The
Universal Shifts of Consciousness
First Lot of Books by
Carlos
Castaneda
You are not
Your Physical Body; You are Not the Physical Matter: You are Energy !
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Carlos
Castaneda "Separate
Reality"
Second book in the series.
Index:
Introduction...............................................................................3
Part 1:The Preliminaries of “Seeing”
Chapter
1...................................................................................12
Chapter
2...................................................................................15
Chapter
3...................................................................................25
Chapter
4...................................................................................32
Chapter
5...................................................................................42
Chapter
6...................................................................................49
Part 2: Task of “Seeing”
Chapter
7...................................................................................58
Chapter
8...................................................................................66
Chapter
9...................................................................................69
Chapter
10.................................................................................75
Chapter
11.................................................................................80
Chapter
12.................................................................................88
Chapter
13.................................................................................95
Chapter
14.................................................................................104
Chapter
15.................................................................................114
Chapter
16.................................................................................118
Chapter
17.................................................................................127
Epilogue....................................................................................135
2
Carlos Castaneda
“Separate Reality”
Scanned by Ovix (controlledfolly@gmail.com)
Introduction
Ten years ago I had the fortune of meeting a Yaqui Indian from
northwestern Mexico. I call him "don Juan."
In Spanish, don is an appellative used to denote respect. I made don
Juan's acquaintance under the most
fortuitous circumstances. I was sitting with Bill, a friend of mine, in
a bus depot in a border town in Arizona. We
were very quiet. In the late afternoon the summer heat seemed
unbearable. Suddenly he leaned over and tapped
me on the shoulder.
"There's the man I told you about," he said in a low voice.
He nodded casually toward the entrance. An old man had just walked in.
"What did you tell me about him?" I asked.
"He's the Indian that knows about peyote. Remember?"
I remembered that Bill and I had once driven all day looking for the
house of an "eccentric" Mexican Indian
who lived in the area. We did not find the man's house and I had the
feeling that the Indians whom we had asked
for directions had deliberately misled us. Bill had told me that the
man was a "yerbero," a person who gathers and
sells medicinal herbs, and that he knew a great deal about the
hallucinogenic cactus, peyote. He had also said that
it would be worth my while to meet him. Bill was my guide in the
Southwest while I was collecting information
and specimens of medicinal plants used by the Indians of the area.
Bill got up and went to greet the man. The Indian was of medium height.
His hair was white and short, and
grew a bit over his ears, accentuating the roundness of his head.
He was very dark; the deep wrinkles cm his face gave him the appearance
of age, yet his body seemed to be
strong and fit. I watched him for a moment. He moved around with a
nimbleness that I would have thought
impossible for an old man.
Bill signaled me to join them.
"He's a nice guy," Bill said to me. "But I can't understand him. His
Spanish is weird, full of rural colloquialisms,
I suppose."
The old man looked at Bill and smiled. And Bill, who speaks only a few
words of Spanish, made up an
absurd phrase in that language. He looked at me as if asking whether he
was making sense, but I did not know
what he had had in mind; he then smiled shyly and walked away. The old
man looked at me and began laughing.
I explained to him that my friend sometimes forgot that he did not
speak Spanish.
"I think he also forgot to introduce us," I said, and I told him my
name.
"And I am Juan Matus, at your service," he said.
We shook hands and remained quiet for some time. I broke the silence
and told him about my enterprise. I
told him that I was looking for any kind of information on plants,
especially peyote. I talked compulsively for a
long time, and although I was almost totally ignorant on the subject, I
said I knew a great deal about peyote. I
thought that if I boasted about my knowledge he would become interested
in talking to me. But he did not say
anything. He listened patiently. Then he nodded slowly and peered at
me. His eyes seemed to shine with a light
of their own. I avoided his gaze. I felt embarrassed. I had the
certainty that at that moment he knew I was talking
nonsense.
"Come to my house some time," he finally said, taking his eyes away
from me. "Perhaps we could talk there
with more ease."
I did not know what else to say. I felt uneasy. After a while Bill came
back into the room. He recognized my
discomfort and did not say a word. We sat in tight silence for some
time. Then the old man got up. His bus had
come. He said goodbye.
"It didn't go too well, did it?" Bill asked.
3
"No."
"Did you ask him about plants?"
"I did. But I think I goofed."
"I told you, he's very eccentric. The Indians around here know him, yet
they never mention him. And that's
something."
"He said I could come to his house, though."
"He was bullshitting you. Sure, you can go to his house, but what does
it mean? He'll never tell you anything.
If you ever ask him anything he'll clam up as if you were an idiot
talking nonsense."
Bill said convincingly that he had encountered people like him before,
people who gave the impression of
knowing a great deal. In his judgment, he said, such people were not
worth the trouble, because sooner or later
one could obtain the same information from someone else who did not
play hard to get. He said that he had
neither patience nor time for old fogies, and that it was possible that
the old man was only presenting himself as
being knowledgeable about herbs, when in reality he knew as little as
the next man.
Bill went on talking but I was not listening. My mind kept on wondering
about the old Indian. He knew I had
been bluffing. I remembered his eyes. They had actually shone.
I went back to see him a couple of months later, not so much as a
student of anthropology interested in
medicinal plants but as a person with an inexplicable curiosity. The
way he had looked at me was an
unprecedented event in my life. I wanted to know what was involved in
that look, it became almost an obsession
with me. I pondered it and the more I thought about it the more unusual
it seemed to be.
Don Juan and I became friends, and for a year I paid innumerable
visits. I found his manner very reassuring I
his sense of humor superb; but above all I felt there a silent
consistency about his acts, a consistency which was
thoroughly baffling to me. I felt a strange delight in his presence and
at the same time I experienced a strange
discomfort. His mere company forced me to make a tremendous
reevaluation of my models of behavior. I had
been reared, perhaps like everyone else, to have a readiness to accept
man as an essentially weak and fallible
creature. What impressed me about don Juan was the fact that he did not
make a point of being weak and
helpless, and just being around him insured an unfavorable comparison
between his way of behaving and mine.
Perhaps one of the most impressive statements he made to me at that
time was concerned with our inherent
difference. Prior to one of my visits I had been feeling quite unhappy
about the total course of my life and about a
number of pressing personal conflicts that I had. When I arrived at his
house I felt moody and nervous.
We were talking about my interest in knowledge; but, as usual, we were
on two different tracks. I was
referring to academic knowledge that transcends experience, while he
was talking about direct knowledge of the
world.
"Do you know anything about the world around you?" he asked.
"I know all kinds of things," I said.
"I mean do you ever feel the world around you?"
"I feel as much of the world around me as I can."
"That's not enough. You must feel everything, otherwise the world loses
its sense."
I voiced the classical argument that I did not have to taste the soup
in order to know the recipe, nor did I have
to get an electric shock in order to know about electricity.
"You make it sound stupid," he said. "The way I see it, you want to
cling to your arguments, despite the fact
that they bring nothing to you; you want to remain the same even at the
cost of your well-being."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"I am talking about the fact that you're not complete. You have no
peace."
That statement annoyed me. I felt offended. I thought he was certainly
not qualified to pass judgment on my
acts or my personality.
"You're plagued with problems," he said. "Why?"
"I am only a man, don Juan," I said peevishly.
I made that statement in the same vein my father used to make it.
Whenever he said he was only a man he
4
implicitly meant he was weak and helpless and his statement, like mine,
was filled with an ultimate sense of
despair.
Don Juan peered at me as he had done the first day we met.
"You think about yourself too much," he said and smiled. "And that
gives you a strange fatigue that makes
you shut off the world around you and cling to your arguments.
Therefore, all you have is problems. I'm only a
man too, but I don't mean that the way you do."
"How do you mean it?"
"I've vanquished my problems. Too bad my life is so short that I can't
grab onto all the things I would like to.
But that is not an issue; it's only a pity."
I liked the tone of his statement. There was no despair or self-pity in
it.
In 1961, a year after our first meeting, don Juan disclosed to me that
he had a secret knowledge of medicinal
plants. He told me he was a "brujo." The Spanish word brujo can be
rendered in English as sorcerer, medicine
man, curer. From that point on the relation between us changed; I
became his apprentice and for the next four
years he endeavored to teach me the mysteries of sorcery. I have
written about that apprenticeship in The Teachings
of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge.
Our conversations were conducted in Spanish, and thanks to don Juan's
superb command of that language I
obtained detailed explanations of the intricate means of his system of
beliefs. I have referred to that complex and
well-systematized body of knowledge as sorcery and to him as a sorcerer
because those categories he himself
used in informal conversations. In the context of more serious
elucidations, however, he could use the terms
"knowledge" to categorize sorcery and "man of knowledge" or "one who
knows" to categorize a sorcerer.
In order to teach and corroborate his knowledge don Juan used three
well-known psychotropic plants: peyote,
Lophophora williamasii; jimson weed, Datura inoxia; and a species of
mushroom which belongs to the genus
Psylocebe. Through the separate ingestion of each of these
hallucinogens he produced in me, as his apprentice,
some peculiar states of distorted perception, or altered consciousness,
which I have called "states of nonordinary
reality." I have used the word "reality" because it was a major premise
in don Juan's system of beliefs that the
states of consciousness produced by the ingestion of any of those three
plants were not hallucinations, but concrete,
although unordinary, aspects of the reality of everyday life. Don Juan
behaved toward these states of nonordinary
reality not "as if" they were real but "as" real.
To classify these plants as hallucinogens and the states they produced
as nonordinary reality is, of course, my
own device. Don Juan understood and explained the plants as being
vehicles that would conduct or lead a man to
certain impersonal forces or "powers" and the states they produced as
being the "meetings" that a sorcerer had to
have with those "powers" in order to gain control over them.
He called peyote "Mescalito" and he explained it as being a benevolent
teacher and protector of men.
Mescalito taught the "right way to live." Peyote was usually ingested
at gatherings of sorcerers called "mitotes,"
where the participants would gather specifically to seek a lesson on
the right way to live.
Don Juan considered the jimson weed and the mushrooms to be powers of a
different sort. He called them
"allies" and said that they were capable of being manipulated; a
sorcerer, in fact, drew his strength from manipulating
an ally. Of the two, don Juan preferred the mushroom. He maintained
that the power contained in the
mushroom was his personal ally and he called it "smoke" or "little
smoke."
Don Juan's procedure to utilize the mushrooms was to let them dry into
a fine powder inside a small gourd.
He kept the gourd sealed for a year and then mixed the fine powder with
five other dry plants and produced a
mixture for smoking in a pipe.
In order to become a man of knowledge one had to "meet" with the ally
as many times as possible; one had
to become familiar with it. This premise implied, of course, that one
had to smoke the hallucinogenic mixture
quite often. The process of "smoking" consisted of ingesting the fine
mushroom powder, which did not
incinerate, and inhaling the smoke of the other five plants that made
up the mixture. Don Juan explained the
profound effects that the mushrooms had on one's perceptual capacities
as the "ally removing one's body."
Don Juan's method of teaching required an extraordinary effort on the
part of the apprentice. In fact, the
5
degree of participation and involvement needed was so strenuous that by
the end of 1965 I had to withdraw from
the apprenticeship. I can say now, with the perspective of the five
years that have elapsed, that at that time don
Juan's teachings had begun to pose a serious threat to my "idea of the
world." I had begun to lose the certainty,
which all of us have, that the reality of everyday life is something we
can take for granted.
At the time of my withdrawal I was convinced that my decision was
final; I did not want to see don Juan ever
again. However, in April of 1968 an early copy of my book was made
available to me and I felt compelled to
show it to him. I paid him a visit. Our link of teacher-apprentice was
mysteriously reestablished, and I can say
that on that occasion I began a second cycle of apprenticeship, very
different from the first. My fear was not as
acute as it had been in the past. The total mood of don Juan's
teachings was more relaxed. He laughed and also
made me laugh a great deal. There seemed to be a deliberate intent on
his part to minimize seriousness in general.
He clowned during the truly crucial moments of this second cycle, and
thus helped me to overcome experiences
which could easily have become obsessive. His premise was that a light
and amenable disposition was needed in
order to withstand the impact and the strangeness of the knowledge he
was teaching me.
"The reason you got scared and quit is because you felt too damn
important," he said, explaining my previous
withdrawal. "Feeling important makes one heavy, clumsy, and vain. To be
a man of knowledge one needs to be
light and fluid."
Don Juan's particular interest in his second cycle of apprenticeship
was to teach me to "see." Apparently in
his system of knowledge there was the possibility of making a semantic
difference between "seeing" and
"looking" as two distinct manners of perceiving. "Looking" referred to
the ordinary way in which we are
accustomed to perceive the world, while "seeing" entailed a very
complex process by virtue of which a man of
knowledge allegedly perceives the "essence" of the things of the world.
In order to present the intricacies of this learning process in a
readable form I have condensed long passages
of questions and answers, and thus I have edited my original field
notes. It is my belief, however, that at this
point my presentation cannot possibly detract from the meaning of don
Juan's teachings. The editing was aimed
at making my notes flow, as conversation flows, so they would have the
impact I desired; that is to say, I wanted
by means of a reportage to communicate to the reader the drama and
directness of the field situation. Each
section I have set as a chapter was a session with don Juan. As a rule,
he always concluded each of our sessions
on an abrupt note; thus the dramatic tone of the ending of each chapter
is not a literary device of my own, it was a
device proper of don Juan's oral tradition. It seemed to be a mnemonic
device that helped me to retain the
dramatic quality and importance of the lessons.
Certain explanations are needed, however, to make my reportage cogent,
since its clarity depends on the
elucidation of a number of key concepts or key units that I want to
emphasize. This choice of emphasis is
congruous with my interest in social science. It is perfectly possible
that another person with a different set of
goals and expectations would single out concepts entirely different
from those I have chosen myself.
During the second cycle of apprenticeship don Juan made a point of
assuring me that the use of the smoking
mixture was the indispensable prerequisite to "seeing." Therefore I had
to use it as often as possible.
"Only the smoke can give you the necessary speed to catch a glimpse of
that fleeting world," he said.
With the aid of the psychotropic mixture, he produced in me a series of
states of nonordinary reality. The
main feature of such states, in relation to what don Juan seemed to be
doing, was a condition of "inapplicability."
What I perceived in those states of altered consciousness was
incomprehensible and impossible to interpret by
means of our everyday mode of understanding the world. In other words,
the condition of inapplicability entailed
the cessation of the pertinence of my world view.
Don Juan used this condition of inapplicability of the states of
nonordinary reality in order to introduce a
series of preconceived, new "units of meaning." Units of meaning were
all the single elements pertinent to the
knowledge don Juan was striving to teach me. I have called them units
of meaning because they were the basic
conglomerate of sensory data and their interpretations on which more
complex meaning was constructed. One
example of such a unit is the way in which the physiological effect of
the psychotropic mixture was understood.
It produced a numbness and loss of motor control that was interpreted
in don Juan's system as an act performed
6
by the smoke, which in this case was the ally, in order "to remove the
body of the practitioner."
Units of meaning were grouped together in a specific way, and each
block thus created formed what I have
called a "sensible interpretation." Obviously there has to be an
endless number of possible sensible interpretations
that are pertinent to sorcery that a sorcerer must learn to make. In
our day-to-day life we are confronted with an
endless number of sensible interpretations pertinent to it. A simple
example could be the no longer deliberate
interpretation, which we make scores of times every day, of the
structure we call "room." It is obvious that we
have learned to interpret the structure we call room in terms of room;
thus room is a sensible interpretation
because it requires that at the time we make it we are cognizant, in
one way or another, of all the elements that
enter into its composition. A system of sensible interpretation is, in
other words, the process by virtue of which a
practitioner is cognizant of all the units of meaning necessary to make
assumptions, deductions, predictions, etc.,
about all the situations pertinent to his activity.
By "practitioner" I mean a participant who has an adequate knowledge of
all, or nearly all, the units of meaning
involved in his particular system of sensible interpretation. Don Juan
was a practitioner; that is, he was a
sorcerer who knew all the steps of his sorcery.
As a practitioner he attempted to make his system of sensible
interpretation accessible to me. Such an
accessibility, in this case, was equivalent to a process of
re-socialization in which new ways of interpreting
perceptual data were learned.
I was the "stranger," the one who lacked the capacity to make
intelligent and congruous interpretations of the
units of meaning proper to sorcery.
Don Juan's task, as a practitioner making his system accessible to me,
was to disarrange a particular certainty
which I share with everyone else, the certainty that our "common-sense"
views of the world are final. Through
the use of psychotropic plants, and through well-directed contacts
between the alien system and myself, he
succeeded in pointing out to me that my view of the world cannot be
final because it is only an interpretation.
For the American Indian, perhaps for thousands of years, the vague
phenomenon we call sorcery has been a
serious bona fide practice, comparable to that of our science. Our
difficulty in understanding it stems, no doubt,
from the alien units of meaning with which it deals.
Don Juan had once told me that a man of knowledge had predilections. I
asked him to explain his statement.
"My predilection is to see," he said.
"What do you mean by that?"
"I like to see" he said, "because only by seeing can a man of knowledge
know."
"What kind of things do you see?"
"Everything."
"But I also see everything and I'm not a man of knowledge."
"No. You don't see.
"I think I do."
"I tell you, you don't."
"What makes you say that, don Juan?"
"You only look at the surface of things."
"Do you mean that every man of knowledge actually sees through
everything he looks at?"
"No. That's not what I mean. I said that a man of knowledge has his own
predilections; mine is just to see and
to know; others do other things."
"What other things, for example?"
"Take Sacateca, he's a man of knowledge and his predilection is
dancing. So he dances and knows."
"Is the predilection of a man of knowledge something he does in order
to know?"
"Yes, that is correct."
"But how could dancing help Sacateca to know?"
"One can say that Sacateca dances with all he has."
"Does he dance like I dance? I mean like dancing?"
7
"Let's say that he dances like I see and not like you may dance."
"Does he also see the way you see?"
"Yes, but he also dances."
"How does Sacateca dance?"
"It's hard to explain that. It is a peculiar way of dancing he does
when he wants to know. But all I can say
about it is that, unless you understand the ways of a man who knows, it
is impossible to talk about dancing or
seeing."
"Have you seen him doing his dancing?"
"Yes. However, it is not possible for everyone who looks at his dancing
to see that it is his peculiar way of
knowing."
I knew Sacateca, or at least I knew who he was. We had met and once I
had bought him a beer. He was very
polite and told me I should feel free to stop at his house anytime I
wanted to. I toyed for a long time with the idea
of visiting him but I did not tell don Juan. On the afternoon of May
14, 1962, I drove up to Sacateca's house; he
had given me directions how to get there and I had no trouble finding
it. It was on a corner and had a fence all
around it. The gate was closed. I walked around it to see if I could
peek inside the house. It appeared to be
deserted.
"Don Elias," I called out loud. The chickens got frightened and
scattered about cackling furiously. A small
dog came to the fence. I expected it to bark at me; instead, it just
sat there looking at me. I called out once again
and the chickens had another burst of cackling.
An old woman came out of the house. I asked her to call don Elias.
"He's not here," she said.
"Where can I find him?"
"He's in the fields."
"Where in the fields?"
"I don't know. Come back in the late afternoon. Hell be here around
five."
"Are you don Elias wife?"
"Yes, I'm his wife," she said and smiled.
I tried to ask her about Sacateca but she excused herself and said that
she did not speak Spanish well. I got
into my car and drove away.
I returned to the house around six o'clock. I drove to the door and
yelled Sacateca's name. This time he came
out of the house. I turned on my tape recorder, which in its brown
leather case looked like a camera hanging from
my shoulder. He seemed to recognize me.
"Oh, it's you," he said, smiling. "How's Juan?"
"He's fine. But how are you, don Elias?"
He did not answer. He seemed to be nervous. Overtly he was very
composed, but I felt that he was ill at ease.
"Has Juan sent you here on some sort of errand?"
"No. I came here by myself."
"What in the world for?"
His question seemed to betray very bona fide surprise.
"I just wanted to talk to you," I said, hoping to sound as casual as
possible. "Don Juan has told me marvelous
things about you and I got curious and wanted to ask you a few
questions."
Sacateca was standing in front of me. His body was lean and wiry. He
was wearing khaki pants and shirt. His
eyes were half-closed; he seemed to be sleepy or perhaps drunk. His
mouth was open a bit and his lower lip
hung. I noticed that he was breathing deeply and seemed to be almost
snoring. The thought came to me that
Sacateca was undoubtedly plastered out of his mind. But that thought
seemed to be very incongruous because
only a few minutes before, when he came out of his house, he had been
very alert and aware of my presence.
"What do you want to talk about?" he finally said.
His voice was tired; it was as though his words dragged after each
other. I felt very uneasy. It was as if his
8
tiredness was contagious and pulling me.
"Nothing in particular," I answered. "I just came to chat with you in a
friendly way. You once asked me to
come to your house."
''Yes, I did, but it's not the same now."
"Why isn't it the same?"
"Don't you talk with Juan?"
"Yes, I do."
"Then what do you want with me?"
"I thought maybe I could ask you some questions?"
"Ask Juan. Isn't he teaching you?"
"He is, but just the same I would like to ask you about what he is
teaching me, and have your opinion. This
way I'll be able to know what to do."
"Why do you want to do that? Don't you trust Juan?"
"I do."
"Then why don't you ask him to tell you what you want to know?"
"I do. And he tells me. But if you could also tell me about what don
Juan is teaching me, perhaps I will
understand better."
"Juan can tell you everything. He alone can do that. Don't you
understand that?"
"I do, but then I'd like to talk with people like you, don Elias. One
does not find a man of knowledge every
day."
"Juan is a man of knowledge."
"I know that."
"Then why are you talking to me?"
"I said I came to be friends,"
"No, you didn't. There is something else about you this time."
I wanted to explain myself and all I could do was mumble incoherently.
Sacateca did not say anything. He
seemed to listen attentively. His eyes were half-closed again but I
felt he was peering at me. He nodded almost
imperceptibly. Then his lids opened and I saw his eyes. He seemed to be
looking past me. He casually tapped the
floor with the tip of his right foot, just behind his left heel. His
legs were slightly arched; his arms were limp
against his sides. Then he lifted his-right arm; his hand was open with
the palm turned perpendicular to the
ground; his fingers were extended and pointing toward me. He let his
hand wobble a couple of times before he
brought it to my face level. He held it in that position for an instant
and then he said a few words to me. His voice
was very clear, yet the words dragged.
After a moment he dropped his hand to his side and remained motionless,
taking a strange position. He was
standing, resting on the ball of his left foot. His right foot was
crossed behind the heel of the left foot and he was
tapping the floor rhythmically and gently with the tip of his right foot
I felt an unwarranted apprehension, a form of restlessness. My thoughts
seemed to be dissociated. I was
thinking unrelated nonsensical thoughts that had nothing to do with
what was going on. I noticed my discomfort
and tried to steer my thoughts back to the situation at hand, but I
couldn't in spite of a great struggle. It was as if
some force was keeping me from concentrating or thinking relevant
thoughts.
Sacateca had not said a word, and I didn't know what else to say or do.
Quite automatically, I turned around
and left.
Later on I felt compelled to tell don Juan about my encounter with
Sacateca. Don Juan roared with laughter.
"What really took place there?" I asked.
"Sacateca danced!" don Juan said. "He saw you, then he danced."
"What did he do to me? I felt very cold and dizzy."
"He apparently didn't like you and stopped you by tossing a word at
you."
"How could he possibly do that?" I exclaimed incredulously.
9
"Very simple; he stopped you with his will."
"What did you say?"
"He stopped you with his will!"
The explanation did not suffice. His statements sounded like gibberish
to me. I tried to probe him further, but
he could not explain the event to my satisfaction.
Obviously that event or any event that occurred within this alien
system of sensible interpretation could be
explained or understood only in terms of the units of meaning proper to
that system. This work is, therefore, a
reportage and should be read as a reportage. The system I recorded was
incomprehensible to me, thus the
pretense to anything other than reporting about it would be misleading
and impertinent. In this respect I have
adopted the phenomenological method and have striven to deal with
sorcery solely as phenomena that were
presented to me. I, as the perceiver, recorded what I perceived, and at
the moment of recording I endeavored to
suspend judgment.
10
Part 1
The Preliminaries of “Seeing”
11
1
April 2.1968
Don Juan looked at me for a moment and did not seem at all surprised to
see me, even though it had been
more than two years since I last visited him. He put his hand on my
shoulder and smiled gently and said that I
looked different, that I was getting fat and soft.
I had brought him a copy of my book. Without any preliminaries I took
it out of my brief case and handed it
to him.
"It's a book about you, don Juan," I said.
He took it and flipped through the pages as if they were a deck of
cards. He liked the green color on the dust
jacket and the height of the book. He felt the cover with his palms,
turned it around a couple of times, and then
handed it back to me. I felt a great surge of pride.
"I want you to keep it," I said.
He shook his head with a silent laugh.
"I better not," he said, and then added with a broad "You know what we
do with paper in Mexico."
I laughed. I thought his touch of irony was beautiful.
We where sitting on a bench in the park of a small town in the
mountainous area of central Mexico. I had
absolutely no way of letting him know about my intention of paying him
a visit, but I was certain I was going to
find him, and I did. I waited only a short while in that town before
don Juan came down from the mountains and I
found him at the market, at the stand of one of his friends.
Don Juan told me, matter-of-factly, that I was there just in time to
take him back to Sonora, and we sat in the
park to wait for a friend of his, a Mazatec Indian with whom he lived.
We waited about three hours. We talked about different unimportant
things, and toward the end of the day,
right before his friend came, I related to him some events I had
witnessed a few days before.
During my trip to see him my car broke down in the outskirts of a city
and I had to stay in town for three
days while it was being repaired. There was a motel across the street
from the auto shop, but the outskirts of
towns are always depressing for me, so I took lodgings in a modern
eight-story hotel in the center of town.
The bellboy told me that the hotel had a restaurant, and when I came
down to eat I found that there were
tables out on the sidewalk. It was a rather handsome arrangement set on
the street corner under some low brick
arches of modern lines. It was cool outside and there were empty
tables, yet I preferred to sit in the stuffy
indoors. I had noticed upon entering that a group of shoeshine boys
were sitting on the curb in front of the
restaurant, and I was certain they would have hounded me had I taken
one of the outside tables.
From where I was seated I could see the group of boys through the glass
window. A couple of young men
took a table and the boys flocked around them, asking to shine their
shoes. The young men refused and I was
amazed to see that the boys did not insist and went back to sit on the
curb. After a while three men in business
suits got up and left and the boys ran to their table and began eating
the leftovers; in a matter of seconds the
plates were clean. The same thing happened with leftovers on all the
other tables.
I noticed that the children were quite orderly; if they spilled water
they sponged it up with their own
shoeshine cloths. I also noticed the thoroughness of their scavenging
procedures. They even ate the ice cubes left
in the glasses of water and the lemon slices from the tea, peel and
all. There was absolutely nothing that they
wasted.
In the course of the time I stayed in the hotel I found out that there
was an agreement between the children
and the manager of the restaurant; the boys were allowed to hang around
the premises to make some money from
the customers and were also allowed to eat the leftovers, provided that
they did not harass anybody and did not
break anything. There were eleven in all, ranging in age from five to
twelve; the oldest, however, was kept a distance
from the rest of the group. They deliberately ostracized him, taunting
him with a singsong that he already
had pubic hair and was too old to be among them.
After three days of watching them go like vultures after the most
meager of leftovers I became despondent,
and I left that city feeling that there was no hope for those children
whose world was already molded by their
12
day-after-day struggle for crumbs.
"Do you feel sorry for them?" don Juan exclaimed in a questioning tone.
"I certainly do," I said.
"Why?"
"Because I'm concerned with the well-being of my fellow men. Those are
children and their world is ugly
and cheap."
"Wait! Wait! How can you say that their world is ugly and cheap?" don
Juan said, mocking my statement.
"You think that you're better off, don't you?"
I said I did; and he asked me why; and I told him that in comparison to
those children's world mine was
infinitely more varied and rich in experiences and in opportunities for
personal satisfaction and development.
Don Juan's laughter was friendly and genuine. He said that I was not
careful with what I was saying, that I had no
way of knowing about the richness and the opportunities in the world of
those children.
I thought don Juan was being stubborn. I really thought he was taking
the opposite view just to annoy me. I
sincerely believed that those children did not have the slightest
chance for any intellectual growth.
I argued my point for a while longer and then don Juan asked me
bluntly, "Didn't you once tell me that in
your opinion man's greatest accomplishment was to become a man of
knowledge?"
I had said that, and I repeated again that in my opinion to become a
man of knowledge was one of the
greatest intellectual accomplishments.
"Do you think that your very rich world would ever help you to become a
man of knowledge?" don Juan
asked with slight sarcasm.
I did not answer and he then worded the same question in a different
manner, a thing I always do to him
when I think he does not understand.
"In other words," he said, smiling broadly, obviously aware that I was
cognizant of his ploy, "can your freedom
and opportunities help you to become a man of knowledge?"
"No!" I said emphatically.
"Then how could you feel sorry for those children?" he said seriously.
"Any of them could become a man of
knowledge. All the men of knowledge I know were kids like those you saw
eating leftovers and licking the
tables."
Don Juan's argument gave me an uncomfortable sensation. I had not felt
sorry for those underprivileged
children because they did not have enough to eat, but because in my
terms their world had already condemned
them to be intellectually inadequate. And yet in don Juan's terms any
of them could achieve what I believed to be
the epitome of man's intellectual accomplishment, the goal of becoming
a man of knowledge. My reason for
pitying them was incongruous. Don Juan had nailed me neatly.
"Perhaps you're right," I said. "But how can one avoid the desire, the
genuine desire, to help our fellow
men?"
"How do you think one can help them?"
"By alleviating their burden. The least one can do for our fellow men
is to try to change them. You yourself
are involved in doing that. Aren't you?"
"No. I'm not. I don't know what to change or why to change anything in
my fellow men."
"What about me, don Juan? Weren't you teaching me so I could change?"
"No. I'm not trying to change you. It may happen that one day you may
become a man of knowledge—there's
no way to know that—but that will not change you. Some day
perhaps you'll be able to see men in another mode
and then you'll realize that there's no way to change anything about
them."
"What's this other mode of seeing men, don Juan?"
"Men look different when you see. The little smoke will help you to see
men as fibers of light"
"Fibers of light?"
"Yes. Fibers, like white cobwebs. Very fine threads that circulate from
the head to the navel. Thus a man
looks like an egg of circulating fibers. And his arms and legs are like
luminous bristles, bursting out in all direc-
13
tions."
"Is that the way everyone looks?"
"Everyone. Besides, every man is in touch with everything else, not
through his hands, though, but through a
bunch of long fibers that shoot out from the center of his abdomen.
Those fibers join a man to his surroundings;
they keep his balance; they give him stability. So, as you may see some
day, a man is a luminous egg whether
he's a beggar or a king and there's no way to change anything; or
rather, what could be changed in that luminous
egg? What?"
14
2
My visit to don Juan started a new cycle. I had no trouble falling back
again into my old pattern of enjoying
his sense of drama and his humor and his patience with me. I definitely
felt that I had to visit him more often. Not
to see don Juan was indeed a great loss for me; besides, I had
something of particular interest that I wanted to discuss
with him.
After I had finished the book about his teachings I began to reexamine
the field notes I had not used. I had
discarded a great deal of data because my emphasis had been on the
states of nonordinary reality. Rehashing my
old notes I had come to the conclusion that a skillful sorcerer could
bring forth the most specialized range of
perception in his apprentice by simply "manipulating social cues." My
whole argument about the nature of these
manipulatory procedures rested on the assumption that a leader was
needed to bring forth the necessary range of
perception. I took as a specific test case the sorcerer's peyote
meetings. I contended that in those meetings
sorcerers reached an agreement about the nature of reality without any
overt exchange of words or signs, and my
conclusion was that a very sophisticated code was employed by the
participants to arrive at such an agreement. I
had constructed a complex system to explain the code and procedures, so
I went back to see don Juan to ask his
personal opinion and advice about my work.
May 21,1968
Nothing out of the ordinary happened during my trip to see don Juan.
The temperature in the desert was over
a hundred degrees and was quite uncomfortable. The heat subsided in the
late afternoon and by the tune I arrived
at his house, in the early evening, there was a cool breeze. I was not
very tired, so we sat in his room and talked, I
felt comfortable and relaxed, and we talked for hours. It was not a
conversation that I would have liked to record;
I was not really trying to make great sense or trying to draw great
meaning; we talked about the weather, the
crops, his grandson, the Yaqui Indians, the Mexican government. I told
don Juan how much I enjoyed the
exquisite sensation of talking in the dark. He said that my statement
was consistent with my talkative nature; that
it was easy for me to like chattering in the darkness because talking
was the only thing I could do at that time,
while sitting around. I argued that it was more than the mere act of
talking that I enjoyed. I said that I relished the
soothing warmth of the darkness around us. He asked me what I did at
home when it was dark. I said that
invariably I would turn on the lights or I would go out into the
lighted streets until it was time to go to sleep.
"Oh!" he said incredulously. "I thought you had learned to use the
darkness."
"What can you use it for?" I asked.
He said the darkness—and he called it "The darkness of the
day"—was the best time to "see." He stressed the
word "see" with a peculiar inflection. I wanted to know what he meant
by that, but he said it was too late to go
into it then.
May 22,1968
As soon as I woke up in the morning, and without any preliminaries, I
told don Juan that I had constructed a
system to explain what took place at a peyote meeting, a mitote, I took
my notes and read to him what I had
done. He listened patiently while I struggled to elucidate my schemata.
I said that I believed a covert leader was necessary in order to cue
the participants so they could arrive at any
pertinent agreement. I pointed out that people attend a mitote to seek
the presence of Mescalito and his lessons
about the right way to live; and that those persons never exchange a
word or a gesture among them, yet they
agree about the presence of Mescalito and his specific lesson. At least
that was what they purportedly did in the
mitotes I had attended; they agreed that Mescalito had appeared to them
individually and had given them a
lesson. In my personal experience I had found that the form of the
individual visit of Mescalito and his
consequent lesson were strikingly homogeneous, although varying in
content from person to person. I could not
explain this homogeneity except as a result of a subtle and complex
system of cueing.
It took me close to two hours to read and explain to don Juan the
scheme I had constructed. I ended my talk
by begging him to tell me in his own words what were the exact
procedures for reaching agreement.
When I had finished he frowned. I thought he must have found my
explanation challenging; he appeared to
15
be involved in deep deliberation. After a reasonable silence I asked
him what he thought about my idea.
My question made him suddenly turn his frown into a smile and then into
roaring laughter. I tried to laugh
too and asked nervously what was so funny.
"You're deranged!" he exclaimed. "Why should anyone be bothered with
cueing at such an important time as
a mitote? Do you think one ever fools around with Mescalito?"
I thought for a moment that he was being evasive; he was not really
answering my question.
"Why should anyone cue?" don Juan asked stubbornly. "You have been in
mitotes. You should know that no
one told you how to feel, or what to do, no one except Mescalito
himself."
I insisted that such an explanation was not possible and begged him
again to tell me how the agreement was
reached.
"I know why you have come," don Juan said in a mysterious tone. "I
can't help you in your endeavor because
there is no system of cueing."
"But how can all those persons agree about Mescalito's presence?"
''They agree because they see" don Juan said dramatically, and then
added casually, "Why don't you attend
another mitote and see for yourself?"
I felt that was a trap. I did not say anything, but put my notes away.
He did not insist.
A while later he asked me to drive him to the house of one of his
friends. We spent most of the day there.
During the course of a conversation his friend John asked me what bad
become of my interest in peyote. John
had provided the peyote buttons for my first experience nearly eight
years before. I did not know what to say to
him. Don Juan came to my aid and told John I was doing fine.
On our way back to don Juan's house I felt obliged to make a comment
about John's question and I said,
among other things, that I had no intention of learning any more about
peyote, because it required a kind of
courage I did not have; and that I had really meant it when I said I
had quit. Don Juan smiled and did not say
anything. I kept on talking until we got to the house.
We sat on the clean area in front of the door. It was a warm, clear
day, but there was enough of a breeze in
the late afternoon to make it pleasant.
"Why do you have to push so hard?" don Juan said suddenly. "How many
years now have you been saying
that you don't want to learn any more?"
"Three."
"Why are you so vehement about it?"
"I feel that I'm betraying you, don Juan. I think that's why I'm always
talking about it."
"You're not betraying me."
"I have failed you. I have run away. I feel I am defeated."
"You do what you can. Besides, you haven't been defeated yet. What I
have to teach you is very hard. I, for
instance, found it perhaps even harder than you."
"But you kept at it, don Juan. My case is different. I gave up and I
have come to see you not because I want
to learn, but only because I wanted to ask you to clarify a point in my
work."
Don Juan looked at me for a moment and then he looked away.
"You ought to let the smoke guide you again," he said forcefully.
"No, don Juan, I can't use your smoke any more. I think I have
exhausted myself."
"You haven't begun."
"I am too afraid."
"So you're afraid. There is nothing new about being afraid. Don't think
about your fear. Think about the
wonders of seeing!"
"I sincerely wish I could think about those wonders, but I can't. When
I think of your smoke I feel a sort of
darkness coming upon me. It is as if there were no more people on the
earth, no one to turn to. Your smoke has
shown me the ultimate of loneliness, don Juan."
"That's not true. Take me, for example. The smoke is my ally and I
don't feel such a loneliness."
16
"But you're different; you've conquered your fear."
Don Juan patted me gently on the shoulder.
"You're not afraid," he said softly. His voice carried a strange
accusation.
"Am I lying about my fear, don Juan?"
"I'm not concerned with lies," he said severely. "I'm concerned with
something else. The reason you don't
want to learn is not because you're afraid. It's something else."
I vehemently urged him to tell me what it was. I pleaded with him, but
he did not say anything; he just shook
his head as if he could not believe I did not know it.
I told him that perhaps it was inertia which kept me from learning. He
wanted to know the meaning of the
word "inertia." I read to him from my dictionary: "The tendency of
matter to remain at rest if at rest, or, if moving,
to keep moving in the same direction, unless affected by some outside
force."
" 'Unless affected by some outside force,'" he repeated. "That's about
the best word you've found. I've told
you already, only a crackpot would undertake the task of becoming a man
of knowledge of his own accord. A
sober-headed man has to be tricked into doing it."
"I'm sure there must be scores of people who would gladly undertake the
task," I said.
"Yes, but those don't count. They are usually cracked. They are like
gourds that look fine from the outside
and yet they would leak the minute you put pressure on them, the minute
you filled them with water.
"I had to trick you into learning once, tine same way my benefactor
tricked me. Otherwise you wouldn't have
learned as much as you did. Perhaps it's time to trick you again."
The tricking to which he was referring was one of the most crucial
points of my apprenticeship. It had taken
place years before, yet in my mind it was as vivid as if it had just
happened. Through very artful manipulations
don Juan had once forced me into a direct and terrifying confrontation
with a woman reputed to be a sorceress.
The clash resulted in a profound animosity on her part Don Juan
exploited my fear of the woman as motivation to
continue with the apprenticeship, claiming that I had to learn more
about sorcery in order to protect myself
against her magical onslaughts. The end results of his "tricking" were
so convincing that I sincerely felt I had no
other recourse than to learn as much as possible if I wanted to stay
alive.
"If you're planning to scare me again with that woman I simply won't
come back any more," I said.
Don Juan's laughter was very joyous.
"Don't worry," he said reassuringly. "Tricks with fear won't work with
you any more. You're no longer
afraid. But if it is needed, you can be tricked wherever you are; you
don't have to be around here for that."
He put his arms behind his head and lay down to sleep. I worked on my
notes until he woke up a couple of
hours later; it was almost dark then. Noticing that I was writing, he
sat up straight and, smiling, asked me if I had
written myself out of my problem.
May 23,1968
We were talking about Oaxaca. I told don Juan that once I had arrived
in the city on a day when the market
was open, a day when scores of Indians from all over the area flock to
town to sell food and all kinds of trinkets.
I mentioned that I was particularly interested in a man who was selling
medicinal plants. He carried a wooden kit
in which he kept a number of small jars with dry, shredded plants, and
he stood in the middle of the street
holding one jar, yelling a very peculiar singsong.
"I bring here," he would say, "for fleas, flies, mosquitoes, and lice.
"Also for pigs, horses, goats, and cows.
"I have here for all the maladies of man.
"The mumps, the measles, rheumatism, and gout
"I bring here for the heart, the liver, the stomach, and the loin.
"Come near, ladies and gentlemen.
"I bring here for fleas, flies, mosquitoes, and lice."
I had listened to him for a long time. His format consisted of
enumerating a long list of man's diseases for
which he claimed to have a cure; the device he used to give rhythm to
his singsong was to pause after naming a
17
set of four.
Don Juan said that he also used to sell herbs in the market in Oaxaca
when he was young. He said he still remembered
his selling pitch and he yelled it for me. He said that he and his
friend Vicente used to make concoctions.
"Those concoctions were really good," don Juan said. "My friend Vicente
used to make great extracts of
plants."
I told don Juan that once during one of my trips to Mexico I had met
his friend Vicente. Don Juan seemed to
be surprised and wanted to know more about it.
I was driving through Durango at that time and remembered that don Juan
had once told me I should pay a
visit to his friend, who lived there. I looked for him and found him,
and talked to him for a while. Before I left he
gave me a sack with some plants and a series of instructions for
replanting one of them.
I stopped on my way to the town of Aguas Calientes. I made sure there
were no people around. For at least
ten minutes I had been watching the road and surrounding areas. There
had not been any houses in sight, nor
cattle grazing alongside the road. I stopped on the top of a small
hill; from there I could see the road ahead and
behind me. It was deserted in both directions as far into the distance
as I could see. I waited for a few minutes to
orient myself and to remember don Vicente's instructions. I took one of
the plants, walked into a field of cacti on
the east side of the road, and planted it as don Vicente had instructed
me. I had with me a bottle of mineral water
with which I intended to sprinkle the plant. I tried to open it by
hitting the cap with the small iron bar I had used
as a digging stick, but the bottle exploded and a glass sliver nicked
my upper lip and made it bleed.
I walked back to my car to get another bottle of mineral water. As I
was getting it out of my trunk a man
driving a VW station wagon stopped and asked me if I needed help. I
said that everything was all right and he
drove away. I returned to water the plant and then I started back
toward my car. When I was perhaps a hundred
feet away I heard some voices. I hurried down a slope onto the highway
and found three Mexicans at the car, two
men and one woman. One of the men was sitting on the front bumper. He
was perhaps in his late thirties, of
medium height, with black curly hair. He was carrying a bundle on his
back and was wearing old slacks and a
worn-out pinkish shirt. His shoes were untied and perhaps too big for
his feet; they seemed to be loose and
uncomfortable. He was sweating profusely.
The other man was standing about twenty feet away from the car. He was
small-boned and shorter than the
other man, and his hair was straight and combed backwards. He carried a
smaller bundle and was older, perhaps
in his late forties. His clothes were in better condition. He had on a
dark blue jacket, light blue slacks, and black
shoes. He was not perspiring at all and seemed aloof, uninterested.
The woman appeared to be also in her forties. She was fat and had a
very dark complexion. She wore black
Capris, a white sweater, and black, pointed shoes. She did not carry a
bundle, but was holding a portable transistor
radio. She seemed to be very tired and her face was covered with beads
of perspiration.
When I approached them the younger man and the woman accosted me. They
wanted a ride. I told them I did
not have any space in my car. I showed them that the back seat was
loaded to capacity and there was really no
room left. The man suggested that if I drove slow they could go perched
on the back bumper, or lying across the
front fender. I thought the idea was preposterous. Yet there was such
an urgency in their plea that I felt very sad
and ill at ease. I gave them some money for their bus fare.
The younger man took the bills and thanked me, but the older man turned
his back disdainfully.
"I want transportation," he said. "I'm not interested in money."
Then he turned to me. "Can't you give us some food or water?" he asked.
I really had nothing to give them. They stood there looking at me for a
moment and then they began to walk
away.
I got into my car and tried to start the motor. The heat was very
intense and the motor seemed to be flooded.
The younger man stopped when he heard the starter grinding and came
back and stood behind my car ready to
push it. I felt a tremendous apprehension. I was actually panting
desperately. The motor finally ignited and I
zoomed away.
18
After I had finished relating this, don Juan remained pensive for a
long while.
"Why haven't you told me this before?" he said without looking at me.
I did not know what to say. I shrugged my shoulders and told him that I
never thought it was important.
"It's damn important!" he said. "Vicente is a first-rate sorcerer. He
gave you something to plant because he
had his reasons; and if you encountered three people who seemed to have
popped out of nowhere right after you
had planted it, there was a reason for that too; but only a fool like
you would disregard the incident and think it
wasn't important."
He wanted to know exactly what had taken place when I paid don Vicente
the visit.
I told him that I was driving across town and passed by the market; I
got the idea then of looking for don
Vicente. I walked into the market and went to the section for medicinal
herbs. There were three stands in a row
but they were run by three fat women. I walked to the end of the aisle
and found another stand around the corner.
There I saw a thin, small-boned, white-haired man. He was at that
moment selling a birdcage to a woman.
I waited around until he was by himself and then I asked him if he knew
Vicente Medrano. He looked at me
without answering.
"What do you want with that Vicente Medrano?" he finally said.
I told him I had come to pay him a visit on behalf of his friend, and
gave him don Juan's name. The old man
looked at me for an instant and then he said he was Vicente Medrano and
was at my service. He asked me to sit
down. He seemed to be pleased, very relaxed, and genuinely friendly. I
told him about my friendship with don
Juan, I felt that there was an immediate bond of sympathy between us.
He told me he had known don Juan since
they were in their twenties. Don Vicente had only words of praise for
don Juan. Toward the end of our
conversation he said in a vibrant tone: "Juan is a true man of
knowledge. I myself have dwelled only briefly with
plant powers. I was always interested in their curative properties; I
have even collected botany books, which I
sold only recently."
He remained silent for a moment; he rubbed his chin a couple of times.
He seemed to be searching for a
proper word.
"You may say that I am only a man of lyric knowledge," he said. "I'm
not like Juan, my Indian brother."
Don Vicente was silent again for another moment. His eyes were glassy
and were staring at the floor by my
left side.
Then he turned to me and said almost in a whisper, "Oh, how high soars
my Indian brother!"
Don Vicente got up. It seemed that our conversation was finished.
