Version 2006.05.05

## "The Eagle's Gift" - ©1981 by Carlos Castaneda

Six Explanatory Propositions: from "The Eagle's Gift: Spanish Version"

### 2. Attention is what makes us perceive the Eagle's emanations as the action of skimming.

Don Juan used to say that perception is a physical faculty that living creatures groom. The final result of this grooming is known, among seers, as "attention". Don Juan described attention as the action of hooking and channeling perception. He said that this action is our most singular feat which covers all the spectrum of both human alternatives and human possibilities. Don Juan established a precise distinction between alternatives and possibilities. Human alternatives are those that we are enabled to choose as persons who function within the social environment. Our landscape of this dominion is quite limited. Human possibilities are those that we are capable of achieving as luminous beings.

Don Juan revealed to me a classificatory scheme of three types of attention, emphasizing that calling them "types" was erroneous. In fact, they are three levels of knowledge: first, second and third attention; each one of them an independent dominion, complete in itself.

For a warrior that is in the initial stages of his learning, the first attention is the most important of the three. Don Juan said that his explanatory propositions were attempts to bring into first-frame the way in which the first attention works; something that passes completely unadverted [*unadverted -not given attention to] to us. He considered it imperative for warriors to understand the nature of the first attention if they were going to venture into the other two. He explained to me that the first attention has been taught how to move instantly through a whole spectrum of the Eagle's emanations, without emphasizing at all that fact, in order to reach "perceptual units" which all of us have learned that are perceivable. Seers call this feat "skimming" because it implies the capability of suppressing those emanations which are superfluous, and selecting which of them must be emphasized.

Don Juan explained this process by taking as an example the mountain that we were seeing at that moment. He stressed that my first attention, at the moment of seeing the mountain, had skimmed an infinite number of emanations to obtain a miracle of perception; a skimming that all human beings know because each one of them has attained it by himself.

Seers contend that everything the first attention suppresses to obtain a skimming, cannot be recovered anymore by the first attention under any condition. Once we learn to perceive in terms of skimmings, our senses stop registering the superfluous emanations. To elucidate [*elucidate -make free from confusion or ambiguity; make clear] this point he gave me the example of the skimming "human body". He said that our first attention is totally unconscious of the emanations that compose the external luminous shield of the physical body. Our oval cocoon is not subjected to perception; those emanations have been rejected which would make it perceivable in a benefit to those emanations which allow the first attention to perceive the physical body such as we know it. Therefore, the perceptual goal that children must achieve as they grow up consists in learning to isolate the appropriate emanations to be able to channel their chaotic perception and transform it into the first attention. In doing so, they learn how to build skimmings. All grown up human beings who surround children teach them how to skim. Sooner or later, children learn to control their first attention in order to perceive skimmings in terms which are alike to those of their teachers.

Don Juan never ceased to be amazed at the capability of human beings to bring order into the chaos of perception. He contended that all of us, by his/her own merits, is a magistral magician, and that our magic consists in rendering reality to the skimmings that our first attention has learned how to build. The fact that we perceive in terms of skimmings is the Eagle's command, but to perceive the commands as objects is our power, our magical gift. Our fallacy, on the other hand, is that we always end up being one-sided when forgetting that skimmings are only real in terms that we perceive them as real due to the power that we have to do it. Don Juan called this an error in judgment which destroys the richness of our mysterious origins.