The Art of Dreaming (32 page)

I
understood so well that I asked him if it would be possible for him to make me
change levels of awareness in order to alleviate my fear and discomfort. He
nearly made me jump with the explosion of his "no".

"You
must face the death defier in coldness and with ultimate premeditation,"
he went on.

"And
you can't do this by proxy."

Don Juan
calmly began to repeat everything he had already told me about the death defier.
As he talked, I realized that part of my confusion was the result of his use of
words. He rendered "death defier" in Spanish as
el desafiante de
la muerte
, and "tenant" as
el inquilino
, both of which
automatically denote a male. But in describing the relationship between the
tenant and the naguals of his line, don Juan kept on mixing the
Spanish-language male and female gender denotation, creating a great confusion
in me.

He said
that the tenant was supposed to pay for the energy
he
took from the naguals
of our lineage, but that whatever
he
paid has bound those sorcerers for
generations. As payment for the energy taken from all those naguals, the woman
in the church taught them exactly what to do to displace their assemblage point
to some specific positions, which
she
herself had chosen. In other
words,
she
bound every one of those men with a gift of power consisting
of a preselected, specific position of the assemblage point and all its
implications."

"What
do you mean by "all its implications," don Juan?"

"I
mean the negative results of those gifts. The woman in the church knows only of
indulging. There is no frugality, no temperance in that woman. For instance,
she taught the nagual Julian how to arrange his assemblage point to be, just
like her, a woman. Teaching this to my benefactor, who was an incurable
voluptuary, was like giving booze to a drunkard."

"But
isn't it up to each one of us to be responsible for what we do?"

"Yes,
indeed. However, some of us have more difficulty than others in being responsible.
To augment that difficulty deliberately, as that woman does, is to put too much
unnecessary pressure on us."

"How
do you know the woman in the church does this deliberately?"

"She
has done it to every one of the naguals of my line. If we look at ourselves
fairly and squarely, we have to admit that the death defier has made us, with
his gifts, into a line of very indulging, dependent sorcerers."

I could not
overlook his inconsistency of language usage any longer, and I complained to
him.

"You
have to speak about that sorcerer as either a male or a female, but not as
both," I said harshly. "I'm too stiff, and your arbitrary use of
gender makes me all the more uneasy."

"I am
very uneasy myself," he confessed. "But the truth is that the death
defier is both: male and female. I've never been able to take that sorcerer's
change with grace. I was sure you would feel the same way, having seen him as a
man first."

Don Juan
reminded me of a time, years before, when he took me to meet the death defier
and I met a man, a strange Indian who was not old but not young either and was
very slightly built. I remember mostly his strange accent and his use of one
odd metaphor when describing things he allegedly had seen. He said,
mis ojos
se pasearon
, "my eyes walked on". For instance, he said, "My
eyes walked on the helmets of the Spanish conquerors."

The event
was so fleeting in my mind that I had always thought the meeting had lasted
only a few minutes. Don Juan later told me that I had been gone with the death
defier for a whole day.

"The
reason I was trying to find out from you earlier whether you knew what was
going on," don Juan continued, "was because I thought that years ago
you had made an appointment with the death defier yourself."

"You
were giving me undue credit, don Juan. In this instance, I really don't know
whether I am coming or going. But what gave you the idea that I knew?"

"The
death defier seemed to have taken a liking to you. And that meant to me that he
might have already given you a gift of power, although you didn't remember it.
Or he might have set up your appointment with him, as a woman. I even suspected
she had given you precise directions."

Don Juan
remarked that the death defier, being definitely a creature of ritual habits,
always met the naguals of his line first as a man, as it had happened with the
nagual Sebastian, and subsequently as a woman.

"Why
do you call the death defier's gifts, gifts of power? And why the
mystery?" I asked. "You yourself can displace your assemblage point
to whatever spot you want, isn't that so?"

"They
are called gifts of power because they are products of the specialized
knowledge of the sorcerers of antiquity," he said. "The mystery about
the gifts is that no one on this earth, with the exception of the death defier,
can give us a sample of that knowledge. And, of course, I can displace my
assemblage point to whatever spot I want, inside or outside man's energy shape.
But what I can't do, and only the death defier can, is to know what to do with
my energy body in each one of those spots in order to get total perception,
total cohesion."

He
explained, then, that modern-day sorcerers do not know the details of the
thousands upon thousands of possible positions of the assemblage point.

"What
do you mean by details?" I asked.

"Particular
ways of treating the energy body in order to maintain the assemblage point
fixed on specific positions," he replied.

He took
himself as an example. He said that the death defier's gift of power to him had
been the position of the assemblage point of a crow and the procedures to
manipulate his energy body to get the total perception of a crow. Don Juan
explained that total perception, total cohesion was what the old sorcerers
sought at any cost, and that, in the case of his own gift of power, total
perception came to him by means of a deliberate process he had to learn, step
by step, as one learns to work a very complex machine.

Don Juan
further explained that most of the shifts modern-day sorcerers experience are
mild shifts within a thin bundle of energetic luminous filaments inside the
luminous egg, a bundle called the band of man, or the purely human aspect of
the universe's energy. Beyond that band, but still within the luminous egg,
lies the realm of the grand shifts. When the assemblage point shifts to any
spot on that area, perception is still comprehensible to us, but extremely
detailed procedures are required for perception to be total.

