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Six Explanatory Propositions
Six Explanatory Propositions The
following is a translation of "The Six Explanatory Propositions"
included in the Spanish language version of the Eagle's Gift but never
included or published in the English versions of the book. In spite of
the amazing maneuvers that DJ did with my awareness, along the years I
stubbornly insisted in trying to intellectually evaluate what he did.
Although I have written at length about these maneuvers, it has always been
from a strictly experiential point of view and, besides, from a strictly
rational perspective. Immersed as I was in my own rationality, I couldn't
recognize the goals of the teachings of Don Juan. To understand the stretch
of these goals with a certain degree of precision, it was necessary that I
lost my human form and arrived to the totality of myself. The teachings
of Don Juan were meant to guide me through the second stage of a warrior's
development: the verification and unrestricted acceptance that within us lies another type of awareness. This stage was divided
into two categories. The first one, for which Don Juan required Don Genaro's help, dealt with two activities. It consisted of
showing me certain procedures, actions and methods that were designed to
exercise my awareness. The second one had to do with the six explanatory
propositions. Due to the
difficulties that I had in adapting my rationality in order to accept the
plausibility of what he was teaching me, Don Juan presented these explanatory
propositions in terms of my scholastic records. The first
thing he did, as an introduction, was to create a division in myself by means
of a specific blow on the right shoulder blade, a blow which made me enter an
unusual state of awareness, which I couldn't recall once I was back to
normality. Until the
moment in which Don Juan made me enter such state of awareness I had an
undeniable sense of continuity, which I thought of as a product of my vital
experience. The idea that I had about myself was
that of being a full entity that could explain everything it had done.
Besides, I was convinced that the dwelling of all my awareness, if there was
such, was in my head. However, Don Juan showed me with his blow that it
exists a center in the spinal cord, at the height of the shoulder blades, that is obviously a center of enhanced awareness. When I
questioned Don Juan about the nature of this blow, he explained that the nagual is a director, a guide who bears the
responsibility of opening the way, and that he must be impeccable to
impregnate his warriors with a sense of confidence and clarity. Only under
these conditions is a nagual in the possibility of
giving this blow on the back to force a displacement of awareness, because
the power of the nagual is what allows the
transition. If the nagual is not an impeccable
practitioner, the displacement doesn't occur, as when I tried,
unsuccessfully, to put the other apprentices in a state of heightened
awareness hitting them on the back before we ventured into the bridge. I asked Don
Juan what this displacement of awareness implied. He said that the nagual has to strike on a precise spot, which varies from
person to person but which is always located in the general area of the
shoulder blades. A nagual has to see to specify the
spot, which is located in the periphery of one's luminosity and not on the
physical body itself; once the nagual identifies
it, he pushes it in, more that striking it, and thus creates a concavity, a
depression in the luminous shield. The state of heightened awareness
resulting from this blow lasts as much as this depression lasts. Some
luminous shields go back to their original forms by themselves, some have to
be struck in another point to be restored, and some others never go back to
their oval shapes. Don Juan
said that seers see awareness as a peculiar glow. Everyday awareness is a
glow on the right side, which extends from the physical body's exterior to
the periphery of our luminosity. Heightened awareness is a more intense shine
associated with great speed and concentration, a fulgor
which saturates the periphery of the left side. Don Juan
said that seers explain what happens with the blow of the nagual
as a temporal dislodging of a center located in the luminous cocoon of the
body. The Eagle's emanations are in reality evaluated and selected in that
center. The blow alters their normal behavior. Through
their observations, seers have reached the conclusion that warriors must be
put in that state of disorientation. The change in the way awareness works
under these conditions makes this state an ideal territory to dillucidate the commands of the Eagle: it allows warriors
to function as if they were in everyday awareness, with the difference that
they can concentrate in everything they do with unprecedented clarity and
strength. Don Juan
said that my situation was analogous to the one he had experienced. His
benefactor created a deep division in himself, making him move once and once
again from the awareness of the right side to the awareness of the left side.
