At home, I soon realized that it was impossible for me to answer any of my questions. In fact, I could not even formulate them. Perhaps that was because the boundary of the second attention had begun to collapse on me: This was when I met Florinda Grau and Carol Tiggs in the world of everyday life. The confusion of not knowing them at all yet knowing them so intimately that I would have died for them at the drop of a hat was most deleterious to me. I had met Taisha Abelar a few years before, and I was just beginning to get used to the confounded feeling of knowing her without having the vaguest idea of how. To add two more people to my overloaded system proved too much for me. I got ill out of fatigue and had to seek don Juan's aid. I went to the town in southern Mexico where he and his companions lived.
Don Juan and his fellow sorcerers laughed uproariously at the mere mention of my turmoils. Don Juan explained to me that they were not really laughing at me, but at themselves. My cognitive problems reminded them of the ones they had had when the boundary of the second attention had collapsed on them just as it had on me. Their awareness, like mine, had not been prepared for it, don Juan said.
"Every sorcerer goes through the same agony," don Juan went on. "Awareness is an endless area of exploration for sorcerers and man in general. In order to enhance awareness, there is no risk we should not run; no means we should refuse. Bear in mind, however, that only in soundness of mind can awareness be enhanced."
Don Juan reiterated, then, that his time was coming to an end, and that I had to use my resources wisely to cover as much ground as I could before he left. Talk like that had used to throw me into states of profound depression. But as the time of his departure approached, I had begun to react with more resignation. I had no longer felt depressed, but I still panicked.
Nothing else was said after that. The next day, at his request, I drove don Juan to Mexico City. We arrived around noon and went directly to the hotel del Prado, in the Paseo Alameda, the place he usually lodged when he was in the city. Don Juan had an appointment with a lawyer that day at four in the afternoon. Since we had plenty of time, we went to have lunch in the famous Cafe Tacuba, a restaurant in the heart of downtown where it was purported that real meals were served.
Don Juan was not hungry. He ordered only two sweet tamales, while I gorged myself on a sumptuous feast. He laughed at me and made signs of silent despair at my healthy appetite.
"I'm going to propose a line of action for you," he said in a curt tone when we had finished our lunch. "It's the last task of the third gate of dreaming, and it consists of stalking the stalkers; a most mysterious maneuver. To stalk the stalkers means to deliberately draw energy from the inorganic beings' realm in order to perform a sorcery feat."
"What kind of sorcery feat, don Juan?"
"A journey; a journey that uses awareness as an element of the environment," he explained. "In the world of daily life, water is an element of the environment that we use for traveling. Imagine awareness being a similar element that can be used for traveling. Through the medium of awareness, scouts from all over the universe come to us, and vice versa; via awareness, sorcerers go to the ends of the universe."
There had been certain concepts, among the hosts of concepts don Juan had made me aware of in the course of his teachings, that attracted my full interest without any coaxing. This was one.
"The idea that awareness is a physical element is revolutionary," I said in awe.
"I didn't say it's a physical element," he corrected me. "It's an energetic element. You have to make that distinction. For sorcerers who see, awareness is a glow. They can hitch their energy body to that glow and go with it."
"What's the difference between a physical and an energetic element?" I asked.
"The difference is that physical elements are part of our interpretation system, but energetic elements are not. Energetic elements, like awareness, exist in our universe. But we, as average people, perceive only the physical elements because we were taught to do so. Sorcerers perceive the energetic elements for the same reason: They were taught to do so."
Don Juan explained that the use of awareness as an energetic element of our environment is the essence of sorcery; that in terms of practicalities, the trajectory of sorcery is, first, to free the existing energy in us by impeccably following the sorcerers' path; second, to use that energy to develop the energy body by means of dreaming; and, third, to use awareness as an element of the environment in order to enter with the energy body and all our physicality into other worlds.
