  difficulty,  I had to add the  certainty I had that with its touch the
scout had made an energetic connection with me.  I knew what it wanted me to
do the instant it seemed to tug me or shove me.
     The  first thing it did was to push me through a huge cavern or opening
into the  physical mass I had  been  facing. Once I was inside  that mass, I
realized that the interior was as  homogeneously porous  as  the outside but
much softer  looking, as if  the roughness had been sanded down. What  I was
facing was  a structure that looked something like the enlarged picture of a
beehive.  There were  countless  geometric-shaped  tunnels  going  in  every
direction. Some went up or  down, or to my left or  my  right; they were  at
angles with one another, or going up or down on steep or mild inclines.
     The  light was very  dim, yet  everything was  perfectly  visible.  The
tunnels  seemed to be alive  and conscious;  they sizzled. I stared at them,
and the realization that  I was seeing hit me. Those were tunnels of energy.
At  the  instant of this  realization,  the voice of the  dreaming  emissary
roared inside my ears, so loudly I could not understand what it said. "Lower
it down," I yelled with  unusual impatience and became aware that if I spoke
I blocked my view of the tunnels and entered into a vacuum where all I could
do was hear.
     The emissary modulated its voice and said, "You are inside an inorganic
being. Choose a tunnel and you can even live in it."  The voice  stopped for
an instant, then added, "That is, if you want to do it."
     I  could  not bring  myself  to  say anything. I  was  afraid  that any
statement of mine might be construed as the opposite of what I meant.