The clarity and freedom of his left side awareness were in direct opposition
to the rationalizations and endless defenses of his right side. He told me
that all warriors are cast into the depths of the same situation that
polarity molds, and that the nagual creates and
reinforces the division to be able to lead his apprentices to the conviction
that there is an awareness in human beings yet
unexplored. 1. What we perceive as
the world are the Eagle's emanations. Don Juan
explained to me that the world we perceive does not have a transcendental
existence. Since we are familiarized with it we believe that what we perceive
is a world of objects which exist such as we perceive them, when in reality
there is not a world of objects, but, rather, a universe of Eagle's
emanations. These emanations represent the only immutable reality. It is a
reality that encompasses all that is, perceivable and unperceivable, knowable
and unknowable. Seers who
see the Eagle's emanations call them commands because of their urging force.
All living creatures are urged to use the emanations, and they use them
without getting to know what they are. Ordinary men interpret them as
reality. And seers who see the emanations interpret them as the rule. In
spite that seers see the emanations, they don't have a way of knowing what it
is they are seeing. Instead of entangling themselves with useless
conjectures, seers occupy themselves in the functional speculation of how the
Eagle's commands can be interpreted. Don Juan sustained that to intuit a
reality which transcends the world we perceive stays at the level of conjecture;
it is not enough for a warrior to conjecture that the Eagle's commands are
instantly perceived by all creatures that live on Earth, and that none of
them perceives them in the same way. Warriors must try to behold the flow of
emanations and "see" the way in which man and other living beings
use it to build their perceptual world. When I
proposed to use the word "description" instead of Eagles's emanations, Don Juan said that he was not making
a metaphor. He said that the word "description" connotes a human
agreement, and that what we perceive stems from a command in which human
agreements do not count. 2. Attention is what
makes us perceive the Eagle's emanations as the action of skimming. Don Juan
used to say that perception is a physical faculty that living creatures
groom; the final result of this grooming is known, among seers, as
"attention". Don Juan described attention as the action of hooking
and channeling perception. He said that this action is our most singular
feat, which covers all the spectrum of human alternatives and possibilities.
Don Juan established a precise distinction between alternatives and
possibilities. Human alternatives are those that we are enabled to choose as
persons who function within the social environment. Our landscape of this
dominion is quite limited. Human possibilities are those that we are capable
of achieving as luminous beings. Don Juan
revealed to me a classificatory scheme of three types of attention,
emphasizing that calling them "types" was erroneous. In fact, they
are three levels of knowledge: first, second and third attention; each one of
them an independent dominion, complete in itself. For a
warrior that is in the initial stages of his learning, the first attention is
the most important of the three. Don Juan said that his explanatory
propositions were attempts to bring into first frame the way
in which the first attention works, something that passes completely unadverted to us. He considered imperative for warriors
to understand the nature of the first attention if they were going to venture
into the other two. He explained
to me that the first attention has been taught how to move instantly through
a whole spectrum of the Eagle's emanations, without emphasizing at all that
fact, in order to reach "perceptual units" which all of us have
learned that are perceivable. Seers call this feat "skimming",
because it implies the capability of suppressing those emanations which are
superfluous and selecting which of them must be emphasized. Don Juan explained
this process taking as an example the mountain that we were seeing at that
moment. He stressed that my first attention, at the moment of seeing the
mountain, had skimmed an infinite number of emanations to obtain a miracle of
perception; a skimming that all human beings know because each one of them
has attained it by himself. Seers
contend that everything the first attention suppresses to obtain a skimming,
cannot be recovered anymore by the first attention under any condition. Once
we learn to perceive in terms of skimmings, our
senses stop registering the superfluous emanations. To dillucidate
this point he gave me the example of the skimming: "human body". He
said that our first attention is totally unconscious of the emanations that
compose the external luminous shield of the physical body. Our oval cocoon is
not subjected to perception; those emanations have been rejected which would
make it perceivable in benefit of those which allow the first attention to
perceive the physical body such as we know it. Therefore,
the perceptual goal that children must achieve as they grow up consists in
learning to isolate the appropriate emanations to be able to channel their