"There are two kinds of energy journeys into other worlds," he went on. "One is when awareness picks up the sorcerer's energy body and takes it wherever it may; and the other is when the sorcerer decides, in full consciousness, to use the avenue of awareness to make a journey. You've done the first kind of journeying. It takes an enormous discipline to do the second."
After a long silence, don Juan stated that in the life of sorcerers there are issues that require masterful handling; and that dealing with awareness as an energetic element open to the energy body is the most important, vital, and dangerous of those issues.
I had no comment. I was suddenly on pins and needles; hanging on every one of his words.
"By yourself, you don't have enough energy to perform the last task of the third gate of dreaming," he went on, "but you and Carol Tiggs together can certainly do what I have in mind."
He paused, deliberately egging me on with his silence to ask what he had in mind. I did. His laughter only increased the ominous mood.
"I want you two to break the boundaries of the normal world, and using awareness as an energetic element, enter into another," he said. "This breaking and entering amounts to stalking the stalkers. Using awareness as an element of the environment bypasses the influence of the inorganic beings, but it still uses their energy."
He did not want to give me any more information- in order not to influence me- he said. His belief was that the less I knew beforehand the better off I would be. I disagreed, but he assured me that, in a pinch, my energy body was perfectly capable of taking care of itself.
We went from the restaurant to the lawyer's office. Don Juan quickly concluded his business, and we were, in no time at all, in a taxi on our way to the airport. Don Juan informed me that Carol Tiggs was arriving on a flight from Los Angeles, and that she was coming to Mexico City exclusively to fulfill this last dreaming task with me.
"The valley of Mexico is a superb place to perform the kind of sorcery feat you are after," he commented.
"You haven't told me yet what the exact steps to follow are," I said.
He didn't answer me. We did not speak any more, but while we waited for the plane to land, he explained the procedure I had to follow. I was to go to Carol's room at the Regis Hotel across the street from our hotel, and after getting into a state of total inner silence with her, we had to slip gently into dreaming; voicing our intent to go to the realm of the inorganic beings.
I interrupted to remind him that I always had to wait for a scout to show up before I could manifest out loud my intent to go to the inorganic beings' world.
Don Juan chuckled and said, "You haven't dreamt with Carol Tiggs yet. You'll find out that it's a treat. Sorceresses don't need any props. They just go to that world whenever they want to; for them, there is a scout on permanent call."
I could not bring myself to believe that a sorceress would be able to do what he was asserting. I thought I had a degree of expertise in handling the inorganic beings' world. When I mentioned to him what was going through my mind, he retorted that I had no expertise whatsoever when it came to what sorceresses are capable of.
"Why do you think I had Carol Tiggs with me to pull you bodily out of that world?" he asked. "Do you think it was because she's beautiful?"
"Why was it, don Juan?"
"Because I couldn't do it myself; and for her, it was nothing. She has a knack for that world."
"Is she an exceptional case, don Juan?"
"Women in general have a natural bent for that realm; sorceresses are, of course, the champions, but Carol Tiggs is better than anyone I know because she, as the nagual woman, has superb energy."
I thought I had caught don Juan in a serious contradiction. He had told me that the inorganic beings were not interested at all in women. Now he was asserting the opposite.
"No. I'm not asserting the opposite," he remarked when I confronted him. "I've said to you that the inorganic beings don't pursue females; they only go after males. But I've also said to you that the inorganic beings are female, and that the entire universe is female to a large degree. So draw your own conclusions."
Since I had no way to draw any conclusions, Don Juan explained to me that sorceresses, in theory, come and go as they please in that world because of their enhanced awareness and their femaleness.
"Do you know this for a fact?" I asked.
"The women of my party have never done that," he confessed, "not because they can't but because I dissuaded them. The women of your party, on the other hand, do it like changing skirts."
I felt a vacuum in my stomach. I really did not know anything about the women of my party. Don Juan consoled me saying that my circumstances were different from his; as was my role as a nagual. He assured me that I did not have it in me to dissuade any of the women of my party, even if I stood on my head.
