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 thecalling of spirits through charms, spells, or rituals to produce supernaturaleffects. For don Juan, sorcery was the act of embodying some specializedtheoretical and practical premises about the nature and role of perception inmolding the universe around us.

 Following don Juan's suggestion, I have refrained from using shamanism, a category properto anthropology, to classify his knowledge. I have called it all along what hehimself called it sorcery. On examination, however, I realized that calling itsorcery obscures even more the already obscure phenomena he presented to me inhis teachings.

Inanthropological works, shamanism is described as a belief system of some nativepeople of northern Asia - prevailing also among certain native North AmericanIndian tribes - which maintains that an unseen world of ancestral spiritualforces, good and evil, is pervasive around us and that these spiritual forcescan be summoned or controlled through the acts of practitioners, who are theintermediaries between the natural and supernatural realms.

DonJuan was indeed an intermediary between the natural world of everyday life andan 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 havedescribed in my previous work his teaching methods to this effect, as well asthe sorcery arts he made me practice, the most important of which is called theart of dreaming.

DonJuan contended that our world, which we believe to be unique and absolute, isonly one in a cluster of consecutive worlds, arranged like the layers of anonion. He asserted that even though we have been energetically conditioned toperceive solely our world, we still have the capability of entering into thoseother realms, which are as real, unique, absolute, and engulfing as our ownworld is.

DonJuan explained to me that, for us to perceive those other realms, not only dowe 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, buttheir inaccessibility is entirely a consequence of our energetic conditioning.In other words, simply and solely because of that conditioning, we arecompelled to assume that the world of daily life is the one and only possibleworld.

Believingthat our energetic conditioning is correctable, don Juan stated that sorcerersof ancient times developed a set of practices designed to recondition ourenergetic capabilities to perceive. They called this set of practices the artof dreaming.

Withthe perspective time gives, I now realize that the most fitting statement donJuan made about dreaming was to call it the "gateway to infinity." Iremarked, at the time he said it, that the metaphor had no meaning to me.

"Let'sthen do away with metaphors," he conceded. "Let's say that dreamingis the sorcerers' practical way of putting ordinary dreams to use."

"Buthow can ordinary dreams be put to use?" I asked.

"Wealways get tricked by words," he said. "In my own case, my teacherattempted to describe dreaming to me by saying that it is the way sorcerers saygood night to the world. He was, of course, tailoring his description to fit mymentality. I'm doing the same with you."

Onanother occasion don Juan said to me, "Dreaming can only be experienced.Dreaming is not just having dreams; neither is it daydreaming or wishing orimagining. Through dreaming we can perceive other worlds, which we cancertainly describe, but we can't describe what makes us perceive them. Yet wecan feel how dreaming opens up those other realms. Dreaming seems to be asensation - a process in our bodies, an awareness in our minds."

In thecourse of his general teachings, don Juan thoroughly explained to me theprinciples, rationales, and practices of the art of dreaming. His instructionwas divided into two parts. One was about dreaming procedures, the other aboutthe purely abstract explanations of these procedures. His teaching method wasan interplay between enticing my intellectual curiosity with the abstractprinciples of dreaming and guiding me to seek an outlet in its practices.

I havealready described all this in as much detail as I was able to. And I have alsodescribed the sorcerers' milieu in which don Juan placed me in order to teachme his arts. My interaction in this milieu was of special interest to mebecause it took place exclusively in the second attention. I interacted therewith the ten women and five men who were don Juan's sorcerer companions andwith the four young men and the four young women who were his apprentices.

DonJuan gathered them immediately after I came into his world. He made it clear tome 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 realizedthat I was different than he expected. He explained that difference in terms ofan energy configuration seen only by sorcerers instead of having fourcompartments of energy, as he himself had, I had only three. Such aconfiguration, which he had mistakenly hoped was a correctable flaw, made me socompletely

inadequatefor interacting with or leading those eight apprentices that it becameimperative for don Juan to gather another group of people more akin to myenergetic structure.

I havewritten extensively about those events. Yet I have never mentioned the secondgroup of apprentices; don Juan did not permit me to do so. He argued that theywere exclusively in my field and that the agreement I had with him was to writeabout his field, not mine.

Thesecond group of apprentices was extremely compact. It had only three members adreamer, Florinda Donner-Grau; a stalker, Taisha Abelar; and a nagual woman,Carol Tiggs.

Weinteracted with one another solely in the second attention. In the world ofeveryday life, we did not have even a vague notion of one another. In terms ofour relationship with don Juan, however, there was no vagueness; he putenormous effort into training all of us equally. Nevertheless, toward the end,when don Juan's time was about to finish, the psychological pressure of hisdeparture started to collapse the rigid boundaries of the second attention. Theresult was that our interaction began to lapse into the world of everydayaffairs, and we met, seemingly for the first time.

Noneof us, consciously, knew about our deep and arduous interaction in the secondattention. Since all of us were involved in academic studies, we ended up morethan shocked when we found out we had met before. This was and still is, ofcourse, intellectually inadmissible to us, yet we know that it was thoroughlywithin our experience. We have been left, therefore, with the disquietingknowledge that the human psyche is infinitely more complex than our mundane oracademic reasoning had led us to believe.

Oncewe asked don Juan, in unison, to shed light on our predicament. He said that hehad two explanatory options. One was to cater to our hurt rationality and patchit up, saying that the second attention is a state of awareness as illusory aselephants flying in the sky and that everything we thought we had experiencedin that state was simply a product of hypnotic suggestions. The other optionwas to explain it the way sorcerer ''dreamers understand it as an energeticconfiguration of aware-ness.

Duringthe fulfillment of my dreaming tasks, however, the ' barrier of the secondattention remained unchanged. Every ill;' time I entered into dreaming, I alsoentered into the second attention, and waking up from dreaming did notnecessarily 1 mean I had left the second attention. For years I could rememberonly bits of my dreaming experiences. The bulk of what I did was energeticallyunavailable to me. It took me fifteen years of uninterrupted work, from 1973 to1988, to store enough energy to rearrange everything linearly in my mind. Iremembered then sequences upon sequences of dreaming events, and I was able tofill in, at last, some seeming lapses of memory. In this manner I captured theinherent continuity of don Juan's lessons in the art of dreaming, a continuitythat had been lost to me because of his making me weave between the awarenessof our everyday life and the awareness of the second attention. This work is aresult of that rearrangement.

Allthis brings me to the final part of my statement the reason for writing thisbook. Being in possession of most of the pieces of don Juan's lessons in theart of dreaming, I would like to explain, in a future work, the currentposition and interest of his last four students Florinda Donner-Grau, TaishaAbelar, Carol Tiggs, and myself. But before I describe and explain the resultsof don Juan's guidance and influence on us, I must review, in light of what Iknow now, the parts of don Juan's lessons in dreaming to which I did not haveaccess before.

The definitive reason for this work, however, was given by Carol Tiggs. Her beliefis that explaining the world that don Juan made us inherit is the ultimateexpression of our gratitude to him and our commitment to his quest.