see in dreaming not only did I have
to intend seeing but I had to put my intent into loud words. For reasons he
refused to explain, he insisted that I had to speak up. He conceded that
there are other means to accomplish the same result, but he asserted that
voicing one's intent is the simplest and most direct way.
The first time I put into words my intent to see, I was dreaming of a
church bazaar. There were so many articles that I could not make up my mind
which one to gaze at. A giant, conspicuous vase in a corner made up my mind
for me. I gazed at it, voicing my intent to see. The vase remained in my
view for an instant, then it changed into another object.
I gazed at as many things as I could in that dream. After I voiced my
intent to see, every item I had chosen to gaze at vanished or turned into
something else, as had happened all along in my dreaming practices. My
dreaming attention was finally exhausted, and I woke up tremendously
frustrated, almost angry.
For months on end, I actually gazed at hundreds of items in my dreams
and deliberately voiced my intent to see, but nothing ever happened. Tired
of waiting, I finally had to ask don Juan about it.
"You need to have patience. You are learning to do something
extraordinary," he remarked. "You are learning to intend to see in your
dreams. Someday you will not have to voice your intent; you'll simply will
it, silently."
"I think I have not understood the function of whatever I am doing," I
said. "Nothing happens when I shout my intent to see. What does that mean?"
"It means that your dreams, so far, have been ordinary dreams; they
have been phantom projections; images that have life only in your dreaming
attention."
He wanted to know exactly what had happened to the items on which I had
focused my gaze. I said that they had vanished or changed shape or even
produced vortexes that eventually changed my dreams.
"It has been like that in all my daily dreaming practices," I said.
"The only thing out of the ordinary is that I am learning to yell in my
dreams, at the top of my voice."
My last statement threw don Juan into a genuine fit of belly laughter,
which I found disconcerting. I failed to find the humor of my statement or
the reason for his reaction.
"Someday you'll appreciate how funny all this is," he said as an answer
to my silent protest. "In the meantime, don't give up or get discouraged.
Keep on trying. Sooner or later, you'll hit the right note."
As usual, he was right. A couple of months later, I hit the jackpot. I
had a most unusual dream. It started with the appearance of a scout from the
inorganic beings' world. The scouts as well as the dreaming emissary had
been strangely absent from my dreams. I had not missed them or pondered
their disappearance. In fact, I was so at ease without them I had even
forgotten to ask don Juan about their absence.
In that dream, the scout had been, at first, a gigantic yellow topaz,
which I had found stuck in the back of a drawer. The moment I voiced my
intent to see, the topaz turned into a blob of sizzling energy. I feared
that I would be compelled to follow it, so I moved my gaze away from the
scout and focused it on an aquarium with tropical fish. I voiced my intent
to see and got a tremendous surprise. The aquarium emitted a low, greenish
glow and changed into a large surrealist portrait of a bejeweled woman. The
portrait emitted the same greenish glow when I voiced my intent to see.
As I gazed at that glow, the whole dream changed. I was walking then on
a street in a town that seemed familiar to me; it might have been Tucson. I
gazed at a display of women's clothes in a store window and spoke out loud
my intent to see. Instantly, a black mannequin, prominently displayed, began
to glow. I gazed next at a saleslady who came at that moment to rearrange
the window. She looked at me. After voicing my intent, I saw her glow. It
was so stupendous that I was afraid some detail in her splendorous glow
would trap me, but the woman moved inside the store before I had time to
focus my total attention on her. I certainly intended to follow her inside;
however, my dreaming attention was caught by a moving glow. It came to me
charging, filled with hatred. There was loathing in it and viciousness. I
jumped backward. The glow stopped its charge; a black substance swallowed
me, and I woke up.
These images were so vivid that I firmly believed I had seen energy and
my dream had been one of those conditions that don Juan had called
dreamlike, energy-generating. The idea that dreams can take place in the
consensual reality of our daily world intrigued me, just as the dream images
of the inorganic beings' realm had intrigued me.
