I asked him to explain what the Eagle’s emanations are.
He said that the Eagle’s emanations are an immut-able thing-in-itself, which engulfs everything that ex-ists, the knowable and the unknowable.
“There is no way to describe in words what the Eagle’s emanations really are,” don Juan continued. “A seer must witness them.”
“Have you witnessed them yourself, don Juan?”
“Of course I have, and yet I can’t tell you what they are. They are a presence, almost a mass of sorts, a pressure that creates a dazzling sensation. One can catch only a glimpse of them, as one can catch only a glimpse of the Eagle itself.”
“Would you say, don Juan, that the Eagle is the source of the emanations?”
“It goes without saying that the Eagle is the source of its emanations.”
“I meant to ask if that is so visually.”
“There is nothing visual about the Eagle. The entire body of a seer senses the Eagle. There is something in all of us that can make us witness with our entire body. Seers explain the act of seeing the Eagle in very simple terms: because man is composed of the Eagle’s emanations, man need only revert back to his compo-nents. The problem arises with man’s awareness; it is his awareness that becomes entangled and confused. At the crucial moment when it should be a simple case of the emanations acknowledging themselves, man’s awareness is compelled to interpret. The result is a vision of the Eagle and the Eagle’s emanations. But there is no Eagle and no Eagle’s emanations. What is out there is something that no living creature can grasp.”
I asked him if the source of the emanations was called the Eagle because eagles in general have important attributes.
“This is simply the case of something unknowable vaguely resembling something known,” he replied. “On account of that, there have certainly been attempts to imbue eagles with attributes they don’t have. But that always happens when impressionable people learn to perform acts that require great sobriety. Seers come in all sizes and shapes.”
“Do you mean to say that there are different kinds of seers?”
“No. I mean that there are scores of imbeciles who become seers. Seers are human beings full of foibles, or rather, human beings full of foibles are capable of becoming seers. Just as in the case of miserable people who become superb scientists.
“The characteristic of miserable seers is that they are willing to forget the wonder of the world. They become overwhelmed by the fact that they see and believe that it’s their genius that counts. A seer must be a paragon in order to override the nearly invincible laxness of our human condition. More important than seeing itself is what seers do with what they see.”
“What do you mean by that, don Juan?”
“Look at what some seers have done to us. We are stuck with their vision of an Eagle that rules us and devours us at the moment of our death.”
He said that there is a definite laxness in that version, and that personally he did not appreciate the idea of something devouring us. For him, it would be more accurate to say that there is a force that attracts our consciousness, much as a magnet attracts iron shav-ings. At the moment of dying, all of our being disintegrates under the attraction of that immense force.
That such an event was interpreted as the Eagle devouring us he found grotesque, because it turns an indescribable act into something as mundane as eat-ing.
“I’m a very average man,” I said. “The description of an Eagle that devours us had a great impact on me.”
“The real impact can’t be measured until the mo-ment when you see it yourself,” he said. “But you must bear in mind that our flaws remain with us even after we become seers. So when you see that force, you may very well agree with the lax seers who called it the Eagle, as I did myself. On the other hand, you may not. You may resist the temptation to ascribe human attributes to what is incomprehensible, and actually improvise a new name for it, a more accurate one.”
“Seers who see the Eagle’s emanations often call them commands,” don Juan said. “I wouldn’t mind calling them commands myself if I hadn’t got used to calling them emanations. It was a reaction to my benefactor’s preference; for him they were commands. I thought that term was more in keeping with his forceful personality than with mine. I wanted something impersonal. ‘Commands’ sounds too human to me, but that’s what they really are, commands.”
Don Juan said that to see the Eagle’s emanations is to court disaster. The new seers soon discovered the tremendous difficulties involved, and only after great tribulations in trying to map the unknown and separate it from the unknowable did they realize that everything is made out of the Eagle’s emanations. Only a small portion of those emanations is within reach of human awareness, and that small portion is still further reduced, to a minute fraction, by the constraints of our daily lives. That minute fraction of the Eagle’s emanations is the known; the small portion within possible reach of human awareness is the unknown, and the incalculable rest is the unknowable.
He went on to say that the new seers, being prag-matically oriented, became immediately cognizant of the compelling power of the emanations. They realized that all living creatures are forced to employ the Eagle’s emanations without ever knowing what they are. They also realized that organisms are constructed to grasp a certain range of those emanations and that every species has a definite range. The emanations exert great pressure on organisms, and through that pressure organisms construct their perceivable world.
“In our case, as human beings,” don Juan said, “we employ those emanations and interpret them as reality. But what man senses is such a small portion of the Eagle’s emanations that it’s ridiculous to put much stock in our perceptions, and yet it isn’t possible for us to disregard our perceptions. The new seers found this out the hard way?after courting tremendous dangers.”
Don Juan was sitting where he usually sat in the large room. Ordinarily there was no furniture in that room?people sat on mats on the floor?but Carol, the nagual woman, had managed to furnish it with very comfortable armchairs for the sessions when she and I took turns reading to him from the works of Spanish-speaking poets.
“I want you to be very aware of what we are doing,” he said as soon as I sat down. “We are discussing the mastery of awareness. The truths we’re discussing are the principles of that mastery.”
He added that in his teachings for the right side he had demonstrated those principles to my normal awareness with the help of one of his seer companions, Genaro, and that Genaro had played around with my awareness with all the humor and irreverence for which the new seers were known.
“Genaro is the one who should be here telling you about the Eagle,” he said, “except that his versions are too irreverent. He thinks that the seers who called that force the Eagle were either very stupid or were making a grand joke, because eagles not only lay eggs, they also lay turds.”
Don Juan laughed and said that he found Genaro’s comments so appropriate that he couldn’t resist laughter. He added that if the new seers had been the ones to describe the Eagle the description would certainly have been made half in fun.
I told don Juan that on one level I took the Eagle as a poetic image, and as such it delighted me, but on another level I took it literally, and that terrified me.
“One of the greatest forces in the lives of warriors is fear,” he said. “It spurs them to learn.”
He reminded me that the description of the Eagle came from the ancient seers. The new seers were through with description, comparison, and conjecture of any sort. They wanted to get directly to the source of things and consequently risked unlimited danger to get to it. They did see the Eagle’s emanations. But they never tampered with the description of the Eagle. They felt that it took too much energy to see the Eagle, and that the ancient seers had already paid heavily for their scant glimpse of the unknowable.
“How did the old seers come around to describing the Eagle?” I asked.
“They needed a minimal set of guidelines about the unknowable for purposes of instruction,” he replied. “They resolved it with a sketchy description of the force that rules all there is, but not of its emanations, because the emanations cannot be rendered at all in a language of comparisons. Individual seers may feel the urge to make comments about certain emanations, but that will remain personal, in other words, there is no pat version of the emanations, as there is of the Eagle.”