Inner silence is a state of profound quietude.
Don Juan defined inner silence as a state of being in which thoughts were canceled out, and I could function from a level other than that of daily awareness. He stressed that inner silence meant the suspension of the perennial companion of thoughts; the suspension of my internal dialogue.
"The old sorcerers," don Juan said, "called this state inner silence because it is a state in which perception does not depend on using the senses as we are accustomed to. What is at work during inner silence is another faculty that man has; the faculty that makes him a magical being; the very faculty that has been curtailed- not by man himself, but by some extraneous influence."
"What is this extraneous influence that curtails the magical faculty of man?" I asked.
"That," don Juan replied, "is the topic for a future explanation, and is not a subject of our present discussion, even though it is indeed a most serious aspect of the sorcery of the shamans of ancient Mexico.
"Inner silence," he continued, "is the stand from which everything stems in sorcery. In other words, everything we do leads to that stand, which, like everything else in the world of sorcerers, doesn't reveal itself unless something gigantic shakes us."
Don Juan said that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico devised endless ways to shake themselves, or other sorcery practitioners at their foundations in order to reach that coveted state of inner silence. They considered the most farfetched acts, which may seem totally unrelated to the pursuit of inner silence- such as jumping into waterfalls or spending nights hanging upside down from the top branch of a tree- to be key methods that brought inner silence into being.
Following the rationales [* rationale- an explanation of the fundamental facts that logically justifies some premise or conclusion] of the sorcerers of ancient Mexico, don Juan stated categorically [* categorically- in an unqualified manner; unconditionally] that inner silence was accrued; [* accrue- grow by addition: come into the possession of] accumulated. [* accumulate- collect or gather]
In my case, he struggled to guide me to construct a core of inner silence in myself, and then add to it, second by second on every occasion I practiced it. He explained that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico discovered that each individual had a different threshold of inner silence in terms of time; meaning that inner silence must be kept by each one of us for the length of time of our specific threshold before it can work.
"What did those sorcerers consider the sign that inner silence is working, don Juan?" I asked.
"Inner silence works from the moment you begin to accrue it," he replied. "What the old sorcerers were after was the final, dramatic, end result of reaching that individual threshold of silence. Some very talented practitioners need only a few minutes of silence to reach that coveted goal. Others, less talented, need long periods of silence, perhaps more than one hour of complete quietude, before they reach the desired result. The desired result is what the old sorcerers called stopping the world; the moment when everything around us ceases to be what it's always been.
"This is the moment when sorcerers return to the true nature of man," don Juan went on. "The old sorcerers also called it total freedom. It is the moment when 'man the slave' becomes 'man the free being' capable of feats of perception that defy our linear imagination."
Don Juan assured me that inner silence is the avenue that leads to a true suspension of judgment- to a moment when sensory data emanating from the universe at large ceases to be interpreted by the senses; a moment when cognition ceases to be the force which, through usage and repetition, decides the nature of the world.
"Sorcerers need a breaking point for the workings of inner silence to set in," don Juan said. "The breaking point is like the mortar that a mason puts between bricks. It's only when the mortar hardens that the loose bricks become a structure."
From the beginning of our association, don Juan had drilled into me the value and the necessity of inner silence. I did my best to follow his suggestions by accumulating inner silence second by second. I had no means to measure the effect of this accumulation, nor did I have any means to judge whether or not I had reached any threshold. I simply aimed doggedly at accruing it, not just to please don Juan, but because the act of accumulating it had become a challenge in itself.
One day, don Juan and I were taking a leisurely stroll in the main plaza of Hermosillo. It was the early afternoon of a cloudy day. The heat was dry, and actually very pleasant. There were lots of people walking around. There were stores around the plaza. I had been to Hermosillo many times, and yet I had never noticed the stores. I knew that they were there, but their presence was not something I had been consciously aware of. I couldn't have made a map of that plaza if my life depended on it. That day, as I walked with don Juan, I was trying to locate and identify the stores. I searched for something to use as a mnemonic [* mnemonic- involved in aiding the memory] device that would stir my recollection for later use.
