Don Juan often took me and the rest of his apprentices on short trips to the western range nearby. On this occasion we left at dawn, and late in the afternoon, started back. I chose to walk with don Juan. To be close to him always soothed and relaxed me, whereas being with his volatile apprentices always produced in me the opposite effect: They made me feel very tired.
As we all came down from the mountains, don Juan and I made one stop before we reached the flatlands. An attack of profound melancholy came upon me with such speed and strength that all I could do was to sit down. Then, following don Juan's suggestion, I lay on my stomach, on top of a large round boulder.
The rest of the apprentices taunted me and continued walking. I heard their laughter and yelling become faint in the distance. Don Juan urged me to relax and let my assemblage point, which he said had moved with sudden speed, settle into its new position.
"Don't fret," he advised me. "In a short while, you'll feel a sort of tug, or a pat on your back, as if someone has touched you. Then you'll be fine."
The act of lying motionless on the boulder, waiting to feel the pat on my back, triggered a spontaneous recollection so intense and clear that I never noticed the pat I was expecting. I was sure, however, that I got it, because my melancholy indeed vanished instantly.
I quickly described what I was recollecting to don Juan. He suggested I stay on the boulder and move my assemblage point back to the exact place it was when I experienced the event that I was recalling.
"Get every detail of it," he warned.
It had happened many years before. Don Juan and I had been at that time in the state of Chihuahua in northern Mexico, in the high desert. I used to go there with him because it was an area rich in the medicinal herbs he collected.
From an anthropological point of view that area also held a tremendous interest for me. Archaeologists had found, not too long before, the remains of what they concluded was a large, prehistoric trading post. They surmised that the trading post, strategically situated in a natural passway, had been the epicenter of commerce along a trade route which joined the American Southwest to southern Mexico and Central America.
The few times I had been in that flat, high desert had reinforced my conviction that archaeologists were right in their conclusions that it was a natural passkey. I, of course, had lectured don Juan on the influence of that passway in the prehistoric distribution of cultural traits on the North American continent. I was deeply interested at that time in explaining sorcery among the Indians of the American Southwest, Mexico, and Central America as a system of beliefs which had been transmitted along trade routes and which had served to create, at a certain abstract level, a sort of pre-Columbian pan-Indianism.
Don Juan, naturally, laughed uproariously every time I expounded my theories.
The event that I recollected had begun in the midafternoon. After don Juan and I had gathered two small sacks of some extremely rare medicinal herbs, we took a break and sat down on top of some huge boulders. But before we headed back to where I had left my car, don Juan insisted on talking about the art of stalking. He said that the setting was the most adequate one for explaining its intricacies, but that in order to understand them I first had to enter into heightened awareness.
I demanded that before he do anything he explain to me again what heightened awareness really was.
Don Juan, displaying great patience, discussed heightened awareness in terms of the movement of the assemblage point. As he kept talking, I realized the facetiousness [* facetiousness- playful humour] of my request. I knew everything he was telling me. I remarked that I did not really need anything explained, and he said that explanations were never wasted, because they were imprinted in us for immediate or later use; or to help prepare our way to reaching silent knowledge.
When I asked him to talk about silent knowledge in more detail, he quickly responded that silent knowledge was a general position of the assemblage point, that ages ago it had been man's normal position, but that, for reasons which would be impossible to determine, man's assemblage point had moved away from that specific location and adopted a new one called "reason."
Don Juan remarked that not every human being was a representative of this new position. The assemblage points of the majority of us were not placed squarely on the location of reason itself, but in its immediate vicinity. The same thing had been the case with silent knowledge: not every human being's assemblage point had been squarely on that location either.
He also said that 'the place of no pity', being another position of the assemblage point, was the forerunner of silent knowledge, and that yet another position of the assemblage point called 'the place of concern', was the forerunner of reason.
I found nothing obscure about those cryptic remarks. To me they were self-explanatory. I understood everything he said while I waited for his usual blow to my shoulder blades to make me enter into heightened awareness. But the blow never came, and I kept on understanding what he was saying without really being aware that I understood anything. The feeling of ease, of taking things for granted, proper to my normal consciousness, remained with me, and I did not question my capacity to understand.
Don Juan looked at me fixedly and recommended that I lie face down on top of a round boulder with my arms and legs spread like a frog.
I lay there for about ten minutes, thoroughly relaxed, almost asleep, until I was jolted out of my slumber by a soft, sustained hissing growl. I raised my head, looked up, and my hair stood on end. A gigantic, dark jaguar was squatting on a boulder, scarcely ten feet from me, right above where don Juan was sitting. The jaguar, its fangs showing, was glaring straight at me. He seemed ready to jump on me,
"Don't move!" don Juan ordered me softly. "And don't look at his eyes. Stare at his nose and don't blink. Your life depends on your stare."
