AN INTRODUCTION

Don Juan stressed, time and time again, that everything he was teaching mehad been envisioned and worked out by men he referred to as sorcerers ofantiquity. He made it very clear that there was a profound distinction betweenthose sorcerers and the sorcerers of modern times. He categorized sorcerers ofantiquity as men who existed in Mexico perhaps thousands of years before theSpanish Conquest, men whose greatest accomplishment had been to build thestructures of sorcery, emphasizing practicality and concreteness. He renderedthem as men who were brilliant but lacking in wisdom. Modern sorcerers, bycontrast, don Juan portrayed as men renowned for their sound minds and theircapacity to rectify the course of sorcery if they deemed it necessary.

Don Juan explained to me that the sorcery premises pertinent to dreamingwere naturally envisioned and developed by sorcerers of antiquity. Out ofnecessity - for those premises are key in explaining and understanding dreaming- I 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 myprevious works.

During one of our conversations, don Juan stated that, in order toappreciate the position of dreamers and dreaming, one has to understand thestruggle of modern-day sorcerers to steer sorcery away from concreteness towardthe abstract.

"What do you call concreteness, don Juan?" I asked.

"The practical part of sorcery," he said. "The obsessivefixation of the mind on practices and techniques, the unwarranted influenceover 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, allthat's humanly possible. I say that present-day sorcerers seek the abstractbecause they seek freedom; they have no interest in concrete gains. There areno social functions for them, as there were for the sorcerers of the past. Soyou'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-daysorcerers?"

"It certainly has value. It's the taste of that past which we don'tlike. I personally detest the darkness and morbidity of the mind. I like theimmensity of thought. However, regardless of my likes and dislikes, I have togive due credit to the sorcerers of antiquity, for they were the first to findout and do everything we know and do today. Don Juan explained that their mostimportant attainment was to perceive the energetic essence of things. Thisinsight was of such importance that it was turned into the basic premise ofsorcery. Nowadays, after lifelong discipline and training, sorcerers do acquirethe capacity to perceive the essence of things, a capacity they call seeing.

"What would it mean to me to perceive the energetic essence ofthings?" 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 essenceof everything. Whatever we are perceiving is energy, but since we can'tdirectly perceive energy, we process our perception to fit a mold. This mold isthe 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 perceivedand makes us believe that the mold into which we fit our perception is all thatexists. I am convinced that for man to survive now, his perception must changeat its social base."

"What is this social base of perception, don Juan?"

"The physical certainty that the world is made of concrete objects. Icall this a social base because a serious and fierce effort is put out byeverybody 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 baseof 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. Thenwe 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 hewas doing with me and his other apprentices. He was teaching us a new way ofperceiving, first, by making us realize we process our perception to fit a moldand, second, by fiercely guiding us to perceive energy directly. He assured methat this method was very much like the one used to teach us to perceive theworld of daily affairs.

Don Juan's conception was that our entrapment in processing our perceptionto fit a social mold loses its power when we realize we have accepted thismold, as an inheritance from our ancestors, without bothering to examine it.

"To perceive a world of hard objects that had either a positive or anegative 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," Icomplained. "It is unquestionably a world of objects. To prove it, all wehave 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 worldof 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 thephysical certainty of what you've just pointed out the hardness ofobjects."

His argument was extremely mystifying to me. In those days, my mind wouldsimply refuse to consider any way to understand the world except the one withwhich I was familiar. Don Juan's claims and the points he struggled to raisewere outlandish propositions that I could not accept but could not refuseeither.

"Our way of perceiving is a predator's way," he said to me onone occasion. "A very efficient manner of appraising and classifying foodand danger. But this is not the only way we are able to perceive. There isanother mode, the one I am familiarizing you with the act of perceiving theessence 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, moresophisticated terms." This was don Juan's claim. And the moresophisticated terms to which he was alluding were those he had been taught byhis predecessors, terms that correspond to sorcery truths, which have norational foundation and no relation whatsoever to the facts of our daily worldbut which are self-evident truths for the sorcerers who perceive energydirectly and see the essence of everything.

