I was surprised when he spoke to me, as I had been in the house for a couple of days then and he had not said so much as hello.
As don Juan and I were leaving the house, la Gorda intercepted us and demanded that we take her along. She seemed determined not to take no for an answer. Don Juan in a very stern voice told her that he had to discuss something in private with me.
“You’re going to talk about me,” la Gorda said, her tone and gestures betraying both suspicion and annoyance.
“You’re right,” don Juan replied dryly. He moved past her without turning to look at her.
I followed him, and we walked in silence to the town’s square. When we sat down I asked him what on earth we would find to discuss about la Gorda. I was still smarting from her look of menace when we left the house.
“We have nothing to discuss about la Gorda or anybody else,” he said. “I told her that just to provoke her enormous self-importance. And it worked. She is furious with us. If I know her, by now she will have talked to herself long enough to have built up her confidence and her righteous indignation at having been refused and made to look like a fool. I wouldn’t be surprised if she barges in on us here, at the park bench.”
“If we’re not going to talk about la Gorda, what are we going to discuss?” I asked.
“We’re going to continue the discussion we started in Oaxaca,” he replied. “To understand the explanation of awareness will require your utmost effort and your willingness to shift back and forth between levels of awareness. While we are involved in our discussion I will demand your total concentration and patience.”
Half-complaining, I told him that he had made me feel very uncomfortable by refusing to talk to me for the past two days. He looked at me and arched his brows. A smile played on his lips and vanished. I realized that he was letting me know I was no better than la Gorda.
“I was provoking your self-importance,” he said with a frown. “Self-importance is our greatest enemy. Think about it?what weakens us is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of our fellow men. Our self-importance requires that we spend most of our lives offended by someone.
“The new seers recommended that every effort should be made to eradicate self-importance from the lives of warriors. I have followed that recommendation, and much of my endeavors with you has been geared to show you that without self-importance we are invulnerable.”
As I listened his eyes suddenly became very shiny. I was thinking to myself that he seemed to be on the verge of laughter and there was no reason for it when I was startled by an abrupt, painful slap on the right side of my face.
I jumped up from the bench. La Gorda was standing behind me, her hand still raised. Her face was flushed with anger.
“Now you can say what you like about me and with more justification,” she shouted. “If you have anything to say, however, say it to my face!”
Her outburst appeared to have exhausted her, because she sat down on the cement and began to weep. Don Juan was transfixed with inexpressible glee. I was frozen with sheer fury. La Gorda glared at me and then turned to don Juan and meekly told him that we had no right to criticize her.
Don Juan laughed so hard he doubled over almost to the ground. He couldn’t even speak. He tried two or three times to say something to me, then finally got up and walked away, his body still shaking with spasms of laughter.
I was about to run after him, still glowering at la Gorda?at that moment I found her despicable ? when something extraordinary happened to me. I realized what don Juan had found so hilarious. La Gorda and I were horrendously alike. Our self-importance was monumental. My surprise and fury at being slapped were just like la Gorda’s feelings of anger and suspicion. Don Juan was right. The burden of self-importance is a terrible encumbrance.
I ran after him then, elated, the tears flowing down my cheeks. I caught up with him and told him what I had realized. His eyes were shining with mischievous-ness and delight.
“What should I do about la Gorda?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he replied. “Realizations are always personal.”
He changed the subject and said that the omens were telling us to continue our discussion back at his house, either in a large room with comfortable chairs or in the back patio, which had a roofed corridor around it. He said that whenever he conducted his explanation inside the house those two areas would be off limits to everyone else.
We went back to the house. Don Juan told everyone what la Gorda had done. The delight all the seers showed in taunting her made la Gorda’s position extremely uncomfortable.
“Self-importance can’t be fought with niceties,” don Juan commented when I expressed my concern about la Gorda.
He then asked everyone to leave the room. We sat down and don Juan began his explanations.
He said that seers, old and new, are divided into two categories. The first one is made up of those who are willing to exercise self-restraint and can channel their activities toward pragmatic goals, which would benefit other seers and man in general. The other category consists of those who don’t care about self-re- straint or about any pragmatic goals. It is the consensus among seers that the latter have failed to resolve the problem of self-importance.
“Self-importance is not something simple and naive,” he explained. “On the one hand, it is the core of everything that is good in us, and on the other hand, the core of everything that is rotten. To get rid of the self-importance that is rotten requires a masterpiece of strategy. Seers, through the ages, have given the highest praise to those who have accomplished it.”
I complained that the idea of eradicating self-impor- tance, although very appealing to me at times, was really incomprehensible; I told him that I found his directives for getting rid of it so vague I could not follow them.
“I’ve said to you many times,” he said, “that in order to follow the path of knowledge one has to be very imaginative. You see, in the path of knowledge nothing is as clear as we’d like it to be.”
My discomfort made me argue that his admonitions about self-importance reminded me of Catholic die-turns. After a lifetime of being told about the evils of sin, I had become callous.
“Warriors fight self-importance as a matter of strategy, not principle,” he replied. “Your mistake is to understand what I say in terms of morality.”
“I see you as a highly moral man, don Juan,” I insisted.
“You’ve noticed my impeccability, that’s all,” he said.
“Impeccability, as well as getting rid of self-impor- tance, is too vague a concept to be of any value to me,” I remarked.
Don Juan choked with laughter, and I challenged him to explain impeccability.
“Impeccability is nothing else but the proper use of energy,” he said. “My statements have no inkling of morality. I’ve saved energy and that makes me impeccable. To understand this, you have to save enough energy yourself.”
We were quiet for a long time. I wanted to think about what he had said. Suddenly, he started talking again.
“Warriors take strategic inventories,” he said. “They list everything they do. Then they decide which of those things can be changed in order to allow themselves a respite, in terms of expending their en-ergy.”
I argued that their list would have to include everything under the sun. He patiently answered that the strategic inventory he was talking about covered only behavioral patterns that were not essential to our survival and well-being.
I jumped at the opportunity to point out that survival and well-being were categories that could be interpreted in endless ways, hence, there was no way of agreeing what was or was not essential to survival and well-being.
As I kept on talking I began to lose momentum. Finally, I stopped because I realized the futility of my arguments.
Don Juan said then that in the strategic inventories of warriors, self-importance figures as the activity that consumes the greatest amount of energy, hence, their effort to eradicate it.
“One of the first concerns of warriors is to free that energy in order to face the unknown with it,” don Juan went on. “The action of rechanneling that energy i? impeccability.”
He said that the most effective strategy was worked out by the seers of the Conquest, the unquestionable masters of stalking. It consists of six elements that interplay with one another. Five of them are called the attributes of warriorship: control, discipline, forbearance, timing, and will. They pertain to the world of the warrior who is fighting to lose self-importance. The sixth element, which is perhaps the most important of all, pertains to the outside world and is called the petty tyrant.