"This time, you not only saw energy but crossed a dangerous boundary,"
don Juan said, after hearing my account.
He reiterated that the drill for the third gate of dreaming is to make
the energy body move on its own. In my last session, he said, I had
unwittingly superseded the effect of that drill and crossed into another
world.
"Your energy body moved," he said. "It journeyed, by itself. That kind
of journeying is beyond your abilities at this moment, and something
attacked you."
"What do you think it was, don Juan?"
"This is a predatorial universe. It could have been one of thousands of
things existing out there."
"Why do you think it attacked me?"
"For the same reason the inorganic beings attacked you: because you
made yourself available."
"Is it that clear-cut, don Juan?"
"Certainly. It's as clear-cut as what you would do if a strange-looking
spider crept across your desk while you were writing. You'd squash it, out
of fright, rather than admire it or examine it."
I was at a loss and searched for words to ask the proper question. I
wanted to ask him where my dream had taken place, or what world I was in in
that dream. But those questions did not make any sense; I could gather that
myself. Don Juan was very understanding.
"You want to know where your dreaming attention was focused, don't
you?" he asked with a grin.
This was exactly how I wanted to word my question. I reasoned that in
the dream under consideration, I must have been looking at some real object.
Just like what had happened when I saw in dreams the minute details on the
floor or the walls or the door of my room, details that I later had
corroborated, existed.
Don Juan said that in special dreams, like the one I'd had, our
dreaming attention focuses on the daily world, and that it moves instantly
from one real object to another in the world. What makes this movement
possible is that the assemblage point is on the proper dreaming position.
From that position, the assemblage point gives the dreaming attention such
fluidity that it can move in a split second over incredible distances, and
in doing so it produces a perception so fast, so fleeting that it resembles
an ordinary dream.
Don Juan explained that in my dream I had seen a real vase and then my
dreaming attention had moved over distances to see a real surrealist
painting of a bejeweled woman. The result, with the exception of seeing
energy, had been very close to an ordinary dream, in which items, when gazed
at, quickly turn into something else.
"I know how disturbing this is," he went on, definitely aware of my
bewilderment. "For some reason pertinent to the mind, to see energy in
dreaming is more upsetting than anything one can think of."
I remarked that I had seen energy in dreaming before, yet it had never
affected me like this.
"Now your energy body is complete and functioning," he said.
"Therefore, the implication that you see energy in your dream is that you
are perceiving a real world, through the veil of a dream. That's the
importance of the journey you took. It was real. It involved
energy-generating items that nearly ended your life."
"Was it that serious, don Juan?"
"You bet! The creature that attacked you was made of pure awareness and
was as deadly as anything can be. You saw its energy. I am sure that you
realize by now that unless we see in dreaming, we can't tell a real,
energy-generating thing from a phantom projection. So, even though you
battled the inorganic beings and indeed saw the scouts and the tunnels, your
energy body doesn't know for sure if they were real, meaning energy
generating. You are ninety-nine but not one hundred percent sure."
Don Juan insisted on talking about the journey I had taken. For
inexplicable reasons, I was reluctant to deal with that subject. What he was
saying produced an instantaneous reaction in me. I found myself trying to
come to grips with a deep, strange fear; it was dark and obsessive in a
nagging, visceral way.
"You definitely went into another layer of the onion," don Juan said,
finishing a statement to which I had not paid attention.
"What is this other layer of the onion, don Juan?"
"The world is like an onion, it has many skins. The world we know is
but one of them. Sometimes, we cross boundaries and enter into another skin:
another world, very much like this one, but not the same. And you entered
into one, all by yourself."
"How is this journey you're talking about possible, don Juan?"
"That is a meaningless question, because no one can answer it. In the
view of sorcerers, the universe is constructed in layers, which the energy
body can cross. Do you know where the old sorcerers are still existing to
this day? In another layer, in another skin of the onion."
"For me, the idea of a real, pragmatic journey, taken in dreams, is
very difficult to understand or to accept, don Juan."
"We have discussed this topic to exhaustion. I was convinced you
understood that the journey of the energy body depends exclusively on the
position of the assemblage point."