I did what he told me. The jaguar and I stared at each other for a moment until don Juan broke the standoff by hurling his hat, like a frisbee, at the jaguar's head. The jaguar jumped back to avoid being hit, and don Juan let out a loud, prolonged, and piercing whistle. He then yelled at the top of his voice and clapped his hands two or three times. It sounded like muffled gunshots.
Don Juan signaled me to come down from the boulder and join him. The two of us yelled and clapped our hands until he decided we had scared the jaguar away.
My body was shaking, yet I was not frightened. I told don Juan that what had caused me the greatest fear had not been the cat's sudden growl or his stare, but the certainty that the jaguar had been staring at me long before I had heard him and lifted my head.
Don Juan did not say a word about the experience. He was deep in thought. When I began to ask him if he had seen the jaguar before I had, he made an imperious gesture to quiet me. He gave me the impression he was ill at ease or even confused.
After a moment's silence, don Juan signaled me to start walking. He took the lead. We walked away from the rocks, zigzagging at a fast pace through the bush.
After about half an hour we reached a clearing in the chaparral where we stopped to rest for a moment. We had not said a single word and I was eager to know what don Juan was thinking.
"Why are we walking in this pattern?" I asked. "Wouldn't it be better to make a beeline out of here, and fast?"
"No!" he said emphatically. "It wouldn't be any good. That one is a male jaguar. He's hungry and he's going to come after us."
"All the more reason to get out of here fast," I insisted.
"It's not so easy," he said. "That jaguar is not encumbered by reason. He'll know exactly what to do to get us. And as sure as I am talking to you, he'll read our thoughts."
"What do you mean, the jaguar reading our thoughts?" I asked.
"That is no metaphorical statement," he said. "I mean what I say. Big animals like that have the capacity to read thoughts. And I don't mean guess. I mean that they know everything directly."
"What can we do then?" I asked, truly alarmed.
"We ought to become less rational and try to win the battle by making it impossible for the jaguar to read us," he replied.
"How would being less rational help us?" I asked.
"Reason makes us choose what seems sound to the mind," he said. "For instance, your reason already told you to run as fast as you can in a straight line. What your reason failed to consider is that we would have had to run about six miles before reaching the safety of your car. And the jaguar will outrun us. He'll cut in front of us and be waiting in the most appropriate place to jump us.
"A better but less rational choice is to zigzag."
"How do you know that it's better, don Juan?" I asked.
"I know it because my connection to the spirit is very clear," he replied. "That is to say, my assemblage point is at the place of silent knowledge. From there I can discern that this is a hungry jaguar, but not one that has already eaten humans. And he's baffled by our actions. If we zigzag now, the jaguar will have to make an effort to anticipate us."
"Are there any other choices beside zigzagging?" I asked.
"There are only rational choices," he said. "And we don't have all the equipment we need to back up rational choices. For example, we can head for the high ground, but we would need a gun to hold it.
"We must match the jaguar's choices. Those choices are dictated by silent knowledge. We must do what silent knowledge tells us, regardless of how unreasonable it may seem."
He began his zigzagging trot. I followed him very closely, but I had no confidence that running like that would save us. I was having a delayed panic reaction. The thought of the dark, looming shape of the enormous cat obsessed me.
The desert chaparral consisted of tall, ragged bushes spaced four or five feet apart. The limited rainfall in the high desert did not allow the growth of plants with thick foliage or of dense underbrush. Yet the visual effect of the chaparral was of thickness and impenetrable growth.
Don Juan moved with extraordinary nimbleness and I followed as best as I could. He suggested that I watch where I stepped and make less noise. He said that the sound of branches cracking under my weight was a dead giveaway.
I deliberately tried to step in don Juan's tracks to avoid breaking dry branches. We zigzagged about a hundred yards in this manner before I caught sight of the jaguar's enormous dark mass no more than thirty feet behind me.
I yelled at the top of my voice. Without stopping, don Juan turned around quickly enough to see the big cat move out of sight. Don Juan let out another piercing whistle and kept clapping his hands, imitating the sound of muffled gunshots.
In a very low voice he said that cats did not like to go uphill and so we were going to cross, at top speed, the wide and deep ravine a few yards to my right.
He gave a signal to go and we thrashed through the bushes as fast as we could. We slid down one side of the ravine, reached the bottom, and rushed up the other side. From there we had a clear view of the slope, the bottom of the ravine, and the level ground where we had been. Don Juan whispered that the jaguar was following our scent, and that if we were lucky we would see him running to the bottom of the ravine, close to our tracks.
Gazing fixedly at the ravine below us, I waited anxiously to catch a glimpse of the animal. But I did not see him. I was beginning to think the jaguar might have run away when I heard the frightening growling of the big cat in the chaparral just behind us. I had the chilling realization that don Juan had been right. To get to where he was, the jaguar must have read our thoughts and crossed the ravine before we had.
Without uttering a single word, don Juan began running at a formidable speed. I followed and we zigzagged for quite a while. I was totally out of breath when we stopped to rest.
