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Over the past twenty years, I have written a
series of books about my apprenticeship with
a Mexican Yaqui Indian sorcerer, don Juan Matus. I have explained in those books that
he taught me sorcery but not as we understand sorcery in the context of our daily world:
the use of supernatural powers over others,
or the calling of spirits through charms,
spells, or rituals to produce supernatural effects. For don Juan, sorcery was the act of
embodying some specialized theoretical and practical premises about the nature and role
of perception in molding the universe around us.
Following don Juan's suggestion, I have refrained from using shamanism, a category
proper to anthropology, to classify his knowledge. I have called it all along what he
himself called it: sorcery. On examination, however, I realized that calling it sorcery
obscures even more the already obscure phenomena he presented to me in his teachings.
In anthropological works, shamanism is described as a belief system of some native
people of northern Asia-prevailing also among
certain native North American Indian
tribes-which maintains that an unseen world of ancestral spiritual forces, good and evil,
is pervasive around us and that these spiritua
l forces can be summoned or controlled
through the acts of practitioners, who are th
e intermediaries between the natural and
supernatural realms.
Don Juan was indeed an intermediary between the natural world of everyday life and an
unseen world, which he called not the supernatur
al but the second attention. His role as a
teacher was to make this configuration accessib
le to me. I have described in my previous
work his teaching methods to this effect, as well as the sorcery arts he made me practice,
the most important of which is called the art of dreaming.
Don Juan contended that our world, which we believe to be unique and absolute, is only
one in a cluster of consecutive worlds, arranged like the layers of an onion. He asserted
that even though we have been energetically co
nditioned to perceive solely our world, we
still have the capability of entering into those other realms, which are as real, unique,
absolute, and engulfing as our own world is.
Don Juan explained to me that, for us to perceive those other realms, not only do we have
to covet them but we need to have sufficient energy to seize them. Their existence is
constant and independent of our awareness, he said, but their inaccessibility is entirely a
consequence of our energetic conditioning. In
other words, simply and solely because of
that conditioning, we are compelled to assume that the world of daily life is the one and
only possible world.
Believing that our energetic conditioning is correctable, don Juan stated that sorcerers of
ancient times developed a set of practices
designed to recondition our energetic
capabilities to perceive. They called this set of practices the art of dreaming.
With the perspective time gives, I now realize that the most fitting statement don Juan
made about dreaming was to call it the "gateway to infinity." I remarked, at the time he
said it, that the metaphor had no meaning to me.
"Let's then do away with metaphors," he conceded. "Let's say that dreaming is the
sorcerers' practical way of putting ordinary dreams to use."
"But how can ordinary dreams be put to use?" I asked.
"We always get tricked by words," he said. "In my own case, my teacher attempted to
describe dreaming to me by saying that it is the way sorcerers say good night to the
world. He was, of course, tailoring his descri
ption to fit my mentality. I'm doing the same
with you."
On another occasion don Juan said to me, "D
reaming can only be experienced. Dreaming
is not just having dreams; neither is it daydreaming or wishing or imagining. Through
dreaming we can perceive other worlds, which we can certainly describe, but we can't
describe what makes us perceive them. Yet we can feel how dreaming opens up those
other realms. Dreaming seems to be a sensati
on-a process in our bodies, an awareness
in our minds."
In the course of his general teachings, don Juan thoroughly explained to me the
principles, rationales, and practices of the art of dreaming. His instruction was divided
into two parts.. One was about dreaming procedures, the other about the purely abstract
explanations of these procedures. His teaching method was an interplay between enticing
my intellectual curiosity with the abstract principles of dreaming and guiding me to seek
an outlet in its practices. |
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