Don Juan laughed so hard that the sound of his laughter echoed in the mountains. That echo disturbed me as much as the jaguar had. Yet it was not the echo itself which disturbed me, but the fact that I had never heard an echo at night. Echoes were, in my mind, associated only with the daytime.
It had taken me several hours to recall all the details of my experience with the jaguar. During that time, don Juan had not talked to me. He had simply propped himself against a rock and gone to sleep in a sitting position. After a while I no longer noticed that he was there, and finally I fell asleep.
I was awakened by a pain in my jaw. I had been sleeping with the side of my face pressed against a rock. The moment I opened my eyes, I tried to slide
down off the boulder on which I had been lying, but lost my balance and fell noisily on my seat. Don Juan appeared from behind some bushes just in time to laugh.
It was getting late and I wondered aloud if we had enough time to get to the valley before nightfall. Don Juan shrugged his shoulders and did not seem concerned. He sat down beside me.
I asked him if he wanted to hear the details of my recollection. He indicated that it was fine with him, yet he did not ask me any questions. I thought he was leaving it up to me to start, so I told him there were three points I remembered which were of great importance to me. One was that he had talked about silent knowledge; another was that I had moved my assemblage point using intent; and the final point was that I had entered into heightened awareness without requiring a blow between my shoulder blades.
“Intending the movement of your assemblage point was your greatest accomplishment,” don Juan said. “But accomplishment is something personal. It’s necessary, but it’s not the important part. It is not the residue sorcerers look forward to.”
I thought I knew what he wanted. I told him that I hadn’t totally forgotten the event. What had remained with me in my normal state of awareness was that a mountain lion—since I could not accept the idea of a jaguar—had chased us up a mountain, and that don Juan had asked me if I had felt offended by the big cat’s onslaught. I had assured him that it was absurd that I could feel offended, and he had told me I should feel the same way about the onslaughts of my fellow men. I should protect myself, or get out of their way, but without feeling morally wronged.
“That is not the residue I am talking about,” he said, laughing. “The idea of the abstract, the spirit, is the only residue that is important. The idea of the personal self has no value whatsoever. You still put yourself and your own feelings first. Every time I’ve had the chance, I have made you aware of the need to abstract. You have always believed that I meant to think abstractly. No. To abstract means to make yourself available to the spirit by being aware of it.”
He said that one of the most dramatic things about the human condition was the macabre connection between stupidity and self-reflection.
It was stupidity that forced us to discard anything that did not conform with our self-reflective expectations. For example, as average men, we were blind to the most crucial piece of knowledge available to a human being: the existence of the assemblage point and the fact that it could move.
“For a rational man it’s unthinkable that there should be an invisible point where perception is assembled,” he went on. “And yet more unthinkable, that such a point is not in the brain, as he might vaguely expect if he were given to entertaining the thought of its existence.”
He added that for the rational man to hold steadfastly to his self-image insured his abysmal ignorance. He ignored, for instance, the fact that sorcery was not incantations and hocus-pocus, but the freedom to perceive not only the world taken for granted, but everything else that was humanly possible.
“Here is where the average man’s stupidity is most dangerous,” he continued. “He is afraid of sorcery. He trembles at the possibility of freedom. And freedom is at his fingertips. It’s called the third point. And it can be reached as easily as the assemblage point can be made to move.”
“But you yourself told me that moving the assemblage point is so difficult that it is a true accomplishment,” I protested.
“It is,” he assured me. “This is another of the sorcerers’ contradictions: it’s very difficult and yet it’s the simplest thing in the world. I’ve told you already that a high fever could move the assemblage point. Hunger or fear or love or hate could do it; mysticism too, and also unbending intent, which is the preferred method of sorcerers.”
I asked him to explain again what unbending intent was. He said that it was a sort of single-mindedness human beings exhibit; an extremely well-defined purpose not countermanded by any conflicting interests or desires; unbending intent was also the force engendered when the assemblage point was maintained fixed in a position which was not the usual one.
Don Juan then made a meaningful distinction— which had eluded me all these years—between a movement and a shift of the assemblage point. A movement, he said, was a profound change of position, so extreme that the assemblage point might even reach other bands of energy within our total luminous mass of energy fields. Each band of energy represented a completely different universe to be perceived. A shift, however, was a small movement within the band of energy fields we perceived as the world of everyday life.
He went on to say that sorcerers saw unbending intent as the catalyst to trigger their unchangeable decisions, or as the converse: their unchangeable decisions were the catalyst that propelled their assemblage points to new positions, positions which in turn generated unbending intent.
I must have looked dumbfounded. Don Juan laughed and said that trying to reason out the sorcerers’ metaphorical descriptions was as useless as trying to reason out silent knowledge. He added that the problem with words was that any attempt to clarify the sorcerers’ description only made them more confusing.
I urged him to try to clarify this in any way he could. I argued that anything he could say, for instance, about the third point could only clarify it, for although I knew everything about it, it was still very confusing.
“The world of daily life consists of two points of reference,” he said. “We have for example, here and there, in and out, up and down, good and evil, and so on and so forth. So, properly speaking, our perception of our lives is two-dimensional. None of what we perceive ourselves doing has depth.”
I protested that he was mixing levels. I told him that I could accept his definition of perception as the capacity of living beings to apprehend with their senses fields of energy selected by their assemblage points— a very farfetched definition by my academic standards, but one that, at the moment, seemed cogent. However, I could not imagine what the depth of what we did might be. I argued that it was possible he was talking about interpretations—elaborations of our basic perceptions.
“A sorcerer perceives his actions with depth,” he said. “His actions are tri-dimensional for him. They have a third point of reference.”
“How could a third point of reference exist?” I asked with a tinge of annoyance.
“Our points of reference are obtained primarily from our sense perception,” he said. “Our senses perceive and differentiate what is immediate to us from what is not. Using that basic distinction we derive the rest.
“In order to reach the third point of reference one must perceive two places at once.”
My recollecting had put me in a strange mood—it was as if I had lived the experience just a few minutes earlier. I was suddenly aware of something I had completely missed before. Under don Juan’s supervision, I had twice before experienced that divided perception, but this was the first time I had accomplished it all by myself.
Thinking about my recollection, I also realized that my sensory experience was more complex than I had at first thought. During the time I had loomed over the bushes, I had been aware—without words or even thoughts—that being in two places, or being “here and here” as don Juan had called it, rendered my perception immediate and complete at both places. But I had also been aware that my double perception lacked the total clarity of normal perception.
Don Juan explained that normal perception had an axis. “Here and there” were the perimeters of that axis, and we were partial to the clarity of “here.” He said that in normal perception, only “here” was perceived completely, instantaneously, and directly. Its twin referent, “there,” lacked immediacy. It was inferred, deduced, expected, even assumed, but it was not apprehended directly with all the senses. When we perceived two places at once, total clarity was lost, but the immediate perception of “there” was gained.