“I never saw the reason for his jokes,” don Juan went on. “To me the nagual Elías was like a breath of fresh air. He would patiently explain everything to me. Very much as I explain things to you, but perhaps with a bit more of something. I wouldn’t call it compassion, but rather, empathy. Warriors are incapable of feeling compassion because they no longer feel sorry for themselves. Without the driving force of self-pity, compassion is meaningless.”
“Are you saying, don Juan, that a warrior is all for himself?”
“In a way, yes. For a warrior everything begins and ends with himself. However, his contact with the abstract causes him to overcome his feeling of self-importance. Then the self becomes abstract and impersonal.
“The nagual Elías felt that our lives and our personalities were quite similar,” don Juan continued. “For this reason, he felt obliged to help me. I don’t feel that similarity with you, so I suppose I regard you very much the way the nagual Julian used to regard me.”
Don Juan said that the nagual Elías took him under his wing from the very first day he arrived at his benefactor’s house to start his apprenticeship and began to explain what was taking place in his training, regardless of whether don Juan was capable of understanding. His urge to help don Juan was so intense that he practically held him prisoner. He protected him in this manner from the nagual Julian’s harsh onslaughts.
“At the beginning, I used to stay at the nagual Elías’s house all the time,” don Juan continued. “And I loved it. In my benefactor’s house I was always on the lookout, on guard, afraid of what he was going to do to me next. But in the nagual Elías’s home I felt confident, at ease.
“My benefactor used to press me mercilessly. And I couldn’t figure out why he was pressuring me so hard. I thought that the man was plain crazy.”
Don Juan said that the nagual Elías was an Indian from the state of Oaxaca, who had been taught by another nagual named Rosendo, who came from the same area. Don Juan described the nagual Elías as being a very conservative man who cherished his privacy. And yet he was a famous healer and sorcerer, not only in Oaxaca, but in all of southern Mexico.
Nonetheless, in spite of his occupation and notoriety, he lived in complete isolation at the opposite end of the country, in northern Mexico.
Don Juan stopped talking. Raising his eyebrows, he fixed me with a questioning look. But all I wanted was for him to continue his story.
“Every single time I think you should ask questions, you don’t,” he said. “I’m sure you heard me say that the nagual Elías was a famous sorcerer who dealt with people daily in southern Mexico, and at the same time he was a hermit in northern Mexico. Doesn’t that arouse your curiosity?”
I felt abysmally stupid. I told him that the thought had crossed my mind, as he was telling me those facts, that the man must have had terrible difficulty commuting.
Don Juan laughed, and, since he had made me aware of the question, I asked how it had been possible for the nagual Elías to be in two places at once.
“Dreaming is a sorcerer’s jet plane,” he said. “The nagual Elías was a dreamer as my benefactor was a stalker. He was able to create and project what sorcerers know as the dreaming body, or the Other, and to be in two distant places at the same time. With his dreaming body, he could carry on his business as a sorcerer, and with his natural self be a recluse.”
I remarked that it amazed me that I could accept so easily the premise that the nagual Elías had the ability to project a solid three-dimensional image of himself, and yet could not for the life of me understand the explanations about the abstract cores.
Don Juan said that I could accept the idea of the nagual Elías’s dual life because the spirit was making final adjustments in my capacity for awareness. And I exploded into a barrage of protests at the obscurity of his statement.
“It isn’t obscure,” he said. “It’s a statement of fact.
You could say that it’s an incomprehensible fact for he moment, but the moment will change.”
Before I could reply, he began to talk again about he nagual Elías. He said that the nagual Elías had a very inquisitive mind and could work well with his lands. In his journeys as a dreamer he saw many objects, which he copied in wood and forged iron. Don Juan assured me that some of those models were of a haunting, excite beauty. “What kind of objects were the originals?” I asked. “There’s no way of knowing,” don Juan said. “You’ve got to consider that because he was an Indian the nagual Elías went into his dreaming journeys the way a wild animal prowls for food. An animal never shows up at a site when there are signs of activity. He comes only when no one is around. The nagual Elías, as a solitary dreamer, visited, let’s say, the junkyard of infinity, when no one was around and copied whatever he saw, but never knew what those things were used for, or their source.”
Again, I had no trouble accepting what he was saying. The’ idea did not appear to me farfetched in any way. I was about to comment when he interrupted me with a gesture of his eyebrows. He then continued his account about the nagual Elías.
“Visiting him was for me the ultimate treat,” he said, “and simultaneously, a source of strange guilt. I used to get bored to death there. Not because the nagual Elías was boring, but because the nagual Julian had no peers and he spoiled anyone for life.”
“But I thought you were confident and at ease in the nagual Elías’s house,” I said.
“I was, and that was the source of my guilt and my imagined problem. Like you, I loved to torment myself. I think at the very beginning I found peace in the nagual Elías’s company, but later on, when I understood the nagual Julian better, I went his way.”
He told me that the nagual Elías’s house had an open, roofed section in the front, where he had a forge and a carpentry bench and tools. The tiled-roof adobe house consisted of a huge room with a dirt floor where he lived with five women seers, who were actually his wives. There were also four men, sorcerer-seers of his party who lived in small houses around the nagual’s house. They were all Indians from different parts of the country who had migrated to northern Mexico.
“The nagual Elías had great respect for sexual energy,” don Juan said. “He believed it has been given to us so we can use it in dreaming. He believed dreaming had fallen into disuse because it can upset the precarious mental balance of susceptible people.
“I’ve taught you dreaming the same way he taught me,” he continued. “He taught me that while we dream the assemblage point moves very gently and naturally. Mental balance is nothing but the fixing of the assemblage point on one spot we’re accustomed to. If dreams make that point move, and dreaming is used to control that natural movement, and sexual energy is needed for dreaming, the result is sometimes disastrous when sexual energy is dissipated in sex instead of dreaming. Then dreamers move their assemblage point erratically and lose their minds.”
“What are you trying to tell me, don Juan?” I asked because I felt that the subject of dreaming had not been a natural drift in the conversation.
“You are a dreamer,” he said. “If you’re not careful with your sexual energy, you might as well get used to the idea of erratic shifts of your assemblage point. A moment ago you were bewildered by your reactions. Well, your assemblage point moves almost erratically, because your sexual energy is not in balance.”
I made a stupid and inappropriate comment about the sex life of adult males.
“Our sexual energy is what governs dreaming,” he explained. “The nagual Elías taught me—and I taught you—that you either make love with your sexual energy or you dream with it. There is no other way. The reason I mention it at all is because you are having great difficulty shifting your assemblage point to grasp our last topic: the abstract.
“The same thing happened to me,” don Juan went on. “It was only when my sexual energy was freed from the world that everything fit into place. That is the rule for dreamers. Stalkers are the opposite. My benefactor was, you could say, a sexual libertine both as an average man and as a nagual.”
Don Juan seemed to be on the verge of revealing his benefactor’s doings, but he obviously changed his mind. He shook his head and said that I was way too stiff for such revelations. I did not insist.