(Heightened awareness and the warrior’s sobriety)
Don Juan explained that in a state of heightened awareness apprentices can behave almost as naturally as in everyday life, but can bring their minds to focus on anything with uncommon force and clarity.
Don Juan had told me that there is no completeness without sadness and longing, for without them there is no sobriety, no kindness. Wisdom without kindness, he said, and knowledge without sobriety are useless.
At that moment they are consumed by a fire from within and vanish from the face of the earth, free, as if they had never existed.
1 The New Seers
“Ages before the Spaniards came to Mexico,” he said, “there were extraordinary Toltec seers, men capable of inconceivable deeds. They were the last link in a chain of knowledge that extended over thousands of years. “The Toltec seers were extraordinary men—powerful sorcerers, somber, driven men who unraveled mysteries and possessed secret knowledge that they used to influence and victimize people by fixating the awareness of their victims on whatever they chose.”
“Seeing is a peculiar feeling of knowing,” he replied, “of knowing something without a shadow of doubt. In this case, I know what those men did, not only because of my seeing, but because we are so closely bound together.” Don Juan explained then that his use of the term “Toltec” did not correspond to what I understood it to mean. To me it meant a culture, the Toltec Empire. To him, the term “Toltec” meant “man of knowledge.”
(Self-importance: the warrior’s greatest enemy)
was provoking your self-importance,” he said with a frown. “Self-importance is our greatest enemy. Think about it—what weakens us is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of our fellow men. Our self-importance requires that we spend most of our lives offended by someone. “The new seers recommended that every effort should be made to eradicate self-importance from the lives of warriors. I have followed that recommendation, and much of my endeavors with you has been geared to show you that without self-importance we are invulnerable.”
“Self-importance is not something simple and naive,” he explained. “On the one hand, it is the core of everything that is good in us, and on the other hand, the core of everything that is rotten. To get rid of the self-importance that is rotten requires a masterpiece of strategy. Seers, through the ages, have given the highest praise to those who have accomplished it.”
“Warriors fight self-importance as a matter of strategy, not principle,” he replied. “Your mistake is to understand what I say in terms of morality.” “I see you as a highly moral man, don Juan,” I insisted. “You’ve noticed my impeccability, that’s all,” he said.
“Impeccability is nothing else but the proper use of energy,” he said. “My statements have no inkling of morality. I’ve saved energy and that makes me impeccable. To understand this, you have to save enough energy yourself.”
Don Juan said then that in the strategic inventories of warriors, self-importance figures as the activity that consumes the greatest amount of energy, hence, their effort to eradicate it. “One of the first concerns of warriors is to free that energy in order to face the unknown with it,” don Juan went on. “The action of rechanneling that energy is impeccability.”
(The unknowable and the shifting assemblage point)
We know that nothing can temper the spirit of a warrior as much as the challenge of dealing with impossible people in positions of power. Only under those conditions can warriors acquire the sobriety and serenity to stand the pressure of the unknowable.”
He said that to him madness was to be confronted by men who had been buried for two thousand years and were still alive, and not to think that that was the epitome of preposterousness.
When I reached the group I realized that don Juan was right; they were not really men. Only four of them had any resemblance to men, but they were not men either; they were strange creatures with huge yellow eyes.
The only thing he found objectionable was my indulging in fear, especially after I had realized that warriors have nothing to fear. “How do you know I had realized that?” I asked. “Because you were free. When fear disappears all the ties that bind us dissolve,” he said. “An ally was gripping your foot because it was attracted by your animal terror.”
“Don’t concern yourself with that.” He laughed. “You know that such realizations are a dime a dozen; they don’t amount to anything in the life of warriors, because they are canceled out as the assemblage point shifts.
He did it once already, and you went so far into the left side that it will take quite a while for you to remember it.
“But do you honestly believe that those Toltec seers are still alive?” I asked. He laughed and shook his head in disbelief. “It’s time for you to shift that assemblage point of yours just a bit,” he said. “I can’t talk to you when you are in your idiot’s stage.”
