Man has two types of awareness: the right side is normal awareness, necessary for everyday life; the left side is a mysterious side, a state of awareness needed to function as a sorcerer and seer. Teaching for both sides are necessary.

The final teaching is to leap from a mountaintop into an abyss while in normal awareness.

The teachings for the left side are to master three aspects of an ancient knowledge: Awareness, stalking and intent.
The old seers were sorcerers; the new seers are warriors who [see].
The teacher Don Juan was a seer and a nagaul.

[Seeing] can be understood to be the capacity of human beings to enlarge their perceptual field until they are capable of assessing not only outer appearances, but also the essence of everything.

Seers [see] men and women as a field of energy, which looks like a luminous egg, the front part is a shield and stronger than the rear, there is a depression the size of a fist just above the navel. The majority of people have their energy fields divided into two parts; A few men/women four or sometimes three parts, these people are more resilient than the average man. They can become nagauls after learning to [see].

To be a nagaul entails being a leader, a teacher and a guide.

As a nagaul, Don Juan was the leader of a group of seers, known as the nagauls party, which comprised of eight female seers, three male seers and four couriers or messengers. In addition to this party, Don Juan also taught and guided a group of apprentice seers, known as the new nagauls party, consisting of five young men and six women, the nominal leaders of this group were 1 male and 1 female.
To gain teaching for the left side, it is necessary for people to enter into a unique state of perceptual clarity, known as heightened awareness. To enter this state, a blow is delivered, (only by a nagaul), with the palm of his or her hand onto the upper back. When in this state, apprentices can behave almost as naturally as in every day life but they can bring their minds to focus on anything with uncommon force and clarity. Yet, an inherent quality of this state is that it is not susceptible to normal recall. What transpires in such a state becomes part of the apprentices’ everyday awareness, only through a staggering effort of recovery. When entering into this state, it feels as if a veil has been lifted from your eyes. The freedom, the shear joy that possesses you is an incomparable experience, Yet at the same time there is a frightening feeling of sadness and longing that goes hand in hand with that freedom and joy.

It has been said that there is no completeness without sadness and longing, for without them there is no sobriety, no kindness. Wisdom without kindness and knowledge without sobriety are useless.

In heightened awareness one is minimally conscious of the surrounding, because one’s total concentration is taken by the details of the action at hand. The action at hand now, is the elucidation of the mastery of awareness. The mastery of awareness is the modern day version of the tradition of the ancient Toltec seers. (Toltec. means: man of knowledge).

The essential character of the new cycle of seers is that they are not caught by death, like the rest of mortal man, but choose the moment and the way of their departure from this world. At that moment they are consumed by a fire from within and vanish from the face of the Earth, free, as if they had never existed.

The New Seers

Ages before the Spaniards came to Mexico, there were extraordinary ‘Toltec’ seers, men capable of inconceivable deeds. They were the last link in the chain of knowledge that extended over thousands of years. The toltec seers were powerful sorcerers, sombre, driven men who unraveled mysteries and possessed secret knowledge that they used to influence and victimize people by fixating the awareness of their victims on whatever they chose. One of the hardest things to acknowledge is that awareness can be manipulated. The toltec seers were the supreme masters of the art of handling awareness. Their secret knowledge and practices allowed them to pry open the mystery of being aware. Enough of their practices have survived to this day, fortunately in a modified form thankfully, because those unmodified activities did not lead the ancient Toltec seers to freedom but to their doom. The seers who belong to the new cycle know those techniques but that doesn’t mean they practice them, they have other views.

For the average man, sorcery is a negative business, but fascinating. It is encouraged in normal awareness to think of it as sorcery as it serves to attract interest. But for us to be sorcerers would be like entering a dead-end street. The way the toltec first started on the path of knowledge was by eating power plants. It was only a matter of time before some of them began to analyze their experiences; the first men on the path of knowledge were very daring, but very mistaken. This is no conjecture, as when you focus your [seeing] on that time, you know everything that took place. [Seeing] is a peculiar feeling of knowing something without a shadow of doubt.