"You've told me that. And I have been mulling it over and over; still,
saying that the journey is in the position of the assemblage point doesn't
say anything to me."
"Your problem is your cynicism. I was just like you. Cynicism doesn't
allow us to make drastic changes in our understanding of the world. It also
forces us to feel that we are always right."
I understood his point to perfection, but I reminded him about my fight
against all that.
"I propose that you do one nonsensical thing that might turn the tide,"
he said. "Repeat to yourself incessantly that the hinge of sorcery is the
mystery of the assemblage point. If you repeat this to yourself long enough,
some unseen force takes over and makes the appropriate changes in you."
Don Juan did not give me any indication that he was being facetious. I
knew he meant every word of it. What bothered me was his insistence that I
repeat the formula ceaselessly to myself. I caught myself thinking that all
of it was asinine.
"Cut your cynical attitude," he snapped at me. "Repeat this in a bona
fide manner.
"The mystery of the assemblage point is everything in sorcery," he
continued, without looking at me. "Or rather, everything in sorcery rests on
the manipulation of the assemblage point. You know all this, but you have to
repeat it."
For an instant, as I heard his remarks, I thought I was going to die of
anguish. An incredible sense of physical sadness gripped my chest and made
me scream with pain. My stomach and diaphragm seemed to be pushing up,
moving into my chest cavity. The push was so intense that my awareness
changed levels, and I entered into my normal state. Whatever we had been
talking about became a vague thought about something that might have
happened but actually had not, according to the mundane reasoning of my
everyday-life consciousness.
The next time don Juan and I talked about dreaming, we discussed the
reasons I had been unable to proceed with my dreaming practices for months
on end. Don Juan warned me that to explain my situation he had to go in a
roundabout way. He pointed out, first, that there is an enormous difference
between the thoughts and deeds of the men of antiquity and those of modern
men. Then he pointed out that the men of ancient times had a very realistic
view of perception and awareness because their view stemmed from their
observations of the universe around them. Modern men, in contrast, have an
absurdly unrealistic view of perception and awareness because their view
stems from their observations of the social order and from their dealings
with it.
"Why are you telling me this?" I asked.
"Because you are a modern man involved with the views and observations
of men of antiquity," he replied. "And none of those views and observations
are familiar to you. Now more than ever you need sobriety and aplomb. I am
trying to make a solid bridge, a bridge you can walk on, between the views
of men of ancient times and those of modern men."
He remarked that of all the transcendental observations of the men of
ancient times, the only one with which I was familiar, because it had
filtered down to our day, was the idea of selling our souls to the devil in
exchange for immortality, which he admitted sounded to him like something
coming straight out of the relationship of the old sorcerers with the
inorganic beings. He reminded me how the dreaming emissary had tried to
induce me to stay in its realm by offering me the possibility of maintaining
my individuality and self-awareness for nearly an eternity.
"As you know, succumbing to the lure of the inorganic beings is not
just an idea; it's real," don Juan went on. "But you haven't yet fully
realized the implication of that realness. Dreaming, likewise, is real; it
is an energy-generating condition. You hear my statements and you certainly
understand what I mean, but your awareness hasn't caught up with the total
implication of it yet."
Don Juan said that my rationality knew the import of a realization of
this nature, and during our last talk it had forced my awareness to change
levels. I ended up in my normal awareness before I could deal with the
nuances of my dream. My rationality had further protected itself by
suspending my dreaming practices.
"I assure you that I am fully aware of what an energy-generating
condition means," I said.
"And I assure you that you are not," he retorted. "If you were, you
would measure dreaming with greater care and deliberation. Since you believe
you are just dreaming, you take blind chances. Your faulty reasoning tells
you that no matter what happens, at a given moment the dream will be over
and you will wake up."
He was right. In spite of all the things I had witnessed in my dreaming
practices, somehow I still retained the general sense that all of it had
been a dream.