"The
inorganic beings tricked you and Carol Tiggs in your last journey by helping
you two to get total cohesion on a grand shift," don Juan said. "They
displaced your assemblage points to the farthest possible spot, then helped you
perceive there as if you were in your daily world. A nearly impossible thing.
To do that type of perceiving a sorcerer needs pragmatic knowledge, or
influential friends.

"Your
friends would have betrayed you in the end and left you and Carol to fend for
yourselves and learn pragmatic measures in order to survive in that world. You
two would have ended filled to the brim with pragmatic procedures, just like
those most knowledgeable old sorcerers.

"Every
grand shift has different inner workings," he continued, "which
modern sorcerers could learn if they knew how to fixate the assemblage point
long enough at any grand shift. Only the sorcerers of ancient times had the
specific knowledge required to do this."

Don Juan
went on to say that the knowledge of specific procedures involved in shifts was
not available to the eight naguals who preceded the nagual Sebastian, and that
the tenant showed the nagual Sebastian how to achieve total perception on ten
new positions of the assemblage point. The nagual Santisteban received seven,
the nagual Lujan fifty, the nagual Rosendo six, the nagual Elias four, the
nagual Julian sixteen, and he was shown two; that made a total of ninety-five
specific positions of the assemblage point that his lineage knew about. He said
that if I asked him whether he considered this an advantage to his lineage, he
would have to say no, because the weight of those gifts put them closer to the
old sorcerers' mood.

"Now
it's your turn to meet the tenant," he continued. "Perhaps the gifts
he will give you will offset our total balance and our lineage will plunge into
the darkness that finished off the old sorcerers."

"This
is so horribly serious, it's sickening," I said.

"I
most sincerely sympathize with you," he retorted with a serious
expression. "I know it's no consolation to you if I say that this is the
toughest trial of a modern nagual. To face something so old and mysterious as
the tenant is not awe-inspiring but revolting. At least it was to me, and still
is."

"Why
do I have to continue with it, don Juan?"

"Because,
without knowing it, you accepted the death defier challenge. I drew an
acceptance from you in the course of your apprenticeship, in the same manner my
teacher drew one from me, surreptitiously.

"I
went through the same horror, only a little more brutally than you." He
began to chuckle. "The nagual Julian was given to playing horrendous
jokes. He told me that there was a very beautiful and passionate widow who was
madly in love with me. The nagual used to take me to church often, and I had
seen the woman staring at me. I thought she was a good-looking woman. And I was
a horny young man. When the nagual said that she liked me, I fell for it. My
awakening was very rude."

I had to
fight not to laugh at don Juan's gesture of lost innocence. Then the idea of
his predicament hit me, as being not funny but ghastly.

"Are
you sure, don Juan, that that woman is the tenant?" I asked, hoping that
perhaps it was a mistake or a bad joke.

"I am
very, very sure," he said. "Besides, even if I were so dumb as to
forget the tenant, my
seeing
can't fail me."

"Do
you mean, don Juan, that the tenant has a different type of energy?"

"No,
not a different type of energy, but certainly different energy features than a
normal person."

"Are
you absolutely sure, don Juan, that that woman is the tenant?" I insisted,
driven by a strange revulsion and fear.

"That
woman is the tenant!" don Juan exclaimed in a voice that admitted no
doubts.

We remained
quiet. I waited for the next move in the midst of a panic beyond description.

"I
have already said to you that to be a natural man or a natural woman is a
matter of positioning the assemblage point," don Juan said. "By
natural I mean someone who was born either male or female. To a seer, the
shiniest part of the assemblage point faces outward, in the case of females and
inward, in the case of males. The tenant's assemblage point was originally
facing inward, but he changed it by twisting it around and making his egglike
energy shape look like a shell that has curled up on itself."

Don Juan
and I sat in silence. I had run out of questions, and he seemed to have said to
me all that was pertinent. It could not have been more than seven o'clock, but
the plaza was unusually deserted. It was a warm night. In the evenings, in that
town, people usually meandered around the plaza until ten or eleven.

I took a
moment to reconsider what was happening to me. My time with don Juan was coming
to an end. He and his party were going to fulfill the sorcerers' dream of
leaving this world and entering into inconceivable dimensions. On this basis of
my limited success in
dreaming
, I believed that the claims were not
illusory but extremely sober, although contrary to reason. They were seeking to
perceive the unknown, and they had made it.

Don Juan
was right in saying that, by inducing a systematic displacement of the
assemblage point,
dreaming
liberates perception, enlarging the scope of
what can be perceived. For the sorcerers of his party,
dreaming
had not
only opened the doors of other perceivable worlds but prepared them for
entering into those realms in full awareness.
Dreaming
, for them, had
become ineffable, unprecedented, something whose nature and scope could only be
alluded to, as when don Juan said that it is the gateway to the light and to
the darkness of the universe.

There was
only one thing pending for them: my encounter with the death defier. I
regretted that don Juan had not given me notice so that I could prepare myself
better. But he was a nagual who did everything of importance on the spur of the
moment, without any warning.

For a
moment, I seemed to be doing fine, sitting with don Juan in that park, waiting
for things to develop. But then my emotional stability suffered a downward
swing and, in the twinkling of an eye, I was in the midst of a dark despair. I
was assailed by petty considerations about my safety, my goals, my hopes in the
world, my worries. Upon examination, however, I had to admit that perhaps the
only true worry I had was about my three cohorts in don Juan's world. Yet, if I
thought it out, even that was no real worry to me. Don Juan had taught them to
be the kind of sorceresses who always knew what to do, and, most important, he
had prepared them always to know what to do with what they knew.