As the taxi drove us to her hotel, Carol delighted don Juan and me with her impersonations of people we knew. I tried to be serious and questioned her about our task. She mumbled some apologies for not being able to answer me with the seriousness I deserved. Don Juan laughed uproariously when she mimicked my solemn tone of voice.
After registering Carol at the hotel, the three of us meandered around downtown looking for secondhand bookstores. We ate a light dinner at the Sanborn's restaurant in the House of Tiles. About ten o'clock, we walked to the Regis Hotel. We went directly to the elevator. My fear had sharpened my capacity to perceive details. The hotel building was old and massive. The furniture in the lobby had obviously seen better days. Yet there was still, all around us, something left of an old glory that had a definite appeal. I could easily understand why Carol liked that hotel so much.
Before we got into the elevator, my anxiety mounted to such heights that I had to ask don Juan for last-minute instructions.
"Tell me again how we are going to proceed," I begged.
Don Juan pulled us to the huge, ancient stuffed chairs in the lobby and patiently explained to us that, once we were in the world of the inorganic beings, we had to voice our intent to transfer our normal awareness to our energy bodies. He suggested that Carol and I voice our intent together, although that part was not really important. What was important, he said, was that each of us intend the transfer of the total awareness of our daily world to our energy body.
"How do we do this transference of awareness?" I asked.
"Transferring awareness is purely a matter of voicing our intent and having the necessary amount of energy," he said. "Carol knows all this. She's done it before. She entered physically into the inorganic beings' world when she pulled you out of it, remember? Her energy will do the trick. It'll tip the scales."
"What does it mean to tip the scales? I am in limbo, don Juan."
Don Juan explained that to tip the scales meant to add one's total physical mass to the energy body. He said that using awareness as a medium to make the journey into another world is not the result of applying any techniques, but is rather the corollary of intending and having enough energy. The bulk of energy from Carol Tiggs added to mine- or the bulk of my energy added to Carol's- was going to make us into one single entity; energetically capable of pulling our physicality and placing it on the energy body in order to make that journey.
"What exactly do we have to do in order to enter into that other world?" Carol asked. Her question scared me half to death: I thought she knew what was going on.
"Your total physical mass has to be added to your energy body," don Juan replied, looking into her eyes. "The great difficulty of this maneuver is to discipline the energy body, a thing the two of you have already done. Lack of discipline is the only reason the two of you may fail in performing this feat of ultimate stalking. Sometimes, as a fluke, an average person ends up performing it and entering into another world. But this is immediately explained away as insanity or hallucination."
I would have given anything in the world for don Juan to continue talking. But he put us in the elevator, and we went up to the second floor to Carol's room despite my protests and my rational need to know. Deep down, however, my turmoil was not so much that I needed to know: The bottom line was my fear. Somehow, this sorcerers' maneuver was more frightening to me than anything I had done so far.
Don Juan's parting words to us were "Forget the self and you will fear nothing." His grin and the nodding of his head were invitations to ponder the statement.
Carol laughed and began to clown; imitating don Juan's voice as he gave us his cryptic instructions. Her lisping added quite a bit of color to what don Juan had said. Sometimes I found her lisping adorable. Most of the time, I detested it. Fortunately, that night her lisping was hardly noticeable.
We went to her room and sat down on the edge of the bed. My last conscious thought was that the bed was a relic from the beginning of the century. Before I had time to utter a single word, I found myself in a strange-looking bed. Carol was with me. She half sat up at the same time I did. We were naked, each covered with a thin blanket.
"What's going on?" she asked in a feeble voice.
"Are you awake?" I asked inanely.
"Of course I am awake," she said in an impatient tone.
"Do you remember where we were?" I asked. There was a long silence, as she obviously tried to put her thoughts in order.
"I think I am real, but you are not," she finally said. "I know where I was before this. And you want to trick me."
