“What can be done with man’s natural sensuality?” I asked don Juan.
“Nothing,” he replied. “There is nothing wrong with man’s sensuality, it’s man’s ignorance of and disregard for his magical nature that is wrong. It’s a mistake to waste recklessly the life-bestowing force of sex and not have children, but it’s also a mistake not to know that in having children one taxes the glow of awareness.”
“How do seers know that having children taxes the glow of awareness?” I asked.
“They see that on having a child, the parents’ glow of awareness diminishes and the child’s increases. In some supersensitive, frail parents, the glow of awareness almost disappears. As children enhance their awareness, a big dark spot develops in the luminous cocoon of the parents, on the very place from which the glow was taken away. It is usually on the midsection of the cocoon. Sometimes those spots can even be seen superimposed on the body itself.”
I asked him if there was anything that could be done to give people a more balanced understanding of the glow of awareness.
“Nothing,” he said. “At least, there is nothing that seers can do. Seers aim to be free, to be unbiased witnesses incapable of passing judgment; otherwise they would have to assume the responsibility for bringing about a more adjusted cycle. No one can do that. The new cycle, if it is to come, must come of itself.”
5
The First Attention
The following day we ate breakfast at dawn, then don Juan made me shift levels of awareness.
“Today, let’s go to an original setting,” don Juan said to Genaro.
“By all means,” Genaro said gravely. He glanced at me and then added in a low voice, as if not wanting me to overhear him, “Does he have to… perhaps it’s too much…”
In a matter of seconds my fear and suspicion escalated to unbearable heights. I was sweating and panting. Don Juan came to my side and, with an expression of almost uncontrollable amusement, assured me that Genaro was just entertaining himself at my expense, and that we were going to a place where the original seers had lived thousands of years ago.
As don Juan was speaking to me, I happened to glance at Genaro. He slowly shook his head from side to side. It was an almost imperceptible gesture, as if he were letting me know that don Juan was not telling the truth. I went into a state of nervous frenzy, near hysteria?and stopped only when Genaro burst into laughter.
I marveled how easily my emotional states could escalate to nearly unmanageable heights or drop to nothing.
Don Juan, Genaro, and I left Genaro’s house in the early morning and traveled a short distance into the surrounding eroded hills. Presently we stopped and sat down on top of an enormous flat rock, on a gradual slope, in a corn field that seemed to have been recently harvested.
“This is the original setting,” don Juan said to me. “We’ll come back here a couple more times, during the course of my explanation.”
“Very weird things happen here at night,” Genaro said. “The nagual Julian actually caught an ally here. Or rather, the ally …”
Don Juan made a noticeable gesture with his eyebrows and Genaro stopped in midsentence. He smiled at me.
“It’s too early in the day for scary stories,” Genaro said. “Let’s wait until dark.”
He stood up and began creeping all around the rock, tiptoeing with his spine arched backward.
“What was he saying about your benefactor’s catching an ally here?” I asked don Juan.
He did not answer right away. He was ecstatic, watching Genaro’s antics.
“He was referring to some sophisticated use of awareness,” he finally replied, still staring at Genaro.
Genaro completed a circle around the rock and came back and sat down by me. He was panting heavily, almost wheezing, out of breath.
Don Juan seemed fascinated by what Genaro had done. Again I had the feeling that they were amusing themselves at my expense, that both of them were up to something I knew nothing about.
Suddenly, don Juan began his explanation. His voice soothed me. He said that after much toiling, seers arrived at the conclusion that the consciousness of adult human beings, matured by the process of growth, can no longer be called awareness, because it has been modified into something more intense and complex, which seers call attention.
“How do seers know that man’s awareness is being cultivated and that it grows?” I asked.
He said that at a given time in the growth of human beings a band of the emanations inside their cocoons becomes very bright; as human beings accumulate experience, it begins to glow. In some instances, the glow of this band of emanations increases so dramatically that it fuses with the emanations from the outside. Seers, witnessing an enhancement of this kind, had to surmise that awareness is the raw material and attention the end product of maturation.
“How do seers describe attention?” I asked.
“They say that attention is the harnessing and enhancing of awareness through the process of being alive,” he replied.
He said that the danger of definitions is that they simplify matters to make them understandable; in this case, in defining attention, one runs the risk of transforming a magical, miraculous accomplishment into something commonplace. Attention is man’s greatest single accomplishment. It develops from raw animal awareness until it covers the entire gamut of human alternatives. Seers perfect it even further until it cov-ers the whole scope of human possibilities.
I wanted to know if there was a special significance to alternatives and possibilities in the seers’ view.
Don Juan replied that human alternatives are everything we are capable of choosing as persons. They have to do with the level of our day-to-day range, the known; and owing to that fact, they are quite limited in number and scope. Human possibilities belong to the unknown. They are not what we are capable of choosing but what we are capable of attaining. He said that an example of human alternatives is our choice to believe that the human body is an object among objects. An example of human possibilities is the seers’ achievement in viewing man as an egglike luminous being. With the body as an object one tackles the known, with the body as a luminous egg one tackles the unknown; human possibilities have, therefore, nearly an inexhaustible scope.
“Seers say that there are three types of attention,” don Juan went on. “When they say that, they mean it just for human beings, not for all the sentient beings in existence. But the three are not just types of attention, they are rather three levels of attainment. They are the first, second, and third attention, each of them an independent domain, complete in itself.”
He explained that the first attention in man is animal awareness, which has been developed, through the process of experience, into a complex, intricate, and extremely fragile faculty that takes care of the day-to- day world in all its innumerable aspects, in other words, everything that one can think about is part of the first attention.
“The first attention is everything we are as average men,” he continued. “By virtue of such an absolute rule over our lives, the first attention is the most valuable asset that the average man has. Perhaps it is even our only asset.
“Taking into account its true value, the new seers started a rigorous examination of the first attention through seeing. Their findings molded their total outlook and the outlook of all their descendants, even though most of them do not understand what those seers really saw.”
He emphatically warned me that the conclusions of the new seers’ rigorous examination had very little to do with reason or rationality, because in order to examine and explain the first attention, one must see it. Only seers can do that. But to examine what seers see in the first attention is essential. It allows the first attention the only opportunity it will ever have to realize its own workings.
“In terms of what seers see, the first attention is the glow of awareness developed to an ultra shine,” he continued. “But it is a glow fixed on the surface of the cocoon, so to speak. It is a glow that covers the known.
“The second attention, on the other hand, is a more complex and specialized state of the glow of awareness. It has to do with the unknown. It comes about when unused emanations inside man’s cocoon are utilized.
“The reason I called the second attention specialized is that in order to utilize those unused emanations, one needs uncommon, elaborate tactics that require supreme discipline and concentration.”
He said that he had told me before, when he was teaching me the art of dreaming, that the concentration needed to be aware that one is having a dream is the forerunner of the second attention. That concentration is a form of consciousness that is not in the same category as the consciousness needed to deal with the daily world.