For such sorcerers, the most significant act of sorcery is to see theessence of the universe. Don Juan's version was that the sorcerers ofantiquity, the first ones to see the essence of the universe, described it inthe best manner. They said that the essence of the universe resemblesincandescent threads stretched into infinity in every conceivable direction,luminous filaments that are conscious of themselves in ways impossible for thehuman mind to comprehend.

From seeing the essence of the universe, the sorcerers of antiquity wenton to see the energy essence of human beings. Don Juan stated that theydepicted human beings as bright shapes that resembled giant eggs and calledthem luminous eggs.

"When sorcerers see a human being," don Juan said, "theysee a giant, luminous shape that floats, making, as it moves, a deep furrow inthe energy of the earth, just as if the luminous shape had a taproot that wasdragging."

Don Juan had the impression that our energy shape keeps on changingthrough time. He said that every seer he knew, himself included, saw that humanbeings are shaped more like balls or even tombstones than eggs. But, once in awhile, and for no reason known to them, sorcerers see a person whose energy isshaped like an egg. Don Juan suggested that people who are egglike in shapetoday are more akin to people of ancient times.

In the course of his teachings, don Juan repeatedly discussed andexplained what he considered the decisive finding of the sorcerers ofantiquity. He called it the crucial feature of human beings as luminous balls around spot of intense brilliance, the size of a tennis ball, permanently lodgedinside the luminous ball, flush with its surface, about two feet back from thecrest of a person's right shoulder blade.

Since I had trouble visualizing this the first time don Juan described itto 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 itis located on a place at the height of the shoulder blades, an arm's lengthfrom a person's back. He said that the old sorcerers named it the assemblagepoint after seeing what it does.

"What does the assemblage point do?" I asked. "It makes usperceive," he replied. "The old sorcerers saw that, in human beings,perception is assembled there, on that point. Seeing that all living beingshave such a point of brilliance, the old sorcerers surmised that perception ingeneral must take place on that spot, in whatever pertinent manner."

"What did the old sorcerers see that made them conclude thatperception takes place on the assemblage point?" I asked.

He answered that, first, they saw that out of the millions of theuniverse's luminous energy filaments passing through the entire luminous ball,only a small number pass directly through the assemblage point, as should beexpected since it is small in comparison with the whole.

Next, they saw that a spherical extra glow, slightly bigger than theassemblage point, always surrounds it, greatly intensifying the luminosity ofthe filaments passing directly through that glow.

Finally, they saw two things. One, that the assemblage points of humanbeings 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 ofthe subjects being observed. But when their assemblage points and surroundingglowing spheres are on a different position than the habitual one, theirunusual behavior seems to be the proof that their awareness is different, thatthey are perceiving in an unfamiliar manner.

The conclusion the old sorcerers drew from all this was that the greaterthe displacement of the assemblage point from its customary position, the moreunusual the consequent behavior and, evidently, the consequent awareness andperception.

"Notice that when I talk about seeing, I always say 'having the appearanceof or 'seemed like" don Juan warned me. "Everything one sees is sounique that there is no way to talk about it except by comparing it tosomething known to us."

He said that the most adequate example of this difficulty was the waysorcerers talk about the assemblage point and the glow that surrounds it. Theydescribe them as brightness, yet it cannot be brightness, because seers seethem without their eyes. They have to fill out the difference, however, and saythat the assemblage point is a spot of light and that around it there is ahalo, a glow. Don Juan pointed out that we are so visual, so ruled by ourpredator's perception, that everything we see must be rendered in terms of whatthe predator's eye normally sees.

After seeing what the assemblage point and its surrounding glow seemed tobe doing, don Juan said that the old sorcerers advanced an explanation. Theyproposed that in human beings the assemblage point, by focusing its glowingsphere on the universe's filaments of energy that pass directly through it,automatically and without premeditation assembles those filaments into a steadyperception of the world.

"How are those filaments you talk about assembled into a steadyperception 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 ofenergy cannot tell them how or why energy moves."