I thought she was doing the same thing herself: that she knew what was going on and was testing me or pulling my leg. Don Juan had told me that her demons and mine were caginess and distrust. I was having a grand sample of that.
"I refuse to be part of any shit where you are in control," she said. She looked at me with venom in her eyes. "I am talking to you, whoever you are."
She took one of the blankets we had been covered with and wrapped herself with it. "I am going to lie here and go back to where I came from," she said, with an air of finality. "You and the nagual go and play with each other."
"You have to stop this nonsense," I said forcefully. "We are in another world."
She didn't pay any attention and turned her back to me like an annoyed, pampered child. I did not want to waste my dreaming attention in futile discussions of realness. I began to examine my surroundings. The only light in the room was moonlight shining through the window directly in front of us. We were in a small room, on a high bed. I noticed that the bed was primitively constructed. Four thick posts had been planted in the ground, and the bed frame was a lattice, made of long poles attached to the posts. The bed had a thick mattress, or rather a compact mattress. There were no sheets or pillows. Filled burlap sacks were stacked up against the walls. Two sacks by the foot of the bed, staggered one on top of the other, served as a stepladder to climb onto it.
Looking for a light switch, I became aware that the high bed was in a corner, against the wall. Our heads were to the wall; I was on the outside of the bed and Carol on the inside. When I sat on the edge of the bed, I realized that it was perhaps over three feet above the ground.
Carol sat up suddenly and said with a heavy lisp, "This is disgusting! The nagual certainly didn't tell me I was going to end up like this."
"I didn't know it either," I said. I wanted to say more and start a conversation, but my anxiety had grown to extravagant proportions.
"You shut up," she snapped at me, her voice cracking with anger. "You don't exist. You're a ghost. Disappear! Disappear!"
Her lisping was actually cute and distracted me from my obsessive fear. I shook her by the shoulders. She yelled, not so much in pain as in surprise or annoyance.
"I'm not a ghost," I said. "We made the journey because we joined our energy."
Carol Tiggs was famous among us for her speed in adapting to any situation. In no time at all, she was convinced of the realness of our predicament and began to look for her clothes in the semidarkness. I marveled at the fact that she was not afraid. She became busy, reasoning out loud where she might have put her clothes had she gone to bed in that room.
"Do you see any chair?" she asked.
I faintly saw a stack of three sacks that might have served as a table or high bench. She got out of the bed, went to it, and found her clothes and mine, neatly folded, the way she always handled garments. She handed my clothes to me: They were my clothes, but not the ones I had been wearing a few minutes before, in Carol's room at the Regis Hotel.
"These are not my clothes," she lisped. "And yet they are mine. How strange!"
We dressed in silence. I wanted to tell her that I was about to burst with anxiety. I also wanted to comment on the speed of our journey, but in the time I had taken to dress, the thought of our journey had become very vague. I could hardly remember where we had been before waking up in that room. It was as if I had dreamt the hotel room. I made a supreme effort to recollect, to push away the vagueness that had begun to envelop me. I succeeded in dispelling the fog, but that act exhausted all my energy. I ended up panting and sweating.
"Something nearly, nearly got me," Carol said. I looked at her. She, like me, was covered with perspiration. "It nearly got you too. What do you think it is?"
"The position of the assemblage point," I said with absolute certainty.
She did not agree with me. "It's the inorganic beings collecting their dues," she said shivering. "The nagual told me it was going to be horrible, but I never imagined anything this horrible."
I was in total agreement with her; we were in a horrifying mess, yet I could not conceive what the horror of that situation was. Carol and I were not novices: We had seen and done endless things, some of them outright terrifying. But there was something in that dream room that chilled me beyond belief.
"We are dreaming, aren't we?" Carol asked.
Without hesitation, I reassured her that we were, although I would have given anything to have don Juan there to reassure me of the same thing.
"Why am I so frightened?" she asked me, as if I were capable of rationally explaining it.