The fear of being chased by the jaguar had not, however, prevented me from admiring don Juan's superb physical prowess. He had run as if he were a young man. I began to tell him that he had reminded me of someone in my childhood who had impressed me deeply with his running ability, but he signaled me to stop talking. He listened attentively and so did I.
I heard a soft rustling in the underbrush, right ahead of us. And then the black silhouette of the jaguar was visible for an instant at a spot in the chaparral perhaps fifty yards from us.
Don Juan shrugged his shoulders and pointed in the direction of the animal.
"It looks like we're not going to shake him off," he said with a tone of resignation. "Let's walk calmly, as if we were taking a nice stroll in the park, and you tell me the story of your childhood. This is the right time and the right setting for it. A jaguar is after us with a ravenous appetite, and you are reminiscing about your past: the perfect not-doing for being chased by a jaguar."
He laughed loudly. But when I told him I had completely lost interest in telling the story, he doubled up with laughter.
"You are punishing me now for not wanting to listen to you, aren't you?" he asked.
And I, of course, began to defend myself. I told him his accusation was definitely absurd. I really had lost the thread of the story.
"If a sorcerer doesn't have self-importance, he doesn't give a rat's ass about having lost the thread of a story," he said with a malicious shine in his eyes. "Since you don't have any self-importance left, you should tell your story now. Tell it to the spirit, to the jaguar, and to me, as if you hadn't lost the thread at all."
I wanted to tell him that I did not feel like complying with his wishes, because the story was too stupid and the setting was overwhelming. I wanted to pick the appropriate setting for it, some other time, as he himself did with his stories.
Before I voiced my opinions, he answered me.
"Both the jaguar and I can read thoughts," he said, smiling. "If I choose the proper setting and time for my sorcery stories, it's because they are for teaching and I want to get the maximum effect from them."
He signaled me to start walking. We walked calmly, side by side. I said I had admired his running and his stamina, and that a bit of self-importance was at the core of my admiration, because I considered myself a good runner.
Then I told him the story from my childhood I had remembered when I saw him running so well.
I told him I had played soccer as a boy and had run extremely well. In fact, I was so agile and fast that I felt I could commit any prank with impunity because I would be able to outrun anyone chasing me, especially the old policemen who patrolled the streets of my hometown on foot. If I broke a street light or something of the sort, all I had to do was to take off running and I was safe.
But one day, unbeknownst to me, the old policemen were replaced by a new police corps with military training. The disastrous moment came when I broke a Store window and ran; confident that my speed was my safeguard.
A young policeman took off after me. I ran as I had never run before, but it was to no avail. The officer, who was a crack center forward on the police soccer team, had more speed and stamina than my ten-year-old body could manage. He caught me and kicked me all the way back to the store with the broken window. Very artfully he named off all his kicks, as if he were training on a soccer field. He did not hurt me, he only scared me spitless, yet my intense humiliation was tempered by a ten-year-old's admiration for his prowess and his talent as a soccer player.
I told don Juan that I had felt the same with him that day. He was able to outrun me in spite of our age difference and my old proclivity for speedy getaways.
I also told him that for years I had been having a recurrent dream in which I ran so well that the young policeman was no longer able to overtake me.
"Your story is more important than I thought," don Juan commented. "I thought it was going to be a story about your mama spanking you."
The way he emphasized his words made his statement very funny and very mocking. He added that at certain times it was the spirit, and not our reason, which decided on our stories. This was one of those times. The spirit had triggered this particular story in my mind, doubtlessly because the story was concerned with my indestructible self-importance. He said that the torch of anger and humiliation had burned in me for years, and my feelings of failure and dejection were still intact.
"A psychologist would have a field day with your story and its present context," he went on. "In your mind, I must be identified with the young policeman who shattered your notion of invincibility."
Now that he mentioned it, I had to admit that that had been my feeling, although I would not consciously have thought of it, much less voiced it.
We walked in silence. I was so touched by his analogy that I completely forgot the jaguar stalking us, until a wild growl reminded me of our situation.
Don Juan directed me to jump up and down on the long, low branches of the shrubs and break off a couple of them to make a sort of long broom. He did the same. As we ran, we used them to raise a cloud of dust, stirring and kicking the dry, sandy dirt.
"That ought to worry the jaguar," he said when we stopped again to catch our breath. "We have only a few hours of daylight left. At night the jaguar is unbeatable, so we had better start running straight toward those rocky hills."
He pointed to some hills in the distance, perhaps half a mile south.
"We've got to go east," I said. "Those hills are too far south. If we go that way, we'll never get to my car."
"We won't get to your car today, anyway," he said calmly. "And perhaps not tomorrow either. Who is to say we'll ever get back to it?"
I felt a pang of fear, and then a strange peace took possession of me. I told don Juan that if death was going to take me in that desert chaparral I hoped it would be painless.
"Don't worry," he said. "Death is painful only when it happens in one's bed, in sickness. In a fight for your life, you feel no pain. If you feel anything, it's exultation."
