The Eagle's Gift: Part SEP: Chapter SEP 1 - What We Perceive As The World Are The Eagle's Emanations.

The Eagle's Gift. ©1982 by Carlos Castaneda.

Part S.E.P.: Chapter S.E.P. 1 - What We Perceive As The World Are The Eagle's Emanations.

Don Juan explained to me that the world we perceive does not have a transcendental existence. Since we are familiarized with it, we believe that what we perceive is a world of objects which exist such as we perceive them, when in reality there is not a world of objects, but rather, a universe of Eagle's emanations.

These emanations represent the only immutable reality. It is a reality that encompasses all that is, both perceivable and unperceivable; knowable and unknowable.

Seers who see the Eagle's emanations call them commands because of their urging force. All living creatures are urged to use the emanations, and they use them without getting to know what they are. Ordinary men interpret them as reality. And seers who see the emanations interpret them as the rule.

Despite the fact that seers see the emanations, they do not have a way of knowing what it is they are seeing. Instead of entangling themselves with useless conjectures, seers occupy themselves in the functional speculation of how the Eagle's commands can be interpreted. Don Juan maintained that to intuit a reality which transcends the world we perceive stays at the level of conjecture. It is not enough for a warrior to conjecture that the Eagle's commands are instantly perceived by all creatures that live on Earth, and that none of them perceives them in the same way. Warriors must try to behold the flow of emanations and "see" the way in which man and other living beings use it to build their perceptual world.

When I proposed to use the word "description" instead of Eagle's emanations, Don Juan said that he was not making a metaphor. He said that the word "description" connotes a human agreement, and that what we perceive stems from a command in which human agreements do not count.