„The great difficulty is that the entrance into the second attention is utterly easy and its lure nearly
irresistible.”
He said that the old seers, being the masters of awareness, applied their expertise to their own
glows of awareness and made them expand to inconceivable limits. They actually aimed at lighting
up all the emanations inside their cocoons, one band at a time. They succeeded, but oddly enough
the accomplishment of lighting up one band at a time was instrumental in their becoming
imprisoned in the quagmire of the second attention.
„The new seers corrected that error,” he continued, „and let the mastery of awareness develop to its
natural end, which is to extend the glow of awareness beyond the bounds of the luminous cocoon in
one single stroke.
„The third attention is attained when the glow of awareness turns into the fire from within: a glow
that kindles not one band at a time but all the Eagle’s emanations inside man’s cocoon.”
Don Juan expressed his awe for the new seers’ deliberate effort to attain the third attention while
they are alive and conscious of their individuality.
He did not consider it worthwhile to discuss the random cases of men and other sentient beings
who enter into the unknown and the unknowable without being aware of it; he referred to this as the
Eagle’s gift. He asserted that for the new seers to enter into the third attention is also a gift, but has
a different meaning, it is more like a reward for an attainment.
He added that at the moment of dying all human beings enter into the unknowable and some of
them do attain the third attention, but altogether too briefly and only to purify the food for the
Eagle.
„The supreme accomplishment of human beings,” he said, „is to attain that level of attention while
retaining the lifeforce, without becoming a disembodied awareness moving like a flicker of light up
to the Eagle’s beak to be devoured.”