He said that one of the most dramatic differences between civilized men and sorcerers was the way in which death came to them. Only with sorcerer-warriors was death kind and sweet. They could be mortally wounded and yet would feel no pain. And what was even more extraordinary was that death held itself in abeyance for as long as the sorcerers needed it to do so.
"The greatest difference between an average man and a sorcerer is that a sorcerer commands his death with his speed," don Juan went on. "If it comes to that, the jaguar will not eat me. He'll eat you, because you don't have the speed to hold back your death."
He then elaborated on the intricacies of the sorcerers' idea of speed and death. He said that in the world of everyday life, our word or our decisions could be reversed very easily. The only irrevocable thing in our world was death. In the sorcerers' world, on the other hand, normal death could be countermanded, but not the sorcerers' word. In the sorcerers' world decisions could not be changed or revised. Once they had been made, they stood forever.
I told don Juan that his statements, impressive as they were, could not convince me that death could be revoked; and he explained once more what he had explained before.
He said that for a seer, human beings were either oblong or spherical luminous masses of countless, static, yet vibrant fields of energy; and that only sorcerers were capable of injecting movement into those spheres of static luminosity.
In a millisecond they could move their assemblage points to any place in their luminous mass. That movement and the speed with which it is performed entailed an instantaneous shift into the perception of another totally different universe.
Or they could move their assemblage points, without stopping, across their entire fields of luminous energy. The force created by such movement was so intense that it instantly consumed their whole luminous mass.
He said that if a rockslide were to come crashing down on us at that precise moment, he would be able to cancel the normal effect of an accidental death. By using the speed with which his assemblage point would move, he could make himself change universes or make himself burn from within in a fraction of a second. I, on the other hand, would die a normal death, crushed by the rocks, because my assemblage point lacked the speed to pull me out.
I said it seemed to me that the sorcerers had just found an alternative way of dying, which was not the same as a cancellation of death. And he replied that all he had said was that sorcerers commanded their deaths. They died only when they had to.
Although I did not doubt what he was saying, I kept asking questions, almost as a game. But while he was talking, thoughts and unanchored memories about other perceivable universes were forming in my mind, as if on a screen.
I told don Juan I was thinking strange thoughts. He laughed and recommended I stick to the jaguar, because he was so real that he could only be a true manifestation of the spirit.
The idea of how real the animal was made me shudder.
"Wouldn't it be better if we changed direction instead of heading straight for the hills?" I asked.
I thought that we could create a certain confusion in the jaguar with an unexpected change.
"It's too late to change direction," don Juan said. "The jaguar already knows that there is no place for us to go but the hills."
"That can't be true, don Juan!" I exclaimed.
"Why not?" he asked.
I told him that although I could attest to the animal's ability to be one jump ahead of us, I could not quite accept that the jaguar had the foresight to figure out where we wanted to go.
"Your error is to think of the jaguar's power in terms of his capacity to figure things out," he said. "He can't think. He only knows."
Don Juan said that our dust-raising maneuver was to confuse the jaguar by giving him sensory input on something for which we had no use. We could not develop a real feeling for raising dust though our lives depended on it.
"I truly don't understand what you are saying," I whined.
Tension was taking its toll on me. I was having a hard time concentrating.
Don Juan explained that human feelings were like hot or cold currents of air and could easily be detected by a beast. We were the senders, the jaguar was the receiver. Whatever feelings we had would find their way to the jaguar. Or rather, the jaguar could read any feelings that had a history of use for us. In the case of the dust-raising maneuver, the feeling we had about it was so out of the ordinary that it could only create a vacuum in the receiver.
"Another maneuver silent knowledge might dictate would be to kick up dirt," don Juan said.
He looked at me for an instant as if he were waiting for my reactions.
"We are going to walk very calmly now," he said. "And you are going to kick up dirt as if you were a ten-foot giant."
I must have had a stupid expression on my face. Don Juan's body shook with laughter.
"Raise a cloud of dust with your feet," he ordered me. "Feel huge and heavy."
I tried it and immediately had a sense of massiveness. In a joking tone, I commented that his power of suggestion was incredible. I actually felt gigantic and ferocious. He assured me that my feeling of size was not in any way the product of his suggestion, but the product of a shift of my assemblage point.
He said that men of antiquity became legendary because they knew by silent knowledge about the power to be obtained by moving the assemblage point. On a reduced scale, sorcerers had recaptured that old power. With a movement of their assemblage points, they could manipulate their feelings and change things. I was changing things by feeling big and ferocious. Feelings processed in that fashion were called intent.
"Your assemblage point has already moved quite a bit," he went on. "Now you are in the position of either losing your gain, or making your assemblage point move beyond the place where it is now."
He said that possibly every human being under normal living conditions had had at one time or another the opportunity to break away from the bindings of convention. He stressed that he did not mean social convention, but the conventions binding our perception.
A moment of elation would suffice to move our assemblage points and break our conventions. So, too, a moment of fright, ill health, anger, or grief. But ordinarily, whenever we had the chance to move our assemblage points we became frightened. Our religious, academic, and social backgrounds would come into play. They would assure our safe return to the flock; the return of our assemblage points to the prescribed position of normal living.