“Nothing,” he replied. “We were the ones who were after them. The seers, of course, had already noticed your field of energy the first time you saw them; when you came back, they were set to feast on you.”
And they found it, at a fixed position in one of the seven bands of inorganic awareness. The seers felt that they were relatively safe there. After all, they were separated from the daily world by a nearly insurmountable barrier, the barrier of perception set by the assemblage point.
“I’m sure that it is the nagual’s presence,” he continued, “that sometimes makes people act dumb. When the nagual Julian was still around, I was dumber than I am now. I am convinced that when I’m no longer here, you’ll be capable of remembering everything.”
(The rolling force, the earth’s boost, and total freedom)
He said that the old seers had found out a way to utilize the rolling force and be propelled by it. Instead of succumbing to the onslaughts of the tumbler they rode with it and let it move their assemblage points to the confines of human possibilities.
He explained that the earth’s boost is the force of alignment of only the amber emanations. It is a boost that heightens awareness to unthinkable degrees. To the new seers it is a blast of unlimited consciousness, which they call total freedom.
“You have to admit, no matter how disgusted you feel, that those devils were very daring,” he went on. “I never liked them myself, as you know, but I can’t help admiring them. Their love for life is truly beyond me.” “How can that be love for life, don Juan? It’s something nauseating,” I said. “What else could push a man to those extremes if it is not love for life?” he asked.
Love, one needs love for life, for intrigue, for mystery. One needs unquenching curiosity and guts galore. So don’t give me this nonsense about your being revolted. It’s embarrassing!” Don Juan’s eyes were shining with contained laughter. He was putting me in my place, but he was laughing at it.
A blob of light is the dreaming body of the new seers. He also said that such an impersonal dreaming body is more conducive to understanding and examination, which are the basis of all the new seers do. The intensely humanized dreaming body of the old seers drove them to look for answers that were equally personal, humanized.
We can only vaguely assess the scope of that tremendous force, if we consider that the energy involved in perceiving and acting in the world of everyday life is a product of the alignment of hardly one-tenth of the emanations encased in man’s cocoon.
“What happens at the moment of death is that all that energy is released at once,” he continued. “Living beings at that moment become flooded by the most inconceivable force. It is not the rolling force that has cracked their gaps, because that force never enters inside the cocoon; it only makes it collapse. What floods them is the force of all the emanations that are suddenly aligned after being dormant for a lifetime. There is no outlet for such a giant force except to escape through the gap.”
“To break the barrier of perception is the last task of the mastery of awareness,” he said. “In order to move your assemblage point to that position you must gather enough energy. Make a journey of recovery. Remember what you’ve done!”
Don Juan was untouched by my fury. He said matter-of-factly that anger was a natural reaction to the hesitation of the assemblage point to move on command.
“That’s the essence of the mastery of intent. In the meantime, make a command now not to fret, not even at the worst moments of doubt. It will be a slow process until that command is heard and obeyed as if it were the Eagle’s command.”
In that unmeasurable area, warriors fall prey to every conceivable misdeed. He warned me to be on the lookout and not lose confidence, for I would unavoidably be struck at one time or another by gripping feelings of defeat. “The new seers recommend a very simple act when impatience, or despair, or anger, or sadness comes their way,” he continued. “They recommend that warriors roll their eyes. Any direction will do; I prefer to roll mine clockwise. “The movement of the eyes makes the assemblage point shift momentarily. In that movement, you will find relief. This is in lieu of true mastery of intent.”
He went back then to discussing the mold of man. He said that to see it on my own, unaided by anyone, was an important step, because all of us have certain ideas that must be broken before we are free; the seer who travels into the unknown to see the unknowable must be in an impeccable state of being. He winked at me and said that to be in an impeccable state of being is to be free of rational assumptions and rational fears.
