As the Indian struck him repeatedly on the back, the dying man became convinced that the Indian was the woman’s lover or husband and was murdering him. But seeing the intensely brilliant eyes of that Indian, he changed his mind. He knew that the Indian was simply crazy and was not connected with the woman. With his last bit of consciousness, he focused his attention on the man’s mumblings. What he was saying was that the power of man was incalculable, that death existed only because we had intended it since the moment of our birth, that the intent of death could be suspended by making the assemblage point change positions.
He then knew that the Indian was totally insane. His situation was so theatrical—dying at the hands of a crazy Indian mumbling gibberish—that he vowed he would be a ham actor to the bitter end, and he promised himself not to die of either the hemorrhaging or the blows, but to die of laughter. And he laughed until he was dead.
Don Juan remarked that naturally his benefactor could not possibly have taken the Indian seriously. No one could take such a person seriously, especially not a prospective apprentice who was not supposed to be volunteering for the sorcery task.
Don Juan then said that he had given me different versions of what that sorcery task consisted. He said it would not be presumptuous of him to disclose that, from the spirit’s point of view, the task consisted of clearing our connecting link with it. The edifice that intent flaunts before us is, then, a clearinghouse, within which we find not so much the procedures to clear our connecting link as the silent knowledge that allows the clearing process to take place. Without that silent knowledge no process could work, and all we would have would be an indefinite sense of needing something.
He explained that the events unleashed by sorcerers as a result of silent knowledge were so simple and yet so abstract that sorcerers had decided long ago to speak of those events only in symbolic terms. The manifestations and the knock of the spirit were examples.
Don Juan said that, for instance, a description of what took place during the initial meeting between a nagual and a prospective apprentice from the sorcerers’ point of view, would be absolutely incomprehensible. It would be nonsense to explain that the nagual, by virtue of his lifelong experience, was focusing something we couldn’t imagine, his second attention —the increased awareness gained through sorcery training—on his invisible connection with some indefinable abstract. He was doing this to emphasize and clarify someone else’s invisible connection with that indefinable abstract.
He remarked that each of us was barred from silent knowledge by natural barriers, specific to each individual; and that the most impregnable of my barriers was the drive to disguise my complacency as independence.
I challenged him to give me a concrete example. I reminded him that he had once warned me that a favorite debating ploy was to raise general criticisms that could not be supported by concrete examples. Don Juan looked at me and beamed. “In the past, I used to give you power plants,” he said. “At first, you went to extremes to convince yourself that what you were experiencing were hallucinations. Then you wanted them to be special hallucinations. I remember I made fun of your insistence on calling them didactic hallucinatory experiences.”
He said that my need to prove my illusory independence forced me into a position where I could not accept what he had told me was happening, although it was what I silently knew for myself. I knew he was employing power plants, as the very limited tools they were, to make me enter partial or temporary states of heightened awareness by moving my assemblage point away from its habitual location.
“You used your barrier of independence to get you over that obstruction,” he went on. “The same barrier has continued to work to this day, so you still retain that sense of indefinite anguish, perhaps not so pronounced. Now the question is, how are you arranging your conclusions so that your current experiences fit into your scheme of complacency?”
I confessed that the only way I could maintain my independence was not to think about my experiences at all.
Don Juan’s hearty laugh nearly made him fall out of his cane chair. He stood and walked around to catch his breath. He sat down again and composed himself. He pushed his chair back and crossed his legs. He said that we, as average men did not know, nor would we ever know, that it was something utterly real and functional—our connecting link with intent— which gave us our hereditary preoccupation with fate. He asserted that during our active lives we never have the chance to go beyond the level of mere preoccupation, because since time immemorial the lull of daily affairs has made us drowsy. It is only when our lives are nearly over that our hereditary preoccupation with fate begins to take on a different character. It begins to make us see through the fog of daily affairs. Unfortunately, this awakening always comes hand in hand with loss of energy caused by aging, when we have no more strength left to turn our preoccupation into a pragmatic and positive discovery. At this point, all there is left is an amorphous, piercing anguish, a longing for something indescribable, and simple anger at having missed out.
“I like poems for many reasons,” he said. “One reason is that they catch the mood of warriors and explain what can hardly be explained.”
He conceded that poets were keenly aware of our connecting link with the spirit, but that they were aware of it intuitively, not in the deliberate, pragmatic way of sorcerers.
“Poets have no firsthand knowledge of the spirit,” he went on. “That is why their poems cannot really hit the center of true gestures for the spirit. They hit pretty close to it, though.”
He picked up one of my poetry books from a chair next to him, a collection by Juan Ramon Jimenez. He opened it to where he had placed a marker, handed it to me and signaled me to read.
Is it I who walks tonight in my room or is it the beggar who was prowling in my garden at nightfall?
I look around
and find that everything
is the same and it is not the same . . .
Was the window open?
Had I not already fallen asleep?
Was not the garden pale green? . . .
The sky was clear and blue . . .
And there are clouds
and it is windy
and the garden is dark and gloomy.
I think that my hair was black . . .
I was dressed in grey . . .
And my hair is grey
and I am wearing black . . .
Is this my gait?
Does this voice, which now resounds in me,
have the rhythms of the voice I used to have?
Am I myself or am I the beggar
who was prowling in my garden
at nightfall?
I look around . . .
There are clouds and it is windy . . .
The garden is dark and gloomy . . .
I come and go … Is it not true that I had already fallen asleep? My hair is grey . . . And everything is the same and it is not the same . . .
I reread the poem to myself and I caught the poet’s mood of impotence and bewilderment. I asked don Juan if he felt the same.
“I think the poet senses the pressure of aging and the anxiety that that realization produces,” don Juan said. “But that is only one part of it. The other part, which interests me, is that the poet, although he never moves his assemblage point, intuits that something extraordinary is at stake. He intuits with great certainty that there is some unnamed factor, awesome because of its simplicity, that is determining our fate.”
3
The Trickery of the Spirit
DUSTING THE LINK WITH THE SPIRIT
The sun had not yet risen from behind the eastern peaks, but the day was already hot. As we reached the first steep slope, a couple of miles along the road from the outskirts of town, don Juan stopped walking and moved to the side of the paved highway. He sat down by some huge boulders that had been dynamited from the face of the mountain when they cut the road and signaled me to join him. We usually stopped there to talk or rest on our way to the nearby mountains. Don Juan announced that this trip was going to be long and that we might be in the mountains for days.
“We are going to talk now about the third abstract core,” don Juan said. “It is called the trickery of the spirit, or the trickery of the abstract, or stalking oneself, or dusting the link.”