chaotic perception and transform it into the first attention; in doing so,
they learn how to build skimmings. All grown up
human beings who surround children teach them how to skim. Sooner or later,
children learn to control their first attention in order to perceive skimmings in terms which are alike to those of their
teachers. Don Juan
never ceased to be amazed at the capability of human beings to bring order
into the chaos of perception. He contended that all of us, by his/her own
merits, is a magistral
magician and that our magic consists in rendering reality to the skimmings that our first attention has learned how to
build. The fact that we perceive in terms of skimmings
is the Eagle's command, but to perceive the commands as objects is our power,
our magical gift. Our fallacy, on the other hand, is that we always end up
being one-sided when forgetting that skimmings are
only real in terms that we perceive them as real, due to the power that we
have to do it. Don Juan called this an error in judgment which destroys the
richness of our mysterious origins. 3. The skimmings are made sense of by the first ring of power. Don Juan
used to say that the first ring of power is the force that stems from the
Eagle's emanations to affect exclusively our first attention. He explained
that it has been represented as a "ring "
because of its dynamism, of its uninterrupted movement. It has been called
ring "of power" due to, first, its compulsive character, and,
second, because of its unique ability to stop its works, to change them or
reverse their direction. The
compulsive character is better shown in the fact that it doesn't only urge
the first attention to build and perpetuate skimmings,
but it also demands a consensus from all the participants. Each one of us is
demanded a complete agreement upon the faithful reproduction of skimmings, since conformity to the first ring of power
must be total. It is
precisely this conformity which gives us the certainty that skimmings are objects which exist as such, independent
from our perception. Besides, the compulsiveness of the first ring of power
does not cease after the initial agreement, but it demands that we
continuously renovate the agreement. Our whole life we must operate as if,
for example, each one of our skimmings was
perceptually the first one for each human being, in spite of languages and cultures.
Don Juan granted that even if all this is too serious to be taken jokingly,
the urging character of the first ring of power is so intense that forces us
to believe that if the "mountain" could have an awareness of its own, it would consider itself as the skimming that we have
learned how to build. The most
valuable feature that the first ring of power bears to a warrior is the
singular capability of interrupting its flux of energy, or to totally suspend
it. Don Juan said that this is a latent capability which exists within us all
as a backup unit. In our narrow world of skimmings,
there is no need to use it. Since we are so efficiently buttressed and
shielded by the net of the first attention, we do not realize, not even
vaguely, that we have hidden resources. However, if another alternative to
follow would present itself to us, such as is the warrior's option to use the
second attention, the latent capability of the first ring of power could
start to function and could be used with spectacular results. Don Juan
underlined that the biggest feat of sorcerers is the process of activating
this latent capability; he called it blocking the intent of the first ring of
power. He explained to me that the Eagle's emanations, which have already
been isolated by the first attention in order to build the everyday world,
exert an unbending pressure upon the first attention. For this pressure to
stop its activity, the intent must be displaced. Seers call this an
obstruction or an interruption of the first ring of power. 4. Intent is the Force
that moves the first ring of power. Don Juan
explained to me that intent doesn't refer to have an intention, or to want
one thing or the other, but rather has to do with an imponderable force that
makes us behave in ways which could be described as intentions, wishing,
volition, etc. Don Juan didn't bring it forth as a condition of being,
stemming from oneself, such as is a habit produced by socialization, or a
biological reaction, but rather brought it forth as a private, intimate force
that we possess and use individually as a key that makes the first ring of
power move in acceptable ways. Intent is what directs our first attention in
order for it to focus on the Eagle's emanations within a certain frame. And
intent is also what commands the first ring of power to obstruct or interrupt
its flux of energy. Don Juan
suggested me to conceive intent as an invisible force which exists in the
universe, without receiving itself, but still affecting everything: force
that creates and sustains skimmings. He asserted
that skimmings must be incessantly recreated to be
imbued with continuity. In order to recreate them each time with the
freshness that they need to build a living world, we must intend them each
time we build them. For instance, we must intend the "mountain"
along with all its complexities for the skimming to be fully materialized.
