Except for the cold wind pouring in through the open door, there was nothing to notice in there.
“Weird creatures came in when I opened the door,” he said. “Don’t you notice anything?”
There was something in his voice that told me he was not joking this time.
The three of us, with both of them flanking me, walked out of the house. Don Juan picked up the kerosene lantern, and Genaro locked the front door. We got inside the car, through the passenger’s side. They pushed me in first. And then we drove to don Juan’s house in the next town.
6
Inorganic Beings
The next day I repeatedly asked don Juan to explain our hasty departure from Genaro’s house. He refused even to mention the incident. Genaro was no help either. Every time I asked him he winked at me, grinning like a fool.
In the afternoon, don Juan came to the back patio of his house, where I was talking with his apprentices. As if on cue, all the young apprentices left instantly.
Don Juan took me by the arm, and we began to walk along the corridor. He did not say anything; for a while we just strolled around, very much as if we were in the public square.
Don Juan stopped walking and turned to me. He circled me, looking over my entire body. I knew that he was seeing me. I felt a strange fatigue, a laziness I had not felt until his eyes swept over me. He began to talk all of a sudden.
“The reason Genaro and I didn’t want to focus on what happened last night,” he said, “was that you had been very frightened during the time you were in the unknown. Genaro pushed you, and things happened to you in there.”
“What things, don Juan?”
“Things that are still difficult if not impossible to explain to you now,” he said. “You don’t have enough surplus energy to enter into the unknown and make sense of it. When the new seers arranged the order of the truths about awareness, they saw that the first attention consumes all the glow of awareness that human beings have, and not an iota of energy is left free. That’s your problem now. So, the new seers proposed that warriors, since they have to enter into the unknown, have to save their energy. But where are they going to get energy, if all of it is taken? They’ll get it, the new seers say, from eradicating unnecessary habits.”
He stopped talking and solicited questions. I asked him what eradicating unnecessary habits did to the glow of awareness.
He replied that it detaches awareness from self-re- flection and allows it the freedom to focus on something else.
“The unknown is forever present,” he continued, “but it is outside the possibility of our normal awareness. The unknown is the superfluous part of the average man. And it is superfluous because the average man doesn’t have enough free energy to grasp it.
“After all the time you’ve spent in the warrior’s path, you have enough free energy to grasp the unknown, but not enough energy to understand it or even to remember it.”
He explained that at the site of the flat rock, I had entered very deeply into the unknown. But I indulged in my exaggerated nature and became terrified, which was about the worst thing anyone can do. So I had rushed out of the left side, like a bat out of hell; unfortunately, taking a legion of strange things with me.
I told don Juan that he was not getting to the point, that he should come out and tell me exactly what he meant by a legion of strange things.
He took me by the arm and continued strolling around with me.
“In explaining awareness,” he said, “I am presum-ably fitting everything or nearly everything into place. Let’s talk a little bit about the old seers. Genaro, as I’ve told you, is very much like them.”
He led me then to the big room. We sat down there and he began his elucidation.
“The new seers were simply terrified by the knowledge that the old seers had accumulated over the years,” don Juan said. “It’s understandable. The new seers knew that that knowledge leads only to total destruction. Yet they were also fascinated by it?especially by the practices.”
“How did the new seers know about those practices?” I asked.
“They are the legacy of the old Toltecs,” he said. “The new seers learn about them as they go along. They hardly ever use them, but the practices are there as part of their knowledge.”
“What kind of practices are they, don Juan?”
“They are very obscure formulas, incantations, lengthy procedures that have to do with the handling of a very mysterious force. At least it was mysterious to the ancient Toltecs, who masked it and made it more horrifying than it really is.”
“What is that mysterious force?” I asked.
“It’s a force that is present throughout everything there is,” he said. “The old seers never attempted to unravel the mystery of the force that made them cre-ate their secret practices; they simply accepted it as something sacred. But the new seers took a close look and called it wilt, the will of the Eagle’s emanations, or intent.”’
Don Juan went on explaining that the ancient Toltecs had divided their secret knowledge into five sets of two categories each: the earth and the dark regions, fire and water, the above and the below, the loud and the silent, the moving and the stationary. He speculated that there must have been thousands of different techniques, which became more and more intricate as time passed.
“The secret knowledge of the earth,” he went on, “had to do with everything that stands on the ground. There were particular sets of movements, words, un-guents, potions that were applied to people, animals, insects, trees, small plants, rocks, soil.
“These were techniques that made the old seers into horrid beings. And their secret knowledge of the earth was employed either to groom or to destroy anything that stands on the ground.
“The counterpart of the earth was what they knew as the dark regions. These practices were by far the most dangerous. They dealt with entities without organic life. Living creatures that are present on the earth and populate it together with all organic beings.
“Doubtlessly, one of the most worthwhile findings of the ancient seers, especially for them, was the discovery that organic life is not the only form of life present on this earth.”
I did not quite comprehend what he had said. I waited for him to clarify his statements.
“Organic beings are not the only creatures that have life,” he said and paused again as if to allow me time to think his statements over.
I countered with a long argument about the definition of life and being alive. I talked about reproduction, metabolism, and growth, the processes that distinguish live organisms from inanimate things.
“You’re drawing from the organic,” he said. “But that’s only one instance. You shouldn’t draw all you have to say from one category alone.”
“But how else can it be?” I asked.
“For seers, to be alive means to be aware,” he replied. “For the average man, to be aware means to be an organism. This is where seers are different. For them, to be aware means that the emanations that cause awareness are encased inside a receptacle.
“Organic living beings have a cocoon that encloses the emanations. But there are other creatures whose receptacles don’t look like a cocoon to a seer. Yet they have the emanations of awareness in them and characteristics of life other than reproduction and metabolism.”
“Such as what, don Juan?”
“Such as emotional dependency, sadness, joy, wrath, and so forth and so on. And I forgot the best yet, love; a kind of love man can’t even conceive.”
“Are you serious, don Juan?” I asked in earnest.
“Inanimately serious,” he answered with a deadpan expression and then broke into laughter.
“If we take as our clue what seers see,” he continued, “life is indeed extraordinary.”
“If those beings are alive, why don’t they make themselves known to man?” I asked.
“They do, all the time. And not only to seers but also to the average man. The problem is that all the energy available is consumed by the first attention. Man’s inventory not only takes it all, but it also tough-ens the cocoon to the point of making it inflexible. Under those circumstances there is no possible interaction.”
He reminded me of the countless times, in the course of my apprenticeship with him, when I had had a firsthand view of inorganic beings. I retorted that I had explained away nearly every one of those instances. I had even formulated the hypothesis that his teachings, through the use of hallucinogenic plants, were geared to force an agreement, on the part of the apprentice, about a primitive interpretation of the world. I told him that I had not formally called it primitive interpretation but in anthropological terms I had labeled it a “world view more proper to hunting and gathering societies.”