THE THIRD SERIES
The Series of the Five Concerns: The Westwood Series
The Third Group:
Dreaming
Don Juan Matus defined dreaming as the act of using normal dreams
as a bona fide entrance for human awareness into other realms of perceiving.
This definition implied for him that ordinary dreams could be used as a
hatch that led perception into other regions of energy different from the
energy of the world of everyday life, and yet utterly similar to it at
a basic core. The result of such an entrance was, for sorcerers, the perception
of veritable worlds where they could live or die, worlds which were astoundingly
different from ours, and yet utterly similar.
Pressed for a linear explanation of this contradiction, don Juan Matus
reiterated the standard position of sorcerers: that the answers to all
those questions were in the practice, not in the intellectual inquiry.
He said that in order to talk about such possibilities, we would have to
use the syntax of language, whatever language we spoke, and that syntax,
by the force of usage, limits the possibilities of expression. The syntax
of any language refers only to perceptual possibilities found in the world
in which we live.
Don Juan made a significant differentiation, in Spanish, between two verbs:
one was to dream, soñar; and the other was ensoñar
which is to dream the way sorcerers dream. In English,
there is no clear distinction between these two states: the normal dreaming,
sueño, and the more complex state that sorcerers call ensueño.
The art of dreaming, according to what don Juan taught, originated
in a very casual observation that the shamans of ancient Mexico made when
they saw people who were asleep. They noticed that during sleep
the assemblage point was displaced in a very natural, easy way from
its habitual position, and that it moved anywhere along the periphery of
the luminous sphere, or to any place in the interior of it. Correlating
their seeing with the reports of the people who had been observed
sleeping, they realized that the greater the observed displacement of the
assemblage point, the more astounding the reports of events and
scenes experienced in dreams.
After this observation took hold of them, those sorcerers began to look
avidly for opportunities to displace their own assemblage points.
They ended up using psychotropic plants to accomplish this. Very quickly,
they realized that the displacement brought about by using these plants
was erratic, forced, and out of control. In the midst of this failure,
nonetheless they discovered one thing of great value. They called it dreaming
attention.
Don Juan explained this phenomenon, referring first to the daily awareness
of human beings as the attention placed on the elements of the world
of everyday life. He pointed out that human beings took only a cursory
and yet sustained look at everything that surrounded them. More than examining
things, human beings simply established the presence of those elements
by a special type of attention, a specific aspect of their general
awareness. His contention was that the same type of cursory and yet sustained
"look," so to speak, could be applied to the elements of an ordinary dream.
He called this other, specific aspect of general awareness dreaming
attention or the capacity that practitioners acquire to maintain their
awareness unwaveringly fixed on the items of their dreams.
The cultivation of dreaming attention gave the sorcerers of don
Juan's lineage a basic taxonomy of dreams. They found out that most of
their dreams were imagery, products of the cognition of their daily world;
however, there were some which escaped that classification. Such dreams
were veritable states of heightened awareness in which the elements
of the dream were not mere imagery, but energy-generating affairs. Dreams
which had energy-generating elements were, for those shamans, dreams in
which they were capable of seeing energy as it flowed in the universe.
Those shamans were able to focus their dreaming attention on any
element of their dreams, and found out, in this fashion, that there are
two kinds of dreams. One is the dreams that we are all familiar with, in
which phantasmagorical elements come into play, something which we could
categorize as the product of our mentality, our psyche; perhaps something
that has to do with our neurological makeup. The other kind of dreams they
called energy-generating dreams. Don Juan said that those sorcerers
of ancient times found themselves in dreams which were not dreams, but
actual visitations made in a dreamlike state to bona fide places other
than this world—real places, just like the world in which we live; places
where the objects of the dream generated energy, just as trees, or animals,
or even rocks generate energy in our daily world, for a seeing sorcerer.
Their visions of such places were, however, for those shamans, too fleeting,
too temporary, to be of any value to them. They attributed this flaw to
the fact that their assemblage points could not be held fixed for
any considerable time at the position to which they had been displaced.
Their attempts to remedy the situation resulted in the other high art of
sorcery: the art of stalking.
Don Juan defined the two arts very clearly one day when he said to me that
the art of dreaming consisted of purposely displacing the assemblage
point from its habitual position. The art of stalking consisted
volitionally making it stay fixed on the new position to which it had been
displaced.
This fixation allowed the shamans of ancient Mexico the opportunity to
witness other worlds in their full extent. Don Juan said that some those
sorcerers never returned from their journeys. In other words, they opted
for staying there, wherever "there" might have been.
"When the old sorcerers finished mapping human beings as luminous spheres,"
don Juan said to me once, "they had discovered no less than six hundred
spots in the total luminous sphere that were the sites bona fide worlds.