Don Juan stated that, seeing that millions of conscious energy filamentspass through the assemblage point, the old sorcerers postulated that in passingthrough it they come together, amassed by the glow that surrounds it. Afterseeing that the glow is extremely dim in people who have been renderedunconscious 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?" Iasked.

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 andconsciousness. The inescapable conclusion of the sorcerers of antiquity wasthat awareness and perception go together and are tied to the assemblage pointand the glow that surrounds it.

"Is there a chance that those sorcerers might have been mistakenabout their seeing?" I asked.

"I can't explain to you why, but there is no way sorcerers can bemistaken about their seeing," don Juan said, in a tone that admitted noargument. "Now, the conclusions they arrive at from their seeing might bewrong, but that would be because they are naive, uncultivated. In order toavoid this disaster, sorcerers have to cultivate their minds, in whatever formthey can."

He softened up then and remarked that it certainly would be infinitelysafer 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, isfar too great to resist.

The effect of the assemblage point's displacement was another energyconfiguration the sorcerers of antiquity were able to see and study. Don Juansaid that when the assemblage point is displaced to another position, a newconglomerate of millions of luminous energy filaments come together on thatpoint. The sorcerers of antiquity saw this and concluded that since the glow ofawareness is always present wherever the assemblage point is, perception isautomatically assembled there. Because of the different position of theassemblage point, the resulting world, however, cannot be our world of dailyaffairs.

Don Juan explained that the old sorcerers were capable of distinguishingtwo types of assemblage point displacement. One was a displacement to anyposition on the surface or in the interior of the luminous ball; thisdisplacement they called a shift of the assemblage point. The other was adisplacement to a position outside the luminous ball; they called thisdisplacement a movement of the assemblage point. They found out that thedifference between a shift and a movement was the nature of the perception eachallows.

Since the shifts of the assemblage point are displacements within theluminous ball, the worlds engendered by them, no matter how bizarre or wondrousor unbelievable they might be, are still worlds within the human domain. Thehuman domain is the energy filaments that pass through the entire luminousball. By contrast, movements of the assemblage point, since they aredisplacements to positions outside the luminous ball, engage filaments ofenergy that are beyond the human realm. Perceiving such filaments engendersworlds that are beyond comprehension, inconceivable worlds with no trace ofhuman antecedents in them.

The problem of validation always played a key role in my mind in thosedays. "Forgive me, don Juan," I said to him on one occasion,"but this business of the assemblage point is an idea so farfetched, soinadmissible that I don't know how to deal with it or what to think ofit."

"There is only one thing for you to do," he retorted. "Seethe assemblage point! It isn't that difficult to see. The difficulty is inbreaking the retaining wall we all have in our minds that holds us in place. Tobreak it, all we need is energy. Once we have energy, seeing happens to us byitself. The trick is in abandoning our fort of self-complacency and falsesecurity."

"It is obvious to me, don Juan, that it takes a lot of knowledge tosee. It isn't just a matter of having energy."

"It is just a matter of having energy, believe me. The hard part isconvincing yourself that it can be done. For this, you need to trust thenagual. The marvel of sorcery is that every sorcerer has to prove everythingwith his own experience. I am telling you about the principles of sorcery notwith the hope that you will memorize them but with the hope that you will practicethem."

Don Juan was certainly right about the need for trusting. In the beginningstages of my thirteen-year apprenticeship with him, the hardest thing for mewas to affiliate myself with his world and his person. This affiliating meantthat I had to learn to trust him implicitly and accept him without bias as thenagual.

Don Juan's total role in the sorcerers' world was synthesized in the titleaccorded to him by his peers; he was called the nagual. It was explained to methat this concept refers to any person, male or female, who possesses aspecific kind of energy configuration, which to a seer appears as a doubleluminous ball. Seers believe that when one of these people enters into thesorcerers' world, that extra load of energy is turned into a measure ofstrength and the capacity for leadership. Thus, the nagual is the naturalguide, the leader of a party of sorcerers.

At first, to feel such a trust for don Juan was quite disturbing to me, ifnot altogether odious. When I discussed it with him, he assured me that totrust 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," donJuan said. "He replied that without trusting the nagual there is nopossibility of relief and thus no possibility of clearing the debris from ourlives in order to be free."