If anyone else had made a statement about an Indian brother I would
have taken it for a cheap cliche. Don
Vicente's tone, however, was so sincere and his eyes were so clear that
he enraptured me with the image of his
Indian brother soaring so high. And I believed he meant what he had
said.
"Lyric knowledge, my eye!" don Juan exclaimed after I had recounted the
whole story. "Vicente is a brujo.
Why did you go to see him?"
I reminded him that he himself had asked me to visit don Vicente,
"That's absurd!" he exclaimed dramatically. "I said to you, some day,
when you know how to see, you should
pay a visit to my friend Vicente; that's what I said. Apparently you
were not listening."
I argued that I could find no harm in having met don Vicente, that I
was charmed by his manners and his
kindness.
Don Juan shook his head from side to side and in a half-kidding tone
expressed his bewilderment at what he
called my "baffling good luck," He said that my visiting don Vicente
was like walking into a lion's den armed
with a twig. Don Juan seemed to be agitated, yet I could not see any
reason for his concern. Don Vicente was a
beautiful man. He seemed so frail; his strangely haunting eyes made him
look almost ethereal. I asked don Juan
how a beautiful person like that could be dangerous.
"You're a damn fool," he said and looked stern for a moment "He won't
cause you any harm by himself. But
knowledge is power, and once a man embarks on the road of knowledge
he's no longer liable for what may
happen to those who come in contact with him. You should have paid him
a visit when you knew enough to
19
defend yourself; not from him, but from the power he has harnessed,
which, by the way, is not his or anybody
else's. Upon hearing that you were my friend, Vicente assumed that you
knew how to protect yourself and then
made you a gift. He apparently liked you and must have made you a great
gift, and you chucked it. What a pity!"
May 24,1968
I had been pestering don Juan all day to tell me about don Vicente's
gift. I had pointed out to him in various
ways that he had to consider our differences; I said that what was
self-explanatory for him might be totally incomprehensible
for me.
"How many plants did he give you?" he finally asked,
I said four, but I actually could not remember. Then don Juan wanted to
know exactly what had taken place
after I left don Vicente and before I stopped on the side of the road.
But I could not remember either.
"The number of plants is important and so is the order of events," he
said. "How can I tell you what his gift
was if you don't remember what happened?"
I struggled unsuccessfully to visualize the sequence of events.
"If you would remember everything that happened," he said, "I could at
least tell you how you chucked your
gift."
Don Juan seemed to be very disturbed. He urged me impatiently to
recollect, but my memory was almost a
total blank.
"What do you think I did wrong, don Juan?" I said, just to continue the
conversation.
"Everything."
"But I followed don Vicente's instructions to the letter."
"So what? Don't you understand that to follow his instructions was
meaningless?"
"Why?"
"Because those instructions were designed for someone who could see,
not for an idiot who got out with his
life just by sheer luck. You went to see Vicente without preparation.
He liked you and gave you a gift. And that
gift could easily have cost you your life."
"But why did he give me something so serious? If he's a sorcerer he
should've known that I don't know anything."
"No, he couldn't have seen that. You look as though you know, but you
don't know much really."
I said I was sincerely convinced that I had never misrepresented
myself, at least not deliberately.
"I didn't mean that," he said. "If you were putting on airs Vicente
could've seen through you. This is
something worse than putting on airs. When I see you, you look to me as
if you know a great deal, and yet I
myself know that you don't."
"What do I seem to know, don Juan?"
"Secrets of power, of course; a brujo's knowledge. So when Vicente saw
you he made you a gift and you
acted toward it the way a dog acts toward food when his belly is full.
A dog pisses on food when he doesn't want
to eat any more, so other dogs won't eat it. You did that on the gift.
Now we'll never know what really took place.
You have lost a great deal. What a waste!"
He was quiet for some time; then he shrugged his shoulders and smiled.
"It's useless to complain," he said, "and yet it's so difficult not to.
Gifts of power happen so rarely in one's
life; they are unique and precious. Take me, for instance; nobody has
ever made me such a gift. There are few
people, to my knowledge, who ever had one. To waste something so unique
is a shame."
"I see what you mean, don Juan," I said. "Is there anything I can do
now to salvage the gift?"
He laughed and repeated several times, "To salvage the gift."
"That sounds nice," he said. "I like that. Yet there isn't anything one
can do to salvage your gift."
May 25,1968
Don Juan spent nearly all his time today showing me how to assemble
trapping devices for small animals.
We had been cutting and cleaning branches nearly all morning. There
were many questions in my mind. I had to
talk to him while we worked, but he had made a joke and said that of
the two of us only I could move my hands
20
and my mouth at the same time. We finally sat down to rest and I
blurted out a question.
"What's it like to see, don Juan?"
"You have to learn to see in order to know that. I can't tell you."
"Is it a secret I shouldn't know?"
"No. It's just that I can't describe it."
"Why?"
"It wouldn't make sense to you."
"Try me, don Juan. Maybe it'll make sense to me."
"No. You must do it yourself. Once you learn, you can see every single
thing in the world in a different way."
"Then, don Juan, you don't see the world in the usual way any more."
"I see both ways. When I want to look at the world I see it the way you
do. Then when I want to see it I look
at it the way I know and I perceive it in a different way."
"Do things look consistently the same every time you see them?"
"Things don't change. You change your way of looking, that's all"
"I mean, don Juan, that if you see, for instance, the same tree, does
it remain the same every time you see it?"
"No. It changes and yet it's the same."
"But if the same tree changes every time you see it, your seeing may be
a mere illusion."
He laughed and did not answer for some time, but seemed to be thinking.
Finally he said, "Whenever you
look at things you don't see them. You just look at them, I suppose, to
make sure that something is there. Since
you're not concerned with seeing, things look very much the same every
time you look at them. When you learn
to see, on the other hand, a thing is never the same every time you see
it, and yet it is the same. I told you, for instance,
that a man is like an egg. Every time I see the same man I see an egg,
yet it is not the same egg."
"But you won't be able to recognize anything, since nothing is the
same; so what's the advantage of learning
to see?"
"You can tell things apart. You can see them for what they really are."
"Don't I see things as they really are?"
"No. Your eyes have learned only to look. Take, for example, the three
people you encountered, the three
Mexicans. You have described them in detail, and even told me what
clothes they wore. And that only proved to
me that you didn't see them at all. If you were capable of seeing you
would have known on the spot that they
were not people."
"They were not people? What were they?"
"They were not people, that's all."
"But that's impossible. They were just like you and me."
"No, they were not. I'm sure of it." I asked him if they were ghosts,
spirits, or the souls of dead people. His
reply was that he did not know what ghosts, spirits, and souls were.
I translated for him the Webster's New World Dictionary definition of
the word ghosts: "The supposed
disembodied spirit of a dead person, conceived of as appearing to the
living as a pale, shadowy apparition." And
then the definition of spirit: "A supernatural being, especially one
thought of... as a ghost, or as inhabiting a
certain region, being of a certain (good or evil) character."
He said they could perhaps be called spirits, although the definition I
had read was not quite adequate to describe
them.
"Are they guardians of some sort?" I asked.
"No. They don't guard anything."
"Are they overseers? Are they watching over us?"
"They are forces, neither good nor bad, just forces that a brujo learns
to harness."
"Are they the allies, don Juan?"
"Yes, they are the allies of a man of knowledge."
This was the first time in eight years of our association that don Juan
had come close to defining an "ally." I
21
must have asked him to do so dozens of times. He usually disregarded my
question, saying that I knew what an
ally was and that it was stupid to voice what I already knew. Don
Juan's direct statement about the nature of an
ally was a novelty and I was compelled to probe him.
"You told me the allies were in the plants," I said, "in the jimson
weed and in the mushrooms."
"I've never told you that," he said with great conviction. "You always
jump to your own conclusions."
"But I wrote it down in my notes, don Juan."
"You may write whatever you want, but don't tell me I said that."
I reminded him that he had at first told me his benefactor's ally was
the jimson weed and his own ally was the
little smoke; and that he had later clarified it by saying that the
ally was contained in each plant.
"No. That's not correct," he said, frowning. "My ally is the little
smoke, but that doesn't mean that my ally is
in the smoking mixture, or in the mushrooms, or in my pipe. They all
have to be put together to get me to the
ally, and that ally I call little smoke for reasons of my own."
Don Juan said that the three people I had seen, whom he called "those
who are not people"—los que no son
gente—were in reality don Vicente's allies.
I reminded him that he had established that the difference between an
ally and Mescalito was that an ally
could not be seen, while one could easily see Mescalito.
We involved ourselves in a long discussion then. He said that he had
established the idea that an ally could
not be seen because an ally adopted any form. When I pointed out that
he had once also said that Mescalito
adopted any form, don Juan dropped the whole conversation, saying that
the "seeing" to which he was referring
was not like ordinary "looking at things" and that my confusion stemmed
from my insistence on talking.
Hours later don Juan himself started back again on the topic of the
allies. I had felt he was somehow annoyed
by my questions so I had not pressed him any further. He was showing me
then how to make a trap for rabbits; I
had to hold a long stick and bend it as far as possible so he could tie
a string around the ends. The stick was fairly
thin but still demanded considerable strength to bend. My head and arms
were shivering with the exertion and I
was nearly exhausted when he finally tied the string.
We sat down and began to talk. He said it was obvious to him that I
could not comprehend anything unless I
talked about it, and that he did not mind my questions and was going to
tell me about the allies.
"The ally is not in the smoke," he said. "The smoke takes you to where
the ally is, and when you become one
with the ally you don't ever have to smoke again. From then on you can
summon your ally at will and make him
do anything you want.
"The allies are neither good nor evil, but are put to use by the
sorcerers for whatever purpose they see fit. I
like the little smoke as an ally because it doesn't demand much of me.
It's constant and fair."
"How does an ally look to you, don Juan? Those three people I saw, for
instance, who looked like ordinary
people to me; how would they look to you?"
"They would look like ordinary people."
"Then how can you tell them apart from real people?"
"Real people look like luminous eggs when you see them. Non-people
always look like people. That's what I
meant when I said you cannot see an ally. The allies take different
forms. They look like dogs, coyotes, birds,
even tumbleweeds, or anything else. The only difference is that when
you see them they look just like what
they're pretending to be. Everything has its own way of being when you
see. Just like men look like eggs, other
things look like something else, but the allies can be seen only in the
form they are portraying. That form is good
enough to fool the eyes, our eyes, that is. A dog is never fooled,
neither is a crow."
"Why would they want to fool us?"
"I think we are all clowns. We fool ourselves. The allies just take the
outward appearance of whatever is
around and then we take them for what they are not. It is not their
fault that we have taught our eyes only to look
at things."
"I'm not clear about their function, don Juan. What do allies do in the
world?"
"This is like asking me what we men do in the world. I really don't
know. We are here, that's all. And the
22
allies are here like us; and maybe they have been here before us."
"What do you mean before us, don Juan?"
"We men have not always been here."
"Do you mean here in this country or here in the world?"
We involved ourselves in another long argument at this point Don Juan
said that for him there was only the
world, the place where he put his feet. I asked him how he knew that we
had not always been in the world.
"Very simple," he said. "We men know very little about the world. A
coyote knows much more than we do.
A coyote is hardly ever fooled by the world's appearance."
"How come we can catch them and kill them?" I asked. "If they are not
fooled by appearances how come
they die so easily?"
Don Juan stared at me until I became embarrassed.
"We may trap or poison or shoot a coyote," he said. "Any way we do it a
coyote is an easy prey for us
because he is not familiar with man's machinations. If the coyote
survived, however, you could rest assured that
we'd never catch up with him again. A good hunter knows that and never
sets his trap twice on the same spot,
because if a coyote dies in a trap, every coyote can see his death,
which lingers on, and thus they will avoid the
trap or even the general area where it was set. We, on the other hand,
never see death, which lingers on the spot
where one of our fellow men has died; we may suspect it, but we never
see it."
"Can a coyote see an ally?"
"Certainly."
"How does an ally look to a coyote?"
"I would have to be a coyote to know that. I can tell you, however,
that to a crow it looks like a pointed hat.
Round and wide at the bottom, ending in a long point. Some of them
shine, but the majority are dull and appear
to be very heavy. They resemble a dripping piece of cloth. They are
foreboding shapes."
"How do they look to you when you see them, don Juan?"
"I've told you already; they look like whatever they're pretending to
be. They take any shape or size that suits
them. They could be shaped like a pebble or a mountain."
"Do they talk, or laugh, or make any noise?"
"In the company of men they behave like men. In the company of animals
they behave like animals. Animals
are usually afraid of them; however, if they are accustomed to seeing
the allies, they leave them alone. We
ourselves do something similar. We have scores of allies among us, but
we don't bother them. Since our eyes can
only look at things, we don't notice them."
"Do you mean that some of the people I see in the street are not really
people?" I asked, truly bewildered by
his statement.
"Some of them are not," he said emphatically.
His statement seemed preposterous to me, yet I could not seriously
conceive of don Juan's making such a remark
purely for effect I told him it sounded like a science-fiction tale
about beings from another planet. He said
he did not care how it sounded, but some people in the streets were not
people.
"Why must you think that every person in a moving crowd is a human
being?" he asked with an air of utmost
seriousness.
I really could not explain why, except that I was habituated to believe
that as an act of sheer faith on my part.
He went on to say how much he liked to watch busy places with a lot of
people, and how he would
sometimes see a crowd of men who looked like eggs, and among the mass
of egg-like creatures he would spot
one who looked just tike a person.
"It's very enjoyable to do that," he said, laughing, "or at least it's
enjoyable for me. I like to sit in parks and
bus depots and watch. Sometimes I can spot an ally right away; at other
times I can see only real people. Once I
saw two allies sitting in a bus, side by side. That's the only time in
my life I have seen two together."
"Did it have a special significance for you to see two of them?"
"Certainly. Anything they do is significant. From their actions a brujo
can sometimes draw his power. Even if
23
a brujo does not have an ally of his own, as long as he knows how to
see, he can handle power by watching the
acts of the allies. My benefactor taught me to do that, and for years
before I had my own ally I watched for allies
among crowds of people and every time I saw one it taught me something.
You found three together. What a
magnificent lesson you wasted."
He did not say anything else until we finished assembling the rabbit
trap. Then he turned to me and said suddenly,
as if he had just remembered it, that another important thing about the
allies was that if one found two of
them they were always two of the same kind. The two allies he saw were
two men, he said; and since I had seen
two men and one woman he concluded that my experience was even more
unusual.
I asked if the allies portray children; if the children could be of the
same or of different sex; if the allies portrayed
people of different races; if they could portray a family composed of a
man, a woman, and a child; and
finally I asked him if he had ever seen an ally driving a car or a bus.
Don Juan did not answer at all. He smiled and let me do the talking.
When he heard my last question he burst
out laughing and said that I was being careless with my questions, that
it would have been more appropriate to
ask if he had ever seen an ally driving a motor vehicle.
"You don't want to forget the motorcycles, do you?" he said with a
mischievous glint in his eye.
I thought his making fun of my question was funny and lighthearted and
I laughed with him.
Then he explained that the allies could not take the lead or act upon
anything directly; they could, however,
act upon man in an indirect way. Don Juan said that coming in contact
with an ally was dangerous because the
ally was capable of bringing out the worst in a person. The
apprenticeship was long and arduous, he said, because
one had to reduce to a minimum all that was unnecessary in one's life,
in order to withstand the impact of such an
encounter. Don Juan said that his benefactor, when he first came in
contact with an ally, was driven to burn
himself and was scarred as if a mountain lion had mauled him. In his
own case, he said, an ally pushed him into a
pile of burning wood, and he burned himself a little on the knee and
shoulder blade, but the scars disappeared in
time, when he became one with the ally.
24
3
On June 10, 1968, I started on a long journey with don Juan to
participate in a mitote. I had been waiting for
this opportunity for months, yet I was not really sure I wanted to go.
I thought my hesitation was due to my fear
that at a peyote meeting I would have to ingest peyote, and I had no
intention whatsoever of doing that. I had
repeatedly expressed those feelings to don Juan. He laughed patiently
at first, but finally he firmly stated that he
did not want to hear one more thing about my fear.
As far as I was concerned, a mitote was ideal ground for me to verify
the schemata I had constructed. For one
thing, I had never completely abandoned the idea that a covert leader
was necessary at such a meeting in order to
insure agreement among the participants. Somehow I had the feeling that
don Juan had discarded my idea for
reasons of his own, since he deemed it more efficacious to explain
everything that took place at a mitote in terms
of "seeing." I thought that my interest in finding a suitable
explanation in my own terms was not in accordance
with what he himself wanted me to do; therefore he had to discard my
rationale, as he was accustomed to doing
with whatever did not conform to his system.
Right before we started on the journey don Juan eased my apprehension
about having to ingest peyote by
telling me that I was attending the meeting only to watch. I felt
elated. At that tune I was almost certain I was
going to discover the covert procedure by which the participants arrive
at an agreement.
It was late afternoon when we left; the sun was almost on the horizon;
I felt it on my neck and wished I had a
Venetian blind in the rear window of my car. From the top of a hill I
could see down into a huge valley; the road
was like a black ribbon laid flat over the ground, up and down
innumerable hills. I followed it with my eyes for a
moment before we began descending; it ran due south until it
disappeared over a range of low mountains in the
distance.
Don Juan sat quietly, looking straight ahead. We had not said a word
for a long time. It was uncomfortably
warm inside the car. I had opened all the windows, but that did not
help because it was an extremely hot day. I
felt very annoyed and restless. I began to complain about the heat.
Don Juan frowned and looked at me quizzically.
"It's hot all over Mexico this time of the year," he said. "There is
nothing one can do about it."
I did not look at him, but I knew he was gazing at me. The car picked
up speed going down the slope. I
vaguely saw a highway sign, Vado—dip. When I actually saw the
dip I was going quite fast, and although I did
slow down, we still felt the impact and bobbed up and down on the
seats. I reduced the speed considerably; we
were going through an area where livestock grazed freely on the sides
of the road, an area where the carcass of a
horse or a cow run down by a car was a common sight. At a certain point
I had to stop completely and let some
horses cross the highway. I was getting more restless and annoyed. I
told don Juan that it was the heat; I said that
I had always disliked the heat since my childhood, because every summer
I used to feel suffocated and I could
hardly breathe.
"You're not a child now," he said.
"The heat still suffocates me."
"Well, hunger used to suffocate me when I was a child," he said softly.
"To be very hungry was the only
thing I knew as a child, and I used to swell up until I could not
breathe either. But that was when I was a child. I
cannot suffocate now, neither can I swell like a toad when I am hungry."
I didn't know what to say. I felt I was getting myself into an
untenable position and soon I would have to defend
a point I really didn't care to defend. The heat was not that bad. What
disturbed me was the prospect of
driving for over a thousand miles to our destination. I felt annoyed at
the thought of having to exert myself.
"Let's stop and get something to eat," I said. "Maybe it won't be so
hot once the sun goes down."
Don Juan looked at me, smiling, and said that there were not any clean
towns for a long stretch and that he
had understood my policy was not to eat from the stands on the roadside.
"Don't you fear diarrhea any more?" he asked.
I knew he was being sarcastic, yet he kept an inquisitive and at the
same time serious look on his face.
25
"The way you act," he said, "one would think that diarrhea is lurking
out there, waiting for you to step out of
the car to jump you. You're in a terrible fix; if you escape the heat,
diarrhea will eventually get you."
Don Juan's tone was so serious that I began to laugh. Then we drove in
silence for a long time. When we
arrived at a highway stop for trucks called Los Vidrios—
Glass—it was already quite dark.
Don Juan shouted from the car, "What do you have to eat today?"
"Pork meat," a woman shouted back from inside.
"I hope for your sake that the pig was run down on the road today," don
Juan said to me, laughing.
We got out of the car. The road was flanked on both sides by ranges of
low mountains that seemed to be the
solidified lava of some gigantic volcanic eruption. In the darkness the
black, jagged peaks were silhouetted
against the sky like huge menacing walls of glass slivers.
While we ate I told don Juan that I could see the reason why the place
was called Glass. I said that to me the
name was obviously due to the glass-sliver shape of the mountains.
Don Juan said in a convincing tone that the place was called Los
Vidrios because a truck loaded with glass
had overturned on that spot and the glass shreds were left lying around
the road for years.
I felt he was being facetious and asked him to tell me if that was the
real reason.
"Why don't you ask someone here?" he said.
I asked a man who was sitting at a table next to ours; he said
apologetically that he didn't know. I went into
the kitchen and asked the women there if they knew, but they all said
they didn't; that the place was just called
Glass.
"I believe I'm right," don Juan said in a low voice. "Mexicans are not
given to noticing things around them.
I'm sure they can't see the glass mountains, but they surely can leave
a mountain of glass shreds lying around for
years."
We both found the image funny and laughed.
When we had finished eating don Juan asked me how I felt. I told him
fine, but I really felt somewhat
queasy. Don Juan gave me a steadfast look and seemed to detect my
feeling of discomfort.
"Once you decided to come to Mexico you should have put all your petty
fears away," he said very sternly.
"Your decision to come should have vanquished them. You came because
you wanted to come. That's the
warrior's way. I have told you time and time again, the most effective
way to live is as a warrior. Worry and think
before you make any decision, but once you make it, be on your way free
from worries or thoughts; there will be
a million other decisions still awaiting you. That's the warrior's way."
"I believe I do that, don Juan, at least some of the time. It's very
hard to keep on reminding myself, though."
"A warrior thinks of his death when things become unclear."
"That's even harder, don Juan. For most people death is very vague and
remote. We never think of it."
"Why not?"
"Why should we?"
"Very simple," he said. "Because the idea of death is the only thing
that tempers our spirit."
By the time we left Los Vidrios it was so dark that the jagged
silhouette of the mountains had emerged into
the darkness of the sky. We drove in silence for more than an hour. I
felt tired. It was as though I didn't want to
talk because there was nothing to talk about. The traffic was minimal.
Few cars passed by from the opposite
direction. It seemed as if we were the only people going south on the
highway. I thought that was strange and I
kept on looking in the rear-view mirror to see if there were other cars
coming from behind, but there were none.
After a while I stopped looking for cars and began to dwell again on
the prospect of our trip. Then I noticed
that my headlights seemed extremely bright in contrast with the
darkness all around and I looked again in the
rear-view mirror. I saw a bright glare first and then two points of
light that seemed to have emerged from the
ground. They were the headlights of a car on a hilltop in the distance
behind us. They remained visible for a
while, then they disappeared into the darkness as if they had been
scooped away; after a moment they appeared
on another hilltop, and then they disappeared again. I followed their
appearances and disappearances in the
mirror for a long time. At one point it occurred to me that the car was
gaining on us. It was definitely closing in.
26
The lights were bigger and brighter. I deliberately stepped on the gas
pedal. I had a sensation of uneasiness. Don
Juan seemed to notice my concern, or perhaps he was only noticing that
I was speeding up. He looked at me first,
then he turned around and looked at the distant headlights.
He asked me if there was something wrong with me. I told him that I had
not seen any cars behind us for
hours and that suddenly I had noticed the lights of a car that seemed
to be gaining on us all the time.
He chuckled and asked me if I really thought it was a car. I told him
that it had to be a car and he said that my
concern revealed to him that, somehow, I must have felt that whatever
was behind us was something more than a
mere car. I insisted that I thought it was just another car on the
highway, or perhaps a truck.
"What else can it be?" I said loudly.
Don Juan's probing had put me on edge.
He turned and looked straight at me, then he nodded slowly, as if
measuring what he was going to say.
"Those are the lights on the head of death," he said softly. "Death
puts them on like a hat and then shoots off
on a gallop. Those are the lights of death on the gallop gaining on us,
getting closer and closer."
A chill ran up my back. After a while I looked in the rear-view mirror
again, but the lights were not there any
more.
I told don Juan that the car must have stopped or turned off the road.
He did not look back; he just stretched
his arms and yawned.
"No," he said. "Death never stops. Sometimes it turns off its lights,
that's all."
We arrived in northeastern Mexico June 13. Two old Indian women, who
looked alike and seemed to be
sisters, and four girls were gathered at the door of a small adobe
house. There was a hut behind the house and a
dilapidated barn that had only part of its roof and one wall left. The
women were apparently waiting for us; they
must have spotted my car by the dust it raised on the dirt road after I
left the paved highway a couple of miles
away. The house was in a deep valley, and viewed from the door the
highway looked like a long scar high up on
the side of the green hills.
Don Juan got out of the car and talked with the old women for a moment.
They pointed to some wooden
stools in front of the door. Don Juan signaled me to come over and sit
down. One of the old women sat with us;
the rest went inside the house. Two of the girls remained by the door,
examining me with curiosity. I waved at
them; they giggled and ran inside. After a few minutes two young men
came over and greeted don Juan. They did
not speak to me or even look at me. They talked to don Juan briefly;
then he got up and all of us, including the
women, Walked to another house, perhaps half a mile away.
We met there with another group of people. Don Juan went inside but
told me to stay by the door. I looked in
and saw an old Indian man around don Juan's age sitting on a wooden
stool.
It was not quite dark. A group of young Indian men and women were
standing quietly around an old truck
parked in front of the house. I talked to them in Spanish but they
deliberately avoided answering me; the women
giggled every time I said something and the men smiled politely and
turned their eyes away. It was as if they did
not understand me, yet I was sure all of them spoke Spanish because I
had heard them talking among themselves.
After a while don Juan and the other old man came out and got into the
truck and sat next to the driver. That
appeared to be a signal for everyone to climb onto the flatbed of the
truck. There were no side railings, and when
the truck began to move we all hung onto a long rope that was tied to
some hooks on the chassis.
The truck moved slowly on the dirt road. At one point, on a very steep
slope, it stopped and everybody
jumped down and walked behind it; then two young men hopped onto the
flatbed again and sat on the edge
without using the rope. The women laughed and encouraged them to
maintain their precarious position. Don Juan
and the old man, who was referred to as don Silvio, walked together and
did not seem to be concerned with the
young men's histrionics. When the road leveled off everybody got on the
track again.
We rode for about an hour. The floor was extremely hard and
uncomfortable, so I stood up and held onto the
roof of the cab and rode that way until we stopped in front of a group
of shacks. There were more people there; it
was very dark by then and I could see only a few of them in the dim,
yellowish light of a kerosene lantern that
hung by an open door.
27
Everybody got off the truck and mingled with the people in the houses.
Don Juan told me again to stay
outside. I leaned against the front fender of the truck and after a
minute or two I was joined by three young men. I
had met one of them four years before at a previous mitote. He embraced
me by grabbing my forearms.
"You're fine," he whispered to me in Spanish.
We stayed very quietly by the truck. It was a warm, windy night. I
could hear the soft rumble of a stream
close by. My friend asked me in a whisper if I had any cigarettes. I
passed a pack around. By the glow of the cigarettes
I looked at my watch. It was nine o'clock.
A group of people emerged from inside the house soon afterwards and the
three young men walked away.
Don Juan came over to me and told me that he had explained my presence
to everybody's satisfaction and that I
was welcome to come and serve water at the mitote. He said we would be
going right away.
A group of ten women and eleven men left the house. The man heading the
party was rather husky; he was
per-haps in his mid-fifties. They called him "Mocho," a nickname which
means "cropped." He moved with brisk,
firm steps. He carried a kerosene lantern and waved it from side to
side as he walked. At first I thought he was
moving it at random, but then I discovered that he waved the lantern to
mark an obstacle or a difficult pass on the
road. We walked for over an hour. The women chatted and laughed softly
from time to time. Don Juan and the
other old man were at the head of the line; I was at the very tail end
of it. I kept my eyes down on the road, trying
to see where I was walking.
It had been four years since don Juan and I had been in the hills at
night, and I had lost a great deal of
physical prowess. I kept stumbling and involuntarily kicking small
rocks. My knees did not have any flexibility;
the road seemed to come up at me when I encountered a high spot, or it
seemed to give in under me when I hit a
low spot. I was the noisiest walker and that made me into an unwilling
clown. Someone in the group said,
"Woo," every time I stumbled and everyone laughed. At one point, one of
the rocks I kicked hit a woman's heel
and she said out loud, to everyone's delight, "Give a candle to that
poor boy!" But the final mortification was
when I tripped and had to hold onto the person in front of me; he
nearly lost his balance with my weight on him
and let out a deliberate scream that was out of all proportion.
Everyone laughed so hard that the whole group had
to stop for a while.
At a certain moment the man who was leading jerked his lantern up and
down. It seemed that was the sign
we had arrived at our destination. There was a dark silhouette of a low
house to my right, a short distance away.
Everyone in the group scrambled in different directions. I looked for
don Juan. It was difficult to find him in the
darkness. I stumbled noisily for a while before noticing that he was
sitting on a rock.
He again told me that my duty was to bring water for the men who were
going to participate. He had taught
me the procedure years before. I remembered every detail of it but he
insisted on refreshing my memory and
showed me again how to do it.
Afterwards we walked to the back of the house where all the men had
gathered. They had built a fire. There
was a cleared area covered with straw mats perhaps fifteen feet away
from the fire. Mocho, the man who had led
us, sat on a mat first; I noticed that the upper edge of his left ear
was missing, which accounted for his nickname.
Don Silvio sat to his right and don Juan to his left. Mocho was sitting
facing the fire. A young man advanced
toward him and placed a flat basket with peyote buttons in front of
him; then the young man sat down between
Mocho and don Silvio. Another young man carried two small baskets and
placed them next to the peyote buttons
and then sat between Mocho and don Juan. Then two other young men
flanked don Silvio and don Juan, closing
a circle of seven persons. The women remained inside the house. Two
young men were in charge of keeping the
fire burning all night, and one teenager and I kept the water that was
going to be given to the seven participants
after their all-night ritual. The boy and I sat by a rock. The fire and
the receptacle with water were opposite each
other and at an equal distance from the circle of participants.
Mocho, the headman, sang his peyote song; his eyes were closed; his
body bobbed up and down. It was a
very long song. I did not understand the language. Then all of them,
one by one, sang their peyote songs. They
did not seem to follow any preconceived order. They apparently sang
whenever they felt like doing it. Then
Mocho held the basket with peyote buttons, took two of them, and placed
it back again in the center of the circle;
28
don Silvio was nest and then don Juan. The four young men, who seemed
to be a separate unit, took two peyote
buttons each, following a counter-clockwise direction.
Each of the seven participants sang and ate two peyote buttons four
consecutive times, then they passed the
other two baskets, which contained dried fruit and meat.
They repeated this cycle at various times during the night, yet I could
not detect any underlying order to their
individual movements. They did not speak to one another; they seemed
rather to be by themselves and to
themselves. I did not see any of them, not even once, paying attention
to what the other men were doing.
Before daybreak they got up and the young man and I gave them water.
Afterwards I walked around to orient
myself. The house was a one-room shack, a low adobe construction with a
thatched roof. The scenery that surrounded
it was quite oppressive. The shack was located in a harsh plain with
mixed vegetation. Shrubs and cacti
grew together, but there were no trees at all. I did not feel like
venturing beyond the house.
The women left during the morning. The men moved silently in the area
immediately surrounding the house.
Around midday all of us sat down again in the same order we had sat the
night before. A basket with pieces of
dried meat cut to the same size as a peyote button was passed around.
Some of the men sang their peyote songs.
After an hour or so all of them stood up and went off in different
directions.
The women had left a pot of gruel for the fire and water attendants. I
ate some of it and then I slept most of
the afternoon.
After dark the young men in charge of the fire built another one and
the cycle of intaking peyote buttons
began again. It followed roughly the same order as the preceding night,
ending at daybreak.
During the course of the night I struggled to observe and record every
single movement performed by each of
the seven participants, in hopes of discovering the slightest form of a
detectable system of verbal or nonverbal
communication among them. There was nothing in their actions, however,
that revealed an underlying system.
In the early evening the cycle of intaking peyote was renewed. By
morning I knew that I had completely
failed to find clues that would point out the covert leader, or to
discover any form of covert communication
among them or any traces of their system of agreement. For the rest of
the day I sat by myself and tried to
arrange my notes.
When the men gathered again for the fourth night I knew somehow that
this was to be the last meeting. Nobody
had mentioned anything about it to me, yet I knew they would disband
the next day. I sat by the water again
and everyone else resumed his position in the order that had already
been established.
The behavior of the seven men in the circle was a replica of what I had
observed during the three previous
nights. I became absorbed in their movements as I had done before. I
wanted to record everything they did, every
movement, every utterance, every gesture.
At a certain moment I heard a sort of beep in my ear; it was a common
sort of buzzing in the ear and I did not
pay attention to it. The beep became louder, yet it was still within
the range of my ordinary bodily sensations. I
remembered dividing my attention between watching the men and listening
to the buzzing I was hearing. Then, at
a given instant, the faces of the men seemed to become brighter; it was
as if a light had been turned on. But it was
not quite like an electric light, or a lantern, or the reflection of
the fire on their faces. It was rather an iridescence;
a pink luminosity, very tenuous, yet detectable from where I was. The
buzzing seemed to increase. I looked at the
teenage boy who was with me but he had fallen asleep.
The pink luminosity became more noticeable by then. I looked at don
Juan; his eyes were closed; so were
don Silvio's and so were Mocho's. I could not see the eyes of the four
younger men because two of them were
bent forward and the other two had their backs turned to me.
I became even more involved in watching. Yet I had not fully realized
that I was actually hearing a buzzing
and was actually seeing a pinkish glow hovering over the men. After a
moment I became aware that the tenuous
pink light and the buzzing were very steady, I had a moment of intense
bewilderment and then a thought crossed
my mind, a thought that had nothing to do with the scene I was
witnessing, nor with the purpose I had in mind for
being there. I remembered something my mother had told me once when I
was a child. The thought was
distracting and very inappropriate; I tried to discard it and involve
myself again in my assiduous watching, but I
29
could not do it. The thought recurred; it was stronger, more demanding,
and then I clearly heard my mother's
voice calling me. I heard the shuffling of her slippers and then her
laughter. I turned around looking for her; I
conceived that I was going to be transported in time by some sort of
hallucination or mirage and I was going to
see her, but I saw only the boy sleeping beside me. To see him jolted
me and I experienced a brief moment of
ease, of sobriety.
I looked again at the group of men. They had not changed their
positions at all. However, the luminosity was
gone, and so was the buzzing in my ears. I felt relieved. I thought
that the hallucination of hearing my mother's
voice was over. Her voice had been so clear and vivid. I said to myself
over and over that for an instant the voice
had almost trapped me. I noticed vaguely that don Juan was looking at
me, but that did not matter. It was the
memory of my mother's voice calling me that was mesmerizing. I
struggled desperately to think about something
else. And then I heard her voice again, as clearly as if she had been
behind me. She called my name. I turned
quickly, but all I saw was the dark silhouette of the shack and the
shrubs beyond it.
Hearing my name caused me the most profound anguish. I whined
involuntarily. I felt cold and very lonely
and I began to weep. At that moment I had the sensation that I needed
someone to care for me. I turned my head
to look at don Juan; he was staring at me. I did not want to see him so
I closed my eyes. And then I saw my
mother. It was not the thought of my mother, the way I think of her
ordinarily. This was a clear vision of her,
standing by me. I felt desperate. I was trembling and wanted to escape.
The vision of my mother was too
disturbing, too alien to what I was pursuing in that peyote meeting.
There was apparently no conscious way to
avoid it. Perhaps I could have opened my eyes if I really wanted the
vision to vanish, but instead I examined it in
detail. My examination was more than merely looking at her; it was a
compulsive scrutiny and assessment. A
very peculiar feeling enveloped me as if it were an outside force, and
I suddenly felt the horrendous burden of my
mother's love. When I heard my name I was torn apart; the memory of my
mother filled me with anguish and
melancholy, but when I examined her I knew that I had never liked her.
This was a shocking realization.
Thoughts and images came to me as an avalanche. The vision of my mother
must have vanished in the meantime;
it was no longer important. I was no longer interested in what the
Indians were doing either. In fact I had
forgotten the mitote. I was absorbed in a series of extraordinary
thoughts, extraordinary because they were more
than thoughts; these were complete units of feeling that were emotional
certainties, indisputable evidences about
the nature of my relationship with my mother.
At a certain moment these extraordinary thoughts ceased to come. I
noticed that they had lost their fluidity
and their quality of being complete units of feeling. I had begun to
think about other things. My mind was
rambling. I thought of other members of my immediate family, but there
were no images to accompany my
thoughts. Then I looked at don Juan. He was standing; the rest of the
men were also standing, and then they all
walked toward the water. I moved aside and nudged the boy who was still
asleep.
I related to don Juan the sequence of my astounding vision almost as
soon as he got into my car. He laughed
with great delight and said that my vision was a sign, an omen as
important as my first experience with
Mescalito.
I remembered that don Juan had interpreted the reactions I had when I
first ingested peyote as an allimportant
omen; in fact he decided to teach me his knowledge because of it.
Don Juan said that during the last night of the mitote Mescalito had
hovered over me so obviously that
everyone was forced to turn toward me, and that was why he was staring
at me when I looked at him.
I wanted to hear his interpretation of my vision, but he did not want
to talk about it. He said that whatever I
had experienced was nonsense in comparison to the omen.
Don Juan kept on talking about Mescalito's light hovering over me and
how everyone had seen it.
"That was really something," he said. "I couldn't possibly ask for a
better omen."
Don Juan and I were obviously on two different avenues of thought. He
was concerned with the importance
of the events he had interpreted as an omen and I was obsessed with the
details of the vision I had had.
"I don't care about omens," I said. "I want to know what happened to
me."
He frowned as if he were upset and remained very stiff and quiet for a
moment. Then he looked at me. His
30
tone was very forceful. He said that the only important issue was that
Mescalito had been very gentle with me,
had engulfed me with his light and had given me a lesson with no other
effort on my part than being around.
31
4
On September 4, 1968, I went to Sonora to visit don Juan. Following a
request he had made during my previous
visit to him, I stopped on the way, in Hermosillo, to buy him a
noncommercial tequila called bacanora. His
request seemed very odd to me at the time, since I knew he disliked
drinking, but I bought four bottles and put
them in a box along with other things I had brought for him.
"Why, you got four bottles!" he said, laughing, when he opened the box.
"I asked you to buy me one. I
believe you thought the bacanora was for me, but it's for my grandson
Lucio, and you have to give it to him as
though it's a personal gift of your own."
I had met don Juan's grandson two years before; he was twenty-eight
years old then. He was very tall, over
six feet, and was always extravagantly well dressed for his means and
in comparison to his peers. While the
majority of Yaquis wear khakis and Levis, straw hats, and homemade
sandals called guaraches, Lucio's outfit
was an expensive black leather jacket with frills of turquoise beads, a
Texan cowboy hat, and a pair of boots that
were monogrammed and hand decorated.
Lucio was delighted to receive the liquor and immediately took the
bottles inside his house, apparently to put
them away. Don Juan made a casual comment that one should never hoard
liquor and drink alone. Lucio said he
was not really hoarding, but was putting it away until that evening, at
which time he was going to invite his
friends to drink with him.
That evening around seven o'clock I returned to Lucio's place. It was
dark. I made out the vague silhouette of
two people standing under a small tree; it was Lucio and one of his
friends, who were waiting for me and guided
me to the house with a flashlight.
Lucio's house was a flimsy, two-room, dirt-floor, wattle-and-daub
construction. It was perhaps twenty feet
long and supported by relatively thin beams of the mesquite tree. It
had, as all the houses of the Yaquis have, a
flat, thatched roof and a nine-foot-wide ramada, which is a sort of
awning over the entire front part of the house.
A ramada roof is never thatched; it is made of branches arranged in a
loose fashion, giving enough shade and yet
permitting the cooling breeze to circulate freely.
As I entered the house I turned on my tope recorder, which I kept
inside my brief case. Lucio introduced me
to his friends. There were eight men inside the house, including don
Juan. They were sitting casually around the
center of the room under the bright light of a gasoline lantern that
hung from a beam, Don Juan was sitting on a
box. I sat facing him at the end of a six-foot bench made with a thick
wooden beam nailed on two prongs planted
in the ground.
Don Juan had placed his hat on the floor beside him. The light of the
gasoline lantern made his short white
hair look more brilliantly white. I looked at his face; the light had
also enhanced the deep wrinkles on his neck
and forehead, and made him look darker and older.
I looked at the other men; under the greenish-white light of the
gasoline lantern all of them looked tired and
old.
Lucio addressed the whole group in Spanish and said in a loud voice
that we were going to drink one bottle
of bacanora that I had brought for him from Hermosillo. He went into
the other room, brought out a bottle,
uncorked it, and gave it to me along with a small tin cup. I poured a
very small amount into the cup and drank it.
The bacanora seemed to be more fragrant and more dense than regular
tequila, and stronger too. It made me
cough. I passed the bottle and everyone poured himself a small drink,
everyone except don Juan; he just took the
bottle and placed it in front of Lucio, who was at the end of the line.
All of them made lively comments about the rich flavor of that
particular bottle, and all of them agreed that
the liquor must have come from the high mountains of Chihuahua.
The bottle went around a second time. The men smacked their lips,
repeated their statements of praise, and
engaged themselves in a lively discussion about the noticeable
differences between the tequila made around Guadalajara
and that made at a high altitude in Chihuahua.
During the second time around don Juan again did not drink and I poured
only a dab for myself, but the rest
32
of them filled the cup to the brim. The bottle went around once more
and was finished.
"Get the other bottles, Lucio," don Juan said.
Lucio seemed to vacillate, and don Juan quite casualty explained to the
others that I had brought four bottles
for Lucio.
Benigno, a young man of Lucio's age, looked at the brief case that I
had placed inconspicuously behind me
and asked if I was a tequila salesman. Don Juan answered that I was
not, and that I had really come to Sonora to
see him.
"Carlos is learning about Mescalito, and I'm teaching him," don Juan
said.
All of them looked at me and smiled politely. Bajea, the woodcutter, a
small, thin man with sharp features,
looked at me fixedly for a moment and then said that the storekeeper
had accused me of being a spy from an
American company that was planning to do mining in the Yaqui land. They
all reacted as if they were indignant
at such an accusation. Besides, they all resented the storekeeper, who
was a Mexican, or a Yori as the Yaquis say.
Lucio went into the other room and returned with another bottle of
bacanora. He opened it, poured himself a
large drink, and then passed it around. The conversation drifted to the
probabilities of the American company
coming to Sonora and its possible effect on the Yaquis. The bottle went
back to Lucio. He lifted it and looked at
its contents to see how much was left.
"Tell him not to worry," don Juan whispered to me. "Tell him you'll
bring him more next time you come
around."
I leaned over to Lucio and assured him that on my next visit I was
going to bring him at least half a dozen
bottles.
At one moment the topics of conversation seemed to wane away.
Don Juan turned to me and said loudly, "Why don't you tell the guys
here about your encounters with Mescalito?
I think that'll be much more interesting than this idle chat about what
will happen if the American company
comes to Sonora."
"Is Mescalito peyote, Grandpa?" Lucio asked curiously.
"Some people call it that way," don Juan said dryly. "I prefer to call
it Mescalito."
"That confounded thing causes madness," said Genaro, a tall, husky,
middle-aged man.
"I think it's stupid to say that Mescalito causes madness," don Juan
said softly. "Because if that were the case,
Carlos would be in a strait-jacket this very moment instead of being
here talking to you. He has taken it and look
at him. He is fine."
Bajea smiled and replied shyly, "Who can tell?" and everybody laughed.
"Look at me then," don Juan said. "I've known Mescalito nearly all my
life and it has never hurt me."
The men did not laugh, but it was obvious that they were not taking him
seriously.
"On the other hand," don Juan went on, "it's true that Mescalito drives
people crazy, as you said, but that's
only when they come to him without knowing what they're doing."
Esquere, an old man who seemed to be don Juan's age, chuckled softly as
he shook his head from side to
side.
"What do you mean by 'knowing,' Juan?" he asked. "The last time I saw
you, you were saying the same
thing."
"People go really crazy when they take that peyote stuff," Genaro
continued. "I've seen the Huichol Indians
eating it. They acted as if they had rabies. They frothed and puked and
pissed all over the place. You could get
epilepsy from taking that confounded thing. That's what Mr. Salas, the
government engineer, told me once. And
epilepsy is for life, you know."
"That's being worse than animals," Bajea added solemnly.
"You saw only what you wanted to see about the Huichol Indians,
Genaro," don Juan said. "For one thing,
you never took the trouble of finding out from them what it's like to
get acquainted with Mescalito. Mescalito has
never made anyone epileptic, to my knowledge. The government engineer
is a Yori and I doubt that a Yori
knows anything about it. You really don't think that all the thousands
of people who know Mescalito are crazy,
33
do you?"
"They must be crazy, or pretty nearly so, to do a thing like that,"
answered Genaro.
"But if all those thousands of people were crazy at the same time who
would do their work? How would they
manage to survive?" don Juan asked.
"Macario, who comes from the 'other side'"—the
U.S.A.—"told me that whoever takes it there is marked for
life," Esquere said.
"Macario is lying if he says that," don Juan said. "I'm sure he doesn't
know what he's talking about."
"He really tells too many lies," said Benigno.
"Who's Macario?" I asked.
"He's a Yaqui Indian who lives here," Lucio said. "He says he's from
Arizona and that he was in Europe
during the war. He tells all kinds of stories."
"He says he was a colonel!" Benigno said.
Everyone laughed and the conversation shifted for a while to Macario's
unbelievable tales, but don Juan returned
again to the topic of Mescalito.
"If all of you know that Macario is a liar, how can you believe him
when he talks about Mescalito?"
"Do you mean peyote, Grandpa?" Lucio asked, as if he were really
struggling to make sense out of the term.
"God damn it! Yes!"
Don Juan's tone was sharp and abrupt. Lucio recoiled involuntarily, and
for a moment I felt they were all
afraid. Then don Juan smiled broadly and continued in a mild tone.
"Don't you fellows see that Macario doesn't know what he's talking
about? Don't you see that in order to talk
about Mescalito one has to know?"
"There you go again," Esquere said. "What the hell is this knowledge?
You are worse than Macario. At least
he says what's on his mind, whether he knows it or not. For years I've
been listening to you say we have to know.
What do we have to know?"
"Don Juan says there is a spirit in peyote," Benigno said.
"I have seen peyote in the field, but I have never seen spirits or
anything of the sort," Bajea added.
