Version 2006.05.09

## "The Fire From Within" - ©1984 by Carlos Castaneda

### Foreword

I have written extensive descriptive accounts of my apprentice relationship with a Mexican Indian sorcerer, don Juan Matus. Due to the foreignness of the concepts and practices don Juan wanted me to understand and internalize, I have had no other choice but to render his teachings in the form of a narrative; a narrative of what happened, as it happened.

The organization of don Juan's instruction was predicated on the idea that man has two types of awareness. He labeled them the right side and the left side. He described the first as the state of normal awareness necessary for everyday life. The second, he said, was the mysterious side of man; the state of awareness needed to function as sorcerer and seer. Don Juan divided his instruction, accordingly, into teachings for the right side and teachings for the left side.

He conducted his teachings for the right side when I was in my state of normal awareness, and I have described those teachings in all my accounts. In my state of normal awareness don Juan told me that he was a sorcerer. He even introduced me to don Genaro Flores, whom he also led me to believe was another sorcerer. Because of the nature of our association, I logically concluded that they had taken me as their sorcerers' apprentice.

That apprenticeship ended with an incomprehensible act that both don Juan and don Genaro led me to perform. They had me jump from the top of a flat mountain into an abyss.

I have described in one of my accounts what took place on that mountaintop. The last drama of don Juan's teachings for the right side was played there by don Juan himself; don Genaro; two apprentices, Pablito and Nestor; and me. Pablito, Nestor, and I jumped from that mountaintop into an abyss.

For years afterward I thought that just my total trust in don Juan and don Genaro had been sufficient to obliterate all my rational fears on facing actual annihilation. I know now that it wasn't so; I know that the secret was in don Juan's teachings for the left side, and that it took tremendous discipline and perseverance for don Juan, don Genaro, and their companions to conduct those teachings.

It has taken me nearly ten years to recollect what exactly took place in his teachings for the left side that led me to be so willing to perform such an incomprehensible act as jumping into an abyss.

It was in his teachings for the left side that don Juan let on what he, don Genaro, and their companions were really doing to me and who they were. They were not teaching me sorcery, but how to master three aspects of an ancient knowledge they possessed: awareness, stalking, and intent. And they were not sorcerers; they were seers. And don Juan was not only a seer, but also a nagual.

Don Juan had already explained to me, in his teachings for the right side, a great deal about the nagual and about seeing. I had understood seeing to be the capacity of human beings to enlarge their perceptual field until they are capable of assessing, not only the outer appearances, but the essence of everything. He had also explained that seers see man as a field of energy which looks like a luminous egg. The majority of people, he said, have their fields of energy divided into two parts. A few men and women have four or sometimes three parts. Because these people are more resilient than the average man, they can become naguals after learning to see.

In his teachings for the left side, don Juan explained to me the intricacies of seeing and of being a nagual. To be a nagual, he said, is something more complex and far-reaching than being merely a more resilient man who has learned to see. To be a nagual entails being a leader, being a teacher and a guide.

As a nagual, don Juan was the leader of a group of seers known as the nagual's party, which was composed of eight female seers: Cecilia, Delia, Hermelinda, Carmela, Nelida, Florinda, Zuleica, and Zoila; three male seers: Vicente, Silvio Manuel, and Genaro; and four couriers or messengers: Emilito, John Tuma, Marta, and Teresa.

In addition to leading the nagual's party, don Juan also taught and guided a group of apprentice seers known as the new nagual's party. It consisted of four young men: Pablito, Nestor, Eligio, and Benigno; along with five women: Soledad, la Gorda, Lidia, Josefina, and Rosa. I was the nominal leader of the new nagual's party together with the nagual woman Carol.

In order for don Juan to impart to me his teachings for the left side, it was necessary for me to enter into a unique state of perceptual clarity known as heightened awareness. Throughout the years of my association with him, he had me repeatedly shift into such a state by means of a blow that he delivered with the palm of his hand on my upper back.

Don Juan explained that in a state of heightened awareness apprentices can behave almost as naturally as in everyday life, but can bring their minds to focus on anything with uncommon force and clarity. Yet, an inherent quality of heightened awareness is that it is not susceptible to normal recall. What transpires in such a state becomes part of the apprentice's everyday awareness only through a staggering effort of recovery.

My interaction with the nagual's party was an example of this difficulty of recall. With the exception of don Genaro, I had contact with them only when I was in a state of heightened awareness. Hence, in my normal everyday life I could not remember them; not even as vague characters in dreams. The manner in which I met with them every time was almost a ritual. I would drive to don Genaro's house in a small town in the southern part of Mexico. Don Juan would join us immediately and the three of us would then get busy with don Juan's teachings for the right side. After that, don Juan would make me change levels of awareness and then we would drive to a larger, nearby town where he and the other fifteen seers were living.

Every time I entered into heightened awareness I could not cease marveling at the difference between my two sides. I always felt as if a veil had been lifted from my eyes; as if I had been partially blind before and now I could see. The freedom, the sheer joy that used to possess me on those occasions cannot be compared with anything else I have ever experienced. Yet at the same time, there was a frightening feeling of sadness and longing that went hand in hand with that freedom and joy. Don Juan had told me that there is no completeness without sadness and longing, for without them there is no sobriety, no kindness. Wisdom without kindness, he said, and knowledge without sobriety are useless.

The organization of his teachings for the left side also required that don Juan, together with some of his fellow seers, explain to me the three facets of their knowledge: the mastery of awareness, the mastery of stalking, and the mastery of intent.

This work deals with the mastery of awareness, which is part of his total set of teachings for the left side; the set he used in order to prepare me for performing the astonishing act of jumping into an abyss.

Due to the fact that the experiences I narrate here took place in heightened awareness, they cannot have the texture of daily life. They are lacking in worldly context, although I have tried my best to supply it without fictionalizing it. In heightened awareness one is minimally conscious of the surroundings, because one's total concentration is taken by the details of the action at hand.

In this case the action at hand was, naturally, the elucidation [* elucidation- an act of explaining that serves to clear up and cast light on] of the mastery of awareness. Don Juan understood the mastery of awareness as being the modern-day version of an extremely old tradition, which he called the tradition of the ancient Toltec seers.

Although he felt that he was inextricably linked to that old tradition, he considered himself to be one of the seers of a new cycle. When I asked him once what the essential character of the seers of the new cycle was, he said that they are the warriors of total freedom; that they are such masters of awareness, stalking, and intent that they are not caught by death like the rest of mortal men; but choose the moment and the way of their departure from this world. At that moment they are consumed by a fire from within and vanish from the face of the earth, free, as if they had never existed.