All the Toltecs were employed in specific lines of wok: curing, bewitching, storytelling, dancing, being an oracle preparing food and drink. Those lines of work fostered specific wisdom, which distinguished them from average men, similar to doctors, artists, teachers, priests and merchants of our time.
Their downfall came when they became obsessed with what they [saw], which filled them with intense reverence and fear, in doing so they ceased to be men of knowledge. Some endeavored to use [seeing] positively and taught their fellow men. Under their direction, populations of cities went into other worlds and never came back.

But for the seers who could only [see] there were fiasco’s when, their land was invaded by Indians (Mongol tribes) they were defenseless. Those conquerors took over the process of the Toltec world - they appropriated everything - but they never learned to [see]. They copied the procedure of the Toltec seers without having the Toltecs’ inner knowledge. To this day there are scores of sorcerers all over Mexico, who follow the Toltec ways but don’t know what they are doing, or what they’re talking about, because they’re not seers.

When the Spaniards came, the old seers had been gone for centuries, but the new breed of seers were securing their place in a new cycle.
When the first Toltecs’ world was destroyed, the survivors began a serious examination of their practices. The first thing they did was to establish stalking, dreaming and intent as key procedures and to de-emphasis the use of power plants.

When the Spanish came the new seers were prepared. They were consummate practitioners of the art of stalking. They refined their principles in this time. Today there are a scattered handful left and those that are exactly the same don’t cross each other path for security reasons. Each of those seers founded a lineage, not all had descendants. Around the end of 16th century every nagaul isolated his group from any overt contact with other seers.

Don Juan’s lineage underwent a drastic change in 1723 a new beginning is counted from that time.

By learning sorcery techniques whilst in heightened awareness sets up a formidable barrier for warriors, who have to recollect all the instructions given to them if they are to go on. When they do the concepts and procedures that were taught to them have been internalized and have thus acquired the force the new seers meant them to have.

Self-importance is our greatest enemy. Think about it - what weakens us feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of our fellow men. Our self-importance requires that we spend most of our lives offended by someone. Every effort should be made to eradicate self-importance from the lives of warriors. Without self-importance we are invulnerable. The burden of self-importance is a terrible encumbrance. Don’t feel personally offended no matter what is done to you e.g. slap in the face, bullet in the back. Realizations are always personal, keep them that way. Self-importance can’t be fought with niceties.

Seers, old and new are divided into two categories. The first is made up of those who are willing to exercise self-importance and channel their activities toward pragmatic goals, which would benefit other seers and man in general. The other category consists of those who don’t care about self-importance or about any pragmatic goals. It has been noted that the later have failed to resolve the problem of self-importance.

Self-importance is not simple and naïve, it is the core of everything that is good in us and the core of everything that is rotten. To get rid of the self-importance that is rotten requires a masterpiece of strategy.

In order to follow the path of knowledge one has to be very imaginative, because nothing is as clear as we’d like it to be. Warriors fight self-importance as a matter of strategy, not principle, don’t take it as a mere exercise.
Impeccability is nothing else but the proper use of energy. To become impeccable one has to save energy.

Warriors take strategic inventories, they list everything they do. Then decide which of those things can be changed in order to allow them a respite, in terms of expending survival and well being. Self-importance is the activity that consumes the greatest amount of energy. One of the first concerns of warriors is to free that energy in order to face the unknown with it. The action of re-channeling that energy is impeccability.

The most effective strategy is stalking. It consists of six elements that interplay with one another. Five of them are called the attributes of warrior-ship: control, discipline, forbearance, timing and will. They pertain to be the world of the warrior who is fighting to lose self-importance. The sixth element pertains to the outside world and is called the petty tyrant.

Petty tyrants help you by destroying your self-importance, the more powerful they are the better, one has to use the art of stalking on them with right and timely action and turn their fear against them, without thinking of plotting harm against them until the time is right.

A petty tyrant is a tormentor, someone who either holds the power of life and death of warriors or simply annoys them to distraction.

Humor is the only means to counteract the compulsion of human awareness to take inventories and to make cumbersome classification. There are tinges of malicious humor in all classifications of petty tyrants. The new sees headed their classifications with the primal source of energy, the one and only ruler in the universe, they called that the tyrant. The rest of the despots and authoritarians are infinitely below the tyrant.

