The Power of Silence (34 page)

He went on
to say that every act performed by any sorcerer was by definition governed by
these four principles. So, properly speaking, every sorcerer's every action is
deliberate in thought and realization, and has the specific blend of the four
foundations of stalking.

"Sorcerers
use the four moods of stalking as guides," he continued. "These are
four different frames of mind, four different brands of intensity that
sorcerers can use to induce their assemblage points to move to specific
positions."

He seemed
suddenly annoyed. I asked if it was my insistence on speculating that was
bothering him.

"I am
just considering how our rationality puts us between a rock and a hard
place," he said. "Our tendency is to ponder, to question, to find
out. And there is no way to do that from within the discipline of sorcery.
Sorcery is the act of reaching the place of silent knowledge, and silent
knowledge can't be reasoned out. It can only be experienced."

He smiled,
his eyes shining like two spots of light. He said that sorcerers, in an effort
to protect themselves from the overwhelming effect of silent knowledge,
developed the art of stalking. Stalking moves the assemblage point minutely but
steadily, thus giving sorcerers time and therefore the possibility of
buttressing themselves.

"Within
the art of stalking," don Juan continued, "there is a technique which
sorcerers use a great deal: controlled folly. Sorcerers claim that controlled
folly is the only way they have of dealing with themselves - in their state of
expanded awareness and perception - and with everybody and everything in the
world of daily affairs."

Don Juan
had explained controlled folly as the art of controlled deception or the art of
pretending to be thoroughly immersed in the action at hand - pretending so well
no one could tell it from the real thing. Controlled folly is not an outright
deception, he had told me, but a sophisticated, artistic way of being separated
from everything while remaining an integral part of everything.

"Controlled
folly is an art," don Juan continued. "A very bothersome art, and a difficult
one to learn. Many sorcerers don't have the stomach for it, not because there
is anything inherently wrong with the art, but because it takes a lot of energy
to exercise it."

Don Juan
admitted that he practiced it conscientiously, although he was not particularly
fond of doing so, perhaps because his benefactor had been so adept at it. Or,
perhaps it was because his personality - which he said was basically devious
and petty - simply did not have the agility needed to practice controlled
folly.

I looked at
him with surprise. He stopped talking and fixed me with his mischievous eyes.

"By
the time we come to sorcery, our personality is already formed," he said,
and shrugged his shoulders to signify resignation, "and all we can do is
practice controlled folly and laugh at ourselves."

I had a
surge of empathy and assured him that to me he was not in any way petty or
devious. "But that's my basic personality," he insisted.

And I
insisted that it was not.

"Stalkers
who practice controlled folly believe that, in matters of personality, the
entire human race falls into three categories," he said, and smiled the
way he always did when he was setting me up.

"That's
absurd," I protested. "Human behavior is too complex to be
categorized so simply." "Stalkers say that we are not so complex as
we think we are," he said, "and that we all belong to one of three
categories."

I laughed
out of nervousness. Ordinarily I would have taken such a statement as a joke,
but this time, because my mind was extremely clear and my thoughts were
poignant, I felt he was indeed serious.

"Are
you serious?" I asked, as politely as I could.

"Completely
serious," he replied, and began to laugh.

His
laughter relaxed me a little. And he continued explaining the stalkers' system
of classification. He said that people in the first class are the perfect
secretaries, assistants, companions. They have a very fluid personality, but
their fluidity is not nourishing. They are, however, serviceable, concerned,
totally domestic, resourceful within limits, humorous, well-mannered, sweet,
delicate. In other words, they are the nicest people one could find, but they
have one huge flaw: they can't function alone. They are always in need of
someone to direct them. With direction, no matter how strained or antagonistic
that direction might be, they are stupendous. By themselves, they perish.

People in
the second class are not nice at all. They are petty, vindictive, envious,
jealous, self-centered. They talk exclusively about themselves and usually
demand that people conform to their standards. They always take the initiative
even though they are not comfortable with it. They are thoroughly ill at ease
in every situation and never relax. They are insecure and are never pleased;
the more insecure they become the nastier they are. Their fatal flaw is that
they would kill to be leaders.

In the
third category are people who are neither nice nor nasty. They serve no one,
nor do they impose themselves on anyone. Rather they are indifferent. They have
an exalted idea about themselves derived solely from daydreams and wishful
thinking. If they are extraordinary at anything, it is at waiting for things to
happen. They are waiting to be discovered and conquered and have a marvelous
facility for creating the illusion that they have great things in abeyance,
which they always promise to deliver but never do because, in fact, they do not
have such resources.

Don Juan
said that he himself definitely belonged to the second class. He then asked me
to classify myself and I became rattled. Don Juan was practically on the
ground, bent over with laughter.

He urged me
again to classify myself, and reluctantly I suggested I might be a combination
of the three.

"Don't
give me that combination nonsense," he said, still laughing. "We are
simple beings, each of us is one of the three types. And as far as I am
concerned, you belong to the second class. Stalkers call them farts."

I began to
protest that his scheme of classification was demeaning. But I stopped myself
just as I was about to go into a long tirade. Instead I commented that if it
were true that there are only three types of personalities, all of us are
trapped in one of those three categories for life with no hope of change or
redemption.

He agreed
that that was exactly the case. Except that one avenue for redemption remained.
Sorcerers had long ago learned that only our personal self-reflection fell into
one of the categories.

