The Art of Dreaming by Carlos Castaneda Read Free Book Online Page A

from
other realms," he said. "Their energy bodies do that. They recognize
energy and go for it. But it isn't desirable for dreamers to indulge in searching
for scouts. I was reluctant to tell you about it, because of the facility with
which one can get swayed by that search."
    Don Juan
then quickly went on to another subject. He carefully outlined for me an entire
block of practices. At the time, I found that on one level it was all
incomprehensible to me, yet on another it was perfectly logical and
understandable. He reiterated that reaching, with deliberate control, the first
gate of dreaming is a way of arriving at the energy body. But to
maintain that gain is predicated on energy alone. Sorcerers get that energy by
redeploying, in a more intelligent manner, the energy they have and use for
perceiving the daily world.
    When I
urged don Juan to explain it more clearly, he added that we all have a determined
quantity of basic energy. That quantity is all the energy we have, and we use
all of it for perceiving and dealing with our engulfing world. He repeated
various times, to emphasize it, that there is no more energy for us anywhere
and, since our available energy is already engaged, there is not a single bit
left in us for any extraordinary perception, such as dreaming .
    "Where
does that leave us?" I asked.
    "It
leaves us to scrounge energy for ourselves, wherever we can find it," he
replied.
    Don Juan
explained that sorcerers have a scrounging method. They intelligently redeploy
their energy by cutting down anything they consider superfluous in their lives.
They call this method the sorcerers' way. In essence, the sorcerers' way, as
don Juan put it, is a chain of behavioral choices for dealing with the world,
choices much more intelligent than those our progenitors taught us. These
sorcerers' choices are designed to revamp our lives by altering our basic
reactions about being alive.
    "What
are those basic reactions?" I asked.
    "There
are two ways of facing our being alive," he said. "One is to
surrender to it, either by acquiescing to its demands or by fighting those
demands. The other is by molding our particular life situation to fit our own
configurations."
    "Can
we really mold our life situation, don Juan?"
    "One's
particular life situation can be molded to fit one's specifications," don
Juan insisted. "Dreamers do that. A wild statement? Not really, if you
consider how little we know about ourselves."
    He said
that his interest, as a teacher, was to get me thoroughly involved with the
themes of life and being alive; that is to say, with the difference between
life, as a consequence of biological forces, and the act of being alive, as a
matter of cognition.
    "When
sorcerers talk about molding one's life situation," don Juan explained,
"they mean molding the awareness of being alive. Through molding this
awareness, we can get enough energy to reach and sustain the energy body, and
with it we can certainly mold the total direction and consequences of our
lives."
    Don Juan
ended our conversation about dreaming admonishing me not merely to think
about what he had told me but to turn his concepts into a viable way of life by
a process of repetition. He claimed that everything new in our lives, such as
the sorcerers' concepts he was teaching me, must be repeated to us to the point
of exhaustion before we open ourselves to it. He pointed out that repetition is
the way our progenitors socialized us to function in the daily world.
    As I
continued my dreaming practices, I gained the capability of being
thoroughly aware that I was falling asleep as well as the capability of
stopping in a dream to examine at will anything that was part of that dream's
content. To experience this was for me no less than miraculous.
    Don Juan
stated that as we tighten the control over our dreams, we tighten the mastery
over our dreaming attention . He was right in saying that the dreaming
attention comes into play when it is called, when it is