"Mescalito is like a spirit, perhaps," don Juan explained. "But
whatever he is doesn't become clear until one
knows about him. Esquere complains that I have been saying this for
years. Well, I have. But it's not my fault that
you don't understand. Bajea says that whoever takes it becomes like an
animal. Well, I don't see it that way. To
me those who think they are above animals live worse than animals. Look
at my grandson here. He works
without rest. I would say he lives to work, like a mule. And all he
does that is not animal-like is to get drunk."
Everybody laughed, Victor, a very young man who seemed to be still in
adolescence, laughed in a pitch
above everybody else.
Eligio, a young farmer, had not uttered a single word so far. He was
sitting on the floor to my right, with his
back against some sacks of chemical fertilizer that had been piled
inside the house to protect them from the rain.
He was one of Lucio's childhood friends, powerful looking and, although
shorter than Lucio, more stocky and
better built. Eligio seemed concerned about don Juan's words. Bajea was
trying to come back with a comment,
but Eligio interrupted him.
"In what way would peyote change all this?" he asked. "It seems to me
that a man is born to work all his life,
like mules do."
"Mescalito changes everything," don Juan said, "yet we still have to
work like everybody else, like mules. I
said there was a spirit inside Mescalito because it is something like a
spirit which brings about the change in men.
A spirit we can see and can touch, a spirit that changes us, sometimes
even against our will."
"Peyote drives you out of your mind," Genaro said, "and then of course
you believe you've changed. True?"
"How can it change us?" Eligio insisted.
"He teaches us the right way to live," don Juan said. "He helps and
protects those who know him. The life
you fellows are leading is no life at all. You don't know the happiness
that comes from doing things deliberately.
You don't have a protector!"
34
"What do you mean?" Genaro said indignantly. "We certainly have. Our
Lord Jesus Christ, and our Mother
the Virgin, and the little Virgin of Guadalupe. Aren't they our
protectors?"
"Fine bunch of protectors!" don Juan said mockingly. "Have they taught
you a better way to live?"
"That's because people don't listen to them," Genaro protested, "and
they only pay attention to the devil."
"If they were real protectors they would force you to listen," don Juan
said. "If Mescalito becomes your protector
you will have to listen whether you Iike it or not, because you can see
him and you must take heed of what
he says. He will make you approach him with respect. Not the way you
fellows are accustomed to approach your
protectors."
"What do you mean, Juan?" Esquere asked.
"What I mean is that for you to come to your protectors means that one
of you has to play a fiddle, and a
dancer has to put on his mask and leggings and rattles and dance, while
the rest of you drink. You, Benigno, you
were a dancer once, tell us about it."
"I gave it up after three years," Benigno said. "It's hard work."
"Ask Lucio," Esquere said satirically. "He gave it up in one week!"
Everybody laughed except don Juan. Lucio smiled, seemingly embarrassed,
and gulped down two huge swallows
of bacanora.
"It is not hard, it is stupid," don Juan said. "Ask Valencio, the
dancer, if he enjoys dancing. He does not! He
got accustomed to it, that's all. I've seen him dance for years, and
every time I have, I've seen the same movements
badly executed. He takes no pride in his art except when he talks about
it. He has no love for it, therefore
year after year he repeats the same motions. What was bad about his
dancing at the beginning has become fixed.
He cannot see it any longer."
"He was taught to dance that way," Eligio said. "I was also a dancer in
the town of Torim. I know you must
dance the way they teach you."
"Valencio is not the best dancer anyway," Esquere said. "There are
others. How about Sacateca?"
"Sacateca is a man of knowledge, he is not in the same class with you
fellows," don Juan said sternly. "He
dances because that's the bent of his nature. All I wanted to say was
that you, who are not dancers, do not enjoy
it. Perhaps if the dances are well performed some of you will get
pleasure. Not many of you know that much
about dancing, though; therefore you are left with a very lousy piece
of joy. This is why you fellows are all
drunkards. Look at my grandson here!"
"Cut it out, Grandpa!" Lucio protested.
"He's not lazy or stupid," don Juan went on, "but what else does he do
besides drink?"
"He buys leather jackets!" Genaro remarked, and the whole audience
roared.
Lucio gulped down more bacanora.
"And how is peyote going to change that?" Eligio asked.
"If Lucio would seek the protector," don Juan said, "his life would be
changed. I don't know exactly how, but
I am sure it would be different."
"He would stop drinking, is that what you mean?" Eligio insisted.
"Perhaps he would. He needs something else besides tequila to make his
life satisfying. And that something,
whatever it may be, might be provided by the protector."
"Then peyote must taste very good," Eligio said.
"I didn't say that," don Juan said.
"How in the hell are you going to enjoy it if it doesn't taste good?"
Eligio said.
"It makes one enjoy life better," don Juan said. "But if it doesn't
taste good, how could it make us enjoy our
lives better?" Eligio persisted. "It doesn't make sense,"
"Of course it makes sense," Genaro said with conviction. "Peyote makes
you crazy and naturally you think
you're having a great time with your life, no matter what you do."
They all laughed again.
"It does make sense," don Juan proceeded, undisturbed, "if you think
how little we know and how much
35
there is to see. Booze is what makes people crazy. It blurs the images.
Mescalito, on the other hand, sharpens
everything. It makes you see so very well. So very well!"
Lucio and Benigno looked at each other and smiled as though they had
already heard the story before.
Genaro and Esquere grew more impatient and began to talk at the same
time. Victor laughed above all the other
voices. The only one interested seemed to be Eligio.
"How can peyote do all that?" he asked.
"In the first place," don Juan explained, "you must want to become
acquainted with him, and I think this is by
far the most important thing. Then you must be offered to him, and you
must meet with him many times before
you can say you know him."
"And what happens then?" Eligio asked.
Genaro interrupted. "You crap on the roof with your ass on the ground."
The audience roared.
"What happens next is entirely up to you," don Juan went on without
losing his self-control. "You must come
to him without fear and, little by little, he will teach you how to
live a better life."
There was a long pause. The men seemed to be tired. The bottle was
empty. Lucio, with obvious reluctance,
opened another.
"Is peyote Carlos' protector too?" Eligio asked in a joking tone.
"I wouldn't know that," don Juan said. "He has taken it three times, so
ask him to tell you about it."
They all turned to me curiously and Eligio asked, "Did you really take
it?"
"Yes. I did."
It seemed don Juan had won a round with his audience. They were either
interested in hearing about my
experience or too polite to laugh in my face.
"Didn't it hurt your mouth?" Lucio asked.
"It did. It also tasted terrible."
"Why did you take it, then?" Benigno asked.
I began to explain to them in elaborate terms that for a Western man
don Juan's knowledge about peyote was
one of the most fascinating things one could find. I said that
everything he had said about it was true and that
each one of us could verify that truth for ourselves.
I noticed that all of them were smiling as if they were concealing
their contempt. I grew very embarrassed. I
was aware of my awkwardness in conveying what I really had in mind. I
talked for a while longer, but I had lost
the impetus and only repeated what don Juan had already said.
Don Juan came to my aid and asked in a reassuring tone, "You were not
looking for a protector when you
first came to Mescalito, were you?"
I told them that I did not know that Mescalito could be a protector,
and that I was moved only by my
curiosity and a great desire to know him.
Don Juan reaffirmed that my intentions had been faultless and said that
because of it Mescalito had had a
beneficial effect on me.
"But it made you puke and piss all over the place, didn't it?" Genaro
insisted.
I told him that it had in fact affected me in such a manner. They all
laughed with restraint. I felt that they had
become even more contemptuous of me. They didn't seem to be interested,
except for Eligio, who was gazing at
me.
"What did you see?" he asked.
Don Juan urged me to recount for them all or nearly all the salient
details of my experiences, so I described
the sequence and the form of what I had perceived. When I finished
talking Lucio made a comment.
"If peyote is that weird, I'm glad I've never taken it."
"It is just like I said," Genaro said to Bajea. "That thing makes you
insane."
"But Carlos is not insane now. How do you account for that?" don Juan
asked Genaro.
"How do we know he isn't?" Genaro retorted.
36
They all broke out laughing, including don Juan.
"Were you afraid?" Benigno asked.
"I certainly was."
"Why did you do it, then?" Eligio asked.
"He said he wanted to know," Lucio answered for me. "I think Carlos is
getting to be like my grandpa. Both
have been saying they want to know, but nobody knows what in the hell
they want to know."
"It is impossible to explain that knowing," don Juan said to Eligio,
"because it is different for every man. The
only thing which is common to all of us is that Mescalito reveals his
secrets privately to each man. Being aware
of how Genaro feels, I don't recommend that he meet Mescalito. Yet in
spite of my words or his feelings,
Mescalito could have a totally beneficial effect on him. But only he
could find out, and that is the knowing I have
been talking about."
Don Juan got up. "It's time to go home," he said. "Lucio is drunk and
Victor is asleep."
Two days later, on September 6, Lucio, Benigno, and Eligio came over to
the house where I was staying to
go hunting with me. They remained silent for a while as I kept on
writing my notes. Then Benigno laughed
politely as a warning that he was going to say something important.
After a preliminary embarrassing silence he laughed again and said,
"Lucio here says that he would take
peyote."
"Would you really?" I asked.
"Yes. I wouldn't mind it."
Benigno's laughter came in spurts.
"Lucio says he will eat peyote if you buy him a motorcycle."
Lucio and Benigno looked at each other and broke out laughing.
"How much is a motorcycle in the United States?" Lucio asked.
"You could probably get one for a hundred dollars," I said.
"That isn't very much there, is it? You could easily get it for him,
couldn't you?" Benigno asked.
"Well, let me ask your grandpa first," I said to Lucio.
"No, no," he protested. "Don't mention it to him. He'll spoil
everything. He's a weirdo. And besides, he's too
old and feeble-minded and he doesn't know what he's doing."
"He was a real sorcerer once," Benigno added. "I mean a real one. My
folks say he was the best. But he took
to peyote and became a nobody. Now he's too old."
"And he goes over and over the same crappy stories about peyote," Lucio
said.
"That peyote is pure crap," Benigno said. "You know, we tried it once.
Lucio got a whole sack of it from his
grandpa. One night as we were going to town we chewed it. Son of a
bitch! It cut my mouth to shreds. It tasted
like hell!"
"Did you swallow it?" I asked.
"We spit it out," Lucio said, "and threw the whole damn sack away."
They both thought the incident was very funny. Eligio, in the meantime,
had not said a word. He was
withdrawn, as usual. He did not even laugh.
"Would you like to try it, Eligio?" I asked.
"No. Not me. Not even for a motorcycle."
Lucio and Benigno found the statement utterly funny and roared again.
"Nevertheless," Eligio continued, "I must admit that don Juan baffles
me."
"My grandfather is too old to know anything," Lucio said with great
conviction.
"Yeah, he's too old," Benigno echoed.
I thought the opinion the two young men had of don Juan was childish
and unfounded. I felt it was my duty
to defend his character and I told them that in my judgment don Juan
was then, as he had been in the past, a great
sorcerer, perhaps even the greatest of all. I said I felt there was
something about him, something truly
extraordinary.
37
I urged them to remember that he was over seventy years old and yet he
was more energetic and stronger
than all of us put together. I challenged the young men to prove it to
themselves by trying to sneak up on don
Juan.
"You just can't sneak up on my grandpa," Lucio said proudly. "He's a
brujo."
I reminded them that they had said he was too old and feeble-minded,
and that a feeble-minded person does
not know what goes on around him. I said that I had marveled at don
Juan's alertness time and time again.
"No one can sneak up on a brujo, even if he's old," Benigno said with
authority. "They can gang up on him
when he's asleep, though. That's what happened to a man named Cevicas.
People got tired of his evil sorcery and
killed him."
I asked them to give me all the details of that event, but they said it
had taken place before their time, or
when they were still very young. Eligio added that people secretly
believed that Cevicas had been only a fool,
and that no one could harm a real sorcerer. I tried to question them
further on their opinions about sorcerers.
They did not seem to have much interest in the subject; besides, they
were eager to start out and shoot the .22
rifle I had brought.
We were silent for a while as we walked toward the thick chaparral,
then Eligio, who was at the head of the
line, turned around and said to me, "Perhaps we're the crazy ones.
Perhaps don Juan is right. Look at the way we
live."
Lucio and Benigno protested. I tried to mediate. I agreed with Eligio
and told them that I myself had felt that
the way I lived was somehow wrong. Benigno said that I had no business
complaining about my life, that I had
money and I had a car. I retorted that I could easily say that they
themselves were better off because each owned
a piece of land. They responded in unison that the owner of their land
was the federal bank. I told them that I did
not own my car either, that a bank in California owned it, and that my
life was only different but not better than
theirs. By that time we were already in the dense shrubs.
We did not find any deer or wild boars, but we got three jack rabbits.
On our return we stopped at Lucio's
house and he announced that his wife was going to make rabbit stew.
Benigno went to the store to buy a bottle of
tequila and get us some sodas. When we came back don Juan was with him.
"Did you find my grandpa at the store buying beer?" Lucio asked
laughing.
"I haven't been invited to this reunion," don Juan said. "I've just
dropped by to ask Carlos if he's leaving for
Hermosillo."
I told him I was planning to leave the next day, and while we talked
Benigno distributed the bottles. Eligio
gave his to don Juan, and since among the Yaquis it is deadly impolite
to refuse, even as a courtesy, don Juan
took it quietly. I gave mine to Eligio, and he was obliged to take it.
So Benigno in turn gave me his bottle. But
Lucio, who had obviously visualized the entire scheme of Yaqui good
manners, had already finished drinking his
soda. He turned to Benigno, who had a pathetic look on his face, and
said, laughing, "They've screwed you out of
your bottle."
Don Juan said he never drank soda and placed his bottle in Benigno's
hands. We sat under the ramada in
silence.
Eligio seemed to be nervous. He fidgeted with the brim of his hat.
"I've been thinking about what you said the other night," he said to
don Juan. "How can peyote change our
life? How?"
Don Juan did not answer. He stared fixedly at Eligio for a moment and
then began to sing in Yaqui. It was
not a song proper, but a short recitation. We remained quiet for a long
time. Then I asked don Juan to translate
the Yaqui words for me.
"That was only for Yaquis," he said matter-of-factly.
I felt dejected. I was sure he had said something of great importance.
"Eligio is an Indian," don Juan finally said to me, "and as an Indian
Eligio has nothing. We Indians have
nothing. All you see around here belongs to the Yoris. The Yaquis have
only their wrath and what the land offers
to them freely."
38
Nobody uttered a sound for quite some time, then don Juan stood up and
said goodbye and walked away. We
looked at him until he had disappeared behind a bend of the road. All
of us seemed to be nervous. Lucio told us
in a disoriented manner that his grandfather had not stayed because he
hated rabbit stew. Eligio seemed to be
immersed in thoughts. Benigno turned to me and said loudly, "I think
the Lord is going to punish you and don
Juan for what you're doing."
Lucio began to laugh and Benigno joined him.
"You're clowning, Benigno," Eligio said somberly. "What you've just
said isn't worth a damn."
September 15,1968
It was nine o'clock Saturday night. Don Juan sat in front of Eligio in
the center of the ramada of Lucio's
house. Don Juan placed his sack of peyote buttons between them and sang
while rocking his body slightly back
and forth. Lucio, Benigno, and I sat five or six feet behind Eligio
with our backs against the wall. It was quite
dark at first. We had been sitting inside the house under the gasoline
lantern waiting for don Juan. He had called
us out to the ramada when he arrived and had told us where to sit.
After a while my eyes became accustomed to
the dark. I could see everyone clearly. I noticed that Eligio seemed to
be terrified. His entire body shook; his
teeth chattered uncontrollably. He was convulsed with spasmodic jerks
of his head and back.
Don Juan spoke to him, telling him not to be afraid, and to trust the
protector, and to think of nothing else. He
casually took a peyote button, offered it to Eligio, and ordered him to
chew it very slowly. Eligio whined like a
puppy and recoiled. His breathing was very rapid, it sounded like the
whizzing of bellows. He took off his hat
and wiped his forehead. He covered his face with his hands. I thought
he was crying. It was a very long, tense
moment before he regained some control over himself. He sat up straight
and, still covering his face with one
hand, took the peyote button and began chewing it.
I felt a tremendous apprehension. I had not realized until then that I
was perhaps as scared as Eligio. My
mouth had a dryness similar to that produced by peyote. Eligio chewed
the button for a long tune. My tension increased.
I began to whine involuntarily as my respiration became more
accelerated.
Don Juan began to chant louder, then he offered another button to
Eligio and after Eligio had finished it he
offered him dry fruit and told him to chew it very slowly. Eligio got
up repeatedly and went to the bushes. At one
point he asked for water. Don Juan told him not to drink it but only
swish it in his mouth.
Eligio chewed two more buttons and don Juan gave him dry meat.
By the time he had chewed his tenth button I was nearly sick with
anxiety.
Suddenly Eligio slumped forward and his forehead hit the ground. He
rolled on his left side and jerked convulsively.
I looked at my watch. It was twenty after eleven. Eligio tossed,
wobbled, and moaned for over an hour
while he lay on the floor.
Don Juan maintained the same position in front of him. His peyote songs
were almost a murmur. Benigno,
who was sitting to my right, looked inattentive; Lucio, next to him,
had slumped on his side and was snoring.
Eligio's body crumpled into a contorted position. He lay on his right
side with his front toward me and his
hands between his legs. His body gave a powerful jump and he turned on
his back with his legs slightly curved.
His left hand waved out and up with an extremely free and elegant
motion. His right hand repeated the same
pattern, and then both arms alternated in a wavering, slow movement,
resembling that of a harpist. The movement
became more vigorous by degrees. His arms had a perceptible vibration
and went up and down like pistons.
At the same time his hands rotated onward at the wrist and his fingers
quivered. It was a beautiful, harmonious,
hypnotic sight. I thought his rhythm and muscular control were beyond
comparison.
Eligio then rose slowly, as if he were stretching against an enveloping
force. His body Shivered. He squatted
and then pushed himself up to an erect position. His arms, trunk, and
head trembled as if an intermittent electric
current were going through them. It was as though a force outside his
control was setting him or driving him up.
Don Juan's chanting became very loud. Lucjo and Benigno woke up and
looked at the scene uninterestedly
for a while and then went back to sleep.
Eligio seemed to be moving up and up. He was apparently climbing. He
cupped his hands and seemed to
grab onto objects beyond my vision. He pushed himself up and paused to
catch his breath.
39
I wanted to see his eyes and moved closer to him, but don Juan gave me
a fierce look and I recoiled to my
place.
Then Eligio jumped. It was a final, formidable leap. He had apparently
reached his goal. He puffed and
sobbed with the exertion. He seemed to be holding onto a ledge. But
something was overtaking him. He shrieked
desperately. His grip faltered and he began to fall. His body arched
backward and was convulsed from head to
toe with the most beautiful, coordinated ripple. The ripple went
through him perhaps a hundred times before his
body collapsed like a lifeless burlap sack.
After a while he extended his arms in front of him as though he was
protecting his face. His legs stretched
out backward as he lay on his chest; they were arched a few inches
above the ground, giving his body the very
appearance of sliding or flying at an incredible speed. His head was
arched as far back as possible, his arms
locked over his eyes, shielding them. I could feel the wind hissing
around him. I gasped and gave a loud
involuntary shriek. Lucio and Benigno woke and looked at Eligio
curiously.
"If you promise to buy me a motorcycle I will chew it now," Lucio said
loudly.
I looked at don Juan. He made an imperative gesture with his head.
"Son of a bitch!" Lucio mumbled, and went back to sleep.
Eligio stood up and began walking. He took a couple of steps toward me
and stopped. I could see him
smiling with a beatific expression. He tried to whistle. There was no
clear sound yet it had harmony. It was a
tune. It had only a couple of bars, which he repeated over and over.
After a while the whistling was distinctly
audible, and then it became a sharp melody. Eligio mumbled
unintelligible words. The words seemed to be the
lyrics to the tune. He repeated it for hours. A very simple song,
repetitious, monotonous, and yet strangely
beautiful.
Eligio seemed to be looking at something while he sang. At one moment
he got very close to me. I saw his
eyes in the semidarkness. They were glassy, transfixed. He smiled and
giggled. He walked and sat down and
walked again, groaning and sighing.
Suddenly something seemed to have pushed him from behind. His body
arched in the middle as though
moved by a direct force. At one instant Eligio was balanced on the tips
of his toes, making nearly a complete
circle, his hands touching the ground. He dropped to the ground again,
softly, on his back, and extended his
whole length, acquiring a strange rigidity.
He whimpered and groaned for a whale, then began to snore. Don Juan
covered him with some burlap sacks.
It was 5:35 A.M.
Lucio and Benigno had fallen asleep shoulder to shoulder with their
backs against the wall. Don Juan and I
sat quietly for a very long time. He seemed to be tired. I broke the
silence and asked him about Eligio. He told
me that Eligio's encounter with Mescalito had been exceptionally
successful; Mescalito had taught him a song the
first time they met and that was indeed extraordinary.
I asked him why he had not let Lucio take some for a motorcycle. He
said that Mescalito would have killed
Lucio if he had approached him under such conditions. Don Juan admitted
that he had prepared everything
carefully to convince his grandson; he told me that he had counted on
my friendship with Lucio as the central
part of his strategy. He said that Lucio had always been his great
concern, and that at one time they had lived
together and were very close, but Lucio became gravely ill when he was
seven and don Juan's son, a devout
Catholic, made a vow to the Virgin of Guadalupe that Lucio would join a
sacred dancing society if his life were
spared. Lucio recovered and was forced to carry out the promise. He
lasted one week as an apprentice, and then
made up his mind to break the vow. He thought he would have to die as a
result of it, braced himself, and for a
whole day he waited for death to come. Everybody made fun of the boy
and the incident was never forgotten.
Don Juan did not speak for a long time. He seemed to have become
engulfed by thoughts.
"My setup was for Lucio," he said, "and I found Eligio instead. I knew
it was useless, but when we like
someone we should properly insist, as though it were possible to remake
men. Lucio had courage when he was a
little boy and then he lost it along the way."
"Can you bewitch him, don Juan?"
40
"Bewitch him? For what?"
"So he will change and regain his courage."
"You don't bewitch for courage. Courage is something personal.
Bewitching is for rendering people harmless
or sick or dumb. You don't bewitch to make warriors. To be a warrior
you have to be crystal clear, like Eligio.
There you have a man of courage!"
Eligio snored peacefully under the burlap sacks. It was already
daylight. The sky was impeccably blue. There
were no clouds in sight.
"I would give anything in this world," I said, "to know about Eligio's
journey. Would you mind if I asked him
to tell me?"
"You should not under any circumstances ask him to do that!"
"Why not? I tell you about my experiences."
"That's different. It is not your inclination to keep things to
yourself. Eligio is an Indian. His journey is all he
has. I wish it had been Lucio."
"Isn't there anything you can do, don Juan?"
"No. Unfortunately there is no way to make bones for a jellyfish. It
was only my folly."
The sun came out. Its light blurred my tired eyes.
"You've told me time and time again, don Juan, that a sorcerer cannot
have follies. I've never thought you
could have any."
Don Juan looked at me piercingly. He got up, glanced at Eligio and then
at Lucio. He tucked his hat on his
head, patting it on its top.
"It's possible to insist, to properly insist, even though we know that
what we're doing is useless," he said,
smiling, "But we must know first that our acts are useless and yet we
must proceed as if we didn't know it. That's
a sorcerer's controlled folly."
41
5
I returned to don Juan's house on October 3, 1968, for the sole purpose
of asking him about the events surrounding
Eligio's initiation. An almost endless stream of questions had occurred
to me while rereading the
account of what took place then. I was after very precise explanations
so I made a list of questions beforehand,
carefully choosing the most appropriate words.
I began by asking him: "Did I see that night, don Juan?"
"You almost did."
"Did you see that I was seeing Eligio's movements?"
"Yes. I saw that Mescalito was allowing you to see part of Eligio's
lesson, otherwise you would've been looking
at a man sitting there, or perhaps lying there. During the last mitote
you did not notice that the men were
doing anything, did you?"
At the last mitote I had not noticed any of the men performing
movements out of the ordinary. I told him I
could safely say that all I had recorded in my notes was that some of
them got up and went to the bushes more
often than others.
"But you nearly saw Eligio's entire lesson," don Juan went on. "Think
about that. Do you understand now
how generous Mescalito is with you? Mescalito has never been so gentle
with anyone, to my knowledge. Not
anyone. And yet you have no regard for his generosity. How can you turn
your back on him so bluntly? Or
perhaps I should say, in exchange for what are you turning your back on
Mescalito?"
I felt that don Juan was cornering me again. I was unable to answer his
question. I had always believed I had
quit the apprenticeship in order to save myself, yet I had no idea from
what I was saving myself, or for what. I
wanted to change the direction of our conversation quickly, and to that
end I abandoned my intention to carry on
with all my precalculated questions and brought out my most important
query.
"I wonder if you could tell me more about your controlled folly," I
said.
"What do you want to know about it?"
"Please tell me, don Juan, what exactly is controlled folly?"
Don Juan laughed loudly and made a smacking sound by slapping his thigh
with the hollow of his hand.
"This is controlled folly!" he said, and laughed and slapped his thigh
again.
"What do you mean ... ?"
"I am happy that you finally asked me about my controlled folly after
so many years, and yet it wouldn't have
mattered to me in the least if you had never asked. Yet I have chosen
to feel happy, as if I cared, that you asked,
as if it would matter that I care. That is controlled folly!"
We both laughed very loudly. I hugged him. I found his explanation
delightful although I did not quite understand
it.
We were sitting, as usual, in the area right in front of the door of
his house. It was mid-morning. Don Juan
had a pile of seeds in front of him and was picking the debris from
them. I had offered to help him but he had
turned me down; he said the seeds were a gift for one of his friends in
central Mexico and I did not have enough
power to touch them.
"With whom do you exercise controlled folly, don Juan?" I asked after a
long silence.
He chuckled.
"With everybody!" he exclaimed, smiling.
"When do you choose to exercise it, then?"
"Every single time I act."
I felt I needed to recapitulate at that point and I asked him if
controlled folly meant that his acts were never
sincere but were only the acts of an actor.
"My acts are sincere," he said, "but they are only the acts of an
actor."
"Then everything you do must be controlled folly!" I said truly
surprised.
"Yes, everything," he said.
42
"But it can't be true," I protested, "that every one of your acts is
only controlled folly."
"Why not?" he replied with a mysterious look.
"That would mean that nothing matters to you and you don't really care
about anything or anybody. Take me,
for example. Do you mean that you don't care whether or not I become a
man of knowledge, or whether I live, or
die, or do anything?"
"True! I don't. You are like Lucio, or everybody else in my life, my
controlled folly."
I experienced a peculiar feeling of emptiness. Obviously there was no
reason in the world why don Juan had
to care about me, but on the other hand I had almost the certainty that
he cared about me personally; I thought it
could not be otherwise, since he had always given me his undivided
attention during every moment I had spent
with him. It occurred to me that perhaps don Juan was just saying that
because he was annoyed with me. After
all, I had quit his teachings.
"I have the feeling we are not talking about the same thing," I said.
"I shouldn't have used myself as an example.
What I meant to say was that there must be something in the world you
care about in a way that is not
controlled folly. I don't think it is possible to go on living if
nothing really matters to us."
"That applies to you" he said. "Things matter to you. You asked me
about my controlled folly and I told you
that everything I do in regard to myself and my fellow men is folly,
because nothing matters."
"My point is, don Juan, that if nothing matters to you, how can you go
on living?"
He laughed and after a moment's pause, in which he seemed to deliberate
whether or not to answer, he got up
and went to the back of his house. I followed him.
"Wait, wait, don Juan." I said. "I really want to know; you must
explain to me what you mean."
"Perhaps it's not possible to explain," he said. "Certain things in
your life matter to you because they're
important; your acts are certainly important to you, but for me, not a
single thing is important any longer, neither
my acts nor the acts of any of my fellow men. I go on living, though,
because I have my will. Because I have
tempered my will throughout my life until it's neat and wholesome and
now it doesn't matter to me that nothing
matters. My will controls the folly of my life."
He squatted and ran his fingers on some herbs that he had put to dry in
the sun on a big piece of burlap.
I was bewildered. Never would I have anticipated the direction that my
query had taken. After a long pause I
thought of a good point. I told him that in my opinion some of the acts
of my fellow men were of supreme importance.
I pointed out that a nuclear war was definitely the most dramatic
example of such an act. I said that for
me destroying life on the face of the earth was an act of staggering
enormity.
"You believe that because you're thinking. You're thinking about life,"
don Juan said with a glint in his eyes.
"You're not seeing."
"Would I feel differently if I could see?" I asked.
"Once a man learns to see he finds himself alone in the world with
nothing but folly," don Juan said
cryptically.
He paused for a moment and looked at me as if he wanted to judge the
effect of his words.
"Your acts, as well as the acts of your fellow men in general, appear
to be important to you because you have
learned to think they are important."
He used the word "learned" with such a peculiar inflection that it
forced me to ask what he meant by it.
He stopped handling his plants and looked at me.
"We learn to think about everything," he said, "and then we train our
eyes to look as we think about the
things we look at. We look at ourselves already thinking that we are
important. And therefore we've got to feel
important! But then when a man learns to see, he realizes that he can
no longer think about the things he looks at,
and if he cannot think about what he looks at everything becomes
unimportant."
Don Juan must have noticed my puzzled look and repeated his statements
three times, as if to make me
understand them. What he said sounded to me like gibberish at first,
but upon thinking about it, his words loomed
more like a sophisticated statement about some facet of perception.
I tried to think of a good question that would make him clarify his
point, but I could not think of anything.
43
All of a sudden I felt exhausted and could not formulate my thoughts
clearly.
Don Juan seemed to notice my fatigue and patted me gently.
"Clean these plants here," he said, "and then shred them carefully into
this jar."
He handed me a large coffee jar and left.
He returned to his house hours later, in the late afternoon. I had
finished shredding his plants and had plenty
of time to write my notes. I wanted to ask him some questions right
off, but he was not in any mood to answer
me. He said he was famished and had to fix his food first. He lit a
fire in his earthen stove and set up a pot with
bone-broth stock. He looked in the bag of groceries I had brought and
took some vegetables, sliced them into
small pieces, and dumped them into the pot. Then he lay on his mat,
kicked off his sandals, and told me to sit
closer to the stove so I could feed the fire.
It was almost dark; from where I sat I could see the sky to the west.
The edges of some thick cloud formations
were tinted with a deep buff, while the center of the clouds remained
almost black.
I was going to make a comment on how beautiful the clouds were, but he
spoke first.
"Fluffy edges and a thick core," he said, pointing at the clouds.
His statement was so perfectly apropos that it made me jump.
"I was just going to tell you about the clouds," I said.
"Then I beat you to it," he said, and laughed with childlike abandon.
I asked him if he was in a mood to answer some questions.
"What do you want to know?" he replied.
"What you told me this afternoon about controlled folly has disturbed
me very much," I said. "I really cannot
understand what you meant."
"Of course you cannot understand it," he said. "You are trying to think
about it, and what I said does not fit
with your thoughts."
"I'm trying to think about it," I said, "because that's the only way I
personally can understand anything. For
example, don Juan, do you mean that once a man learns to see,
everything in the whole world is worthless?"
"I didn't say worthless. I said unimportant. Everything is equal and
therefore unimportant. For example, there
is no way for me to say that my acts are more important than yours, or
that one thing is more essential than another,
therefore all things are equal and by being equal they are unimportant."
I asked him if his statements were a pronouncement that what he had
called "seeing" was in effect a "better
way" than merely "looking at things." He said that the eyes of man
could perform both functions, but neither of
them was better than the other; however, to train the eyes only to look
was, in his opinion, an unnecessary loss.
"For instance, we need to look with our eyes to laugh," he said,
"because only when we look at things can we
catch the funny edge of the world. On the other hand, when our eyes
see, everything is so equal that nothing is
funny."
"Do you mean, don Juan, that a man who sees cannot ever laugh?'
He remained silent for some time.
"Perhaps there are men of knowledge who never laugh," he said. "I don't
know any of them, though. Those I
know see and also look, so they laugh."
"Would a man of knowledge cry as well?"
"I suppose so. Our eyes look so we may laugh, or cry, or rejoice, or be
sad, or be happy. I personally don't
like to be sad, so whenever I witness something that would ordinarily
make me sad, I simply shift my eyes and
see it instead of looking at it. But when I encounter something funny I
look and I laugh."
"But then, don Juan, your laughter is real and not controlled folly."
Don Juan stared at me for a moment.
"I talk to you because you make me laugh," he said. "You remind me of
some bushy-tailed rats of the desert
that get caught when they stick their tails in holes trying to scare
other rats away in order to steal their food. You
get caught in your own questions. Watch out! Sometimes those rats yank
their tails off trying to pull themselves
free."
44
I found his comparison funny and I laughed. Don Juan had once shown me
some small rodents with bushy
tails that looked like fat squirrels; the image of one of those chubby
rats yanking its tail off was sad and at the
same time morbidly funny.
"My laughter, as well as everything I do, is real," he said, "but it
also is controlled folly because it is useless;
it changes nothing and yet I still do it."
"But as I understand it, don Juan, your laughter is not useless. It
makes you happy."
"No! I am happy because I choose to look at things that make me happy
and then my eyes catch their funny
edge and I laugh. I have said this to you countless times. One must
always choose the path with heart in order to
be at one's best, perhaps so one can always laugh."
I interpreted what he had said as meaning that crying was inferior to
laughter, or at least perhaps an act that
weakened us. He asserted that there was no intrinsic difference and
that both were unimportant; he said, however,
that his preference was laughter, because laughter made his body feel
better than crying.
At that point I suggested that if one has a preference there is no
equality; if he preferred laughing to crying,
the former was indeed more important.
He stubbornly maintained that his preference did not mean they were not
equal; and I insisted that our argument
could be logically stretched to saying that if things were supposed to
be so equal why not also choose
death?
"Many men of knowledge do that," he said. "One day they may simply
disappear. People may think that they
have been ambushed and killed because of their doings. They choose to
die because it doesn't matter to them. On
the other hand, I choose to live, and to laugh, not because it matters,
but because that choice is the bent of my nature.
The reason I say I choose is because I see, but it isn't that I choose
to live; my will makes me go on living in
spite of anything I may see.
"You don't understand me now because of your habit of thinking as you
look and thinking as you think."
This statement intrigued me very much. I asked him to explain what he
meant by it.
He repeated the same construct various times, as if giving himself time
to arrange it in different terms, and
then delivered his point, saying that by "thinking" he meant the
constant idea that we have of everything in the
world. He
said that "seeing" dispelled that habit and until I learned to "see" I
could not really understand what he meant.
"But if nothing matters, don Juan, why should it matter that I learn to
see?"
"I told you once that our lot as men is to learn, for good or bad," he
said. "I have learned to see and I tell you
that nothing really matters; now it is your turn; perhaps some day you
will see and you will know then whether
things matter or not. For me nothing matters, but perhaps for you
everything will. You should know by now that
a man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, nor
by thinking about what he will think when
he has finished acting. A man of knowledge chooses a patlh with heart
and follows it; and then he looks and
rejoices and laughs; and then he sees and knows. He knows that his life
will be over altogether too soon; he
knows that he, as well as everybody else, is not going anywhere; he
knows, because he sees, that nothing is more
important than anything else. In other words, a man of knowledge has no
honor, no dignity, no family, no name,
no country, but only life to be lived, and under these circumstances
his only tie to his fellow men is his controlled
folly. Thus a man of knowledge endeavors, and sweats, and puffs, and if
one looks at him he is just like any
ordinary man, except that the folly of has life is under control.
Nothing being more important than anything else,
a man of knowledge chooses any act, and acts it out as if it matters to
him. His controlled folly makes him say
that what he does matters and makes him act as if it did, and yet he
knows that it doesn't; so when he fulfills his
acts he retreats in peace, and whether his acts were good or bad, or
worked or didn't, is in no way part of his
concern.
"A man of knowledge may choose, on the other hand, to remain totally
impassive and never act, and behave
as if to be impassive really matters to him; he will be rightfully true
at that too, because that would also be his
controlled folly."
I involved myself at this point in a very complicated effort to explain
to don Juan that I was interested in
45
knowing what would motivate a man of knowledge to act in a particular
way in spite of the fact that he knew
nothing mattered.
He chuckled softly before answering.
"You think about your acts," he said. "Therefore you have to believe
your acts are as important as you think
they are, when in reality nothing of what one does is important.
Nothing! But then if nothing really matters, as
you asked me, how can I go on living? It would be simple to die; that's
what you say and believe, because you're
thinking about life, just as you're thinking now what seeing would be
like. You wanted me to describe it to you so
you could begin to think about it, the way you do with everything else.
In the case of seeing, however, thinking is
not the issue at all, so I cannot tell you what it is like to see. Now
you want me to describe the reasons for my
controlled folly and I can only tell you that controlled folly is very
much like seeing; it is something you cannot
think about."
He yawned. He lay on his back and stretched his arms and legs. His
bones made a cracking sound.
"You have been away too long," he said. "You think too much."
He got up and walked into the thick chaparral at the side of the house.
I fed the fire to keep the pot boiling. I
was going to light a kerosene lantern but the semidarkness was very
soothing. The fire from the stove, which
supplied enough light to write, also created a reddish glow all around
me. I put my notes on the ground and lay
down. I felt tired. Out of the whole conversation with don Juan the
only poignant thing in my mind was that he
did not care about me; it disturbed me immensely. Over a period of
years I had put my trust in him. Had I not had
complete confidence in him I would have been paralyzed with fear at the
prospect of learning his knowledge; the
premise on which I had based my trust was the idea that he cared about
me personally; actually I had always been
afraid of him, but I had kept my fear in check because I trusted him.
When he removed that basis I had nothing to
fall back on and I felt helpless.
A very strange anxiety possessed me. I became extremely agitated and
began pacing up and down in front of
the stove. Don Juan was taking a long time. I waited for him
impatiently.
He returned a while later; he sat down again in front of the fire and I
blurted out my fears. I told him that I
worried because I was incapable of changing directions in midstream; I
explained to him that together with the
trust I had in him, I had also learned to respect and to regard his way
of life as being intrinsically more rational,
or at least more functional, than mine. I said that his words had
plunged me into a terrible conflict because they
entailed my having to change my feelings. To illustrate my point I told
don Juan the story of an old man of my
culture, a very wealthy, conservative lawyer who lived his life
convinced that he upheld the truth. In the early
thirties, with the advent of the New Deal, he found himself
passionately involved in the political drama of that
time. He was categorically sure that change was deleterious to the
country, and out of devotion to his way of life
and the conviction that he was right, he vowed to fight what he thought
to be a political evil. But the tide of the
time was too strong, it overpowered him. He struggled for ten years
against it in the political arena and in the
realm of his personal life; then the Second World War sealed his
efforts into total defeat. His political and
ideological downfall resulted in a profound bitterness; he became a
self-exile for twenty-five years. When I met
him he was eighty-four years old and had come back to his home town to
spend his last years in a home for the
aged. It seemed inconceivable to me that he had lived that long,
considering the way he had squandered his life in
bitterness and self-pity. Somehow he found my company amenable and we
used to talk at great length. The last
time I saw him he had concluded our conversation with the following: "I
have had time to turn around and
examine my life. The issues of my time are today only a story; not even
an interesting one. Perhaps I threw away
years of my life chasing something that never existed. I've had the
feeling lately that I believed in something
farcical. It wasn't worth my while. I think I know that. However, I
can't retrieve the forty years I've lost."
I told don Juan that my conflict arose from the doubts into which his
words about controlled folly had thrown
me.
"If nothing really matters," I said, "upon becoming a man of knowledge
one would find oneself, perforce, as
empty as my friend and in no better position."
"That's not so," don Juan said cuttingly. "Your friend is lonely
because he will die without seeing. In his life
46
he just grew old and now he must have more self-pity than ever before.
He feels he threw away forty years
because he was after victories and found only defeats. He'll never know
that to be victorious and to be defeated
are equal.
"So now you're afraid of me because I've told you that you're equal to
everything else. You're being childish.
Our lot as men is to learn and one goes to knowledge as one goes to
war; I have told you this countless times.
One goes to knowledge or to war with fear, with respect, aware that one
is going to war, and with absolute
confidence in oneself. Put your trust in yourself, not in me.
"And so you're afraid of the emptiness of your friend's life. But
there's no emptiness in the life of a man of
knowledge, I tell you. Everything is filled to the brim."
Don Juan stood up and extended his arms as if feeling things in the air.
"Everything is filled to the brim," he repeated, "and everything is
equal. I'm not like your friend who just
grew old. When I tell you that nothing matters I don't mean it the way
he does. For him, his struggle was not
worth his while, because he was defeated; for me there is no victory,
or defeat, or emptiness. Everything is filled
to the brim and everything is equal and my struggle was worth my while.
"In order to become a man of knowledge one must be a warrior, not a
whimpering child. One must strive
without giving up, without a complaint, without flinching, until one
sees, only to realize then that nothing
matters."
Don Juan stirred the pot with a wooden spoon. The food was ready. He
took the pot off the fire and placed it
on an adobe rectangular block, which he had built against the wall and
which he used as a shelf or a table. With
his foot he shoved two small boxes that served as comfortable chairs,
especially if one sat with his back against
the supporting beams of the wall. He signaled me to sit down and then
he poured a bowl of soup. He smiled; his
eyes were shining as if he were truly enjoying my presence. He pushed
the bowl gently toward me. There was
such a warmth and kindness in his gesture that it seemed to be an
appeal to restore my trust in him. I felt idiotic; I
tried to disrupt my mood by looking for my spoon, but I couldn't find
it. The soup was too hot to be drunk
directly from the bowl, and while it cooled off I asked don Juan if
controlled folly meant that a man of
knowledge could not like anybody any more.
He stopped eating and laughed.
"You're too concerned with liking people or with being liked yourself,"
he said. "A man of knowledge likes,
that's all. He likes whatever or whoever he wants, but he uses his
controlled folly to be unconcerned about it. The
opposite of what you are doing now. To like people or to be liked by
people is not all one can do as a man."
He stared at me for a moment with his head tilted a little to one side.
"Think about that," he said.
"There is one more thing I want to ask, don Juan. You said that we need
to look with our eyes to laugh, but I
believe we laugh because we think. Take a blind man, he also laughs."
"No," he said. "Blind men don't laugh. Their bodies jerk a little with
the ripple of laughter. They have never
looked at the funny edge of the world and have to imagine it. Their
laughter is not roaring."
We did not speak any more. I had a sensation of well-being, of
happiness. We ate in silence; then don Juan
began to laugh. I was using a dry twig to spoon the vegetables into my
mouth.
October 4,1968
At a certain moment today I asked don Juan if he minded talking a bit
more about "seeing." He seemed to
deliberate for an instant, then he smiled and said that I was again
involved in my usual routine, trying to talk
instead of doing.
"If you want to see you have to let the smoke guide you," he said
emphatically. "I won't talk about this any
more."
I was helping him clean some dry herbs. We worked in complete silence
for a long time. When I am forced
into a prolonged silence I always feel apprehensive, especially around
don Juan. At a given moment I brought up
a question to him in a sort of compulsive, almost belligerent outburst.
"How does a man of knowledge exercise controlled folly when it comes to
the death of a person he loves?" I
47
asked.
Don Juan was taken aback by my question and looked at me quizzically.
"Take your grandson Lucio," I said. "Would your acts be controlled
folly at the time of his death?"
"Take my son Eulalio, that's a better example," don Juan replied
calmly. "He was crushed by rocks while
working in the construction of the Pan-American Highway. My acts toward
him at the moment of his death were
controlled folly. When I came down to the blasting area he was almost
dead, but his body was so strong that it
kept on moving and kicking. I stood in front of him and told the boys
in the road crew not to move him any more;
they obeyed me and stood there surrounding my son, looking at his
mangled body. I stood there too, but I did not
look. I shifted my eyes so I would see his personal life
disintegrating, expanding uncontrollably beyond its limits,
like a fog of crystals, because that is the way life and death mix and
expand. That is what I did at the time of my
son's death. That's all one could ever do, and that is controlled
folly. Had I looked at him I would have watched
him becoming immobile and I would have felt a cry inside of me, because
never again would I look at his fine
figure pacing the earth. I saw his death instead, and there was no
sadness, no feeling. His death was equal to
everything else." Don Juan was quiet for a moment. He seemed to be sad,
but then he smiled and tapped my
head.
"So you may say that when it comes to the death of a person I love, my
controlled folly is to shift my eyes."
I thought about the people I love myself and a terribly oppressive wave
of self-pity enveloped me.
"Lucky you, don Juan," I said. "You can shift your eyes, while I can
only look."
He found my statement funny and laughed.
"Lucky, bull!" -he said. "It's hard work."
We both laughed. After a long silence I began probing him again,
perhaps only to dispel my own sadness.
"If I have understood you correctly then, don Juan," I said, "the only
acts in the life of a man of knowledge
which are not controlled folly are those he performs with his ally or
with Mescalito. Isn't that right?"
"That's right," he said, chuckling. "My ally and Mescalito are not on a
par with us human beings. My controlled
folly applies only to myself and to the acts I perform while in the
company of my fellow men."
"However, it is a logical possibility," I said, "to think that a man of
knowledge may also regard his acts with
his ally or with Mescalito as controlled folly, true?"
He stared at me for a moment.
"You're thinking again," he said. "A man of knowledge doesn't think,
therefore he cannot encounter that
possibility. Take me, for example. I say that my controlled folly
applies to the acts I performed while in the company
of my fellow men; I say that because I can see my fellow men. However,
I cannot see through my ally and
that makes it incomprehensible to me, so how could I control my folly
if I don't see through it? With my ally or
with Mescalito I am only a man who knows how to see and finds that he's
baffled by what he sees; a man who
knows that he'll never understand all that is around him.
"Take your case, for instance. It doesn't matter to me whether you
become a man of knowledge or not;
however, it matters to Mescalito. Obviously it matters to him or he
wouldn't take so many steps to show his
concern about you. I can notice his concern and I act toward it, yet
his reasons are incomprehensible to me."
48
6
Just as we were getting into my car to start on a trip to central
Mexico, on October 5, 1968, don Juan stopped
me.