"As I have told you before, many times," don Juan said, jolting me out of my concentration, "every sorcerer I know, male or female, sooner or later arrives at a breaking point in their lives."
"Do you mean that they have a mental breakdown or something like that?" I asked
"No, no," he said, laughing. "Mental breakdowns are for persons who indulge in themselves. Sorcerers are not persons. What I mean is that at a given moment, the continuity of their lives has to break in order for inner silence to set in and become an active part of their structures.
"It's very, very important," don Juan went on, "that you yourself deliberately arrive at that breaking point, or that you create it artificially, and intelligently."
"What do you mean by that, don Juan?" I asked, caught in his intriguing reasoning.
"Your breaking point" he said, "is to discontinue your life as you know it. You have done everything I told you, dutifully and accurately. If you are talented, you never show it. That seems to be your style. You're not slow, but you act as if you were. You're very sure of yourself, but you act as if you were insecure. You're not timid, and yet you act as if you were afraid of people. Everything you do points at one single spot; your need to break all that, ruthlessly."
"But in what way, don Juan? What do you have in mind?" I asked, genuinely frantic.
"I think everything boils down to one act," he said. "You must leave your friends. You must say good-bye to them, for good. It's not possible for you to continue on the warriors' path carrying your personal history with you, and unless you discontinue your way of life, I won't be able to go ahead with my instruction."
"Now, now, now, don Juan," I said, "I have to put my foot down. You're asking too much of me. To be frank with you, I don't think I can do it. My friends are my family; my points of reference."
"Precisely, precisely," he remarked. "They are your points of reference. Therefore, they have to go. Sorcerers have only one point of reference: infinity."
"But how do you want me to proceed, don Juan?" I asked in a plaintive voice. His request was driving me up the wall.
"You must simply leave," he said matter-of-factly. "Leave any way you can."
"But where would I go?" I asked.
"My recommendation is that you rent a room in one of those chintzy hotels you know," he said. "The uglier the place, the better. If the room has drab green carpet, and drab green drapes, and drab green walls, so much the better- a place comparable to that hotel I showed you once in Los Angeles."
I laughed nervously at my recollection of a time when I was driving with don Juan through the industrial side of Los Angeles, where there were only warehouses and dilapidated hotels for transients. One hotel in particular attracted don Juan's attention because of its bombastic name: Edward the Seventh. We stopped across the street from it for a moment to look at it.
"That hotel over there," don Juan said, pointing at it, "is to me the true representation of life on Earth for the average person. If you are lucky, or ruthless, you will get a room with a view of the street, where you will see this endless parade of human misery. If you're not that lucky, or that ruthless, you will get a room on the inside, with windows to the wall of the next building. Think of spending a lifetime torn between those two views, envying the view of the street if you're inside, and envying the view of the wall if you're on the outside, tired of looking out."
Don Juan's metaphor bothered me no end, for I had taken it all in.
Now, faced with the possibility of having to rent a room in a hotel comparable to the Edward the Seventh, I didn't know what to say or which way to go.
"What do you want me to do there, don Juan?" I asked.
"A sorcerer uses a place like that to die," he said, looking at me with an unblinking stare. "You have never been alone in your life. This is the time to do it. You will stay in that room until you die."
His request scared me, but at the same time, it made me laugh.
"Not that I'm going to do it, don Juan," I said, "but what would be the criteria to know that I'm dead?- unless you want me to actually die physically."
"No," he said, "I don't want your body to die physically. I want your person to die. The two are very different affairs. In essence, your person has very little to do with your body. Your person is your mind, and believe you me, your mind is not yours."
"What is this nonsense, don Juan, that my mind is not mine?" I heard myself asking with a nervous twang in my voice.
