The Power of Silence (14 page)

Don Juan
proceeded with his story. He said that the nagual Elias had stopped the young
actor's death by making him shift into heightened awareness, and following
hours of struggle, the young actor regained consciousness. The nagual Elias did
not mention his name, but he introduced himself as a professional healer who
had stumbled onto the scene of a tragedy, where two persons had nearly died. He
pointed to the young woman, Talia, stretched out on the ground. The young man
was astonished to see her lying unconscious next to him. He remembered seeing
her as she ran away. It startled him to hear the old healer explain that
doubtlessly God had punished Talia for her sins by striking her with lightning
and making her lose her mind.

"But
how could there be lightning if it's not even raining?" the young actor
asked in a barely audible voice. He was visibly affected when the old Indian
replied that God's ways couldn't be questioned.

Again I
interrupted don Juan. I was curious to know if the young woman really had lost
her mind. He reminded me that the nagual Elias delivered a shattering blow to
her assemblage point. He said that she had not lost her mind, but that as a
result of the blow she slipped in and out of heightened awareness, creating a
serious threat to her health. After a gigantic struggle, however, the nagual
Elias helped her to stabilize her assemblage point and she entered permanently
into heightened awareness.

Don Juan
commented that women are capable of such a master stroke: they can permanently
maintain a new position of their assemblage point. And Talia was peerless. As
soon as her chains were broken, she immediately understood everything and
complied with the nagual's designs.

Don Juan,
recounting his story, said that the nagual Elias - who was not only a superb
dreamer, but also a superb stalker - had seen that the young actor was spoiled
and conceited, but only seemed to be hard and calloused. The nagual knew that
if he brought forth the idea of God, sin, and retribution, the actor's
religious beliefs would make his cynical attitude collapse.

Upon
hearing about God's punishment, the actor's facade began to crumble. He started
to express remorse, but the nagual cut him short and forcefully stressed that
when death was so near, feelings of guilt no longer mattered.

The young
actor listened attentively, but, although he felt very ill, he did not believe
that he was in danger of dying. He thought that his weakness and fainting had
been brought on by his loss of blood.

As if he
had read the young actor's mind, the nagual explained to him that those
optimistic thoughts were out of place, that his hemorrhaging would have been
fatal had it not been for the plug that he, as a healer, had created.

"When
I struck your back, I put in a plug to stop the draining of your life
force," the nagual said to the skeptical young actor. "Without that
restraint, the unavoidable process of your death would continue. If you don't
believe me, I'll prove it to you by removing the plug with another blow."

As he
spoke, the nagual Elias tapped the young actor on his right side by his
ribcage. In a moment the young man was retching and choking. Blood poured out
of his mouth as he coughed uncontrollably. Another tap on his back stopped the
agonizing pain and retching. But it did not stop his fear, and he passed out.

"I can
control your death for the time being," the nagual said when the young
actor regained consciousness. "How long I can control it depends on you,
on how faithfully you acquiesce to everything I tell you to do."

The nagual
said that the first requirements of the young man were total immobility and
silence. If he did not want his plug to come out, the nagual added, he had to
behave as if he had lost his powers of motion and speech. A single twitch or a
single utterance would be enough to restart his dying.

The young
actor was not accustomed to complying with suggestions or demands. He felt a
surge of anger. As he started to voice his protest, the burning pain and convulsions
started up again.

"Stay
with it, and I will cure you," the nagual said. "Act like the weak,
rotten imbecile you are, and you will die."

The actor,
a proud young man, was numbed by the insult. Nobody had ever called him a weak,
rotten imbecile. He wanted to express his fury, but his pain was so severe that
he could not react to the indignity.

"If
you want me to ease your pain, you must obey me blindly," the nagual said
with frightening coldness. "Signal me with a nod. But know now that the
moment you change your mind and act like the shameful moron you are, I'll
immediately pull the plug and leave you to die."

With his
last bit of strength the actor nodded his assent. The nagual tapped him on his
back and his pain vanished. But along with the searing pain, something else
vanished: the fog in his mind. And then the young actor knew everything without
understanding anything. The nagual introduced himself again. He told him that
his name was Elias, and that he was the nagual. And the actor knew what it all meant.

The nagual
Elias then shifted his attention to the semiconscious Talia. He put his mouth
to her left ear and whispered commands to her in order to make her assemblage
point stop its erratic shifting. He soothed her fear by telling her, in
whispers, stories of sorcerers who had gone through the same thing she was
experiencing. When she was fairly calm, he introduced himself as the nagual
Elias, a sorcerer; and then he attempted with her the most difficult thing in
sorcery: moving the assemblage point beyond the sphere of the world we know.

Don Juan
remarked that seasoned sorcerers are capable of moving beyond the world we
know, but that inexperienced persons are not. The nagual Elias always
maintained that ordinarily he would not have dreamed of attempting such a feat,
but on that day something other than his knowledge or his volition was making
him act. Yet the maneuver worked. Talia moved beyond the world we know and came
safely back.

Then the
nagual Elias had another insight. He sat between the two people stretched out
on the ground - the actor was naked, covered only by the nagual Elias's riding
coat - and reviewed their situation. He told them they had both, by the force
of circumstances, fallen into a trap set by the spirit itself. He, the nagual, was
the active part of that trap, because by encountering them under the conditions
he had, he had been forced to become their temporary protector and to engage
his knowledge of sorcery in order to help them. As their temporary protector it
was his duty to warn them that they were about to reach a unique threshold; and
that it was up to them, both individually and together, to attain that
threshold by entering a mood of abandon but not recklessness; a mood of caring
but not indulgence. He did not want to say more for fear of confusing them or
influencing their decision. He felt that if they were to cross that threshold,
it had to be with minimal help from him.