"I have told you before," he said with a serious expression, "that one
should never reveal the name nor the
whereabouts of a sorcerer. I believe you understood that you should
never reveal my name nor the place where
my body is. Now I am going to ask you to do the same with a friend of
mine, a friend you will call Genaro. We
are going to his house; we will spend some time there."
I assured don Juan that I had never betrayed his confidence.
"I know that," he said without changing his serious expression. "Yet I
am concerned with your becoming
thoughtless."
I protested and don Juan said his aim was only to remind me that every
time one was careless in matters of
sorcery, one was playing with an imminent and senseless death that
could be averted by being thoughtful and
aware.
"We will not touch upon this matter any longer," he said. "Once we
leave my house we will not mention
Genaro, nor will we think about him. I want you to put your thoughts in
order now. When you meet him you
must be clear and have no doubts in your mind."
"What kinds of doubts are you referring to, don Juan?"
"Any kinds of doubts whatever. When you meet him you ought to be
crystal clear. He will see you!"
His strange admonitions made me very apprehensive. I mentioned that
perhaps I should not meet his friend at
all but only drive to the vicinity of his friend's house and leave him
there.
"What I've told you was only a precaution," he said. "You've met one
sorcerer already, Vicente, and he
nearly killed you. Watch out this time!"
After we arrived in central Mexico it took us two days to walk from
where I left my car to his friend's house,
a little shack perched on the side of a mountain. Don Juan's friend was
at the door, as if he had been waiting for
us. I recognized him immediately. I had already made his acquaintance,
although very briefly, when I brought my
book to don Juan. I had not really looked at him at that time, except
in a glancing fashion, so I had had the feeling
he was as old as don Juan. As he stood at the door of his house,
however, I noticed that he was definitely
younger. He was perhaps in his early sixties. He was shorter than don
Juan and slimmer, very dark and wiry. His
hair was thick and graying and a bit long; it ran over his ears and
forehead. His face was round and hard. A very
prominent nose made him look like a bird of prey with small dark eyes.
He talked to don Juan first. Don Juan nodded affirmatively. They
conversed briefly. They were not speaking
Spanish so I did not understand what they were saying. Then don Genaro
turned to me.
"You're welcome to my humble little shack," he said apologetically in
Spanish.
His words were a polite formula I had heard before in various rural
areas of Mexico. Yet as he said the words
he laughed joyously for no overt reason, and I knew he was exercising
his controlled folly. He did not care in the
least that his house was a shack. I liked don Genaro very much.
For the next two days we went into the mountains to collect plants. Don
Juan, don Genaro, and I left each
day at the crack of dawn. The two old men went together to some
specific but unidentified part of the mountains
and left me alone in one area of the woods. I had an exquisite feeling
there. I did not notice the passage of time,
nor was I apprehensive at staying alone; the extraordinary experience I
had both days was an uncanny capacity to
concentrate on the delicate task of finding the specific plants don
Juan had entrusted me to collect.
We returned to the house in the late afternoon and both days I was so
tired that I fell asleep immediately.
The third day, however, was different. The three of us worked together,
and don Juan asked don Genaro to
teach me how to select certain plants. We returned around noon and the
two old men sat for hours in front of the
house, in complete silence, as if they were in a state of trance. Yet
they were not asleep. I walked around them a
couple of times; don Juan followed my movements with his eyes, and so
did don Genaro.
"You must talk to the plants before you pick them," don Juan said. He
dropped his words casually and
49
repeated his statement three times, as if to catch my attention. Nobody
had said a word until he spoke.
"In order to see the plants you must talk to them personally," he went
on. "You must get to know them
individually; then the plants can tell you anything you care to know
about them."
It was late in the afternoon. Don Juan was sitting on a flat rock
facing the western mountains; don Genaro
was sitting by him on a straw mat with his face toward the north. Bon
Juan had told me, the first day we were
there, that those were their "positions" and that I had to sit on the
ground at any place opposite to both of them.
He added that while we sat in those positions I had to keep my face
toward the southeast and look at them only in
brief glances.
"Yes, that's the way it is with plants, isn't it?" don Juan said and
turned to don Genaro, who agreed with an
affirmative gesture.
I told him that the reason I had not followed his instructions was
because I felt a little stupid talking to plants.
"You fail to understand that a sorcerer is not joking," he said
severely. "When a sorcerer attempts to see, he
attempts to gain power."
Don Genaro was staring at me. I was taking notes and that seemed to
baffle him. He smiled at me, shook his
head, and said something to don Juan. Don Juan shrugged his shoulders.
To see me writing must have been quite
odd for don Genaro. Don Juan was, I suppose, habituated to my taking
notes, and the fact that I wrote while he
spoke was no longer odd to him; he could carry on talking without
appearing to notice my acts. Don Genaro,
however, kept on laughing, and I had to stop writing in order not to
disrupt the mood of the conversation.
Don Juan affirmed again that a sorcerer's acts were not to be taken as
jokes because a sorcerer played with
death at every turn of the way. Then he proceeded to relate to don
Genaro the story of how one night I had
looked at the lights of death following me during one of our trips. The
story proved to be utterly funny; don
Genaro rolled on the ground laughing.
Don Juan apologized to me and said that his friend was given to
explosions of laughter. I glanced at don
Genaro, who I thought was still rolling on the ground, and saw him
performing a most unusual act. He was
standing on his head without the aid of his arms or hands, and his legs
were crossed as if he were sitting. The
sight was so incongruous that it made me jump. When I realized he was
doing something almost impossible,
from the point of view of body mechanics, he had gone back again to a
normal sitting position. Don Juan,
however, seemed to be cognizant of what was involved and celebrated don
Genaro's performance with
roaring laughter.
Don Genaro seemed to have noticed my confusion; he clapped his hands a
couple of times and rolled on the
ground again; apparently he wanted me to watch him. What had at first
appeared to be rolling on the ground was
actually leaning over in a sitting position, and touching the ground
with his head. He seemingly attained his illogical
posture by gaining momentum, leaning over several times, until the
inertia carried his body to a vertical
stand, so that for an instant he "sat on his head."
When their laughter subsided don Juan continued talking; his tone was
very severe. I shifted the position of
my body in order to be at ease and give him all my attention. He did
not smile at all, as he usually does,
especially when I try to pay deliberate attention to what he is saying.
Don Genaro kept looking at me as if he
were expecting me to start writing again, but I did not take notes any
more. Don Juan's words were a reprimand
for not talking to the plants I had collected, as he had always told me
to do. He said the plants I had killed could
also have killed me; he said he was sure they would, sooner or later,
make me get ill. He added that if I became
ill as a result of hurting plants, I would, however, slough it off and
believe I had only a touch of the flu.
The two of them had another moment of mirth, then don Juan became
serious again and said that if I did not
think of my death, my entire life would be only a personal chaos. He
looked very stern.
"What else can a man have, except his life and his death?" he said to
me.
At that point I felt it was indispensable to take notes and I began
writing again. Don Genaro stared at me and
smiled. Then he tilted his head back a little and opened his nostrils.
He apparently had remarkable control over
the muscles operating his nostrils, because they opened up to perhaps
twice their normal size.
What was most comical about his clowning was not so much his gestures
as his own reactions to them. After
50
he enlarged his nostrils he tumbled down, laughing, and worked his body
again into the same, strange, sitting-onhis-
head, upside-down posture.
Don Juan laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks. I felt a bit
embarrassed and laughed nervously.
"Genaro doesn't like writing," don Juan said as an explanation.
I put my notes away, but don Genaro assured me that it was all right to
write, because he did not really mind
it. I gathered my notes again and began writing. He repeated the same
hilarious motions and both of them had the
same reactions again.
Don Juan looked at me, still laughing, and said that his friend was
portraying me; that my tendency was to
open my nostrils whenever I wrote; and that don Genaro thought that
trying to become a sorcerer by taking notes
was as absurd as sitting on one's head and thus he had made up the
ludicrous posture of resting the weight of his
sitting body on his head.
"Perhaps you don't think it's funny," don Juan said, "but only Genaro
can work his way up to sitting on his
head, and only you can think of learning to be a sorcerer by writing
your way up."
They both had another explosion of laughter and don Genaro repeated his
incredible movement.
I liked him. There was so much grace and directness in his acts.
"My apologies, don Genaro," I said, pointing to the writing pad.
"It's all right," he said and chuckled again.
I could not write any more. They went on talking for a very long time
about how plants could actually kill
and how sorcerers used plants in that capacity. Both of them kept
staring at me while they talked, as if they
expected me to write.
"Carlos is like a horse that doesn't like to be saddled," don Juan
said. "You have to be very slow with him.
You scared him and now he won't write."
Don Genaro expanded his nostrils and said in a mocking plea, frowning
and puckering his mouth.
"Come on, Carlitos, write! Write until your thumb falls off."
Don Juan stood up, stretching his arms and arching his back. In spite
of his advanced age his body seemed to
be powerful and limber. He went to the bushes at the side of the house
and I was left alone with don Genaro. He
looked at me and I moved my eyes away because he made me feel
embarrassed.
"Don't tell me you're not even going to look at me?" he said with a
most hilarious intonation.
He opened his nostrils and made them quiver; then he stood up and
repeated don Juan's movements, arching
his back and stretching his arms but with his body contorted into a
most ludicrous position; it was truly an
indescribable gesture that combined an exquisite sense of pantomime and
a sense of the ridiculous. It enthralled
me. It was a masterful caricature of don Juan.
Don Juan came back at that moment and caught the gesture and obviously
the meaning also. He sat down
chuckling.
"Which direction is the wind?" don Genaro asked casually.
Don Juan pointed to the west with a movement of his head.
"I'd better go where the wind blows," don Genaro said with a serious
expression.
He then turned and shook his finger at me.
"And don't you pay any attention if you hear strange noises," he said.
"When Genaro shits the mountains
tremble."
He leaped into the bushes and a moment later I heard a very strange
noise, a deep, unearthly rumble. I did not
know what to make of it. I looked at don Juan for a clue but he was
doubled over with laughter.
October 17,1968
I don't remember what prompted don Genaro to tell me about the
arrangement of the "other world," as he
called it. He said that a master sorcerer was an eagle, or rather that
he could make himself into an eagle. On the
other hand, an evil sorcerer was a "tecolote," an owl. Don Genaro said
that an evil sorcerer was a child of the
night and for such a man the most useful animals were the mountain lion
or other wild cats, or the night birds,
especially the owl. He said that the "brujos liricos," lyric sorcerers,
meaning the dilettante sorcerers, preferred
51
other animals—a crow, for example. Don Juan laughed; he had
been listening in silence.
Don Genaro turned to him and said, "That's true, you know that, Juan."
Then he said that a master sorcerer could take his disciple on a
journey with him and actually pass through
the ten layers of the other world. The master, provided that he was an
eagle, could start at the very bottom layer
and then go through each successive world until he reached the top.
Evil sorcerers and dilettantes could at best,
be said, go through only three layers.
Don Genaro gave a description of what those steps were by saying, "You
start at the very bottom and then
your teacher takes you with him in his flight and soon, boom! You go
through the first layer. Then a little while
later, boom! You go through the second; and boom! You go through the
third..."
Don Genaro took me through ten booms to the last layer of the world.
When he had finished talking don Juan
looked at me and smiled knowingly.
"Talking is not Genaro's predilection," he said, "but if you care to
get a lesson, he will teach you about the
equilibrium of things."
Don Genaro nodded affirmatively; he puckered up his mouth and closed
his eyelids halfway. I thought his
gesture was delightful. Don Genaro stood up and so did don Juan. "All
right," don Genaro said. "Let's go, then.
We could go and wait for Nestor and Pablito. They're through now. On
Thursdays they're through early."
Both of them got into my car; don Juan sat in the front. I did not ask
them anything but simply started the
engine. Don Juan directed me to a place he said was Nestor's home; don
Genaro went into the house and a while
later came out with Nestor and Pablito, two young men who were his
apprentices. They all got in my car and don
Juan told me to take the road toward the western mountains.
We left my car on the side of the dirt road and walked along the bank
of a river, which was perhaps fifteen or
twenty feet across, to a waterfall that was visible from where I had
parked. It was late afternoon. The scenery was
quite impressive. Directly above us there was a huge, dark, bluish
cloud that looked like a floating roof; it had a
well-defined edge and was shaped like an enormous half-circle. To the
west, on the high mountains of the Cordillera
Central, the rain seemed to be descending on the slopes. It looked like
a whitish curtain falling on the
green peaks. To the east there was the long, deep valley; there were
only scattered clouds over the valley and the
sun was shining there. The contrast between the two areas was
magnificent. We stopped at the bottom of the
waterfall; it was perhaps a hundred and fifty feet high; the roar was
very loud.
Don Genaro fastened a belt around his waist. He had at least seven
items hanging from it. They looked like
small gourds. He took off his hat and let it hang on his back from a
cord tied around his neck. He put on a headband
that he took from a pouch made of a thick wool fabric. The headband was
also made of wool of various
colors; a sharp yellow was the most prominent of them. He inserted
three feathers in the headband. They seemed
to be eagle feathers. I noticed that the places where he had inserted
them were not symmetrical. One feather was
above the back curve of his right ear, the other was a few inches to
the front, and the third was over his left
temple. Then he took off his sandals, hooked or tied them to the waist
of his trousers, and fastened his belt over
his poncho. The belt seemed to be made of woven strips of leather. I
could not see whether he tied it or buckled
it. Don Genaro walked toward the waterfall.
Don Juan manipulated a round rock into a steady position and-sat down
on it. The other two young men did
the same with some rocks and sat down to his left. Don Juan pointed to
the place next to him, on his right side,
and told me to bring a rock and sit by him".
"We must make a line here," he said, showing me that the three were
sitting in a row.
By then don Genaro had reached the very bottom of the waterfall and had
begun climbing a trail on the right
side of it. From where we were sitting the trail looked fairly steep.
There were a lot of shrubs he used as railings.
At one moment he seemed to lose his footing and almost slid down, as if
the dirt were slippery. A moment later
the same thing happened and the thought crossed my mind that perhaps
don Genaro was too old to be climbing. I
saw him slipping and stumbling several times before he reached the spot
where the trail ended.
I experienced a sort of apprehension when he began to climb tihe rocks.
I could not figure out what he was
going to do.
52
"What's he doing?" I asked don Juan in a whisper.
Don Juan did not look at me.
"Obviously he's climbing," he said.
Don Juan was looking straight at don Genaro. His gaze was fixed. His
eyelids were half-closed. He was
sitting very erect with his hands resting between his legs, on the edge
of the rock.
I leaned over a little bit to see the two young men. Don Juan made an
imperative gesture with his hand to
make me get back in line. I retreated immediately. I had only a glimpse
of the young men. They seemed to be as
attentive as he was.
Don Juan made another gesture with his hand and pointed to the
direction of the waterfall.
I looked again. Don Genaro had climbed quite a way on the rocky wall.
At the moment I looked he was
perched on a ledge, inching his way slowly to circumvent a huge
boulder. His arms were spread, as if he were
embracing the rock. He moved slowly toward his right and suddenly he
lost his footing. I gasped involuntarily.
For a moment his whole body hung in the air. I was sure he was going to
fall but he did not. His right hand had
grabbed onto something and very agilely his feet went back on the ledge
again. But before he moved on he
turned to us and looked. It was only a glance. There was, however, such
a stylization to the movement of turning
his head that I began to wonder. I remembered then that he had done the
same thing, turning to look at us, every
time he slipped. I had thought that don Genaro must have felt
embarrassed by his clumsiness and turned to see if
we were looking.
He climbed a bit more toward the top, suffered another loss of footing,
and hung perilously on the
overhanging rock face. This time he was supported by his left hand.
When he regained his balance he turned and
looked at us again. He slipped twice more before he reached the top.
From where we were sitting, the crest of the
waterfall seemed to be twenty to twenty-five feet across.
Don Genaro stood motionless for a moment. I wanted to ask don Juan what
don Genaro was going to do up
there, but don Juan seemed to be so absorbed in watching that I did not
dare disturb him.
Suddenly don Genaro jumped onto the water. It was such a thoroughly
unexpected action that I felt a vacuum
in the pit of my stomach. It was a magnificent, outlandish leap. For a
second I had the clear sensation that I had
seen a series of superimposed images of his body making an elliptical
flight to the middle of the stream.
When my surprise receded I noticed that he had landed on a rock on the
edge of the fall, a rock which was
hardly visible from where we were sitting.
He stayed perched there for a long time. He seemed to be fighting the
power of the onrushing water. Twice
he hung over the precipice and I could not determine what he was
clinging to. He gained his balance and squatted
on the rock. Then he leaped again, like a tiger. I could barely see the
next rock where he landed; it was like a
small cone on the very edge of tine fall.
He remained there almost ten minutes. He was motionless. His immobility
was so impressive to me that I
was shivering. I wanted to get up and walk around. Don Juan noticed my
nervousness and told me imperatively
to be calm.
Don Genaro's stillness plunged me into an extraordinary and mysterious
terror. I felt that if he remained
perched there any longer I could not control myself.
Suddenly he jumped again, this time all the way to the other bank of
the waterfall. He landed on his feet and
hands, like a feline. He remained in a squat position for a moment,
then he stood up and looked across the fall, to
the other side, and then down at us. He stayed dead still looking at
us. His hands were clasped at his sides, as if
he were holding onto an unseen railing.
There was something truly exquisite about his posture; his body seemed
so nimble, so frail. I thought that
don
Genaro with his headband and feathers, his dark poncho and his bare
feet was the most beautiful human
being I had ever seen.
He threw his arms up suddenly, lifted his head, and flipped his body
swiftly in a sort of lateral somersault to
his left. The boulder where he had been standing was round and when he
jumped he disappeared behind it.
53
Huge drops of rain began to fall at that moment. Don Juan got up and so
did the two young men. Their movement
was so abrupt that it confused me. Don Genaro's masterful feat had
thrown me into a state of profound
emotional excitement. I felt he was a consummate artist and I wanted to
see him right then to applaud him.
I strained to look on the left side of the waterfall to see if he was
coming down, but he was not. I insisted on
knowing what had happened to him. Don Juan did not answer.
"We better hurry out of here," he said. "It's a real downpour. We have
to take Nestor and Pablito to their
house and then we'll have to start on our trip back."
"I didn't even say goodbye to don Genaro," I complained.
"He already said goodbye to you," don Juan answered harshly.
He peered at me for an instant and then softened his frown and smiled.
"He has also wished you well," he said. "He felt happy with you."
"But aren't we going to wait for him?"
"No!" don Juan said sharply, "Let him be, wherever he is. Perhaps he is
an eagle flying to the other world, or
perhaps he has died up there. It doesn't matter now."
October 23,1968
Don Juan casually mentioned that he was going to make another trip to
central Mexico in the near future.
"Are you going to visit don Genaro?" I asked.
"Perhaps," he said without looking at me.
"He's all right, isn't he, don Juan? I mean nothing bad happened to him
up there on top of the waterfall, did
it?"
"Nothing happened to him; he is sturdy."
We talked about his projected trip for a while and then I said I had
enjoyed don Genaro's company and his
jokes. He laughed and said that don Genaro was truly like a child.
There was a long pause; I struggled in my
mind to find an opening line to ask about his lesson. Don Juan looked
at me and said in a mischievous tone:
"You're dying to ask me about Genaro's lesson, aren't you?"
I laughed with embarrassment. I had been obsessed with everything that
took place at the waterfall. I had
been hashing and rehashing all the details I could remember and my
conclusions were that I had witnessed an
incredible feat of physical prowess. I thought don Genaro was beyond
doubt a peerless master of equilibrium;
every single movement he had performed was highly ritualized and,
needless to say, must have had some
inextricable, symbolic meaning.
"Yes," I said. "I admit I'm dying to know what his lesson was."
"Let me tell you something," don Juan said. "It was a waste of time for
you. His lesson was for someone who
can see. Pablito and Nestro got the gist of it, although they don't see
very well. But you, you went there to look. I
told Genaro that you are a very strange plugged-up fool and that
perhaps you'd get unplugged with his lesson, but
you didn't. It doesn't matter, though. Seeing is very difficult.
"I didn't want you to speak to Genaro afterwards, so we had to leave.
Too bad. Yet it would have been worse
to stay. Genaro risked a great deal to show you something magnificent.
Too bad you can't see."
"Perhaps, don Juan, if you tell me what the lesson was I may find out
that I really saw."
Don Juan doubled up with laughter.
"Your best feature is asking questions," he said.
He was apparently going to drop the subject again. We were sitting, as
usual, in the area in front of his house;
he suddenly got up and walked inside. I trailed behind him and insisted
on describing to him what I had seen. I
faithfully followed the sequence of events as I remembered it. Don Juan
kept on smiling while I spoke. When I
had finished he shook his head.
"Seeing is very difficult," he said.
I begged him to explain his statement
"Seeing is not a matter of talk," he said imperatively.
Obviously he was not going to tell me anything more, so I gave up and
left the house to run some errands for
54
him.
When I returned it was already dark; we had something to eat and
afterwards we walked out to the ramada;
we had no sooner sat down than don Juan began to talk about don
Genaro's lesson. He did not give me any time
to prepare myself for it. I did have my notes with me, but it was too
dark to write and I did not want to alter the
flow of his talk by going inside the house for the kerosene lantern.
He said that don Genaro, being a master of balance, could perform very
complex and difficult movements.
Sitting on his head was one of such movements and with it he had
attempted to show me that it was impossible to
"see" while I took notes. The action of sitting on his head without the
aid of his hands was, at best, a freakish
stunt that lasted only an instant. In don Genaro's opinion, writing
about "seeing" was the same; that is, it was a
precarious maneuver, as odd and as unnecessary as sitting on one's head.
Don Juan peered at me in the dark and in a very dramatic tone said that
while don Genaro was horsing
around, sitting on his head, I was on the very verge of "seeing." Don
Genaro noticed it and repeated his maneuvers
over and over, to no avail, because I had lost the thread right away.
Don Juan said that afterwards don Genaro, moved by his personal liking
for me, attempted in a very dramatic
way to bring me back to that verge of "seeing." After very careful
deliberation he decided to show me a feat of
equilibrium by crossing the waterfall. He felt that the waterfall was
like the edge on which I was standing and
was confident I could also make it across. Don Juan then explained don
Genaro's feat. He said that he had already
told me that human beings were, for those who "saw," luminous beings
composed of something like fibers of
light, which rotated from the front to the back and maintained the
appearance of an egg. He said that he had also
told me that the most astonishing part of the egg-like creatures was a
set of long fibers that came out of the area
around the navel; don Juan said that those fibers were of the uttermost
importance in the life of a man. Those
fibers were the secret of don Genaio's balance and his lesson had
nothing to do with acrobatic jumps across the
waterfall. His feat of equilibrium was in the way he used those
"tentacle-like" fibers.
Don Juan dropped the subject as suddenly as he had started it and began
to talk about something thoroughly
unrelated.
October 24,1968
I cornered don Juan and told him I intuitively felt that I was never
going to get another lesson in equilibrium
and that he had to explain to me all the pertinent details, which I
would otherwise never discover by myself. Don
Juan said I was right, in so far as knowing that don Genaro would never
give me another lesson.
"What else do you want to know?" he asked.
"What are those tentacle-like fibers, don Juan?"
"They are the tentacles that come out of a man's body which are
apparent to any sorcerer who sees. Sorcerers
act toward people in accordance to the way they see their tentacles.
Weak persons have very short, almost
invisible fibers; strong persons have bright, long ones. Genaro's, for
instance, are so bright that they resemble
thickness. You can tell from the fibers if a person is healthy, or if
he is sick, or if he is mean, or kind, or
treaoherous. You can also tell from the fibers if a person can see.
Here is a baffling problem. When Genaro saw
you he knew, just like my friend Vicente did, that you could see; when
I see you I see that you can see and yet I
know myself that you can't. How baffling! Genaro couldn't get over
that. I told him that you were a strange fool. I
think he wanted to see that for himself and took you to the waterfall."
"Why do you think I give the impression I can see?"
Don Juan did not answer me. He remained silent for a long time. I did
not want to ask him anything else.
Finally he spoke to me and said that he knew why but did not know how
to explain it.
"You think everything in the world is simple to understand," he said,
"because everything you do is a routine
that is simple to understand. At the waterfall, when you looked at
Genaro moving across the water, you believed
that he was a master of somersaults, because somersaults was all you
could think about. And that is all you will
ever believe he did. Yet Genaro never jumped across that water. If he
had jumped he would have died. Genaro
balanced himself on his superb, bright fibers. He made them long, long
enough so that he could, let's say, roll on
them across the waterfall. He demonstrated the proper way to make those
tentacles long, and how to move them
55
with precision.
"Pablito saw nearly all of Genaro's movements. Nestor, on the other
hand, saw only the most obvious
maneuvers. He missed the delicate details. But you, you saw nothing at
all."
"Perhaps if you had told me beforehand, don Juan, what to look for ..."
He interrupted me and said that giving me instructions would only have
hindered don Genaro. Had I known
what was going to take place, my fibers would have been agitated and
would have interfered with don Genaro's.
"If you could see," he said, "it would have been obvious to you, from
the first step that Genaro took, that he
was not slipping as he went up the side of the waterfall. He was
loosening his tentacles. Twice he made them go
around boulders and held to the sheer rock like a fly. When he got to
the top and was ready to cross the water he
focused them onto a small rock in the middle of the stream, and when
they were secured there, he let the fibers
pull him. Genaro never jumped, therefore he could land on the slippery
surfaces of small boulders at the very
edge of the water. His fibers were at all times neatly wrapped around
every rock he used.
"He did not stay on the first boulder very long, because he had the
rest of his fibers tied onto another one,
even smaller, at the place where the onrush of water was the greatest.
His tentacles pulled him again and he
landed on it. That was the most outstanding thing he did. The surface
was too small for a man to hold onto; and
the onrush of the water would have washed his body over the precipice
had he not had some of his fibers still
focused on the first rock.
"He stayed in that second position for a long time, because he had to
draw out his tentacles again and send
them across to the other side of the fall. When he had them secured he
had to release the fibers focused on the
first rock. That was very tricky. Perhaps only Genaro could do that. He
nearly lost his grip; or maybe he was only
fooling us, well never know that for sure. Personally, I really think
he nearly lost his grip. I know that, because he
became rigid and sent out a magnificent shoot, like a beam of light
across the water. I feel that beam alone could
have pulled him through. When he got to the other side he stood up and
let his fibers glow like a cluster of lights.
That was the one thing he did just for you. If you had been able to
see, you would have seen that.
"Genaro stood there looking at you, and then he knew that you had not
seen."
56
Part 2
The task of “Seeing”
57
7
Don Juan was not at his house when I arrived there at midday on
November 8, 1968. I had no idea where to
look for him, so I sat and waited. For some unknown reason I knew he
would soon be home. A short while later
don Juan walked into his house. He nodded at me. We exchanged
greetings. He seemed to be tired and lay down
on his mat. He yawned a couple of times.
The idea of "seeing" had become an obsession with me and I had made up
my mind to use his hallucinogenic
smoking mixture again. It had been a terribly difficult decision to
make, so I still wanted to argue the point a bit
further.
"I want to learn to see, don Juan," I said bluntly. "But I really don't
want to take anything; I don't want to
smoke your mixture. Do you think there is any chance I could learn to
see without it?"
He sat up, stared at me for a moment, and lay down again.
"No!" he said. "You will have to use the smoke."
"But you said I was on the verge of seeing with don Genaro."
"I meant that something in you was glowing as though you were really
aware of Genaro's doings, but you
were just looking. Obviously there is something in you that resembles
seeing, but isn't; you're plugged up and
only the smoke can help you."
"Why does one have to smoke? Why can't one simply learn to see by
oneself? I have a very earnest desire.
Isn't that enough?"
"No, it's not enough. Seeing is not so simple and only the smoke can
give you the speed you need to catch a
glimpse of that fleeting world. Otherwise you will only look."
"What do you mean by a fleeting world?"
"The world, when you see, is not as you think it is now. It's rather a
fleeting world that moves and changes.
One may perhaps learn to apprehend that fleeting world by oneself, but
it won't do any good, because the body
decays with the stress. With the smoke, on the other hand, one never
suffers from exhaustion. The smoke gives
the necessary speed to grasp the fleeting movement of the world and at
the same time it keeps the body and its
strength intact."
"All right!" I said dramatically. "I don't want to beat around the bush
any longer. I'll smoke."
He laughed at my display of histrionics.
"Cut it out," he said. "You always hook onto the wrong thing. Now you
think that just deciding to let the
smoke guide you is going to make you see. There's much more to it.
There is always much more to anything."
He became serious for a moment.
"I have been very careful with you, and my acts have been deliberate,"
he said, "because it is Mescalito's
desire that you understand my knowledge. But I know that I won't have
time to teach you all I want. I will only
have time to put you on the road and trust that you will seek in the
same fashion I did. I must admit that you are
more indolent and more stubborn than I. You have other views, though,
and the direction that your life will take
is something I cannot foresee."
His deliberate tone of voice, something in his attitude, summoned up an
old feeling in me, a mixture of fear,
loneliness, and expectation.
"We'll soon know where you stand," he said cryptically. He did not say
anything else. After a while he went
outside the house. I followed him and stood in front of him, not
knowing whether to sit down or to unload some
packages I had brought for him.
"Would it be dangerous?" I asked, just to say something.
"Everything is dangerous," he said.
Don Juan did not seem to be inclined to tell me anything else; he
gathered some small bundles that were
piled in a corner and put them inside a carrying net. I did not offer
to help him because I knew that if he had
wished my help he would have asked me. Then he lay down on his straw
mat. He told me to relax and rest. I lay
down on my mat and tried to sleep but I was not tired; the night before
I had stopped at a motel and slept until
58
noon, knowing that I had only a three-hour drive to don Juan's place.
He was not sleeping either. Although his
eyes were closed, I noticed an almost imperceptible, rhythmical
movement of his head. The thought occurred to
me that he was perhaps chanting to himself.
"Let's eat something," don Juan said suddenly, and his voice made me
jump. "You're going to need all your
energy. You should be in good shape."
He made some soup, but I wasn't hungry.
The next day, November 9, don Juan let me eat only a morsel of food and
told me to rest. I lay around all
morning but I could not relax. I had no idea what don Juan had in mind,
but, worst of all, I was not certain what I
had in mind myself.
We were sitting under his ramada around 3:00 P.M. I was very hungry. I
had suggested various times that we
should eat, but he had refused.
"You haven't prepared your mixture for three years," he said suddenly.
"You'll have to smoke my mixture, so
let's say that I have collected it for you. You will need only a bit of
it. I will fill the pipe's bowl once. You will
smoke all of it and then rest. Then the keeper of the other world will
come. You will do nothing but observe it.
Observe how it moves; observe everything it does. Your life may depend
on how well you watch."
Don Juan had dropped his instructions so abruptly that I did not know
what to say or even what to think. I
mumbled incoherently for a moment. I could not organize my thoughts.
Finally I asked the first clear thing that
came to my mind.
"Who's this guardian?"
Don Juan flatly refused to involve himself in conversation, but I was
too nervous to stop talking and I
insisted desperately that he tell me about this guardian.
"You'll see it," he said casually. "It guards the other world."
"What world? The world of the dead?"
"It's not the world of the dead or the world of anything. It's just
another world. There's no use telling you
about it. See it for yourself."
With that don Juan went inside the house. I followed him into his room.
"Wait, wait, don Juan. What are you going to do?" He did not answer. He
took his pipe out of a bundle and
sat down on a straw mat in the center of the room, looking at me
inquisitively. He seemed to be waiting for my
consent.
"You're a fool," he said softly. "You're not afraid. You just say
you're afraid."
He shook his head slowly from side to side. Then he took the little bag
with the smoking mixture and filled
the pipe bowl.
"I am afraid, don Juan. I am really afraid."
"No, it's not fear."
I desperately tried to gain time and began a long discussion about the
nature of my feelings. I sincerely maintained
that I was afraid, but he pointed out that I was not panting, nor was
my heart beating faster than usual.
I thought for a while about what he had said. He was wrong; I did have
many of the physical changes
ordinarily associated with fear, and I was desperate. A sense of
impending doom permeated everything around
me. My stomach was upset and I was sure I was pale; my hands were
sweating profusely; and yet I really thought
I was not afraid. I did not have the feeling of fear I had been
accustomed to throughout my life. The fear which
has always been idiosyncratically mine was not there. I was talking as
I paced up and down the room in front of
don Juan, who was still sitting on his mat, holding his pipe, and
looking at me inquisitively; and upon
considering the matter I arrived at the conclusion that what I felt
instead of my usual fear was a profound sense of
displeasure, a discomfort at the mere thought of the confusion created
by the intake of hallucinogenic plants.
Don Juan stared at me for an instant, then he looked past me, squinting
as if he were struggling to detect
something in the distance.
I kept walking back and forth in front of him until he forcefully told
me to sit down and relax. We sat quietly
for a few minutes.
59
"You don't want to lose your clarity, do you?" he said abruptly.
"That's very right, don Juan," I said.
He laughed with apparent delight.
"Clarity, the second enemy of a man of knowledge, has loomed upon you.
"You're not afraid," he said reassuringly, "but now you hate to lose
your clarity, and since you're a fool, you
call that fear."
He chuckled.
"Get me some charcoals," he ordered.
His tone was kind and reassuring. I got up automatically and went to
the back of the house and gathered
some small pieces of burning charcoal from the fire, put them on top of
a small stone slab, and returned to the
room.
"Come out here to the porch," don Juan called loudly from outside.
He placed a straw mat on the spot where I usually sit. I put the
charcoals next to him and he blew on them to
activate the fire. I was about to sit down but he stopped me and told
me to sit on the right edge of the mat. He
then put a piece of charcoal in the pipe and handed it to me. I took
it. I was amazed at the silent forcefulness with
which don Juan had steered me. I could not think of anything to say. I
had no more arguments. I was convinced
that I was not afraid, but only unwilling to lose my clarity.
"Puff, puff," he ordered me gently. "Just one bowl this time."
I sucked on the pipe and heard the chirping of the mixture catching on
fire. I felt an instantaneous coat of ice
inside my mouth and my nose. I took another puff and the coating
extended to my chest. When I had taken the
last puff I felt that the entire inside of my body was coated with a
peculiar sensation of cold warmth.
Don Juan took the pipe away from me and tapped the bowl on his palm to
loosen the residue. Then, as he
always does, he wet his finger with saliva and rubbed it inside the
bowl.
My body was numb, but I could move. I changed positions to sit more
comfortably.
"What's going to happen?" I asked.
I had some difficulty vocalizing.
Don Juan very carefully put his pipe inside its sheath and rolled it up
in a long piece of cloth. Then he sat up
straight, facing me. I felt dizzy; my eyes were closing involuntarily.
Don Juan shook me vigorously and ordered
me to stay awake. He said I knew very well that if I fell asleep I
would die. That jolted me. It occurred to me that
don Juan was probably just saying that to keep me awake, but on the
other hand, it also occurred to me that he
might be right. I opened my eyes as wide as I could and that made don
Juan laugh. He said that I had to wait for a
while and keep my eyes open all the time and that at a given moment I
would be able to see the guardian of the
other world.
I felt a very annoying heat all over my body; I tried to change
positions, but I could not move any more. I
wanted to talk to don Juan; the words seemed to be so deep inside of me
that I could not bring them out. Then I
tumbled on my left side and found myself looking at don Juan from the
floor.
He leaned over and ordered me in a whisper not to look at him but to
stare fixedly at a point on my mat
which was directly in front of my eyes. He said that I had to look with
one eye, my left eye, and that sooner or
later I would see the guardian.
I fixed my stare on the spot he had pointed to but I did not see
anything. At a certain moment, however, I
noticed a gnat flying in front of my eyes. It landed on the mat. I
followed its movements. It came very close to
me, so close that my visual perception blurred. And then, all of a
sudden, I felt as if I had stood up. It was a very
puzzling sensation that deserved some pondering, but there was no time
for that. I had the total sensation that I
was looking straight onward from my usual eye level, and what I saw
shook up the last fiber of my being. There
is no other way to describe the emotional jolt I experienced. Right
there facing me, a short distance away, was a
gigantic, monstrous animal. A truly monstrous thing! Never in the
wildest fantasies of fiction had I encountered
anything like it. I looked at it in complete, utmost bewilderment.
The first thing I really noticed was its size. I thought, for some
reason, that it must be close to a hundred feet
60
tall. It seemed to be standing erect, although I could not figure out
how it stood. Next, I noticed that it had wings,
two short, wide wings. At that point I became aware that I insisted on
examining the animal as if it were an
ordinary sight; that is, I looked at it. However, I could not really
look at it in the way I was accustomed to
looking. I realized that I was, rather, noticing things about it, as if
the picture were becoming more clear as parts
were added. Its body was covered with tufts of black hair. It had a
long muzzle and was drooling. Its eyes were
bulgy and round, like two enormous white balls.
Then it began to beat its wings. It was not the flapping motion of a
bird's wings, but a kind of flickering,
vibratory tremor. It gained speed and began circling in front of me; it
was not flying, but rather skidding with
astounding speed and agility, just a few inches above the ground. For a
moment I found myself engrossed in
watching it move. I thought that its movements were ugly and yet its
speed and easiness were superb.
It circled twice in front of me, vibrating its wings, and whatever was
drooling out of its mouth flew in all
directions. Then it turned around and skidded away at an incredible
speed until it disappeared in the distance. I
stared fixedly in the direction it had gone because there was nothing
else I could do. I had a most peculiar sensation
of being incapable of organizing my thoughts coherently. I could not
move away. It was as if I were glued to
the spot. Then I saw something like a cloud in the distance; an instant
later the gigantic beast was circling again
at full speed in front of me. Its wings cut closer and closer to my
eyes until they hit me. I felt that its wings had
actually hit whatever part of me was there. I yelled with all my might
in the midst of one of the most excruciating
pains I have ever had.
The next thing I knew I was seated on my mat and don Juan was rubbing
my forehead. He rubbed my arms
and legs with leaves, then he took me to an irrigation ditch behind his
house, took off my clothes, and submerged
me completely, then pulled me out and submerged me over and over again.
As I lay on the shallow bottom of the irrigation ditch, don Juan pulled
up my left foot from time to time and
tapped the sole gently. After a while I felt a ticklishness. He noticed
it and said that I was all right. I put on my
clothes and we returned to his house. I sat down again on my straw mat
and tried to talk, but I felt I could not
concentrate on what I wanted to say, although my thoughts were very
clear. I was amazed to realize how much
concentration was necessary to talk. I also noticed that in order to
say something I had to stop looking at things. I
had the impression that I was entangled at a very deep level and when I
wanted to talk I had to surface like a
diver; I had to ascend as if pulled by my words. Twice I went as far as
clearing my throat in a fashion which was
perfectly ordinary. I could have said then whatever I wanted to, but I
did not. I preferred to remain at the strange
level of silence where I could just look. I had the feeling that I was
beginning to tap what don Juan had called
"seeing" and that made me very happy.
Afterwards don Juan gave me some soup and tortillas and ordered me to
eat. I was able to eat without any
trouble and without losing what I thought to be my "power of seeing." I
focused my gaze on everything around
me. I was convinced I could "see" everything, and yet the world looked
the same to the best of my assessment. I
struggled to "see" until it was quite dark. I finally got tired and lay
down and went to sleep.
I woke up when don Juan covered me with a blanket. I had a headache and
I was sick to my stomach. After a
while I felt better and slept soundly until the next day.
In the morning I was myself again. I asked don Juan eagerly, "What
happened to me?"
Don Juan laughed coyly. "You went to look for the keeper and of course
you found it," he said.
"But what was it, don Juan?"
"The guardian, the keeper, the sentry of the other world," don Juan
said factually.
I intended to relate to him the details of the portentous and ugly
beast, but he disregarded my attempt, saying
that my experience was nothing special, that any man could do that.
I told him that the guardian had been such a shock to me that I really
had not yet been able to think about it.
Don Juan laughed and made fun of what he called an overdramatic bent of
my nature.
"That thing, whatever it was, hurt me," I said. "It was as real as you
and I."
"Of course it was real. It caused you pain, didn't it?"
As I recollected my experience I grew more excited. Don Juan told me to
calm down. Then he asked me if I
61
had really been afraid of it; he stressed the word "really."
"I was petrified," I said. "Never in my life have I experienced such an
awesome fright."
"Come on," he said, laughing. "You were not that afraid."
"I swear to you," I said with genuine fervor, "that if I could have
moved I would have run hysterically."
He found my statement very funny and roared with laughter.
"What was the point of making me see that monstrosity, don Juan?"
He became serious and gazed at me.
"That was the guardian," he said. "If you want to see you must overcome
the guardian."
"But how am I to overcome it, don Juan? It is perhaps a hundred feet
tall."
Don Juan laughed so hard that tears rolled down his cheeks.
"Why don't you let me tell you what I saw, so there won't be any
misunderstanding?" I said.
"If that makes you happy, go ahead, tell me."
I narrated everything I could remember, but that did not seem to change
his mood.
"Still, that's nothing new," he said, smiling.
"But how do you expect me to overcome a thing like that? With what?"
He was silent for quite a while. Then he turned to me and said,
"You were not afraid, not really. You were hurt, but you were not
afraid."
He reclined against some bundles and put his arms behind his head. I
thought he had dropped the subject.
"You know," he said suddenly, looking at the roof of the ramada, "every
man can see the guardian. And the
guardian is sometimes for some of us an awesome beast as high as the
sky. You're lucky; for you it was only a
hundred feet tall. And yet its secret is so simple."
He paused for a moment and hummed a Mexican song.
"The guardian of the other world is a gnat," he said slowly, as if he
were measuring the effect of his words.
"I beg your pardon."
"The guardian of the other world is a gnat," he repeated. "What you
encountered yesterday was a gnat; and
that little gnat will keep you away until you overcome it."
For a moment I did not want to believe what don Juan was saying, but
upon recollecting the sequence of my
vision I had to admit that at a certain moment I was looking at a gnat,
and an instant later a sort of mirage had
taken place and I was looking at the beast.
"But how could a gnat hurt me, don Juan?" I asked, truly bewildered.
"It was not a gnat when it hurt you," he said, "it was the guardian of
the other world. Perhaps some day you
will have the courage to overcome it. Not now, though; now it is a
hundred-foot-tall drooling beast. But there is
no point in talking about it. It's no feat to stand in front of it, so
if you want to know more about it, find the
guardian again."
Two days later, on November 11, I smoked don Juan's mixture again.
I had asked don Juan to let me smoke once more to find the guardian. I
had not asked him on the spur of the
moment, but after long deliberation. My curiosity about the guardian
was disproportionately greater than my fear,
or the discomfort of losing my clarity.
The procedure was the same. Don Juan filled the pipe bowl once and when
I had finished the entire contents
he cleaned it and put it away.
The effect was markedly slower; when I began to feel a bit dizzy don
Juan came to me and, holding my head
in his hands, helped me to lie down on my left side. He told me to
stretch my legs and relax and then helped me
put my right arm in front of my body, at the level of my chest. He
turned my hand so the palm was pressing
against the mat, and let my weight rest on it. I did not do anything to
help or hinder him, for I did not know what
be was doing. He sat in front of me and told me not to be concerned
with anything. He said that the guardian was
going to come, and that I had a ringside seat to see it. He also told
me, in a casual way, that the guardian could
cause great pain, but that there was one way to avert it. He said that
two days before he had made me sit up when
he judged I had had enough. He pointed to my right arm and said that he
had deliberately put it in that position so
62
I could use it as a lever to push myself up whenever I wanted to.
By the time he had finished telling me all that, my body was quite
numb. I wanted to call to his attention the
fact that it would be impossible for me to push myself up because I had
lost control of my muscles. I tried to
vocalize the words but I could not. He seemed to have anticipated me,
however, and explained that the trick was
in the will. He urged me to remember the time, years before, when I had
first smoked the mushrooms. On that
occasion I had fallen to the ground and sprung up to my feet again by
an act of what he called, at that time, my
''will"; I had "thought myself up." He said that was in fact the only
possible way to get up.
What he was saying was useless to me because I did not remember what I
had really done years before. I had
an overwhelming sense of despair and closed my eyes.
Don Juan grabbed me by the hair, shook my head vigorously, and ordered
me imperatively not to close my
eyes. I not only opened my eyes but I did something I thought was
astonishing. I actually said,
"I don't know how I got up that time."
I was startled. There was something very monotonous about the rhythm of
my voice, but it was plainly my
voice, and yet I honestly believed I could not have said that, because
a minute before I had been incapable of
speaking.
I looked at don Juan. He turned his face to one side and laughed.
"I didn't say that," I said.
And again I was startled by my voice. I felt elated. Speaking under
these conditions became an exhilarating
process. I wanted to ask don Juan to explain my talking, but I found I
was again incapable of uttering one single
word. I struggled fiercely to voice my thoughts, but it was useless. I
gave up and at that moment, almost involuntarily,
I said,
"Who's talking, who's talking?"
That question made don Juan laugh so hard that at one point he bobbed
on his side.
Apparently it was possible for me to say simple things, as long as I
knew exactly what I wanted to say.
"Am I talking? Am I talking?" I asked.
Don Juan told me that if I did not stop horsing around he was going to
go out and lie down under the ramada
and leave me alone with my clowning.
"It isn't clowning," I said.
I was very serious about that. My thoughts were very clear; my body,
however, was numb; I did not feel it. I
was not suffocated, as I had once been in the past under similar
conditions; I was comfortable because I could not
feel anything; I had no control whatever over my voluntary system and
yet I could talk. The thought occurred to
me that if I could talk I could probably stand up as don Juan had said.
"Up," I said in English, and in a flicker of an eye I was up.
Don Juan shook his head in disbelief and walked out of the house.
"Don Juan!" I called out three times.
He came back.
"Put me down," I said.
"Put yourself down," he said. "You seem to be doing very well."
I said, "Down," and suddenly I lost sight of the room. I could not see
anything. After a moment the room and
don Juan came back again into my field of vision. I thought that I must
have lain down with my face to the
ground and he had grabbed me by the hair and lifted my head.
"Thank you," I said in a very slow monotone.
"You are welcome," he replied, mocking my tone of voice, and had
another attack of laughter.
Then he took some leaves and began rubbing my arms and feet with them.
"What are you doing?" I asked,
"I am rubbing you," he said, imitating my painful monotone.
