The Power of Silence (6 page)

The mere
mention of my discomfort delighted don Juan beyond measure. He had to stand up
from his chair lest he choke on his laughter. He put his arm on my shoulder and
said that we either loved or hated those who were reflections of ourselves.

Again a
silly self-consciousness prevented me from asking him what he meant. Don Juan
kept on laughing, obviously aware of my mood. He finally commented that the nagual
Julian was like a child whose sobriety and moderation came always from without.
He had no inner discipline beyond his training as an apprentice in sorcery.

I had an
irrational urge to defend myself. I told don Juan that my discipline came from
within me.

"Of
course," he said patronizingly. "You just can't expect to be exactly
like him." And began to laugh again.

Sometimes
don Juan exasperated me so that I was ready to yell. But my mood did not last.
It dissipated so rapidly that another concern began to loom. I asked don Juan
if it was possible that I had entered into heightened awareness without being
conscious of it? Or maybe I had remained in it for days?

"At
this stage you enter into heightened awareness all by yourself," he said.
"Heightened awareness is a mystery only for our reason. In practice, it's
very simple. As with everything else, we complicate matters by trying to make
the immensity that surrounds us reasonable."

He remarked
that I should be thinking about the abstract core he had given me instead of
arguing uselessly about my person.

I told him
that I had been thinking about it all morning and had come to realize that the
metaphorical theme of the story was the manifestations of the spirit. What I
could not discern, however, was the abstract core he was talking about. It had
to be something unstated.

"I
repeat," he said, as if he were a schoolteacher drilling his students,
"the manifestations of the spirit is the name for the first abstract core
in the sorcery stories. Obviously, what sorcerers recognize as an abstract core
is something that bypasses you at this moment. That part which escapes you
sorcerers know as the edifice of intent, or the silent voice of the spirit, or
the ulterior arrangement of the abstract."

I said I
understood ulterior to mean something not overtly revealed, as in
"ulterior motive." And he replied that in this case ulterior meant
more; it meant knowledge without words, outside our immediate comprehension -
especially mine. He allowed that the comprehension he was referring to was
merely beyond my aptitudes of the moment, not beyond my ultimate possibilities
for understanding.

"If
the abstract cores are beyond my comprehension what's the point of talking
about them?" I asked.

"The
rule says that the abstract cores and the sorcery stories must be told at this
point," he replied. "And some day the ulterior arrangement of the
abstract, which is knowledge without words or the edifice of intent inherent in
the stories, will be revealed to you by the stories themselves."

I still did
not understand.

"The
ulterior arrangement of the abstract is not merely the order in which the
abstract cores were presented to you," he explained, "or what they
have in common either, nor even the web that joins them. Rather it's to know
the abstract directly, without the intervention of language."

He
scrutinized me in silence from head to toe with the obvious purpose of
seeing
me.

"It's
not evident to you yet," he declared.

He made a
gesture of impatience, even short temper, as though he were annoyed at my
slowness. And that worried me. Don Juan was not given to expressions of
psychological displeasure.

"It
has nothing to do with you or your actions," he said when I asked if he
was angry or disappointed with me. "It was a thought that crossed my mind
the moment I
saw
you. There is a feature in your luminous being that the old sorcerers would
have given anything to have."

"Tell
me what it is," I demanded.

"I'll
remind you of this some other time," he said.

"Meanwhile,
let's continue with the element that propels us: the abstract. The element
without which there could be no warrior's path, nor any warriors in search of
knowledge."

He said
that the difficulties I was experiencing were nothing new to him. He himself
had gone through agonies in order to understand the ulterior order of the
abstract. And had it not been for the helping hand of the nagual Elias, he
would have wound up just like his benefactor, all action and very little
understanding.

"What
was the nagual Elias like?" I asked, to change the subject.

"He
was not like his disciple at all," don Juan said. "He was an Indian.
Very dark and massive. He had rough features, big mouth, strong nose, small
black eyes, thick black hair with no gray in it. He was shorter than the nagual
Julian and had big hands and feet. He was very humble and very wise, but he had
no flare. Compared with my benefactor, he was dull. Always all by himself,
pondering questions. The nagual Julian used to joke that his teacher imparted
wisdom by the ton. Behind his back he used to call him the nagual Tonnage.

"I
never saw the reason for his jokes," don Juan went on. "To me the
nagual Elias was like a breath of fresh air. He would patiently explain
everything to me. Very much as I explain things to you, but perhaps with a bit
more of something. I wouldn't call it compassion, but rather, empathy. Warriors
are incapable of feeling compassion because they no longer feel sorry for
themselves. Without the driving force of self-pity, compassion is
meaningless."

"Are
you saying, don Juan, that a warrior is all for himself?"

"In a
way, yes. For a warrior everything begins and ends with himself. However, his
contact with the abstract causes him to overcome his feeling of
self-importance. Then the self becomes abstract and impersonal.

"The
nagual Elias felt that our lives and our personalities were quite
similar," don Juan continued. "For this reason, he felt obliged to
help me. I don't feel that similarity with you, so I suppose I regard you very
much the way the nagual Julian used to regard me."

Don Juan
said that the nagual Elias took him under his wing from the very first day he
arrived at his benefactor's house to start his apprenticeship and began to
explain what was taking place in his training, regardless of whether don Juan
was capable of understanding. His urge to help don Juan was so intense that he
practically held him prisoner. He protected him in this manner from the nagual
Julian's harsh onslaughts.