Meaning that, if the assemblage point became attached to any of
those places, the result was the entrance of the practitioner into a total
new world."
"But where are those six hundred other worlds, don Juan?" I asked.
"The only answer to that question is incomprehensible," he said, laughing.
"It's the essence of sorcery, and yet it means nothing to the average mind.
Those six hundred worlds are in the position of the assemblage point.
Incalculable amounts of energy are required to mat sense out of this answer.
We have the energy. What we lack is the facility or disputation to use it."
I could add that nothing could be truer than all these statements, an yet,
nothing could make less sense.
Don Juan explained usual perception in the terms in which the sorcerers
of his lineage understood it: The assemblage point, at its habitual
location, receives an inflow of energy fields from the universe at large
in the form of luminous filaments, numbering in the trillions. Since its
position is consistently the same, it stood to sorcerers' reasoning that
the same energy fields, in the form of luminous filaments, converge on
the assemblage point and go through it, giving as a consistent result
the perception of the world that we know. Those sorcerers arrived at the
unavoidable conclusion that if the assemblage point were displaced
to another position, another set of energy filaments would go through it,
resulting in the perception of a world that, by definition, was not the
same as the world of everyday life.
In don Juan's opinion, what human beings ordinarily regard as perceiving
is rather the act of interpreting sensory data. He maintains that from
the moment of birth, everything around us supplies us with possibility
of interpretation, and that with time, this possibility turns into a full
system by means of which we conduct all of our perceptual transactions
in the world.
He pointed out that the assemblage point is not only the center
where perception is assembled, but also the center where the interpretation
of sensory data is accomplished, so that if it were to change locations,
it would interpret the new influx of energy fields in very much the same
terms in which it interprets the world of everyday life. The result of
this new interpretation is the perception of a world which is strangely
similar to ours, and yet intrinsically different. Don Juan said that energetically,
those other worlds are as different from ours as they could possibly be.
It is only the interpretation of the assemblage point which accounts
for the seeming similarities.
Don Juan called for a new syntax that could be used in order to express
this wondrous quality of the assemblage point and the possibilities
of perception brought about by dreaming. He conceded, however, that
perhaps the present syntax of our language could be forced to cover it
if this experience became available to any one of us, and not merely to
shaman initiates.
Something related to dreaming that was of tremendous interest to
me, but which bewildered me to no end, was don Juan's statement that there
was really no procedure to speak of that would teach anyone how to dream.
He said that more than anything else, dreaming was an arduous effort
on the part of the practitioners to put themselves in contact with the
indescribable all-pervading force that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico
called intent. Once this link was established, dreaming also
mysteriously became established. Don Juan asserted that this linkage could
be accomplished following any pattern that implied discipline.
When I asked him to give me a succinct explanation of the procedures involved,
he laughed at me.
"To venture into the world of sorcerers," he said, "is not like learning
to drive a car. To drive a car, you need manuals and instructions. To dream,
you need to intend it."
"But how can I intend it?" I insisted.
"The only way you could intend it is by intending it," he
declared. "One of the most difficult things for a man of our day to accept
is a lack of procedure. Modern man is in the throes of manuals, praxes,
methods, steps leading to. He is ceaselessly taking notes, making diagrams,
deeply involved in the 'know-how.' But in the world of sorcerers, procedures
and rituals are mere designs to attract and focus attention. They art devices
used to force a focusing of interest and determination. They have no other
value."
What don Juan considered to be of supreme importance in order to dream
is the rigorous execution of the magical passes: the only device that
the sorcerers of his lineage used to aid the displacement of the assemblage
point. The execution of the magical passes gave those sorcerers the
stability and the energy necessary to call forth their dreaming attention,
without which there was no possibility of dreaming for them. Without
the emergence of dreaming attention, practitioners could aspire
at best, to have lucid dreams about phantasmagorical worlds. They could
perhaps have views of worlds that generate energy, but these would make
no sense to them whatsoever in the absence of an all-inclusive rationale
that would properly categorize them.
Once the shamans of don Juan's lineage had developed their dreaming
attention, they realized that they had tapped on the doors of infinity.
They had succeeded in enlarging the parameters of their normal perception.
They discovered that their normal state of awareness was infinitely more
varied than it had been before the advent of their dreaming attention.
From that point on, those sorcerers could truthfully venture into the unknown.
"The aphorism," don Juan said to me once, "that 'the sky is the limit'
was most applicable to the sorcerers of ancient times. They certainly outdid
themselves."
"Was it really true for them that the sky was the limit, don Juan?" I asked.
"This question could be answered only by each of us individually," he said,
smiling expansively. "They gave us the tools. It is up to us individually
to use them or refuse them. In essence, we are alone in front of infinity,
and the issue of whether or not we are capable of reaching our limits has
to be answered personally."
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