His body convulsed with laughter. His eyes were shiny and very
friendly. I liked him. I felt that don Juan was
compassionate and fair and funny. I could not laugh with him, but I
would have liked to. Another feeling of ex-
63
hilaration invaded me and I laughed; it was such an awful sound that
don Juan was taken aback for an instant.
"I better take you to the ditch," he said, "or you're going to kill
yourself clowning."
He put me up on my feet and made me walk around the room. Little by
little I began to feel my feet, and my
legs, and finally my entire body. My ears were bursting with a strange
pressure. It was like the sensation of a leg
or an arm that has fallen asleep. I felt a tremendous weight on the
back of my neck and under the scalp on the top
of my head.
Don Juan rushed me to the irrigation ditch at the back of his house; he
dumped me there fully clothed. The
cold water reduced the pressure and the pain, by degrees, until it was
all gone.
I changed my clothes in the house and sat down and I again felt the
same kind of aloofness, the same desire
to stay quiet. I noticed this time, however, that it was not clarity of
mind, or a power to focus; rather, it was a sort
of melancholy and a physical fatigue. Finally I fell asleep.
November 12,1968
This morning don Juan and I went to the nearby hills to collect plants.
We walked about six miles on
extremely rough terrain. I became very tired. We sat down to rest, at
my initiative, and he began a conversation,
saying that he was pleased with my progress.
"I know now that it was I who talked," I said, "but at the time I could
have sworn it was someone else."
"It was you, of course," he said.
"How come I couldn't recognize myself?"
"That's what the little smoke does. One can talk and not notice it; or
one can move thousands of miles and
not notice that either. That's also how one can go through things. The
little smoke removes the body and one is
free, like the wind; better than the wind, the wind can be stopped by a
rock or a wall or a mountain. The little
smoke makes one as free as the air; perhaps even freer, the air can be
locked in a tomb and become stale, but with
the aid of the little smoke one cannot be stopped or locked in."
Don Juan's words unleashed a mixture of euphoria and doubt. I felt an
overwhelming uneasiness, a sensation
of undefined guilt.
"Then one can really do all those things, don Juan?"
"What do you think? You would rather think you're crazy, wouldn't you?"
he said cuttingly.
"Well, it's easy for you to accept all those things. For me it's
impossible."
"It's not easy for me. I don't have any more privileges than you. Those
things are equally hard for you or for
me or for anyone else to accept."
"But you are at home with all this, don Juan."
"Yes, but it cost me plenty. I had to struggle, perhaps more than you
ever will. You have a baffling way of
getting everything to work for you. You have no idea how hard I had to
toil to do what you did yesterday. You
have something that helps you every inch of the way. There is no other
possible explanation for the manner in
which you learn about the powers. You did it before with Mescalito, now
you have done it with the little smoke.
You should concentrate on the fact that you have a great gift, and
leave other considerations on the side."
"You make it sound so easy, but it isn't. I'm torn inside."
"You'll be in one piece again soon enough. You have not taken care of
your body, for one thing. You're too
fat. I didn't want to say anything to you before. One must always let
others do what they have to do. You were
away for years. I told you that you would come back, though, and you
did. The same thing happened to me. I quit
for five and a half years."
"Why did you stay away, don Juan?"
"For the same reason you did. I didn't like it."
"Why did you come back?"
"For the same reason you have come back yourself, because there is no
other way to live."
That statement had a great impact on me, for I had found myself
thinking that perhaps there was no other
way to live. I had never voiced this thought to anyone, yet don Juan
had surmised it correctly.
After a very long silence I asked him,
64
"What did I do yesterday, don Juan?"
"You got up when you wanted to."
"But I don't know how I did that."
"It takes tune to perfect that technique. The important thing, however,
is that you know how to do it."
"But I don't. That's the point, I really don't."
"Of course you do."
"Don Juan, I assure you, I swear to you . . ."
He did not let me finish; he got up and walked away.
Later on we talked again about the guardian of the other world.
"If I believe that whatever I have experienced is actually real," I
said, "then the guardian is a gigantic creature
that can cause unbelievable physical pain; and if I believe that one
can actually travel enormous distances by an
act of will, then it's logical to conclude that I could also will the
monster to disappear. Is that correct?"
"Not exactly," he said. "You cannot will the guardian to disappear.
Your will can stop it from harming you,
though. Of course if you ever accomplish that, the road is open to you.
You can actually go by the guardian and
there's nothing that it can do, not even whirl around madly."
"How can I accomplish that?"
"You already know how. All you need now is practice."
I told him that we were having a misunderstanding that stemmed from our
differences in perceiving the
world. I said that for me to know something meant that I had to be
fully aware of what I was doing and that I
could repeat what I knew at will, but in this case I was neither aware
of what I had done under the influence of
the smoke, nor could I repeat it if my life depended on it.
Don Juan looked at me inquisitively. He seemed to be amused by what I
was saying. He took off his hat and
scratched his temples as he does when he wants to pretend bewilderment.
"You really know how to talk and say nothing, don't you?" he said
laughing. "I have told you, you have to
have an unbending intent in order to become a man of knowledge. But you
seem to have an unbending intent to
confuse yourself with riddles. You insist on explaining everything as
if the whole world were composed of things
that can be explained. Now you are confronted with the guardian and
with the problem of moving by using your
will. Has it ever occurred to you that only a few things in this world
can be explained your way? When I say that
the guardian is really blocking your passing and could actually knock
the devil out of you, I know what I mean.
When I say that one can move by one's will, I also know what I mean. I
wanted to teach you, little by little, how
to move, but then I realized that you know how to do it even though you
say you don't."
"But I really don't know how," I protested.
"You do, you fool," he said sternly, and then smiled. "It reminds me of
the time when someone put that kid
Julio on a harvesting machine; he knew how to run it although he had
never done it before."
"I know what you mean, don Juan; however, I still feel that I could not
do it again, because I am not sure of
what I did."
"A phony sorcerer tries to explain everything in the world with
explanations he is not sure about," he said,
"and so everything is witchcraft. But then you're no better. You also
want to explain everything your way but
you're not sure of your explanations either."
65
8
Don Juan asked me abruptly if I was planning to leave for home during
the weekend. I said I intended to
leave Monday morning. We were sitting under his ramada around midday on
Saturday, January 18, 1969, taking
a rest after a long walk in the nearby hills. Don Juan got up and went
into the house. A few moments later he
called me inside. He was sitting in the middle of his room and had
placed my straw mat in front of his. He
motioned me to sit down and without saying a word he unwrapped his
pipe, took it out of its sheath, filled its
bowl with his smoking mixture, and lit it. He had even brought into his
room a clay tray filled with small
charcoals.
He did not ask me whether I was willing to smoke. He just handed me the
pipe and told me to puff. I did not
hesitate. Don Juan had apparently assessed my mood correctly; my
overwhelming curiosity about the guardian
must have been obvious to him. I did not need any coaxing and eagerly
smoked the entire bowl.
The reactions I had were identical to those I had had before. Don Juan
also proceeded in very much the same
manner. This time, however, instead of helping me to do it, he just
told me to prop my right arm on the mat and
lie down on my left side. He suggested that I should make a fist if
that would give me a better leverage.
I did make a fist with my right hand, because I found it was easier
than turning my palm against the floor
while lying with my weight on it I was not sleepy; I felt very warm for
a while, then I lost all feeling.
Don Juan lay down on his side facing me; his right forearm rested on
his elbow and propped his head up like
a pillow. Everything was perfectly placid, even my body, which by then
lacked tactile sensations. I felt very content.
"It's nice," I said.
Don Juan got up hurriedly.
"Don't you dare start with this crap," he said forcefully. "Don't talk.
You'll waste every bit of energy talking,
and then the guardian will mash you down, like you would smash a gnat."
He must have thought that his simile was funny because he began to
laugh, but he stopped suddenly.
"Don't talk, please don't talk," he said with a serious look on his
face.
"I wasn't about to say anything," I said, and I really did not want to
say that.
Don Juan got up. I saw him walking away toward the back of his house. A
moment later I noticed that a gnat
had landed on my mat and that filled me with a kind of anxiety I had
never experienced before. It was a mixture
of elation, anguish, and fear. I was totally aware that something
transcendental was about to unfold in front of
me; a gnat who guarded the other world. It was a ludicrous thought; I
felt like laughing out loud, but then I
realized that my elation was distracting me and I was going to miss a
transition period I wanted to clarify. In my
previous attempt to see the guardian I had looked at the gnat first
with my left eye, and then I felt that I had stood
up and looked at it with both eyes, but I was not aware how that
transition had occurred.
I saw the gnat whirling around on the mat in front of my face and
realized that I was looking at it with both
eyes. It came very close; at a given moment I could not see it with
both eyes any longer and shifted the view to
my left eye, which was level with the ground. The instant I changed
focus I also felt that I had straightened my
body to a fully vertical position and I was looking at an unbelievably
enormous animal. It was brilliantly black.
Its front was covered with long, black, insidious hair, which looked
like spikes coming through the cracks of
some slick, shiny scales. The hair was actually arranged in tufts. Its
body was massive, thick and round. Its wings
were wide and short in comparison to the length of its body. It had two
white, bulging eyes and a long muzzle.
This time it looked more like an alligator. It seemed to have long
ears, or perhaps horns, and it was drooling.
I strained myself to fix my gaze on it and then became fully aware that
I could not look at it in the same way
I ordinarily look at things. I had a strange thought; looking at the
guardian's body I felt that every single part of it
was independently alive, as the eyes of men are alive. I realized then
for the first tune in my life that the eyes
were the only part of a man that could show, to me, whether or not he
was alive. The guardian, on the other hand,
had a "million eyes."
I thought this was a remarkable finding. Before this experience I had
speculated on the similes that could
66
describe the "distortions" that rendered a gnat as a gigantic beast;
and I had thought that a good simile was "as if
looking at an insect through the magnifying lens of a microscope." But
that was not so. Apparently viewing the
guardian was much more complex than looking at a magnified insect.
The guardian began to whirl in front of me. At one moment it stopped
and I felt it was looking at me. I
noticed then that it made no sound. The dance of the guardian was
silent. The awesomeness was in its
appearance: its bulging eyes; its horrendous mouth; its drooling; its
insidious hair; and above all its incredible
size. I watched very closely the way it moved its wings, how it made
them vibrate without sound. I watched how
it skidded over the ground like a monumental ice skater.
Looking at that nightmarish creature in front of me, I actually felt
elated. I really believed I had discovered
the secret of overpowering it. I thought the guardian was only a moving
picture on a silent screen; it could not
harm me; it only looked terrifying.
The guardian was standing still, facing me; suddenly it fluttered its
wings and turned around. Its back looked
like brilliantly colored armor; its shine was dazzling but the hue was
nauseating; it was my unfavorable color.
The guardian remained with its back turned to me for a while and then,
fluttering its wings, again skidded out of
sight.
I was confronted with a very strange dilemma. I honestly believed that
I had overpowered it by realizing that
it presented only a picture of wrath. My belief was perhaps due to don
Juan's insistence that I knew more than I
was willing to admit. At any rate, I felt I had overcome the guardian
and the path was free. Yet I did not know
how to proceed. Don Juan had not told me what to do in such a case. I
tried to turn and look behind me, but I was
unable to move. However, I could see very well over the major part of a
180-degree range in front of my eyes.
And what I saw was a cloudy, pale-yellow horizon; it seemed gaseous. A
sort of lemon hue uniformly covered all
I could see. It seemed that I was on a plateau filled with vapors of
sulphur.
Suddenly the guardian appeared again at a point on the horizon. It made
a wide circle before stopping in front
of me; its mouth was wide open, like a huge cavern; it had no teeth. It
vibrated its wings for an instant and then it
charged at me. It actually charged at me like a bull, and with its
gigantic wings it swung at my eyes. I screamed
with pain and then I flew up, or rather I felt I had ejected myself up,
and went soaring beyond the guardian,
beyond the yellowish plateau, into another world, the world of men, and
I found myself standing in the middle of
don Juan's room.
January 19,1969
"I really thought I had overpowered the guardian," I said to don Juan.
"You must be kidding," he said.
Don Juan had not spoken one word to me since the day before and I did
not mind it I had been immersed in a
sort of reverie and again I had felt that if I looked intently I would
be able to "see." But I did not see anything that
was different. Not talking, however, had relaxed me tremendously.
Don Juan asked me to recount the sequence of my experience, and what
particularly interested him was the
hue I had seen on the guardian's back. Don Juan sighed and seemed to be
really concerned.
"You were lucky that the color was on the guardian's back," he said
with a serious face. "Had it been on the
front part of its body, or worse yet, on its head, you would be dead by
now. You must not try to see the guardian
ever again. It's not your temperament to cross that plain; yet I was
convinced that you could go through it. But
let's not talk about it any more. This was only one of a variety of
roads."
I detected an unaccustomed heaviness in don Juan's tone.
"What will happen to me if I try to see the guardian again?"
"The guardian will take you away," he said, "It will pick you up in its
mouth and carry you into that plain and
leave you there forever. It is obvious that the guardian knew that it
is not your temperament and warned you to
stay away.”
"How do you think the guardian knew that?"
Don Juan gave me a long, steadfast look. He tried to say something, but
gave up as though he was unable to
find the right words.
67
"I always fall for your questions," he said, smiling.
"You were not really thinking when you asked me that, were you?"
I protested and reaffirmed that it puzzled me that the guardian knew my
temperament.
Don Juan had a strange glint in his eye when he said,
"And you had not even mentioned anything about your temperament to the
guardian, had you?"
His tone was so comically serious that we both laughed. After a while,
however, he said that the guardian,
being the keeper, the watchman of that world, knew many secrets that a
brujo was entitled to share.
"That's one way a brujo gets to see" he said. "But that will not be
your domain, so there is no point in talking
about it."
"Is smoking the only way to see the guardian?" I asked.
"No. You could also see it without it. There are scores of people who
could do that. I prefer the smoke
because it is more effective and less dangerous to oneself. If you try
to see the guardian without the aid of the
smoke, chances are that you may delay in getting out of its way. In
your case, for instance, it is obvious that the
guardian was warning you when it turned its back so you would look at
your enemy color. Then it went away;
but when it came back you were still there, so it charged at you. You
were prepared, however, and jumped. The
little smoke gave you the protection you needed; had you gone into that
world without its aid you wouldn't have
been able to extricate yourself from the guardian's grip."
"Why not?"
"Your movements would have been too slow. To survive in that world you
need to be as fast as lightning. It
was my mistake to leave the room, but I didn't want you to talk any
more. You are a blabbermouth, so you talk
even against your desire. Had I been there with you I would've pulled
your head up. You jumped up by yourself,
which was even better; however, I would rather not run a risk like
that; the guardian is not something you can
fool around with."
68
9
For three months don Juan systematically avoided talking about the
guardian. I paid him four visits during
these months; he involved me in running errands for him every time, and
when I had performed the errands he
simply told me to go home. On April 24, 1969, the fourth time I was at
his house, I finally confronted him after
we had eaten dinner and were sitting next to his earthen stove. I told
him that he was doing something
incongruous to me; I was ready to learn and yet he did not even want me
around. I had had to struggle very hard
to overcome my aversion to using his hallucinogenic mushrooms and I
felt, as he had said himself, that I had no
time to lose.
Don Juan patiently listened to my complaints.
"You're too weak," he said. "You hurry when you should wait, but you
wait when you should hurry. You
think too much. Now you think that there is no time to waste. A while
back you thought you didn't want to smoke
any more. Your life is too damn loose; you're not tight enough to meet
the little smoke. I am responsible for you
and I don't want you to die like a goddamn fool."
I felt embarrassed.
"What can I do, don Juan? I'm very impatient."
"Live like a warrior! I've told you already, a warrior takes
responsibility for his acts; for the most trivial of
his acts. You act out your thoughts and that's wrong. You failed with
the guardian because of your thoughts."
"How did I fail, don Juan?"
"You think about everything. You thought about the guardian and thus
you couldn't overcome it.
"First you must live like a warrior. I think you understand that very
well."
I wanted to interject something in my defense, but he gestured with his
hand to be quiet.
"Your life is fairly tight," he continued. "In fact, your life is
tighter than Pablito's or Nestor's, Genaro's
apprentices, and yet they see and you don't. Your life is tighter than
Eligio's and he'll probably see before you do.
This baffles me. Even Genaro cannot get over that. You've faithfully
carried out everything I have told you to do.
Everything that my benefactor taught me, in the first stage of
learning, I have passed on to you. The rule is right,
the steps cannot be changed. You have done everything one has to do and
yet you don't see; but to those who
see, like Genaro, you appear as though you see. I rely on that and I am
fooled. You always turn around and
behave like an idiot who doesn't see, which of course is right for you."
Don Juan's words distressed me profoundly. I don't know why but I was
close to tears. I began to talk about
my childhood and a wave of self-pity enveloped me. Don Juan stared at
me for a brief moment and then moved
his eyes away. It was a penetrating glance. I felt he had actually
grabbed me with his eyes. I had the sensation of
two fingers gently clasping me and I acknowledged a weird agitation, an
itching, a pleasant despair in the area of
my solar plexus. I became aware of my abdominal region. I sensed its
heat. I could not speak coherently any
more and I mumbled, then stopped talking altogether.
"Perhaps it's the promise," don Juan said after a long pause.
"I beg your pardon."
"A promise you once made, long ago."
"What promise?"
"Maybe you can tell me that. You do remember it, don't you?"
"I don't."
"You promised something very important once. I thought that perhaps
your promise was keeping you from
seeing."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"I'm talking about a promise you made! You must remember it."
"If you know what the promise was, why don't you tell me, don Juan?"
"No. It won't do any good to tell you."
"Was it a promise I made to myself?"
69
For a moment I thought he might be referring to my resolution to quit
the apprenticeship.
"No. This is something that took place a long time ago," he said.
I laughed because I was certain don Juan was playing some sort of game
with me. I felt mischievous. I had a
sensation of elation at the idea that I could fool don Juan, who, I was
convinced, knew as little as I did about the
alleged promise. I was sure he was fishing in the dark and trying to
improvise. The idea of humoring him
delighted me.
"Was it something I promised to my grandpa?"
"No," he said, and his eyes glittered. "Neither was it something you
promised to your little grandma."
The ludicrous intonation he gave to the word "grandma" made me laugh. I
thought don Juan was setting
some sort of trap for me, but I was willing to play the game to the
end. I began enumerating all the possible
individuals to whom I could have promised something of great
importance. He said no to each. Then he steered
the conversation to my childhood.
"Why was your childhood sad?" he asked with a serious expression.
I told him that my childhood had not really been sad, but perhaps a bit
difficult.
"Everybody feels that way," he said, looking at me again. "I too was
very unhappy and afraid when I was a
child. To be an Indian is hard, very hard. But the memory of that time
no longer has meaning for me, beyond that
it was hard. I had ceased to think about the hardship of my life even
before I had learned to see."
"I don't think about my childhood either," I said.
"Why does it make you sad, then? Why do you want to weep?"
"I don't know. Perhaps when I think of myself as a child I feel sorry
for myself and for all my fellow men. I
feel helpless and sad."
He looked at me fixedly and again my abdominal region registered the
weird sensation of two gentle fingers
clasping it. I moved my eyes away and then glanced back at him. He was
looking into the distance, past me; his
eyes were foggy, out of focus.
"It was a promise of your childhood," he said after a moment's silence.
"What did I promise?"
He did not answer. His eyes were closed. I smiled involuntarily; I knew
he was feeling his way in the dark;
however, I had lost some of my original impetus to humor him.
"I was a skinny child," he went on, "and I was always afraid."
"So was I," I said.
"What I remember the most is the terror and sadness that fell upon me
when the Mexican soldiers killed my
mother," he said softly, as if the memory was still painful. "She was a
poor and humble Indian. Perhaps it was
better that her life was over then. I wanted to be killed with her,
because I was a child. But the soldiers picked me
up and beat me. When I grabbed onto my mother's body they hit my
fingers with a horsewhip and broke them. I
didn't feel any pain, but I couldn't grasp any more, and then they
dragged me away."
He stopped talking. His eyes were still closed and I could detect a
very slight tremor in his lips. A profound
sadness began to overtake me. Images of my own childhood started to
flood my mind.
"How old were you, don Juan?" I asked, just to offset the sadness in me.
"Maybe seven. That was the time of the great Yaqui wars. The Mexican
soldiers came upon us unexpectedly
while my mother was cooking some food. She was a helpless woman. They
killed her for no reason at all. It
doesn't make any difference that she died that way, not really, and yet
for me it does. I cannot tell myself why,
though; it just does. I thought they had killed my father too, but they
hadn't. He was wounded. Later on they put
us in a tram like cattle and closed the door. For days they kept us
there in the dark, like animals. They kept us
alive with bits of food they threw into the wagon from time to time.
"My father died of his wounds in that wagon. He became delirious with
pain and fever and went on telling
me that I had to survive. He kept on telling me that until the very
last moment of his life.
"The people took care of me; they gave me food; an old woman curer
fixed the broken bones of my hand.
And as you can see, I lived. Life has been neither good nor bad to me;
life has been hard. Life is hard and for a
70
child it is sometimes horror itself."
We did not speak for a very long time. Perhaps an hour went by in
complete silence. I had very confusing
feelings. I was somewhat dejected and yet I could not tell why. I
experienced a sense of remorse. A while before
I had been willing to humor don Juan, but he had suddenly turned the
tables with his direct account. It had been
simple and concise and had produced a strange feeling in me. The idea
of a child undergoing pain had always
been a touchy subject for me. In an instant my feelings of empathy for
don Juan gave way to a sensation of
disgust with myself. I had actually taken notes, as if don Juan's life
were merely a clinical case. I was on the
verge of ripping up my notes when don Juan poked my calf with his toe
to attract my attention. He said he was
"seeing" a light of violence around me and wondered whether I was going
to start beating him. His laughter was
a delightful break. He said that I was given to outbursts of violent
behavior but that I was not really mean and
that most of the time the violence was against myself.
"You're right, don Juan," I said.
"Of course," he said, laughing.
He urged me to talk about my childhood. I began to tell him about my
years of fear and loneliness and got
involved in describing to him what I thought to be my overwhelming
struggle to survive and maintain my spirit.
He laughed at the metaphor of "maintaining my spirit."
I talked for a long time. He listened with a serious expression. Then,
at a given moment his eyes "clasped"
me again and I stopped talking. After a moment's pause he said that
nobody had ever humiliated me and that was
the reason I was not really mean.
"You haven't been defeated yet," he said. He repeated the statement
four or five times so I felt obliged to ask
him what he meant by that. He explained that to be defeated was a
condition of life which was unavoidable. Men
were either victorious or defeated and, depending on that, they became
persecutors or victims. These two
conditions were prevalent as long as one did not "see"; "seeing"
dispelled the illusion of victory, or defeat, or
suffering. He added that I should learn to "see" while I was victorious
to avoid ever having the memory of being
humiliated.
I protested that I was not and had never been victorious at anything;
and that my life was, if anything, a
defeat. He laughed and threw his hat on the floor.
"If your life is such a defeat, step on my hat," he dared me in jest.
I sincerely argued my point. Don Juan became serious. His eyes squinted
to a fine slit. He said that I thought
my life was a defeat for reasons other than defeat itself. Then in a
very quick and thoroughly unexpected manner
he took my head in his hands by placing his palms against my temples.
His eyes became fierce as he looked into
mine. Out of fright I took an involuntary deep breath through my mouth.
He let my head go and reclined against
the wall, still gazing at me. He had performed his movements with such
a speed that by the time he had relaxed
and reclined comfortably against the wall, I was still in the middle of
my deep breath. I felt dizzy, ill at ease.
"I see a little boy crying," don Juan said after a pause.
He repeated it various times as if I did not understand. I had the
feeling he was talking about me as a little
boy crying, so I did not really pay attention to it.
"Hey!" he said, demanding my full concentration. "I see a little boy
crying."
I asked him if that boy was me. He said no. Then I asked him if it was
a vision of my life or just a memory of
his own life. He did not answer.
"I see a little boy," he continued saying. "And he is crying and
crying."
"Is he a boy I know?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Is he my little boy?"
"No."
"Is he crying now?"
"He's crying now," he said with conviction.
I thought don Juan was having a vision of someone I knew who was a
little boy and who was at that very
71
moment crying. I voiced the names of all the children I knew, but he
said those children were irrelevant to my
promise and the child who was crying was very important to it.
Don Juan's statements seemed to be incongruous. He had said that I had
promised something to someone
during my childhood, and that the child who was crying at that very
moment was important to my promise. I told
him he was not making sense. He calmly repeated that he "saw" a little
boy crying at that moment, and that the
little boy was hurt.
I seriously struggled to fit his statements into some sort of orderly
pattern, but I could not relate them to
anything I was aware of.
"I give up," I said, "because I can't remember making an important
promise to anybody, least of all to a
child."
He squinted his eyes again and said that this particular child who was
crying at that precise moment was a
child of my childhood.
"He was a child during my childhood and is still crying now?" I asked.
"He is a child crying now," he insisted.
"Do you realize what you're saying, don Juan?"
"I do."
"It doesn't make sense. How can he be a child now if he was one when I
was a child myself?"
"He's a child and he's crying now," he said stubbornly.
"Explain it to me, don Juan."
"No. You must explain it to me."
For the life of me I could not fathom what he was referring to.
"He's crying! He's crying!" don Juan kept on saying in a mesmerizing
tone. "And he's hugging you now. He's
hurt! He's hurt! And he's looking at you. Do you feel his eyes? He's
kneeling and hugging you. He's younger than
you. He has come running to you. But his arm is broken. Do you feel his
arm? That little boy has a nose that
looks like a button. Yes! That's a button nose."
My ears began to buzz and I lost the sensation of being at don Juan's
house. The words "button nose"
plunged me at once into a scene out of my childhood. I knew a
button-nose boy! Don Juan had edged his way
into one of the most recondite places of my life. I knew then the
promise he was talking about. I had a sensation
of elation, of despair, of awe for don Juan and his splendid maneuver.
How in the devil did he know about the
button-nose boy of my childhood? I became so agitated by the memory don
Juan had evoked in me that my
power to remember took me back to a time when I was eight years old. My
mother had left two years before and
I had spent the most hellish years of my life circulating among my
mother's sisters, who served as dutiful mother
surrogates and took care of me a couple of months at a time. Each of my
aunts had a large family, and no matter
how careful and protective the aunts were toward me, I had twenty-two
cousins to contend with. Their cruelty
was sometimes truly bizarre. I felt then that I was surrounded by
enemies, and in the excruciating years that
followed I waged a desperate and sordid war. Finally, through means I
still do not know to this day, I succeeded
in subduing all my cousins. I was indeed victorious. I had no more
competitors who counted. However, I did not
know that, nor did I know how to stop my war, which logically was
extended to the school grounds.
The classrooms of the rural school where I went were mixed and the
first and third grades were separated
only by a space between the desks. It was there that I met a little boy
with a flat nose, who was teased with the
nickname "Button-nose." He was a first-grader. I used to pick on him
haphazardly, not really intending to. But he
seemed to like me in spite of everything I did to him. He used to
follow me around and even kept the secret that I
was responsible for some of the pranks that baffled the principal. And
yet I still teased him. One day I deliberately
toppled over a heavy standing blackboard; it fell on him; the desk in
which he was sitting absorbed some of the
impact, but still the blow broke his collarbone. He fell down. I helped
him up and saw the pain and fright in his
eyes as he looked at me and held onto me. The shock of seeing him in
pain, with a mangled arm, was more than I
could bear. For years I had viciously battled against my cousins and I
had won; I had vanquished my foes; I had
felt good and powerful up to the moment when the sight of the
button-nose little boy crying demolished my
72
victories. Right there I quit the battle. In whatever way I was capable
of, I made a resolution not to win ever
again. I thought his arm would have to be cut off, and I promised that
if the little boy was cured I would never
again be victorious. I gave up my victories for him. That was the way I
understood it then.
Don Juan had opened a festered sore in my life. I felt dizzy,
overwhelmed. A well of unmitigated sadness
beckoned me and I succumbed to it. I felt the weight of my acts on me.
The memory of that little button-nose
boy, whose name was Joaquin, produced in me such a vivid anguish that I
wept. I told don Juan of my sadness
for that boy who never had anything, that little Joaquin who did not
have money to go to a doctor and whose arm
never set properly. And all I had to give him were my childish
victories. I felt so ashamed.
"Be in peace, you funny bird," don Juan said imperatively. "You gave
enough. Your victories were strong
and they were yours. You gave enough. Now you must change your promise."
"How do I change it? Do I just say so?"
"A promise like that cannot be changed by just saying so. Perhaps very
soon you'll be able to know what to
do about changing it. Then perhaps you'll even get to see."
"Can you give me any suggestions, don Juan?"
"You must wait patiently, knowing that you're waiting, and knowing what
you're waiting for. That is the
warrior's way. And if it is a matter of fulfilling your promise then
you must be aware that you are fulfilling it.
Then a time will come when your waiting will be over and you will no
longer have to honor your promise. There
is nothing you can do for that little boy's life. Only he could cancel
that act."
"But how can he?"
"By learning to reduce his wants to nothing. As long as he thinks that
he was a victim, his life will be hell.
And as long as you think the same your promise will be valid. What
makes us unhappy is to want. Yet if we
would learn to cut our wants to nothing, the smallest thing we'd get
would be a true gift. Be in peace, you made a
good gift to Joaquin. To be poor or wanting is only a thought; and so
is to hate, or to be hungry, or to be in pain."
"I cannot truly believe that, don Juan. How could hunger and pain be
only thoughts?"
"They are only thoughts for me now. That's all I know. I have
accomplished that feat. The power to do that is
all we have, mind you, to oppose the forces of our lives; without that
power we are dregs, dust in the wind."
"I have no doubt that you have done it, don Juan, but how can a simple
man like myself or little Joaquin
accomplish that?"
"It is up to us as single individuals to oppose the forces of our
lives. I have said this to you countless times:
Only a warrior can survive. A warrior knows that he is waiting and what
he is waiting for; and while he waits he
wants nothing and thus whatever little thing he gets is more than he
can take. If he needs to eat he finds a way,
because he is not hungry; if something hurts his body he finds a way to
stop it, because he is not in pain. To be
hungry or to be in pain means that the man has abandoned himself and is
no longer a warrior; and the forces of
his hunger and pain will destroy him."
I wanted to go on arguing my point, but I stopped because I realized
that by arguing I was making a barrier to
protect myself from the devastating force of don Juan's superb feat
which had touched me so deeply and with
such a power. How did he know? I thought that perhaps I had told him
the story of the button-nose boy during
one of my deep states of nonordinary reality. I did not recollect
telling him, but my not remembering under such
conditions was understandable.
"How did you know about my promise, don Juan?"
"I saw it."
"Did you see it when I had taken Mescalito, or when I had smoked your
mixture?"
"I saw it now. Today."
"Did you see the whole thing?"
"There you go again. I've told you, there's no point in talking about
what seeing is like. It is nothing."
I did not pursue the point any longer. Emotionally I was convinced.
"I also made a vow once," don Juan said suddenly. The sound of his
voice made me jump. "I promised my
father that I would live to destroy his assassins. I carried that
promise with me for years. Now the promise is
73
changed. I'm no longer interested in destroying anybody. I don't hate
the Mexicans. I don't hate anyone. I have
learned that the countless paths one traverses in one's life are all
equal. Oppressors and oppressed meet at the end,
and the only thing that prevails is that life was altogether too short
for both. Today I feel sad not because my
mother and father died the way they did; I feel sad because they were
Indians. They lived like Indians and died
like Indians and never knew that they were, before anything else, men."
74
10
I went back to visit don Juan on May 30, 1969, and bluntly told him
that I wanted to take another crack at
"seeing." He shook his head negatively and laughed, and I felt
compelled to protest. He told me I had to be
patient and the time was not right, but I doggedly insisted I was ready.
He did not seem annoyed with my nagging requests. He tried,
nevertheless, to change the subject. I did not
let go and asked him to advise me what to do in order to overcome my
impatience.
"You must act like a warrior," he said.
"How?"
"One learns to act like a warrior by acting, not by talking."
"You said that a warrior thinks about his death. I do that all the
time; obviously that isn't enough."
He seemed to have an outburst of impatience and made a smacking sound
with his lips. I told him that I had
not meant to make him angry and that if he did not need me there at his
house, I was ready to go back to Los
Angeles. Don Juan patted me gently on the back and said that he never
got angry with me; he had simply
assumed I knew what it meant to be a warrior.
"What can I do to live like a warrior?" I asked.
He took off his hat and scratched his temples. He looked at me fixedly
and smiled.
"You like everything spelled out, don't you?"
"My mind works that way."
"It doesn't have to."
"I don't know how to change. That is why I ask you to tell me exactly
what to do to live like a warrior; if I
knew that, I could find a way to adapt myself to it."
He must have thought my statements were humorous; he patted me on the
back as he laughed.
I had the feeling he was going to ask me to leave any minute, so I
quickly sat down on my straw mat facing
him and began asking him more questions. I wanted to know why I had to
wait.
He explained that if I were to try to "see" in a helter-skelter manner,
before I had "healed the wounds" I received
battling the guardian, chances were that I would encounter the guardian
again even though I was not looking
for it. Don Juan assured me that no man in that position would be
capable of surviving such an encounter.
"You must completely forget the guardian before you can again embark on
the quest of seeing" he said.
"How can anyone forget the guardian?"
"A warrior has to use his will and his patience to forget. In fact, a
warrior has only his will and his patience
and with them he builds anything he wants."
"But I'm not a warrior."
"You have started learning the ways of sorcerers. You have no more time
for retreats or for regrets. You only
have time to live like a warrior and work for patience and will,
whether you like it or not."
"How does a warrior work for them?"
Don Juan thought for a long time before answering.
"I think there is no way of talking about it," he finally said.
"Especially about will. Will is something very
special. It happens mysteriously. There is no real way of telling how
one uses it, except that the results of using
the will are astounding. Perhaps the first thing that one should do is
to know that one can develop the will. A
warrior knows that and proceeds to wait for it. Your mistake is not to
know that you are waiting for your will.
"My benefactor told me that a warrior knows that he is waiting and
knows what he is waiting for. In your
case, you know that you're waiting. You've been here with me for years,
yet you don't know what you are waiting
for. It is very difficult, if not impossible, for the average man to
know what he is waiting for. A warrior, however,
has no problems; he knows that he is waiting for his will."
"What exactly is the will? Is it determination, like the determination
of your grandson Lucio to have a motorcycle?"
"No," don Juan said softly and giggled. "That's not will. Lucio only
indulges. Will is something else, some-
75
thing very clear and powerful which can direct our acts. Will is
something a man uses, for instance, to win a
battle which he, by all calculations, should lose."
"Then will must be what we call courage," I said.
"No. Courage is something else. Men of courage are dependable men,
noble men perennially surrounded by
people who flock around them and admire them; yet very few men of
courage have will. Usually they are fearless
men who are given to performing daring common-sense acts; most of the
time a courageous man is also fearsome
and feared. Will, on the other hand, has to do with astonishing feats
that defy our common sense."
"Is will the control we may have over ourselves?" I asked.
"You may say that it is a kind of control."
"Do you think I can exercise my will, for instance, by denying myself
certain things?"
"Such as asking questions?" he interjected.
He said it in such a mischievous tone that I had to stop writing to
look at him. We both laughed.
"No," he said. "Denying yourself is an indulgence and I don't recommend
anything of the kind. That is the
reason why I let you ask all the questions you want. If I told you to
stop asking questions, you might warp your
will trying to do that. The indulgence of denying is by far the worst;
it forces us to believe we are doing great
things, when in effect we are only fixed within ourselves. To stop
asking questions is not the will I'm talking
about. Will is a power. And since it is a power it has to be controlled
and tuned and that takes time. I know that
and I'm patient with you. When I was your age I was as impulsive as
you. Yet I have changed. Our will operates
in spite of our indulgence. For example, your will is already opening
your gap, little by little."
"What gap are you talking about?"
"There is a gap in us; like the soft spot on the head of a child which
closes with age, this gap opens as one develops
one's will."
"Where is that gap?"
"At the place of your luminous fibers," he said, pointing to his
abdominal area.
"What is it like? What is it for?"
"It's an opening. It allows a space for the will to shoot out, like an
arrow."
"Is the will an object? Or like an object?"
"No. I just said that to make you understand. What a sorcerer calls
will is a power within ourselves. It is not a
thought, or an object, or a wish. To stop asking questions is not will
because it needs thinking and wishing. Will
is what can make you succeed when your thoughts tell you that you're
defeated. Will is what makes you
invulnerable. Will is what sends a sorcerer through a wall; through
space; to the moon, if he wants."
There was nothing else I wanted to ask. I was tired and somewhat tense.
I was afraid don Juan was going to
ask me to leave and that annoyed me.
"Let's go to the hills," he said abruptly, and stood up.
On the way he started talking about will again and laughed at my dismay
over not being able to take notes.
He described will as a force which was the true link between men and
the world. He was very careful to
establish that the world was whatever we perceive, in any manner we may
choose to perceive. Don Juan
maintained that "perceiving the world" entails a process of
apprehending whatever presents itself to us. This
particular "perceiving" is done with our senses and with our will.
I asked him if will was a sixth sense. He said it was rather a relation
between ourselves and the perceived
world. I suggested that we halt so I could take notes. He laughed and
kept on walking.
He did not make me leave that night, and the next day after eating
breakfast he himself brought up the
subject of will.
"What you yourself call will is character and strong disposition," he
said. "What a sorcerer calls will is a
force that comes from within and attaches itself to the world out
there. It comes out through the belly, right here,
where the luminous fibers are."
He rubbed his navel to point out the area.
"I say that it comes out through here because one can feel it coming
out."
76
"Why do you call it will?"
"I don't call it anything. My benefactor called it will, and other men
of knowledge call it will."
"Yesterday you said that one can perceive the world with the senses as
well as with the will. How is that possible?"
"An average man can 'grab' the things of the world only with his hands,
or his eyes, or his ears, but a sorcerer
can grab them also with his nose, or his tongue, or his will,
especially with his will. I cannot really describe how
it is done, but you yourself, for instance, cannot describe to me how
you hear. It happens that I am also capable
of hearing, so we can talk about what we hear, but not about how we
hear. A sorcerer uses his will to perceive the
world. That perceiving, however, is not like hearing. When we look at
the world or when we hear it, we have the
impression that it is out there and that it is real. When we perceive
the world with our will we know that it is not
as 'out there' or 'as real' as we think."
"Is will the same as seeing?"
"No. Will is a force, a power. Seeing is not a force, but rather a way
of getting through things. A sorcerer
may have a very strong will and yet he may not see; which means that
only a man of knowledge perceives the
world with his senses and with his will and also with his seeing." I
told him that I was more confused than ever
about how to use my will to forget the guardian. That statement and my
mood of perplexity seemed to delight
him.
"I've told you that when you talk you only get confused," he said and
laughed. "But at least now you know
you are waiting for your will. You still don't know what it is, or how
it could happen to you. So watch carefully
everything you do. The very thing that could help you develop your will
is amidst all the little things you do."
Don Juan was gone all morning; he returned in the early afternoon with
a bundle of dry plants. He signaled
me with his head to help him and we worked in complete silence for
hours, sorting the plants. When we finished
we sat down to rest and he smiled at me benevolently.
I said to him in a very serious manner that I had been reading my notes
and I still could not understand what
being a warrior entailed or what the idea of will meant.
"Will is not an idea," he said.
This was the first time he had spoken to me the whole day.
After a long pause he continued:
"We are different, you and I. Our characters are not alike. Your nature
is more violent than mine. When I was
your age I was not violent but mean; you are the opposite. My
benefactor was like that; he would have been
perfectly suited to be your teacher. He was a great sorcerer but he did
not see; not the way I see or the way
Genaro sees. I understand the world and live guided by my seeing. My
benefactor, on the other hand, had to live
as a warrior. If a man sees he doesn't have to live like a warrior, or
like anything else, for he can see things as
they really are and direct his life accordingly. But, considering your
character, I would say that you may never
learn to see, in which case you will have to live your entire life like
a warrior.
My benefactor said that when a man embarks on the paths of sorcery he
becomes aware, in a gradual manner,
that ordinary life has been forever left behind; that knowledge is
indeed a frightening affair; that the means of the
ordinary world are no longer a buffer for him; and that he must adopt a
new way of life if he is going to survive.
The first thing he ought to do, at that point, is to want to become a
warrior, a very important step and decision.
The frightening nature of knowledge leaves one no alternative but to
become a warrior.
"By the time knowledge becomes a frightening affair the man also
realizes that death is the irreplaceable
partner that sits next to him on the mat. Every bit of knowledge that
becomes power has death as its central force.
Death lends the ultimate touch, and whatever is touched by death indeed
becomes power.
"A man who follows the paths of sorcery is confronted with imminent
annihilation every turn of the way, and
unavoidably he becomes keenly aware of his death. Without the awareness
of death he would be only an ordinary
man involved in ordinary acts. He would lack the necessary potency, the
necessary concentration that transforms
one's ordinary time on earth into magical power.
"Thus to be a warrior a man has to be, first of all, and rightfully so,
keenly aware of his own death. But to be
77
concerned with death would force any one of us to focus on the self and
that would be debilitating. So the next
thing one needs to be a warrior is detachment. The idea of imminent
death, instead of becoming an obsession, becomes
an indifference."
Don Juan stopped talking and looked at me. He seemed to be waiting for
a comment.
"Do you understand?" he asked.
I understood what he had said but I personally could not see how anyone
could arrive at a sense of
detachment. I said that from the point of view of my own apprenticeship
I had already experienced the moment
when knowledge became such a frightening affair. I could also
truthfully say that I no longer found support in the
ordinary premises of my daily life. And I wanted, or perhaps even more
than wanted, I needed, to live like a
warrior.
"Now you must detach yourself," he said.
"From what?"
"Detach yourself from everything."
"That's impossible. I don't want to be a hermit."
"To be a hermit is an indulgence and I never meant that. A hermit is
not detached, for he willfully abandons
himself to being a hermit.
"Only the idea of death makes a man sufficiently detached so he is
incapable of abandoning himself to anything.
Only the idea of death makes a man sufficiently detached so he can't
deny himself anything. A man of that
sort, however, does not crave, for he has acquired a silent lust for
life and for all things of life. He knows his
death is stalking him and won't give him time to cling to anything, so
he tries, without craving, all of everything.
"A detached man, who knows he has no possibility of fencing off his
death, has only one thing to back
himself with: the power of his decisions. He has to be, so to speak,
the master of his choices. He must fully
understand that his choice is his responsibility and once he makes it
there is no longer time for regrets or
recriminations. His decisions are final, simply because his death does
not permit him time to cling to anything.
"And thus with an awareness of his death, with his detachment, and with
the power of his decisions a warrior
sets his life in a strategical manner. The knowledge of his death
guides him and makes him detached and silently
lusty; the power of his final decisions makes him able to choose
without regrets and what he chooses is always
strategically the best; and so he performs everything he has to with
gusto and lusty efficiency.
"When a man behaves in such a manner one may rightfully say that he is
a warrior and has acquired
patience!"
Don Juan asked me if I had anything to say, and I remarked that the
task he had described would take a lifetime.
He said I protested too much in front of him and that he knew I
behaved, or at least tried to behave, in terms
of a warrior in my day-to-day life.
"You have pretty good claws," he said, laughing. "Show them to me from
time to time. It's good practice."
I made a gesture of claws and growled, and he laughed. Then he cleared
his throat and went on talking.
"When a warrior has acquired patience he is on his way to will. He
knows how to wait. His death sits with
him on his mat, they are friends. His death advises him, in mysterious
ways, how to choose, how to live
strategically. And the warrior waits! I would say that the warrior
learns without any hurry because he knows he is
waiting for his will; and one day he succeeds in performing something
ordinarily quite impossible to accomplish.
He may not even notice his extraordinary deed. But as he keeps on
performing impossible acts, or as impossible
things keep on happening to him, he becomes aware that a sort of power
is emerging. A power that conies out of
his body as he progresses on the path of knowledge. At first it is like
an itching on the belly, or a warm spot that
cannot be soothed; then it becomes a pain, a great discomfort.
Sometimes the pain and discomfort are so great
that the warrior has convulsions for months, the more severe the
convulsions the better for him. A fine power is
always heralded by great pain.
"When the convulsions cease the warrior notices he has strange feelings
about things. He notices that he can
actually touch anything he wants with a feeling that comes out of his
body from a spot right below or right above
his navel. That feeling is the will, and when he is capable of grabbing
with it, one can rightfully say that the
78
warrior is a sorcerer, and that he has acquired will."
Don Juan stopped talking and seemed to await my comments or questions.
I had nothing to say. I was deeply
concerned with the idea that a sorcerer had to experience pain and
convulsions but I felt embarrassed about
asking him if I also had to go through that. Finally, after a long
silence, I asked him, and he giggled as if he had
been anticipating my question. He said that pain was not absolutely
necessary; he, for example, had never had it
and will had just happened to him.
"One day I was in the mountains," he said, "and I stumbled upon a puma,
a female one; she was big and
hungry. I ran and she ran after me. I climbed a rock and she stood a
few feet away ready to jump. I threw rocks at
her. She growled and began to charge me. It was then that my will fully
came out, and I stopped her with it
before she jumped on me.
"I caressed her with my will. I actually rubbed her tits with it. She
looked at me with sleepy eyes and lay
down and I ran like a son of a bitch before she got over it."
Don Juan made a very comical gesture to portray a man running for dear
life, holding onto his hat.
I told him that I hated to think I had only female mountain lions or
convulsions to look forward to, if I
wanted will.
"My benefactor was a sorcerer of great powers," he went on. "He was a
warrior through and through. His will
was indeed his most magnificent accomplishment. But a man can go still
further than that; a man can learn to
see. Upon learning to see he no longer needs to live like a warrior,
nor be a sorcerer. Upon learning to see a man
becomes everything by becoming nothing. He, so to speak, vanishes and
yet he's there. I would say that this is the
time when a man can be or can get anything he desires. But he desires
nothing, and instead of playing with his
fellow men like they were toys, he meets them in the midst of their
folly. The only difference between them is
that a man who sees controls his folly, while his fellow men can't. A
man who sees has no longer an active
interest in his fellow men. Seeing has already detached him from
absolutely everything he knew before."
"The sole idea of being detached from everything I know gives me the
chills," I said.