Don Juan reiterated how right his teacher had been. And I reiterated myprofound disagreement. I told him that being reared in a stifling religiousenvironment had had dreadful effects on me, and that his teacher's statementsand his own acquiescence to his teacher reminded me of the obedience dogma thatI had to learn as a child and that I abhorred. "It sounds like you'revoicing a religious belief when you talk about the nagual," I said.

"You may believe whatever you want," don Juan repliedundauntedly. "The fact remains, there is no game without the nagual. Iknow this and I say so. And so did all the naguals ' who preceded me. But theydidn't say it from the standpoint of self-importance, and neither do I. To saythere is no path without the nagual is to refer totally to the fact that theman, 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 onlyincidentally with the man who brings us its message."

I did learn to trust don Juan implicitly as the nagual, and this, as hehad stated it, brought me an immense sense of relief and a greater capacity toaccept what he was striving to teach me.

In his teachings, he put a great emphasis on explaining and discussing theassemblage point. I asked him once if the assemblage point had anything to dowith the physical body.

"It has nothing to do with what we normally perceive as thebody," he said. "It's part of the luminous egg, which is our energyself."

"How is it displaced?" I asked.

"Through energy currents. Jolts of energy, originating outside orinside our energy shape. These are usually unpredictable currents that happenrandomly, but with sorcerers they are very predictable currents that obey thesorcerer'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 anyattention to feelings like that."

"What do those currents feel like?"

"Like a mild discomfort, a vague sensation of sadness followedimmediately by euphoria. Since neither the sadness nor the euphoria has anexplainable cause, we never regard them as veritable onslaughts of the unknownbut as unexplainable, ill-founded moodiness."

"What happens when the assemblage point moves outside the energyshape? Does it hang outside? Or is it attached to the luminous ball?"

"It pushes the contours of the energy shape out, without breaking itsenergy boundaries."

Don Juan explained that the end result of a movement of the assemblagepoint is a total change in the energy shape of a human being. Instead of a ballor an egg, he becomes something resembling a smoking pipe. The tip of the stemis the assemblage point, and the bowl of the pipe is what remains of theluminous ball. If the assemblage point keeps on moving, a moment comes when theluminous ball becomes a thin line of energy.

Don Juan went on to explain that the old sorcerers were the only ones whoaccomplished this feat of energy shape transformation. And I asked him whetherin their new energetic shape those sorcerers were still men.

"Of course they were still men," he said. "But I think whatyou 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 meaningwhatsoever 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. Theycertainly looked like men. What else would they look like? But they were notquite like what you or I would expect. Yet if you pressed me to tell in what waythey 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 hisbehavior that was unusual."

"In what way was it unusual?"

"All I can tell you is that the behavior of the sorcerer I met isSomething that defies the imagination. But to make it a matter of merelybehavior is misleading. It is really something you must see toappreciate."

"Were all those sorcerers like the one you met?"

"Certainly not. I don't know how the others were, except throughsorcerers' stories handed down from generation to generation. And those storiesportray them as being quite bizarre."

"Do you mean monstrous?"

"Not at all. They say that they were very likable but extremelyscary. They were more like unknown creatures. What makes mankind homogeneous isthe fact that we are all luminous balls. And those sorcerers were no longerballs of energy but lines of energy that were trying to bend themselves intocircles, 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 stretchingtheir shapes, they had also succeeded in stretching the duration of theirconsciousness. So they are alive and conscious to this day. There are storiesabout 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 myawareness and yet disappear into the vastness- In my personal opinion, thoseold sorcerers were extravagant, obsessive, capricious men who got pinned downby 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'spotentials are nothing to sneeze at."

Another topic of don Juan's explanations was the indispensability ofenergetic uniformity and cohesion for the purpose of perceiving. His contentionwas that mankind perceives the world we know, in the terms we do, only becausewe share energetic uniformity and cohesion. He said that we automaticallyattain these two conditions of energy in the course of our rearing and thatthey are so taken for granted we do not realize their vital importance until weare faced with the possibility of perceiving worlds other than the world weknow. At those moments, it becomes evident that we need a new appropriateenergetic uniformity and cohesion to perceive coherently and totally.