"I am talking to you about the views of men of antiquity and the views
of modern man," don Juan went on, "because your awareness, which is the
awareness of modern man, prefers to deal with an unfamiliar concept as if it
were an empty ideality.
"If I left it up to you, you'd regard dreaming as an idea. Of course.
I'm sure you take dreaming seriously, but you don't quite believe in the
reality of dreaming."
"I understand what you are saying, don Juan, but I don't understand why
you are saying it."
"I am saying all this because you are now, for the first time, in the
proper position to understand that dreaming is an energy-generating
condition. For the first time, you can understand now that ordinary dreams
are the honing devices used to train the assemblage point to reach the
position that creates this energy-generating condition we call dreaming."
He warned me that, since dreamers touch and enter real worlds of
all-inclusive effects, they ought to be in a permanent state of the most
intense and sustained alertness; any deviation from total alertness imperils
the dreamer in ways more than dreadful.
I began again, at this point, to experience a movement in my chest
cavity, exactly as I had felt the day my awareness changed levels by itself.
Don Juan forcibly shook me by the arm.
"Regard dreaming as something extremely dangerous!" he commanded me.
"And begin that now! Don't start any of your weird maneuvers."
His tone of voice was so urgent that I stopped whatever I was,
unconsciously, doing.
"What is going on with me, don Juan?" I asked.
"What's going on with you is that you can displace your assemblage
point quickly and easily," he said. "Yet that ease has the tendency to make
the displacement erratic. Bring your ease to order. And don't allow yourself
even a fraction of an inch leeway."
I could easily have argued that I did not know what he was talking
about, but I knew. I also knew I had only a few seconds to round up my
energy and change my attitude, and I did.
This was the end of our exchange that day. I went home, and for nearly
a year I faithfully and daily repeated what don Juan had asked me to say.
The results of my litany-like invocation were incredible. I was firmly
convinced that it had the same effect on my awareness that exercise has on
the muscles of the body. My assemblage point became more agile, which meant
that seeing energy in dreaming became the sole goal of my practices. My
skill at intending to see grew in proportion to my efforts. A moment came
when I was able just to intend seeing, without saying a word, and actually
experience the same result as when I voiced out loud my intent to see.
Don Juan congratulated me on my accomplishment. I, naturally, assumed
he was being facetious. He assured me that he meant it, but beseeched me to
continue shouting, at least whenever I was at a loss. His request did not
seem odd to me. On my own, I had been yelling in my dreams at the top of my
voice every time I deemed it necessary.
I discovered that the energy of our world wavers. It scintillates. Not
only living beings but everything in our world glimmers with an inner light
of its own. Don Juan explained that the energy of our world consists of
layers of shimmering hues.
The top layer is whitish; another, immediately adjacent to it, is
chartreuse; and another one, more distant yet, is amber.
I found all those hues, or rather I saw glimmers of them whenever items
that I encountered in my dreamlike states changed shapes. However, a whitish
glow was always the initial impact of seeing anything that generated energy.
"Are there only three different hues?" I asked don Juan. "There is an
endless number of them," he replied, "but for the purposes of a beginning
order, you should be concerned with those three. Later on, you can get as
sophisticated as you want and isolate dozens of hues, if you are able to do
it.
"The whitish layer is the hue of the present position of mankind's
assemblage point," don Juan continued. "Let's say that it is a modern hue.
Sorcerers believe that everything man does nowadays is tinted with that
whitish glow. At another time, the position of mankind's assemblage point
made the hue of the ruling energy in the world chartreuse; and at another
time, more distant yet, it made it amber. The color of sorcerers' energy is
amber, which means that they are energetically associated with the men who
existed in a distant past."
"Do you think, don Juan, that the present whitish hue will change
someday?"
"If man is capable of evolving. The grand task of sorcerers is to bring
forth the idea that, in order to evolve, man must first free his awareness
from its bindings to the social order. Once awareness is free, intent will
redirect it into a new evolutionary path."
"Do you think sorcerers will succeed in that task?"
"They have already succeeded. They themselves are the proof. To
convince others of the value and import of evolving is another matter."