Compared to the source of everything, the most fearsome, tyrannical men are buffoons and therefore classified as petty tyrants. There are two subclasses of minor petty tyrants. The first subclass consists of people who persecute and inflict misery but without actually causing anybody’s death and who are called little petty tyrants. The second consists of people who are only exasperating and bothersome to no end and are called small-fry petty tyrants or teensy-weensy petty tyrants. The little petty tyrants are divided into four categories, one that torments with brutality and violence, another that does it by creating unbearable apprehension through deviousness, another which oppresses with sadness, and one who torment by making warriors rage. What they teach you is detachment.

This strategy not only gets rid of self-importance, it also prepares warriors for the final realization that impeccability is the only thing that counts in the path of knowledge.

What the new seers had in mind was a deadly maneuver in which the petty tyrant is like a mountain peak and the attributes of warrior-ship are like climbers who meet at the summit.

Usually only (will) is saved for an ultimate confrontation, where warriors are facing the firing squad, so to speak. Because (will) belongs to another sphere, the unknown. The other four belong to the known where the petty tyrants are lodged. What turns people into petty tyrants is the obsessive manipulation of the known. The interplay, of all the five attributes is done only by seers who are also impeccable warriors and have mastery over will. Such interplay is a supreme maneuver that cannot be performed on the daily human stage.

Four attributes are all that is needed to deal with the worst of petty tyrants, provided a petty tyrant has been found. A warrior who stumbles on a petty tyrant is a lucky one, because if you don’t, you have to go out and look for one.

One of the greatest accomplishments of the seers of the Spanish conquest was a construct called the three-face progression. By understanding the nature of man, they concluded if seers could hold their own in facing petty tyrants, they can face the unknown with impunity, and then they can even stand the presence of the unknowable. It is false to believe that the seer who can hold his own in the face of the unknown can certainly face the petty tyrants.

Nothing can temper the spirit of a warrior as much as the challenge of dealing with impossible people in position of power. Only under those conditions can warriors acquire the sobriety and serenity to stand the pressure of the unknowable.
What the new seers considered to be the four steps of the path of knowledge is also what one has to do to profit from facing a petty tyrant.

The first step is the decision to become an apprentice. After the apprentice changes his/her views about themselves and the world, they take the second step and become warriors, meaning beings capable of the utmost discipline and control over themselves. The third step, after acquiring timing and forbearance, is to become men of knowledge. When men of knowledge learn to [see] they have taken the fourth step and have become seers.

Control and discipline refer to an inner state. A warrior is self-oriented, not in a self way, but in the sense of a total and continuos examination of the self.
Forbearance and timing are not quite an inner state. They are in the domain of the man of knowledge.

The idea of suing a petty tyrant is not only for perfecting the warrior’s spirit, but also for enjoyment and happiness. With a good strategy you can sue a petty tyrant with flair and joyfulness. Even the worst tyrants can bring delight, provided that one is a warrior.

The mistake average men make is not having a strategy to fall back on; the floor is of the petty tyrants, are all-important. Warriors not only have a well-thought-out strategy, but also are free from self-importance. What restrains their self-importance is that they have understood that reality is an interpretation we make.

Warriors can defeat petty tyrants using only the single realization that petty tyrants take themselves with deadly seriousness while warriors do not.

Control makes you fulfil the petty tyrant’s most asinine demands. What exhausts us in this situation is the wear and tear on our self-importance. Any man who has an iota of pride is ripped apart by being made to feel worthless. Gladly do anything he asks be joyful and strong and don’t care about your pride or fear. To tune the spirit when someone is trampling on you is called control. Do not feel sorry for yourself, but immediately map out the petty tyrants’ strong points, his weakness, and his quirks of behavior.

In example the petty tyrants’ strong points may be his violent nature and his daring. His weakness maybe, he likes his job and does not want to endanger it, another weakness is being a family man. To gather this information while they are beating you up is called discipline. A perfect petty tyrant has no redeeming feature. In the strategy, forbearance is to wait patiently - no rush, no anxiety - a simple, joyful holding back of what is due.