"You must be joking! The thing which should give you the chills is not
to have anything to look forward to
but a lifetime of doing that which you have always done. Think of the
man who plants corn year after year until
he's too old and tired to get up, so he lies around like an old dog.
His thoughts and feelings, the best of him,
ramble aimlessly to the only things he has ever done, to plant corn.
For me that is the most frightening waste
there is.
"We are men and our lot is to learn and to be hurled into inconceivable
new worlds."
"Are there any new worlds for us really?" I asked half in jest.
"We have exhausted nothing, you fool," he said imperatively.
"Seeing is for impeccable men. Temper your spirit now, become a
warrior, learn to see, and then you'll know
that there is no end to the new worlds for our vision."
79
11
Don Juan did not make me leave after I had run his errands, as he had
been doing lately. He said I could stay,
and the next day, June 28, 1969, just before noon he told me I was
going to smoke again.
"Am I going to try to see the guardian again?"
"No, that's out. This is something else."
Don Juan calmly filled his pipe with smoking mixture, lighted it, and
handed it to me. I experienced no
apprehension, A pleasant drowsiness enveloped me right away. When I had
finished smoking the whole bowl of
mixture, don Juan put his pipe away and helped me stand up. We had been
sitting facing each other on two straw
mats he had placed in the center of his room. He said that we were
going for a short walk and encouraged me to
walk, shoving me gently. I took a step and my legs sagged. I did not
feel any pain when my knees hit the ground.
Don Juan held my arm and pushed me up on my feet again.
"You have to walk," he said, "the same way you got up the other time.
You must use your will."
I seemed to be stuck to the ground. I attempted a step with my right
foot and almost lost my balance. Don
Juan held my right arm at the armpit and gently catapulted me forward,
but my legs did not support me and I
would have collapsed on my face had don Juan not caught my arm and
buffered my fall. He held me by the right
armpit and made me lean on him. I could not feel anything but I was
certain that my head was resting on his
shoulder; I was seeing the room from a slanted perspective. He dragged
me in that position around the porch. We
circled it twice in a most painful fashion; finally, I suppose, my
weight became so great that he had to drop me on
the ground. I knew he could not move me. In a certain way it was as if
part of myself deliberately wanted to
become lead-heavy. Don Juan did not make any effort to pick me up. He
looked at me for an instant; I was lying
on my back facing him, I tried to smile at him and he began to laugh;
then he bent over and slapped me on the
belly. I had a most peculiar sensation. It was not painful or
pleasurable or anything I could think of. It was rather
a jolt. Don Juan immediately began to roll me around. I did not feel
anything; I assumed he was rolling me
around because my view of the porch changed in accordance with a
circular motion. When don Juan had me in
the position he wanted he stepped back.
"Stand up!" he ordered me imperatively. "Stand up the way you did it
the other day. Don't piddle around.
You know how to get up. Now get up!"
I intently tried to recollect the actions I had performed on that
occasion, but I could not think clearly; it was
as if my thoughts had a will of their own no matter how hard I tried to
control them. Finally the thought occurred
to me that if I said "up" as I had done before I would certainly get
up. I said, "Up," loud and clear but nothing
happened.
Don Juan looked at me with obvious displeasure and then walked around
me toward the door. I was lying on
my left side and had a full view of the area in front of his house; my
back was to the door, so when he walked
around me I immediately assumed he had gone inside.
"Don Juan!" I called loudly, but he did not answer.
I had an overpowering feeling of impotence and despair. I wanted to get
up. I said, "Up," again and again, as
if that were the magic word that would make me move. Nothing happened.
I had an attack of frustration and I
went through a sort of tantrum. I wanted to beat my head against the
floor and weep. I spent excruciating
moments in which I wanted to move or talk and I could not do either. I
was truly immobile, paralyzed.
"Don Juan, help me!" I finally managed to bellow.
Don Juan came back and sat in front of me, laughing. He said that I was
getting hysterical and that whatever
I was experiencing was inconsequential. He lifted my head and, looking
straight at me, said that I was having an
attack of sham fear. He told me not to fret.
"Your life is getting complicated," he said. "Get rid of whatever it is
that's causing you to lose your temper.
Stay here quietly and rearrange yourself."
He placed my head on the ground. He stepped over me and all I could
perceive was the shuffling of his
sandals as he walked away.
80
My first impulse was to fret again, but I could not gather the energy
to work myself into it. Instead, I found
myself slipping into a rare state of serenity; a great feeling of ease
enveloped me. I knew what the complexity of
my life was. It was my little boy. I wanted to be his father more than
anything else on this earth. I liked the idea
of molding his character and taking him hiking and teaching him "how to
live," and yet I abhorred the idea of
coercing him into my way of life, but that was precisely what I would
have to do, coerce him with force or with
that artful set of arguments and rewards we call understanding.
"I must let him go," I thought. "I must not cling to him. I must set
him free."
My thoughts brought on a terrifying feeling of melancholy. I began to
weep. My eyes filled with tears and
my view of the porch blurred. Suddenly I had a great urge to get up and
look for don Juan to explain to him about
my little boy; and the next thing I knew, I was looking at the porch
from an upright position. I turned around to
face the house and found don Juan standing in front of me. Apparently
he had been standing there behind me all
the time.
Although I could not feel my steps, I must have walked toward him,
because I moved. Don Juan came to me
smiling and held me up by the armpits. His face was very close to mine.
"Good, good work," he said reassuringly.
At that instant I became aware that something extraordinary was taking
place right there. I had the feeling at
first that I was only recollecting an event that had taken place years
before. At one time in the past I had seen don
Juan's face at very close range; I had smoked his mixture and I had had
the feeling then that don Juan's face was
submerged in a tank of water. It was enormous and it was luminous and
it moved. The image had been so brief
that I did not have time to really take stock of it. This time,
however, don Juan was holding me and his face was
no more than a foot away from mine and I had time to examine it. When I
stood up and turned around I definitely
saw don Juan; "the don Juan I know" definitely walked toward me and
held me. But when I focused my eyes on
his face I did not see don Juan as I am accustomed to seeing him;
instead, I saw a large object in front of my
eyes. I knew it was don Juan's face, yet that knowledge was not guided
by my perception; it was, rather, a logical
conclusion on my part; after all, my memory confirmed that the instant
before, "the don Juan I know" was holding
me by the armpits. Therefore the strange, luminous object in front of
me had to be don Juan's face; there was
a familiarity to it; yet it had no resemblance to what I would call don
Juan's "real" face. What I was looking at
was a round object which had a luminosity of its own. Every part in it
moved. I perceived a contained,
undulatory, rhythmical flow; it was as if the flowing was enclosed
within itself, never moving beyond its limits,
and yet the object in front of my eyes was oozing with movement at any
place on its surface. The thought that
occurred to me was that it oozed life. In fact it was so alive that I
became engrossed looking at its movement. It
was a mesmerizing fluttering. It became more and more engrossing, until
I could no longer tell what the
phenomenon in front of my eyes was.
I experienced a sudden jolt; the luminous object became blurry, as if
something were shaking it, and then it
lost its glow and became solid and fleshy. I was then looking at don
Juan's familiar dark face. He was smiling
placidly. The view of his "real" face lasted an instant and then the
face again acquired a glow, a shine, an
iridescence. It was not light as I am accustomed to perceiving light,
or even a glow; rather it was movement, an
incredibly fast flickering of something. The glowing object began to
bobble up and down again and that
disrupted its undulatory continuity. Its shine diminished as it shook,
until it again became the "solid" face of don
Juan, as I see him in everyday life. At that moment I vaguely realized
that don Juan was shaking me. He was also
speaking to me. I did not understand what he was saying, but as he kept
on shaking me I finally heard him.
"Don't stare at me. Don't stare at me," he kept saying. "Break your
gaze. Break your gaze. Move your eyes
away."
Shaking my body seemed to force me to dislodge my steady gaze;
apparently when I did not peer intently
into don Juan's face I did not see the luminous object. When I moved my
eyes away from his face and looked at it
with the corner of my eye, so to speak, I could perceive his solidity;
that is to say, I could perceive a threedimensional
person; without really looking at him I could, in fact, perceive his
whole body, but when I focused
my gaze, the face became at once the luminous object.
81
"Don't look at me at all," don Juan said gravely.
I moved my eyes away and looked at the ground.
"Don't fix your gaze on anything," don Juan said imperatively, and
stepped aside in order to help me walk.
I did not feel my steps and could not figure out how I performed the
act of walking, yet with don Juan
holding me by the armpit, we moved all the way to the back of his
house. We stopped by the irrigation ditch.
"Now gaze at the water," don Juan ordered me.
I looked at the water but I could not gaze at it. Somehow the movement
of the current distracted me, Don
Juan kept on urging me in a joking manner to exercise my "gazing
powers," but I could not concentrate. I gazed
at don Juan's face once again but the glow did not become apparent any
more.
I began to experience a strange itching on my body, the sensation of a
limb that has fallen asleep; the muscles
of my legs began to twitch. Don Juan shoved me into the water and I
tumbled down all the way to the bottom. He
had apparently held my right hand as he pushed me, and when I hit the
shallow bottom he pulled me up again.
It took a long time for me to regain control over myself. When we got
back to his house hours later, I asked
him to explain my experience. As I put on my dry clothes I excitedly
described what I had perceived, but he
discarded my entire account, saying that there was nothing of
importance in it.
"Big deal!" he said, mocking me. "You saw a glow, big deal."
I insisted on an explanation and he got up and said he had to leave. It
was almost five in the afternoon.
The next day I insisted again on discussing my peculiar experience.
"Was it seeing, don Juan?" I asked.
He remained quiet, smiling mysteriously, as I kept pressing him to
answer me.
"Let's say that seeing is somewhat like that," he finally said. "You
were gazing at my face and saw it shining,
but it was still my face. It just happens that the little smoke makes
one gaze like that. Nothing to it."
"But in what way would seeing be different?"
"When you see there are no longer familiar features in the world.
Everything is new. Everything has never
happened before. The world is incredible!"
"Why do you say incredible, don Juan? What makes it incredible?"
"Nothing is any longer familiar. Everything you gaze at becomes
nothing! Yesterday you didn't see. You
gazed at my face and, since you like me, you noticed my glow. I was not
monstrous, like the guardian, but
beautiful and interesting. But you did not see me. I didn't become
nothing in front of you. And yet you did well.
You took the first real step toward seeing. The only drawback was that
you focused on me, and in that case I'm
no better than the guardian for you. You succumbed in both instances
and didn't see."
"Do things disappear? How do they become nothing?"
"Things don't disappear. They don't vanish, if that's what you mean;
they simply become nothing and yet
they are still there."
"How can that be possible, don Juan?"
"You have the damnedest insistence on talking!" don Juan exclaimed with
a serious face. "I think we didn't
hit it right about your promise. Perhaps what you really promised was
to never, ever stop talking."
Don Juan's tone was severe. The look in his face was concerned. I
wanted to laugh but I did not dare. I
believed that don Juan was serious, but he was not. He began to laugh.
I told him that if I did not talk I got very
nervous.
"Let's walk, then," he said.
He took me to the mouth of a canyon at the bottom of the hills. It was
about an hour's walk. We rested for a
short while and then he guided me through the thick desert underbrush
to a water hole; that is, to a spot he said
was a water hole. It was as dry as any other spot in the surrounding
area.
"Sit in the middle of the water hole," he ordered me.
I obeyed and sat down.
"Are you going to sit here too?" I asked.
I saw him fixing a place to sit some twenty yards from the center of
the water hole, against the rocks on the
82
side of the mountain.
He said he was going to watch me from there. I was sitting with my
knees against my chest. He corrected my
position and told me to sit with my left leg tucked under my seat and
my right one bent, with the knee in an
upward position. My right arm had to be by my side with my fist resting
on the ground, while my left arm was
crossed over my chest. He told me to face him and stay there, relaxed
but not "abandoned." He then took a sort of
whitish cord from his pouch. It looked like a big loop. He looped it
around his neck and stretched it with his left
hand until it was taut. He plucked the tight string with his right
hand. It made a dull, vibratory sound.
He relaxed his grip and looked at me and told me that I had to yell a
specific word if I began to feel that
something was coming at me when he plucked the string.
I asked what was supposed to come at me and he told me to shut up. He
signaled me with his hand that he
was going to commence. He said that if something came at me in a very
menacing way I had to adopt a fighting
form that he had taught me years before, which consisted of dancing,
beating the ground with the tip of the left
foot, while I slapped my right thigh vigorously. The fighting form was
part of a defense technique used in cases
of extreme distress and danger.
I had a moment of genuine apprehension. I wanted to inquire about the
reason for our being there, but he did
not give me time and began plucking the string. He did it various times
at regular intervals of perhaps twenty
seconds. I noticed that as he kept plucking the string he augmented the
tension. I could clearly see that his arms
and neck were shivering under the stress. The sound became more clear
and I realized then that he added a
peculiar yell every time he plucked the string. The combined sound of
the tense string and the human voice
produced a weird, unearthly reverberation.
I did not feel anything coming at me, but the sight of don Juan's
exertion and the eerie sound he was
producing had me almost in a state of trance.
Don Juan relaxed his grip and looked at me. While he played, his back
was turned to me and he was facing
the southeast, as I was; when he relaxed, he faced me.
"Don't look at me when I play," he said. "Don't close your eyes,
though. Not for anything. Look at the ground
in front of you and listen."
He tensed the string again and began playing. I looked at the ground
and concentrated on the sound he was
making. I had never heard the sound before in my life.
I became very frightened. The eerie reverberation filled the narrow
canyon and began to echo. In fact the
sound don Juan was making was coming back to me as an echo from all
around the canyon walls. Don Juan must
have also noticed that and increased the tension of his string.
Although don Juan had changed the pitch, the echo
seemed to subside, and then it seemed to concentrate on one point,
toward the southeast.
Don Juan reduced the tension of the string by degrees, until I heard a
final dull twang. He put the string
inside his pouch and walked toward me. He helped me stand up. I noticed
then that the muscles of my arms and
legs were stiff, like rocks; I was literally soaked in perspiration. I
had no idea I had been perspiring so heavily.
Drops of sweat ran into my eyes and made them burn.
Don Juan practically dragged me out of the place. I tried to say
something but he put his hand over my
mouth.
Instead of leaving the canyon the way we had come in, don Juan made a
detour. We climbed the side of the
mountain and ended up in some hills very far from the mouth of the
canyon.
We walked in dead silence to his house. It was already dark by the time
we got there. I tried to talk again but
don Juan put his hand on my mouth once more.
We did not eat and did not light the kerosene lantern. Don Juan put my
mat in his room and pointed at it with
his chin. I understood it as a gesture that I should lie down and go to
sleep.
"I have the proper thing for you to do," don Juan said to me as soon as
I woke up the next morning. "You will
start it today. There isn't much time, you know."
After a very long, uneasy pause I felt compelled to ask him,
"What did you have me doing in the canyon yesterday?"
83
Don Juan giggled like a child.
"I just tapped the spirit of that water hole," he said. "That type of
spirit should be tapped when the water hole
is dry, when the spirit has retreated into the mountains. Yesterday I,
let us say, woke him up from his slumber.
But he didn't mind it and pointed to your lucky direction. His voice
came from that direction."
Don Juan pointed toward the southeast.
"What was the string you played, don Juan?"
"A spirit catcher."
"Can I look at it?"
"No. But I'll make you one. Or better yet, you will make one for
yourself some day, when you learn to see"
"What is it made of, don Juan?"
"Mine is a wild boar. When you get one you will realize that it is
alive and can teach you the different sounds
it likes. With practice you will get to know your spirit catcher so
well that together you will make sounds full of
power."
"Why did you take me to look for the spirit of the water hole, don
Juan?"
"You will know that very soon."
Around 11:30 A.M. we sat under his ramada, where he prepared his pipe
for me to smoke.
He told me to stand up when my body was quite numb; I did that with
great ease. He helped me walk around,
I was surprised at my control; I actually walked twice around the
ramada by myself. Don Juan stayed by my side
but did not guide me or support me. Then he took me by the arm and
walked me to the irrigation ditch. He made
me sit on the edge of the bank and ordered me imperatively to gaze at
the water and think of nothing else.
I tried to focus my gaze on the water but its movement distracted me.
My mind and my eyes began to wander
onto other features of the immediate surroundings. Don Juan bobbed my
head up and down and ordered me again
to gaze only at the water and not think at all. He said it was
difficult to stare at the moving water and that one had
to keep on trying. I tried three times and every time I became
distracted by something else. Don Juan very patiently
shook my head every time. Finally I noticed that my mind and my eyes
were focusing on the water; in
spite of its movement. I was becoming immersed in my view of its
liquidness. The water became slightly
different. It seemed to be heavier and uniformly grayish green. I could
notice the ripples it made as it moved. The
ripples were extremely sharp. And then, suddenly, I had the sensation
that I was not looking at a mass of moving
water but at a picture of water; what I had in front of my eyes was a
frozen segment of the running water. The
ripples were immobile. I could look at every one of them. Then they
began to acquire a green phosphorescence
and a sort of green fog oozed out of them. The fog expanded in ripples
and as it moved, its greenness became
more brilliant until it was a dazzling radiance that covered everything.
I don't know how long I stayed by the irrigation ditch. Don Juan did
not interrupt me. I was immersed in the
green glow of the fog. I could sense it all around me. It soothed me. I
had no thoughts, no feelings. All I had was
a quiet awareness, the awareness of a brilliant, soothing greenness.
Being extremely cold and damp was the next thing I became aware of.
Gradually I realized that I was
submerged in the irrigation ditch. At one moment the water slipped
inside my nose, and I swallowed it and it
made me cough. I had an annoying itch inside my nose and I sneezed
repeatedly. I stood up and had such a
forceful and loud sneeze that I also farted. Don Juan clapped his hands
and laughed.
"If a body farts, it's alive," he said.
He signaled me to follow him and we walked to his house.
I thought of keeping quiet. In a way, I expected to be in a detached
and morose mood, but I really did not feel
tired or melancholy. I felt rather buoyant and changed my clothes very
rapidly. I began to whistle. Don Juan
looked at me curiously and pretended to be surprised; he opened his
mouth and his eyes. His gesture was very
funny and I laughed quite a bit longer than it called for.
"You're cracking up," he said, and laughed very hard himself.
I explained to him that I did not want to fall into the habit of
feeling morose after using his smoking mixture.
I told him that after he had taken me out of the irrigation ditch,
during my attempts to meet the guardian, I had
84
become convinced that I could "see" if I stared at things around me
long enough.
"Seeing is not a matter of looking and keeping quiet," he said. "Seeing
is a technique one has to learn. Or
maybe it is a technique some of us already know."
He peered at me as if to insinuate that I was one of those who already
knew the technique.
"Are you strong enough to walk?" he asked.
I said I felt fine, which I did. I was not hungry, although I had not
eaten all day. Don Juan put some bread
and some pieces of dry meat in a knapsack, handed it to me, and
gestured with his head for me to follow.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
He pointed toward the hills with a slight movement of his head. We
headed for the same canyon where the
water hole was, but we did not enter it. Don Juan climbed onto the
rocks to our right, at the very mouth of the
canyon. We went up the hill. The sun was almost on the horizon. It was
a mild day but I felt hot and suffocated. I
could hardly breathe.
Don Juan was quite a way ahead of me and had to stop to let me catch up
with him. He said I was in terrible
physical condition and that it was perhaps not wise to go any further.
He let me rest for about an hour. He
selected a slick, almost round boulder and told me to lie there. He
arranged my body on the rock. He told me to
stretch my arms and legs and let them hang loose. My back was slightly
arched and my neck relaxed, so that my
head also hung loose. He made me stay in that position for perhaps
fifteen minutes. Then he told me to uncover
my abdominal region. He carefully selected some branches and leaves and
heaped them over my naked belly. I
felt an instantaneous warmth all over my body. Don Juan then took me by
the feet and turned me until my head
was toward the southeast.
"Now let us call that spirit of the water hole," he said.
I tried to turn my head to look at him. He held me vigorously by the
hair and said that I was in a very vulnerable
position and in a terribly weak physical state and had to remain quiet
and motionless. He had put all those
special branches on my belly to protect me and was going to remain next
to me in case I could not take care of
myself.
He was standing next to the top of my head, and if I rolled my eyes I
could see him. He took his string and
tensed it and then realized I was looking at him by rolling my eyes way
into my forehead. He gave me a snappy
tap on the head with his knuckles and ordered me to look at the sky,
not to close my eyes, and to concentrate on
the sound. He added, as if on second thought, that I should not
hesitate to yell the word he had taught me if I felt
something was coming at me.
Don Juan and his "spirit catcher" began with a low-tension twang. He
slowly increased the tension, and I
began to hear a sort of reverberation first, and then a definite echo
which came consistently from a southeasterly
direction. The tension increased. Don Juan and his "spirit catcher"
were perfectly matched. The string produced a
low-range note and don Juan magnified it, increasing its intensity
until it was a penetrating cry, a howling call.
The apex was an eerie shriek, inconceivable from the point of view of
my own experience.
The sound reverberated in the mountains and echoed back to us. I
fancied it was coming directly toward me.
I felt it had something to do with the temperature of my body. Before
don Juan started his calls I had been very
warm and comfortable, but during the highest point of his calls I
became chilled; my teeth chattered
uncontrollably and I truly had the sensation that something was coming
at me. At one point I noticed that the sky
had become very dark. I had not been aware of the sky although I was
looking at it. I had a moment of intense
panic and I yelled the word don Juan had taught me.
Don Juan immediately began to decrease the tension of his eerie calls,
but that did not bring me any relief.
"Cover your ears," don Juan mumbled imperatively.
I covered them with my hands.
After some minutes don Juan stopped altogether and came around to my
side. After he had taken the
branches and leaves off my belly, he helped me up and carefully put
them on the rock where I had been lying. He
made a fire with them, and while it burned he rubbed my stomach with
other leaves from his pouch.
He put his hand on my mouth when I was about to tell him that I had a
terrible headache.
85
We stayed there until all the leaves had burned. It was fairly dark by
then. We walked down the hill and I got
sick to my stomach.
While we were walking along the irrigation ditch, don Juan said that I
had done enough and I should not stay
around. I asked him to explain what the spirit of the water hole was,
but he gestured me to be quiet. He said that
we would talk about it some other time, then he deliberately changed
the subject and gave me a long explanation
about "seeing." I said it was regrettable that I could not write in the
darkness. He seemed very pleased and said
that most of the time I did not pay attention to what he had to say
because I was so determined to write
everything down.
He spoke about "seeing" as a process independent of the allies and the
techniques of sorcery. A sorcerer was
a person who could command an ally and could thus manipulate an ally's
power to his advantage, but the fact that
he commanded an ally did not mean that he could "see." I reminded him
that he had told me before that it was
impossible to "see" unless one had an ally. Don Juan very calmly
replied that he had come to the conclusion it
was possible to "see" and yet not command an ally. He felt there was no
reason why not, since "seeing" had
nothing to do with the manipulatory techniques of sorcery, which served
only to act upon our fellow men. The
techniques of "seeing," on the other hand, had no effect on men.
My thoughts were very clear. I experienced no fatigue or drowsiness and
no longer had an uncomfortable
feeling in my stomach, as I walked with don Juan. I was terribly
hungry, and when we got to his house I gorged
myself with food.
Afterwards I asked him to tell me more about the techniques of
"seeing." He smiled broadly at me and said
that I was again myself.
"How is it," I said, "that the techniques of seeing have no effect on
our fellow men?"
"I've told you already," he said. "Seeing is not sorcery. Yet one may
easily confuse them, because a man who
sees can learn, in no time at all, to manipulate an ally and may become
a sorcerer. On the other hand, a man may
learn certain techniques in order to command an ally and thus become a
sorcerer, and yet he may never learn to
see.
"Besides, seeing is contrary to sorcery. Seeing makes one realize the
unimportance of it all."
"The unimportance of what, don Juan?"
"The unimportance of everything."
We did not say anything else. I felt very relaxed and did not want to
speak any more. I was lying on my back
on a straw mat. I had made a pillow with my windbreaker. I felt
comfortable and happy and wrote my notes for
hours in the light of the kerosene lantern. Suddenly don Juan spoke
again.
"Today you did very well," he said. "You did very well at the water.
The spirit of the water hole likes you
and helped you all the way."
I realized then that I had forgotten to recount my experience to him. I
began to describe the way I had perceived
the water. He did not let me continue. He said that he knew I had
perceived a green fog.
I felt compelled to ask,
"How did you know that, don Juan?"
"I saw you."
"What did I do?"
"Nothing, you sat there and gazed into the water and finally you
perceived the green mist."
"Was it seeing?"
"No. But it was very close. You're getting close."
I got very excited. I wanted to know more about it. He laughed and made
fun of my eagerness. He said that
anyone could perceive the green fog because it was like the guardian,
something that was unavoidably there, so
there was no great accomplishment in perceiving it.
"When I said you did well, I meant that you did not fret," he said, "as
you did with the guardian. If you had
become restless I would have had to shake your head and bring you back.
Whenever a man goes into the green
fog his benefactor has to stay by him in case it begins to trap him.
You can jump out of the guardian's reach by
86
yourself, but you can't escape the clutches of the green fog by
yourself. At least not at the beginning. Later on
you may learn a way to do it. Now we're trying to find out something
else."
"What are we trying to find out?"
"Whether you can see the water."
"How will I know that I have seen it, or that I am seeing it?"
"You will know. You get confused only when you talk."
87
12
Working on my notes I had come across various questions.
"Is the green fog, like the guardian, something that one has to
overcome in order to see?" I asked don Juan as
soon as we sat down under his ramada on August 8, 1969.
"Yes. One must overcome everything," he said.
"How can I overcome the green fog?"
"The same way you should have overcome the guardian, by letting it turn
into nothing."
"What should I do?"
"Nothing. For you, the green fog is something much easier than the
guardian. The spirit of the water hole
likes you, while it certainly was not your temperament to deal with the
guardian. You never really saw the
guardian."
"Maybe that was because I didn't like it. What if I were to meet a
guardian I liked? There must be some
people who would regard the guardian I saw as being beautiful. Would
they overcome it because they liked it?"
"No! You still don't understand. It doesn't matter whether you like or
dislike the guardian. As long as you
have a feeling toward it, the guardian will remain the same, monstrous,
beautiful, or whatever. If you have no
feeling toward it, on the other hand, the guardian will become nothing
and will still be there in front of you."
The idea that something as colossal as the guardian could become
nothing and still be in front of my eyes
made absolutely no sense. I felt it was one of the alogical premises of
don Juan's knowledge. However, I also felt
that if he wanted to he could explain it to me. I insisted on asking
him what he meant by that.
"You thought the guardian was something you knew, that's what I mean."
"But I didn't think it was something I knew."
"You thought it was ugly. Its size was awesome. It was a monster. You
know what all those things are. So
the guardian was always something you knew, and as long as it was
something you knew you did not see it. I
have told you already, the guardian had to become nothing and yet it
had to stand in front of you. It had to be
there and it had, at the same time, to be nothing."
"How could that be, don Juan? What you say is absurd."
"It is. But that is seeing. There is really no way to talk about it.
Seeing, as I said before, is learned by seeing.
"Apparently you have no problem with water. You nearly saw it the other
day. Water is your 'hinge.' All you
need now is to perfect your technique of seeing. You have a powerful
helper in the spirit of the water hole."
"That's another burning question I have, don Juan."
"You may have all the burning questions you want, but we cannot talk
about the spirit of the water hole in
this vicinity. In fact, it is better not to think about it at all. Not
at all. Otherwise the spirit will trap you and if that
happens there is nothing a living man can do to help you. So keep your
mouth shut and keep your thoughts on
something else."
Around ten o'clock the next morning don Juan took his pipe out of its
sheath, filled it with smoking mixture,
then handed it to me and told me to carry it to the bank of the stream.
Holding the pipe with both hands, I
managed to unbutton my shirt and put the pipe inside and hold it tight.
Don Juan carried two straw mats and a
small tray with coals. It was a warm day. We sat on the mats in the
shade of a small grove of brea trees at the
very edge of the water. Don Juan placed a charcoal inside the pipe bowl
and told me to smoke. I did not have any
apprehension or any feeling of elation. I remembered that during my
second attempt to "see" the guardian, after
don Juan had explained its nature, I had had a unique sensation of
wonder and awe. This time, however, although
don Juan had made me cognizant of the possibility of actually "seeing"
the water, I was not involved
emotionally; I was only curious.
Don Juan made me smoke twice the amount I had smoked during previous
attempts. At a given moment he
leaned over and whispered in my right ear that he was going to teach me
how to use the water in order to move. I
felt his face very close, as if he had put his mouth next to my ear. He
told me not to gaze into the water, but to
focus my eyes on the surface and keep them fixed until the water turned
into a green fog. He repeated over and
88
over that I had to put all my attention on the fog until I could not
detect anything else.
"Look at the water in front of you," I heard him saying, "but don't let
its sound carry you anywhere. If you let
the sound of the water carry you I may never be able to find you and
bring you back. Now get into the green fog
and listen to my voice."
I heard and understood him with extraordinary clarity. I began looking
at the water fixedly, and had a very
peculiar sensation of physical pleasure; an itch; an undefined
happiness. I stared for a long time but did not detect
the green fog. I felt that my eyes were getting out of focus and I had
to struggle to keep looking at the water;
finally I could not control my eyes any longer and I must have closed
them, or blinked, or perhaps I just lost my
capacity to focus; at any rate, at that very moment the water became
fixed; it ceased to move. It seemed to be a
painting. The ripples were immobile. Then the water began to fizzle; it
was as if it had carbonated particles that
exploded at once. For an instant I saw the fizzling as a slow expansion
of green matter. It was a silent explosion;
the water burst into a brilliant green mist, which expanded until it
had enveloped me.
I remained suspended in it until a very sharp, sustained, shrill noise
shook everything; the fog seemed to
congeal into the usual features of the water surface. The shrill noise
was don Juan yelling, "Heyyyy!" close to my
ear. He told me to pay attention to his voice and go back into the fog
and wait there until he called me. I said,
"O.K.," in English and heard the cackling noise of his laughter.
"Please, don't talk," he said. "Don't give me any more O.K.s."
I could hear him very well. The sound of his voice was melodious and
above all friendly. I knew that without
thinking; it was a conviction that struck me and then passed.
Don Juan's voice ordered me to focus all my attention on the fog but
not abandon myself to it. He said
repeatedly that a warrior did not abandon himself to anything, not even
to his death. I became immersed in the
mist again and noticed that it was not fog at all, or at least it was
not what I conceive fog to be like. The foglike
phenomenon was composed of tiny bubbles, round objects that came into
my field of "vision" and moved out of
it with a floating quality. I watched their movement for a while, then
a loud, distant noise jolted my attention and
I lost my capacity to focus and could no longer perceive the tiny
bubbles. All I was aware of then was a green,
amorphous, foglike glow. I heard the loud noise again and the jolt it
gave dispelled the fog at once and I found
myself looking at the water of the irrigation ditch. Then I heard it
again much closer; it was don Juan's voice. He
was telling me to pay attention to him, because his voice was my only
guide. He ordered me to look at the bank
of the stream and at the vegetation directly in front of me. I saw some
reeds and a space which was clear of reeds.
It was a small cove on the bank, a place where don Juan steps across to
plunge his bucket and fill it with water.
After a few moments don Juan ordered me to return to the fog and asked
me again to pay attention to his voice,
because he was going to guide me so I could learn how to move; he said
that once I saw the bubbles I should
board one of them and let it carry me.
I obeyed him and was at once surrounded by the green mist, and then I
saw the tiny bubbles. I heard don
Juan's voice again as a very strange and frightening rumble.
Immediately upon hearing it I began losing my
capacity to perceive the bubbles.
"Mount one of those bubbles," I heard him saying.
I struggled to maintain my perception of the green bubbles and still
hear his voice. I don't know how long I
fought to do that, when suddenly I was aware that I could listen to him
and still keep sight of the bubbles, which
kept on passing through, floating slowly out of my field of perception.
Don Juan's voice kept on urging me to
follow one of them and mount it.
I wondered how I was supposed to do that and automatically I voiced the
word, "How." I felt that the word
was very deep inside me and as it came out it carried me to the
surface. The word was like a buoy that emerged
out of my depth. I heard myself saying, "How," and I sounded like a dog
howling. Don Juan howled back, also
like a dog, and then he made some coyote sounds, and laughed. I thought
it was very funny and I actually
laughed.
Don Juan told me very calmly to let myself become affixed to a bubble
by following it.
"Go back again," he said. "Go into the fog! Into the fog!"
89
I went back and noticed that the movement of the bubbles had slowed
down and they had become as large as
basketballs. In fact they were so large and slow that I could examine
any one of them in great detail. They were
not really bubbles, not like a soap bubble, nor like a balloon, nor any
spherical container. They were not containers,
yet they were contained. Nor were they round, although when I first
perceived them I could have sworn
they were round and the image that came to my mind was "bubbles." I
viewed them as if I were looking through
a window; that is, the frame of the window did not allow me to follow
them but only permitted me to view them
coming into and going out of my field of perception. When I ceased to
view them as bubbles, however, I was
capable of following them; in the act of following them I became
affixed to one of them and I floated with it. I
truly felt I was moving. In fact I was the bubble, or that thing which
resembled a bubble.
Then I heard the shrill sound of don Juan's voice. It jolted me and I
lost my feeling of being "it." The sound
was extremely frightening; it was a remote voice, very metallic, as if
he were talking through a loud-speaker. I
made out some of the words.
"Look at the banks," he said.
I saw a very large body of water. The water was rushing. I could hear
the noise it made.
"Look at the banks," don Juan ordered me again.
I saw a concrete wall. The sound of the water became terribly loud; the
sound engulfed me. Then it ceased
instantaneously, as if it had been cut off. I had the sensation of
blackness, of sleep.
I became aware that I was immersed in the irrigation ditch. Don Juan
was splashing water in my face as he
hummed. Then he submerged me in the ditch. He pulled my head up, over
the surface, and let me rest it on the
bank as he held me by the back of my shirt collar. I had a most
pleasant sensation in my arms and legs. I
stretched them. My eyes were tired and they itched; I lifted my right
hand to rub them. It was a difficult
movement. My arm seemed to be heavy. I could hardly lift it out of the
water, but when I did, my arm came out
covered with a most astonishing mass of green mist. I held my arm in
front of my eyes. I could see its contour as
a darker mass of green surrounded by a most intense greenish glow. I
got to my feet in a hurry and stood in the
middle of the stream and looked at my body; my chest, arms, and legs
were green, deep green. The hue was so
intense that it gave me the feeling of a viscous substance. I looked
like a figurine don Juan had made for me years
before out of a datura root.
Don Juan told me to come out. I noticed an urgency in his voice.
"I'm green," I said.
"Cut it out," he said imperatively. "You have no time. Get out of
there. The water is about to trap you. Get
out of it! Out! Out!"
I panicked and jumped out.
"This time you must tell me everything that took place," he said
matter-of-factly, as soon as we sat facing
each other inside his room.
He was not interested in the sequence of my experience; he wanted to
know only what I had encountered
when he told me to look at the bank. He was interested in details. I
described the wall I had seen.
"Was the wall to your left or to your right?" he asked.
I told him that the wall had really been in front of me. But he
insisted that it had to be either to the left or to
the right.
"When you first saw it, where was it? Close your eyes and don't open
them until you have remembered."
He stood up and turned my body while I had my eyes closed until he had
me facing east, the same direction I
had faced when I was sitting in front of the stream. He asked me in
which direction I had moved.
I said I had moved onward, ahead, in front of me. He insisted that I
should remember and concentrate on the
tune when I was still viewing the water as bubbles.
"Which way did they flow?" he asked.
Don Juan urged me to recall, and finally I had to admit that the
bubbles had seemed to be moving to my
right. Yet I was not as absolutely sure as he wanted me to be. Under
his probing I began to realize that I was
incapable of classifying my perception. The bubbles had moved to my
right when I first viewed them, but when
90
they became larger they flowed everywhere. Some of them seemed to be
coming directly at me, others seemed to
go in every possible direction. There were bubbles moving above and
below me. In fact they were all around me.
I recollected hearing their fizzing; thus I must have perceived them
with my ears as well as with my eyes.
When the bubbles became so large that I was able to "mount" one of
them, I "saw" them rubbing each other
like balloons.
My excitement increased as I recollected the details of my perception.
Don Juan, however, was completely
uninterested. I told him that I had seen the bubbles fizzing. It was
not a purely auditory or purely visual effect,
but something undifferentiated, yet crystal clear; the bubbles rasped
against each other. I did not see or hear their
movement, I felt it; I was part of the sound and the motion.
As I recounted my experience I became deeply moved. I held his arm and
shook it in an outburst of great agitation.
I had realized that the bubbles had no outer limit; nonetheless, they
were contained and their edges
changed shape and were uneven and jagged. The bubbles merged and
separated with great speed, yet their
movement was not dazzling. Their movement was fast and at the same time
slow.
Another thing I remembered, as I recounted my experience, was the
quality of color that the bubbles seemed
to possess. They were transparent and very bright and seemed almost
green, although it was not a hue, as I am
accustomed to perceiving hues.
"You're stalling," don Juan said. "Those things are not important.
You're dwelling on the wrong items. The
direction is the only important issue."
I could only remember that I had moved without any point of reference,
but don Juan concluded that since
the bubbles had flowed consistently to my
right—south—at the beginning, the south was the
direction with
which I had to be concerned. He again urged me imperatively to
recollect whether the wall was to my right or my
left. I strained to remember.
When don Juan "called me" and I surfaced, so to speak, I think I had
the wall to my left. I was very close to it
and was able to distinguish the grooves and protuberances of the wooden
armature or mold into which the
concrete had been poured. Very thin strips of wood had been used and
the pattern they had created was compact
The wall was very high. One end of it was visible to me, and I noticed
that it did not have a corner but curved
around.
He sat in silence for a moment, as if he were thinking how to decipher
the meaning of my experience; he
finally said that I had not accomplished a great deal, that I had
fallen short of what he expected me to do.
"What was I supposed to do?"
He did not answer but made a puckering gesture with his lips.
"You did very well," he said. "Today you learned that a brujo uses the
water to move."
"But did I see?"
He looked at me with a curious expression. He rolled his eyes and said
that I had to go into the green mist a
good many times until I could answer that question myself. He changed
the direction of our conversation in a
subtle way, saying I had not really learned how to move using the
water, but I had learned that a brujo could do
that, and he had deliberately told me to look at the bank of the stream
so I could check my movement.
"You moved very fast," he said, "as fast as a man who knows how to
perform this technique. I had a hard
time keeping up with you."
I begged him to explain what had happened to me from the beginning. He
laughed, shaking his head slowly
as though in disbelief.
"You always insist on knowing things from the beginning," he said. "But
there's no beginning; the beginning
is only in your thought."
"I think the beginning was when I sat on the bank and smoked," I said.
"But before you smoked I had to figure out what to do with you," he
said. "I would have to tell you what I
did and I can't do that, because it would take me to still another
point. So perhaps things would be clearer to you
if you didn't think about beginnings."
"Then tell me what happened after I sat on the bank and smoked"
91
"I think you have told me that already," he said, laughing.
"Was anything I did of any importance, don Juan?"
He shrugged his shoulders.
"You followed my directions very well and had no problem getting into
and out of the fog. Then you listened
to my voice and returned to the surface every time I called you. That
was the exercise. The rest was very easy.
You simply let the fog carry you. You behaved as though you knew what
to do. When you were very far away I
called you again and made you look at the bank, so you would know how
far you had gone. Then I pulled you
back."
"You mean, don Juan, that I really traveled in the water?"
"You did. And very far too."
"How far?"
"You wouldn't believe it."
I tried to coax him into telling me, but he dropped the subject and
said he had to leave for a while. I insisted
that he should at least give me a hint.
"I don't like to be kept in the dark," I said.
"You keep yourself in the dark," he said.
"Think about the wall you saw. Sit down here on your mat and remember
every detail of it. Then perhaps you
yourself may discover how far you went. All I know now is that you
traveled very far. I know that because I had
a terrible time pulling you back. If I had not been around, you might
have wandered off and never returned, in
which case all that would be left of you now would be your dead body on
the side of the stream. Or perhaps you
might have returned by yourself. With you I'm not sure. So judging by
the effort it took me to bring you back, I'd
say you were clearly in ..."
He made a long pause; he stared at me in a friendly way.
"I would go as far as the mountains of central Mexico," he said. "I
don't know how far you would go, perhaps
as far as Los Angeles, or perhaps even as far as Brazil."
Don Juan returned the next day late in the afternoon.
In the meantime I had written down everything I could recollect about
my perception. While I wrote, it
occurred to me to follow the banks up and down the stream in each
direction and corroborate whether I had
actually seen a feature on either side that might have elicited in me
the image of a wall. I conjectured that don
Juan might have made me walk, in a state of stupor, and then might have
made me focus my attention on some
wall on the way. In the hours that elapsed between the tune I first
detected the fog and the time I got out of the
ditch and went back to his house, I calculated that if he had made me
walk, we could have walked, at the most,
two and a half miles. So I followed the banks of the stream for about
three miles in each direction, carefully
observing every feature which might have been pertinent to my vision of
the wall. The stream was, as far as I
could tell, a plain canal used for irrigation. It was four to five feet
wide throughout its length and I could not find
any visible features in it that would have reminded me or forced the
image of a concrete wall.
When don Juan arrived at his house in the late afternoon I accosted him
and insisted on reading my account
to htm. He refused to listen and made me sit down. He sat facing me. He
was not smiling. He seemed to be
thinking, judging by the penetrating look in his eyes, which were fixed
above the horizon.
"I think you must be aware by now," he said in a tone that was suddenly
very severe, "that everything is
mortally dangerous. The water is as deadly as the guardian. If you
don't watch out the water will trap you. It
nearly did that yesterday. But in order to be trapped a man has to be
willing. There's your trouble. You're willing
to abandon yourself."
I did not know what he was talking about. His attack on me had been so
sudden that I was disoriented. I
feebly asked him to explain himself. He reluctantly mentioned that he
had gone to the water canyon and had
"seen" the spirit of the water hole and had the profound conviction I
had flubbed my chances to "see" the water.
"How?" I asked, truly baffled.
"The spirit is a force," he said, "and as such, it responds only to
strength. You cannot indulge in its presence."
92
"When did I indulge?"
"Yesterday, when you became green in the water."
"I did not indulge. I thought it was a very important moment and I told
you what was happening to me."
"Who are you to think or decide what is important? You know nothing
about the forces you're tapping. The
spirit of the water hole exists out there and could have helped you; in
fact it was helping you until you flubbed it.
Now I don't know what will be the outcome of your doings. You have
succumbed to the force of the water-hole
spirit and now it can take you any time."
"Was it wrong to look at myself turning green?"
"You abandoned yourself. You willed to abandon yourself. That was
wrong. I have told you this already and
I will repeat it again. You can survive in the world of a brujo only if
you are a warrior. A warrior treats everything
with respect and does not trample on anything unless he has to. You did
not treat the water with respect
yesterday. Usually you behave very well. However, yesterday you
abandoned yourself to your death, like a goddamned
fool. A warrior does not abandon himself to anything, not even to his
death. A warrior is not a willing
partner; a warrior is not available, and if he involves him-self with
something, you can be sure that he is aware of
what he is doing."
I did not know what to say. Don Juan was almost angry. That disturbed
me. Don Juan had rarely behaved in
such a way with me. I told him that I truly had no idea I was doing
something wrong. After some minutes of
tense silence he took off his hat and smiled and told me that I had
gained control over my indulging self. He
stressed that I had to avoid water and keep it from touching the
surface of my body for three or four months.
"I don't think I could go without taking a shower," I said.
Don Juan laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks.
"You can't go without a shower! At times you're so weak I think you're
putting me on. But it is not a joke. At
times you really have no control and the forces of your life take you
freely."
I raised the point that it was humanly impossible to be controlled at
all times. He maintained that for a
warrior there was nothing out of control, I brought up the idea of
accidents and said that what happened to me at
the water canal could certainly be classed as an accident, since I
neither meant it nor was I aware of my improper
behavior. I talked about different people who had misfortunes that
could be explained as accidents; I talked
especially about Lucas, a very fine old Yaqui man who had suffered a
serious injury when the truck he was
driving overturned.
"It seems to me it is impossible to avoid accidents," I said. "No man
can control everything around him."
"True," don Juan said cuttingly. "But not everything is an unavoidable
accident. Lucas doesn't live like a
warrior. If he did, he'd know that he is waiting and what he is waiting
for; and he wouldn't have driven that truck
while he was drunk. He crashed against the rock side of the road
because he was drunk and mangled his body for
nothing.
"Life for a warrior is an exercise in strategy," don Juan went on. "But
you want to find the meaning of life. A
warrior doesn't care about meanings. If Lucas lived like a
warrior—and he had a chance to, as we all have a
chance to—he would set his life strategically. Thus if he
couldn't avoid an accident that crushed his ribs, he
would have found means to offset that handicap, or avoid its
consequences, or battle against them. If Lucas were
a warrior he wouldn't be sitting in his dingy house dying of
starvation. He would be battling to the end."
I posed an alternative to don Juan, using him as an example, and asked
him what would be the outcome if he
himself were to be involved in an accident that severed his legs.
"If I cannot help it, and lose my legs," he said, "I won't be able to
be a man any more, so I will join that
which is waiting for me out there."
He made a sweeping gesture with his hand to point all around him. I
argued that he had misunderstood me. I
had meant to point out that it was impossible for any single individual
to foresee all the variables involved in his
day-to-day actions.
"All I can say to you," don Juan said, "is that a warrior is never
available; never is he standing on the road
waiting to be clobbered. Thus he cuts to a minimum his chances of the
unforeseen. What you call accidents are,
93
most of the time, very easy to avoid, except for fools who are living
helter-skelter."
"It is not possible to live strategically all the time," I said.
"Imagine that someone is waiting for you with a
powerful rifle with a telescopic sight; he could spot you accurately
five hundred yards away. What would you
do?"
Don Juan looked at me with an air of disbelief and then broke into
laughter.
"What would you do?" I urged him.
"If someone is waiting for me with a rifle with a telescopic sight?" he
said, obviously mocking me.
"If someone is hiding out of sight, waiting for you. You won't have a
chance. You can't stop a bullet."
"No. I can't. But I still don't understand your point."