Before I could formulate a thought about it, she answered her question herself. She said that what frightened her was to realize, at a body level, that perceiving is an all-inclusive act when the assemblage point has been immobilized on one position. She reminded me that don Juan had told us that the power our daily world has over us is a result of the fact that our assemblage point is immobile on its habitual position. This immobility is what makes our perception of the world so inclusive and overpowering that we cannot escape from it. Carol also reminded me about another thing the nagual had said: that if we want to break this totally inclusive force, all we have to do is dispel the fog, that is to say, displace the assemblage point by intending its displacement.
I had never really understood what don Juan meant until the moment I had to bring my assemblage point to another position, in order to dispel that world's fog, which had begun to swallow me.
Carol and I, without saying another word, went to the window and looked out. We were in the country. The moonlight revealed some low, dark shapes of dwelling structures. By all indications, we were in the utility or supply room of a farm or a big country house.
"Do you remember going to bed here?" Carol asked.
"I almost do," I said and meant it. I told her I had to fight to keep the image of her hotel room in my mind as a point of reference.
"I have to do the same," she said in a frightened whisper. "I know that if we let go of that memory, we are goners."
Then she asked me if I wanted us to leave that shack and venture outside. I did not. My apprehension was so acute that I was unable to voice my words. I could only give her a signal with my head.
"You are so very right not to want to go out," she said. "I have the feeling that if we leave this shack, we'll never make it back."
I was going to open the door and just look outside, but she stopped me.
"Don't do that," she said. "You might let the outside in."
The thought that crossed my mind at that instant was that we had been placed inside a frail cage. Anything, such as opening the door, might upset the precarious balance of that cage. At the moment I had that thought, both of us had the same urge. We took off our clothes as if our lives depended on that. We then jumped into the high bed without using the two sack steps- only to jump down from it in the next instant.
It was evident that Carol and I had the same realization at the same time. She confirmed my assumption when she said, "Anything that we use belonging to this world can only weaken us. If I stand here naked and away from the bed and away from the window, I don't have any problem remembering where I came from. But if I lie in that bed or wear those clothes or look out the window, I am done for."
We stood in the center of the room for a long time, huddled together. A weird suspicion began to fester in my mind. "How are we going to return to our world?" I asked, expecting her to know.
"The reentry into our world is automatic if we don't let the fog set in," she said with the air of a foremost authority; which was her trademark.
And she was right. Carol and I woke up, at the same time, in the bed of her room in the Regis Hotel. It was so obvious we were back in the world of daily life that we didn't ask questions or make comments about it. The sunlight was nearly blinding.
"How did we get back?" Carol asked. "Or rather, when did we get back?"
I had no idea what to say or what to think. I was too numb to speculate, which was all I could have done.
"Do you think that we just returned?" Carol insisted. "Or maybe we've been asleep here all night. Look! We're naked. When did we take our clothes off?"
"We took them off in that other world," I said and surprised myself with the sound of my voice.
My answer seemed to stump Carol. She looked uncomprehendingly at me and then at her own naked body.
We sat there without moving for an endless time. Both of us seemed to be deprived of volition. But then, quite abruptly, we had the same thought at exactly the same time. We got dressed in record time, ran out of the room, went down two flights of stairs, crossed the street, and rushed into don Juan's hotel.
Inexplicably and excessively out of breath, since we had not really exerted ourselves physically, we took turns explaining to him what we had done. He confirmed our conjectures.
"What you two did was about the most dangerous thing one can imagine," he said.
He addressed Carol and told her that our attempt had been both a total success and a fiasco. We had succeeded in transferring our awareness of the daily world to our energy bodies, thus making the journey with all our physicality, but we had failed in avoiding the influence of the inorganic beings. He said that ordinarily dreamers experience the whole maneuver as a series of slow transitions, and that they have to voice their intent to use awareness as an element. In our case, all those steps were dispensed with. Because of the intervention of the inorganic beings, the two of us had actually been hurled into a deadly world with a most terrifying speed.
