“How were they wrong, don Juan?”
“It’s an error to isolate anything for seeing. At the beginning, the new seers did exactly the opposite from what their predecessors did. They focused with equal attention on the other side of the tumbler. What happened to them was as terrible as, if not worse than, what happened to the old seers. They died stupid deaths, just as the average man does. They didn’t have the mystery or the malignancy of the ancient seers, nor had they the quest for freedom of the seers of today.
“Those first new seers served everybody. Because they were focusing their seeing on the life-giving side of the emanations, they were filled with love and kindness. But that didn’t keep them from being tumbled. They were vulnerable, just as were the old seers who were filled with morbidity.”
He said that for the modern-day new seers, to be left stranded after a life of discipline and toil, just like men who have never had a purposeful moment in their lives, was intolerable.
Don Juan said that these new seers realized, after they had readopted their tradition, that the old seers’ knowledge of the rolling force had been complete; at one point the old seers had concluded that there were, in effect, two different aspects of the same force. The tumbling aspect relates exclusively to destruction and death. The circular aspect, on the other hand, is what maintains life and awareness, fulfillment and purpose. They had chosen, however, to deal exclusively with the tumbling aspect.
“Gazing in teams, the new seers were able to see the separation between the tumbling and the circular aspects,” he explained. “They saw that both forces are fused, but are not the same. The circular force comes to us just before the tumbling force; they are so close to each other that they seem the same.
“The reason it’s called the circular force is that it comes in rings, threadlike hoops of iridescence?a very delicate affair indeed. And just like the tumbling force, it strikes all living beings ceaselessly, but for a different purpose. It strikes them to give them strength, direction, awareness; to give them life.
“What the new seers discovered is that the balance of the two forces in every living being is a very delicate one,” he continued, “if at any given time an individual feels that the tumbling force strikes harder than the circular one, that means the balance is upset; the tumbling force strikes harder and harder from then on, until it cracks the living being’s gap and makes it die.”
He added that out of what I had called balls of fire comes an iridescent hoop exactly the size of living beings, whether men, trees, microbes, or allies.
“Are there different-size circles?” I asked.
“Don’t take me so literally,” he protested. “There are no circles to speak of, just a circular force that gives seers, who are dreaming it, the feeling of rings. And there are no different sizes either. It’s one indi-visible force that fits all living beings, organic and inorganic.”
“Why did the old seers focus on the tumbling as-pect?” I asked.
“Because they believed that their lives depended on seeing it,” he replied. “They were sure that their seeing was going to give them answers to age-old questions. You see, they figured that if they unraveled the secrets of the rolling force they would be invulnerable and immortal. The sad part is that in one way or another, they did unravel the secrets and yet they were neither invulnerable nor immortal.
“The new seers changed it all by realizing that there is no way to aspire to immortality as long as man has a cocoon.”
Don Juan explained that the old seers apparently never realized that the human cocoon is a receptacle and cannot sustain the onslaught of the rolling force forever. In spite of all the knowledge that they had accumulated, they were in the end certainly no better, and perhaps much worse, off than the average man.
“In what way were they left worse off than the average man?” I asked.
“Their tremendous knowledge forced them to take it for granted that their choices were infallible,” he said. “So they chose to live at any cost.”
Don Juan looked at me and smiled. With his theat-rical pause he was telling me something I could not fathom.
“They chose to live,” he repeated. “Just as they chose to become trees in order to assemble worlds with those nearly unreachable great bands.”
“What do you mean by that, don Juan?”
“I mean that they used the rolling force to shift their assemblage points to unimaginable dreaming positions, instead of letting it roll them to the beak of the Eagle to be devoured.”
15
The Death Defiers
I arrived at Genaro’s house around 2: 00 p. m. Don Juan and I became involved in conversation, and then don Juan made me shift into heightened awareness.
“Here we are again, the three of us, just as we were the day we went to that flat rock,” don Juan said. “And tonight we’re going to make another trip to that area.
“You have enough knowledge now to draw very serious conclusions about that place and its effects on awareness.”
“What is it with that place, don Juan?”
“Tonight you’re going to find out some gruesome facts that the old seers collected about the rolling force; and you’re going to see what I meant when I told you that the old seers chose to live at any cost.”
Don Juan turned to Genaro, who was about to fall asleep. He nudged him.
“Wouldn’t you say, Genaro, that the old seers-were dreadful men?” don Juan asked.
“Absolutely,” Genaro said in a crisp tone and then seemed to succumb to fatigue.
He began to nod noticeably. In an instant he was sound asleep, his head resting on his chest with his chin tucked in. He snored.
I wanted to laugh out loud. But then I noticed that Genaro was staring at me, as if he were sleeping with his eyes open.
“They were such dreadful men that they even de-fied death,” Genaro added between snores.
“Aren’t you curious to know how those gruesome men defied death?” don Juan asked me.
He seemed to be urging me to ask for an example of their gruesomeness. He paused and looked at me with what I thought was a glint of expectation in his eyes.
“You’re waiting for me to ask for an example, aren’t you?” I said.
“This is a great moment,” he said, patting me on the back and laughing. “My benefactor had me on the edge of my seat at this point. I asked him to give me an example, and he did; now i’m going to give you one whether you ask for it or not.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked, so frightened that my stomach was tied in knots and my voice cracked.
It took quite a while for don Juan to stop laughing. Every time he started to speak, he’d get an attack of coughing laughter.
“As Genaro told you, the old seers were dreadful men,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “There was something they tried to avoid at all costs: they didn’t want to die. You may say that the average man doesn’t want to die either, but the advantage that the old seers had over the average man was that they had the concentration and the discipline to intend things away; and they actually intended death away.”
He paused and looked at me with raised eyebrows. He said that I was falling behind, that I was not asking my usual questions. I remarked that it was plain to me that he was leading me to ask if the old seers had succeeded in intending death away, but he himself had already told me that their knowledge about the tumbled had not saved them from dying.
“They succeeded in intending death away,” he said, pronouncing his words with extra care. “But they still had to die.”
“How did they intend death away?” I asked.
“They observed their allies,” he said, “and seeing that they were living beings with a much greater resilience to the rolling force, the seers patterned themselves on their allies.”
The old seers realized, don Juan explained, that only organic beings have a gap that resembles a bowl. Its size and shape and its brittleness make it the ideal configuration to hasten the cracking and collapsing of the luminous shell under the onslaughts of the tumbling force. The allies, on the other hand, who have only a line for a gap, present such a small surface to the rolling force as to be practically immortal. Their cocoons can sustain the onslaughts of the tumbler in-definitely. because hairline gaps offer no ideal configuration to it.
“The old seers developed the most bizarre techniques for closing their gaps,” don Juan continued. “They were essentially correct in assuming that a hairline gap is more durable than a bowl-like one.”