energy

In this chapter, Castaneda recounts don Juan’s teachings about the sorcerers of antiquity, who, though brilliant, were obsessed with concreteness and power. Their modern counterparts, in contrast, seek the abstract: freedom. Don Juan explained that the ancients’ greatest achievement was learning to perceive energy directly, a capacity called *seeing*. This requires separating oneself from the “social mold” of perception, which dictates that the world is made only of concrete objects. He described the universe as being made of incandescent, conscious filaments of energy, and human beings as luminous egg-shaped balls of that energy. The key to perception, according to these ancient sorcerers, is a spot of intense brilliance on our energy body called the assemblage point, which assembles a certain number of energy filaments into our perceived reality. Displacing this point allows one to perceive other worlds. A “shift” of the point results in perceiving other worlds within the human domain, while a “movement” outside the luminous body leads to perceiving inconceivable, nonhuman worlds. He concluded by explaining that the old sorcerers, upon discovering that the assemblage point shifts easily during sleep, developed the art of dreaming to control this displacement at will.