He told me that all the mystics and spiritual teachers I knew of had done just that: Their assemblage points moved, either through discipline or accident, to a certain point; and then they returned to normalcy carrying a memory that lasted them a lifetime.
"You can be a very pious, good boy," he went on, "and forget about the initial movement of your assemblage point. Or you can push beyond your reasonable limits. You are still within those limits."
I knew what he was talking about, yet there was a strange hesitation in me making me vacillate.
Don Juan pushed his argument further. He said that the average man, incapable of finding the energy to perceive beyond his daily limits, called the realm of extraordinary perception sorcery, witchcraft, or the work of the devil, and shied away from it without examining it further.
"But you can't do that anymore," don Juan went on. "You are not religious and you are much too curious to discard anything so easily. The only thing that could stop you now is cowardice.
"Turn everything into what it really is: the abstract, the spirit, the nagual. There is no witchcraft, no evil, no devil. There is only perception."
I understood him. But I could not tell exactly what he wanted me to do.
I looked at don Juan, trying to find the most appropriate words. I seemed to have entered into an extremely functional frame of mind and did not want to waste a single word.
"Be gigantic!" he ordered me, smiling. "Do away with reason."
Then I knew exactly what he meant. In fact, I knew that I could increase the intensity of my feelings of size and ferociousness until I actually could be a giant, hovering over the shrubs, seeing all around us.
I tried to voice my thoughts but quickly gave up. I became aware that don Juan knew all I was thinking, and obviously much, much more.
And then something extraordinary happened to me. My reasoning faculties ceased to function. Literally I felt as though a dark blanket had covered me and obscured my thoughts. I let go of my reason with the abandon of one who doesn't have a worry in the world. I was convinced that if I wanted to dispel the obscuring blanket, all I had to do was feel myself breaking through it.
In that state, I felt I was being propelled; set in motion. Something was making me move physically from one place to another. I did not experience any fatigue. The speed and ease with which I could move elated me.
I did not feel I was walking; I was not flying either. Rather I was being transported with extreme facility. My movements became jerky and ungraceful only when I tried to think about them. When I enjoyed them without thought, I entered into a unique state of physical elation for which I had no precedent.
If I had had instances of that kind of physical happiness in my life, they must have been so short-lived that they had left no memory. Yet when I experienced that ecstasy I felt a vague recognition, as if I had once known it but had forgotten.
The exhilaration of moving through the chaparral was so intense that everything else ceased. The only things that existed for me were those periods of exhilaration and the moments when I would stop moving and find myself facing the chaparral.
But even more inexplicable was the total bodily sensation of looming over the bushes which I had had since the instant I started to move.
At one moment, I clearly saw the figure of the jaguar up ahead of me. He was running away as fast as he could. I felt that he was trying to avoid the spines of the cactuses. He was being extremely careful about where he stepped.
I had the overwhelming urge to run after the jaguar and scare him into losing his caution. I knew that he would get pricked by the spines. A thought then erupted in my silent mind- I thought that the jaguar would be a more dangerous animal if he was hurt by the spines. That thought produced the same effect as someone waking me from a dream.
When I became aware that my thinking processes were functioning again, I found that I was at the base of a low range of rocky hills. I looked around. Don Juan was a few feet away. He seemed exhausted. He was pale and breathing very hard.
"What happened, don Juan?" I asked, after clearing my raspy throat.
"You tell me what happened," he gasped between breaths.
I told him what I had felt. Then I realized that I could barely see the top of the mountain directly in my line of vision. There was very little daylight left, which meant I had been running, or walking, for more than two hours.
I asked don Juan to explain the time discrepancy. He said that my assemblage point had moved beyond the place of no pity into the place of silent knowledge, but that I still lacked the energy to manipulate it myself. To manipulate it myself meant I would have to have enough energy to move between reason and silent knowledge at will. He added that if a sorcerer had enough energy- or even if he did not have sufficient energy but needed to shift because it was a matter of life and death- he could fluctuate between reason and silent knowledge.
His conclusions about me were that because of the seriousness of our situation, I had let the spirit move my assemblage point. The result had been my entering into silent knowledge. Naturally, the scope of my perception had increased, which gave me the feeling of height, of looming over the bushes.
At that time, because of my academic training, I was passionately interested in validation by consensus. I asked him my standard question of those days.
"If someone from UCLA's Anthropology Department had been watching me, would he have seen me as a giant thrashing through the chaparral?"
"I really don't know," don Juan said. "The way to find out would be to move your assemblage point when you are in the Department of Anthropology."
"I have tried," I said. "But nothing ever happens. I must need to have you around for anything to take place."
"It was not a matter of life and death for you then," he said. "If it had been, you would have moved your assemblage point all by yourself."
"But would people see what I see when my assemblage point moves?" I insisted.
