“How do you measure defeat?”
“Anyone who joins the petty tyrant is defeated. To act in anger, without control and discipline, to have no forbearance, is to be defeated.”
“What happens after warriors are defeated?”
“They either regroup themselves or they abandon the quest for knowledge and join the ranks of the petty tyrants for life.”
3
The Eagle’s Emanations
The next day, don Juan and I went for a walk along the road to the city of Oaxaca. The road was deserted at that hour. It was 2: 00 p. m.
As we strolled leisurely, don Juan suddenly began to talk. He said that our discussion about the petty tyrants had been merely an introduction to the topic of awareness. I remarked that it had opened a new view for me. He asked me to explain what I meant.
I told him that it had to do with an argument we had had some years before about the Yaqui Indians. In the course of his teachings for the right side, he had tried to tell me about the advantages that the Yaquis could find in being oppressed. I had passionately argued that there were no possible advantages in the wretched conditions in which they lived. And I had told him that I could not understand how, being a Yaqui himself, he did not react against such a flagrant injustice.
He had listened attentively. Then, when I was sure he was going to defend his point, he agreed that the conditions of the Yaqui Indians were indeed wretched. But he pointed out that it was useless to single out the Yaquis when life conditions of man in general were horrendous.
“Don’t just feel sorry for the poor Yaqui Indians,” he had said. “Feel sorry for mankind. In the case of the Yaqui Indians, I can even say they’re the lucky ones. They are oppressed, and because of that, some of them may come out triumphant in the end. But the oppressors, the petty tyrants that tread upon them, they don’t have a chance in hell.”
I had immediately answered him with a barrage of political slogans. I had not understood his point at all. He again tried to explain to me the concept of petty tyrants, but the whole idea bypassed me. It was only now that everything fit into place.
“Nothing has fit into place yet,” he said, laughing at what I had told him. “Tomorrow, when you are in your normal state of awareness, you won’t even remember what you’ve realized now.”
I felt utterly depressed, for I knew he was right.
“What’s going to happen to you is what happened to me,” he continued. “My benefactor, the nagual Julian, made me realize in heightened awareness what you have realized yourself about petty tyrants. And I ended up, in my daily life, changing my opinions without knowing why.
“I had always been oppressed, so I had real venom toward my oppressors, imagine my surprise when I found myself seeking the company of petty tyrants. I thought I had lost my mind.”
We came to a place, on the side of the road, where some large boulders were half buried by an old land-slide; don Juan headed for them and sat down on a flat rock. He signaled me to sit down, facing him. And then without further preliminaries, he started his explanation of the mastery of awareness.
He said that there were a series of truths that seers, old and new, had discovered about awareness, and that such truths had been arranged in a specific sequence for purposes of comprehension.
He explained that the mastery of awareness consisted in internalizing the total sequence of such truths. The first truth, he said, was that our familiarity with the world we perceive compels us to believe that we are surrounded by objects, existing by themselves and as themselves, just as we perceive them, whereas, in fact, there is no world of objects, but a universe of the Eagle’s emanations.
He told me then that before he could explain the Eagle’s emanations, he had to talk about the known, the unknown, and the unknowable. Most of the truths about awareness were discovered by the old seers, he said. But the order in which they were arranged had been worked out by the new seers. And without that order those truths were nearly incomprehensible.
He said that not to seek order was one of the great mistakes that the ancient seers made. A deadly consequence of that mistake was their assumption that the unknown and the unknowable are the same thing. It was up to the new seers to correct that error. They set up boundaries and defined the unknown as something that is veiled from man, shrouded perhaps by a terrifying context, but which, nonetheless, is within man’s reach. The unknown becomes the known at a given time. The unknowable, on the other hand, is the indescribable, the unthinkable, the unrealizable. It is something that will never be known to us, and yet it is there, dazzling and at the same time horrifying in its vastness.
“How can seers make the distinction between the two?” I asked.
“There is a simple rule of thumb,” he said. “In the face of the unknown, man is adventurous. It is a quality of the unknown to give us a sense of hope and happiness. Man feels robust, exhilarated. Even the apprehension that it arouses is very fulfilling. The new seers saw that man is at his best in the face of the unknown.”
He said that whenever what is taken to be the unknown turns out to be the unknowable the results are disastrous. Seers feel drained, confused. A terrible oppression takes possession of them. Their bodies lose tone, their reasoning and sobriety wander away aimlessly, for the unknowable has no energizing effects whatsoever. It is not within human reach; therefore, it should not be intruded upon foolishly or even prudently. The new seers realized that they had to be prepared to pay exorbitant prices for the faintest contact with it.
Don Juan explained that the new seers had had formidable barriers of tradition to overcome. At the time when the new cycle began, none of them knew for certain which procedures of their immense tradition were the right ones and which were not. Obviously, something had gone wrong with the ancient seers, but the new seers did not know what. They began by assuming that everything their predecessors had done was erroneous. Those ancient seers had been the masters of conjecture. They had, for one thing, assumed that their proficiency in seeing was a safeguard. They thought that they were untouchable?that is, until the invaders smashed them, and put most of them to horrendous deaths. The ancient seers had no protection whatsoever, despite their total certainty that they were invulnerable.
The new seers did not waste their time in specula-tions about what went wrong. Instead, they began to map the unknown in order to separate it from the unknowable.
“How did they map the unknown, don Juan?” I asked.
“Through the controlled use of seeing,” he replied.
I said that what I had meant to ask was, what was entailed in mapping the unknown?
He answered that mapping the unknown means making it available to our perception. By steadily practicing seeing, the new seers found that the unknown and the known are really on the same footing, because both are within the reach of human perception. Seers, in fact, can leave the known at a given moment and enter into the unknown.
Whatever is beyond our capacity to perceive is the unknowable. And the distinction between it and the knowable is crucial. Confusing the two would put seers in a most precarious position whenever they are confronted with the unknowable.
“When this happened to the ancient seers,” don Juan went on, “they thought their procedures had gone haywire. It never occurred to them that most of what’s out there is beyond our comprehension. It was a terrifying error of judgment on their part, for which they paid dearly.”
“What happened after the distinction between the unknown and the unknowable was realized?” I asked.
“The new cycle began,” he replied. “That distinction is the frontier between the old and the new. Everything that the new seers have done stems from understanding that distinction.”
Don Juan said that seeing was the crucial element in both the destruction of the ancient seers’ world and in the reconstruction of the new view. It was through seeing that the new seers discovered certain undeni-able facts, which they used to arrive at certain conclusions, revolutionary to them, about the nature of man and the world. These conclusions, which made the new cycle possible, were the truths about awareness he was explaining to me.
Don Juan asked me to accompany him to the center of town for a stroll around the square. On our way, we began to talk about machines and delicate instruments. He said that instruments are extensions of our senses, and I maintained that there are instruments that are not in that category, because they perform functions that we are not physiologically capable of performing.