We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same. - Carlos Castañeda

Whenever the internal dialogue stops, the world collapses, and extraordinary facets of ourselves surface, as though they had been kept heavily guarded by our words.

"Our way of perceiving is a predator's way," he said to me on one occasion.

"A very
efficient manner of appraising and classifying food and danger. But this is not the only
way we are able to perceive. There is another mode, the one I am familiarizing you with:
the act of perceiving the essence of everything, energy itself, directly.

"To perceive the essence of everything will make us understand, classify and describe
the world in entirely new, more exciting, more sophisticated terms." This was don Juan's claim. And the more sophisticated terms to which he was alluding were those he had been taught by his predecessors, terms that correspond to sorcery truths, which have no rational foundation and no relation whatsoever to the facts of our daily world but which are self-evident truths for the sorcerers who perceive energy directly and see the essence of everything.

For such sorcerers, the most significant act of sorcery is to see the essence of the
universe."

When they are "seen" as fields of energy, human beings appear to be like fibers of light, like white cobwebs, very fine threads that circulate from the head to the toes. Thus to the eye of a seer, a man looks like an egg of circulating fibers. And his arms and legs are like luminous bristles, bursting out in all directions.