“If you think about life in terms of hours instead of years, our lives are immensely long,” he said. “Even if you think in terms of days, life is still interminable.”
That was exactly what I had been thinking.
He told me that sorcerers counted their lives in hours, and that in one hour it was possible for a sorcerer to live the equivalent in intensity of a normal life. This intensity is an advantage when it comes to storing information in the movement of the assemblage point.
I demanded that he explain this to me in more detail. A long time before, because it was so cumbersome to take notes on conversations, he had recommended that I keep all the information I obtained about the sorcerers’ world neatly arranged, not on paper nor in my mind, but in the movement of my assemblage point.
“The assemblage point, with even the most minute shifting, creates totally isolated islands of perception,” don Juan said. “Information, in the form of experiences in the complexity of awareness, can be stored there.”
“But how can information be stored in something
so vague?” I asked.
“The mind is equally vague, and still you trust it because you are familiar with it,” he retorted. “You don’t yet have the same familiarity with the movement of the assemblage point, but it is just about the same.”
“What I mean is, how is information stored?” I insisted.
“The information is stored in the experience itself,” he explained. “Later, when a sorcerer moves his assemblage point to the exact spot where it was, he relives the total experience. This sorcerers’ recollection is the way to get back all the information stored in the movement of the assemblage point.
“Intensity is an automatic result of the movement of the assemblage point,” he continued. “For instance, you are living these moments more intensely than you ordinarily would, so, properly speaking, you are storing intensity. Some day you’ll relive this moment by making your assemblage point return to the precise spot where it is now. That is the way sorcerers store information.”
I told don Juan that the intense recollections I had had in the past few days had just happened to me, without any special mental process I was aware of.
“How can one deliberately manage to recollect?” I asked.
“Intensity, being an aspect of intent, is connected naturally to the shine of the sorcerers’ eyes,” he explained. “In order to recall those isolated islands of perception sorcerers need only intend the particular shine of their eyes associated with whichever spot they want to return to. But I have already explained that.”
I must have looked perplexed. Don Juan regarded me with a serious expression. I opened my mouth two or three times to ask him questions, but could not formulate my thoughts.
“Because his intensity rate is greater than normal,” don Juan said, “in a few hours a sorcerer can live the equivalent of a normal lifetime. His assemblage point, by shifting to an unfamiliar position, takes in more energy than usual. That extra flow of energy is called intensity.”
I understood what he was saying with perfect clarity, and my rationality staggered under the impact of the tremendous implication.
Don Juan fixed me with his stare and then warned me to beware of a reaction which typically afflicted sorcerers—a frustrating desire to explain the sorcery experience in cogent, well-reasoned terms.
“The sorcerers’ experience is so outlandish,” don Juan went on, “that sorcerers consider it an intellectual exercise, and use it to stalk themselves with. Their trump card as stalkers, though, is that they remain keenly aware that we are perceivers and that perception has more possibilities than the mind can conceive.”
As my only comment I voiced my apprehension about the outlandish possibilities of human awareness.
“In order to protect themselves from that immensity,” don Juan said, “sorcerers learn to maintain a perfect blend of ruthlessness, cunning, patience, and sweetness. These four bases are inextricably bound together. Sorcerers cultivate them by intending them. These bases are, naturally, positions of the assemblage point.”
He went on to say that every act performed by any sorcerer was by definition governed by these four principles. So, properly speaking, every sorcerer’s every action is deliberate in thought and realization, and has the specific blend of the four foundations of stalking.
“Sorcerers use the four moods of stalking as guides,” he continued. “These are four different frames of mind, four different brands of intensity that sorcerers can use to induce their assemblage points to move to specific positions.”
He seemed suddenly annoyed. I asked if it was my insistence on speculating that was bothering him.
“I am just considering how our rationality puts us between a rock and a hard place,” he said. “Our tendency is to ponder, to question, to find out. And there is no way to do that from within the discipline of sorcery. Sorcery is the act of reaching the place of silent knowledge, and silent knowledge can’t be reasoned out. It can only be experienced.”
He smiled, his eyes shining like two spots of light. He said that sorcerers, in an effort to protect themselves from the overwhelming effect of silent knowledge, developed the art of stalking. Stalking moves the assemblage point minutely but steadily, thus giving sorcerers time and therefore the possibility of buttressing themselves.
“Within the art of stalking,” don Juan continued, “there is a technique which sorcerers use a great deal: controlled folly. Sorcerers claim that controlled folly is the only way they have of dealing with themselves —in their state of expanded awareness and perception —and with everybody and everything in the world of daily affairs.”
Don Juan had explained controlled folly as the art of controlled deception or the art of pretending to be thoroughly immersed in the action at hand—pretending so well no one could tell it from the real thing. Controlled folly is not an outright deception, he had told me, but a sophisticated, artistic way of being separated from everything while remaining an integral part of everything.
“Controlled folly is an art,” don Juan continued. “A very bothersome art, and a difficult one to learn. Many sorcerers don’t have the stomach for it, not because there is anything inherently wrong with the art, but because it takes a lot of energy to exercise it.”
Don Juan admitted that he practiced it conscientiously, although he was not particularly fond of doing so, perhaps because his benefactor had been so adept at it. Or, perhaps it was because his personality— which he said was basically devious and petty— simply did not have the agility needed to practice controlled folly.
I looked at him with surprise. He stopped talking and fixed me with his mischievous eyes.
“By the time we come to sorcery, our personality is already formed,” he said, and shrugged his shoulders to signify resignation, “and all we can do is practice controlled folly and laugh at ourselves.”
I had a surge of empathy and assured him that to me he was not in any way petty or devious.
“But that’s my basic personality,” he insisted.
And I insisted that it was not.
“Stalkers who practice controlled folly believe that, in matters of personality, the entire human race falls into three categories,” he said, and smiled the way he always did when he was setting me up.
“That’s absurd,” I protested. “Human behavior is too complex to be categorized so simply.”
“Stalkers say that we are not so complex as we think we are,” he said, “and that we all belong to one of three categories.”
I laughed out of nervousness. Ordinarily I would have taken such a statement as a joke, but this time, because my mind was extremely clear and my thoughts were poignant, I felt he was indeed serious.
“Are you serious?” I asked, as politely as I could.
“Completely serious,” he replied, and began to laugh.
His laughter relaxed me a little. And he continued explaining the stalkers’ system of classification. He said that people in the first class are the perfect secretaries, assistants, companions. They have a very fluid personality, but their fluidity is not nourishing. They are, however, serviceable, concerned, totally domestic, resourceful within limits, humorous, well-mannered, sweet, delicate. In other words, they are the nicest people one could find, but they have one huge flaw: they can’t function alone. They are always in need of someone to direct them. With direction, no matter how strained or antagonistic that direction might be, they are stupendous. By themselves, they perish.
People in the second class are not nice at all. They are petty, vindictive, envious, jealous, self-centered. They talk exclusively about themselves and usually demand that people conform to their standards. They always take the initiative even though they are not comfortable with it. They are thoroughly ill at ease in every situation and never relax. They are insecure and are never pleased; the more insecure they become the nastier they are. Their fatal flaw is that they would kill to be leaders.