It was stated in the previous issue, that for don Juan and other practitioners like him, a sorcerer was any person who, through discipline and purpose, was capable of interrupting the effect of the interpretation system we use to construct the world that we know. Sorcerers maintain that energy at large is transformed into sensorial data and these sensorial data are interpreted as the world of everyday life. Sorcery is, therefore, a maneuver of interference; a maneuver by means of which a flow is interrupted. For sorcerers, sorcery has nothing to do with incantations or rituals, which are mere concatenations designed to obscure purposefully its true nature and goal: the enlargement of the parameters of normal perception.
For don Juan Matus, the practitioners of sorcery were fighters who struggled to return their perceiving attributes to an origin that was more engulfing than the perceiving accomplished in daily living. He called this kind of fighter, warrior guardian, and said that all the practitioners like him were warrior guardians. War- rior guardian was for him a synonym for sorcerer.
The only thing that differentiates some warrior guardians from others is the fact that a specific goal or purpose has been designated for some of them, and not for others. A case in question is, for example, the three Chacmools, known to the attendants of the Tensegrity seminars and workshops. Their specific purpose was to guard the other warrior guardians and, as a unit, teach Tensegrity.
Circumstances beyond anybody’s control appeared on the scene, and the reactions of those three warrior guardians made it imperative to dissolve their configuration. Don Juan had already warned his disciples that whoever takes the warriors’ path is subject to the effects of energy, which opens the way or closes it. He insisted that his disciples have the prowess to obey the dictums of energy and not try to command it by imposing their wills.
When a state of profound sobriety is reached by a practitioner, there is no mistake whatsoever when reading the commands of energy. It is as if energy is conscious and alive, and it gives manifestations of its will. To go against it means an unnecessary risk which practitioners pay for dearly when, due to ignorance, or willfulness, they refuse to follow energy indications.
The present format of warrior guardians that has replaced the Chacmools, has been selected by energy itself. This new format is called the Energy Trackers. At the beginning, when the formulation presented itself, the Energy Trackers were called, for a moment, the Pathfinders. The belief was that the Pathfinders would find new paths, new procedures, new solutions. In the act of working together, it became apparent that what they were doing was tracking energy.
The explanation of tracking energy that don Juan Matus gave was somewhat confusing at the beginning. It became more and more clear as time went by, until it reached a level of being obvious to the point of redundancy.
“To track energy is to be able to follow the tenuous trail that energy leaves as it flows,” don Juan explained. “Not every one of us is an energy tracker; however, a moment comes in the life of every practitioner when he can follow the flow of energy, even if he does it in a clumsy manner. So I could say that some warriors are more elegant energy trackers than others, because their proclivity is to track energy.”
The sparseness of his explanation made it very difficult for me even to conceive what he was referring to. Later on, I became more acutely cognizant of what don Juan had in mind. My change of awareness was at first a vague sensation, derived mostly from a curious intellect, which affirmed that it is reasonable to assume that energy, although I didn’t know what energy was, must leave a trail. As my involvement with don Juan Matus’ world became super-intense, I became convinced that all of his concepts were based on direct observations made at a level incomprehensible to my daily awareness.
Don Juan explained my queries and sensations as a natural consequence of an inner silence I had gradually learned to attain. “What you are feeling is the flow of energy,” don Juan told me. “It is like a very mild electric charge, or a weird itching on your solar plexus, or above your kidneys. It is not a visual effect, yet every sorcerer I know speaks of it as seeing energy. I’ll tell you a secret. I have never seen energy. I only feel it. My advantage is that I have never tried to explain what I feel. I just feel whatever! feel, end of the story.”
His statements were a revelation to me. I happened to feel what he was describing. From there, I passed to the acceptance of those new feelings as events in my life without trying to explain them by finding a relationship of cause and effect.
On the topic of tracking energy, don Juan also said that a nexus of warrior guardians could be formed, because of their close proximity to one other; and that the members of such a nexus that could very well show a remarkable capacity for tracking energy. Such an event took place among us after the Chacmools’ collapse. And a new format emerged; a group of warrior guardians became, quite suddenly, strangely capable of tracking energy. This was manifested by their unusual nervousness and their agility to grab onto new situations with uncanny certainty.
If the modern jargon were to be used, it could be said that energy trackers are “channelers” par excellence. But the idea of channeling implies a certain degree of will on the part of the practitioner, who as the term describes, channels things into him- self or herself. Energy trackers, on the other hand, do not impose their volition. They simply allow energy to show itself to them.
(Carlos Castaneda, Jounal of Applied Hermeneutics)
