He said that if a rockslide were to come crashing down on us at that precise moment, he would be able to cancel the normal effect of an accidental death. By using the speed with which his assemblage point would move, he could make himself change universes or make himself burn from within in a fraction of a second. I, on the other hand, would die a normal death, crushed by the rocks, because my assemblage point lacked the speed to pull me out.
I said it seemed to me that the sorcerers had just found an alternative way of dying, which was not the same as a cancellation of death. And he replied that all he had said was that sorcerers commanded their deaths. They died only when they had to.
Although I did not doubt what he was saying, I kept asking questions, almost as a game. But while he was talking, thoughts and unanchored memories about other perceivable universes were forming in my mind, as if on a screen.
I told don Juan I was thinking strange thoughts. He laughed and recommended I stick to the jaguar, because he was so real that he could only be a true manifestation of the spirit.
The idea of how real the animal was made me shudder. “Wouldn’t it be better if we changed direction instead of heading straight for the hills?” I asked.
I thought that we could create a certain confusion in the jaguar with an unexpected change.
“It’s too late to change direction,” don Juan said. “The jaguar already knows that there is no place for us to go but the hills.”
“That can’t be true, don Juan!” I exclaimed.
“Why not?” he asked.
I told him that although I could attest to the animal’s ability to be one jump ahead of us, I could not quite accept that the jaguar had the foresight to figure out where we wanted to go.
“Your error is to think of the jaguar’s power in terms of his capacity to figure things out,” he said. “He can’t think. He only knows.”
Don Juan said that our dust-raising maneuver was to confuse the jaguar by giving him sensory input on something for which we had no use. We could not develop a real feeling for raising dust though our lives depended on it.
“I truly don’t understand what you are saying,” I whined.
Tension was taking its toll on me. I was having a hard time concentrating.
Don Juan explained that human feelings were like hot or cold currents of air and could easily be detected by a beast. We were the senders, the jaguar was the receiver. Whatever feelings we had would find their way to the jaguar. Or rather, the jaguar could read any feelings that had a history of use for us. In the case of the dust-raising maneuver, the feeling we had about it was so out of the ordinary that it could only create a vacuum in the receiver.
“Another maneuver silent knowledge might dictate would be to kick up dirt,” don Juan said.
He looked at me for an instant as if he were waiting for my reactions.
“We are going to walk very calmly now,” he said. “And you are going to kick up dirt as if you were a ten-foot giant.”
I must have had a stupid expression on my face. Don Juan’s body shook with laughter.
“Raise a cloud of dust with your feet,” he ordered me. “Feel huge and heavy.”
I tried it and immediately had a sense of massive-ness. In a joking tone, I commented that his power of suggestion was incredible. I actually felt gigantic and ferocious. He assured me that my feeling of size was not in any way the product of his suggestion, but the product of a shift of my assemblage point.
He said that men of antiquity became legendary because they knew by silent knowledge about the power to be obtained by moving the assemblage point. On a reduced scale sorcerers had recaptured that old power. With a movement of their assemblage points they could manipulate their feelings and change things. I was changing things by feeling big and ferocious. Feelings processed in that fashion were called intent.
“Your assemblage point has already moved quite a bit,” he went on. “Now you are in the position of either losing your gain or making your assemblage point move beyond the place where it is now.”
He said that possibly every human being under normal living conditions had had at one time or another the opportunity to break away from the bindings of convention. He stressed that he did not mean social convention, but the conventions binding our perception. A moment of elation would suffice to move our assemblage points and break our conventions. So, too, a moment of fright, ill health, anger, or grief. But ordinarily, whenever we had the chance to move our assemblage points we became frightened. Our religious, academic, social backgrounds would come into play. They would assure our safe return to the flock; the return of our assemblage points to the prescribed position of normal living.
He told me that all the mystics and spiritual teachers I knew of had done just that: their assemblage points moved, either through discipline or accident, to a certain point; and then they returned to normalcy carrying a memory that lasted them a lifetime.
“You can be a very pious, good boy,” he went on, “and forget about the initial movement of your assemblage point. Or you can push beyond your reasonable limits. You are still within those limits.”
I knew what he was talking about, yet there was a strange hesitation in me making me vacillate.
Don Juan pushed his argument further. He said that the average man, incapable of finding the energy to perceive beyond his daily limits, called the realm of extraordinary perception sorcery, witchcraft, or the work of the devil, and shied away from it without examining it further.
“But you can’t do that anymore,” don Juan went on. “You are not religious and you are much too curious to discard anything so easily. The only thing that could stop you now is cowardice.
“Turn everything into what it really is: the abstract, the spirit, the nagual. There is no witchcraft, no evil, no devil. There is only perception.”
I understood him. But I could not tell exactly what he wanted me to do.
I looked at don Juan, trying to find the most appropriate words. I seemed to have entered into an extremely functional frame of mind and did not want to waste a single word.
“Be gigantic!” he ordered me, smiling. “Do away with reason.”
Then I knew exactly what he meant. In fact, I knew that I could increase the intensity of my feelings of size and ferociousness until I actually could be a giant, hovering over the shrubs, seeing all around us.
I tried to voice my thoughts but quickly gave up. I became aware that don Juan knew all I was thinking, and obviously much, much more.
And then something extraordinary happened to me. My reasoning faculties ceased to function. Literally, I felt as though a dark blanket had covered me and obscured my thoughts. And I let go of my reason with the abandon of one who doesn’t have a worry in the world. I was convinced that if I wanted to dispel the obscuring blanket, all I had to do was feel myself breaking through it.
In that state, I felt I was being propelled, set in motion. Something was making me move physically from one place to another. I did not experience any fatigue. The speed and ease with which I could move elated me.
I did not feel I was walking; I was not flying either. Rather I was being transported with extreme facility. My movements became jerky and ungraceful only when I tried to think about them. When I enjoyed them without thought, I entered into a unique state of physical elation for which I had no precedent. If I had had instances of that kind of physical happiness in my life, they must have been so short-lived that they had left no memory. Yet when I experienced that ecstasy I felt a vague recognition, as if I had once known it but had forgotten.
The exhilaration of moving through the chaparral was so intense that everything else ceased. The only things that existed for me were those periods of exhilaration and then the moments when I would stop moving and find myself facing the chaparral.
But even more inexplicable was the total bodily sensation of looming over the bushes which I had had since the instant I started to be moved.
At one moment, I clearly saw the figure of the jaguar up ahead of me. He was running away as fast as he could. I felt that he was trying to avoid the spines of the cactuses. He was being extremely careful about where he stepped.