Don Juan said that, for a spectator, who behaves exclusively based upon the
first attention without the intervention of intent, the "mountain" would
appear as an entirely different skimming. It could appear as the skimming
"geometric form" or "amorphous spot of color". For the
skimming mountain to be completed, the spectator must intend it, whether it
is unconsciously through the urging force of the first ring of power, or
premeditatedly, through the warrior's training. Don Juan
pointed to me the three ways in which intent comes to us. The most
predominating one is known by seers as "the intent of the first ring of
power". This is a blind intent which comes to us by chance. It is as if
we were in its way, or as if intent was in ours. Inevitably we find ourselves
trapped in its net without having the least control of what is happening to
us. The second
way is when intent comes to us by its own. This requires a considerable
amount of purpose, a sense of determination on our part. Only in our
capability as warriors we can put ourselves voluntarily in the way of intent;
we summon it, so to speak. Don Juan explained to me that his insistence in
being an impeccable warrior was nothing more than an effort to let intent
know that he is putting himself in its way. Don Juan
used to say that warriors call this phenomenon "power". Thus when
they speak of having personal power, they are referring to the intent that
comes to them voluntarily. The outcome, he used to say to me, can be
described as the facility to find new solutions, or the facility to affect
people or events. It is as if other possibilities, previously unknown by the
warrior, suddenly become apparent. In this way, an impeccable warrior never
plans anything ahead, but his actions are so decisive that it seems as if the
warrior had calculated beforehand each facet of his activity. The third
way in which we find intent is the most rare and complex of the three; it
occurs when intent allows us to harmonize with it. Don Juan described this
state as the real moment of power: the culmination of a lifetime effort in
search of impeccability. Only supreme warriors obtain it, and as long as they
are in such state, intent lets itself be handled by them at will. It is as if
intent had fused in those warriors, and in doing so it transforms them into a
pure force, without preconceptions. Seers call this state the "intent of
the second ring of power", or "will". 5. The First Ring of
Power can be stopped by a functional blocking of the capability of building skimmings. Don Juan
used to say that the function of the not-doings is to create an obstruction
in the usual focus of out first attention. The not-doings are, in this sense,
maneuvers destined to prepare the first attention for the functional blocking
of the first ring of power, or, in other words, for the interruption of
intent. Don Juan
explained to me that this functional blocking, which is the only method to
systematically use the latent capability of the first ring of power,
represents a temporal interruption that the benefactor creates in the
disciple's capability for building skimmings. It is
a premeditated and powerful artificial intrusion into the first attention, in
order to push it beyond the appearances which the known skimmings
present to us; this intrusion is accomplished by interrupting the intent of
the first ring of power. Don Juan
used to say that in order to achieve this interruption, the benefactor treats
intent as what it really is, a flux, a current of
energy that can eventually be stopped or reoriented. An interruption of this
nature, however, implies a commotion of such magnitude that can force the
first ring of power to stop fully; a situation which is impossible to
conceive under our normal life conditions. It is unthinkable to us that we
can un-walk the steps we took when we consolidated our perception, but it is
feasible that under the impact of this interruption we could place ourselves
in a perceptual position very similar to the one of our beginnings, when the
Eagle's commands were emanations which we still had not imbued with
significance. Don Juan
used to say that any procedure the benefactor could use to create this
interruption must be intimately linked with his personal power. Therefore, a
benefactor doesn't use any process to handle intent, but rather moves it and
makes it available to the apprentice trough his personal power. In my case,
Don Juan achieved the functional blocking of the first ring of power through
a complex process, which combined three methods: the ingestion of
hallucinogenic plants, manipulation of the body and maneuvering with intent
itself. In the
beginning Don Juan relied strongly upon the ingestion of hallucinogenic
plants, apparently due to the persistence of my rational side. The effect was
tremendous, and yet retarded the sought for interruption. The fact that the
plants were hallucinogenic offered my reason the perfect justification to
congregate all of its available resources to continue exerting control. I was
convinced that I could logically explain anything that I was experiencing,
along with the inconceivable feats that Don Juan and Don Genaro
used to do to create the interruptions, as perceptual distortions caused by
the ingestion of hallucinogenics. Don Juan
used to say that the most remarkable effect of hallucinogenic plants was
something that every time I ingested them I interpreted as the peculiar
