Question about "technique" from book Tales of Power

Hi all. I have question about the technique from the book "Tales of Power" chapter "An Appointment with Knowledge" Does anyone have experience (probably the more experienced ones) with this technique or what should I call it or something similar?

--

" First you must stop your internal

dialogue, then you must bring up the image of the person that you want to see; any thought that

one holds in mind in a state of silence is properly a command, since there are no other thoughts

to compete with it. Tonight, the moth in the bushes wants to help you, so it will sing for you. Its

song will bring the golden specks and then you will see the person you've selected."

I wanted to have more details, but he made an abrupt gesture and signaled me to proceed.

After struggling for a few minutes to stop my internal dialogue I was thoroughly silent. And

then I deliberately held the brief thought of a friend of mine. I kept my eyes closed for what I

believed to be just an instant and then I became aware that someone was shaking me by the

shoulders. It was a slow realization. I opened my eyes and found myself lying on my left side.

--

I had apparently fallen asleep so deeply that I did not remember having slumped to the ground.

Don Juan helped me to sit up again. He was laughing. He imitated my snoring and said that if he

had not witnessed it himself he would not believe that anyone could fall asleep so fast. He said

that it was a treat for him to be around me whenever I had to do something that my reason did

not understand. He pushed my notebook away from me and said that we had to start all over.

I followed the necessary steps. The strange sputtering sound happened again. This time,

however, it did not come from the chaparral; rather it seemed to happen inside of me, as if my

lips, or legs, or arms were producing it. The sound soon engulfed me. I felt like soft balls were

being sputtered out from or against me; it was a soothing, exquisite feeling of being bombarded

by heavy cotton puffs. Suddenly I heard a door blown open by a gust of wind and I was thinking

again. I thought that I had ruined another chance. I opened my eyes and found myself in my

room. The objects on my desk were as I had left them. The door was open; there was a strong

wind outside. The thought crossed my mind that I should check the water heater. I then heard a

rattling on the sliding windows that I had put up myself and which did not fit well on the window

frame. It was a furious rattling as if someone wanted to enter. I experienced a jolt of fright. I

stood up from my chair. I felt something pulling me. I screamed. Don Juan was shaking me by the shoulders. I excitedly gave him an account of my vision. It had been so vivid that I was shivering. I felt that I had just been at my desk, in my full corporeal form.

Don Juan shook his head in disbelief and said that I was a genius in tricking myself. He did

not seem impressed by what I had done. He discarded it flatly and ordered me to start again.

I then heard the mysterious sound again. It came to me, as don Juan had suggested, in the

form of a rain of golden specks. I did not feel that they were flat specks or flakes, as he had

described them, but rather spherical bubbles. They floated towards me. One of them burst open

and revealed a scene to me. It was as if it had stopped in front of my eyes and opened up,

disclosing a strange object. It looked like a mushroom. I was definitely looking at it, and what I

was experiencing was not a dream. The mushroomlike object remained unchanged within my

field of "vision" and then it popped, as though the light that was shining on it had been turned

off. An interminable darkness followed it. I felt a tremor, a very unsettling jolt, and then I had the

abrupt realization that I was being shaken. All at once my senses were turned on. Don Juan was

shaking me vigorously, and I was looking at him. I must have just opened my eyes at that

moment. He sprinkled water on my face. The coldness of the water was very appealing. After a

moment's pause he wanted to know what had happened.

I recounted every detail of my vision.

"But what did I see?" I asked.

"Your friend," he retorted.

I laughed and patiently explained that I had seen a mushroom-like figure. Although I had no

criteria to judge dimensions, I had had the feeling that it was about a foot long.

Don Juan emphasized that feeling was all that counted. He said that my feelings were the

gauge that assessed the state of being of the subject that I was seeing.

"From your description and your feelings I must conclude that your friend must be a very

fine man," he said. I was baffled by his words.

He said that the mushroomlike formation was the essential shape of human beings when a

sorcerer was seeing them from far away, but when a sorcerer was directly facing the person he

was seeing, the human quality was shown as an egglike cluster of luminous fibers.

"You were not facing your friend," he said. "Therefore, he appeared like a mushroom."

"Why is that so, don Juan?"

--

"No one knows. That simply is the way men appear in this specific type of seeing."

He added that every feature of the mushroomlike formation had a special significance, but

that it was impossible for a beginner to accurately interpret that significance.

I then had an intriguing recollection. Some years before, in a state of nonordinary reality

elicited by the intake of psychotropic plants, I had experienced or perceived, while I was looking

at a water stream, that a cluster of bubbles floated towards me, engulfing me. The golden bubbles

I had just envisioned had floated and engulfed me in exactly the same manner. In fact, I could

say that both clusters had had the same structure and the same pattern.

Don Juan listened to my commentaries without interest.

"Don't waste your power on trifles," he said. "You are dealing with that immensity out there."

He pointed towards the chaparral with a movement of his hand.

