Летуны   ::   Автор неизвестен

The more egomaniacal our self-concern, the better we taste to them. However, we can produce an awareness that is rejected by the Voladores, awareness developed through discipline. Such awareness is unpalatable to them, and we can keep it. Taisha described herself as having retained enough awareness to extend from her feet to her knees, which allows her to perceive fantastic worlds. Carlos has developed even more, and don Juan's awareness covered his entire body. His ability to perceive was likewise enormous.

The Voladores are essentially impersonal energy, but predatory like all beings in the universe. In order to convince us that the Voladores are much more than mere metaphor, Taisha showed us three photos, two incremental enlargements of the first, displaying an enormous Voladore, a black shadow on the Mexican mountains, leaping between pyramids. The figure looked human with arms folded as if praying, knees bent. The occasion for the photograph was a spring festival at which hundreds of Tibetan Buddhists and Christians participated. The quantity of available awareness generated by these groups was so bountiful that the Voladores actually became visible to photographic film.

When she was a doctoral student in anthropology at UCLA, Taisha took on a research project involving old age and death. By this time, she had learned to see inorganic beings. She discovered that senior citizens homes were infested by Voladores, munching on the awareness of the residents. Funeral homes and cemeteries, Taisha added, are also popular places with the inorganic. At one point, after Taisha had been working on her assignment for some time, she came home to find her apartment overrun by Voladores that had followed her home. They flew around the room like big black bats. She had to ask don Juan to help her, and he was able to get rid of them, somehow.

Eventually, she built up enough awareness based on discipline so that the Voladores were no longer interested in munching her. When she asked don Juan to explain this, he replied that she would be surprised to learn just how fast word gets around in the Second Attention.

WBR, VG (В пятницу 24 Октября 1997)