carlos castaneda's commentaries

The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge


The irreducible description of what I did in the field would be to say that the Yaqui Indian sorcerer, don Juan Matus, introduced me into the cognition of the shamans of ancient Mexico. By cognition, it is meant the processes responsible for the awareness of everyday life, processes which include memory, experience, perception, and the expert use of any given syntax. The idea of cognition was, at that time, my most powerful stumbling block. It was inconceivable for me, as an educated Western man, that cognition, as it is defined in the philosophical discourse of our day, could be anything besides a homogeneous, all-engulfing affair for the totality of mankind.

For the sorcerers of don Juan's lineage, however, there is the cognition of modern man, and there is the cognition of the shamans of ancient Mexico. Through the shaman cognition, Don Juan explained, it was energetically imperative for human beings to realize that the only thing that matters is their encounter with infinity. "Man's battlefield is not in his strife with the world around him. His battlefield is over the horizon, in an area which is unthinkable for an average man, the area where man ceases to be a man."

Little did I know at that time that don Juan was not giving me just an appealing intellectual description; he was describing something he called an energetic fact. Energetic facts, for him, were the conclusions that he and the other shamans of his lineage arrived at when they engaged in a function which they called seeing: the act of perceiving energy directly as it flows in the universe. This capacity to perceive energy in this manner is one of the culminating points of shamanism.

According to don Juan, the task of ushering me into the cognition of the shamans of ancient Mexico was carried out in a traditional way, meaning that whatever he did to me was what was done to every shaman initiate throughout the ages. The internalization of the processes of a different cognitivie system always began by drawing the shaman initiates' total attention to the realization that we are beings on our way to dying. Don Juan and the other shamans of his lineage believed that the full realization of this energetic fact, this irreducible truth, would lead to the acceptance of the new cognition.

Don Juan said that the energetic fact which was the cornerstone of the cognition of the shamans was that every nuance of the cosmos is an expression of energy.

To perceive energy directly allowed the sorcerers of don Juan's lineage to see human beings as conglomerates of energy fields that have the appearance of luminous balls. Observing human beings in such a fashion, they noticed that each of those luminous balls is individually connected to an energetic mass of inconceivable proportions that exists in the universe; a mass which they called the dark sea of awareness. They observed that each individual ball is attached to the dark sea of awareness at a point that is even more brilliant than the luminous ball itself. Those shamans called that point of junction the assemblage point, because they observed that it is at that spot that perception takes place.

What the shamans found out when the focused their seeing on the dark sea of awareness was the revelation that the entire cosmos is made of luminous filaments that extend themselves infinitely. Shamans describe them as luminous filaments that go every which way, but without ever touching one another. They saw that they are individual filaments, and yet, they are grouped in inconceivably enormous masses.

Another such filament, besides the dark sea of awareness which the shamans observed and liked because of its vibration, was something they called intent, and the act of individual shamans focusing their attention on such a mass, they called intending. They saw that the entire universe was a universe of intent, and intent, for them, was the equivalent of intelligence. Their conclusion, which became part of their cognitive world, was that vibratory energy, aware of itself, was intelligent in the extreme. They saw that the mass of intent in the cosmos was responsible for all the possible mutations, all the possible variations which happened in the universe, not because of arbitrary, blind circumstances, but because of the intending done by the vibratory energy.

Zillions of these luminous filaments, or rather fields of energy, were observed to converge on and go through the assemblage point. They discovered the energetic fact that the impact of the energy fields going through the assemblage point was transformed into sensory data; data which were then interpreted into the cognition of the world of everyday life. Those shamans accounted for the homogeneity of cognition among human beings by the fact that the assemblage point for the entire human race is located at the same place on the energetic luminous spheres that we are: at the height of the shoulder blades, an arm's length behind them, against the boundary of the lumionus ball.

The seeing-observations of the assemblage point led the sorcerers of ancient Mexico to discover that the assemblage point shifted position under conditions of normal sleep, or extreme fatigue, or disease, or the ingestion of psychotropic plants. Those sorcerers saw that when the assemblage point was at a new position, a different bundle of energy fields went through it, forcing the assemblage point to turn those energy fields into sensory data, and interpret them, giving as a result a veritable new world to perceive.

Another issue related to intent, but transposed to the level of universal intending, was, for the shamans, the energetic fact that we are continually pushed and pulled and tested by the universe itself. The intending of the universe is to be continually testing awareness. The shamans saw that the universe exerts pressure on all beings, forcing them to enhance their awareness, and in this fashion, the universe attempts to become aware of itself. In the cognitive world of the shamans of ancient Mexico, therefore, awareness is the final issue.

Don Juan Matus and the shamans of his lineage regarded awareness as the act of being deliberately conscious of all the perceptual possibilities of man, not merely the perceptual possibilities dictated by any given culture whose role seems to be that of restricting the perceptual capacity of its members. Don Juan maintained that to release, or set free, the total perceiving capacity of human beings would not in any way interfere with their functional behavior. In fact, functional behavior would become an extraordinary issue, for it would acquire a new value. Free from idealities and pseudo-goals, man has only function as his guiding force. Shamans call this impeccability. They derived function from seeing energy directly as it flows in the universe. If energy flows in a certain way, to follow the flow of energy is, for them, being functional.

According to don Juan, the culmination of the shamans' quest is something he considered to be the ultimate energetic fact, for every human being on Earth. He called it the definitive journey. The definitive journey is the possibility that individual awareness, enhanced to the limit by the individual's adherence to the shamans' cognition, could be maintained beyond the point at which the organism is capable of functioning as a cohesive unit, that is to say, beyond death. This transcendental awareness was understood by the shamans of ancient Mexico as the possibility for the awareness of human beings to go beyond everything that is known, and arrive, in this manner, at the level of energy that flows in the universe. Shamans like don Juan Matus defined their quest as the quest of becoming, in the end, an inorganic being, meaning energy aware of itself, acting as a cohesive unit, but without an organism. They called this aspect of their cognition total freedom, a state in which awareness exists, free from the impositions of socialization and syntax.