From The Eagle's Gift, Rule of the Nagual:
" Don Juan explained that the rule was not a tale, and that to cross over to freedom did not mean eternal life as eternity is commonly understood- that is, as living forever.
What the rule stated was that one could keep the awareness which is ordinarily relinquished at the moment of dying.
Don Juan could not explain what it meant to keep that awareness, or perhaps he could not even conceive of it. His benefactor had told him that at the moment of crossing, one enters into the third attention, and the body in its entirety is kindled with knowledge. Every cell at once becomes aware of itself, and also aware of the totality of the body.
His benefactor had also told him that this kind of awareness is meaningless to our compartmentalized minds. Therefore the crux of the warrior's struggle was not so much to realize that the crossing over stated in the rule meant crossing to the third attention, but rather to conceive that there exists such an awareness at all.
Don Juan said that in the beginning the rule was to him something strictly in the realm of words. He could not imagine how it could lapse into the domain of the actual world and its ways.
Under the effective guidance of his benefactor, however, and after a great deal of work, he finally succeeded in grasping the true nature of the rule, and totally accepted it as a set of pragmatic directives rather than a myth. From then on, he had no problem in dealing with the reality of the third attention.
The only obstacle in his way arose from his being so thoroughly convinced that the rule was a map that he believed he had to look for a literal opening in the world, a passageway. Somehow he had become needlessly stuck at the first level of a warrior's development."
From the Fire From Within, The First Attention:
" "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.
Don Juan 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 these cases 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 life-force; without becoming a disembodied awareness moving like a flicker of light up to the Eagle's beak to be devoured."