feeling that everything around me oozed a surprising richness. There were
colors, forms, details that I had never beheld before. Don Juan used this
increment in my ability to perceive, and, through a series of commands and
comments used to force me to enter a state of nervous restlessness. Afterwards
he manipulated my body and made me shift from one side of awareness to the
other, until I had created phantasmagorical visions or absolutely real scenes
with tridimensional creatures that could not possibly exist in this world. Don Juan
explained to me that once the direct relation between intent and the skimmings we are constructing is broken, it cannot ever
be repaired. From that moment on we acquire the ability to catch a current of
what he described as "phantom intent", or the intent of the skimmings which are not present at the moment or place of
the interruption, this is to say, an intent put at
our disposal through some aspect of memory. Don Juan
asserted that with the interruption of the intent of the first ring of power
we become receptive and moldable; a nagual can then
introduce the intent of the second ring of power. Don Juan was convinced that
children of a certain age find themselves in a similar situation of
receptivity; being deprived of intent, they are ready to be imprinted with
any intent which is available to the teachers who surround them. After my
period of continuos ingestion of hallucinogenic
plants, Don Juan totally discontinuated its use.
However, he obtained new and more dramatic interruptions in myself manipulating my body and making me shift states of
awareness, combining all this with maneuvers with intent itself. Through a
combination of mesmerizing instructions and adequate comments, Don Juan
created a current of "phantom intent" and I was lead to experience
common skimmings as something unimaginable. He
conceptualized all this as "glancing into the immensity of the
Eagle". Don Juan
masterfully lead me through countless interruptions
of intent until he was convinced, as a seer, that my body showed the effects
of the functional blocking of the first ring of power. He said that he could
see a unusual activity around the area of the
shoulder blades. He described it as a little hole that had formed exactly as
if the luminosity was a muscular layer contracted by a nerve. To me, the
effect of the functional blocking of the first ring of power was that it
managed to erase the certainty which I had all my life that what my senses
reported was "real". Quietly I entered a
state of inner silence. Don Juan used to say that what gives warriors that
extreme uncertainty that his benefactor had experienced at the end of his
life, that resignation to failure that he himself was living, is the fact
that one glance into the immensity of the Eagle leaves one without hope. Hope
is the result of our familiarity with skimmings and
the idea that we control them. In such moments only the warrior's life can
help us to persevere in our efforts to discover that which the Eagle has
concealed from us, but without hope that we can get to understand what we discover.
6. The Second Attention.
Don Juan
explained to me that the examination of the second attention must begin with
the realization that the force of the first ring of power, which boxes us in,
is a physical, concrete edge. Seers have described it as a wall of fog, a
barrier that can be systematically brought to our awareness by means of the
blocking of the first ring of power; and then can be perforated by means of
the warrior's training. After
perforating this wall of fog, one enters a broad intermediate state. The task
of the warriors then consists in going through it until they reach the next divisory line, which must be perforated in order to enter
what it is properly the other self or the second attention. Don Juan
used to say that the two divisory lines are
perfectly recognizable. When warriors perforate the wall of fog they feel
that their bodies are squeezed, or they feel an intense shaking in the cavity
of their bodies, generally to the right of the stomach or through the middle
part, from right to left. When warriors perforate the second line, they feel
an acute crack on the upper part of the body, something like the sound of a
dry bough that is broken in two. The two
lines that box in both attentions, and individually seal them,
are known to seers as the parallel lines. These seal both attentions by means
of the fact that they extend into infinity, without ever allowing the
crossing unless they are perforated. Between both
lines there exists an area of specific awareness that seers call limbo, or
the world between the parallel lines. It is a real space between two huge
orders of the Eagle's emanations; emanations which are within the human
possibilities of awareness. One is the level which creates the self of
everyday life, and the other is the level which creates the other self. Since
the limbo is a transitional zone, there both fields of emanations extend one
upon the other. The fraction of the level which is known to us, that extends
into that area, hooks a portion of the first ring of power; and the
capability of the first ring of power to build skimmings
makes us perceive a series of skimmings in the
limbo which are almost as those of everyday life, except that they appear
grotesque, uncanny and contorted. In this manner the limbo has specific
features that do not change arbitrarily each time that one goes into it.