The other kind of energy I found present in our world but alien to it
was the scouts' energy, the energy don Juan had called sizzling. I
encountered scores of items in my dreams that, once I saw them, turned into
blobs of energy that seemed to be frying, bubbling with some heatlike inner
activity.
"Bear in mind that not every scout you are going to find belongs to the
realm of inorganic beings," don Juan remarked. "Every scout you have found
so far, except for the blue scout, has been from that realm, but that was
because the inorganic beings were catering to you. They were directing the
show. Now you are on your own. Some of the scouts you will encounter are
going to be not from the inorganic beings' realm but from other, even more
distant levels of awareness."
"Are the scouts aware of themselves?" I asked.
"Most certainly," he replied.
"Then why don't they make contact with us when we are awake?"
"They do. But our great misfortune is to have our consciousness so
fully engaged that we don't have time to pay attention. In our sleep,
however, the two-way- traffic trapdoor opens: we dream. And in our dreams,
we make contact."
"Is there any way to tell whether the scouts are from a level besides
the inorganic beings' world?"
"The greater their sizzling, the farther they come from. It sounds
simplistic, but you have to let your energy body tell you what is what. I
assure you, it'll make very fine distinctions and unerring judgments when
faced with alien energy."
He was right again. Without much ado, my energy body distinguished two
general types of alien energy. The first was the scouts from the inorganic
beings' realm. Their energy fizzled mildly. There was no sound to it, but it
had all the overt appearance of effervescence, or of water that is starting
to boil.
The energy of the second general type of scouts gave me the impression
of considerably more power. Those scouts seemed to be just about to burn.
They vibrated from within as if they were filled with pressurized gas.
My encounters with the alien energy were always fleeting because I paid
total attention to what don Juan recommended. He said, "Unless you know
exactly what you are doing and what you want out of alien energy, you have
to be content with a brief glance. Anything beyond a glance is as dangerous
and as stupid as petting a rattlesnake."
"Why is it dangerous, don Juan?" I asked.
"Scouts are always very aggressive and extremely daring," he said.
"They have to be that way in order to prevail in their explorations.
Sustaining our dreaming attention on them is tantamount to soliciting their
awareness to focus on us. Once they focus their attention on us, we are
compelled to go with them. And that, of course, is the danger. We may end up
in worlds beyond our energetic possibilities."
Don Juan explained that there are many more types of scouts than the
two I had classified, but that at my present level of energy I could only
focus on three. He described the first two types as the easiest to spot.
Their disguises in our dreams are so outlandish, he said, that they
immediately attract our dreaming attention. He depicted the scouts of the
third type as the most dangerous, in terms of aggressiveness and power, and
because they hide behind subtle disguises.
"One of the strangest things dreamers find, which you yourself will
find presently," don Juan continued, "is this third type of scout. So far,
you have found samples of only the first two types, but that's because you
haven't looked in the right place."
"And what is the right place, don Juan?"
"You have again fallen prey to words; this time the culprit word is
'items,' which you have taken to mean only things, objects. Well, the most
ferocious scout hides behind people in our dreams. A formidable surprise was
in store for me, in my dreaming, when I focused my gaze on the dream image
of my mother. After I voiced my intent to see, she turned into a ferocious,
frightening bubble of sizzling energy."
Don Juan paused to let his statements sink in. I felt stupid for being
disturbed at the possibility of finding a scout behind the dream image of my
mother.
"It's annoying that they are always associated with the dream images of
our parents or close friends," he went on. "Perhaps that's why we often feel
ill at ease when we dream of them." His grin gave me the impression that he
was enjoying my turmoil. "A rule of thumb for dreamers is to assume that the
third type of scout is present whenever they feel perturbed by their parents
or friends in a dream. Sound advice is to avoid those dream images. They are
sheer poison."
"Where does the blue scout stand in relation to the other scouts?" I
asked.
"Blue energy doesn't sizzle," he replied. "It is like ours; it wavers,
but it is blue instead of white. Blue energy doesn't exist in a natural
state in our world.