"No, because their assemblage points won't be in the same place as yours," he replied.
"Then, don Juan, did I dream the jaguar?" I asked. "Did all of it happen only in my mind?"
"Not quite," he said. "That big cat is real. You have moved miles and you are not even tired. If you are in doubt, look at your shoes. They are full of cactus spines. So you did move, looming over the shrubs. And at the same time you didn't. It depends on whether one's assemblage point is on the place of reason or on the place of silent knowledge."
I understood everything he was saying while he said it, but could not repeat any part of it at will. Nor could I determine what it was I knew, or why he was making so much sense to me.
The growl of the jaguar brought me back to the reality of the immediate danger. I caught sight of the jaguar's dark mass as he swiftly moved uphill about thirty yards to our right.
"What are we going to do, don Juan?" I asked, knowing that he had also seen the animal moving ahead of us.
"Keep climbing to the very top and seek shelter there," he said calmly.
Then he added, as if he had not a single worry in the world, that I had wasted valuable time indulging in my pleasure at looming over the bushes. Instead of heading for the safety of the hills he had pointed out, I had taken off toward the easterly higher mountains.
"We must reach that scarp before the jaguar or we don't have a chance," he said, pointing to the nearly vertical face at the very top of the mountain.
I turned right and saw the jaguar leaping from rock to rock. He was definitely working his way over to cut us off.
"Let's go, don Juan!" I yelled out of nervousness.
Don Juan smiled. He seemed to be enjoying my fear and impatience. We moved as fast as we could and climbed steadily. I tried not to pay attention to the dark form of the jaguar as it appeared from time to time a bit ahead of us and always to our right.
The three of us reached the base of the escarpment at the same time. The jaguar was about twenty yards to our right. He jumped and tried to climb the face of the cliff, but failed. The rock wall was too steep.
Don Juan yelled that I should not waste time watching the jaguar, because he would charge as soon as he gave up trying to climb. No sooner had don Juan spoken than the animal charged.
There was no time for further urging. I scrambled up the rock wall followed by don Juan. The shrill scream of the frustrated beast sounded right by the heel of my right foot. The propelling force of fear sent me up the slick scarp as if I were a fly.
I reached the top before don Juan, who had stopped to laugh.
Safe at the top of the cliff, I had more time to think about what had happened. Don Juan did not want to discuss anything. He argued that at this stage in my development, any movement of my assemblage point would still be a mystery. My challenge at the beginning of my apprenticeship was, he said, maintaining my gains, rather than reasoning them out- and that at some point everything would make sense to me.
I told him everything made sense to me at that moment. But he was adamant that I had to be able to explain knowledge to myself before I could claim that it made sense to me. He insisted that for a movement of my assemblage point to make sense, I would need to have energy to fluctuate from the place of reason to the place of silent knowledge.
He stayed quiet for a while, sweeping my entire body with his stare. Then he seemed to make up his mind and smiled and began to speak again.
"Today you reached the place of silent knowledge," he said with finality.
He explained that that afternoon, my assemblage point had moved by itself, without his intervention. I had intended the movement by manipulating my feeling of being gigantic, and in so doing my assemblage point had reached the position of silent knowledge.
I was very curious to hear how don Juan interpreted my experience. He said that one way to talk about the perception attained in the place of silent knowledge was to call it "here and here." He explained that when I had told him I had felt myself looming over the desert chaparral, I should have added that I was seeing the desert floor and the top of the shrubs at the same time. Or that I had been at the place where I stood and at the same time at the place where the jaguar was. Thus I had been able to notice how carefully he stepped to avoid the cactus spines. In other words, instead of perceiving the normal here and there, I had perceived "here and here."
His comments frightened me. He was right. I had not mentioned that to him, nor had I admitted even to myself that I had been in two places at once. I would not have dared to think in those terms had it not been for his comments.
He repeated that I needed more time and more energy to make sense of everything. I was too new; I still required a great deal of supervision. For instance, while I was looming over the shrubs, he had to make his assemblage point fluctuate rapidly between the places of reason and silent knowledge to take care of me. And that had exhausted him.
"Tell me one thing," I said, testing his reasonableness. "That jaguar was stranger than you want to admit, wasn't it? Jaguars are not part of the fauna [* fauna- all the animal life in a particular region or period] of this area. Pumas, yes, but not jaguars. How do you explain that?"
Before answering, he puckered his face. He was suddenly very serious.
"I think that this particular jaguar confirms your anthropological theories," he said in a solemn tone. "Obviously, the jaguar was following this famous trade route connecting Chihuahua with Central America."
Don Juan laughed so hard that the sound of his laughter echoed in the mountains. That echo disturbed me as much as the jaguar had. Yet it was not the echo itself which disturbed me, but the fact that I had never heard an echo at night. Echoes were, in my mind, associated only with the daytime.
It had taken me several hours to recall all the details of my experience with the jaguar. During that time, don Juan had not talked to me. He had simply propped himself against a rock and gone to sleep in a sitting position. After a while I no longer noticed that he was there, and finally I fell asleep.
