"There are scores of outside forces controlling you at this moment," Don Juan replied. "The control that I am referring to is something outside the domain of your language. It is your control and at the same time it is not. It cannot be classified, but it certainly can be experienced. And above all, it can certainly be manipulated. Remember this: it can be manipulated - to your total advantage, of course, which again, is not your advantage, but the 'energy body's advantage. However, the 'energy body' is you so we could go on forever like dogs biting our own tails, trying to describe this..."

... I did see some strange fleeting black shadow projected on the foliage of the trees. It was either one shadow going back and forth, or various shadows moving from right to left, or left to right or straight up in the air. They looked like fat black fish to me, enormous fish...

"What is it, don Juan?" I asked, "I see fleeting black shadows all over the place."

"Ah, that's the universe at large," he said, "incommensurable, nonlinear, outside the realm of syntax. The sorcerors of ancient Mexico were the first ones to see those fleeting shadows, so they followed them around. They saw them as you were seeing them, and they saw them as energy that flows in the universe. And they did discover something transcendental... they discovered that we have a companion for life. We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The predator is our lord and master. It has rendered us domicile, helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it demands that we don't do so... this is an explanation, which is the simplest explanation in the world. They took us over because we are food for them, and they squeeze us mercilessly because we are their sustenance. Just as we rear chickens in chicken coops, 'gallineros', the predators rear us in human coops, 'humaneros'. Therefore, thier food is always available to them... think for a moment and tell me how you would explain the contradiction between the intelligence of man the engineer, and the stupidity of his systems of beliefs, or the stupidity of his contradictory behaviour? Sorcerors believe that the predators have given us our systems of beliefs, our ideas of good and evil, our social mores. They are the ones who set up our hopes and expectations and dreams of success and failure. They have given us covetousness, greed, and cowardice. It is the predators who make us COMPLACENT, routinary, and egomaniacal."

"But how can they do this don Juan?" I asked, somehow angered further by what he was saying. "Do they whisper that in our ears while we are asleep?"

"No, they don't do it that way. That's idiotic!" don Juan said, smiling. "They are infinitely more effecient and organized than that. In order to keep us obedient and meek and weak, the predators engaged themselves in a stupendous maneuver - stupendous, of course, from the point of view of a fighting strategist. A horrendous maneuver from the point of view of those who suffer it! Do you hear me? The predators gave us their mind. The predator's mind is baroque, contradictory, morose, filled with the fear of being discovered any minute now.

"I know that even though you have never suffered hunger," he went on, "that you have food anxiety, which is none other than the anxiety of the predator who fears now that any moment now it's maneuver is going to be uncovered and food is going to be denied. Through the mind, which, after all, if their mind, the predators inject into the lives of the human beings whatever is convenient for them. And they insure, in this manner, a degree of security to act as a buffer against that fear."

"It is not that I can't accept all of this at face value, don Juan," I said. "I could, but there's something so odious about it that it actually repels me. It forces me to take a contradictory stand. If it's true that they eat us, how do they do it?"

Don Juan had a broad smile on his face. He was pleased as punch. He explained that sorcerors 'see' infant human beings as strange luminous balls of energy, covereed from the top to the bottom with a glowing coat, something like a plastic cover that is adjusted tightly over their cocoon of energy. He said that this 'glowing coat of awareness' was what the predators consumed, and that when an adult human reached adulthood, all that was left of this 'glowing coat of awareness' was a narrow fringe that went from the ground to the top of the toes. That fringe permitted mankind to continue living but only just barely.

As if I had been in a dream, I heard don Juan Matus, explaining that to his knowledge, man was the only species that had the glowing coat of awareness outside that luminous cocoon. Therefore he became easy prey for an awareness of a different ORDER, such as the HEAVY AWARENESS of the predator.

He then made the most damaging statement he had made so far. He said that this narrow fringe of awareness was the epicenter of our self-reflection (EGO), where man was irremedially caught. By playing on our self-reflection, which is the only point left to us, the predators create flares of awareness that they proceed to consume in a ruthless predatory fashion. They give us inane problems that force those flares of awareness to rise, and in this manner they keep us alive in order for them to be fed with the energetic flare of our pseudoconcerns