"I'll tell you about that subject someday," he said, "but not while you're cushioned by your friends.
"The criteria that indicates that a sorcerer is dead," he went on, "is when it makes no difference to him whether he has company or whether he is alone. The day you don't covet the company of your friends, whom you use as shields, that's the day that your person has died. What do you say? Are you game?"
"I can't do it, don Juan," I said. "It's useless that I try to lie to you. I can't leave my friends."
"It's perfectly all right," he said, unperturbed. My statement didn't seem to affect him in the least. "I won't be able to talk to you anymore, but let's say that during our time together you have learned a great deal. You have learned things that will make you very strong, regardless of whether you come back or you stray away."
He patted me on the back and said good-bye to me. He turned around and simply disappeared among the people in the plaza, as if he had merged with them. For an instant, I had the strange sensation that the people in the plaza were like a curtain that he had opened and then disappeared behind. The end had come, as did everything else in don Juan's world: swiftly and unpredictably. Suddenly, the end of don Juan's world was upon me. I was in the throes [* throes- violent pangs of suffering] of it, and I didn't even know how I had gotten into it.
I should have been crushed. Yet I wasn't. I didn't know why, but I was elated. I marveled at the facility with which everything had ended. Don Juan was indeed an elegant being. There were no recriminations or anger or anything of that sort at all. I got in my car and drove, happy as a lark. I was ebullient. How extraordinary that everything had ended so swiftly, I thought, so painlessly.
My trip home was uneventful. In Los Angeles, being in my familiar surroundings, I noticed that I had derived an enormous amount of energy from my last exchange with don Juan. I was actually very happy, very relaxed, and I resumed what I considered to be my normal life with renewed zest. All my tribulations with my friends, and my realizations about them, everything that I had said to don Juan in reference to this, were thoroughly forgotten. It was as if something had erased all that from my mind. I marveled a couple of times at the facility I had in forgetting something that had been so meaningful; and in forgetting it so thoroughly.
Everything was as expected. There was one single inconsistency in the otherwise neat paradigm [* paradigm- systematic arrangement: the generally accepted perspective of a particular discipline at a given time] of my new old life: I distinctly remembered don Juan saying to me that my departing from the sorcerers' world was purely academic, and that I would be back.
I remembered writting down every word of our exchange. According to my normal linear reasoning and memory, don Juan had never made those statements. How could I remember things that had never taken place? I pondered uselessly. My pseudo-recollection was strange enough to make a case for it, but then I decided that there was no point in reflecting on it. As far as I was concerned, I was out of don Juan's milieu.
Following don Juan's suggestions in reference to my behavior with those who had favored me in any way, I had come to a earthshaking decision for myself: I resolved to honor and to thank my friends before it was too late.
One incident involving my friend Rodrigo, however, toppled my new paradigm and sent it tumbling down to its total destruction.
My attitude toward Rodrigo changed radically when I vanquished my competitiveness with him. I found out that it was the easiest thing in the world for me to project 100 percent into whatever Rodrigo did. In fact, I was exactly like him, but I didn't know it until I stopped competing with him: Then the truth emerged for me with maddening vividness.
One of Rodrigo's foremost wishes was to finish college. Every semester, he registered for school and took as many courses as was permitted. Then, as the semester progressed, he dropped them one by one. Sometimes he would withdraw from school altogether. At other times he would keep one three-unit course all the way through to the bitter end.
During the most recent semester, he had kept a course in sociology because he liked it. The final exam was approaching. He told me that he had three weeks to study; to read the textbook for the course. He thought that that was an exorbitant [* exorbitant- greatly exceeding bounds of reason or moderation] amount of time to read merely six hundred pages. He considered himself something of a speed reader, with a high level of retention; in his opinion, he had a nearly 100 percent photographic memory.
He thought he had a great deal of time before the exam, so he asked me if I would help him recondition his car for his paper route. He wanted to take the right door off in order to throw the paper through that opening with his right hand instead of over the roof with his left.