I was awakened by a pain in my jaw. I had been sleeping with the side of my face pressed against a rock. The moment I opened my eyes, I tried to slide down off the boulder on which I had been lying, but lost my balance and fell noisily on my seat. Don Juan appeared from behind some bushes just in time to laugh.
It was getting late and I wondered aloud if we had enough time to get to the valley before nightfall. Don Juan shrugged his shoulders and did not seem concerned. He sat down beside me.
I asked him if he wanted to hear the details of my recollection. He indicated that it was fine with him, yet he did not ask me any questions. I thought he was leaving it up to me to start, so I told him there were three points I remembered which were of great importance to me.
One was that he had talked about silent knowledge; another was that I had moved my assemblage point using intent; and the final point was that I had entered into heightened awareness without requiring a blow between my shoulder blades.
Don Juan said, "Intending the movement of your assemblage point was your greatest accomplishment. But accomplishment is something personal. Accomplishment is necessary, but it's not the important part. Accomplishment is not the residue sorcerers look forward to."
I thought I knew what he wanted. I told him that I hadn't totally forgotten the event. What had remained with me in my normal state of awareness was that a mountain lion- since I could not accept the idea of a jaguar- had chased us up a mountain; and that don Juan had asked me if I had felt offended by the big cat's onslaught. I had assured him that it was absurd that I could feel offended, and he had told me I should feel the same way about the onslaughts of my fellow men. I should protect myself, or get out of their way, but without feeling morally wronged.
"That is not the residue I am talking about," he said, laughing. "The idea of the abstract, the spirit, is the only residue that is important. The idea of the personal self has no value whatsoever. You still put yourself and your own feelings first. Every time I've had the chance, I have made you aware of the need to abstract. You have always believed that I meant to think abstractly. No. To abstract means to make yourself available to the spirit by being aware of it."
He said that one of the most dramatic things about the human condition was the macabre [* macabre- shockingly repellent; inspiring horror] connection between stupidity and self-reflection.
It is stupidity that forces us to discard anything that does not conform with our self-reflective expectations. For example, as average men we are blind to the most crucial piece of knowledge available to a human being: the existence of the assemblage point and the fact that it could move.
"For a rational man," he went on, "it's unthinkable that there is an invisible point where perception is assembled. And yet more unthinkable that such a point is not in the brain, as he might vaguely expect it to be; if he were given to entertaining the thought of its existence."
He added that for the rational man to hold steadfastly to his self-image insured his abysmal [* abysmal- very great; limitless] ignorance.
The average man ignored, for instance, the fact that sorcery was not incantations and hocus-pocus, but the freedom to perceive not only the world taken for granted, but every thing else that was humanly possible.
"Here is where the average man's stupidity is most dangerous," he continued. "He is afraid of sorcery. He trembles at the possibility of freedom. And freedom is at his fingertips. It's called the third point. And it can be reached as easily as the assemblage point can be made to move."
I protested saying, "But you yourself told me that moving the assemblage point is so difficult that it is a true accomplishment."
"It is," he assured me. "This is another of the sorcerers' contradictions: Moving it is very difficult and yet it's the simplest thing in the world. I've told you already that a high fever could move the assemblage point. Hunger or fear or love or hate could do it; mysticism too.
"Unbending intent can also move the assemblage point, and is the preferred method of sorcerers."
I asked him to explain again what unbending intent was.
He said that it was a sort of single-mindedness human beings exhibit; an extremely well-defined purpose not countermanded by any conflicting interests or desires.
Unbending intent was also the force engendered [* engendered- called forth] when the assemblage point was maintained fixed in a position which was not the usual one.
Don Juan then made a meaningful distinction which had eluded me all these years between a movement and a shift of the assemblage point.
He said a movement was a profound change of position so extreme that the assemblage point might even reach other bands of energy within our total luminous mass of energy fields: Each band of energy represented a completely different universe to be perceived.
A shift, however, was a small movement within the band of energy fields we perceived as the world of everyday life.
He went on to say that sorcerers saw unbending intent as the catalyst to trigger their unchangeable decisions: Or as the converse, their unchangeable decisions were the catalyst that propelled their assemblage points to new positions which in turn generated unbending intent.
I must have looked dumbfounded. Don Juan laughed and said that trying to reason out the sorcerers' metaphorical descriptions was as useless as trying to reason out silent knowledge. He added that the problem with words was that any attempt to clarify the sorcerers' description only made them more confusing.
I urged him to try to clarify this in any way he could. I argued that anything he could say, for instance, about the third point could only clarify it, for although I knew everything about it, it was still very confusing.
"The world of daily life consists of two points of reference," he said. "We have for example, here and there, in and out, up and down, good and evil, and so on and so forth. So, properly speaking, our perception of our lives is two-dimensional. None of what we perceive ourselves doing has 'depth'."
