The third premise of the warriors’ way is: PERCEPTION MUST BE INTENDED IN ITS COMPLETENESS. Don Juan said that perception is perception, and that it is void of goodness or evil. Whatever we perceive has to be catalogued as perception per se, without inflicting any value on it.
When Castaneda presented counterarguments, don Juan would say they were just words, while his own points were “precise references from my book of navigation”—a log of all the things sorcerers perceive on their journeys to infinity. “In infinity, sorcerers find few essential points. The permutations of those essential points are infinite, but… those permutations are not important”. Sorcerers are capable of reinterpreting the flow of energy without the intervention of the mind.
“When one is free from the mind,” don Juan said, “the interpretation of sensory data is no longer an affair taken for granted. One’s total body contributes to it; the body as a conglomerate of energy fields”. The most important part of this interpretation is the contribution of the energy body, the body’s twin in terms of energy. The interplay between the two bodies results in an interpretation that is neither good nor bad but an indivisible unit. When the two sides of man are joined, freedom happens.
An essential premise of the warriors’ way is, therefore, that perception ought to be intended in its completeness; the reinterpretation of direct energy must be made by man in possession of his two essential parts: body and energy body. This reinterpretation, for sorcerers, is completeness and… it must be intended.
(Carlos Castaneda, The Warrior’s Way – A Journal of Applied Hermeneutics)