I pointed out to him that he was left-handed, to which he retorted that among his many abilities, which none of his friends noticed, was that of being ambidextrous. [* ambidextrous- qually skilful with each hand] He was right about that: I had never noticed it myself.
After I helped him to take the door off, he decided to rip out the roof lining, which was badly torn. He said that his car was in optimum mechanical condition, and so he was going to take it to Tijuana, Mexico- which, as a good Angeleno of the day, he called 'TJ'- to have it relined for a few bucks.
"We could use a trip," he said with glee. He even selected the friends he would like to take. "In TJ, I'm sure that you'll go to look for used books, because you're an asshole. The rest of us will go to a bordello. I know quite a few."
It took us a week to rip out all the lining and sand the metal surface to prepare it for its new lining. Rodrigo had two weeks left to study then, and he still considered that to be too much time.
He engaged me then in helping him paint his apartment and redo the floors. It took us over a week to paint it and sand the hardwood floors. He didn't want to paint over the wallpaper in one room. We had to rent a machine that removed wallpaper by applying steam to it.
Naturally, neither Rodrigo nor I knew how to use the machine properly, and we botched the job horrendously. We ended up having to use Topping; a very fine mixture of plaster of paris and other substances that gives a wall a smooth surface.
After all these endeavors, Rodrigo ended up having only two days left to cram six hundred pages into his head. He went frantically into an all-day and all-night reading marathon, with the help of amphetamines. [* amphetamine- a central nervous system stimulant that increases energy and decreases appetite]
Rodrigo did go to school the day of the exam, and did sit down at his desk, and did get the multiple-choice exam sheet.
What he didn't do was stay awake to take the exam. His body slumped forward, and his head hit the desk with a terrifying thud.
The exam had to be suspended for a while. The sociology teacher became hysterical, and so did the students sitting around Rodrigo. His body was stiff and icy cold. The whole class suspected the worst: They thought he had died of a heart attack. Paramedics were summoned to remove him. After a cursory examination, they pronounced Rodrigo profoundly asleep and took him to a hospital to sleep the effect of the amphetamines off.
My projection into Rodrigo Cummings was so total that it frightened me. I was exactly like him. The similarity became untenable to me. In an act of what I considered to be total, suicidal nihilism, [* nihilism- a revolutionary doctrine that advocates destruction of the social system for its own sake] I rented a room in a dilapidated hotel in Hollywood.
The carpets were green and had terrible cigarette burns that had obviously been snuffed out before they turned into full-fledged fires. It had green drapes and drab green walls. The blinking sign of the hotel shone all night through the window.
I ended up doing exactly what don Juan had requested, but in a roundabout way. I didn't do it to fulfill any of don Juan's requirements or with the intention of patching up our differences. I did stay in that hotel room for months on end, until my person, like don Juan had proposed, died; or at least until it truthfully made no difference to me whether I had company or I was alone.
After leaving the hotel, I went to live alone, closer to school. I continued my studies of anthropology, which had never been interrupted, and I started a very profitable business with a lady partner.
Everything seemed perfectly in order until one day when the realization hit me like a kick in the head that I was going to spend the rest of my life worrying about my business, or worrying about the phantom choice between being an academic or a businessman, or worrying about my partner's foibles and shenanigans.
True desperation pierced the depths of my being. For the first time in my life, despite all the things that I had done and seen, I had no way out. I was completely lost. I seriously began to toy with the idea of the most pragmatic and painless way to end my days.
One morning, a loud and insistent knocking woke me up. I thought it was the landlady, and I was sure that if I didn't answer, she would enter with her passkey.
I opened the door, and there was don Juan! I was so surprised that I was numb. I stammered and stuttered, incapable of saying a word. I wanted to kiss his hand, to kneel in front of him. Don Juan came in and sat down with great ease on the edge of my bed.
"I made the trip to Los Angeles," he said, "just to see you."
