The Power of Silence (30 page)

"No,
because their assemblage points won't be in the same place as yours," he
replied. "Then, don Juan, did I dream the jaguar?" I asked. "Did
all of it happen only in my mind?"

"Not
quite," he said. "That big cat is real. You have moved miles and you
are not even tired. If you are in doubt, look at your shoes. They are full of
cactus spines. So you did move, looming over the shrubs. And at the same time
you didn't. It depends on whether one's assemblage point is on the place of
reason or on the place of silent knowledge."

I
understood everything he was saying while he said it, but could not repeat any
part of it at will. Nor could I determine what it was I knew, or why he was
making so much sense to me.

The growl
of the jaguar brought me back to the reality of the immediate danger. I caught
sight of the jaguar's dark mass as he swiftly moved uphill about thirty yards
to our right.

"What
are we going to do, don Juan?" I asked, knowing that he had also seen the
animal moving ahead of us.

"Keep
climbing to the very top and seek shelter there," he said calmly.

Then he
added, as if he had not a single worry in the world, that I had wasted valuable
time indulging in my pleasure at looming over the bushes. Instead of heading
for the safety of the hills he had pointed out, I had taken off toward the
easterly higher mountains.

"We
must reach that scarp before the jaguar or we don't have a chance," he
said, pointing to the nearly vertical face at the very top of the mountain.

I turned
right and saw the jaguar leaping from rock to rock. He was definitely working
his way over to cut us off.

"Let's
go, don Juan!" I yelled out of nervousness.

Don Juan
smiled. He seemed to be enjoying my fear and impatience. We moved as fast as we
could and climbed steadily. I tried not to pay attention to the dark form of
the jaguar as it appeared from time to time a bit ahead of us and always to our
right.

The three
of us reached the base of the escarpment at the same time. The jaguar was about
twenty yards to our right. He jumped and tried to climb the face of the cliff,
but failed. The rock wall was too steep.

Don Juan
yelled that I should not waste time watching the jaguar, because he would
charge as soon as he gave up trying to climb. No sooner had don Juan spoken
than the animal charged.

There was
no time for further urging. I scrambled up the rock wall followed by don Juan.
The shrill scream of the frustrated beast sounded right by the heel of my right
foot. The propelling force of fear sent me up the slick scarp as if I were a
fly.

I reached
the top before don Juan, who had stopped to laugh.

Safe at the
top of the cliff, I had more time to think about what had happened. Don Juan
did not want to discuss anything. He argued that at this stage in my
development, any movement of my assemblage point would still be a mystery. My
challenge at the beginning of my apprenticeship was, he said, maintaining my
gains, rather than reasoning them out - and that at some point everything would
make sense to me.

I told him
everything made sense to me at that moment. But he was adamant that I had to be
able to explain knowledge to myself before I could claim that it made sense to
me. He insisted that for a movement of my assemblage point to make sense, I
would need to have energy to fluctuate from the place of reason to the place of
silent knowledge.

He stayed
quiet for a while, sweeping my entire body with his stare. Then he seemed to
make up his mind and smiled and began to speak again.

"Today
you reached the place of silent knowledge," he said with finality.

He
explained that that afternoon, my assemblage point had moved by itself, without
his intervention. I had intended the movement by manipulating my feeling of
being gigantic, and in so doing my assemblage point had reached the position of
silent knowledge.

I was very
curious to hear how don Juan interpreted my experience. He said that one way to
talk about the perception attained in the place of silent knowledge was to call
it "here and here." He explained that when I had told him I had felt
myself looming over the desert chaparral, I should have added that I was seeing
the desert floor and the top of the shrubs at the same time. Or that I had been
at the place where I stood and at the same time at the place where the jaguar
was. Thus I had been able to notice how carefully he stepped to avoid the
cactus spines. In other words, instead of perceiving the normal here and there,
I had perceived "here and here."

His
comments frightened me. He was right. I had not mentioned that to him, nor had
I admitted even to myself that I had been in two places at once. I would not
have dared to think in those terms had it not been for his comments.

He repeated
that I needed more time and more energy to make sense of everything. I was too
new; I still required a great deal of supervision. For instance, while I was
looming over the shrubs, he had to make his assemblage point fluctuate rapidly
between the places of reason and silent knowledge to take care of me. And that
had exhausted him.

"Tell
me one thing," I said, testing his reasonableness. "That jaguar was
stranger than you want to admit, wasn't it? Jaguars are not part of the fauna
of this area. Pumas, yes, but not jaguars. How do you explain that?"

Before
answering, he puckered his face. He was suddenly very serious.

"I
think that this particular jaguar confirms your anthropological theories,"
he said in a solemn tone. "Obviously, the jaguar was following this famous
trade route connecting Chihuahua with Central America."

Don Juan
laughed so hard that the sound of his laughter echoed in the mountains. That
echo disturbed me as much as the jaguar had. Yet it was not the echo itself
which disturbed me, but the fact that I had never heard an echo at night.
Echoes were, in my mind, associated only with the daytime.

It had
taken me several hours to recall all the details of my experience with the
jaguar. During that time, don Juan had not talked to me. He had simply propped
himself against a rock and gone to sleep in a sitting position. After a while I
no longer noticed that he was there, and finally I fell asleep.