(The mold of man: pattern, not creator)
But these accounts, however beautiful, are flawed by the gross and despairing mistake of believing the mold of man to be an omnipotent, omniscient creator; and so is the interpretation of the old seers, who called the mold of man a friendly spirit, a protector of man. He said that the new seers are the only ones who have the sobriety to see the mold of man and understand what it is. What they have come to realize is that the mold of man is not a creator, but the pattern of every human attribute we can think of and some we cannot even conceive. The mold is our God because we are what it stamps us with and not because it has created us from nothing and made us in its image and likeness. Don Juan said that in his opinion to fall on our knees in the presence of the mold of man reeks of arrogance and human self-centeredness.
Anyone who sees the mold of man automatically assumes that it is God. He called the mystical experience a chance seeing, a one-shot affair that has no significance whatsoever because it is the result of a random movement of the assemblage point.
They have seen, therefore, that what we call God is a static prototype of humanness without any power. For the mold of man cannot under any circumstances help us by intervening in our behalf, or punish our wrongdoings, or reward us in any way. We are simply the product of its stamp; we are its impression. The mold of man is exactly what its name tells us it is, a pattern, a form, a cast that groups together a particular bunch of fiberlike elements, which we call man.
But he seemed unconcerned with my genuine turmoil. He kept on needling me with what he called the unforgivable crime of the chance seers, which makes us focus our irreplaceable energy on something that has no power whatsoever to do anything.
That blow sent me soaring into a radiant light, into a diaphanous source of the most peaceful and exquisite beatitude. That light was a haven, an oasis in the blackness around me.
I felt myself inhaling and exhaling in quietude and relief. What a gorgeous sense of plenitude! I knew beyond a shadow of doubt that I had come face to face with God, the source of everything. And I knew that God loved me. God was love and forgiveness. The light bathed me, and I felt clean, delivered. I wept uncontrollably, mainly for myself. The sight of that resplendent light made me feel unworthy, villainous. Suddenly, I heard don Juan’s voice in my ear. He said that I had to go beyond the mold, that the mold was merely a stage, a stopover that brought temporary peace and serenity to those who journey into the unknown, but that it was sterile, static. It was at the same time a flat reflected image in a mirror and the mirror itself. And the image was man’s image.
but simply out of a sense of ultimate loyalty to and love for the divinity that was in front of me. As I gazed into the light with all the passion I was capable of, the light seemed to condense and I saw a man. A shiny man that exuded charisma, love, understanding, sincerity, truth. A man that was the sum total of all that is good. The fervor I felt on seeing that man was well beyond anything I had ever felt in my life. I did fall on my knees. I wanted to worship God personified, but don Juan intervened and whacked me on my left upper chest, close to my clavicle, and I lost sight of God.
for I always had to start from point one regardless of how much I might have advanced in the past. “That’s only an emotional impression,” he said. “A total misapprehension. Whatever you did years ago is solidly enclosed in some unused emanations. That day when I made you see the mold of man, for instance, I had a true misapprehension myself. I thought that if you saw it, you would be able to understand it. It was a true misunderstanding on my part.”
However, all the things I had seen and learned had only given me a greater, more profound appreciation for the miracle that I had in front of my eyes.
(Freedom, intent, and impeccable transmission)
“Freedom is like a contagious disease,” he said. “It is transmitted; its carrier is an impeccable nagual. People might not appreciate that, and that’s because they don’t want to be free. Freedom is frightening. Remember that. But not for us. I’ve groomed myself nearly all my life for this moment. And so will you.” He repeated over and over that at the stage where I was, no rational assumptions should interfere with my actions.
Over the years don Juan and other members of his party had tried to make me aware that we can be in two places at once, that we can experience a sort of perceptual dualism. As don Juan spoke, I began to remember something so deeply forgotten that at first it was as if I had only heard about it. Then, step by step, I realized that I had lived that experience myself.
When he judged that the time was right, he made me shift into heightened awareness and for a moment I was able to see don Juan and don Genaro as two blobs of light.
I could, with my intent, align the emanations that made me see Genaro as a blob of light, or I could align the emanations that made me see him as merely odd, unknown, strange.
When I saw Genaro as odd, his eyes had a malevolent glare, like the eyes of a beast in the darkness. But they were eyes, nonetheless. I did not see them as points of amber light.