“But then, don Juan, I was right in describing my perception as the important part of my experience,” I said.
“No, you were not,” he said. “What you experienced was vital to you, because it opened the road to silent knowledge, but the important thing was the jaguar. That jaguar was indeed a manifestation of the spirit.
“That big cat came unnoticed out of nowhere. And he could have finished us off as surely as I am talking to you. That jaguar was an expression of magic. Without him you would have had no elation, no lesson, no realizations.”
“But was he a real jaguar?” I asked.
“You bet he was real!”
Don Juan observed that for an average man that big cat would have been a frightening oddity. An average man would have been hard put to explain in reasonable terms what that jaguar was doing in Chihuahua, so far from a tropical jungle. But a sorcerer, because he had a connecting link with intent, saw that jaguar as a vehicle to perceiving—not an oddity, but a source of awe.
There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask, and yet I knew the answers before I could articulate the questions. I followed the course of my own questions and answers for a while, until finally I realized it did not matter that I silently knew the answers; answers had to be verbalized to be of any value.
I voiced the first question that came to mind. I asked don Juan to explain what seemed to be a contradiction. He had asserted that only the spirit could move the assemblage point. But then he had said that my feelings, processed into intent, had moved my assemblage point.
“Only sorcerers can turn their feelings into intent,” he said. “Intent is the spirit, so it is the spirit which moves their assemblage points.
“The misleading part of all this,” he went on, “is that I am saying only sorcerers know about the spirit, that intent is the exclusive domain of sorcerers. This is not true at all, but it is the situation in the realm of practicality. The real condition is that sorcerers are ‘./ore aware of their connection with the spirit than the average man and strive to manipulate it. That’s all. I’ve already told you, the connecting link with intent is the universal feature shared by everything there is.”
Two or three times, don Juan seemed about to start to add something. He vacillated, apparently trying to choose his words. Finally he said that being in two places at once was a milestone sorcerers used to mark the moment the assemblage point reached the place of silent knowledge. Split perception, if accomplished by one’s own means, was called the free movement of the assemblage point.
He assured me that every nagual consistently did everything within his power to encourage the free movement of his apprentices’ assemblage points. This all-out effort was cryptically called “reaching out for the third point.”
“The most difficult aspect of the nagual’s knowledge,” don Juan went on, “and certainly the most crucial part of his task is that of reaching out for the third point—the nagual intends that free movement, and the spirit channels to the nagual the means to accomplish it. I had never intended anything of that sort until you came along. Therefore, I had never fully appreciated my benefactor’s gigantic effort to intend it for me.
“Difficult as it is for a nagual to intend that free movement for his disciples,” don Juan went on, “it’s nothing compared with the difficulty his disciples have in understanding what the nagual is doing. Look at the way you yourself struggle! The same thing happened to me. Most of the time, I ended up believing the trickery of the spirit was simply the trickery of the nagual Julian.
“Later on, I realized I owed him my life and well-being,” don Juan continued. “Now I know I owe him infinitely more. Since I can’t begin to describe what I really owe him, I prefer to say he cajoled me into having a third point of reference.
“The third point of reference is freedom of perception; it is intent; it is the spirit; the somersault of thought into the miraculous; the act of reaching beyond our boundaries and touching the inconceivable.”
THE TWO ONE-WAY BRIDGES
Don Juan and I were sitting at the table in his kitchen. It was early morning. We had just returned from the mountains, where we had spent the night after I had recalled my experience with the jaguar. Recollecting my split perception had put me in a state of euphoria, which don Juan had employed, as usual, to plunge me into more sensory experiences that I was now unable to recall. My euphoria, however, had not waned.
“To discover the possibility of being in two places at once is very exciting to the mind,” he said. “Since our minds are our rationality, and our rationality is our self-reflection, anything beyond our self-reflection either appalls us or attracts us, depending on what kind of persons we are.”
He looked at me fixedly and then smiled as if he had just found out something new.
“Or it appalls and attracts us in the same measure,” he said, “which seems to be the case with both of us.”
I told him that with me it was not a matter of being appalled or attracted by my experience, but a matter of being frightened by the immensity of the possibility of split perception.
“I can’t say that I don’t believe I was in two places at once,” I said. “I can’t deny my experience, and yet I think I am so frightened by it that my mind refuses to accept it as a fact.”
“You and I are the type of people who become obsessed by things like that, and then forget all about them,” he remarked and laughed. “You and I are very much alike.”
It was my turn to laugh. I knew be was making fun of me. Yet he projected such sincerity that I wanted to believe he was being truthful.
I told him that among his apprentices, I was the only one who had learned not to take his statements of equality with us too seriously. I said that I had seen him in action, hearing him tell each of his apprentices, in the most sincere tone, “You and I are such fools. We are so alike!” And I had been horrified, time and time again, to realize that they believed him.
“You are not like any one of us, don Juan,” I said. “You are a mirror that doesn’t reflect our images. You are already beyond our reach.”
“What you’re witnessing is the result of a lifelong struggle,” he said. “What you see is a sorcerer who has finally learned to follow the designs of the spirit, but that’s all.
“I have described to you, in many ways, the different stages a warrior passes through along the path of knowledge,” he went on. “In terms of his connection with intent, a warrior goes through four stages. The first is when he has a rusty, untrustworthy link with intent. The second is when he succeeds in cleaning it. The third is when he learns to manipulate it. And the fourth is when he learns to accept the designs of the abstract.”
Don Juan maintained that his attainment did not make him intrinsically different. It only made him more resourceful; thus he was not being facetious when he said to me or to his other apprentices that he was just like us.
“I understand exactly what you are going through,” he continued. “When I laugh at you, I really laugh at the memory of myself in your shoes. I, too, held on to the world of everyday life. I held on to it by my fingernails. Everything told me to let go, but I couldn’t. Just like you, I trusted my mind implicitly, and I had no reason to do so. I was no longer an average man.
“My problem then is your problem today. The momentum of the daily world carried me, and I kept acting like an average man. I held on desperately to my flimsy rational structures. Don’t you do the same.”
“I don’t hold onto any structures; they hold onto me,” I said, and that made him laugh.
I told him I understood him to perfection, but that no matter how hard I tried I was unable to carry on as a sorcerer should.
He said my disadvantage in the sorcerers’ world was my lack of familiarity with it. In that world I had to relate myself to everything in a new way, which was infinitely mere difficult, because it had very little to do with my everyday life continuity.
He described the specific problem of sorcerers as twofold. One is the impossibility of restoring a shattered continuity; the other is the impossibility of using the continuity dictated by the new position of their assemblage points. That new continuity is always too tenuous, too unstable, and does not offer sorcerers the assuredness they need to function as if they were in the world of everyday life.