"And this brings us to something we've never talked about. What color
were the scouts you've seen so far?"
Until the moment he mentioned it, I had never thought about this. I
told don Juan that the scouts I had seen were either pink or reddish. And he
said that the deadly scouts of the third type were bright orange.
I found out myself that the third type of scout is outright scary.
Every time I found one of them, it was behind the dream images of my
parents, especially of my mother. Seeing it always reminded me of the blob
of energy that had attacked me in my first deliberate seeing dream. Every
time I found it, the alien exploring energy actually seemed about to jump on
me. My energy body used to react with horror even before I saw it.
During our next discussion of dreaming, I queried don Juan about the
total absence of inorganic beings in my dreaming practices. "Why don't they
show up anymore?" I asked.
"They only show themselves at the beginning," he explained. "After
their scouts take us to their world, there is no necessity for the inorganic
beings' projections. If we want to see the inorganic beings, a scout takes
us there. For no one, and I mean no one, can journey by himself to their
realm."
"Why is that so, don Juan?"
"Their world is sealed. No one can enter or leave without the consent
of the inorganic beings. The only thing you can do by yourself once you are
inside is, of course, voice your intent to stay. To say it out loud means to
set in motion currents of energy that are irreversible. In olden times,
words were incredibly powerful. Now they are not. In the inorganic beings'
realm, they haven't lost their power."
Don Juan laughed and said that he had no business saying anything about
the inorganic beings' world because I really knew more about it than he and
all his companions combined.
"There is one last issue related to that world that we haven't
discussed," he said. He paused for a long while, as if searching for the
appropriate words. "In the final analysis," he began, "my aversion to the
old sorcerers' activities is very personal. As a nagual, I detest what they
did. They cowardly sought refuge in the inorganic beings' world. They argued
that in a predatorial universe, poised to rip us apart, the only possible
haven for us is in that realm."
"Why did they believe that?" I asked.
"Because it's true," he said. "Since the inorganic beings can't lie,
the sales pitch of the dreaming emissary is all true. That world can give us
shelter and prolong our awareness for nearly an eternity."
"The emissary's sales pitch, even if it's the truth, has no appeal to
me," I said.
"Do you mean you will chance a road that might rip you apart?" he asked
with a note of bewilderment in his voice.
I assured don Juan that I did not want the inorganic beings' world no
matter what advantages it offered. My statement seemed to please him to no
end. "You are ready then for one final statement about that world. The most
dreadful statement I can make," he said, and tried smile but did not quite
make it.
Don Juan searched in my eyes, I suppose for a glimmer agreement or
comprehension. He was silent for a moment.
"The energy necessary to move the assemblage points of sorcerers comes
from the realm of inorganic beings," he said, as if he were hurrying to get
it over with.
My heart nearly stopped. I felt a vertigo and had to stomp my feet on
the ground not to faint.
"This is the truth," don Juan went on, "and the legacy of the old
sorcerers to us. They have us pinned down to this day. This is the reason I
don't like them. I resent having to dip into one source alone. Personally, I
refuse to do it. And I have tried to steer you away from it. But with no
success, because something pulls you to that world, like a magnet."
I understood don Juan better than I could have thought. Journeying to
that world had always meant to me, at an energetic level, a boost of dark
energy. I had even thought of it in those terms, long before don Juan voiced
his statement.
"What can we do about it?" I asked.
"We can't have dealings with them," he answered, "and yet we can't stay
away from them. My solution has been to take their energy but not give in to
their influence. This is known as the ultimate stalking. It is done by
sustaining the unbending intent of freedom, even though no sorcerer knows
what freedom really is."
"Can you explain to me, don Juan, why sorcerers have to take energy
from the realm of inorganic beings?"
"There is no other viable energy for sorcerers. In order to maneuver
the assemblage point in the manner they do, sorcerers need an inordinate
amount of energy."
I reminded him of his own statement: that a redeployment of energy is
necessary in order to do dreaming.