I asked him what uniformity and cohesion were, and he explained that man'senergetic shape has uniformity in the sense that every human being on earth hasthe form of a ball or an egg. And the fact that man's energy holds itselftogether as a ball or an egg proves it has cohesion. He said that an example ofa new uniformity and cohesion was the old sorcerers' energetic shape when itbecame a line every one of them uniformly became a line and cohesively remaineda line. Uniformity and cohesion at a line level permitted those old sorcerersto perceive a homogeneous new world.

"How are uniformity and cohesion acquired?" I asked.

"The key is the position of the assemblage point, or rather thefixation of the assemblage point," he said.

He did not want to elaborate any further at that time, so I asked him ifthose old sorcerers could have reverted to being egglike. He replied that atone point they could have, but that they did not. And then the line cohesionset in and made it impossible for them to go back. He believed that what reallycrystallized that line cohesion and prevented them from making the journey backwas a matter of choice and greed. The scope of what those sorcerers were ableto perceive and do as lines of energy was astronomically greater than what anaverage man or any average sorcerer can do or perceive.

He explained that the human domain when one is an energy ball is whateverenergy 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. Hewas of the opinion that, if we take this into consideration, the enormity ofwhat the old sorcerers did becomes apparent; they extended themselves into aline a thousand times the size of a man as an energy ball and perceived all theenergy filaments ; that passed through that line.

On his insistence, I made giant efforts to understand the new model ofenergy configuration he was outlining for me. Finally, after much pounding, Icould follow the idea of energy filaments inside the luminous ball and outsideit. But if I thought of a multitude of luminous balls the model broke down inmy mind. In a multitude of luminous balls, I reasoned, the energy filamentsthat are outside one of them will perforce be inside , the adjacent one. So ina multitude there could not possibly be any energy filaments outside anyluminous ball. "To understand all this certainly isn't an exercise foryour reason," he replied after carefully listening to my arguments."I have no way of explaining what sorcerers mean by filaments inside andoutside the human shape. When seers see the human energy shape, they see onesingle ball of energy. If there is another ball next to it, the other ball isseen again as a single ball of energy. The idea of a multitude of luminousballs 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 formyself when he knew I could not. And he proposed that I borrow his energy anduse it to see. "How can I do that? Borrow your energy." "Verysimple. I can make your assemblage point shift to another position moresuitable to perceiving energy directly."

This was the first time, in my memory, that he deliberately talked aboutsomething he had been doing all along making me enter into someincomprehensible state of awareness that defied my idea of the world and ofmyself, a state he called the second attention. So, to make my assemblage pointshift to a position more suitable to perceiving energy directly, don Juanslapped my back, between my shoulder blades, with such a force that he made melose my breath. I thought that I must have fainted or that the blow had made mefall asleep. Suddenly, I was looking or I was dreaming I was looking atsomething literally beyond words. Bright strings of light shot out fromeverywhere, going everywhere, strings of light which were like nothing that hadever entered my thoughts.

When I recovered my breath, or when I woke up, don Juan expectantly askedme, "What did you see?" And when I answered, truthfully, "Yourblow made me see stars," he doubled up laughing.

He remarked that I was not ready yet to comprehend any unusual perceptionI might have had. "I made your assemblage point shift," he went on,"and for an instant you were dreaming the filaments of the universe. Butyou don't yet have the discipline or the energy to rearrange your uniformityand cohesion. The old sorcerers were the consummate masters of thatrearranging. 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 theassemblage point on its new position and keeping it from sliding back to itsoriginal spot."

Don Juan then gave me a traditional definition of the second attention. Hesaid that the old sorcerers called the result of fixing the assemblage point onnew positions the second attention and that they treated the second attentionas an area of all-inclusive activity, just as the attention of the daily worldis. He pointed out that sorcerers really have two complete areas for their endeavorsa small one, called the first attention or the awareness of our daily world orthe fixation of the assemblage point on its habitual position; and a muchlarger area, the second attention or the awareness of other worlds or thefixation the assemblage point on each of an enormous number of positions.