"My point is that all your strategy cannot be of any help in a
situation like that."
"Oh, but it can. If someone is waiting for me with a powerful rifle
with a telescopic sight I simply will not
come around."
94
13
My next attempt at "seeing" took place on September 3, 1969. Don Juan
made me smoke two bowls of the
mixture. The immediate effects were identical to those I had
experienced during previous attempts. I remember
that when my body was thoroughly numb, don Juan held me by my right
armpit and made me walk into the thick
desert chaparral that grows for miles around his house. I cannot
recollect what I or don Juan did after we entered
the brush, nor can I recall how long we walked; at a certain moment I
found I was sitting on top of a small hill.
Don Juan was sitting on my left side, touching me. I could not feel him
but I could see him with the corner of my
eye. I had the feeling that he had been talking to me although I could
not remember his words. Yet I felt I knew
exactly what he had said, in spite of the fact that I could not bring
it back into my clear memory. I had the
sensation that his words were like the cars of a train which was moving
away and his last word was like a square
caboose. I knew what that last word was but I could not say it or think
clearly about it. It was a state of halfwakefulness
with a dreamlike image of a train of words.
Then very faintly I heard don Juan's voice talking to me.
"Now you must look at me," he said as he turned my head to face him. He
repeated the statement three or
four times.
I looked and detected right away the same glowing effect I had
perceived twice before while looking at his
face; it was a mesmerizing movement, an undulatory shift of light
within contained areas. There were no definite
boundaries to those areas, and yet the waving light never spilled over
but moved within invisible limits.
I scanned the glowing object in front of me and immediately it started
to lose its glow and the familiar
features of don Juan's face emerged, or rather became superimposed on
the fading glow. I must have then
focused my gaze again; don Juan's features faded and the glow
intensified. I had placed my attention on an area
which must have been his left eye. I noticed that there the movement of
the glow was not contained. I detected
something perhaps resembling explosions of sparks. The explosions were
rhythmical and actually sent out
something like particles of light that flew out with apparent force
toward me and then retreated as if they were
rubber fibers.
Don Juan must have turned my head around. Suddenly I found myself
looking at a plowed field.
"Now look ahead," I heard don Juan saying.
In front of me, perhaps two hundred yards away, was a large, long hill;
its entire slope had been plowed.
Horizontal furrows ran parallel to each other from the bottom to the
very top of the hill. I noticed that in the
plowed field there were quantities of small rocks and three huge
boulders that interrupted the lineality of the
furrows. There were some bushes right in front of me which prevented me
from observing the details of a ravine
or water canyon at the bottom of the hill. From where I was, the canyon
appeared as a deep cut, with green
vegetation markedly different from the barren hill. The greenness
seemed to be trees that grew in the bottom of
the canyon. I felt a breeze blowing in my eyes. I had a feeling of
peace and profound quietness. There were no
sounds of birds or insects.
Don Juan spoke to me again. It took me a moment to understand what he
was saying.
"Do you see a man in that field?" he kept on asking.
I wanted to tell him that there was no man in that field, but I could
not vocalize the words. Don Juan took my
head in his hands from behind—I could see his fingers over my
eyebrows and on my cheeks—and made me pan
over the field, moving my head slowly from right to left and then in
the opposite direction.
"Watch every detail. Your life may depend on it," I heard him saying
over and over.
He made me pan four times over the 180-degree visual horizon in front
of me. At one moment, when he had
moved my head to face the extreme left, I thought I detected something
moving in the field. I had a brief perception
of movement with the corner of my right eye. He began to shift my head
back to my right and I was capable
of focusing my gaze on the plowed field. I saw a man walking alongside
the furrows. He was a plain man dressed
like a Mexican peasant; he wore sandals, a pair of light gray pants, a
long-sleeved beige shirt, and a straw hat,
and carried a light brown bag with a strap over his right shoulder.
95
Don Juan must have noticed that I had seen the man. He asked me
repeatedly if the man was looking at me or
if he was coming toward me. I wanted to tell him that the man was
walking away and that his back was turned to
me, but I could only say, "No." Don Juan said that if the man turned
and came to me I should yell and he would
turn my head away in order to protect me.
I had no sense of fear or apprehension or involvement. I coldly watched
the scene. The man stopped walking
at the middle of the field. He stood with his right foot on a ledge of
a large round boulder, as if he were tying his
sandal. Then he straightened up, pulled a string from his bag, and
wrapped it around his left hand. He turned his
back to me and, facing the top of the hill, began scanning the area in
front of him. I thought he was scanning
because of the way he moved his head, which he kept turning slowly to
his right; I saw him in profile, and then
he began to turn his whole body toward me until he was looking at me.
He actually jerked his head, or moved it
in such a way that I knew beyond a doubt that he had seen me. He
extended his left arm in front of him, pointing
to the ground, and holding his arm in that position he began to walk
toward me.
"He's coming!" I yelled without any difficulty.
Don Juan must have turned my head around, for next I was looking at the
chaparral. He told me not to gaze
but look "lightly" at things and scan over them. He said that he was
going to stand a short distance in front of me
and then walk toward me, and that I should gaze at him until I saw his
glow.
I saw don Juan moving to a spot perhaps twenty yards away. He walked
with such incredible speed and
agility that I could hardly believe it was don Juan. He turned around
and faced me and ordered me to gaze at him.
His face was glowing; it looked like a blotch of light. The light
seemed to spill over his chest almost to the
middle of his body. It was as if I were looking at a light through my
half-closed eyelids. The glow seemed to expand
and recede. He must have begun to walk toward me because the light
became more intense and more
discernible.
He said something to me. I struggled to understand and lost my view of
the glow, and then I saw don Juan as
I see him in everyday life; he was a couple of feet away from me. He
sat down facing me.
As I pinpointed ray attention on his face I began to perceive a vague
glow. Then it was as if his face were
crisscrossed by thin beams of light. Don Juan's face looked as if
someone were shining tiny mirrors on it; as the
light became more intense the face lost its contours and was again an
amorphous glowing object. I perceived
once more the effect of pulsating explosions of light emanating from an
area which must have been his left eye. I
did not focus my attention on it, but deliberately gazed at an adjacent
area which I surmised to be his right eye, I
caught at once the sight of a clear, transparent pool of light. It was
a liquid light.
I noticed that perceiving was more than sighting; it was feeling. The
pool of dark, liquid light had an
extraordinary depth. It was "friendly," "kind." The light that emanated
from it did not explode but whirled slowly
inward, creating exquisite reflections. The glow had a very lovely and
delicate way of touching me, of soothing
me, which gave me a sensation of exquisiteness.
I saw a symmetrical ring of brilliant dashes of light that expanded
rhythmically on the vertical plain of the
glowing area. The ring expanded to cover nearly all the glowing surface
and then contracted to a point of light in
the middle of the brilliant pool. I saw the ring expanding and
contracting several times. Then I deliberately
moved back without losing my gaze and was capable of seeing both eyes.
I distinguished the rhythm of both
types of light explosions. The left eye sent out dashes of tight that
actually protruded out of the vertical plain,
while the right eye sent out dashes that radiated without protruding.
The rhythm of the two eyes was alternating,
the light of the left eye exploded outward while the radiating light
beams of the right eye contracted and whirled
inward. Then the light of the right eye extended to cover the whole
glowing surface while the exploding light of
the left eye receded.
Don Juan must have turned me around once more, for I was again looking
at the plowed field. I heard him
telling me to watch the man. The man was standing by the boulder
looking at me. I could not distinguish his
features; his hat covered most of his face. After a moment he tucked
his bag under his right arm and began to
walk away toward my right. He walked almost to the end of the plowed
area, changed direction, and took a few
steps toward the gully. Then I lost control of my focusing and he
vanished and so did the total scenery. The
96
image of the desert shrubs became superimposed on it.
I do not recollect how I returned to don Juan's house, nor do I
remember what he did to me to "bring me
back." When I woke up I was lying on my straw mat in don Juan's room.
He came to my side and helped me up. I
was dizzy; my stomach was upset. Don Juan in a very quick and efficient
manner dragged me to the shrubs at the
side of his house. I got sick and he laughed.
Afterwards I felt better. I looked at my watch; it was eleven P.M. I
went back to sleep and by one o'clock the
next afternoon I thought I was myself again.
Don Juan kept asking me how I felt. I had the sensation of being
absent-minded. I could not really concentrate.
I walked around the house for a while under don Juan's close scrutiny.
He followed me around. I felt there
was nothing to do and I went back to sleep. I woke up in the late
afternoon feeling much better. I found a great
many mashed leaves around me. In fact when I woke up I was lying on my
stomach on top of a pile of leaves.
Their scent was very strong. I remember becoming aware of the scent
before I fully woke up.
I wandered to the back and found don Juan sitting by the irrigation
ditch. When he saw me approaching he
made frantic gestures to make me stop and go back into the house.
"Run inside!" he yelled.
I ran into the house and he joined me a while later.
"Don't ever come after me," he said. "If you want to see me wait for me
here."
I apologized. He told me not to waste myself in silly apologies which
did not have the power to cancel my
acts. He said that he had had a very difficult tune bringing me back
and that he had been interceding for me at the
water.
"We have to take a chance now and wash you in the water," he said.
I assured him I felt fine. He gazed into my eyes for a long time.
"Come with me," he said. "I'm going to put you in the water."
"I'm fine," I said. "Look, I'm taking notes."
He pulled me up from my mat with considerable force.
"Don't indulge!" he said. "In no time at all you will fall asleep
again. Maybe I won't be able to wake you up
this time."
We ran to the back of his house. Before we reached the water he told me
in a most dramatic tone to shut my
eyes tight and not open them until he said to. He told me that if I
gazed at the water even for an instant I might
die. He led me by the hand and dunked me into the irrigation ditch head
first.
I kept my eyes shut as he went on submerging and pulling me out of the
water for hours. The change I
experienced was remarkable. Whatever was wrong with me before I entered
the water was so subtle that I did not
really notice it until I compared it with the feeling of well-being and
alertness I had while don Juan kept me in
the irrigation canal.
Water got into my nose and I began to sneeze. Don Juan pulled me out
and led me, with my eyes still closed,
into the house. He made me change my clothes and then guided me into
his room, had me sit down on my mat,
arranged the direction of my body, and then told me to open my eyes. I
opened them and what I saw caused me
to jump back and grab onto his leg. I experienced a tremendously
confusing moment. Don Juan rapped me with
his knuckles on the very top of my head. It was a quick blow which was
not hard or painful but somehow shocking.
"What is the matter with you? What did you see?" he asked.
Upon opening my eyes I had seen the same scene I had watched before. I
had seen the same man. This time,
however, he was almost touching me. I saw his face. There was an air of
familiarity about it. I almost knew who
he was. The scene vanished when don Juan hit me on the head.
I looked up at don Juan. He had his hand ready to hit me again. He
laughed and asked if I would like to get
another blow. I let go of his leg and relaxed on my mat. He ordered me
to look straight ahead and not to turn
around for any reason in the direction of the water at the back of his
house.
I then noticed for the first tune that it was pitch black in the room.
For a moment I was not sure whether I had
97
my eyes open. I touched them with my hands to make sure. I called don
Juan loudly and told him something was
wrong with my eyes; I could not see at all, while a moment before I had
seen him ready to hit me. I heard his
laughter over my head to my right, and then he lit his kerosene
lantern. My eyes adapted to the light in a matter
of seconds. Everything was as it always had been: the wattle-and-daub
walls of the room and the strangely
contorted, dry medicinal roots hanging on them; the bundles of herbs;
the thatched roof; the kerosene lantern
hanging from a beam. I had seen the room hundreds of times, yet this
time there was something unique about it
and about myself. This was the first time I did not believe in the
final "reality" of my perception. I had been
edging toward that feeling and I had perhaps intellectualized it at
various times, but never had I been at the brink
of a serious doubt. This time, however, I did not believe the room was
"real," and for a moment I had the strange
sensation that it was a scene which would vanish if don Juan rapped me
on top of my head with his knuckles.
I began to shiver without being cold. Nervous spasms ran down my spine.
My head felt heavy, especially in
the area right above my neck. I complained that I did not feel well and
told him what I had seen. He laughed at
me, saying that to succumb to fright was a miserable indulgence.
"You're frightened without being afraid," he said. "You saw the ally
staring at you, big deal. Wait until you
have him face to face before you shit in your pants."
He told me to get up and walk to my car without turning around in the
direction of the water, and to wait for
him while he got a rope and a shovel. He made me drive to a place where
we had found a tree stump. We
proceeded to dig it out in the darkness. I worked terribly hard for
hours. We did not get the stump out but I felt
much better. We went back to his house and ate and things were again
perfectly "real" and commonplace.
"What happened to me?" I asked. "What did I do yesterday?"
"You smoked me and then you smoked an ally," he said.
"I beg your pardon?"
Don Juan laughed and said that next I was going to demand that he start
telling me everything from the beginning.
"You smoked me," he repeated. "You gazed into my face, into my eyes.
You saw the lights that mark a man's
face. I am a sorcerer, you saw that in my eyes. You did not know that,
though, because this is the first time
you've done it. The eyes of men are not all alike. You will soon find
that out. Then you smoked an ally."
"Do you mean the man in the field?"
"That was not a man, that was an ally beckoning you."
"Where did we go? Where were we when I saw that man, I mean that ally?"
Don Juan made a gesture with his chin to point out an area in front of
his house and said that he had taken me
to the top of a small hill. I said that the scenery I had viewed had
nothing to do with the desert chaparral around
his house and he replied that the ally that had "beckoned" me was not
from the surroundings.
"Where is it from?"
"I'll take you there very soon."
"What is the meaning of my vision?"
"You were learning to see, that was all; but now you are about to lose
your pants because you indulge; you
have abandoned yourself to your fright. Maybe you should describe
everything you saw."
When I started to describe the way his own face had appeared to me, he
made me stop and said that it was of
no importance whatsoever, I told him that I had almost seen him as a
"luminous egg." He said that "almost" was
not enough and that seeing was going to take me a great deal of time
and work.
He was interested in the scene of the plowed field and in every detail
I could remember about the man.
"That ally was beckoning you," he said "I made you move your head when
he came to you not because he
was endangering you but because it is better to wait. You are not in a
hurry. A warrior is never idle and never in a
hurry. To meet an ally without being prepared is like attacking a lion
with your farts."
I liked the metaphor. We had a delightful moment of laughter.
"What would've happened if you hadn't moved my head?"
"You would've had to move your head yourself."
98
"And if I didn't?"
"The ally would have come to you and scared you stiff. If you had been
alone he might have killed you. It is
not advisable for you to be alone in the mountains or the desert until
you can defend yourself. An ally might
catch you alone there and make mincemeat out of you."
"What was the meaning of the acts he performed?"
"By looking at you he meant he welcomes you. He showed you that you
need a spirit catcher and a pouch,
but not from this area; his bag was from another part of the country.
You have three stumbling blocks in your
way that make you stop; those were the boulders. And you definitely are
going to get your best powers in water
canyons and gullies; the ally pointed out the gully to you. The rest of
the scene was meant to help you locate the
exact place to find him. I know now where the place is. I will take you
there very soon."
"Do you mean that the scenery I saw really exists?
"Of course."
"Where?"
"I cannot tell you that."
"How would I find that area?"
"I cannot tell you that either, and not because I don't want to but
because I simply don't know how to tell
you."
I wanted to know the meaning of seeing the same scene while I was in
his room. Don Juan laughed and
imitated me holding onto his leg.
"That was a reaffirmation that the ally wants you," he said. "He made
sure you or I knew that he was
welcoming you."
"What about the face I saw?"
"It is a familiar face to you because you know him. You have seen it
before. Maybe it is the face of your
death. You got frightened but that was your carelessness. He was
waiting for you and when he showed up you
succumbed to fright. Fortunately I was there to hit you or he would've
turned against you, which would have
been only proper. To meet an ally a man must be a spotless warrior or
the ally may turn against him and destroy
him."
Don Juan dissuaded me from going back to Los Angeles the next morning.
Apparently he thought I still had
not totally recovered. He insisted that I sit inside his room facing
the southeast, in order to preserve my strength.
He sat to my left, handed me my notebook, and said that this time I had
him pinned down; he not only had to stay
with me, he also had to talk to me.
"I have to take you to the water again in the twilight," he said.
"You're not solid yet and you shouldn't be
alone today. I'll keep you company all morning; in the afternoon you'll
be in better shape."
His concern made me feel very apprehensive.
"What's wrong with me?" I asked.
"You've tapped an ally."
"What do you mean by that?"
"We must not talk about allies today. Let us talk about anything else."
I really did not want to talk at all. I had begun to feel anxious and
restless. Don Juan apparently found the
situation utterly ludicrous; he laughed till the tears came.
"Don't tell me that at a time when you should talk you are not going to
find anything to say," he said, his eyes
shining with a mischievous glint.
His mood was very soothing to me.
There was only one topic that interested me at that moment: the ally.
His face was so familiar; it was not as if
I knew him or as if I had seen him before. It was something else. Every
time I began to think about his face my
mind experienced a bombardment of other thoughts, as if some part of
myself knew the secret but did not allow
the rest of me to come close to it. The sensation of the ally's face
being familiar was so eerie that it had forced me
into a state of morbid melancholy. Don Juan had said that it might have
been the face of my death. I think that
99
statement had clinched me. I wanted desperately to ask about it and I
had the clear sensation that don Juan was
holding me back. I took a couple of deep breaths and blurted out a
question.
"What is death, don Juan?"
"I don't know," he said, smiling.
"I mean, how would you describe death? I want your opinions. I think
everybody has definite opinions about
death."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
I had the Tibetan Book of the Dead in the trunk of my car. It occurred
to me to use it as a topic of
conversation, since it dealt with death. I said I was going to read it
to him and began to get up. He made me sit
down and went out and got the book himself.
"The morning is a bad time for sorcerers," he said as an explanation
for my having to stay put.
"You're too weak to leave my room. Inside here you are protected. If
you were to wander off now, chances
are that you would find a terrible disaster. An ally could kill you on
the road or in the bush, and later on when
they found your body they would say that you had either died
mysteriously or had an accident."
I was in no position or mood to question his decisions, so I stayed put
nearly all morning reading and
explaining some parts of the book to him. He listened attentively and
did not interrupt me at all. Twice I had to
stop for short periods of time while he brought some water and food,
but as soon as he was free again he urged
me to continue reading. He seemed to be very interested.
When I finished he looked at me.
"I don't understand why those people talk about death as if death were
like life," he said softly.
"Maybe that's the way they understand it. Do you think the Tibetans
see?"
"Hardly. When a man learns to see, not a single thing he knows
prevails. Not a single one. If the Tibetans
could see they could tell right away that not a single thing is any
longer the same. Once we see, nothing is
known; nothing remains as we used to know it when we didn't see."
"Perhaps, don Juan, seeing is not the same for everyone."
"True. It's not the same. Still, that does not mean that the meanings
of life prevail. When one learns to see,
not a single thing is the same."
"Tibetans obviously think that death is like life. What do you think
death is like, yourself?" I asked.
"I don't think death is like anything and I think the Tibetans must be
talking about something else. At any
rate, what they're talking about is not death."
"What do you think they're talking about?"
"Maybe you can tell me that. You're the one who reads."
I tried to say something else but he began to laugh.
"Perhaps the Tibetans really see," don Juan went on, "in which case
they must have realized that what they
see makes no sense at all and they wrote that bunch of crap because it
doesn't make any difference to them; in
which case what they wrote is not crap at all."
"I really don't care about what the Tibetans have to say," I said, "but
I certainly care about what you have to
say. I would like to hear what you think about death."
He stared at me for an instant and then giggled. He opened his eyes and
raised his eyebrows in a comical
gesture of surprise.
"Death is a whorl," he said. "Death is the face of the ally; death is a
shiny cloud over the horizon; death is the
whisper of Mescalito in your ears; death is the toothless mouth of the
guardian; death is Genaro sitting on his
head; death is me talking; death is you and your writing pad; death is
nothing. Nothing! It is here yet it isn't here
at all."
Don Juan laughed with great delight. His laughter was like a song, it
had a sort of dancing rhythm.
"I make no sense, huh?" don Juan said. "I cannot tell you what death is
like. But perhaps I could tell you
about your own death. There is no way of knowing what it will be like
for sure; however, I could tell you what it
may be like."
100
I became frightened at that point and argued that I only wanted to know
what death appeared to be like to
him; I emphasized that I was interested in his opinions about death in
a general sense, but did not care to know
about the particulars of anybody's personal death, especially my own.
"I can't talk about death except in personal terms," he said. "You
wanted me to tell you about death. All right!
Then don't be afraid of hearing about your own death."
I admitted that I was too nervous to talk about it. I said that I
wanted to talk about death in general terms, as
he himself had done when he told me that at the time of his son
Eulalio's death, life and death mixed like a fog of
crystals.
"I told you that my son's life expanded at the time of his personal
death," he said. "I was not talking about
death in general but about my son's death. Death, whatever it is, made
his life expand."
I definitely wanted to steer the conversation out of the realm of
particulars, and mentioned that I had been
reading accounts of people who had died for several minutes and had
been revived through medical techniques.
In all the cases I had read, the persons involved had made statements,
upon reviving, that they could not recollect
anything at all; that dying was simply a sensation of blacking out.
"That's perfectly understandable," he said. "Death has two stages. The
first is a blackout. It is a meaningless
stage, very similar to the first effect of Mescalito, in which one
experiences a lightness that makes one feel
happy, complete, and that everything in the world is at ease. But that
is only a shallow state; it soon vanishes and
one enters a new realm, a realm of harshness and power. That second
stage is the real encounter with Mescalito.
Death is very much like this. The first stage is a shallow blackout.
The second, however, is the real stage where
one meets with death; it is a brief moment, after the first blackout,
when we find that we are, somehow, ourselves
again. It is then that death smashes against us with quiet fury and
power until it dissolves our lives into nothing."
"How can you be sure that you are talking about death?"
"I have my ally. The little smoke has shown me my unmistakable death
with great clarity. This is why I can
only talk about personal death."
Don Juan's words caused me a profound apprehension and a dramatic
ambivalence. I had a feeling he was
going to describe the overt, commonplace details of my death and tell
me how or when I was going to die. The
mere thought of knowing that made me despair and at the same time
provoked my curiosity. I could have asked
him to describe his own death, of course, but I felt that such a
request would be rather rude and I ruled it out
automatically.
Don Juan seemed to be enjoying my conflict. His body convulsed with
laughter.
"Do you want to know what your death may be like?" he asked me with
childlike delight in his face.
I found his mischievous pleasure in teasing me rather comforting. It
almost took the edge off my
apprehension.
"O.K., tell me," I said, and my voice cracked.
He had a formidable explosion of laughter. He held his stomach and
rolled on his side and mockingly
repeated, " 'O.K., tell me,'" with a crack in his voice. Then he
straightened out and sat down, assuming a feigned
stiffness, and in a tremulous voice he said,
"The second stage of your death may very well be as follows."
His eyes examined me with apparently genuine curiosity. I laughed. I
clearly realized that his making fun
was the only device that could dull the edge of the idea of one's death.
"You drive a great deal," he went on saying, "so you may find yourself,
at a given moment, behind the wheel
again. It will be a very fast sensation that won't give you time to
think. Suddenly, let's say, you would find
yourself driving, as you have done thousands of times. But before you
could wonder about yourself, you would
notice a strange formation in front of your windshield. If you looked
closer you'd realize that it is a cloud that
looks like a shiny whorl. It would resemble, let's say, a face, right
in the middle of the sky in front of you. As you
watched it, you would see it moving backward until it was only a
brilliant point in the distance, and then you
would notice that it began moving toward you again; it would pick up
speed and in a blink of an eye it would
smash against the windshield of your car. You are strong; I'm sure it
would take death a couple of whams to get
101
you.
"By then you would know where you were and what was happening to you;
the face would recede again to a
position on the horizon, would pick up speed and smash against you. The
face would enter inside you and then
you'd know—it was the ally's face all the time, or it was me
talking, or you writing. Death was nothing all the
time. Nothing. It was a little dot lost in the sheets of your notebook.
And yet it would enter inside you with
uncontrollable force and would make you expand; it would make you flat
and extend you over the sky and the
earth and beyond. And you would be like a fog of tiny crystals moving,
moving away."
I was very taken by his description of my death. I had expected to hear
something so different. I could not
say anything for a long time.
"Death enters through the belly," he continued. "Right through the gap
of the will. That area is the most
important and sensitive part of man. It is the area of the will and
also the area through which all of us die. I know
it because my ally has guided me to that stage. A sorcerer tunes his
will by letting his death overtake him, and
when he is fiat and begins to expand, his impeccable will takes over
and assembles the fog into one person
again."
Don Juan made a strange gesture. He opened his hands like two fans,
lifted them to the level of his elbows,
turned them until his thumbs were touching his sides, and then brought
them slowly together at the center of his
body over his navel. He kept them there for a moment. His arms shivered
with the strain. Then he brought them
up until the tips of his middle fingers touched his forehead, and then
pulled them down in the same position to
the center of his body.
It was a formidable gesture. Don Juan had performed it with such force
and beauty that I was spellbound.
"It is his will which assembles a sorcerer," he said, "but as his old
age makes him feeble his will wanes and a
moment unavoidably comes when he is no longer capable of commanding his
will. He then has nothing with
which to oppose the silent force of his death, and his life becomes
like the lives of all his fellow men, an
expanding fog moving beyond its limits."
Don Juan stared at me and stood up. I was shivering.
"You can go to the bushes now," he said. "It is afternoon."
I needed to go but I did not dare. I felt perhaps more jumpy than
afraid. However, I was no longer
apprehensive about the ally.
Don Juan said that it did not matter how I felt as long as I was
"solid." He assured me I was in perfect shape
and could safely go into the bushes as long as I did not get close to
the water.
"That is another matter," he said. "I need to wash you once more, so
stay away from the water."
Later on he wanted me to drive him to the nearby town. I mentioned that
driving would be a welcome change
for me because I was still shaky; the idea that a sorcerer actually
played with his death was quite gruesome to me.
"To be a sorcerer is a terrible burden," he said in a reassuring tone.
"I've told you that it is much better to
learn to see. A man who sees is everything; in comparison, the sorcerer
is a sad fellow."
"What is sorcery, don Juan?"
He looked at me for a long time as he shook his head almost
imperceptibly.
"Sorcery is to apply one's will to a key joint," he said. "Sorcery is
interference. A sorcerer searches and finds
the key joint of anything he wants to affect and then he applies his
will to it. A sorcerer doesn't have to see to be a
sorcerer, all he has to know is how to use his will."
I asked him to explain what he meant by a key joint. He thought for a
while and then he said that he knew
what my car was.
"It's obviously a machine," I said.
"I mean your car is the spark plugs. That's its key joint for me. I can
apply my will to it and your car won't
work."
Don Juan got into my car and sat down. He beckoned me to do likewise as
he made himself comfortable on
the seat.
"Watch what I do," he said. "I'm a crow, so first I'll make my feathers
loose."
102
He shivered his entire body. His movement reminded me of a sparrow
wetting its feathers in a puddle. He
lowered his head like a bird dipping its beak into the water.
"That feels really good," he said, and began to laugh.
His laughter was strange. It had a very peculiar mesmerizing effect on
me. I recollected having heard him
laugh in that manner many times before. Perhaps the reason I had never
become overtly aware of it was that he
had never laughed like that long enough in my presence.
"A crow loosens its neck next," he said, and began twisting his neck
and rubbing his cheeks on his shoulders.
"Then he looks at the world with one eye and then with the other."
His head shook as he allegedly shifted his view of the world from one
eye to the other. The pitch of his
laughter became higher. I had the absurd feeling that he was going to
turn into a crow in front of my eyes. I
wanted to laugh it off but I was almost paralyzed. I actually felt some
kind of enveloping force around me. I was
not afraid nor was I dizzy or sleepy. My faculties were unimpaired, to
the best of my judgment.
"Turn on your car now," don Juan said.
I turned on the starter and automatically stepped on the gas pedal. The
starter began to grind without igniting
the engine. Don Juan's laughter was a soft, rhythmical cackle. I tried
it again; and again. I spent perhaps ten
minutes grinding the starter of my car. Don Juan cackled all that time.
Then I gave up and sat there with a heavy
head.
He stopped laughing and scrutinized me and I "knew" then that his
laughter had forced me into a sort of
hypnotic trance. Although I had been thoroughly aware of what was
taking place, I felt I was not myself. During
the time I could not start my car I was very docile, almost numb. It
was as if don Juan was not only doing
something to my car but also to me. When he stopped cackling I was
convinced the spell was over, and
impetuously I turned on the starter again. I had the certainty don Juan
had only mesmerized me with his laughter
and made me believe I could not start my car. With the corner of my eye
I saw him looking curiously at me as I
ground the motor and pumped the gas furiously.
Don Juan patted me gently and said that fury would make me "solid" and
perhaps I would not need to be
washed in the water again. The more furious I could get, the quicker I
could recover from my encounter with the
ally.
"Don't be embarrassed," I heard don Juan saying. "Kick the car."
His natural everyday laughter exploded, and I felt ridiculous and
laughed sheepishly.
After a while don Juan said he had released the car. It started!
103
14
September 28,1969
There was something eerie about don Juan's house. For a moment I
thought he was hiding somewhere around
the place to scare me. I called out to him and then gathered enough
nerve to walk inside. Don Juan was not there.
I put the two bags of groceries I had brought on a pile of firewood and
sat down to wait for him, as I had done
dozens of times before. But for the first time in my years of
associating with don Juan I was afraid to stay alone
in his house. I felt a presence, as if someone invisible was there with
me. I remembered then that years before I
had had the same vague feeling that something unknown was prowling
around me when I was alone. I jumped to
my feet and ran out of the house.
I had come to see don Juan to tell him that the cumulative effect of
the task of "seeing" was taking its toll on
me. I had begun to feel uneasy; vaguely apprehensive without any overt
reason; tired without being fatigued.
Then my reaction at being alone in don Juan's house brought back the
total memory of how my fear had built up
in the past.
The fear traced back to years before, when don Juan had forced the very
strange confrontation between a sorceress,
a woman he called "la Catalina," and me. It began on November 23, 1961,
when I found him in his house
with a dislocated ankle. He explained that he had an enemy, a sorceress
who could turn into a blackbird and who
had attempted to kill him.
"As soon as I can walk I'm going to show you who the woman is," don
Juan said. "You must know who she
is,"
"Why does she want to kill you?"
He shrugged his shoulders impatiently and refused to say anything else.
I came back to see him ten days later and found him perfectly well. He
rotated his ankle to demonstrate to me
mat it was fine and attributed his prompt recovery to the nature of the
cast he himself had made.
"It's good you're here," he said. "Today I'm going to take you on a
little journey."
He then directed me to drive to a desolate area. We stopped there; don
Juan stretched his legs and made himself
comfortable on the seat, as if he were going to take a nap. He told me
to relax and remain very quiet; he said
we had to be as inconspicuous as possible until nightfall because the
late afternoon was a very dangerous time for
the business we were pursuing.
"What kind of business are we pursuing?" I asked.
"We are here to stake out la Catalina," he said.
When it was fairly dark we slid out of the car and walked very slowly
and noiselessly into the desert chaparral.
From the place where we stopped I could distinguish the black
silhouette of the hills on both sides. We were
in a flat, fairly wide canyon. Don Juan gave me detailed instructions
on how to stay merged with the chaparral
and taught me a way to sit "in vigil," as he called it. He told me to
tuck my right leg under my left thigh and keep
my left leg in a squat position. He explained that the tucked leg was
used as a spring in order to stand up with
great speed, if it were necessary. He then told me to sit facing the
west, because that was the direction of the
woman's house. He sat next to me, to my right, and told me in a whisper
to keep my eyes focused on the ground,
searching, or rather, waiting, for a sort of wind wave that would make
a ripple in the bushes. Whenever the ripple
touched the bushes on which I had focused my gaze, I was supposed to
look up and see the sorceress in all her
"magnificent evil splendor." Don Juan actually used those words.
When I asked him to explain what he meant, he said that if I detected a
ripple I simply had to look up and see
for myself, because "a sorcerer in flight" was such a unique sight that
it defied explanations.
There was a fairly steady wind and I thought I detected a ripple in the
bushes many times. I looked up each
time, prepared to have a transcendental experience, but I did not see
anything. Every time the wind blew the
bushes don Juan would kick the ground vigorously, whirling around,
moving his arms as if they were whips. The
strength of his movements was extraordinary.
104
After a few failures to see the sorceress "in flight" I was sure I was
not going to witness any transcendental
event, yet don Juan's display of "power" was so exquisite that I did
not mind spending the night there.
At daybreak don Juan sat down by me. He seemed to be totally exhausted.
He could hardly move. He lay
down on his back and mumbled that he had failed to "pierce the woman."
I was very intrigued by that statement;
he repeated it several times and each time his tone became more
downhearted, more desperate. I began to
experience an unusual anxiety. I found it very easy to project my
feelings into don Juan's mood.
Don Juan did not mention anything about the incident or the woman for
several months. I thought he had
either forgotten or resolved the whole affair. One day, however, I
found him in a very agitated mood, and in a
manner that was completely incongruous with his natural calmness he
hold me that the "blackbird" had stood in
front of him the night before, almost touching him, and that he had not
even awakened. The woman's artfulness
was so great that he had not felt her presence at all. He said his good
fortune was to wake up in the nick of time
to stage a horrendous fight for his life. Don Juan's tone of voice was
moving, almost pathetic. I felt an
overwhelming surge of compassion and concern.
In a somber and dramatic tone he reaffirmed that he had no way to stop
her and that the next time she came
near him was going to be his last day on earth. I became despondent and
was nearly in tears. Don Juan seemed to
notice my profound concern and laughed, I thought, bravely. He patted
me on the back and said that I should not
worry, that he was not altogether lost yet, because he had one last
card, a trump card.
"A warrior lives strategically," he said, smiling. "A warrior never
carries loads he cannot handle."
Don Juan's smile had the power to dispel the ominous clouds of doom. I
suddenly felt elated and we both
laughed. He patted my head.
"You know, of all the things on this earth, you are my last card," he
said abruptly, looking straight into my
eyes."
What?"
"You are my trump card in my fight against that witch."
I did not understand what he meant and he explained that the woman did
not know me and that if I played my
hand as he would direct me, I had a better than good chance to "pierce
her."
"What do you mean by pierce her'?"
"You cannot kill her but you must pierce her like a balloon. If you do
that she'll leave me alone. But don't
think about it now. I'll tell you what to do when the time comes."
Months went by. I had forgotten the incident and was caught by surprise
when I arrived at his house one day;
don Juan came out running and did not let me get out of my car.
"You must leave immediately," he whispered with appalling urgency.
"Listen carefully. Buy a shotgun, or
get one in any way you can; don't bring me your own gun, do you
understand? Get any gun, except your own,
and bring it here right away."
"Why do you want a shotgun?"
"Go now!"
I returned with a shotgun. I had not had enough money to buy one but a
friend of mine had given me his old
gun. Don Juan did not look at it; he explained, laughing, that he had
been abrupt with me because the blackbird
was on the roof of the house and he did not want her to see me.
"Finding the blackbird on the roof gave me the idea that you could
bring a gun and pierce her with it," don
Juan said emphatically. "I don't want anything to happen to you, so I
suggested that you buy the gun or that you
get one in any other way. You see, you have to destroy the gun after
completing the task."
"What kind of task are you talking about?"
"You must attempt to pierce the woman with your shotgun."
He made me clean the gun by rubbing it with the fresh leaves and stems
of a peculiarly scented plant. He
himself rubbed two shells and placed them inside the barrels. Then he
said I was to hide in front of his house and
wait until the blackbird landed on the roof and then, after taking
careful aim, I was supposed to let go with both
barrels. The effect of the surprise, more than the pellets, would
pierce the woman, and if I were powerful and
105
determined I could force her to leave him alone. Thus my aim had to be
impeccable and so did my determination
to pierce her.
"You must scream at the moment you shoot," he said. "It must be a
potent and piercing yell."
He then piled bundles of bamboo and fire sticks about ten feet away
from the ramada of his house. He made
me lean against the piles. The position was quite comfortable. I was
sort of half-seated; my back was well
propped and I had a good view of the roof.
He said it was too early for the witch to be out, and that we had until
dusk to do all the preparations; he
would then pretend he was locking himself inside the house, in order to
attract her and elicit another attack on his
person. He told me to relax and find a comfortable position that I
could shoot from without moving. He made me
aim at the roof a couple of times and concluded that the act of lifting
the gun to my shoulder and taking aim was
too slow and cumbersome. He then built a prop for the gun. He made two
deep holes with a pointed iron bar,
planted two forked sticks in them, and tied a long pole in between the
forks. The structure gave me a shooting
support and allowed me to keep the gun aimed at the roof.
Don Juan looked at the sky and said it was time for him to go into the
house. He got up and calmly went
inside, giving me the final admonition that my endeavor was not a joke
and that I had to hit the bird with the first
shot.After don Juan left I had a few more minutes of twilight and then
it became quite dark. It seemed as if
darkness had been waiting until I was alone and suddenly it descended
on me. I tried to focus my eyes on the
roof, which was silhouetted against the sky; for a while there was
enough light on the horizon so the line of the
roof was still visible, but then the sky became black and I could
hardly see the house. I kept my eyes focused on
the roof for hours without noticing anything at all. I saw a couple of
owls flying by toward the north; the span of
their wings was quite remarkable and they could not be mistaken for
blackbirds. At a given moment, however, I
distinctly noticed the black shape of a small bird landing on the roof.
It was definitely a bird! My heart began
pounding hard; I felt a buzzing in my ears. I aimed in the dark and
pulled both triggers. There was quite a loud
explosion. I felt a strong recoil of the gun butt on my shoulder and at
the same time I heard a most piercing and
horrendous human shriek. It was loud and eerie and seemed to have come
from the roof. I had a moment of total
confusion. I then remembered that don Juan had admonished me to yell as
I shot and I had forgotten to do so. I
was thinking of reloading my gun when don Juan opened the door and came
out running. He had his kerosene
lantern with him. He appeared to be quite nervous.
"I think you got her," he said. "We must find the dead bird now."
He brought a ladder and made me climb up and look on the ramada, but I
could not find anything there. He
climbed up and looked himself for a while, with equally negative
results.
"Perhaps you have blasted the bird to bits," don Juan said, "in which
case we must find at least a feather."
We began looking around the ramada first and then around the house. We
looked with the light of the lantern
until morning. Then we started looking again all over the area we had
covered during the night. Around 11:00
A.M. don Juan called off our search. He sat down dejected, smiled
sheepishly at me, and said that I had failed to
stop his enemy and that now, more than ever before, his life was not
worth a hoot because the woman was
doubtlessly irked, itching to take revenge.
"You're safe, though," don Juan said reassuringly. "'The woman doesn't
know you."
As I was walking to my car to return home, I asked him if I had to
destroy the shotgun. He said the gun had
done nothing and I should give it back to its owner. I noticed a
profound look of despair in don Juan's eyes. I felt
so moved by it that I was about to weep.
"What can I do to help you?" I asked,
"There's nothing you can do," don Juan said.
We remained silent for a moment. I wanted to leave right away, I felt
an oppressive anguish. I was ill at ease,
"Would you really try to help me?" don Juan asked in a childlike tone.
I told him again that my total person was at his disposal, that my
affection for him was so profound I would
undertake any kind of action to help him. Don Juan smiled and asked
again if I really meant that, and I
106
vehemently reaffirmed my desire to help him.
"If you really mean it," he said, "I may have one more chance."
He seemed to be delighted. He smiled broadly and clapped his hands
several times, the way he always does
when he wants to express a feeling of pleasure. This change of mood was
so remarkable that it also involved me.
I suddenly felt that the oppressive mood, the anguish, had been
vanquished and life was inexplicably exciting
again. Don Juan sat down and I did likewise. He looked at me for a long
moment and then proceeded to tell me in
a very calm and deliberate manner that I was in fact the only person
who could help him at that moment, and thus
he was going to ask me to do something very dangerous and very special.
He paused for a moment as if he wanted a reaffirmation on my part, and
I again reiterated my firm desire to
do anything for him.
"I'm going to give you a weapon to pierce her," he said.
He took a long object from his pouch and handed it to me. I took it and
then examined it. I almost dropped it.
"It is a wild boar," he went on, "You must pierce her with it."
The object I was holding was a dry foreleg of a wild boar. The skin was
ugly and the bristles were revolting
to the touch. The hoof was intact and its two halves were spread out,
as if the leg were stretched. It was an awfullooking
thing. It made me feel almost sick to my stomach. He quickly took it
back.
"You must ram the wild boar right into her navel," don Juan said.
"What?" I said in a feeble voice.
"You must hold the wild boar in your left hand and stab her with it.
She is a sorceress and the wild boar will
enter her belly and no one in this world, except another sorcerer, will
see it stuck in there. This is not an ordinary
battle but an affair of sorcerers. The danger you will run is that if
you fail to pierce her she might strike you dead
on the spot, or her companions and relatives will shoot you or knife
you. You may, on the other hand, get out
without a scratch.
"If you succeed she will have a hellish time with the wild boar in her
body and she will leave me alone."
An oppressive anguish enveloped me again. I had a profound affection
for don Juan. I admired him. At the
time of this startling request, I had already learned to regard his way
of life and his knowledge as a paramount
accomplishment. How could anyone let a man like that die? And yet how
could anyone deliberately risk his life?
I became so immersed in my deliberations I did not notice that don Juan
had stood up and was standing by me
until he patted me on the shoulder. I looked up; he was smiling
benevolently.
"Whenever you feel that you really want to help me, you should return,"
he said, "but not until then. If you
come back I know what we will have to do. Go now! If you don't want to
return I'll understand that too."
I automatically stood up, got into my car, and drove away. Don Juan had
actually let me off the hook. I could
have left and never returned, but somehow the thought of being free to
leave did not soothe me. I drove a while
longer and then impulsively turned around and drove back to don Juan's
house.
He was still sitting underneath his ramada and did not seem surprised
to see me.
"Sit down," he said. "The clouds in the west are beautiful. It will be
dark shortly. Sit quietly and let the
twilight fill you. Do whatever you want now, but when I tell you, look
straight at those shiny clouds and ask the
twilight to give you power and calmness."
I sat facing the western clouds for a couple of hours. Don Juan went
into the house and stayed inside. When
it was getting dark he returned.
"The twilight has come," he said. "Stand up! Don't close your eyes, but
look straight at the clouds; put your
arms up with your hands open and your fingers extended and trot in
place."
I followed his instructions; I lifted my arms over my head and began
trotting. Don Juan came to my side and
corrected my movements. He placed the leg of the wild boar against the
palm of my left hand and made me hold
it with my thumb. He then pulled my arms down until they pointed to the
orange and dark gray clouds over the
horizon, toward the west. He extended my fingers like fans and told me
not to curl them over the palms of my
hands. It was of crucial importance that I keep my fingers spread
because if I closed them I would not be asking
the twilight for power and calm, but would be menacing it. He also
corrected my trotting. He said it should be
107
peaceful and uniform, as if I were actually running toward the twilight
with my extended arms.
I could not fall asleep during that night. It was as if, instead of
calming me, the twilight had agitated me into
a frenzy.
"I still have so many things pending in my life," I said. "So many
things unresolved."
Don Juan chuckled softly.
"Nothing is pending in the world," he said. "Nothing is finished, yet
nothing is unresolved. Go to sleep."
Don Juan's words were strangely soothing.
Around ten o'clock the next morning, don Juan gave me something to eat
and then we were on our way. He
whispered that we were going to approach the woman around noon, or
before noon if possible. He said that the
ideal time would have been the early hours of the day, because a witch
is always less powerful or less aware in
the morning, but she would never leave the protection of her house at
those hours. I did not ask any questions. He
directed me to the highway and at a certain point he told me to stop
and park on the side of the road. He said we
had to wait there.
I looked at my watch; it was five minutes to eleven. I yawned
repeatedly. I was actually sleepy; my mind
wandered around aimlessly.
Suddenly don Juan straightened up and nudged me. I jumped up in my seat.
"There she is!" he said.
I saw a woman walking toward the highway on the edge of a cultivated
field. She was carrying a basket
looped in her right arm. It was not until then that I noticed we were
parked near a crossroads. There were two
narrow trails which ran parallel to both sides of the highway and
another wider and more trafficked trail that ran
perpendicular to the highway; obviously people who used that trail had
to walk across the paved road.
When the woman was still on the dirt road don Juan told me to get out
of the car.
"Do it now," he said firmly.
I obeyed him. The woman was almost on the highway. I ran and overtook
her. I was so close to her that I felt
her clothes on my face. I took the wild boar hoof from under my shirt
and thrust it at her. I did not feel any
resistance to the blunt object I had in my hand. I saw a fleeting
shadow in front of me, like a drape; my head
turned to my right and I saw the woman standing fifty feet away on the
opposite side of the road. She was a fairly
young, dark woman with a strong, stocky body. She was smiling at me.
Her teeth were white and big and her
smile was placid. She had closed her eyes halfway, as if to protect
them from the wind. She was still holding her
basket, looped over her right arm.
I then had a moment of unique confusion. I turned around to look at don
Juan. He was making frantic gestures
to call me back. I ran back. There were three or four men coming in a
hurry toward me. I got into the car
and sped away in the opposite direction.
I tried to ask don Juan what had happened but I could not talk; my ears
were bursting with an overwhelming
pressure; I felt that I was choking. He seemed to be pleased and began
to laugh. It was as if my failure did not
concern him. I had my hands so tight around the steering wheel that I
could not move them; they were frozen; my
arms were rigid and so were my legs. In fact I could not take my foot
off the gas pedal.
Don Juan patted me on the back and told me to relax. Little by little
the pressure in my ears diminished.
"What happened back there?" I finally asked.
He giggled like a child without answering. Then he asked me if I had
noticed the way the woman got out of
the way. He praised her excellent speed. Don Juan's talk seemed so
incongruous that I could not really follow
him. He praised the woman! He said her power was impeccable and she was
a relentless enemy.
I asked don Juan if he did not mind my failure. I was truly surprised
and annoyed at his change of mood. He
seemed to be actually glad.
He told me to stop. I parked alongside the road. He put his hand on my
shoulder and looked piercingly into
my eyes.