"That is correct," he replied. "To start dreaming sorcerers need to
redefine their premises and save their energy, but that redefining is valid
only to have the necessary energy to set up dreaming. To fly into other
realms, to see energy, to forge the energy body, et cetera, et cetera, is
another matter. For those maneuvers, sorcerers need loads of dark, alien
energy."
"But how do they take it from the inorganic beings' world?"
"By the mere act of going to that world. All the sorcerers of our line
have to do this. However, none of us is idiotic enough to do what you've
done. But this is because none of us has your proclivities."
Don Juan sent me home to ponder what he had revealed to me. I had
endless questions, but he did not want to hear any of them.
"All the questions you have, you can answer yourself," he said as he
waved good-bye to me.
10. STALKING THE STALKERS
At home, I soon realized that it was impossible for me to answer any of
my questions. In fact, I could not even formulate them. Perhaps that was
because the boundary of the second attention had begun to collapse on me;
this was when I met Florinda Grau and Carol Tiggs in the world of everyday
life. The confusion of not knowing them at all yet knowing them so
intimately that I would have died for them at the drop of a hat was most
deleterious to me. I had met Taisha Abelar a few years before, and I was
just beginning to get used to the confounded feeling of knowing her without
having the vaguest idea of how. To add two more people to my overloaded
system proved too much for me. I got ill out of fatigue and had to seek don
Juan's aid. I went to the town in southern Mexico where he and his
companions lived.
Don Juan and his fellow sorcerers laughed uproariously at the mere
mention of my turmoils. Don Juan explained to me that they were not really
laughing at me but at themselves. My cognitive problems reminded them of the
ones they had had when the boundary of the second attention had collapsed on
them, just as it had on me. Their awareness, like mine, had not been
prepared for it, he said.
"Every sorcerer goes through the same agony," don Juan went on.
"Awareness is an endless area of exploration for sorcerers and man in
general. In order to enhance awareness, there is no risk we should not run,
no means we should refuse. Bear in mind, however, that only in soundness of
mind can awareness be enhanced."
Don Juan reiterated, then, that his time was coming to an end and that
I had to use my resources wisely to cover as much ground as I could before
he left. Talk like that used to throw me into states of profound depression.
But as the time of his departure approached, I had begun to react with more
resignation. I no longer felt depressed, but I still panicked.
Nothing else was said after that. The next day, at his request, I drove
don Juan to Mexico City. We arrived around noon and went directly to the
hotel del Prado, in the Paseo Alameda, the place he usually lodged when he
was in the city. Don Juan had an appointment with a lawyer that day, at four
in the afternoon. Since we had plenty of time, we went to have lunch in the
famous Cafe Tacuba, a restaurant in the heart of downtown where it was
purported that real meals were served.
Don Juan was not hungry. He ordered only two sweet tamales, while I
gorged myself on a sumptuous feast. He laughed at me and made signs of
silent despair at my healthy appetite.
"I'm going to propose a line of action for you," he said in a curt tone
when we had finished our lunch. "It's the last task of the third gate of
dreaming, and it consists of stalking the stalkers, a most mysterious
maneuver. To stalk the stalkers means to deliberately draw energy from the
inorganic beings' realm in order to perform a sorcery feat."
"What kind of sorcery feat, don Juan?"
"A journey, a journey that uses awareness as an element of the
environment," he explained. "In the world of daily life, water is an element
of the environment that we use for traveling. Imagine awareness being a
similar element that can be used for traveling. Through the medium of
awareness, scouts from all over the universe come to us, and vice versa; via
awareness, sorcerers go to the ends of the universe."
There had been certain concepts, among the hosts of concepts don Juan
had made me aware of in the course of his teachings, that attracted my full
interest without any coaxing. This was one.
"The idea that awareness is a physical element is revolutionary," I
said in awe.
"I didn't say it's a physical element," he corrected me. "It's an
energetic element. You have to make that distinction. For sorcerers who see,
awareness is a glow. They can hitch their energy body to that glow and go
with it."
"What's the difference between a physical and an energetic element?" I
asked.
