“The problem of rational disbelief is not yours alone,” don Juan said. “My benefactor was at first plagued by the same question. Of course, later on he remembered everything. But it took him a long time to do so. When I met him he had already recollected everything, so I never witnessed his doubts. I only heard about them.
“The weird part is that people who have never set eyes on the man have less difficulty accepting that he’s one of the original seers. My benefactor said that his quandaries stemmed from the fact that the shock of meeting such a creature had lumped together a num-ber of emanations. It takes time for those emanations to separate themselves.”
Don Juan went on to explain that as my assemblage point kept on shifting, a moment would come when it would hit the proper combination of emanations; at that moment the proof of the existence of that man would become overwhelmingly evident to me.
I felt compelled to talk again about my ambivalence.
“We’re deviating from our subject,” he said. “It may seem that I’m trying to convince you of the existence of that man; and what I meant to talk about is the fact that the old seer knows how to handle the rolling force. Whether or not you believe that he exists is not important. Someday you’ll know for a fact that he certainly succeeded in closing his gap. The energy that he borrows from the nagual every generation he uses exclusively to close his gap.”
“How did he succeed in closing it?” I asked.
“There is no way of knowing that,” he replied. “I’ve talked to two other naguals who saw that man face to face, the nagual Julian and the nagual Elias. Neither of them knew how. The man never revealed how he closes that opening, which I suppose begins to expand after a time. The nagual Sebastian said that when he first saw the old seer, the man was very weak, actually dying. But my benefactor found him prancing vigorously, like a young man.”
Don Juan said that the nagual Sebastian nicknamed that nameless man “the tenant,” for they struck an arrangement by which the man was given energy, lodging so to speak, and he paid rent in the form of favors and knowledge.
“Did anybody ever get hurt in the exchange?” I asked.
“None of the naguals who exchanged energy with him was injured,” he replied. “The man’s commit-ment was that he’d only take a bit of superfluous en-ergy from the nagual in exchange for gifts, for extraordinary abilities. For instance, the nagual Julian got the gait of power. With it, he could activate or make dormant the emanations inside his cocoon in order to look young or old at will.”
Don Juan explained that the death defiers in general went as far as rendering dormant all the emanations inside their cocoons, except those that matched the emanations of the allies. In this fashion they were able to imitate the allies in some form.
Each of the death defiers we had encountered at the rock, don Juan said, had been able to move his assemblage point to a precise spot on his cocoon in order to emphasize the emanations shared with the allies and to interact with them. But they were all unable to move it back to its usual position and interact with people. The tenant, on the other hand, is capable of shifting his assemblage point to assemble the everyday world as if nothing had ever happened.
Don Juan also said that his benefactor was convinced?and he fully agreed with him?that what takes place during the borrowing of energy is that the old sorcerer moves the nagual’s assemblage point to emphasize the ally’s emanations inside the nagual’s cocoon. He then uses the great jolt of energy produced by those emanations that suddenly become aligned after being so deeply dormant.
He said that the energy locked within us, in the dormant emanations, has a tremendous force and an incalculable scope. We can only vaguely assess the scope of that tremendous force, if we consider that the energy involved in perceiving and acting in the world of everyday life is a product of the alignment of hardly one-tenth of the emanations encased in man’s cocoon.
“What happens at the moment of death is that all that energy is released at once,” he continued. “Liv-ing beings at that moment become flooded by the most inconceivable force. It is not the rolling force that has cracked their gaps, because that force never enters inside the cocoon; it only makes it collapse. What floods them is the force of all the emanations that are suddenly aligned after being dormant for a lifetime. There is no outlet for such a giant force except to escape through the gap.”
He added that the old sorcerer has found a way to tap that energy. By aligning a limited and very specific spectrum of the dormant emanations inside the na-gual’s cocoon, the old seer taps a limited but gigantic jolt.
“How do you think he takes that energy into his own body?” I asked.
“By cracking the nagual’s gap,” he replied. “He moves the nagual’s assemblage point until the gap opens a little. When the energy of newly aligned emanations is released through that opening, he takes it into his own gap.”
“Why is that old seer doing what he’s doing?” I asked.
“My opinion is that he’s caught in a circle he can’t break,” he replied. “We got into an agreement with him. He’s doing his best to keep it, and so are we. We can’t judge him, yet we have to know that his path doesn’t lead to freedom. He knows that, and he also knows he can’t change it; he’s trapped in a situation of his own making. The only thing he can do is to prolong his ally-like existence as long as he possibly can.”
16
The Mold of Man
Right after lunch, don Juan and I sat down to talk. He started without any preamble. He announced that we had come to the end of his explanation. He said that he had discussed with me, in painstaking detail, all the truths about awareness that the old seers had discovered. He stressed that I now knew the order in which the new seers had arranged them. In the last sessions of his explanation, he said, he had given me a detailed account of the two forces that aid our assemblage points to move: the earth’s boost and the rolling force. He had also explained the three techniques worked out by the new seers?stalking, intent, and dreaming ?and their effects on the movement of the assemblage point.
“Now, the only thing left for you to do before the explanation of the mastery of awareness is completed,” he went on, “is to break the barrier of perception by yourself. You must move your assemblage point, unaided by anyone, and align another great band of emanations.
“Not to do this will turn everything you’ve learned and done with me into merely talk, just words. And words are fairly cheap.”
He explained that when the assemblage point is moving away from its customary position and reaches a certain depth, it breaks a barrier that momentarily disrupts its capacity to align emanations. We experience it as a moment of perceptual blankness. The old seers called that moment the wall of fog, because a bank of fog appears whenever the alignment of emanations falters.
He said that there were three ways of dealing with it. It could be taken abstractly as a barrier of perception; it could be felt as the act of piercing a tight paper screen with the entire body; or it could be seen as a wall of fog.
In the course of my apprenticeship with don Juan, he had guided me countless times to see the barrier of perception. At first I had liked the idea of a wall of fog. Don Juan had warned me that the old seers had also preferred to see it that way. He had said that there is great comfort and ease in seeing it as a wall of fog, but that there is also the grave danger of turning something incomprehensible into something somber and foreboding; hence, his recommendation was to keep incomprehensible things incomprehensible rather than making them part of the inventory of the first attention.
After a short-lived feeling of comfort in seeing the wall of fog I had to agree with don Juan that it was better to keep the transition period as an incomprehensible abstraction, but by then it was impossible for me to break the fixation of my awareness. Every time I was placed in a position to break the barrier of perception I saw the wall of fog.
On one occasion, in the past, I had complained to don Juan and Genaro that although I wanted to see it as something else, I couldn’t change it. Don Juan had commented that that was understandable, because I was morbid and somber, that he and I were very different in this respect. He was lighthearted and practical and he did not worship the human inventory. I, on the other hand, was unwilling to throw my inventory out the window and consequently I was heavy, sinister, and impractical. I had been shocked and saddened by his harsh criticism and became very gloomy. Don Juan and Genaro had laughed until tears rolled down their cheeks.