I was
awakened by a pain in my jaw. I had been sleeping with the side of my face pressed
against a rock. The moment I opened my eyes, I tried to slide down off the
boulder on which I had been lying, but lost my balance and fell noisily on my
seat. Don Juan appeared from behind some bushes just in time to laugh.

It was
getting late and I wondered aloud if we had enough time to get to the valley
before
nightfall. Don Juan shrugged his shoulders and did not seem concerned. He sat
down beside me.

I asked him
if he wanted to hear the details of my recollection. He indicated that it was
fine with him, yet he did not ask me any questions. I thought he was leaving it
up to me to start, so I told him there were three points I remembered which
were of great importance to me. One was that he had talked about silent
knowledge; another was that I had moved my assemblage point using intent; and
the final point was that I had entered into heightened awareness without
requiring a blow between my shoulder blades.

"Intending
the movement of your assemblage point was your greatest accomplishment,"
don Juan said. "But accomplishment is something personal. It's necessary,
but it's not the important part. It is not the residue sorcerers look forward
to."

I thought I
knew what he wanted. I told him that I hadn't totally forgotten the event. What
had remained with me in my normal state of awareness was that a mountain lion -
since I could not accept the idea of a jaguar - had chased us up a mountain,
and that don Juan had asked me if I had felt offended by the big cat's
onslaught. I had assured him that it was absurd that I could feel offended, and
he had told me I should feel the same way about the onslaughts of my fellow
men.

I should
protect myself, or get out of their way, but without feeling morally wronged.

"That
is not the residue I am talking about," he said, laughing. "The idea
of the abstract, the spirit, is the only residue that is important. The idea of
the personal self has no value whatsoever. You still put yourself and your own
feelings first. Every time I've had the chance, I have made you aware of the
need to abstract. You have always believed that I meant to think abstractly.
No. To abstract means to make yourself available to the spirit by being aware
of it."

He said
that one of the most dramatic things about the human condition was the macabre
connection between stupidity and self-reflection.

It was
stupidity that forced us to discard anything that did not conform with our
self-reflective expectations. For example, as average men, we were blind to the
most crucial piece of knowledge available to a human being: the existence of
the assemblage point and the fact that it could move.

"For a
rational man it's unthinkable that there should be an invisible point where
perception is assembled," he went on. "And yet more unthinkable, that
such a point is not in the brain, as he might vaguely expect if he were given
to entertaining the thought of its existence."

He added
that for the rational man to hold steadfastly to his self-image insured his
abysmal ignorance. He ignored, for instance, the fact that sorcery was not
incantations and hocus-pocus, but the freedom to perceive not only the world
taken for granted, but every thing else that was humanly possible.

"Here
is where the average man's stupidity is most dangerous," he continued.
"He is afraid of sorcery. He trembles at the possibility of freedom. And
freedom is at his fingertips. It's called the third point. And it can be
reached as easily as the assemblage point can be made to move."

"But
you yourself told me that moving the assemblage point is so difficult that it
is a true accomplishment," I protested.

"It
is," he assured me. "This is another of the sorcerers'
contradictions: it's very difficult and yet it's the simplest thing in the
world. I've told you already that a high fever could move the assemblage point.
Hunger or fear or love or hate could do it; mysticism too, and also unbending
intent, which is the preferred method of sorcerers."

I asked him
to explain again what unbending intent was.

He said
that it was a sort of single-mindedness human beings exhibit; an extremely
well-defined purpose not countermanded by any conflicting interests or desires;
unbending intent was also the force engendered when the assemblage point was
maintained fixed in a position which was not the usual one.

Don Juan
then made a meaningful distinction - which had eluded me all these years -
between a
movement
and a
shift
of the assemblage point. A
movement
,
he said, was a profound change of position, so extreme that the assemblage
point might even reach other bands of energy within our total luminous mass of
energy fields. Each band of energy represented a completely different universe
to be perceived. A
shift
, however, was a small movement within the band
of energy fields we perceived as the world of everyday life.

He went on
to say that sorcerers saw unbending intent as the catalyst to trigger their
unchangeable decisions, or as the converse: their unchangeable decisions were
the catalyst that propelled their assemblage points to new positions, positions
which in turn generated unbending intent.

I must have
looked dumbfounded. Don Juan laughed and said that trying to reason out the
sorcerers' metaphorical descriptions was as useless as trying to reason out
silent knowledge. He added that the problem with words was that any attempt to
clarify the sorcerers' description only made them more confusing.

I urged him
to try to clarify this in any way he could. I argued that anything he could
say, for instance, about the third point could only clarify it, for although I
knew everything about it, it was still very confusing.

"The
world of daily life consists of two points of reference," he said.
"We have for example, here and there, in and out, up and down, good and
evil, and so on and so forth. So, properly speaking, our perception of our
lives is two-dimensional. None of what we perceive ourselves doing has
depth."

I protested
that he was mixing levels. I told him that I could accept his definition of
perception as the capacity of living beings to apprehend with their senses
fields of energy selected by their assemblage points - a very farfetched
definition by my academic standards, but one that, at the moment, seemed
cogent. However, I could not imagine what the depth of what we did might be. I
argued that it was possible he was talking about interpretations - elaborations
of our basic perceptions.

"A
sorcerer perceives his actions with depth," he said. "His actions are
tridimensional for him. They have a third point of reference."

"How
could a third point of reference exist?" I asked with a tinge of
annoyance.