The Power of Silence (13 page)

At the
mention of their benefactor, they laughed like children.

I
understood him perfectly. I had no questions or doubts. If anything, I had the
feeling that I needed to hold onto every word don Juan was saying to anchor
myself. Otherwise my thoughts would have run ahead of him.

I noticed
that my eyes were fixed on the movement of his lips as my ears were fixed on
the sound of his words. But once I realized this, I could no longer follow him.
My concentration was broken. Don Juan continued talking, but I was not
listening. I was wondering about the inconceivable possibility of living
permanently in heightened awareness. I asked myself what would the survival
value be? Would one be able to assess situations better? Be quicker than the
average man, or perhaps more intelligent?

Don Juan
suddenly stopped talking and asked me what I was thinking about.

"Ah,
you're so very practical," he commented after I had told him my reveries.
"I thought that in heightened awareness your temperament was going to be
more artistic, more mystical."

Don Juan
turned to Vicente and asked him to answer my question. Vicente cleared his
throat and dried his hands by rubbing them against his thighs. He gave the
clear impression of suffering from stage fright. I felt sorry for him. My thoughts
began to spin. And when I heard him stammering, an image burst into my mind -
the image I had always had of my father's timidity, his fear of people. But
before I had time to surrender myself to that image, Vicente's eyes flared with
some strange inner luminosity. He made a comically serious face at me and then
spoke with authority and in professorial manner.

"To
answer your question," he said, "there is no survival value in
heightened awareness; otherwise the whole human race would be there. They are safe
from that, though, because it's so hard to get into it. There is always,
however, the remote possibility that an average man might enter into such a
state. If he does, he ordinarily succeeds in confusing himself, sometimes
irreparably."

The three
of them exploded with laughter.

"Sorcerers
say that heightened awareness is the portal of intent" don Juan said.
"And they use it as such. Think about it."

I was
staring at each of them in turn. My mouth was open, and I felt that if I kept
it open I would be able to understand the riddle eventually. I closed my eyes
and the answer came to me. I felt it. I did not think it. But I could not put
it into words, no matter how hard I tried.

"There,
there," don Juan said, "you've gotten another sorcerer's answer all by
yourself, but you still don't have enough energy to flatten it and turn it into
words."

The
sensation I was experiencing was more than just that of being unable to voice
my thoughts; it was like reliving something I had forgotten ages ago: not to
know what I felt because I had not yet learned to speak, and therefore lacked
the resources to translate my feelings into thoughts.

"Thinking
and saying exactly what you want to say requires untold amounts of
energy," don Juan said and broke into my feelings.

The force
of my reverie had been so intense it had made me forget what had started it. I
stared dumbfounded at don Juan and confessed I had no idea what they or I had
said or done just a moment before. I remembered the incident of the leather
rope and what don Juan had told me immediately afterward, but I could not
recall the feeling that had flooded me just moments ago.

"You're
going the wrong way," don Juan said. "You're trying to remember
thoughts the way you normally do, but this is a different situation. A second
ago you had an overwhelming feeling that you knew something very specific.

Such
feelings cannot be recollected by using memory. You have to recall them by
intending them back."

He turned
to Silvio Manuel, who had stretched out in the armchair, his legs under the
coffee table. Silvio Manuel looked fixedly at me. His eyes were black, like two
pieces of shiny obsidian. Without moving a muscle, he let out a piercing
birdlike scream.

"Intent!!"
he yelled. "Intent!! Intent!!"

With each
scream his voice became more and more inhuman and piercing. The hair on the
back of my neck stood on end. I felt goose bumps on my skin. My mind, however,
instead of focusing on the fright I was experiencing, went directly to
recollecting the feeling I had had. But before I could savor it completely, the
feeling expanded and burst into something else. And then I understood not only
why heightened awareness was the portal of intent, but I also understood what
intent was. And, above all, I understood that that knowledge could not be
turned into words. That knowledge was there for everyone. It was there to be
felt, to be used, but not to be explained. One could come into it by changing
levels of awareness, therefore, heightened awareness was an entrance. But even
the entrance could not be explained. One could only make use of it.

There was
still another piece of knowledge that came to me that day without any coaching:
that the natural knowledge of intent was available to anyone, but the command
of it belonged to those who probed it.

I was
terribly tired by this time, and doubtlessly as a result of that, my Catholic
upbringing came to bear heavily on my reactions. For a moment I believed that
intent was God.

I said as
much to don Juan, Vicente and Silvio Manuel. They laughed. Vicente, still in
his professorial tone, said that it could not possibly be God, because intent
was a force that could not be described, much less represented.

"Don't
be presumptuous," don Juan said to me sternly. "Don't try to
speculate on the basis of your first and only trial. Wait until you command
your knowledge, then decide what is what."

Remembering
the four moods of stalking exhausted me. The most dramatic result was a more
than ordinary indifference. I would not have cared if I had dropped dead, nor
if don Juan had. I did not care whether we stayed at that ancient lookout post
overnight or started back in the pitch-dark.

Don Juan
was very understanding. He guided me by the hand, as if I were blind, to a
massive rock, and helped me sit with my back to it. He recommended that I let
natural sleep return me to a normal state of awareness.

Right after
a late lunch, while we were still at the table, don Juan announced that the two
of us were going to spend the night in the sorcerers' cave and that we had to
be on our way. He said that it was imperative that I sit there again, in total
darkness, to allow the rock formation and the sorcerers' intent to move my
assemblage point.

