, as it is defined in the philosophical discourse of our day, could be anything besides a homogeneous, all-engulfing affair for the totality of mankind. Western man is willing to consider cultural differences that would account for quaint ways of describing phenomena, but cultural differences could not possibly account for processes of memory, experience, perception, and the expert use of language to be anything other than the processes known to us. In other words, for Western man, there is only
cognition as a group of general processes.
For the sorcerers of don Juan's lineage, however, there is the cognition of modern man, and there is the cognition of the shamans of ancient Mexico. Don Juan considered these two to be entire worlds of everyday life which were intrinsically different from one another. At a given moment, unbeknownst to me, my task mysteriously shifted from the mere gathering of anthropological data to the internalization of the new cognitive processes of the shamans' world.
A genuine internalization of such rationales entails a transformation, a different response to the world of everyday life. Shamans found out that the initial thrust of this transformation always occurs as an intellectual allegiance to something that appears to be merely a concept, but which has unsuspectedly powerful undercurrents. This was best described by don Juan when he said, "The world of everyday life cannot ever be taken as something personal that has power over us, something that could make us, or destroy us, because man's battlefield is not in his strife with the world around him. His battlefield is over the horizon, in an area which is unthinkable for an average man, the area where man ceases to be a man."
He explained those statements, saying that it was energetically imperative for human beings to realize that the only thing that matters is their encounter with infinity. Don Juan could not reduce the term infinity to a more manageable description. He said that it was energetically irreducible. It was something that could not be personified or even alluded to, except in such vague terms as infinity, ‘lo infinito.’
Little did I know at that time that don Juan was not giving me just an appealing intellectual description; he was describing something he called an energetic fact. Energetic facts, for him, were the conclusions that he and the other shamans of his lineage arrived at when they engaged in a function which they called