I protested that he was mixing levels. I told him that I could accept his definition of perception as the capacity of living beings to apprehend with their senses fields of energy selected by their assemblage points- a very farfetched definition by my academic standards, but one that, at the moment, seemed cogent. [* cogent- powerfully persuasive]
However, I could not imagine what the 'depth' of what we do might be. I argued that it was possible he was talking about interpretations- elaborations of our basic perceptions.
"A sorcerer perceives his actions with depth," he said. "His actions are tri-dimensional for him. They have a third point of reference."
"How could a third point of reference exist?" I asked with a tinge of annoyance.
He said, "Our points of reference are obtained primarily from our sense perception. Our senses perceive and differentiate what is immediate to us from what is not. Using that basic distinction we derive the rest.
"In order to reach the third point of reference one must perceive two places at once."
My recollecting had put me in a strange mood- it was as if I had lived the experience just a few minutes earlier. I was suddenly aware of something I had completely missed before. Under don Juan's supervision, I had twice before experienced that divided perception, but this was the first time I had accomplished it all by myself.
Thinking about my recollection, I also realized that my sensory experience was more complex than I had at first thought. During the time I had loomed over the bushes, I had been aware- without words or even thoughts- that being in two places, or being 'here and here' as don Juan had called it, rendered my perception immediate and complete at both places. But I had also been aware that my double perception lacked the total clarity of normal perception.
Don Juan explained that normal perception had an axis. 'Here and there' were the perimeters of that axis, and we were partial to the clarity of 'here'. He said that in normal perception, only 'here' was perceived completely, instantaneously, and directly. Its twin referent, 'there', lacked immediacy. It was inferred, deduced, expected, even assumed, but it was not apprehended directly with all the senses.
When we perceived two places at once, total clarity was lost, but the immediate perception of 'there' was gained.
"But then, don Juan, I was right in describing my perception as the important part of my experience," I said.
"No, you were not," he said. "What you experienced was vital to you because it opened the road to silent knowledge, but the important thing was the jaguar. That jaguar was indeed a manifestation of the spirit.
"That big cat came unnoticed out of nowhere. And he could have finished us off as surely as I am talking to you. That jaguar was an expression of magic. Without him you would have had no elation, no lesson, no realizations."
"But was he a real jaguar?" I asked.
"You bet he was real!"
Don Juan observed that for an average man that big cat would have been a frightening oddity. An average man would have been hard put to explain in reasonable terms what that jaguar was doing in Chihuahua so far from a tropical jungle. But a sorcerer, because he had a connecting link with intent, saw that jaguar as a vehicle to perceiving- not an oddity, but a source of awe.
There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask, and yet I knew the answers before I could articulate the questions. I followed the course of my own questions and answers for a while, until finally I realized it did not matter that I silently knew the answers; answers had to be verbalized to be of any value.
I voiced the first question that came to mind. I asked don Juan to explain what seemed to be a contradiction. He had asserted that only the spirit could move the assemblage point. But then he had said that my feelings, processed into intent, had moved my assemblage point.
"Only sorcerers can turn their feelings into intent," he said. "Intent is the spirit, so it is the spirit which moves their assemblage points.
"The misleading part of all this," he went on, "is that I am saying only sorcerers know about the spirit and that intent is the exclusive domain of sorcerers. This is not true at all, but it is the situation in the realm of practicality.
"The real condition is that sorcerers are more aware of their connection with the spirit than the average man and strive to manipulate it. That's all.
"I've already told you, the connecting link with intent is the universal feature shared by everything there is."
Two or three times, don Juan seemed about to start to add something. He vacillated, apparently trying to choose his words. Finally he said that being in two places at once was a milestone [* milestone- a significant event in ones life ] sorcerers used to mark the moment the assemblage point reached the place of silent knowledge. Split perception, if accomplished by one's own means, was called the free movement of the assemblage point.
He assured me that every nagual consistently did everything within his power to encourage the free movement of his apprentices' assemblage points. This all-out effort was cryptically called 'reaching out for the third point'.
"The most difficult aspect of the nagual's knowledge," don Juan went on, "and certainly the most crucial part of his task is that of reaching out for the third point- the nagual intends that free movement, and the spirit channels to the nagual the means to accomplish it. I had never intended anything of that sort until you came along. Therefore, I had never fully appreciated my benefactor's gigantic effort to intend it for me.
"Difficult as it is for a nagual to intend that free movement for his disciples," don Juan went on, "it's nothing compared with the difficulty his disciples have in understanding what the nagual is doing. Look at the way you yourself struggle! The same thing happened to me. Most of the time, I ended up believing the trickery of the spirit was simply the trickery of the nagual Julian.
"Later on, I realized I owed him my life and well-being," don Juan continued. "Now I know I owe him infinitely more. Since I can't begin to describe what I really owe him, I prefer to say he cajoled me into having a third point of reference.
"The third point of reference is freedom of perception; it is intent; it is the spirit; the somersault of thought into the miraculous; the act of reaching beyond our boundaries and touching the inconceivable."