I started
to get up from my chair, but he stopped me. He said that there was something he
wanted to explain to me first. He stretched out, putting his feet on the seat
of a chair, then leaned back into a relaxed, comfortable position.

"As I
see you in greater detail," don Juan said, "I notice more and more
how similar you and my benefactor are."

I felt so
threatened that I did not let him continue. I told him that I could not imagine
what those similarities were, hut if there were any - a possibility I did not
consider reassuring - I would appreciate it if he told me about them, to give
me a chance to correct or avoid them.

Don Juan
laughed until tears were rolling down his cheeks.

"One
of the similarities is that when you act, you act very well," he said,
"but when you think, you always trip yourself up. My benefactor was like
that. He didn't think too well."

I was just
about to defend myself, to say there was nothing wrong with my thinking, when I
caught a glint of mischievousness in his eyes. I stopped cold. Don Juan noticed
my shift and laughed with a note of surprise. He must have been anticipating
the opposite.

"What
I mean, for instance, is that you only have problems understanding the spirit
when you think about it," he went on with a chiding smile. "But when
you act, the spirit easily reveals itself to you. My benefactor was that way.

"Before
we leave for the cave, I am going to tell you a story about my benefactor and
the fourth abstract core.

"Sorcerers
believe that until the very moment of the spirit's descent, any of us could
walk away from the spirit; but not afterwards."

Don Juan
deliberately stopped to urge me, with a movement of his eyebrows, to consider
what he was telling me.

"The
fourth abstract core is the full brunt of the spirit's descent," he went
on. "The fourth abstract core is an act of revelation. The spirit reveals
itself to us. Sorcerers describe it as the spirit lying in ambush and then
descending on us, its prey. Sorcerers say that the spirit's descent is always
shrouded. It happens and yet it seems not to have happened at all."

I became
very nervous. Don Juan's tone of voice was giving me the feeling that he was
preparing to spring something on me at any moment.

He asked me
if I remembered the moment the spirit descended on me, sealing my permanent
allegiance to the abstract.

I had no
idea what he was talking about.

"There
is a threshold that once crossed permits no retreat," he said.
"Ordinarily, from the moment the spirit knocks, it is years before an
apprentice reaches that threshold. Sometimes, though, the threshold is reached
almost immediately. My benefactor's case is an example."

Don Juan
said every sorcerer should have a clear memory of crossing that threshold so he
could remind himself of the new state of his perceptual potential. He explained
that one did not have to be an apprentice of sorcery to reach this threshold,
and that the only difference between an average man and a sorcerer, in such
cases, is what each emphasizes. A sorcerer emphasizes crossing this threshold
and uses the memory of it as a point of reference. An average man does not
cross the threshold and does his best to forget all about it.

I told him
that I did not agree with his point, because I could not accept that there was
only one threshold to cross.

Don Juan
looked heavenward in dismay and shook his head in a joking gesture of despair.
I proceeded with my argument, not to disagree with him, but to clarify things
in my mind. Yet I quickly lost my impetus. Suddenly I had the feeling I was
sliding through a tunnel.

"Sorcerers
say that the fourth abstract core happens when the spirit cuts our chains of
self-reflection," he said. "Cutting our chains is marvelous, but also
very undesirible, for nobody wants to be free."

The
sensation of sliding through a tunnel persisted for a moment longer, and then
everything became clear to me. And I began to laugh. Strange insights pent up
inside me were exploding into laughter.

Don Juan
seemed to be reading my mind as if it were a book.

"What
a strange feeling: to realize that everything we think, everything we say
depends on the position of the assemblage point," he remarked.

And that
was exactly what I had been thinking and laughing about.

"I
know that at this moment your assemblage point has shifted," he went on,
"and you have understood the secret of our chains. They imprison us, but
by keeping us pinned down on our comfortable spot of self-reflection, they
defend us from the onslaughts of the unknown."

I was
having one of those extraordinary moments in which everything about the
sorcerers' world was crystal clear. I understood everything.

"Once
our chains are cut," don Juan continued, "we are no longer bound by
the concerns of the daily world. We are still in the daily world, but we don't
belong there anymore. In order to belong we must share the concerns of people,
and without chains we can't."

Don Juan
said that the nagual Elias had explained to him that what distinguishes normal
people is that we share a metaphorical dagger: the concerns of our
self-reflection. With this dagger, we cut ourselves and bleed; and the job of
our chains of self-reflection is to give us the feeling that we are bleeding
together, that we are sharing something wonderful: our humanity. But if we were
to examine it, we would discover that we are bleeding alone; that we are not
sharing anything; that all we are doing is toying with our manageable, unreal,
man-made reflection.

"Sorcerers
are no longer in the world of daily affairs," don Juan went on,
"because they are no longer prey to their self-reflection."

Don Juan
then began his story about his benefactor and the descent of the spirit. He
said that the story started right after the spirit had knocked on the young
actor's door.

I
interrupted don Juan and asked him why he consistently used the terms
"young man" or "young actor" to refer to the nagual Julian.

"At
the time of this story, he wasn't the nagual," don Juan replied. "He
was a young actor. In my story, I can't just call him Julian, because to me he
was always the nagual Julian. As a sign of deference for his lifetime of
impeccabitity, we always prefix 'nagual' to a nagual's name."