There exist in it physical features which resemble the skimmings
of everyday life. Don Juan
sustained that the feeling of heaviness experienced in the limbo is due to
the growing burden that has been placed on the first attention. In the area
located right behind the wall of fog we can still behave as we do normally;
it is as if we were in a grotesque but recognizable world. As we penetrate
further into it, beyond the wall of fog, it becomes progressively difficult
to recognize the features or to behave in terms of the known self. He explained
to me that it was possible to make that instead of the wall of fog anything
else appeared, but that seers have opted for accentuating that which consumes
less energy: to visualize the wall of fog does not demand any effort. What exists
beyond the second divisory line is known by seers
as the second attention, or the other self, or the parallel world; and the
action of going through both edges is known as "crossing the parallel
lines". Don Juan
thought that I could assimilate this concept more firmly if he described each
dominion of awareness as a specific perceptual predisposition. He told me
that in the territory of everyday awareness we are inescapably entangled into
the specific perceptual predisposition of the first attention. From the
moment in which the first ring of power begins to build skimmings,
the way of building them becomes our normal perceptual predisposition.
Breaking the unifying force of the first attention implies to break the first
divisory line. The normal perceptual predisposition
passes then into the intermediate area which is between the parallel lines.
One keeps building almost normal skimmings for some
time. But as one approaches what seers call the second divisory
line, the perceptual predisposition of the first attention begins to recede,
it loses strength. Don Juan used to say that this transition is marked by a
sudden incapability of remembering or understanding what one is doing. When one
gets closer to the second divisory line, the second
attention begins to act on the warriors who undertake the voyage. If they are
inexperienced, their awareness gets emptied, it goes blank. Don Juan held
that this occurs because they are approaching a spectrum of the Eagle's
emanations which has not yet a systematized perceptual predisposition. My
experiences with la Gorda and the nagual woman beyond the wall of fog were an example of
this incapability. I traveled as far as the other self, but I couldn't
account on what we had done for the simple reason that my second attention
was still unformulated and it did not give me the opportunity of formulating
all I had perceived. Don Juan
explained to me that one begins to activate the second ring of power by
forcing the second attention to wake from its slumber. The functional
blocking of the first ring of power achieves this. Then, the task of the
teacher consists in recreating the condition which started the first ring of
power, the condition of being saturated with intent. The first ring of power
is put in motion by the force of the intent given by those who teach how to
skim. As my teacher he was giving me, then, a new intent which would create a
new perceptual environment. Don Juan
said that it takes a lifetime of unceasing discipline, which seers call
unbending intent, to prepare the second ring of power to be able to build skimmings which belong to another level of the Eagle's
emanations. To dominate the perceptual predisposition of the parallel self is
a feat of peerless value which few warriors achieve. Silvio
Manuel was one of those few. Don Juan
warned me that one must not attempt to deliberately dominate it. If this
happens, it must be through a natural process which unfolds itself without
much effort from our part. He explained to me that the reason for this
indifference lies on the practical consideration that when it is dominated it
simply becomes very difficult to break, since the goal that warriors actively
pursuit is to break both perceptual predispositions to enter the final
freedom of the third attention. |
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