Don Juan said that the subsequent centuries of sub-jugation provided for these new seers the ideal circumstances in which to perfect their skills. Oddly enough, it was the extreme rigor and coercion of that period that gave them the impetus to refine their new principles. And, owing to the fact that they never divulged their activities, they were left alone to map their findings.
“Were there a great many new seers during the Conquest?” I asked.
“At the beginning there were. Near the end there were only a handful. The rest had been exterminated.”
“What about in our day, don Juan?” I asked.
“There are a few. They are scattered all over, you understand.”
“Do you know them?” I asked.
“Such a simple question is the hardest one to an-swer,” he replied. “There are some we know very well. But they are not exactly like us because they have concentrated on other specific aspects of knowledge, such as dancing, curing, bewitching, talking, instead of what the new seers recommend, stalking, dreaming, and intent. Those who are exactly like us would not cross our path. The seers who lived during the Conquest set it up that way so as to avoid being exterminated in the confrontation with the Spaniards. Each of those seers founded a lineage. And not all of them had descendants, so the lines are few.”
“Do you know any who are exactly like us?” I asked.
“A few,” he replied laconically.
I asked him then to give me all the information he could, for I was vitally interested in the topic; to me it was of crucial importance to know names and ad-dresses for purposes of validation and corroboration.
Don Juan did not seem inclined to oblige me. “The new seers went through that bit of corroboration,” he said. “Half of them left their bones in the corroborat-ing room. So now they are solitary birds. Let’s leave it that way. All we can talk about is our line. About that, you and I can say as much as we please.”
He explained that all the lines of seers were started at the same time and in the same fashion. Around the end of the sixteenth century every nagual deliberately isolated himself and his group of seers from any overt contact with other seers. The consequence of that drastic segregation, he said, was the formation of the individual lineages. Our lineage consisted of fourteen naguals and one hundred and twenty-six seers, he said. Some of those fourteen naguals had as few as seven seers with them. others had eleven, and some up to fifteen.
He told me that his teacher?or his benefactor, as he called him?was the nagual Julian, and the one who came before Julian was the nagual Ellas. I asked him if he knew the names of all fourteen naguals. He named and enumerated them for me, so I could learn who they were. He also said that he had personally known the fifteen seers who formed his benefactor’s group and that he had also known his benefactor’s teacher, the nagual Ellas, and the eleven seers of his party.
Don Juan assured me that our line was quite excep-tional, because it underwent a drastic change in the year 1723 as a result of an outside influence that came to bear on us and inexorably altered our course. He did not want to discuss the event itself at the moment, but he said that a new beginning is counted from that time; and that the eight naguals who have ruled the line since then are considered intrinsically different from the six who preceded them.
Don Juan must have had business to take care of the next day, for I did not see him until around noon. in the meantime, three of his apprentices had come to town, Pablito, Nestor, and la Gorda. They were shop-ping for tools and materials for Pablito’s carpentry business. I accompanied them and helped them to complete all their errands. Then all of us went back to the boardinghouse.
All four of us were sitting around talking when don Juan came into my room. He announced that we were leaving after lunch, but that before we went to eat he still had something to discuss with me, in private. He wanted the two of us to take a stroll around the main square and then all of us would meet at a restaurant.
Pablito and Nestor stood up and said that they had some errands to run before meeting us. La Gorda seemed very displeased.
“What are you going to talk about?” she blurted out, but quickly realized her mistake and giggled.
Don Juan gave her a strange look but did not say anything.
Encouraged by his silence, la Gorda proposed that we take her along. She assured us that she would not bother us in the least.
“I’m sure you won’t bother us,” don Juan said to her, “but I really don’t want you to hear anything of what I have to say to him.”
La Gorda’s anger was very obvious. She blushed and, as don Juan and I walked out of the room, her entire face clouded with anxiety and tension, becoming instantly distorted. Her mouth was open and her lips were dry.
La Gorda’s mood made me very apprehensive. I felt an actual discomfort. I didn’t say anything, but don Juan seemed to notice my feelings.
“You should thank la Gorda day and night,” he said all of a sudden. “She’s helping you destroy your self-importance. She’s the petty tyrant in your life, but you still haven’t caught on to that.”
We strolled around the plaza until all my nervousness had vanished. Then we sat down on his favorite bench again.
“The ancient seers were very fortunate indeed,” don Juan began, “because they had plenty of time to learn marvelous things. Let me tell you, they knew wonders that we can’t even imagine today.”
“Who taught them all that?” I asked.
“They learned everything by themselves through seeing,”’ he replied. “Most of the things we know in our lineage were figured out by (hem. The new seers corrected the mistakes of the old seers, but the basis of what we know and do is lost in Toltec time.”
He explained. One of the simplest and yet most important findings, from the point of view of instruction, he said, is the knowledge that man has two types of awareness. The old seers called them the right and the left side of man.
“The old seers figured out,” he went on, “that the best way to teach their knowledge was to make their apprentices shift to their left side, to a state of heightened awareness. Real learning takes place there.
“Very young children were given to the old seers as apprentices,” don Juan continued, “so that they wouldn’t know any other way of life. Those children, in turn, when they came of age took other children as apprentices. Imagine the things they must have uncovered in their shifts to the left and to the right, after centuries of that kind of concentration.”
I remarked how disconcerting those shifts were to me. He said that my experience was similar to his own. His benefactor, the nagual Julian, had created a profound schism in him, by making him shift back and forth from one type of awareness to the other. He said that the clarity and freedom he experienced in heightened awareness were in total contrast to the rationalizations, the defenses, the anger, and the fear of his normal state of awareness.
The old seers used to create this polarity to suit their own particular purposes; with it, they forced their apprentices to achieve the concentration needed to learn sorcery techniques. But the new seers, he said, use it to lead their apprentices to the conviction that there are unrealized possibilities in man.
“The best effort of the new seers,” don Juan continued, “is their explanation of the mystery of awareness. They condensed it all into some concepts and actions which are taught while the apprentices are in heightened awareness.”
He said that the value of the new seers’ method of teaching is that it takes advantage of the fact that no one can remember anything that happens while being in a state of heightened awareness. This inability to remember sets up an almost insurmountable barrier for warriors, who have to recollect all the instruction given to them if they are to go on. Only after years of struggle and discipline can warriors recollect their instruction. By then the concepts and the procedures that were taught to them have been internalized and have thus acquired the force the new seers meant them to have.
2
Petty Tyrants
Don Juan did not discuss the mastery of awareness with me until months later. We were at that time in the house where the nagual’s party lived.
“Let’s go for a walk,” don Juan said to me, placing his hand on my shoulder. “Or better yet, let’s go to the town’s square, where there are a lot of people, and sit down and talk.”