I demanded that before he do anything he explain to me again what heightened awareness really was.
Don Juan, displaying great patience, discussed heightened awareness in terms of the movement of the assemblage point. As he kept talking, I realized the facetiousness of my request. I knew everything he was telling me. I remarked that I did not really need anything explained, and he said that explanations were never wasted, because they were imprinted in us for immediate or later use or to help prepare our way to reaching silent knowledge.
When I asked him to talk about silent knowledge in more detail, he quickly responded that silent knowledge was a general position of the assemblage point, that ages ago it had been man’s normal position, but that, for reasons which would be impossible to determine, man’s assemblage point had moved away from that specific location and adopted a new one called “reason.”
Don Juan remarked that not every human being was a representative of this new position. The assemblage points of the majority of us were not placed squarely on the location of reason itself, but in its immediate vicinity. The same thing had been the case with silent knowledge: not every human being’s assemblage point had been squarely on that location either.
He also said that “the place of no pity,” being another position of the assemblage point, was the forerunner of silent knowledge, and that yet another position of the assemblage point called “the place of concern,” was the forerunner of reason.
I found nothing obscure about those cryptic remarks. To me they were self-explanatory. I understood everything he said while I waited for his usual blow to my shoulder blades to make me enter into heightened awareness. But the blow never came, and I kept on understanding what he was saying without really being aware that I understood anything. The feeling of ease, of taking things for granted, proper to my normal consciousness, remained with me, and I did not question my capacity to understand.
Don Juan looked at me fixedly and recommended that I lie face down on top of a round boulder with my arms and legs spread like a frog.
I lay there for about ten minutes, thoroughly relaxed, almost asleep, until I was jolted out of my slumber by a soft, sustained hissing growl. I raised my head, looked up, and my hair stood on end. A gigantic, dark jaguar was squatting on a boulder, scarcely ten feet from me, right above where don Juan was sitting. The jaguar, its fangs showing, was glaring straight at me. He seemed ready to jump on me.
“Don’t move!” don Juan ordered me softly. “And don’t look at his eyes. Stare at his nose and don’t blink. Your life depends on your stare.”
I did what he told me. The jaguar and I stared at each other for a moment until don Juan broke the standoff by hurling his hat, like a Frisbee, at the jaguar’s head. The jaguar jumped back to avoid being hit, and don Juan let out a loud, prolonged, and piercing whistle. He then yelled at the top of his voice and clapped his hands two or three times. It sounded like muffled gunshots.
Don Juan signaled me to come down from the boulder and join him. The two of us yelled and clapped our hands until he decided we had scared the jaguar away.
My body was shaking, yet I was not frightened. I told don Juan that what had caused me the greatest fear had not been the cat’s sudden growl or his stare, but the certainty that the jaguar had been staring at me long before I had heard him and lifted my head.
Don Juan did not say a word about the experience. He was deep in thought. When I began to ask him if he had seen the jaguar before I had, he made an imperious gesture to quiet me. He gave me the impression he was ill at ease or even confused.
After a moment’s silence, don Juan signaled me to start walking. He took the lead. We walked away from the rocks, zigzagging at a fast pace through the bush.
After about half an hour we reached a clearing in the chaparral where we stopped to rest for a moment. We had not said a single word and I was eager to know what don Juan was thinking.
“Why are we walking in this pattern?” I asked. “Wouldn’t it be better to make a beeline out of here, and fast?”
“No!” he said emphatically. “It wouldn’t be any good. That one is a male jaguar. He’s hungry and he’s going to come after us.”
“All the more reason to get out of here fast,” I insisted.
“It’s not so easy,” he said. “That jaguar is not encumbered by reason. He’ll know exactly what to do to get us. And, as sure as I am talking to you, he’ll read our thoughts.”
“What do you mean, the jaguar reading our thoughts?” I asked.
“That is no metaphorical statement,” he said. “I mean what I say. Big animals like that have the capacity to read thoughts. And I don’t mean guess. I mean that they know everything directly.”
“What can we do then?” I asked, truly alarmed.
“We ought to become less rational and try to win the battle by making it impossible for the jaguar to read us,” he replied.
“How would being less rational help us?” I asked.
“Reason makes us choose what seems sound to the mind,” he said. “For instance, your reason already told you to run as fast as you can in a straight line. What your reason failed to consider is that we would have had to run about six miles before reaching the safety of your car. And the jaguar will outrun us. He’ll cut in front of us and be waiting in the most appropriate place to jump us.
“A better but less rational choice is to zigzag.”
“How do you know that it’s better, don Juan?” I asked.
“I know it because my connection to the spirit is very clear,” he replied. “That is to say, my assemblage point is at the place of silent knowledge. From there I can discern that this is a hungry jaguar, but not one that has already eaten humans. And he’s baffled by our actions. If we zigzag now, the jaguar will have to make an effort to anticipate us.”
“Are there any other choices beside zigzagging?” I asked.
“There are only rational choices,” he said. “And we don’t have all the equipment we need to back up rational choices. For example, we can head for the high ground, but we would need a gun to hold it.
“We must match the jaguar’s choices. Those choices are dictated by silent knowledge. We must do what silent knowledge tells us, regardless of how unreasonable it may seem.”
He began his zigzagging trot. I followed him very closely, but I had no confidence that running like that would save us. I was having a delayed panic reaction. The thought of the dark, looming shape of the enormous cat obsessed me.
The desert chaparral consisted of tall, ragged bushes spaced four or five feet apart. The limited rainfall in the high desert did not allow the growth of plants with thick foliage or of dense underbrush. Yet the visual effect of the chaparral was of thickness and impenetrable growth.
Don Juan moved with extraordinary nimbleness and I followed as best as I could. He suggested that I watch where I stepped and make less noise. He said that the sound of branches cracking under my weight was a dead giveaway.
I deliberately tried to step in don Juan’s tracks to avoid breaking dry branches. We zigzagged about a hundred yards in this manner before I caught sight of the jaguar’s enormous dark mass no more than thirty feet behind me.
I yelled at the top of my voice. Without stopping, don Juan turned around quickly enough to see the big cat move out of sight. Don Juan let out another piercing whistle and kept clapping his hands, imitating the sound of muffled gunshots.
In a very low voice he said that cats did not like to go uphill and so we were going to cross, at top speed, the wide and deep ravine a few yards to my right.
He gave a signal to go and we thrashed through the bushes as fast as we could. We slid down one side of the ravine, reached the bottom, and rushed up the other side. From there we had a clear view of the slope, the bottom of the ravine, and the level ground where we had been. Don Juan whispered that the jaguar was following our scent, and that if we were lucky we would see him running to the bottom of the ravine, close to our tracks.