The world of everyday life cannot ever be taken as something personal that has power over us, something that could make us, or destroy us, because man’s battlefield is not in his strife with the world around him. His battlefield is over the horizon, in an area that is unthinkable for the average man, the area where man ceases to be a man.

It is energetically imperative for human beings to realize that the only thing that matters is their encounter with infinity. The term infinity cannot be reduced to a more manageable description. It is energetically irreducible.

This is an energetic fact, which means that it is a conclusion that is arrived at when the shaman is engaged in a function called seeing. Seeing is the act of perceiving energy directly as it flows in the universe.

The end result is a realization, which, by its simplicity, is so difficult to attain: that we are indeed beings that are going to die. Therefore, the real struggle of man is not the strife with his fellowman, but with infinity, and this is not even a struggle; it is, in essence, an acquiescence. We must voluntarily acquiesce to infinity. In the description of the sorcerers, our lives originate in infinity, and they end up wherever they originated: infinity.

It is an energetic fact that every nuance of the cosmos is an expression of energy. From their plateau of seeing energy directly, the shamans arrived at the energetic fact that the entire cosmos is composed of twin forces that are opposite and complementary to each other at the same time. They called those two forces animate energy and inanimate energy.

They saw that inanimate energy has no awareness. Awareness, for shamans, is a vibratory condition of animate energy. The shamans saw that all the organisms of Earth are the possessors of vibratory energy. They called them organic beings, and saw that it is the organism itself that sets up the cohesiveness and the limits of such energy. They also saw that there are conglomerates of vibratory animate energy that have a cohesion of their own, free from the bindings of an organism. They called them inorganic beings, and described them as clumps of cohesive energy that are invisible to the human eye, energy that is aware of itself, and possesses a unity determined by an agglutinating force other than the agglutinating force of the organism.

To perceive energy directly allowed the sorcerers to see human beings as conglomerates of energy fields that have the appearance of luminous balls. Observing human beings in such a fashion allowed them to draw extraordinary energetic conclusions. 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 that 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. They called that point of juncture the assemblage point because they observed that it is at that spot that perception takes place. The flux of energy at large is turned, on that point, into sensory data, and those data are then interpreted as the world that surrounds us.

What the shamans found out when they 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 without ever touching one another. They saw that they are individual filaments, and yet, they are grouped in inconceivably enormous masses.

Another of such masses of filaments, besides the dark sea of awareness, that 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. The universe, therefore, was, for them, a universe of supreme 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 that happened in the universe, not because of arbitrary blind circumstances, but because of the intending done by the vibratory energy, at the level of the flux of energy itself.

Their seeing-observations of the assemblage point led the sorcerers to discover that the assemblage point shifted position under conditions of normal sleep, or extreme fatigue, or disease, or the ingestion of psychotropic plants. They 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. Those shamans maintained that each new world that comes about in such a fashion is an all-inclusive world, different from the world of everyday life, but utterly similar to it in the fact that one could live and die in it.

It is an energetic fact that the possibility of journeying to any of those worlds, or to all of them, is the heritage of every human being. Those worlds are there for the asking, as questions are sometimes begging to be asked, and that all a sorcerer or human being needed to reach them was to intend the movement of the assemblage point.

Another issue related to intent, but transposed to the level of universal intending, was the energetic fact that we are continually pushed and pulled and tested by the universe itself. It was an energetic fact that the universe in general is predatorial to the maximum, but not predatorial in the sense that we understand the term: the act of plundering or stealing, or injuring or exploiting others for one’s own gain. This predatory condition meant that the intending of the universe is to be continually testing awareness. They saw that the universe creates zillions of organic beings and zillions of inorganic beings. By exerting pressure on all of them, the universe forces them to enhance their awareness, and in this fashion, the universe attempts to become aware of itself. In the cognitive world of the shamans, therefore, awareness is the final issue.

The definitive journey is the possibility that individual awareness, enhanced to the limit by the individual’s adherence to the shaman’s 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 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 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.

What Don Juan had offered me was a cognitive revolution. In view of the fact he was acquainting me with a live world, the processes of change in such a live world never cease. Conclusions, therefore, are only mnemonic devices, or operational structures, which serve the function of springboards into hew horizons of cognition.