"To turn that magnificence out there into reasonableness doesn't do anything for you. Here,

surrounding us, is eternity itself. To engage in reducing it to a manageable nonsense is petty and

outright disastrous."

He then insisted that I should attempt to see another person from my realm of acquaintances.

He added that once the vision had terminated I should strive to open my eyes by myself and

surface to the full awareness of my immediate surroundings.

I succeeded in holding the view of another mushroomlike form, but while the first one had

been yellowish and small, the second one was whitish, larger and contorted.

By the time we had finished talking about the two shapes I had seen, I had forgotten the

"moth" in the bushes, which had been so overwhelming a little while before. I told don Juan that

it amazed me that I had such a facility for discarding something so truly uncanny. It was as if I

were not the person I knew myself to be.

"I don't see why you make such a fuss out of this," don Juan said. "Whenever the dialogue

stops, the world collapses and extraordinary facets of ourselves surface, as though they had been

kept heavily guarded by our words. You are like you are, because you tell yourself that you are

that way."

After a short rest, don Juan urged me to continue "calling" friends. He said that the point was

to attempt to see as many times as possible, in order to establish a guideline for feeling.

I called thirty-two persons in succession. After each attempt, he demanded a careful and

detailed rendition of everything I had perceived in my vision. He changed that procedure,

however, as I became more proficient in my performance, judging by my stopping the internal

dialogue in a matter of seconds, by my being capable of opening my eyes by myself at the end of

each experience, and by my resuming ordinary activities without any transition. I noticed this

change while we were discussing the coloration of the mushroomlike formations. He had already

made the point that what I called coloration was not a hue but a glow of different intensities. I

was about to describe a yellowish glow that I had envisioned when he interrupted me and

accurately described what I had seen. From that point on he discussed the content of each vision,

not as if he had understood what I had said, but as if he had seen it himself. When I called him to

comment on it he flatly refused to talk about it.

By the time I had finished calling the thirty-two persons, I had realized that I had seen a

variety of mushroomlike shapes, and glows, and I had had a variety of feelings towards them,

ranging from mild delight to sheer disgust.

Don Juan explained that men were filled with configurations that could be wishes, problems,

sorrows, worries, and so on. He asserted that only a profoundly powerful sorcerer could untangle

the meaning of those configurations, and that I had to be content with viewing only the general

shape of men.

I was very tired. There was something indeed fatiguing about those strange shapes.

--

My overall sensation was one of queasiness. I had not liked them. They had made me feel trapped

and doomed.

Don Juan commanded me to write in order to dispel the sensation of somberness. And after a

long silent interval during which I could not write anything, he asked me to call on people that he

himself would select.

A new series of forms emerged. They were not mushroomlike, but looked more like Japanese

cups for sake, turned upside down. Some of them had a headlike formation, just like the foot of

sake cups; others were more round. Their shapes were appealing and peaceful. I sensed that there

was some inherent feeling of happiness about them. They bounced, as opposed to the earthbound

heaviness that the previous batch had exhibited. Somehow, the mere fact that they were there

eased my fatigue.

Among the persons he had selected was his apprentice Eligio. When I summoned the vision

of Eligio I got a jolt that shook me out of my visionary state. Eligio had a long white shape that

jerked and seemed to leap at me. Don Juan explained that Eligio was a very talented apprentice

and that he, no doubt, had noticed that someone was seeing him.

Another of don Juan's selections was Pablito, don Genaro's apprentice. The jolt that the

vision of Pablito gave me was even greater than Eligio's.

Don Juan laughed so hard that tears rolled down his cheeks.

"Why are those people shaped differently?" I asked.

"They have more personal power," he replied. "As you might have noticed, they are not

pegged down to the ground."

"What has given them that lightness? Were they born that way?"

"We all are born that light and bouncy, but we become earth-bound and fixed. We make

ourselves that way. So perhaps we may say that these people are shaped differently because they

live like warriors. That's not important though. What's of value is that you are at the edge now.

You've called forty-seven people, and there is only one more left in order for you to complete the

original forty-eight."

I remembered at that moment that years before he had told me, while discussing corn sorcery

and divination, that the number of corn kernels that a sorcerer possessed was forty-eight. He had

never explained why.

I asked him again, "Why forty-eight?"

"Forty-eight is our number," he said. "That's what makes us men. I don't know why. Don't

waste your power in idiotic questions."

He stood up and stretched his arms and legs. He told me to do the same. I noticed that there

was a tinge of light in the sky towards the east. We sat down again. He leaned over and put his

mouth to my ear.

"The last person you're going to call is Genaro, the real McCoy," he whispered.

I felt a surge of curiosity and excitation. I breezed through the required steps. The strange

sound from the edge of the chaparral became vivid and acquired new strength. I had almost

forgotten about it. The golden bubbles engulfed me and then in one of them I saw don Genaro

himself. He was standing in front of me, holding his hat in his hand. He was smiling ""