Don Juan helped me to experience inexplicable things in the secondattention by means of what he called a sorcerer's maneuver tapping my backgently or forcefully striking it at height of my shoulder blades. He explainedthat with his blows he displaced my assemblage point. From my experientialposition, such displacements meant that my awareness used to enter into a mostdisturbing state of unequaled clarity, a state of superconsciousness, which Ienjoyed for short periods of time and in which I could understand anything withminimal preambles. It was not quite a pleasing state. Most of the time it wasse a strange dream, so intense that normal awareness paled comparison.

Don Juan justified the indispensability of such a maneuver, lying that innormal awareness a sorcerer teaches his apprentices basic concepts andprocedures and in the second attention gives them abstract and detailedexplanations.

Ordinarily, apprentices do not remember these explanations at all, yetthey somehow store them, faithfully intact, in their memories. Sorcerers haveused this seeming peculiarity of memory and have turned remembering everythingthat happens to them in the second attention into one of the most difficult andcomplex traditional tasks of sorcery.

Sorcerers explain this seeming peculiarity of memory, and the task ofremembering, saying that every time anyone enters I into the second attention,the assemblage point is on a different Imposition. To remember, then, means to relocatethe assemblage on the exact position it occupied at the time those I entrancesinto the second attention occurred. Don Juan assured me not only that sorcerershave total and absolute recall but I that they relive every experience they hadin the second attention by this act of returning their assemblage point to eachof those specific positions. He also assured me that sorcerers dedicate alifetime to fulfilling this task of remembering.

In the second attention, don Juan gave me very detailed explanations ofsorcery, knowing that the accuracy and fidelity of such instruction will remainwith me, faithfully intact, for the duration of my life.

About this quality of faithfulness he said, "Learning something inthe second attention is just like learning when we were children. What we learnremains with us for life. 'It's second nature with me we say when it comes tosomething 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 tosustain, for long periods of time, new positions of my assemblage point and toperceive coherently in them, that is to say, he aimed at forcing me torearrange my uniformity and cohesion.

I succeeded countless times in perceiving everything as precisely as Iperceive in the daily world. My problem was my incapacity to make a bridgebetween 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 secondattention is. Not so much because of its intricacy and complexity, which areindeed extreme, but because, once I was back in my normal awareness, I found itimpossible to remember not only that I had entered into the second attentionbut that such a state existed at all.

Another monumental breakthrough that the old sorcerers claimed, and thatdon Juan carefully explained to me, was to find out that the assemblage pointbecomes very easily displaced during sleep. This realization triggered anotherone that dreams are totally associated with that displacement. The oldsorcerers saw that the greater the displacement, the more unusual the dream orvice versa the more unusual the dream, the greater the displacement. Don Juan saidthat this observation led them to devise extravagant techniques to force thedisplacement of the assemblage point, such as ingesting plants that can producealtered states of consciousness; subjecting themselves to states of hunger,fatigue, and stress; and especially controlling dreams. In this fashion, andperhaps without even knowing it, they created dreaming.

One day, as we strolled around the plaza in the city of Oaxaca, don Juangave me the most coherent definition of dreaming from a sorcerer's standpoint.

"Sorcerers view dreaming as an extremely sophisticated art," hesaid, "the art of displacing the assemblage point at will from itshabitual position in order to enhance and enlarge the scope of what can beperceived." 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 throughthe assemblage point can be assembled into coherent perception.

Two, they saw that if the assemblage point is displaced to anotherposition, no matter how minute the displacement, different and unaccustomedenergy filaments begin to pass through it, engaging awareness and forcing theassembling of these unaccustomed energy fields into a steady, coherentperception.

Three, they saw that, in the course of ordinary dreams, the assemblagepoint becomes easily displaced by itself to another position on the surface orin the interior of the luminous egg.

Four, they saw that the assemblage point can be made to move to positionsoutside the luminous egg, into the energy filaments of the universe at large.

And, five, they saw that through discipline it is possible to cultivateand perform, in the course of sleep and ordinary dreams, a systematic displacementof the assemblage point.