"The difference is that physical elements are part of our
interpretation system, but energetic elements are not. Energetic elements,
like awareness, exist in our universe. But we, as average people, perceive
only the physical elements because we were taught to do so. Sorcerers
perceive the energetic elements for the same reason: they were taught to do
so."
Don Juan explained that the use of awareness as an energetic element of
our environment is the essence of sorcery, that in terms of practicalities,
the trajectory of sorcery is, first, to free the existing energy in us by
impeccably following the sorcerers' path; second, to use that energy to
develop the energy body by means of dreaming; and, third, to use awareness
as an element of the environment in order to enter with the energy body and
all our physicality into other worlds.
"There are two kinds of energy journeys into other worlds," he went on.
"One is when awareness picks up the sorcerer's energy body and takes it
wherever it may, and the other is when the sorcerer decides, in full
consciousness, to use the avenue of awareness to make a journey. You've done
the first kind of journeying. It takes an enormous discipline to do the
second."
After a long silence, don Juan stated that in the life of sorcerers
there are issues that require masterful handling, and that dealing with
awareness, as an energetic element open to the energy body, is the most
important, vital, and dangerous of those issues.
I had no comment. I was suddenly on pins and needles, hanging on every
one of his words.
"By yourself, you don't have enough energy to perform the last task of
the third gate of dreaming," he went on, "but you and Carol Tiggs together
can certainly do what I have in mind."
He paused, deliberately egging me on with his silence to ask what he
had in mind. I did. His laughter only increased the ominous mood.
"I want you two to break the boundaries of the normal world and, using
awareness as an energetic element, enter into another," he said. "This
breaking and entering amounts to stalking the stalkers. Using awareness as
an element of the environment bypasses the influence of the inorganic
beings, but it still uses their energy."
He did not want to give me any more information, in order not to
influence me, he said. His belief was that the less I knew beforehand the
better off I would be. I disagreed, but he assured me that, in a pinch, my
energy body was perfectly capable of taking care of itself.
We went from the restaurant to the lawyer's office. Don Juan quickly
concluded his business, and we were, in no time at all, in a taxi on our way
to the airport. Don Juan informed me that Carol Tiggs was arriving on a
flight from Los Angeles, and that she was coming to Mexico City exclusively
to fulfill this last dreaming task with me.
"The valley of Mexico is a superb place to perform the kind of sorcery
feat you are after," he commented. "You haven't told me yet what the exact
steps to follow are," I said.
He didn't answer me. We did not speak any more, but while we waited for
the plane to land, he explained the procedure I had to follow. I had to go
to Carol's room at the Regis Hotel, across the street from our hotel, and,
after getting into a state of total inner silence, with her I had to slip
gently into dreaming, voicing our intent to go to the realm of the inorganic
beings.
I interrupted to remind him that I always had to wait for a scout to
show up before I could manifest out loud my intent to go to the inorganic
beings' world.
Don Juan chuckled and said, "You haven't dreamt with Carol Tiggs yet.
You'll find out that it's a treat. Sorceresses don't need any props. They
just go to that world whenever they want to; for them, there is a scout on
permanent call."
I could not bring myself to believe that a sorceress would be able to
do what he was asserting. I thought I had a degree of expertise in handling
the inorganic beings' world. When I mentioned to him what was going through
my mind, he retorted that I had no expertise whatsoever when it came to what
sorceresses are capable of.
"Why do you think I had Carol Tiggs with me to pull you bodily out of
that world?" he asked. "Do you think it was because she's beautiful?"
"Why was it, don Juan?"
"Because I couldn't do it myself; and for her, it was nothing. She has
a knack for that world."
"Is she an exceptional case, don Juan?"
"Women in general have a natural bent for that realm; sorceresses are,
of course, the champions, but Carol Tiggs is better than anyone I know
because she, as the nagual woman, has superb energy."
I thought I had caught don Juan in a serious contradiction. He had told
me that the inorganic beings were not interested at all in women. Now he was
asserting the opposite.
"No