PRELUDE

Our experience is our reality. We are social creatures by nature, and sharing our experience has established a consensus, or common agreement, about reality. We accept this consensus as our culture, that is, the matrix from which our experience is derived. While our consensus functions culturally, the results are destructive. For our agreement acts as an artificial overlay, a semantic screen, blinding us to a process, a given matrix, that is truly “cultural.”

We are conditioned from birth to accept the overlay as vital to survival, though it fails us in every way, and to react to the flow of our natural matrix as tantamount to death. This contradiction shapes our perceptions of the world, society, and our self. It literally splits our minds and makes of us our own adversary.

I know of no way to explore this contradiction other than treating this overlay as our antagonist. The technique is an old one. To perceive the real instead of the illusory, don Juan, the Yaqui “Man of Knowledge,” insists that his apprentice confront and accept his own death, a notion in contradiction to consensus conditioning.

This “giving up of life in order to find life” is certain to be sensed as an ultimate threat. Though this is paradoxical on the surface, I hope to show the biological function beneath the covering of words. The issue is truly, as don Juan said, a matter of “body-knowing.”