"At
the beginning, I used to stay at the nagual Elias's house all the time," don
Juan continued. "And I loved it. In my benefactor's house I was always on
the lookout, on guard, afraid of what he was going to do to me next. But in the
Nagual Elias's home I felt confident, at ease.

"My
benefactor used to press me mercilessly. And I couldn't figure out why he was
pressuring me so hard. I thought that the man was plain crazy."

Don Juan
said that the nagual Elias was an Indian from the state of Oaxaca, who had been
taught by another nagual named Rosendo, who came from the same area. Don Juan
described the nagual Elias as being a very conservative man who cherished his
privacy. And yet he was a famous healer and sorcerer, not only in Oaxaca, but in all of southern Mexico. Nonetheless, in spite of his occupation and
notoriety, he lived in complete isolation at the opposite end of the country,
in northern Mexico.

Don Juan
stopped talking. Raising his eyebrows, he fixed me with a questioning look. But
all I wanted was for him to continue his story.

"Every
single time I think you should ask questions, you don't," he said.
"I'm sure you heard me say that the nagual Elias was a famous sorcerer who
dealt with people daily in southern Mexico, and at the same time he was a
hermit in northern Mexico. Doesn't that arouse your curiosity?"

I felt
abysmally stupid. I told him that the thought had crossed my mind, as he was
telling me those facts, that the man must have had terrible difficulty
commuting.

Don Juan
laughed, and, since he had made me aware of the question, I asked how it had
been possible for the nagual Elias to be in two places at once.

"
Dreaming
is a sorcerer's jet plane," he said. "The nagual Elias was a dreamer
as my benefactor was a stalker. He was able to create and project what
sorcerers know as the dreaming body, or the Other, and to be in two distant
places at the same time. With his dreaming body, he could carry on his business
as a sorcerer, and with his natural self be a recluse."

I remarked
that it amazed me that I could accept so easily the premise that the nagual
Elias had the ability to project a solid three-dimensional image of himself,
and yet could not for the life of me understand the explanations about the
abstract cores.

Don Juan
said that I could accept the idea of the nagual Elias's dual life because the
spirit was making final adjustments in my capacity for awareness. And I
exploded into a barrage of protests at the obscurity of his statement.

"It
isn't obscure," he said. "It's a statement of fact. You could say
that it's an incomprehensible fact for the moment, but the moment will
change."

Before I
could reply, he began to talk again about the nagual Elias. He said that the
nagual Elias had a very inquisitive mind and could work well with his hands. In
his journeys as a dreamer he saw many objects, which he copied in wood and
forged iron. Don Juan assured me that some of those models were of a haunting,
exquisite beauty.

"What
kind of objects were the originals?" I asked.

"There's
no way of knowing," don Juan said. "You've got to consider that
because he was an Indian the nagual Elias went into his dreaming journeys the
way a wild animal prowls for food.

An animal
never shows up at a site when there are signs of activity. He comes only when
no one is around. The nagual Elias, as a solitary dreamer, visited, let's say,
the junkyard of infinity, when no one was around - and copied whatever he saw,
but never knew what those things were used for, or their source."

Again, I
had no trouble accepting what he was saying. The idea did not appear to me
farfetched in any way. I was about to comment when he interrupted me with a
gesture of his eyebrows. He then continued his account about the nagual Elias.

"Visiting
him was for me the ultimate treat," he said, "and simultaneously, a
source of strange guilt. I used to get bored to death there. Not because the
nagual Elias was boring, but because the nagual Julian had no peers and he
spoiled anyone for life."

"But I
thought you were confident and at ease in the nagual Elias's house," I
said.

"I
was, and that was the source of my guilt and my imagined problem. Like you, I
loved to torment myself. I think at the very beginning I found peace in the
nagual Elias's company, but later on, when I understood the nagual Julian
better, I went his way."

He told me
that the nagual Elias's house had an open, roofed section in the front, where
he had a forge and a carpentry bench and tools. The tiled-roof adobe house
consisted of a huge room with a dirt floor where he lived with five women
seers, who were actually his wives. There were also four men, sorcerer-seers of
his party who lived in small houses around the nagual's house. They were all
Indians from different parts of the country who had migrated to northern Mexico.

"The
nagual Elias had great respect for sexual energy," don Juan said. "He
believed it has been given to us so we can use it in dreaming. He believed
dreaming had fallen into disuse because it can upset the precarious mental
balance of susceptible people.

"I've
taught you
dreaming
the same way he taught me," he continued.
"He taught me that while we dream the assemblage point moves very gently
and naturally. Mental balance is nothing but the fixing of the assemblage point
on one spot we're accustomed to. If dreams make that point move, and dreaming
is used to control that natural movement, and sexual energy is needed for
dreaming, the result is sometimes disastrous when sexual energy is dissipated
in sex instead of dreaming. Then dreamers move their assemblage point
erratically and lose their minds."

"What
are you trying to tell me, don Juan?" I asked because I felt that the
subject of dreaming had not been a natural drift in the conversation.

"You
are a dreamer" he said. "If you're not careful with your sexual
energy, you might as well get used to the idea of erratic shifts of your
assemblage point. A moment ago you were bewildered by your reactions. Well,
your assemblage point moves almost erratically, because your sexual energy is
not in balance."

I made a
stupid and inappropriate comment about the sex life of adult males.

"Our
sexual energy is what governs
dreaming
," he explained. "The
nagual Elias taught me - and I taught you - that you either make love with your
sexual energy or you
dream
with it. There is no other way. The reason I
mention it at all is because you are having great difficulty shifting your
assemblage point to grasp our last topic: the abstract.