The Power of Silence (23 page)

"You
are forgetting something essential," he said. "The nagual's presence
is enough to move the assemblage point. I have humored you all along with the
nagual's blow. The blow between the shoulder blades that I have delivered is
only a pacifier. It serves the purpose of removing your doubts. Sorcerers use
physical contact as a jolt to the body. It doesn't do anything but give
confidence to the apprentice who is being manipulated."

"Then
who moves the assemblage point, don Juan?" I asked.

"The
spirit does it," he replied in the tone of someone about to lose his
patience.

He seemed to
check himself and smiled and shook his head from side to side in a gesture of
resignation.

"It's
hard for me to accept," I said. "My mind is ruled by the principle of
cause and effect." He had one of his usual attacks of inexplicable
laughter - inexplicable from my point of view, of course. I must have looked
annoyed. He put his hand on my shoulder.

"I
laugh like this periodically because you are demented," he said. "The
answer to everything you ask me is staring you right in the eyes and you don't
see it. I think dementia is your curse."

His eyes
were so shiny, so utterly crazy and mischievous, that I ended up laughing
myself.

"I
have insisted to the point of exhaustion that there are no procedures in
sorcery," he went on. "There are no methods, no steps. The only thing
that matters is the movement of the assemblage point. And no procedure can
cause that. It's an effect that happens all by itself."

He pushed
me as if to straighten my shoulders, and then he peered at me, looking right
into my eyes. My attention became riveted to his words.

"Let
us see how you figure this out," he said. "I have just said that the
movement of the assemblage point happens by itself. But I have also said that
the nagual's presence moves his apprentice's assemblage point and that the way
the nagual masks his ruthlessness either helps or hinders that movement. How
would you resolve this contradiction?"

I confessed
that I had been just about to ask him about the contradiction, for I had been
aware of it, but that I could not even begin to think of resolving it. I was
not a sorcery practitioner. "What are you, then?" he asked.

"I am
a student of anthropology, trying to figure out what sorcerers do," I
said.

My
statement was not altogether true, but it was not a lie.

Don Juan
laughed uncontrollably.

"It's
too late for that," he said. "Your assemblage point has moved
already. And it is precisely that movement that makes one a sorcerer."

He stated
that what seemed a contradiction was really the two sides of the same coin. The
nagual entices the assemblage point into moving by helping to destroy the
mirror of self-reflection. But that is all the nagual can do. The actual mover
is the spirit, the abstract; something that cannot be seen or felt; something
that does not seem to exist, and yet does. For this reason, sorcerers report
that the assemblage point moves all by itself. Or they say that the nagual
moves it. The nagual, being the conduit of the abstract, is allowed to express
it through his actions.

I looked at
don Juan questioningly.

"The
nagual moves the assemblage point, and yet it is not he himself who does the
actual moving," don Juan said. "Or perhaps it would be more
appropriate to say that the spirit expresses itself in accordance with the
nagual's impeccability. The spirit can move the assemblage point with the mere
presence of an impeccable nagual."

He said
that he had wanted to clarify this point, because, if it was misunderstood, it
led a nagual back to self-importance and thus to his destruction.

He changed
the subject and said that, because the spirit had no perceivable essence,
sorcerers deal rather with the specific instances and ways in which they are
able to shatter the mirror of self-reflection.

Don Juan
noted that in this area it was important to realize the practical value of the
different ways in which the naguals masked their ruthlessness. He said my mask
of generosity, for example, was adequate for dealing with people on a shallow
level, but useless for shattering their self-reflection because it forced me to
demand an almost impossible decision on their part. I expected them to jump
into the sorcerers' world without any preparation.

"A
decision such as that jump must be prepared for," he went on. "And in
order to prepare for it, any kind of mask for a nagual's ruthlessness will do,
except the mask of generosity."

Perhaps
because I desperately wanted to believe that I was truly generous, his comments
on my behavior renewed my terrible sense of guilt. He assured me that I had
nothing to be ashamed of, and that the only undesirable effect was that my
pseudo-generosity did not result in positive trickery.

In this
regard, he said, although I resembled his benefactor in many ways, my mask of
generosity was too crude, too obvious to be of value to me as a teacher. A mask
of reasonableness, such as his own, however, was very effective in creating an
atmosphere propitious to moving the assemblage point. His disciples totally
believed his pseudo-reasonableness. In fact, they were so inspired by it that
he could easily trick them into exerting themselves to any degree.

"What
happened to you that day in Guaymas was an example of how the nagual's masked
ruthlessness shatters self-reflection," he continued. "My mask was
your downfall. You, like everyone around me, believed my reasonableness. And,
of course, you expected, above all, the continuity of that reasonableness.

"When
I faced you with not only the senile behavior of a feeble old man, but with the
old man himself, your mind went to extremes in its efforts to repair my
continuity and your self-reflection. And so you told yourself that I must have
suffered a stroke.

"Finally,
when it became impossible to believe in the continuity of my reasonableness,
your mirror began to break down. From that point on, the shift of your
assemblage point was just a matter of time. The only thing in question was
whether it was going to reach the place of no pity."

I must have
appeared skeptical to don Juan, for he explained that the world of our
self-reflection or of our mind was very flimsy and was held together by a few
key ideas that served as its underlying order. When those ideas failed, the
underlying order ceased to function. "What are those key ideas, don
Juan?" I asked.

"In
your case, in that particular instance, as in the case of the audience of that
healer we talked about, continuity was the key idea," he replied.

