The Art of Dreaming (2 page)

"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.