today's world, the center of all our endeavors, hopes, fears, and so on, as a global conglomerate of human beings - for all practical purposes, the capital of the civilized world. He said that all this wasn't in the realm of the abstract, or even in the realm of our minds, but in the realm of intending, because from the point of view of our sensory input, the White House was a building that in no way had the richness, the scope, the depth of the concept of the White House. He added that from the point of view of the input of sensory data, the White House, like everything else in our world, was cursorily apprehended with our visual senses only; our tactile, olfactory, auditory, and taste senses were not engaged in any way. The interpretation that those senses could make of sensory data in relation to the building where the White House is would have no meaning whatsoever.
The question that don Juan asked as a sorcerer was where the White House was. He said, answering his own question, that it was certainly not in our perception, not even in our thoughts, but in a special realm of intending, where it was nurtured with everything pertinent to it. Don Juan's assertion was that to create a total universe of intending in such a manner was our magic.
Since the theme of the first series of Tensegrity is preparing the practitioners for intending, it's important to review the sorcerers' definition of intending. For don Juan, intending was the tacit act of filling out the empty spaces left by direct sensory perception, or the act of enriching the observable phenomena by means of intending a completeness that doesn't exist from the point of view of pure perception.
The act of intending this completeness was referred to by don Juan as calling intent. Everything he explained about intent pointed to the fact that the act of intending is not in the realm of the physical. In other words, it is not part of the physicality of the brain or any other organ. Intent, for don Juan, transcended the world we know. It is something like an energetic wave, a beam of energy which attaches itself to us.
Because of the extrinsic nature of intent, don Juan made a distinction between the body as part of the cognition of everyday life and the body as an energetic unit which was not part of that cognition. This energetic unit included the unseen parts of the body, such as the internal organs, and the energy that flowed through them. Don Juan asserted that it was with this part that energy could be directly perceived.
He pointed out that because of the predominance of sight in our habitual way of perceiving the world, the shamans of ancient Mexico described the act of directly apprehending energy as seeing. For them to perceive energy as it flowed in the universe meant that energy adopted non-idiosyncratic, specific configurations that repeated themselves consistently, and that those configurations could be perceived in the same terms by anyone who saw.
The most important example don Juan Matus could give of this consistency of energy in adopting specific configurations was the perception of the human body when it was seen directly as energy. As it was already said, shamans like don Juan perceive a human being as a conglomerate of energy fields that gives the total impression of a clear-cut sphere of luminosity. Taken in this sense, energy is described by shamans as a vibration that agglutinates itself into cohesive units. Shamans describe the entire universe as being composed of energy configurations that appear to the seeing eye as filaments, or luminous fibers that are strung in every which way without ever being entangled. This is an incomprehensible proposition for the linear mind. It has a built-in contradiction that can't be resolved: How could those fibers extend themselves every which way and yet not be entangled?
Don Juan emphasized the point that shamans were able only to describe events, and that if their terms of description seemed inadequate
The question that don Juan asked as a sorcerer was where the White House was. He said, answering his own question, that it was certainly not in our perception, not even in our thoughts, but in a special realm of intending, where it was nurtured with everything pertinent to it. Don Juan's assertion was that to create a total universe of intending in such a manner was our magic.
Since the theme of the first series of Tensegrity is preparing the practitioners for intending, it's important to review the sorcerers' definition of intending. For don Juan, intending was the tacit act of filling out the empty spaces left by direct sensory perception, or the act of enriching the observable phenomena by means of intending a completeness that doesn't exist from the point of view of pure perception.
The act of intending this completeness was referred to by don Juan as calling intent. Everything he explained about intent pointed to the fact that the act of intending is not in the realm of the physical. In other words, it is not part of the physicality of the brain or any other organ. Intent, for don Juan, transcended the world we know. It is something like an energetic wave, a beam of energy which attaches itself to us.
Because of the extrinsic nature of intent, don Juan made a distinction between the body as part of the cognition of everyday life and the body as an energetic unit which was not part of that cognition. This energetic unit included the unseen parts of the body, such as the internal organs, and the energy that flowed through them. Don Juan asserted that it was with this part that energy could be directly perceived.
He pointed out that because of the predominance of sight in our habitual way of perceiving the world, the shamans of ancient Mexico described the act of directly apprehending energy as seeing. For them to perceive energy as it flowed in the universe meant that energy adopted non-idiosyncratic, specific configurations that repeated themselves consistently, and that those configurations could be perceived in the same terms by anyone who saw.
The most important example don Juan Matus could give of this consistency of energy in adopting specific configurations was the perception of the human body when it was seen directly as energy. As it was already said, shamans like don Juan perceive a human being as a conglomerate of energy fields that gives the total impression of a clear-cut sphere of luminosity. Taken in this sense, energy is described by shamans as a vibration that agglutinates itself into cohesive units. Shamans describe the entire universe as being composed of energy configurations that appear to the seeing eye as filaments, or luminous fibers that are strung in every which way without ever being entangled. This is an incomprehensible proposition for the linear mind. It has a built-in contradiction that can't be resolved: How could those fibers extend themselves every which way and yet not be entangled?
Don Juan emphasized the point that shamans were able only to describe events, and that if their terms of description seemed inadequate
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