“I don’t want to alarm you,” he said, “but nothing has happened to you yet. If what happened to me is going to be the guideline of what will happen to you, you’d better prepare yourself for the shock of your life. It’s better to shake in your boots now than to die of fright tomorrow.”
My fear was so terrifying that I couldn’t even voice the questions that came to my mind. I had a hard lime swallowing. Don Juan laughed until he was coughing. His face got purple. When I got my voice back, every one of my questions prompted another attack of coughing laughter.
“You have no idea how funny this all is to me,” he finally said. “I’m not laughing at you. It’s just the situation. My benefactor made me go through the same motions, and looking at you I can’t help seeing myself.”
I told him that I felt sick to my stomach. He said that that was fine, that it was natural to be scared, and that to control fear was wrong and senseless. The ancient seers got trapped by suppressing their terror when they should have been scared out of their wits. Since they did not want to stop their pursuits or abandon their comforting constructs they controlled their fear instead.
“What else are we going to do with the mirror?” I asked.
“That mirror is going to be used for a face-to-face meeting between you and that creature you only gazed at yesterday.”
“What happens in a face-to-face meeting?”
“What happens is that one form of life, the human form, meets another form of life. The old seers said that in this case, it is a creature from the first level of the fluidity of water.”
He explained that the ancient seers surmised that the seven levels below ours were levels of the fluidity of water. For them a spring had untold significance, because they thought that in such a case the fluidity of water is reversed and goes from the depth to the surface. They took that to be the means whereby creatures from other levels, these other forms of life, come to our plane to peer at us, to observe us.
“In this respect those old seers were not mistaken,” he went on. “They hit the nail right on the head. Entities that the new seers call allies do appear around waterholes.”
“Was the creature in the mirror an ally?” I asked.
“Of course. But not one that can be utilized. The tradition of the allies, which I have acquainted you with in the past, comes directly from the ancient seers. They did wonders with allies, but nothing they did was worth anything when the real enemy came along: their fellow men.”
“Since those creatures are allies, they must be very dangerous,” I said.
“As dangerous as we men are, no more, no less.”
“Can they kill us?”
“Not directly, but they certainly can frighten us to death. They can cross the boundaries themselves, or they can just come to the window. As you may have realized by now, the ancient Toltecs didn’t stop at the window, either. They found weird ways to go beyond it.”
The second stage of the technique proceeded very much as had the first except that it took perhaps twice as long for me to relax and stop my internal turmoil. When that was done, the reflection of don Juan’s face and mine became instantly clear. I gazed from his reflection to mine for perhaps an hour. I expected the ally to appear any moment, but nothing happened. My neck hurt. My back was stiff and my legs were numb. I wanted to kneel on the rock to relieve the pain in my lower back. Don Juan whispered that the moment the ally showed its shape my discomfort would vanish.
He was absolutely right. The shock of witnessing a round shape appear on the edge of the mirror dispelled every discomfort of mine.
“What do we do now?” I whispered.
“Relax and don’t focus your gaze on anything, not even for an instant,” he replied. “Watch everything that appears in the mirror. Gaze without staring.”
I obeyed him. I glanced at everything within the frame of the mirror. There was a peculiar buzzing in my ears. Don Juan whispered that I should move my eyes in a clockwise direction if I felt that I was being enveloped by an unusual force; but under no circumstances, he stressed, should I lift my head to look at him.
After a moment I noticed that the mirror was reflecting more than the reflection of our faces and the round shape. Its surface had become dark. Spots of an intense violet light appeared. They grew large. There were also spots of jet blackness. Then it turned into something like a flat picture of a cloudy sky at night, in the moonlight. Suddenly, the whole surface came into focus, as if it were a moving picture. The new sight was a three-dimensional, breathtaking view of the depths.
I knew that it was absolutely impossible for me to fight off the tremendous attraction of that sight. It began to pull me in.
Don Juan whispered forcefully that I should roll my eyes for dear life. The movement brought immediate relief. I could again distinguish our reflections and that of the ally. Then the ally disappeared and reappeared again on the other end of the mirror.
Don Juan commanded me to grip the mirror with all my might. He warned me to be calm and not make any sudden movements.
“What’s going to happen?” I whispered.
“The ally will try to come out,” he replied.
As soon as he had said that I felt a powerful tug. Something jerked my arms. The tug was from underneath the mirror. It was like a suction force that created a uniform pressure all around the frame.
“Hold the mirror tightly but don’t break it,” don Juan ordered. “Fight the suction. Don’t let the ally sink the mirror too deep.”
The force pulling down on us was enormous. I felt that my fingers were going to break or be crushed against the rocks on the bottom. Don Juan and I both lost our balance at one point and had to step down from the flat rocks into the stream. The water was quite shallow, but the thrashing of the ally’s force around the frame of the mirror was as frightening as if we had been in a large river. The water around our feet was being swirled around madly, but the images in the mirror were undisturbed.
“Watch out!” don Juan yelled. “Here it comes!”
The tugging changed into a thrust from underneath. Something was grabbing the edge of the mirror; not the outer edge of the frame where we were holding it, but from the inside of the glass. It was as if the glass surface were indeed an open window and something or somebody were just climbing through it.
Don Juan and I fought desperately either to push the mirror down when it was being thrust up or pull it up when it was being tugged downward. In a stooped-over position we slowly moved downstream from the original spot. The water was deeper and the bottom was covered with slippery rocks.
“Let’s lift the mirror out of the water and shake him loose,” don Juan said in a harsh voice.
The loud thrashing continued unremittingly. It was as if we had caught an enormous fish with our bare hands and it was swimming around wildly.
It occurred to me that the mirror was in essence a hatch. A strange shape was actually trying to climb up through it. It was leaning on the edge of the hatch with a mighty weight and was big enough to displace the reflection of don Juan’s face and mine. I could not see us anymore. I could only distinguish a mass trying to push itself up.
The mirror was not resting on the bottom anymore. My fingers were not compressed against the rocks. The mirror was in mid-depth, held by the opposing forces of the ally’s tugs and ours. Don Juan said he was going to extend his hands underneath the mirror and that I should very quickly grab them in order to have a better leverage to lift the mirror with our forearms. When he let go it tilled to his side. I quickly reached for his hands but there was nothing underneath. I vacillated a second too long and the mirror flew out of my hands.
“Grab it! Grab it!” don Juan yelled.
I caught the mirror just as it was going to land on the rocks. I lifted it out of the water, but not quickly enough. The water seemed to be like glue. As I pulled the mirror out, I also pulled a portion of a heavy rubbery substance that simply pulled the mirror out of my hands and back into the water.