“A decision such as that jump must be prepared for,” he went on. “And in order to prepare for it, any kind of mask for a nagual’s ruthlessness will do, except the mask of generosity.”
Perhaps because I desperately wanted to believe that 1 was truly generous, his comments on my behavior renewed my terrible sense of guilt. He assured me that I had nothing to be ashamed of, and that the only undesirable effect was that my pseudo-generosity did not result in positive trickery.
In this regard, he said, although I resembled his benefactor in many ways, my mask of generosity was too crude, too obvious to be of value to me as a teacher. A mask of reasonableness, such as his own, however, was very effective in creating an atmosphere propitious to moving the assemblage point. His disciples totally believed his pseudo-reasonableness. In fact, they were so inspired by it that he could easily trick them into exerting themselves to any degree.
“What happened to you that day in Guaymas was an example of how the nagual’s masked ruthlessness
shatters self-reflection,” he continued. “My mask was your downfall. You, like everyone around me, believed my reasonableness. And, of course, you expected, above ail, the continuity of that reasonableness.
“When I faced you with not only the senile behavior of a feeble old man, but with the old man himself, your mind went to extremes in its efforts to repair my continuity and your self-reflection. And so you told yourself that I must have suffered a stroke.
“Finally, when it became impossible to believe in the continuity of my reasonableness, your mirror began to break down. From that point on, the shift of your assemblage point was just a matter of tune. The only thing in question was whether it was going to reach the place of no pity.”
I must have appeared skeptical to don Juan, for he explained that the world of our self-reflection or of our mind was very flimsy and was held together by a few key ideas that served as its underlying order. When those ideas failed, the underlying order ceased to function.
“What are those key ideas, don Juan?” I asked.
“In your case, in that particular instance, as in the case of the audience of that healer we talked about, continuity was the key idea,” he replied.
“What is continuity?” I asked.
“The idea that we are a solid block,” he said. “In our minds, what sustains our world is the certainty that we are unchangeable. We may accept that our behavior can be modified, that our reactions and opinions can be modified, but the idea that we are malleable to the point of changing appearances, to the point of being someone else, is not part of the underlying order of our self-reflection. Whenever a sorcerer interrupts that order, the world of reason stops.”
I wanted to ask him if breaking an individual’s continuity was enough to cause the assemblage point to move. He seemed to anticipate my question. He said that that breakage was merely a softener. What helped the assemblage point move was the nagual’s ruthlessness.
He then compared the acts he performed that afternoon in Guaymas with the actions of the healer we had previously discussed. He said that the healer had shattered the self-reflection of the people in her audience with a series of acts for which they had no equivalents in their daily lives—the dramatic spirit possession, changing voices, cutting the patient’s body open. As soon as the continuity of the idea of themselves was broken, their assemblage points were ready to be moved.
He reminded me that he had described to me in the past the concept of stopping the world. He had said that stopping the world was as necessary for sorcerers as reading and writing was for me. It consisted of introducing a dissonant element into the fabric of everyday behavior for purposes of halting the otherwise smooth flow of ordinary events—events which were catalogued in our minds by our reason.
The dissonant element was called “not-doing,” or the opposite of doing. “Doing” was anything that was part of a whole for which we had a cognitive account. Not-doing was an element that did not belong in that charted whole.
“Sorcerers, because they are stalkers, understand human behavior to perfection,” he said. “They understand, for instance, that human beings are creatures of inventory. Knowing the ins and outs of a particular inventory is what makes a man a scholar or an expert in his field.
“Sorcerers know that when an average person’s inventory fails, the person either enlarges his inventory or his world of self-reflection collapses. The average person is willing to incorporate new items into his inventory if they don’t contradict the inventory’s underlying order. But if the items contradict that order, the person’s mind collapses. The inventory is the mind. Sorcerers count on this when they attempt to break the mirror of self-reflection.”
He explained that that day he had carefully chosen the props for his act to break my continuity. He slowly transformed himself until he was indeed a feeble old man, and then, in order to reinforce the breaking of my continuity, he took me to a restaurant where they knew him as an old man.
I interrupted him. I had become aware of a contradiction I had not noticed before. He had said, at the time, that the reason he transformed himself was that he wanted to know what it was like to be old. The occasion was propitious and unrepeatable. I had understood that statement as meaning that he had not been an old man before. Yet at the restaurant they knew him as the feeble old man who suffered from strokes.
“The nagual’s ruthlessness has many aspects,” he said. “It’s like a tool that adapts itself to many uses. Ruthlessness is a state of being. It is a level of intent that the nagual attains.
“The nagual uses it to entice the movement of his own assemblage point or those of his apprentices. Or he uses it to stalk. I began that day as a stalker, pretending to be old, and ended up as a genuinely old, feeble man. My ruthlessness, controlled by my eyes, made my own assemblage point move.
“Although I had been at the restaurant many times before as an old, sick man, I had only been stalking, merely playing at being old. Never before that day had my assemblage point moved to the precise spot of age and senility.”
He said that as soon as he had intended to be old, his eyes lost their shine, and I immediately noticed it. Alarm was written all over my face. The loss of the shine in his eyes was a consequence of using his eyes to intend the position of an old man. As his assemblage point reached that position, he was able to age in appearance, behavior, and feeling.
I asked him to clarify the idea of intending with the eyes. I had the faint notion I understood it, yet I could not formulate even to myself what I knew.
“The only way of talking about it is to say that intent is intended with the eyes,” he said. “I know that it is so. Yet, just like you, I can’t pinpoint what it is I know. Sorcerers resolve this particular difficulty by accepting something extremely obvious: human beings are infinitely more complex and mysterious than our wildest fantasies.”
I insisted that he had not shed any light on the matter.
“All I can say is that the eyes do it,” he said cuttingly. “I don’t know how, but they do it. They summon intent with something indefinable that they have, something in their shine. Sorcerers say that intent is experienced with the eyes, not with the reason.”
He refused to add anything and went back to explaining my recollection. He said that once his assemblage point had reached the specific position that made him genuinely old, doubts should have been completely removed from my mind. But due to the fact that I took pride in being super-rational, I immediately did my best to explain away his transformation.
“I’ve told you over and over that being too rational is a handicap,” he said. “Human beings have a very deep sense of magic. We are part of the mysterious. Rationality is only a veneer with us. If we scratch that surface, we find a sorcerer underneath. Some of us, however, have great difficulty getting underneath the surface level; others do it with total ease. You and I are very alike in this respect—we both have to sweat blood before we let go of our self-reflection.”
I explained to him that, for me, holding onto my rationality had always been a matter of life or death. Even more so when it came to my experiences in his world.
He remarked that that day in Guaymas my rationality had been exceptionally trying for him. From the start he had had to make use of every device he knew to undermine it. To that end, he began by forcibly putting his hands on my shoulders and nearly dragging me down with his weight. That blunt physical maneuver was the first jolt to my body. And this, together with my fear caused by his lack of continuity, punctured my rationality.