horrendous heresy.When he felt that he had overcome my worst resistance, don Juan drove his point asfar and as deep as he could into me, and I had to admit, without reservations,that in the world of shamans, shaman practitioners judged the world from points ofview which were indescribable to our conceptualization devices. For instance, theyperceived energy as it flowed freely in the universe, energy free from thebindings of socialization and syntax, pure vibratory energy. They called this actseeing.Don Juan's prime objective was to help me to perceive energy as it flows in theuniverse. In the world of shamans, to perceive energy in such a manner is thefirst mandatory step toward a more engulfing, freer view of a different cognitivesystem. In order to elicit a seeing response in me. don Juan utilized otherforeign units of cognition. One of the most important units, he called therecapitulation, which consisted of a systematic scrutiny of one's life, segment bysegment, an examination made not in the light of criticism or finding flaw, but inthe light of an effort to understand one's life, and to change its course. DonJuan's claim was that once any practitioner has viewed his life in the detachedmanner that the recapitulation requires, there's no way to go back to the samelife.To see energy as it flows in the universe meant, to don Juan, the capacity to seea human being as a luminous egg or luminous ball of energy, and to be able todistinguish, in that luminous ball of energy, certain features shared by men incommon, such as a point of brilliance in the already brilliant luminous ball ofenergy. The claim of shamans was that it was on that point of brilliance, whichthose shamans called the assemblage point, that perception was assembled. Theycould extend this thought logically to mean that it was on that point ofbrilliance that our cognition of the world was manufactured. Odd as it may seem,don Juan Matus was right, in the sense that this is exactly what happens.The perception of shamans, therefore, was subject to a different process than theperception of average men. Shamans claimed that perceiving energy directly ledthem to what they called energetic facts. By energetic fact, they meant a viewobtained by seeing energy directly that led to conclusions that were final andirreducible; they couldn't be tampered with by speculation, or by trying to fitthem into our standard system of interpretation.Don Juan said that for the shamans of his lineage, it was an energetic fact thatthe world around us is defined by the processes of cognition, and those processesare not unalterable: they are not givens. They are a matter of training, a matterof practicality and usage. This thought was extended further, to another energeticfact: the processes of standard cognition are the product of our upbringing, nomore than that.Don Juan Matus knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that whatever he was telling meabout the cognitive system of the shamans of ancient Mexico was a reality. DonJuan was among other things, a nagual, which meant, for shaman practitioners, anatural leader, a person who was capable of viewing energetic facts withoutdetriment to his well-being. He was, therefore, capacitated to lead his fellow mensuccessfully into avenues of thought and perception impossible to describe.Considering all the facts that don Juan had taught me about his cognitive world, Iarrived at the conclusion, which was the conclusion that he himself shared, thatthe most important unit of such a world was the idea of intent. For the shamans ofancient Mexico, Intent was a force they could visualize when they saw energy as itflows in the universe. They considered it an all-pervasive force that intervened
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