SUMMITS

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"Don Juan claimed that what limits human perception is timidity. To be able to manage the
world which surrounds us, we have had to give up our perceptual gift; that is, the possibility
of witnessing everything. We sacrifice the flight of awareness in exchange for the security of
the known. We can live strong, audacious, healthy lives; we can be impeccable warriors; but
we don't dare!
"Our heritage is a stable house where we can live, but we have transformed it into a fort for
the defense of the self; or rather, into a jail, where we condemn our energy to weaken in
lifelong imprisonment. Our best years, feelings, and forces are wasted in forever repairing and
bolstering that house, because we have wound up identifying ourselves with it.
"In the process of becoming a social being, a growing child acquires a false conviction of his
own importance, and what was a healthy feeling of self-preservation in the beginning, ends up
transformed into a selfish clamor for attention.
"Of all the gifts we have received, self-importance is the cruelest. It converts a magical, vivid
creature into a poor, arrogant, graceless devil."