"The
trouble with us is that we take ourselves seriously," he said.
"Whichever category our self-image falls into only matters because of our
self-importance. If we weren't self-important, it wouldn't matter at all which
category we fell into.

"I'll
always be a fart," he continued, his body shaking with laughter. "And
so will you. But now I am a fart who doesn't take himself seriously, while you
still do."

I was
indignant. I wanted to argue with him, but could not muster the energy for it.
In the empty plaza, the reverberation of his laughter was eerie.

He changed
the subject then and reeled off the basic cores he had discussed with me: the
manifestations of the spirit, the knock of the spirit, the trickery of the
spirit, the descent of the spirit, the requirement of intent, and handling
intent. He repeated them as if he were giving my memory a chance to retain them
fully. And then, he succinctly highlighted everything he had told me about
them. It was as if he were deliberately making me store all that information in
the intensity of that moment.

I remarked
that the basic cores were still a mystery to me. I felt very apprehensive about
my ability to understand them. He was giving me the impression that he was
about to dismiss the topic, and I had not grasped its meaning at all.

I insisted
that I had to ask him more questions about the abstract cores.

He seemed to
assess what I was saying, then he quietly nodded his head.

"This
topic was also very difficult for me," he said. "And I, too, asked
many questions. I was perhaps a tinge more self-centered than you. And very
nasty. Nagging was the only way I knew of asking questions. You yourself are
rather a belligerent inquisitor. At the end, of course, you and I are equally
annoying, but for different reasons."

There was
only one more thing don Juan added to our discussion of the basic cores before
he changed the subject: that they revealed themselves extremely slowly,
erratically advancing and retreating.

"I
can't repeat often enough that every man whose assemblage point moves can move
it further," he began. "And the only reason we need a teacher is to
spur us on mercilessly. Otherwise our natural reaction is to stop to
congratulate ourselves for having covered so much ground."

He said
that we were both good examples of our odious tendency to go easy on ourselves.
His benefactor, fortunately, being the stupendous stalker he was, had not
spared him.

Don Juan
said that in the course of their nighttime journeys in the wilderness, the
nagual Julian had lectured him extensively on the nature of self-importance and
the movement of the assemblage point. For the nagual Julian, self-importance
was a monster that had three thousand heads. And one could face up to it and
destroy it in any of three ways. The first way was to sever each head one at a
time; the second was to reach that mysterious state of being called the place
of no pity, which destroyed self-importance by slowly starving it; and the
third was to pay for the instantaneous annihilation of the
three-thousand-headed monster with one's symbolic death.

The nagual
Julian recommended the third alternative. But he told don Juan that he could
consider himself fortunate if he got the chance to choose. For it was the
spirit that usually determined which way the sorcerer was to go, and it was the
duty of the sorcerer to follow.

Don Juan
said that, as he had guided me, his benefactor guided him to cut off the three
thousand heads of self-importance, one by one, but that the results had been
quite different. While I had responded very well, he had not responded at all.

"Mine
was a peculiar condition," he went on. "From the moment my benefactor
saw me lying on the road with a bullet hole in my chest, he knew I was the new
nagual. He acted accordingly and moved my assemblage point as soon as my health
permitted it. And I saw with great ease a field of energy in the form of that
monstrous man. But this accomplishment, instead of helping as it was supposed
to, hindered any further movement of my assemblage point. And while the
assemblage points of the other apprentices moved steadily, mine remained fixed
at the level of being able to see the monster."

"But
didn't your benefactor tell you what was going on?" I asked, truly baffled
by the unnecessary complication.

"My
benefactor didn't believe in handing down knowledge," don Juan said.
"He thought that knowledge imparted that way lacked effectiveness. It was
never there when one needed it. On the other hand, if knowledge was only
insinuated, the person who was interested would devise ways to claim that
knowledge."

Don Juan
said that the difference between his method of teaching and his benefactor's
was that he himself believed one should have the freedom to choose. His
benefactor did not.

"Didn't
your benefactor's teacher, the nagual Elias, tell you what was happening?"
I insisted.

"He
tried," don Juan said, and sighed, "but I was truly impossible. I
knew everything. I just let the two men talk my ear off and never listened to a
thing they were saying."

In order to
deal with that impasse, the nagual Julian decided to force don Juan to
accomplish once again, but in a different way, a free movement of his
assemblage point.

I
interrupted him to ask whether this had happened before or after his experience
at the river. Don Juan's stories did not have the chronological order I would
have liked.

"This
happened several months afterward," he replied. "And don't you think
for an instant that because I experienced that split perception I was really
changed; that I was wiser or more sober. Nothing of the sort.

"Consider
what happens to you," he went on. "I have not only broken your
continuity time and time again, I have ripped it to shreds, and look at you;
you still act as if you were intact. That is a supreme accomplishment of magic,
of intending.

"I was
the same. For a while, I would reel under the impact of what I was experiencing
and then I would forget and tie up the severed ends as if nothing had happened.
That was why my benefactor believed that we can only really change if we
die."

Returning
to his story, don Juan said that the nagual used Tulio, the unsociable member
of his household, to deliver a new shattering blow to his psychological
continuity.

Don Juan
said that all the apprentices, including himself, had never been in total
agreement about anything except that Tulio was a contemptibly arrogant little
man. They hated Tulio because he either avoided them or snubbed them. He
treated them all with such disdain that they felt like dirt. They were all
convinced that Tulio never spoke to them because he had nothing to say; and
that his most salient feature, his arrogant aloofness, was a cover for his timidity.