"Whatever I have done to you today was a trick," he said bluntly. "The
rule is that a man of knowledge has to
trap his apprentice. Today I have trapped you and I have tricked you
into learning."
108
I was dumfounded. I could not arrange my thoughts. Don Juan explained
that the whole involvement with the
woman was a trap; that she had never been a threat to him; and that his
job was to put me in touch with her,
under specific conditions of abandon and power I had experienced when I
tried to pierce her. He commended my
resolution and called it an act of power which demonstrated to the
woman that I was capable of great exertion.
Don Juan said that even though I was not aware of it, all I did was to
show off in front of her.
"You could never touch her," he said, "but you showed your claws to
her. She knows now that you're not
afraid. You have challenged her. I used her to trick you because she's
powerful and relentless and never forgets.
Men are usually too busy to be relentless enemies."
I felt a terrible anger. I told him that one should not play with a
person's innermost feelings and loyalties.
Don Juan laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks, and I hated him. I
had an overwhelming desire to punch
him and leave; there was, however, such a strange rhythm in his
laughter that it kept me almost paralyzed.
"Don't be so angry," don Juan said soothingly.
Then he said that his acts had never been a farce, that he also had
thrown his life away a long time before
when his own benefactor tricked him, just as he had tricked me. Don
Juan said that his benefactor was a cruel
man who did not think about him the way he, don Juan, thought about me.
He added very sternly that the woman
had tested her strength against him and had really tried to kill him.
"Now she knows that I was playing with her," he said, laughing, "and
she'll hate you for it. She can't do
anything to me, but she will take it out on you. She doesn't know yet
how much power you have, so she will
come to test you, little by little. Now you have no choice but to learn
in order to defend yourself, or you will fall
prey to that lady. She is no trick."
Don Juan reminded me of the way she had flown away.
"Don't be angry," he said. "It was not an ordinary trick. It was the
rule."
There was something about the way the woman moved away from me that was
truly maddening. I had
witnessed it myself: she had jumped the width of the highway in a flick
of an eyelash. I had no way to get out of
that certainty. From that moment on I focused all my attention on that
incident and little by little I accumulated
"proof" that she was actually following me. The final outcome was that
I had to withdraw from the
apprenticeship under the pressure of my irrational fear.
I came back to don Juan's house hours later, in the early afternoon. He
was apparently waiting for me. He
came up to me as I got out of my car and examined me with curious eyes,
walking around me a couple of times.
"Why the nervousness?" he asked before I had time to say anything.
I explained that something had scared me off that morning and that I
had begun to feel something prowling
around me, as in the past. Don Juan sat down and seemed to be engulfed
in thoughts. His face had an unusually
serious expression. He seemed to be tired. I sat by him and arranged my
notes.
After a very long pause his face brightened up and he smiled.
"What you felt this morning was the spirit of the water hole," he said.
"I've told you that you must be
prepared for unexpected encounters with those forces. I thought you
understood."
"I did."
"Then why the fear?"
I could not answer.
"That spirit is on your trail," he said. "It already tapped you in the
water. I assure you it will tap you again
and probably you won't be prepared and that encounter will be your end."
Don Juan's words made me feel genuinely concerned. My feelings were
strange, however; I was concerned
but not afraid. Whatever was happening to me had not been able to
elicit my old feelings of blind fear.
"What should I do?" I asked.
"You forget too easily," he said. "The path of knowledge is a forced
one. In order to learn we must be
spurred. In the path of knowledge we are always fighting something,
avoiding something, prepared for
something; and that something is always inexplicable, greater, more
powerful than us. The inexplicable forces
will come to you. Now it is the spirit of the water hole, later on
it'll be your own ally, so there is nothing you can
109
do now but to prepare yourself for the struggle. Years ago la Catalina
spurred you, she was only a sorceress,
though, and that was a beginner's trick.
"The world is indeed full of frightening things and we are helpless
creatures surrounded by forces that are
inexplicable and unbending. The average man, in ignorance, believes
that those forces can be explained or
changed; he doesn't really know how to do that, but he expects that the
actions of mankind will explain them or
change them sooner or later. The sorcerer, on the other hand, does not
think of explaining or changing them;
instead, he learns to use such forces by redirecting himself and
adapting to their direction. That's his trick. There
is very little to sorcery once you find out its trick. A sorcerer is
only slightly better off than the average man.
Sorcery does not help him to live a better life; in fact I should say
that sorcery hinders him; it makes his life
cumbersome, precarious. By opening himself to knowledge a sorcerer
becomes more vulnerable than the average
man. On the one hand his fellow men hate him and fear him and will
strive to end his life; on the other hand the
inexplicable and unbending forces that surround every one of us, by
right of our being alive, are for a sorcerer a
source of even greater danger. To be pierced by a fellow man is indeed
painful, but nothing in comparison to
being touched by an ally. A sorcerer, by opening himself to knowledge,
falls prey to such forces and has only one
means of balancing himself, his will; thus he must feel and act like a
warrior. I will repeat this once more: Only
as a warrior can one survive the path of knowledge. What helps a
sorcerer live a better life is the strength of
being a warrior.
"It is my commitment to teach you to see. Not because I personally want
to do so but because you were
chosen; you were pointed out to me by Mescalito. I am compelled by my
personal desire, however, to teach you
to feel and act like a warrior. I personally believe that to be a
warrior is more suitable than anything else.
Therefore I have endeavored to show you those forces as a sorcerer
perceives them, because only under their
terrifying impact can one become a warrior. To see without first being
a warrior would make you weak; it would
give you a false meekness, a desire to retreat; your body would decay
because you would become indifferent. It
is my personal commitment to make you a warrior so you won't crumble.
"I have heard you say time and time again that you are always prepared
to die. I don't regard that feeling as
necessary. I think it is a useless indulgence. A warrior should be
prepared only to battle. I have also heard you
say that your parents injured your spirit. I think the spirit of man is
something that can be injured very easily,
although not by the same acts you yourself call injurious. I believe
that your parents did injure you by making
you indulgent and soft and given to dwelling.
"The spirit of a warrior is not geared to indulging and complaining,
nor is it geared to winning or losing. The
spirit of a warrior is geared only to struggle, and every struggle is a
warrior's last battle on earth. Thus the outcome
matters very little to him. In his last battle on earth a warrior lets
his spirit flow free and clear. And as he
wages his battle, knowing that his will is impeccable, a warrior laughs
and laughs."
I finished writing and looked up. Don Juan was staring at me. He shook
his head from side to side and
smiled.
"You really write everything?" he asked in an incredulous tone. "Genaro
says that he can never be serious
with you because you're always writing. He's right; how can anyone be
serious if you're always writing?"
He chuckled and I tried to defend my position.
"It doesn't matter," he said, "If you ever learn to see, I suppose you
must do it your own weird way."
He stood up and looked at the sky. It was around noon. He said there
was still time to start on a hunting trip
to a place in the mountains.
"What are we going to hunt?" I asked.
"A special animal, either a deer or a wild boar or even a mountain
lion."
He paused for a moment and then added, "Even an eagle."
I stood up and followed him to my car. He said that this time we were
going only to observe and to find out
what animal we had to hunt. He was about to get in my car when he
seemed to remember something. He smiled
and said that the journey had to be postponed until I had learned
something without which our hunting would be
impossible.
110
We went back and sat down again underneath his ramada. There were so
many things I wanted to ask, but he
did not give me time to say anything before he spoke again.
"This brings us to the last point you must know about a warrior," he
said. "A warrior selects the items that
make his world.
"The other day when you saw the ally and I had to wash you twice, do
you know what was wrong with you?"
"No."
"You had lost your shields."
"What shields? What are you talking about?"
"I said that a warrior selects the items that make his world. He
selects deliberately, for every item he chooses
is a shield that protects him from the onslaughts of the forces he is
striving to use. A warrior would use his
shields to protect himself from his ally, for instance.
"An average man who is equally surrounded by those inexplicable forces
is oblivious to them because he has
other kinds of special shields to protect himself."
He paused and looked at me with a question in his eyes. I had not
understood what he meant.
"What are those shields?" I insisted.
"What people do," he repeated.
"What do they do?"
"Well, look around. People are busy doing that which people do. Those
are their shields. Whenever a
sorcerer has an encounter with any of those inexplicable and unbending
forces we have talked about, his gap
opens, making him more susceptible to his death than he ordinarily is;
I've told you that we die through that gap,
therefore if it is open one should have his will ready to fill it; that
is, if one is a warrior. If one is not a warrior,
like yourself, then one has no other recourse but to use the activities
of daily life to take one's mind away from
the fright of the encounter and thus to allow one's gap to close. You
got angry with me that day when you met the
ally. I made you angry when I stopped your car and I made you cold when
I dumped you into the water. Having
your clothes on made you even colder. Being angry and cold helped you
close your gap and you were protected.
At this time in your life, however, you can no longer use those shields
as effectively as an average man. You
know too much about those forces and now you are finally at the brink
of feeling and acting as a warrior. Your
old shields are no longer safe."
"What am I supposed to do?"
"Act like a warrior and select the items of your world. You cannot
surround yourself with things helterskelter
any longer. I tell you this in a most serious vein. Now for the first
time you are not safe in your old way of
life."
"What do you mean by selecting the items of my world?"
"A warrior encounters those inexplicable and unbending forces because
he is deliberately seeking them, thus
he is always prepared for the encounter. You, on the other hand, are
never prepared for it. In fact if those forces
come to you they will take you by surprise; the fright will open your
gap and your life will irresistibly escape
through it. The first thing you must do, then, is be prepared. Think
that the ally is going to pop in front of your
eyes any minute and you must be ready for him. To meet an ally is no
party or Sunday picnic and a warrior takes
the responsibility of protecting his life. Then if any of those forces
tap you and open your gap, you must
deliberately strive to close it by yourself. For that purpose you must
have a selected number of things that give
you great peace and pleasure, things which you can deliberately use to
take your thoughts from your fright and
close your gap and make you solid."
"What kind of things?"
"Years ago I told you that in his day-to-day life a warrior chooses to
follow the path with heart. It is the consistent
choice of the path with heart which makes a warrior different from the
average man. He knows that a path
has heart when he is one with it, when he experiences a great peace and
pleasure traversing its length. The things
a warrior selects to make his shields are the items of a path with
heart."
"But you said I'm not a warrior, so how can I choose a path with heart?"
111
"This is your turning point. Let's say that before you did not really
need to live like a warrior. Now it is
different, now you must surround yourself with the items of a path with
heart and you must refuse the rest, or you
will perish in the next encounter. I may add that you don't need to ask
for the encounter any longer. An ally can
now come to you in your sleep; while you are talking to your friends;
while you are writing."
"For years I have truly tried to live in accordance with your
teachings," I said. "Obviously I have not done
well. How can I do better now?"
"You think and talk too much. You must stop talking to yourself."
"What do you mean?"
"You talk to yourself too much. You're not unique at that. Every one of
us does that. We carry on an internal
talk. Think about it. Whenever you are alone, what do you do?"
"I talk to myself."
"What do you talk to yourself about?"
"I don't know; anything, I suppose."
"I'll tell you what we talk to ourselves about. We talk about our
world. In fact we maintain our world with
our internal talk."
"How do we do that?"
"Whenever we finish talking to ourselves the world is always as it
should be. We renew it, we kindle it with
life, we uphold it with our internal talk. Not only that, but we also
choose our paths as we talk to ourselves. Thus
we repeat the same choices over and over until the day we die, because
we keep on repeating the same internal
talk over and over until the day we die.
"A warrior is aware of this and strives to stop his talking. This is
the last point you have to know if you want
to live like a warrior."
"How can I stop talking to myself?"
"First of all you must use your ears to take some of the burden from
your eyes. We have been using our eyes
to judge the world since the time we were born. We talk to others and
to ourselves mainly about what we see. A
warrior is aware of that and listens to the world; he listens to the
sounds of the world."
I put my notes away. Don Juan laughed and said that he did not mean I
should force the issue, that listening
to the sounds of the world had to be done harmoniously and with great
patience.
"A warrior is aware that the world will change as soon as he stops
talking to himself," he said, "and he must
be prepared for that monumental jolt."
"What do you mean, don Juan?"
"The world is such-and-such or so-and-so only because we tell ourselves
that that is the way it is. If we stop
telling ourselves that the world is so-and-so, the world will stop
being so-and-so. At this moment I don't think
you're ready for such a momentous blow, therefore you must start slowly
to undo the world."
"I really do not understand you!"
"Your problem is that you confuse the world with what people do. Again
you're not unique at that. Every one
of us does that. The things people do are the shields against the
forces that surround us; what we do as people
gives us comfort and makes us feel safe; what people do is rightfully
very important, but only as a shield. We
never learn that the things we do as people are only shields and we let
them dominate and topple our lives. In fact
I could say that for mankind, what people do is greater and more
important than the world itself."
"What do you call the world?"
"The world is all that is encased here," he said, and stomped the
ground. "Life, death, people, the allies, and
everything else that surrounds us. The world is incomprehensible. We
won't ever understand it; we won't ever
unravel its secrets. Thus we must treat it as it is, a sheer mystery!
"An average man doesn't do this, though. The world is never a mystery
for him, and when he arrives at old
age he is convinced he has nothing more to live for. An old man has not
exhausted the world. He has exhausted
only what people do. But in his stupid confusion he believes that the
world has no more mysteries for him. What
a wretched price to pay for our shields!
112
"A warrior is aware of this confusion and learns to treat things
properly. The things that people do cannot
under any conditions be more important than the world. And thus a
warrior treats the world as an endless mystery
and what people do as an endless folly."
113
15
I began the exercise of listening to the "sounds of the world" and kept
at it for two months, as don Juan had
specified. It was excruciating at first to listen and not look, but
even more excruciating was not to talk to myself.
By the end of the two months I was capable of shutting off my internal
dialogue for short periods of time and I
was also capable of paying attention to sounds.
I arrived at don Juan's house at 9:00 A.M. on November 10, 1969.
"We should start that trip right now," he said upon my arrival at his
house.
I rested for an hour and then we drove toward the low slopes of the
mountains to the east. We left my car in
the care of one of his friends who lived in that area while we hiked
into the mountains. Don Juan had put some
crackers and sweet rolls in a knapsack for me. There were enough
provisions for a day or two. I had asked don
Juan if we needed more. He shook his head negatively.
We walked the entire morning. It was a rather warm day. I carried one
canteen of water, most of which I
drank myself. Don Juan drank only twice. When there was no more water
he assured me it was all right to drink
from the streams we found on our way. He laughed at my reluctance.
After a short while my thirst made me
overcome my fears.
In the early afternoon we stopped in a small valley at the bottom of
some lush green hills. Behind the hills,
toward the east, the high mountains were silhouetted against a cloudy
sky.
"You can think, you can write about what we say or about what you
perceive, but nothing about where we
are," he said.
We rested for a while and then he took a bundle from inside his shirt.
He untied it and showed me his pipe.
He filled its bowl with smoking mixture, lighted a match and kindled a
small dry twig, placed the burning twig
inside the bowl, and told me to smoke. Without a piece of charcoal
inside the bowl it was difficult to light the
pipe; we had to keep kindling twigs until the mixture caught on fire.
When I had finished smoking he said that
we were there so I could find out the kind of game I was supposed to
hunt. He carefully repeated three or four
times that the most important aspect of my endeavor was to find some
holes. He emphasized the word "holes"
and said that inside them a sorcerer could find all sorts of messages
and directions.
I wanted to ask what kind of holes they were; don Juan seemed to have
guessed my question and said that
they were impossible to describe and were in the realm of "seeing." He
repeated at various times that I should
focus all my attention on listening to sounds and do my best to find
the holes between the sounds. He said that he
was going to play his spirit catcher four times. I was supposed to use
those eerie calls as a guide to the ally that
had welcomed me; that ally would then give me the message I was
seeking. Don Juan told me I should stay in
complete alertness, since he had no idea how the ally would manifest
himself to me.
I listened attentively. I was sitting with my back against the rock
side of the hill. I experienced a mild
numbness. Don Juan warned me against closing my eyes. I began to listen
and I could distinguish the whistling
of birds, the wind rustling the leaves, the buzzing of insects. As I
placed my individual attention on those sounds,
I could actually make out four different types of bird whistlings. I
could distinguish the speeds of the wind, in
terms of slow or fast; I could also hear the different rustlings of
three types of leaves. The buzzings of insects
were dazzling. There were so many that I could not count them or
correctly differentiate them.
I was immersed in a strange world of sound, as I had never been in my
life. I began to slide to my right. Don
Juan made a motion to stop me but I caught myself before he did. I
straightened up and sat erect again. Don Juan
moved my body until he had propped me on a crevice in the rock wall. He
swept the small rocks from under my
legs and placed the back of my head against the rock.
He told me imperatively to look at the mountains to the southeast. I
fixed my gaze in the distance but he
corrected me and said I should not gaze but look, sort of scanning, at
the hills in front of me and at the vegetation
on them. He repeated over and over that I should concentrate all my
attention on my hearing.
Sounds began to be prominent again. It was not so much that I wanted to
hear them; rather, they had a way of
forcing me to concentrate on them. The wind rustled the leaves. The
wind came high above the trees and then it
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dropped into the valley where we were. Upon dropping, it touched the
leaves of the tall trees first; they made a
peculiar sound which I fancied to be a sort of rich, raspy, lush sound.
Then the wind hit the bushes and their
leaves sounded like a crowd of small things; it was an almost melodious
sound, very engulfing and quite
demanding; it seemed capable of drowning everything else. I found it
displeasing. I felt embarrassed because it
occurred to me that I was like the rustle of the bushes, nagging and
demanding. The sound was so akin to me that
I hated it. Then I heard the wind rolling on the ground. It was not a
rustling sound but more of a whistle, almost a
beep or a flat buzz. Listening to the sounds the wind was making, I
realized that all three of them happened at
once. I was wondering how I had been capable of isolating each of them,
when I again became aware of the
whistling of birds and the buzzing of insects. At one moment there were
only the sounds of the wind and the next
moment a gigantic flow of other sounds emerged at once into my field of
awareness. Logically, all the existing
sounds must have been continually emitted during the time I was hearing
only the wind.
I could not count all the whistles of birds or buzzings of insects, yet
I was convinced I was listening to each
separate sound as it was produced. Together they created a most
extraordinary order. I cannot call it any other
thing but "order." It was an order of sounds that had a pattern; that
is, every sound happened in sequence.
Then I heard a unique prolonged wail. It made me shiver. Every other
noise ceased for an instant, and the
valley was dead still as the reverberation of the wail reached the
valley's outer limits; then the noises began again.
I picked up their pattern immediately. After a moment of attentive
listening I thought I understood don Juan's
recommendation to watch for the holes between the sounds. The pattern
of noises had spaces in between sounds!
For example, specific whistles of birds were timed and had pauses in
between them, and so had all the other
sounds I was perceiving. The rustling of leaves was like a binding glue
that made them into a homogeneous buzz.
The fact of the matter was that the timing of each sound was a unit in
the overall pattern of sounds. Thus the
spaces or pauses in between sounds were, if I paid attention to them,
holes in a structure.
I heard again the piercing wail of don Juan's spirit catcher. It did
not jolt me, but the sounds again ceased for
an instant and I perceived such a cessation as a hole, a very large
hole. At that precise moment I shifted my
attention from hearing to looking. I was looking at a cluster of low
hills with lush green vegetation. The
silhouette of the hills was arranged in such a way that from the place
where I was looking there seemed to be a
hole on the side of one of the hills. It was a space in between two
hills and through it I could see the deep, dark,
gray hue of the mountains in the distance. For a moment I did not know
what it was. It was as if the hole I was
looking at was the "hole" in the sound. Then the noises began again but
the visual image of the huge hole
remained. A short while later I became even more keenly aware of the
pattern of sounds and their order and the
arrangement of their pauses. My mind was capable of distinguishing and
discriminating among an enormous
number of individual sounds. I could actually keep track of all the
sounds, thus each pause between sounds was a
definite hole. At a given moment the pauses became crystallized in my
mind and formed a sort of solid grid, a
structure. I was not seeing or hearing it. I was feeling it with some
unknown part of myself.
Don Juan played his string once again; the sounds ceased as they had
done before, creating a huge hole in the
sound structure. This time, however, that big pause blended with the
hole in the hills I was looking at; they
became superimposed on each other. The effect of perceiving two holes
lasted for such a long time that I was
capable of seeing-hearing their contours as they fit one another. Then
the other sounds began again and their
structure of pauses became an extraordinary, almost visual perception.
I began seeing the sounds as they created
patterns and then all those patterns became superimposed on the
environment in the same way I had perceived
the two big holes becoming superimposed. I was not looking or hearing
as I was accustomed to doing. I was
doing something which was entirely different but combined features of
both. For some reason my attention was
focused on the large hole in the hills. I felt I was hearing it and at
the same time looking at it. There was
something of a lure about it. It dominated my field of perception and
every single sound pattern which coincided
with a feature of the environment was hinged on that hole.
I heard once more the eerie wail of don Juan's spirit catcher; all
other sounds stopped; the two large holes
seemed to light up and next I was looking again at the plowed field;
the ally was standing there as I had seen him
before. The light of the total scene became very clear. I could see him
plainly, as if he were fifty yards away. I
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could not see his face; his hat covered it. Then he began to come
toward me, lifting up his head slowly as he
walked; I could almost see his face and that terrified me. I knew I had
to stop him without delay, I had a strange
surge in my body; I felt an outflow of "power." I wanted to move my
head to the side to stop the vision but I
could not do it. At that crucial instant a thought came to my mind. I
knew what don Juan meant when he spoke of
the items of a "path with heart" being the shields. There was something
I wanted to do in my life, something very
consuming and intriguing, something that tilled me with great peace and
joy. I knew the ally could not overcome
me. I moved my head away without any trouble before I could see his
entire face.
I began hearing all the other sounds; they suddenly became very loud
and shrill, as if they were actually
angry with me. They lost their patterns and turned into an amorphous
conglomerate of sharp, painful shrieks. My
ears began to buzz under their pressure. I felt that my head was about
to explode. I stood up and put the palms of
my hands to my ears.
Don Juan helped me walk to a very small stream, made me take off my
clothes, and rolled me in the water.
He made me lie on the almost dry bed of the stream and then gathered
water in his hat and splashed me with it.
The pressure in my ears subsided very rapidly and it took only a few
minutes to "wash" me. Don Juan looked
at me, shook his head in approval, and said I had made myself "solid"
in no time at all.
I put on my clothes and he took me back to the place where I had been
sitting. I felt extremely vigorous,
buoyant, and clearheaded.
He wanted to know all the details of my vision. He said that the
"holes" in the sounds were used by sorcerers
to find out specific things. A sorcerer's ally would reveal complicated
affairs through the holes in the sounds. He
refused to be more specific about the "holes" and sloughed off my
questions, saying that since I did not have an
ally such information would only be harmful to me.
"Everything is meaningful for a sorcerer," he said. "The sounds have
holes in them and so does everything
around you. Ordinarily a man does not have the speed to catch the
holes, and thus he goes through life without
protection. The worms, the birds, the trees, all of them can tell us
unimaginable things if only one could have the
speed to grasp their message. The smoke can give us that grasping
speed. But we must be on good terms with all
the living things of this world. This is the reason why we must talk to
plants we are about to kill and apologize
for hurting them; the same thing must be done with the animals we are
going to hunt. We should take only
enough for our needs, otherwise the plants and the animals and the
worms we have killed would turn against us
and cause us disease and misfortune. A warrior is aware of this and
strives to appease them, so when he peers
through the holes, the trees and birds and the worms give him truthful
messages.
"But all this is not important now. What is important is that you saw
the ally. That is your game! I've told you
that we were going to hunt for something. I thought it was going to be
an animal. I figured that you were going to
see the animal we had to hunt. I myself saw a wild boar; my spirit
catcher is a wild boar."
"Do you mean your spirit catcher is made out of a wild boar?"
"No! Nothing in the life of a sorcerer is made out of anything else. If
something is anything at all, it is the
thing itself. If you knew wild boars you would realize my spirit
catcher is one."
"Why did we come here to hunt?"
"The ally showed you a spirit catcher that he got from his pouch. You
need to have one if you are going to
call him."
"What is a spirit catcher?"
"It is a fiber. With it I can call the allies, or my own ally, or I can
call the spirits of water holes, the spirits of
rivers, the spirits of mountains. Mine is a wild boar and cries like a
wild boar. I used it twice around you to call
the spirit of the water hole to help you. The spirit came to you as the
ally came to you today. You could not see it,
though, because you did not have the speed; however, that day I took
you to the water canyon and put you on a
rock, you knew the spirit was almost on top of you without actually
seeing it. Those spirits are helpers. They are
hard to handle and sort of dangerous. One needs an impeccable will to
hold them at bay."
"What do they look like?"
"They are different for every man and so are the allies. For you an
ally would apparently look like a man you
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once knew, or like a man you will always be about to know; that's the
bent of your nature. You are given to
mysteries and secrets. I'm not like you, so an ally for me is something
very precise.
"The spirits of water holes are proper to specific places. The one I
called to help you is one I have known
myself. It has helped me many times. Its abode is that canyon. At the
time I called it to help you, you were not
strong and the spirit took you hard. That was not its
intention—they have none—but you were lying there
very
weak, weaker than I suspected. Later on the spirit nearly lured you to
your death; in the water at the irrigation
canal you were phosphorescent. The spirit took you by surprise and you
nearly succumbed. Once a spirit does
that, it always comes back for its prey. I'm sure it will come back for
you. Unfortunately, you need the water to
become solid again when you use the little smoke; that puts you at a
terrible disadvantage. If you don't use the
water you will probably die, but if you do use it, the spirit will take
you."
"Can I use water at another place?"
"It doesn't make any difference. The spirit of the water hole around my
house can follow you anywhere,
unless you have a spirit catcher. That is why the ally showed it to
you. He told you that you need one. He
wrapped it around his left hand and came to you after pointing out the
water canyon. Today he again wanted to
show you the spirit catcher, as he did the first time you met him. It
was wise of you to stop; the ally was going
too fast for your strength and a direct jolt with him would be very
injurious to you."
"How can I get a spirit catcher now?"
"Apparently the ally is going to give you one himself."
"How?"
"I don't know. You will have to go to him. He has already told you
where to look for it."
"Where?"
"Up there, on those hills where you saw the hole."
"Would I be looking for the ally himself?"
"No. But he is already welcoming you. The little smoke has opened your
way to him. Then, later on, you will
meet him face to face, but that will happen only after you know him
very well."
117
16
We arrived in the same valley in the late afternoon of December 15,
1969. Don Juan mentioned repeatedly as
we moved through the shrubs that directions or points of orientation
were of crucial importance in the endeavor I
was going to undertake.
"You must determine the right direction immediately upon arriving at
the top of a hill," don Juan said. "As
soon as you are on the top, face that direction." He pointed to the
southeast.
"That is your good direction and you should always face it, especially
when you're in trouble. Remember
that."
We stopped at the bottom of the hills where I had perceived the hole.
He pointed at a specific place where I
had to sit down; he sat next to me and in a very quiet voice gave me
detailed instructions. He said that as soon as
I reached the hilltop I had to extend my right arm in front of me with
the palm of my hand down and my fingers
stretched like a fan, except the thumb, which had to be tucked against
the palm. Next I had to turn my head to the
north and fold my arm over my chest, pointing my hand also toward the
north; then I had to dance, putting my
left foot behind the right one, beating the ground with the tip of my
left toes. He said that when I felt a warmth
coming up my left leg I had to begin sweeping my arm slowly from north
to south and then to the north again.
"The spot over which the palm of your hand feels warm as you sweep your
arm is the place where you must
sit, and it is also the direction in which you must look," he said.
"If the spot is toward the east, or if it is in that
direction"—he pointed to the southeast again—"the
results
will be excellent. If the spot where your hand gets warm is toward the
north, you will take a bad beating but you
may turn the tide in your favor. If the spot is toward the south you
will have a hard fight.
"You will need to sweep your arm up to four times at first, but as you
become more familiar with the
movement you will need only one single sweep to know whether or not
your hand is going to get warm.
"Once you establish a spot where your hand gets warm, sit there; that
is your first point If you are facing the
south or the north, you have to make up your mind whether you feel
strong enough to stay. If you have doubts
about yourself, get up and leave. There is no need to stay if you are
not confident. If you decide to stick around,
clean an area big enough to build a fire about five feet away from your
first point. The fire must be in a straight
line in the direction you are looking. The area where you build the
fire is your second point. Then gather all the
twigs you can in between those two points and make a fire. Sit on your
first point and look at the fire. Sooner or
later the spirit will come and you will see it.
"If your hand does not get warm at all after four sweeping movements,
sweep your arm slowly from north to
south and then turn around and sweep it to the west. If your hand gets
warm on any place toward the west, drop
everything and rum. Run downhill toward the flat area, and no matter
what you hear or feel behind you, don't
turn around. As soon as you get to the flat area, no matter how
frightened you are, don't keep on running, drop to
the ground, take off your jacket, bunch it around your navel, and curl
up like a ball, tucking your knees against
your stomach. You must also cover your eyes with your hands, and your
arms have to remain tight against your
thighs. You must stay in that position until morning. If you follow
these simple steps no harm will ever come to
you.
"In case you cannot get to the flat area in time, drop to the ground
right where you are. You will have a
horrid time there. You will be harassed, but if you keep calm and don't
move or look you will come out of it
without a single scratch.
"Now if your hand does not get warm at all while you sweep it to the
west, face the east again and run in an
easterly direction until you are out of breath. Stop there and repeat
the same maneuvers. You must keep on running
toward the east, repeating these movements, until your hand gets warm."
After giving me these instructions he made me repeat them until I had
memorized them. Then we sat in
silence for a long time. I attempted to revive the conversation a
couple of times, but he forced me into silence
each time by an imperative gesture.
It was getting dark when don Juan got up and without a word began
climbing the hill. I followed him. At the
118
top of the hill I performed all the movements he had prescribed. Don
Juan stood by, a short distance away, and
kept a sharp look on me. I was very careful and deliberately slow. I
tried to feel any perceivable change of
temperature, but I could not detect whether or not the palm of my hand
became warm. By that time it was fairly
dark, yet I was still capable of running in an easterly direction
without stumbling on the shrubs. I stopped running
when I was out of breath, which was not too far from my point of
departure. I was extremely tired and tense. My
forearms ached and so did my calves.
I repeated there all the required motions and again had the same
negative results. I ran in the dark two more
times, and then, while I was sweeping my arm for the third time, my
hand became warm over a point toward the
east. It was such a definite change of temperature that it startled me.
I sat down and waited for don Juan. I told
him I had detected a change in temperature in my hand. He told me to
proceed, and I picked all the dry brush I
could find and started a fire. He sat to my left a couple of feet away.
The fire drew strange, dancing silhouettes. At times the flames became
iridescent; they grew bluish and then
brilliantly white. I explained that unusual play of colors by assuming
that it was produced by some chemical
property of the specific dry twigs and branches I had collected.
Another very unusual feature of the fire was the
sparks. The new twigs I kept adding created extremely big sparks. I
thought they were like tennis balls that
seemed to explode in midair.
I stared at the fire fixedly, the way I believed don Juan had
recommended, and I became dizzy. He handed
me his water gourd and signaled me to drink. The water relaxed me and
gave me a delightful feeling of freshness.
Don Juan leaned over and whispered in my ear that I did not have to
stare at the flames, that I should only
watch in the direction of the fire. I became very cold and clammy after
watching for almost an hour. At a moment
when I was about to lean over and pick up a twig, something like a moth
or a spot in my retina swept across from
right to left between myself and the fire. I immediately recoiled. I
looked at don Juan and he signaled me with a
movement of his chin to look back at the flames. A moment later the
same shadow swept across in the opposite
direction. Don Juan got up hurriedly and began piling loose dirt on top
of the burning twigs until he had
completely extinguished the flames. He executed the maneuver of putting
out the fire with tremendous speed. By
the time I moved to help him he had finished. He stomped on the dirt on
top of the smoldering twigs and then he
nearly dragged me downhill and out of the valley. He walked very fast
without turning his head back and did not
allow me to talk at all.
When we got to my car hours later I asked him what was the thing I had
seen. He shook his head
imperatively and we drove in complete silence.
He went directly inside when we arrived at his house in the early
morning, and he again hushed me up when
I tried to talk.
Don Juan was sitting outside, behind his house. He seemed to have been
waiting for me to wake up, because
he started talking as I came out of the house. He said that the shadow
I had seen the night before was a spirit, a
force that belonged to the particular place where I had seen it. He
spoke of that specific being as a useless one.
"It only exists there," he said. "It has no secrets of power, so there
was no point in remaining there. You
would have seen only a fast, passing shadow going back and forth all
night. There are other types of beings, however,
that can give you secrets of power, if you are fortunate enough to find
them."
We ate some breakfast then and did not talk for quite a while. After
eating we sat in front of his house.
"There are three kinds of beings," he said suddenly, "those that cannot
give anything because they have
nothing to give, those that can only cause fright, and those that have
gifts. The one you saw last night was a silent
one; it has nothing to give; it is only a shadow. Most of the time,
however, another type of being is associated
with the silent one, a nasty spirit whose only quality is to cause fear
and which always hovers around the abode
of a silent one. That is why I decided to get out of there fast. That
nasty type follows people right into their
homes and makes life impossible for them. I know people who have had to
move out of their houses because of
them. There are always some people who believe they can get a lot out
of that kind of being, but the mere fact
that a spirit is around the house does not mean anything. People may
try to entice it, or they may follow it around
119
the house under the impression that it can reveal secrets to them. But
the only thing people would get is a
frightful experience. I know people who took turns watching one of
those nasty beings that had followed them
into their house. They watched the spirit for months; finally someone
else had to step in and drag the people out
of the house; they had become weak and were wasting away. So the only
wise thing one can do with that nasty
type is to forget about it and leave it alone."
I asked him how people enticed a spirit. He said that people took pains
to figure out first where the spirit
would most likely appear and then they put weapons in its way, in hopes
that it might touch the weapons,
because spirits were known to like paraphernalia of war. Don Juan said
that any kind of gear, or any object, that
was touched by a spirit rightfully became a power object. However, the
nasty type of being was known never to
touch anything, but only to produce the auditory illusion of noise.
I then asked don Juan about the manner in which those spirits caused
fear. He said that their most common
way of frightening people was to appear as a dark shadow shaped as a
man that would roam around the house,
creating a frightening clatter or creating the sound of voices, or as a
dark shadow that would suddenly lurch out
from a dark corner.
Don Juan said that the third type of spirit was a true ally, a giver of
secrets; that special type existed in lonely,
abandoned places, places which were almost inaccessible. He said that a
man who wished to find one of these
beings had to travel far and go by himself. At a distant and lonely
place the man had to take all the necessary
steps alone. He had to sit by his fire and if he saw the shadow he had
to leave immediately. He had to remain,
however, if he encountered other conditions, such as a strong wind that
would kill his fire and would keep him
from kindling it again during four attempts; or if a branch broke from
a nearby tree. The branch really had to
break and the man had to make sure that it was not merely the sound of
a branch breaking off.
Other conditions he had to be aware of were rocks that rolled, or
pebbles which were thrown at his fire, or
any constant noise, and he then had to walk in the direction in which
any of these phenomena occurred until the
spirit revealed itself.
There were many ways in which such a being put a warrior to the test.
It might suddenly leap in front of him,
in the most horrendous appearance, or it might grab the man from the
back and not turn him loose and keep him
pinned down for hours. It might also topple a tree on him. Don Juan
said that those were truly dangerous forces,
and although they could not kill a man hand to hand, they could cause
his death by fright, or by actually letting
objects fall on him, or by appearing suddenly and causing him to
stumble, lose his footing, and go over a
precipice.
He told me that if I ever found one of those beings under inappropriate
circumstances I should never attempt
to struggle with it because it would kill me. It would rob my soul. So
I should throw myself to the ground and
bear it until the morning.
"When a man is facing the ally, the giver of secrets, he has to muster
up all his courage and grab it before it
grabs him, or chase it before it chases him. The chase must be
relentless and then comes the struggle. The man
must wrestle the spirit to the ground and keep it there until it gives
him power."
I asked him if these forces had substance, if one could really touch
them. I said that the very idea of a "spirit"
connoted something ethereal to me.
"Don't call them spirits," he said. "Call them allies; call them
inexplicable forces."
He was silent for a while, then he lay on his back and propped his head
on his folded arms. I insisted on
knowing if those beings had substance.
"You're damn right they have substance," he said after another moment
of silence. "When one struggles with
them they are solid, but that feeling lasts only a moment. Those beings
rely on a man's fear; therefore if the man
struggling with one of them is a warrior, the being loses its tension
very quickly while the man becomes more
vigorous. One can actually absorb the spirit's tension."
"What kind of tension is that?" I asked.
"Power. When one touches them, they vibrate as if they were ready to
rip one apart. But that is only a show.
The tension ends when the man maintains his grip."
120
"What happens when they lose their tension? Do they become like air?"
"No, they just become flaccid. They still have substance, though. But
it is not like anything one has ever
touched."
Later on, during the evening, I said to him that perhaps what I had
seen the night before could have been only
a moth. He laughed and very patiently explained that moths fly back and
forth only around light bulbs, because a
light bulb cannot burn their wings. A fire, on the other hand, would
burn them the first time they came close to it.
He also pointed out that the shadow covered the entire fire. When he
mentioned that, I remembered that it was
really an extremely large shadow and that it actually blocked the view
of the fire for an instant. However, it had
happened so fast that I had not emphasized it in my earlier
recollection.
Then he pointed out that the sparks were very large and flew to my
left. I had noticed that myself. I said that
the wind was probably blowing in that direction. Don Juan replied that
there was no wind whatsoever. That was
true. Upon recalling my experience I could remember that the night was
still.
Another thing I had completely overlooked was a greenish glow in the
flames, which I detected when don
Juan signaled me to keep on looking at the fire, after the shadow had
first crossed my field of vision. Don Juan
reminded me of it. He also objected to my calling it a shadow. He said
it was round and more like a bubble.
Two days later, on December 17, 1969, don Juan said in a very casual
tone that I knew all the details and
necessary techniques in order to go to the hills by myself and obtain a
power object, the spirit catcher. He urged
me to proceed alone and affirmed that his company would only hinder me.
I was ready to leave when he seemed to change his mind.
"You're not strong enough," he said. "I'll go with you to the bottom of
the hills."
When we were at the small valley where I had seen the ally, he examined
from a distance the formation in
the terrain that I had called a hole in the hills, and said that we had
to go still further south into the distant
mountains. The abode of the ally was at the furthermost point we could
see through the hole.
I looked at the formation and all I could distinguish was the bluish
mass of the distant mountains. He guided
me, however, in a southeasterly direction and after hours of walking we
reached a point he said was "deep
enough" into the ally's abode.
It was late afternoon when we stopped. We sat down on some rocks. I was
tired and hungry; all I had eaten
during the day was some tortillas and water. Don Juan stood up all of a
sudden, looked at the sky, and told me in
a commanding tone to take off in the direction that was the best for me
and to be sure I could remember the spot
where we were at the moment, so I could return there whenever I was
through. He said in a reassuring tone that
he would be waiting for me if it took me forever, I asked
apprehensively if he believed that the affair of getting a
spirit catcher was going to take a long time.
"Who knows?" he said, smiling mysteriously.
I walked away toward the southeast, turning around a couple of times to
look at don Juan. He was walking
very slowly in the opposite direction. I climbed to the top of a large
hill and looked at don Juan once again; he
was a good two hundred yards away. He did not turn to look at me. I ran
downhill into a small bowl-like
depression between the hills, and I suddenly found myself alone. I sat
down for a moment and began to wonder
what I was doing there. I felt ludicrous looking for a spirit catcher.
I ran back up to the top of the hill to have a
better view of don Juan but I could not see him anywhere. I ran
downhill in the direction I had last seen him. I
wanted to call off the whole affair and go home. I felt quite stupid
and tired.
"Don Juan!" I yelled over and over.
He was nowhere in sight. I again ran to the top of another steep hill;
I could not see him from there either. I
ran quite a way looking for him but he had disappeared. I retraced my
steps and went back to the original place
where he had left me. I had the absurd certainty I was going to find
him sitting there laughing at my inconsistencies.
"What in the hell have I gotten into?" I said loudly.
I knew then that there was no way to stop whatever I was doing there. I
really did not know how to go back
to my car. Don Juan had changed directions various times and the
general orientation of the four cardinal points
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was not enough. I was afraid of getting lost in the mountains. I sat
down and for the first time in my life I had the
strange feeling that there never really was a way to revert back to an
original point of departure. Don Juan had
said that I always insisted on starting at a point I called the
beginning, when in effect the beginning did not exist.
And there in the middle of those mountains I felt I understood what he
meant It was as if the point of departure
had always been myself; it was as if don Juan had never really been
there; and when I looked for him he became
what he really was—a fleeting image that vanished over a hill.
I heard the soft rustle of leaves and a strange fragrance enveloped me.
I felt the wind as a pressure on my
ears, like a shy buzzing. The sun was about to reach some compact
clouds over the horizon that looked like a
solidly tinted orange band, when it disappeared behind a heavy blanket
of lower clouds; it appeared again a
moment later, like a crimson ball floating in the mist. It seemed to
struggle for a while to get into a patch of blue
sky but it was as if the clouds would not give the sun time, and then
the orange band and the dark silhouette of
the mountains seemed to swallow it up.
I lay down on my back. The world around me was so still, so serene and
at the same time so alien, I felt
overwhelmed. I did not want to weep but tears rolled down easily.
I remained in that position for hours. I was almost unable to get up.
The rocks under me were hard, and right
where I had lain down there was scarcely any vegetation, in contrast to
the lush green bushes all around. From
where I was I could see a fringe of tall trees on the eastern hills.
Finally it got fairly dark. I felt better; in fact I felt almost happy.
For me the semidarkness was much more
nurturing and protective than the hard daylight.
I stood up, climbed to the top of a small hill, and began repeating the
motions don Juan had taught me. I ran
toward the east seven times, and then I noticed a change of temperature
on my hand. I built a fire and set a
careful watch, as don Juan had recommended, observing every detail.
Hours went by and I began to feel very
tired and cold. I had gathered quite a pile of dry twigs; I fed the
fire and moved closer to it. The vigil was so
strenuous and so intense that it exhausted me; I began to nod. I fell
asleep twice and woke up only when my head
bobbed to one side. I was so sleepy that I could not watch the fire any
more. I drank some water and even
sprinkled some on my face to keep awake. I succeeded in fighting my
sleepiness only for brief moments. I had
somehow become despondent and irritable; I felt utterly stupid being
there and that gave me a sensation of
irrational frustration and dejection. I was tired, hungry, sleepy, and
absurdly annoyed with myself. I finally gave
up the struggle of keeping awake. I added a lot of dry twigs to the
fire and lay down to sleep. The pursuit of an
ally and a spirit catcher was at that moment a most ludicrous and
foreign endeavor. I was so sleepy that I could
not even think or talk to myself. I fell asleep.
I was awakened suddenly by a loud crack. It appeared that the noise,
whatever it was, had come from just
above my left ear, since I was lying on my right side. I sat up fully
awake. My left ear buzzed and was deafened
by the proximity and force of the sound.
I must have been asleep for only a short while, judging by the amount
of dry twigs which were still burning
in the fire. I did not hear any other noises but I remained alert and
kept on feeding the fire.
The thought crossed my mind that perhaps what woke me up was a gunshot;
perhaps someone was around
watching me, taking shots at me. The thought became very anguishing and
created an avalanche of rational fears.
I was sure that someone owned that land, and if that was so they might
take me for a thief and kill me, or they
might kill me to rob me, not knowing that I had nothing with me. I
experienced a moment of terrible concern for
my safety. I felt the tension in my shoulders and my neck. I moved my
head up and down; the bones of my neck
made a cracking sound. I still kept looking into the fire but I did not
see anything unusual in it, nor did I hear any
noises.
After a while I relaxed quite a bit and it occurred to me that perhaps
don Juan was at the bottom of all this. I
rapidly became convinced that it was so. The thought made me laugh. I
had another avalanche of rational
conclusions, nappy conclusions this time. I thought that don Juan must
have suspected I was going to change my
mind about staying in the mountains, or he must have seen me running
after him and taken cover in a concealed
cave or behind a bush. Then he had followed me and, noticing I had
fallen asleep, waked me up by cracking a
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branch near my ear. I added more twigs to the fire and began to look
around in a casual and covert manner to see
if I could spot him, even though I knew that if he was hiding around
there I would not be able to discover him.
Everything was quite placid: the crickets, the wind roughing the trees
on the slopes of the hills surrounding
me, the soft, cracking sound of the twigs catching on fire. Sparks flew
around, but they were only ordinary
sparks.
Suddenly I heard the loud noise of a branch snapping in two. The sound
came from my left. I held my breath
as I listened with utmost concentration. An instant later I heard
another branch snapping on my right.
Then I heard the faint faraway sound of snapping branches. It was as if
someone was stepping on them and
making them crack. The sounds were rich and full, they had a lusty
quality. They also seemed to be getting closer
to where I was. I had a very slow reaction and did not know whether to
listen or stand up. I was deliberating what
to do when all of a sudden the sound of snapping branches happened all
around me. I was engulfed by them so
fast that I barely had time to jump to my feet and stomp on the fire.
I began to run downhill in the darkness. The thought crossed my mind as
I moved through the shrubs that
there was no flat land. I kept on trotting and trying to protect my
eyes from the bushes. I was halfway down to the
bottom of the hill when I felt something behind me, almost touching me.
It was not a branch; it was something
which I intuitively felt was overtaking me. This realization made me
freeze. I took off my jacket, bundled it on
my stomach, crouched over my legs, and covered my eyes with my hands,
as don Juan had prescribed. I kept that
position for a short while and then I realized that everything around
me was dead still. There were no sounds of
any kind. I became extraordinarily alarmed. The muscles of my stomach
contracted and shivered spasmodically.
Then I heard another cracking sound. It seemed to have occurred far
away, but it was extremely clear and
distinct. It happened once more, closer to me. There was an interval of
quietness and then something exploded
just above my head. The suddenness of the noise made me jump
involuntarily and I nearly rolled over on my
side. It was definitely the sound of a branch being snapped in two. The
sound had happened so close that I heard
the rustling of the branch leaves as it was being cracked.
Next there was a downpour of cracking explosions; branches were bein