I wanted to take him to breakfast, but he said that he had other things to attend to, and that he had only a moment to talk to me. I hurriedly told him about my experience in the hotel. His presence had created such havoc that not for a second did it occur to me to ask him how he had found out where I lived. I told don Juan how intensely I regretted having said what I had in Hermosillo.
"You don't have to apologize," he assured me. "Every one of us does the same thing. Once, I ran away from the sorcerers' world myself, and I had to nearly die to realize my stupidity.
"The important issue is to arrive at a breaking point in whatever way, and that's exactly what you have done. Inner silence is becoming real for you. This is the reason I am here in front of you, talking to you. Do you see what I mean?"
I thought I understood what he meant. I thought that he had intuited or read, the way he read things in the air, that I was at my wits' end and that he had come to bail me out.
"You have no time to lose," he said. "You must dissolve your business enterprise within an hour, because one hour is all I can afford to wait- not because I don't want to wait, but because infinity is pressing me mercilessly. Let's say that infinity is giving you one hour to cancel yourself out.
"For infinity, the only worthwhile enterprise of a warrior is freedom. Any other enterprise is fraudulent. Can you dissolve everything in one hour?"
I didn't have to assure him that I could. I knew that I had to do it. Don Juan told me then that once I had succeeded in dissolving everything, he was going to wait for me at the marketplace in a town in Mexico. In my effort to think about the dissolution of my business, I overlooked what he was saying. He repeated it and, of course, I thought he was joking.
"How can I reach that town, don Juan? Do you want me to drive, to take a plane?" I asked.
"Dissolve your business first," he commanded. "Then the solution will come. But remember, I'll be waiting for you only for an hour."
He left the apartment, and I feverishly endeavored to dissolve everything I had. Naturally, it took me more than an hour, but I didn't stop to consider this because once I had set the dissolution of the business in motion, its momentum carried me.
It was only when I was through that the real dilemma faced me. I knew then that I had failed hopelessly. I was left with no business, and no possibilities of ever reaching don Juan.
I went to my bed and sought the only solace I could think of: quietude; silence. In order to facilitate the advent of inner silence, don Juan had taught me a way to sit down on my bed, with the knees bent and the soles of the feet touching, the hands pushing the feet together by holding the ankles. He had given me a thick dowel that I always kept at hand wherever I went. It was cut to a fourteen-inch length to support the weight of my head if I leaned over and put the dowel on the floor between my feet, and then placed the other end, which was cushioned, on the spot in the middle of my forehead. Every time I adopted this position, I fell sound asleep in a matter of seconds.
I must have fallen asleep with my usual facility because I dreamed that I was in the Mexican town where don Juan had said he was going to meet me. I had always been intrigued by this town. The marketplace was open one day a week, and the farmers who lived in the area brought their products there to be sold.
What fascinated me the most about that town was the paved road that led to it. At the very entrance to the town, it went over a steep hill. I had sat many times on a bench by a stand that sold cheese, and had looked at that hill. I would see people who were coming into town with their donkeys and their loads, but I would see their heads first; as they kept approaching I would see more of their bodies, until the moment they were on the very top of the hill, when I would see their entire bodies. It seemed to me always that they were emerging from the earth, either slowly or very fast, depending on their speed.
In my dream, don Juan was waiting for me by the cheese stand. I approached him.
"You made it from your inner silence," he said, patting me on the back. "You did reach your breaking point. For a moment, I had begun to lose hope. But I stuck around, knowing that you would make it."
In that dream, we went for a stroll. I was happier than I had ever been. The dream was so vivid, so terrifyingly real, that it left me no doubts that I had resolved the problem, even if my resolving it was only a dream-fantasy.
Don Juan laughed, shaking his head. He had definitely read my thoughts. "You're not in a mere dream," he said, "but who am I to tell you that? You'll know it yourself someday- that there are no dreams from inner silence- because you'll choose to know it."