and
inanimate energy.
They saw that inanimate energy has no awareness. Awareness, for shamans, is a vibratory condition of animate energy. Don Juan said that the shamans of ancient Mexico were the first ones to see that all the organisms on Earth are the possessors of vibratory energy. They called them organic beings, and saw that it is the organism itself which sets up the cohesiveness and the limits of such energy. They also saw that there are conglomerates of vibratory, animate energy which have a cohesion of their own, free from the bindings of an organism. They called them inorganic beings, and described them as clumps of cohesive energy that is invisible to the human eye, energy that is aware of itself, and possesses a unity determined by an agglutinating force other than the agglutinating force of an organism.
The shamans of don Juan's lineage saw that the essential condition of animate energy, organic or inorganic, is to turn energy in the universe at large into sensory data. In the case of organic beings, this sensory data is then turned into a system of interpretation in which energy at large is classified and a given response is allotted to each classification, whatever the classification may be. The assertion of sorcerers is that in the realm of inorganic beings, the sensory data into which energy at large is transformed by the inorganic beings, must be, by definition, interpreted by them in whatever incomprehensible form they may do it.
According to the shamans' logic, in the case of human beings, the system of interpreting sensorial data is their cognition. They maintain that human cognition can be temporarily interrupted, since it is merely a taxonomical system, in which responses have been classified along with the interpretation of sensory data. When this interruption occurs, sorcerers claim that energy can be perceived directly as it flows in the universe. Sorcerers describe perceiving energy directly as having the effect of seeing it with the eyes, although the eyes are only minimally involved.
To perceive energy directly allowed the sorcerers of don Juan's lineage to see human beings as conglomerates of energy fields that have the appearance of luminous balls. Observing human beings in such a fashion allowed those shamans to draw extraordinary energetic conclusions. They noticed that each of those luminous balls is individually connected to an energetic mass of inconceivable proportions that exists in the universe; a mass which they called