The nagual
then left them alone in that isolated spot and went to the city to arrange for
medicinal herbs, mats, and blankets to be brought to them. His idea was that in
solitude they would attain and cross that threshold.

For a long
time the two young people lay next to each other, immersed in their own
thoughts. The fact that their assemblage points had shifted meant that they
could think in greater depth than ordinarily, but it also meant that they
worried, pondered, and were afraid in equally greater depth.

Since Talia
could talk and was a bit stronger, she broke their silence; she asked the young
actor if he was afraid. He nodded affirmatively. She felt a great compassion
for him and took off a shawl she was wearing to put over his shoulders, and she
held his hand.

The young
man did not dare voice what he felt. His fear that his pain would recur if he
spoke was too great and too vivid. He wanted to apologize to her; to tell her
that his only regret was having hurt her, and that it did not matter that he
was going to die - for he knew with certainty that he was not going to survive
the day.

Talia's thoughts
were on the same subject. She said that she too had only one regret: that she
had fought him hard enough to bring on his death. She was very peaceful now, a
feeling which, agitated as she always was and driven by her great strength, was
unfamiliar to her. She told him that her death was very near, too, and that she
was glad it all would end that day.

The young
actor, hearing his own thoughts being spoken by Talia, felt a chill. A surge of
energy came to him then and made him sit up. He was not in pain, nor was he
coughing. He took in great gulps of air, something he had no memory of having
done before. He took the girl's hand and they began to talk without vocalizing.

Don Juan
said it was at that instant that the spirit came to them. And they
saw
. They were deeply
Catholic, and what they
saw
was a vision of heaven, where everything was
alive, bathed in light. They
saw
a world of miraculous sights.

When the
nagual returned, they were exhausted, although not injured. Talia was
unconscious, but the young man had managed to remain aware by a supreme effort
of self-control. He insisted on whispering something in the nagual's ear.

"We
saw heaven," he whispered, tears rolling down his cheeks.

"You
saw more than that," the nagual Elias retorted. "You
saw
the
spirit."

Don Juan
said that since the spirit's descent is always shrouded, naturally, Talia and
the young actor could not hold onto their vision. They soon forgot it, as
anyone would. The uniqueness of their experience was that, without any training
and without being aware of it, they had
dreamed
together and had
seen
the spirit. For them to have achieved this with such ease was quite out of
the ordinary.

"Those
two were really the most remarkable beings I have ever met," don Juan
added.

I,
naturally, wanted to know more about them. But don Juan would not indulge me.
He said that this was all there was about his benefactor and the fourth
abstract core.

He seemed
to remember something he was not telling me and laughed uproariously. Then he
patted me on the back and told me it was time to set out for the cave.

When we got
to the rock ledge it was almost dark. Don Juan sat down hurriedly, in the same
position as the first time. He was to my right, touching me with his shoulder.
He immediately seemed to enter into a deep state of relaxation, which pulled me
into total immobility and silence. I could not even hear his breathing. I
closed my eyes, and he nudged me to warn me to keep them open.

By the time
it became completely dark, an immense fatigue had begun to make my eyes sore
and itchy. Finally I gave up my resistance and was pulled into the deepest,
blackest sleep I have ever had. Yet I was not totally asleep. I could feel the
thick blackness around me. I had an entirely physical sensation of wading
through blackness. Then it suddenly became reddish, then orange, then glaring
white, like a terribly strong neon light. Gradually I focused my vision until I
saw I was still sitting in the same position with don Juan - but no longer in
the cave. We were on a mountaintop looking down over exquisite flatlands with
mountains in the distance. This beautiful prairie was bathed in a glow that,
like rays of light, emanated from the land itself. Wherever I looked, I saw
familiar features: rocks, hills, rivers, forests, canyons, enhanced and
transformed by their inner vibration, their inner glow. This glow that was so
pleasing to my eyes also tingled out of my very being.

"Your
assemblage point has moved," don Juan seemed to say to me.

The words
had no sound; nevertheless I knew what he had just said to me. My rational
reaction was to try to explain to myself that I had no doubt heard him as I
would have if he had been talking in a vacuum, probably because my ears had
been temporarily affected by what was transpiring.

"Your
ears are fine. We are in a different realm of awareness," don Juan again
seemed to say to me.

I could not
speak. I felt the lethargy of deep sleep preventing me from saying a word, yet
I was as alert as I could be.

"What's
happening?" I thought.

"The
cave made your assemblage point move," don Juan thought, and I heard his
thoughts as if they were my own words, voiced to myself.

I sensed a
command that was not expressed in thoughts. Something ordered me to look again
at the prairie.

As I stared
at the wondrous sight, filaments of light began to radiate from everything on
that prairie. At first it was like the explosion of an infinite number of short
fibers, then the fibers became long threadlike strands of luminosity bundled
together into beams of vibrating light that reached infinity. There was really
no way for me to make sense of what I was seeing, or to describe it, except as
filaments of vibrating light. The filaments were not intermingled or entwined.
Although they sprang, and continued to spring, in every direction, each one was
separate, and yet all of them were inextricably bundled together.

"You
are seeing the Eagle's emanations and the force that keeps them apart and
bundles them together," don Juan thought.