"What
is continuity?" I asked.

"The
idea that we are a solid block," he said. "In our minds, what
sustains our world is the certainty that we are unchangeable. We may accept
that our behavior can be modified, that our reactions and opinions can be
modified, but the idea that we are malleable to the point of changing
appearances, to the point of being someone else, is not part of the underlying
order of our self-reflection. Whenever a sorcerer interrupts that order, the
world of reason stops."

I wanted to
ask him if breaking an individual's continuity was enough to cause the
assemblage point to move. He seemed to anticipate my question. He said that
that breakage was merely a softener. What helped the assemblage point move was
the nagual's ruthlessness.

He then
compared the acts he performed that afternoon in Guaymas with the actions of
the healer we had previously discussed. He said that the healer had shattered
the self-reflection of the people in her audience with a series of acts for
which they had no equivalents in their daily lives - the dramatic spirit
possession, changing voices, cutting the patient's body open. As soon as the
continuity of the idea of themselves was broken, their assemblage points were
ready to be moved.

He reminded
me that he had described to me in the past the concept of stopping the world.
He had said that stopping the world was as necessary for sorcerers as reading
and writing was for me. It consisted of introducing a dissonant element into
the fabric of everyday behavior for purposes of halting the otherwise smooth
flow of ordinary events - events which were catalogued in our minds by our
reason.

The
dissonant element was called "not-doing," or the opposite of doing.
"Doing" was anything that was part of a whole for which we had a
cognitive account. Not-doing was an element that did not belong in that charted
whole.

"Sorcerers,
because they are stalkers, understand human behavior to perfection," he
said. They understand, for instance, that human beings are creatures of
inventory. Knowing the ins and outs of a particular inventory is what makes a
man a scholar or an expert in his field.

"Sorcerers
know that when an average person's inventory fails, the person either enlarges
his inventory or his world of self-reflection collapses. The average person is
willing to incorporate new items into his inventory if they don't contradict
the inventory's underlying order. But if the items contradict that order, the
person's mind collapses. The inventory is the mind. Sorcerers count on this
when they attempt to break the mirror of self-reflection."

He
explained that that day he had carefully chosen the props for his act to break
my continuity. He slowly transformed himself until he was indeed a feeble old
man, and then, in order to reinforce the breaking of my continuity, he took me
to a restaurant where they knew him as an old man.

I
interrupted him. I had become aware of a contradiction I had not noticed
before. He had said, at the time, that the reason he transformed himself was
that he wanted to know what it was like to be old. The occasion was propitious
and unrepeatable. I had understood that statement as meaning that he had not
been an old man before. Yet at the restaurant they knew him as the feeble old
man who suffered from strokes.

"The
nagual's ruthlessness has many aspects," he said. "It's like a tool
that adapts itself to many uses. Ruthlessness is a state of being. It is a
level of intent that the nagual attains.

"The
nagual uses it to entice the movement of his own assemblage point or those of
his apprentices. Or he uses it to stalk. I began that day as a stalker,
pretending to be old, and ended up as a genuinely old, feeble man. My
ruthlessness, controlled by my eyes, made my own assemblage point move.

"Although
I had been at the restaurant many times before as an old, sick man, I had only
been stalking, merely playing at being old. Never before that day had my
assemblage point moved to the precise spot of age and senility."

He said
that as soon as he had intended to be old, his eyes lost their shine, and I
immediately noticed it. Alarm was written all over my face. The loss of the
shine in his eyes was a consequence of using his eyes to intend the position of
an old man. As his assemblage point reached that position, he was able to age
in appearance, behavior, and feeling.

I asked him
to clarify the idea of intending with the eyes. I had the faint notion I
understood it, yet I could not formulate even to myself what I knew.

"The
only way of talking about it is to say that intent is intended with the
eyes," he said. "I know that it is so. Yet, just like you, I can't
pinpoint what it is I know. Sorcerers resolve this particular difficulty by
accepting something extremely obvious: human beings are infinitely more complex
and mysterious than our wildest fantasies."

I insisted
that he had not shed any light on the matter.

"All I
can say is that the eyes do it," he said cuttingly. "I don't know
how, but they do it. They summon intent with something indefinable that they
have, something in their shine. Sorcerers say that intent is experienced with
the eyes, not with the reason."

He refused
to add anything and went back to explaining my recollection. He said that once
his assemblage point had reached the specific position that made him genuinely
old, doubts should have been completely removed from my mind. But due to the
fact that I took pride in being super-rational, I immediately did my best to
explain away his transformation.

"I've
told you over and over that being too rational is a handicap," he said.
"Human beings have a very deep sense of magic. We are part of the
mysterious. Rationality is only a veneer with us. If we scratch that surface,
we find a sorcerer underneath. Some of us, however, have great difficulty
getting underneath the surface level; others do it with total ease. You and I
are very alike in this respect - we both have to sweat blood before we let go
of our self-reflection."

I explained
to him that, for me, holding onto my rationality had always been a matter of
life or death. Even more so when it came to my experiences in his world.

He remarked
that that day in Guaymas my rationality had been exceptionally trying for him.
From the start he had had to make use of every device he knew to undermine it.
To that end, he began by forcibly putting his hands on my shoulders and nearly
dragging me down with his weight. That blunt physical maneuver was the first
jolt to my body. And this, together with my fear caused by his lack of
continuity, punctured my rationality.