'The decision as to who can be a warrior and who can only be a hunter is not up to us. That decision is in the realm of the powers that guide men. That's why your playing with Mescalito was such an important omen. Those forces guided you to me; they took you to that bus depot, remember? Some clown brought you to me. A perfect omen, a clown pointing you out. So, I taught you how to be a hunter. And then the other perfect omen, Mescalito himself playing with you. See what I mean?"
His weird logic was overwhelming. His words created visions of myself succumbing to something awesome and unknown, something which I had not bargained for, and which I had not conceived existed, even in my wildest fantasies.
'What do you propose I should do?' I asked.
'Become accessible to power; tackle your dreams,' he replied, 'You call them dreams because you have no power. A warrior, being a man who seeks power, doesn't call them dreams, he calls them real.'
'You mean he takes his dreams as being reality?'
'He doesn't take anything as being anything else. What you call dreams are real for a warrior. You must understand that a warrior is not a fool. A warrior is an immaculate hunter who hunts power; he's not drunk, or crazed, and he has neither the time nor the disposition to bluff, or to lie to himself, or to make a wrong move. The stakes are too high for that. The stakes are his trimmed orderly life which he has taken so long to tighten and perfect. He is not going to throw that away by making some stupid miscalculation, by taking something for being something else.
'Dreaming is real for a warrior because in it he can act deliberately, he can choose and reject, he can select from a variety of items those which lead to power, and then he can manipulate them and use them, while in an ordinary dream he cannot act deliberately.'
'Do you mean then, don Juan, that dreaming is real?'
'Of course it is real.'
'As real as what we are doing now?'
'If you want to compare things, I can say that it is perhaps more real. In dreaming you have power, you can change things; you may find out countless concealed facts; you can control whatever you want.'
J2X