You may grovel daily, and cry under the man’s whip, and yet be happy. Our strategy is what makes you go from day to day without hating the man’s guts. Be a warrior; know that you are waiting and what you are waiting for. Right there is the great joy of warrior-ship.

Your strategy may include a systematic harassment of the man by taking cover with a higher order, just as the new seers shielded themselves with the Catholic Church during the conquest. A lowly priest was sometimes more powerful than a nobleman.
Timing is the quality that governs the release of all that is held back. Control, discipline and forbearance are like a dam behind which everything is pooled. Timing is the gate in the dam. Not once must you feel sorry for yourself or weep in impotence. Be joyful and serene. And do not ever wish the tyrant to die.

Forbearance means holding back with spirit something that the warrior knows is rightfully due. It does not mean that warrior’s plot to do anybody mischief, or plan to settle scores. Forbearance is something independent. As long as the warrior has control, discipline and timing, forbearance assures giving whatever is due to whoever deserves it.

The new seers not only used petty tyrants to get rid of their self-importance, but also to accomplish the very sophisticated maneuver of moving themselves out of this world.

Small fry petty tyrants defeat warriors lots of times, the consequences are not as dire as those in the remote past, warriors today always have a chance to recuperate or retrieve and come back later.

But there is another side to this problem. To be a small fry petty tyrant is not deadly but devastating. Anyone who joins the petty tyrant is defeated, also to act in anger, without control and discipline, to have no forbearance, is to be defeated.
Warriors, after being defeated, either regroup themselves or they abandon the quest for knowledge and join the ranks of the petty tyrants for life.

The Eagle’s Emanation

The writing on the petty tyrant is merely an introduction to the topic of awareness.
There are a series of truths that the seers discovered about awareness, these truths are arranged in a sequence for purpose of comprehension. The mastery of awareness consists of internalizing the total sequence of such truths.
The first truth is that our familiarity with the world we perceive compels us to believe that we are surrounded by objects, existing by themselves and as themselves, just as we perceive them, whereas, in fact, there is no world of objects, but a universe of the Eagle’s emanations. Before explaining the Eagle’s emanations, I’ll talk about the known, the unknown and the unknowable.

The unknown is something that is veiled from man, shrouded perhaps by a terrifying context, but which is within man’s reach. The unknown becomes known at a given time.

The unknowable is the indescribable, the unthinkable, and the unrealizable. It is something that will never be known to us, and yet it is there, dazzling and at the same time horrifying in its vastness.
Seers make the distinction between the two, by using a rule of thumb. In the face of the unknown, man is adventurous. It is the quality of the unknown to give us a sense of hope and happiness. Man feels robust, exhilarated. Even the apprehension that it arouses is very fulfilling. The new seers [saw] that man is at his best in the face of the unknown.

Whenever what is taken to be the unknown turns out to be the unknowable the results are disastrous. Seers feel drained, confused. A terrible oppression takes possession of them. Their bodies lose tone, their reasoning and sobriety wander away aimlessly, for the unknowable has no energizing effects at all. It is not within human reach and it should not be intruded upon foolishly or even prudently.

Seers can have the known at a given moment and enter into the unknown, as the known and the unknown are both within the reach of human perception. Whatever is beyond our capacity to perceive is the unknowable. The distinction between it and the knowable is crucial. Confusing the two would put seers in a precarious position whenever they were confronted with the unknowable.

When this happened to the old seers, they thought their procedures had gone haywire. It didn’t occur to them that most of what’s out there is beyond our comprehension, they erred badly and paid dearly.

The new seers mapped out the unknown in order to separate it from the unknowable, through the controlled use of [seeing] they made it available to our perception.
The realization of the distinction between the unknown and the unknowable is the frontier between the old cycle and the new cycle. Everything the new seers have done stems from understanding that distinction.

[Seeing] was the crucial element in both the destruction of the old seers’ world and in the reconstruction of the new view. Through [seeing] the new seers discovered certain undeniable facts, which they used to arrive at certain conclusions, revolutionary to them, about the nature of man and the world. These conclusions were the truths about awareness.