In his later work, Carlos Castaneda used the term nagualism to refer to both sorcery as practice taught him by Don Juan Matus, the Nagual in his lineage of warriors, as well as the system of concepts he employed for verbal reference to that practice and any discourse within the parameters of the same, claiming that Don Juan himself had used the term. He was not completely satisfied with the word, but could not readily come up with a better one, and neither could we.

Following his first encounter with Don Juan Matus, Castaneda got involved in his mentor’s shamanic (again, for want of a better word) practices as a participant rather than as an observer, soon realising through his own acts of perception that the latter would have been an impossibility. He soon found out that sorcery was a complete alternative description of the world and that involvement in such a description had to be definitive, without an opt-out clause. It consequently required full responsibility for one’s actions in that world. Such involvement was all-embracing, meaning that everything and everyone within one’s total life's experience hitherto, as well as the sum total of one’s own actions up to that point smoothly and seamlessly became an integral part of the new world description without giving rise to any contradictions and discrepancies.

Castaneda thus became sensibly aware of one of the basic tenets of sorcery as taught him by Juan Matus: that the world as we know it (the “reality”) is merely a description, by no means the only possible one. How human beings - and indeed any beings - describe the world depends on the way they choose - or are taught to - perceive it. A change in perception means an immediate change of description, which in turn cancels out the world as we know it. Since the importance of perception is so overwhelming that the very existence of our known world depends on it, it follows that human beings are firstly and essentially perceivers, another basic tenet of Shamanism.

The definitiveness of his involvement made Castaneda aware of the definitiveness of all human acts and thus also of the third basic tenet of Shamanism: that we are beings who are going to die. Only immortal beings commit acts which are not definitive (and are therefore without significance), since they have an eternity to undo them. Mortal beings who can die at any moment commit irrevocable acts and are responsible for them because even the most trivial of their deeds can be their last act on earth.

Becoming sensibly aware of these three tenets brings about a complete change in one's life and actions. The process of gaining competence in dealing with and command over circumstances thus changed is called the warrior's path. Once acquired, this competence and command is called impeccability. The term implies an inability to err, meaning that the warrior acts with absolute certainty of having chosen the only possible course of action at any one given moment and accepting full responsibility for any conceivable consequence of his action.

It is clear that no amount of deliberation can result in absolute certainty, since deliberation implies the existence of multiple choices. In fact, no world description can offer certainty we require in order to act impeccably. Only the world itself and not its description, the fact and not its interpretation, can offer that certainty. To perceive the world itself, one must eliminate all descriptions rather than swap one description for another. Descriptions are created by describing. We maintain our working description of the world by describing it - talking incessantly about it to ourselves (and to others). It follows that, were we to shut off this internal dialogue, the description maintained by it would dissolve.

By practising dreaming and stalking, techniques perfected by generations of sorcerers, Castaneda managed, under Don Juan’s guidance, to stop the internal dialogue and enter a state known as inner silence. Inevitably, the familiar description of the world fell apart and he became able to perceive it as it really was previous to and independent of any interpretation: as pure energy. Without interpretation there was no doubt and deliberation was replaced by silent knowledge which enabled him to act impeccably.

In inner silence, Castaneda witnessed and lived the reality of phenomena conceptualised thousands of years ago by pre-Columbian shamans. He saw that human beings, like all aware entities, consisted of myriads of light fibres encased in a cocoon. He saw a brighter spot the size of a tennis ball on the upper part of the cocoon. (This spot - the assemblage point - acts like a lens, selecting light fibres at large which correspond to light fibres inside the cocoon and thus enables us to perceive. What we perceive depends on the position of the assemblage point. Its habitual position is approximately the same in all human beings and results in the perception of the world as we know it. Minute shifts in its position result in subtle changes of our perception, while large-scale movements can make us perceive a whole unknown world.)

Castaneda also saw that all human beings had a double, or left body (energy body, luminous body, dreaming body), made of pure energy, connected with the physical or right body by a cord of light fibres. He saw that, as humans matured, the energy body drifted further and further away while the cord became ever thinner until it eventually, at the moment of death, broke, whereupon both bodies dissolved into energy fibres at large. It was explained to him, and confirmed by his own experience, that one could lure back the energy body and transfer the assemblage point to it. This could be done by means of a number of techniques, one of which was dreaming: learning to control one's dreams until they acquire the solidity and the reality of the waking world. Once re-united with one's energy body, one had at one's disposal the energy body’s infinitely greater perceptive powers and became able to manipulate energy in order to accomplish the ultimate feat of which human beings are capable: the abstract flight. In this manoeuvre the assemblage point moves rapidly all over the cocoon, selecting and emphasizing all the light fibres within it at once. The being performing the manoeuvre then burns with the fire from within, disappears from all possible descriptions of the world while still retaining self-awareness and sets off on a journey in infinity, moved by Intent, the abstract force which provides the pressure behind all the light fibres in the universe. This condition of being is called the third attention, as distinct from the second attention (the nagual) - the one of the left body - or the first attention (the tonal) which is the one of everyday waking life.

At the moment of death, every human being enters third attention for a brief moment before his or her light fibres rejoin the fibres at large. Immediately afterwards, the Dark Sea of Awareness, known to the pre-Columbian shamans as the Eagle, extracts the being's life experience stored in all the positions the being's assemblage point has assumed during his or her life. These positions constitute each individual's portion of the Wheel of Time which contains all the possible positions of all the assemblage points in the universe.

Warriors intent on abstract flight must prevent this from happening, which means that they must supply the Dark Sea of Awareness with a replica of their lives. They do that by recapitulating their lives from the present moment backwards, recalling vividly - re-living - each encounter they had with every person they had ever met, complete with all the details of the environment in which the encounter took place.

Those who take the warrior's path sooner or later discover that they have embarked on a journey with no return. They learn not to bow to the inevitable but to acquiesce to whatever is affecting them, namely Intent. Acquiescence should be and is an active state of being, once one realises that one's own decision and the bidding of Intent can be one and the same thing, provided one's link with Intent is clear, in which case the warrior no longer wishes, hopes, longs for or plans: he or she intends.

This, by and large, is the conceptual and experiential framework within which this book, Edifice of Intent, operates. It will be humming in the background even where no direct reference to it is made, just as Christianity hums in the background of most Western literature and thought, including science. It will be interesting to see how Joseph Campbell’s theories, particularly his natural history of gods, work when seen through the lens of nagualism, and what light it throws on the characters and concepts of Star Wars.