"It wasn't your combined energy that made your journey possible," he continued. "Something else did that. It even selected adequate clothes for you."
"Do you mean, nagual, that the clothes and the bed and the room happened only because we were being run by the inorganic beings?" Carol asked.
"You bet your life," he replied. "Ordinarily, dreamers are merely voyeurs. The way your journey turned out, you two got a ringside seat and lived the old sorcerers' damnation. What happened to them was precisely what happened to you. The inorganic beings took them to worlds from which they could not return. I should have known, but it didn't even enter my mind that the inorganic beings would take over and try to set up the same trap for you two."
"Do you mean they wanted to keep us there?" Carol asked.
"If you had gotten outside that shack, you'd now be meandering hopelessly in that world," don Juan said.
He explained that since we entered into that world with all our physicality, the fixation of our assemblage points on the position preselected by the inorganic beings was so overpowering that it created a sort of fog that obliterated any memory of the world we came from. He added that the natural consequence of such an immobility, as in the case of the sorcerers of antiquity, is that the dreamer's assemblage point cannot return to its habitual position.
"Think about this," he urged us. "Perhaps this is exactly what is happening to all of us in the world of daily life. We are here, and the fixation of our assemblage point is so overpowering that it has made us forget where we came from, and what our purpose was for coming here."
Don Juan did not want to say any more about our journey. I felt that he was sparing us further discomfort and fear. He took us to eat a late lunch. By the time we reached the restaurant, a couple of blocks down Francisco Madero Avenue, it was six o'clock in the afternoon. Carol and I had slept, if that is what we did, about eighteen hours.
Only don Juan was hungry. Carol remarked with a touch of anger that he was eating like a pig. Quite a few heads turned in our direction on hearing don Juan's laughter.
It was a warm night. The sky was clear. There was a soft, caressing breeze as we sat down on a bench in the Paseo Alameda.
"There is a question that's burning me," Carol said to don Juan. "We didn't use awareness as a medium for traveling, right?"
"That's true," don Juan said and sighed deeply. "The task was to sneak by the inorganic beings, not be run by them."
"What's going to happen now?" she asked.
"You are going to postpone stalking the stalkers until you two are stronger," he said. "Or perhaps you'll never accomplish it. It doesn't really matter: If one thing doesn't work, another will. Sorcery is an endless challenge."
He explained to us again, as if he were trying to fix his explanation in our minds, that in order to use awareness as an element of the environment, dreamers first have to make a journey to the inorganic beings' realm. Then they have to use that journey as a springboard, and, while they are in possession of the necessary dark energy, they have to intend to be hurled through the medium of awareness into another world.
"The failure of your trip was that you didn't have time to use awareness as an element for traveling," he went on. "Before you even got to the inorganic beings' world, you two were already in another world."
"What do you recommend we do?" Carol asked. "I recommend that you see as little of each other as possible," he said. "I'm sure the inorganic beings will not pass up the opportunity to get you two, especially if you join forces."
So Carol Tiggs and I deliberately stayed away from each other from then on. The prospect that we might inadvertently elicit a similar journey was too great a risk for us. Don Juan encouraged our decision by repeating over and over that we had enough combined energy to tempt the inorganic beings to lure us again.
Don Juan brought my dreaming practices back to seeing energy in energy-generating dreamlike states. In the course of time, I saw everything that presented itself to me. I entered in this manner into a most peculiar state: I became incapable of rendering intelligently what I saw. My sensation was always that I had reached states of perception for which I had no lexicon. [* lexicon- (1.) a lamgauge user's knowledge of words (2.) a reference book containing an alphabetical list of words]
Don Juan explained my incomprehensible and indescribable visions as my energy body using awareness as an element not for journeying, because I never had enough energy, but for entering into the energy fields of inanimate matter or of living beings.