Tales of Power Read online

  I was involved in those deliberations when the same strange tapping noise jolted me out of my thoughts. Don Juan smiled and then began to chuckle.

  “You like the humbleness of a beggar,” he said softly. “You bow your head to reason.”

  “I always think that I’m being tricked,” I said. “That’s the crux of my problem.”

  “You’re right. You are being tricked,” he retorted with a disarming smile. “That cannot be your problem. The real crux of the matter is that you feel that I am deliberately lying to you, am I correct?”

  “Yes. There is something in myself that doesn’t let me believe that what’s taking place is real.”

  “You’re right again. Nothing of what is taking place is real.”

  “What do you mean by that, don Juan?”

  “Things are real only after one has learned to agree on their realness. What took place this evening, for instance, cannot possibly be real to you, because no one could agree with you about it.”

  “Do you mean that you didn’t see what happened?”

  “Of course I did. But I don’t count. I am the one who’s lying to you, remember?”

  Don Juan laughed until he coughed and choked. His laughter was friendly even though he was making fun of me.

  “Don’t pay too much attention to all my gibberish,” he said reassuringly. “I’m just trying to relax you and I know that you feel at home only when you’re muddled up.”

  His expression was deliberately comical and we both laughed. I told him that what he had just said made me feel more afraid than ever.

  “You’re afraid of me?” he asked.

  “Not of you, but of what you represent.”

  “I represent the warrior’s freedom. Are you afraid of that?”

  “No. But I’m afraid of the awesomeness of your knowledge. There is no solace for me, no haven to go to.”

  “You’re again confusing issues. Solace, haven, fear, all of them are moods that you have learned without ever questioning their value. As one can see, the black magicians have already engaged all your allegiance.”

  “Who are the black magicians, don Juan?”

  “Our fellow men are the black magicians. And since you are with them, you too are a black magician. Think for a moment. Can you deviate from the path that they’ve lined up for you? No. Your thoughts and your actions are fixed forever in their terms. That is slavery. I, on the other hand, brought you freedom. Freedom is expensive, but the price is not impossible. So, fear your captors, your masters. Don’t waste your time and your power fearing me.”

  I knew that he was right, and yet in spite of my genuine agreement with him I also knew that my lifelong habits would unavoidably make me stick to my old path. I did indeed feel like a slave.

  After a long silence don Juan asked me if I had enough strength for another bout with knowledge.

  “Do you mean with the moth?” I asked half in jest.

  His body contorted with laughter. It was as if I had just told him the funniest joke in the world.

  “What do you really mean when you say that knowledge is a moth?” I asked.

  “I have no other meanings,” he replied. “A moth is a moth. I thought that by now, with all your accomplishments, you would have had enough power to see. You caught sight of a man instead and that was not true seeing.”

  From the beginning of my apprenticeship, don Juan had depicted the concept of “seeing” as a special capacity that one could develop and which would allow one to apprehend the “ultimate” nature of things.

  Over the years of our association I had developed a notion that what he meant by “seeing” was an intuitive grasp of things, or the capacity to understand something at once, or perhaps the ability to see through human interactions and discover convert meanings and motives.

  “I should say that tonight, when you faced the moth, you were half looking and half seeing,” don Juan proceeded. “In that state, although you were not altogether your usual self, you were still capable of being fully aware in order to operate your knowledge of the world.”

  Don Juan paused and looked at me. I did not know what to say at first.

  “How was I operating my knowledge of the world?” I asked.

  “Your knowledge of the world told you that in the bushes one can only find animals prowling or men hiding behind the foliage. You held that thought, and naturally you had to find ways to make the world conform to that thought.”

  “But I wasn’t thinking at all, don Juan.”

  “Let’s not call it thinking then. It is rather the habit of having the world always conform to our thoughts. When it doesn’t, we simply make it conform. Moths as large as a man cannot be even a thought, therefore, for you, what was in the bushes had to be a man.

  “The same thing happened with the coyote. Your old habits decided the nature of that encounter too. Something took place between you and the coyote, but it wasn’t talk. I have been in the same quandary myself. I’ve told you that once I talked with a deer; now you’ve talked to a coyote, but neither you nor I will ever know what really took place at those times.”

  “What are you telling me, don Juan?”

  “When the sorcerers’ explanation became clear to me, it was too late to know what the deer did to me. I said that we talked, but that wasn’t so. To say that we had a conversation is only a way of arranging it so I can talk about it. The deer and I did something, but at the time it was taking place I needed to make the world conform to my ideas, just like you did. I had been talking all my life, just like you, therefore my habits prevailed and were extended to the deer. When the deer came to me and did whatever it did, I was forced to understand it as talking.”

  “Is this the sorcerers’ explanation?”

  “No. This is my explanation for you. But it is not opposed to the sorcerers’ explanation.”

  His statement threw me into a state of great intellectual excitation. For a while I forgot the prowling moth or even to take notes. I tried to rephrase his statements and we involved ourselves in a long discussion about the reflexive nature of our world. The world, according to don Juan, had to conform to its description; that is, the description reflected itself.

  Another point in his elucidation was that we had learned to relate ourselves to our description of the world in terms of what he called “habits.” I introduced what I thought was a more engulfing term, intentionality, the property of human consciousness whereby an object is referred to, or is intended.

  Our conversation engendered a most interesting speculation. Examined in light of don Juan’s explanation, my “talk” with the coyote acquired a new character. I had indeed “intended” the dialogue, since I have never known another avenue of intentional communication. I had also succeeded in conforming to the description that communication takes place through dialogue, and thus I made the description reflect itself.

  I had a moment of great elation. Don Juan laughed and said that to be so moved by words was another aspect of my foolery. He made a comical gesture of talking without sounds.

  “All of us go through the same shenanigans,” he said after a long pause. “The only way to overcome them is to persist in acting like a warrior. The rest comes of itself and by itself.”

  “What is the rest, don Juan?”

  “Knowledge and power. Men of knowledge have both. And yet none of them could tell how they got to have them, except that they had kept on acting like warriors and at a given moment everything changed.”

  He looked at me. He seemed undecided, then stood up and said that I had no other recourse but to keep my appointment with knowledge.

  I felt a shiver; my heart began to pound fast. I got up. Don Juan moved around me as if he were examining my body from every possible angle. He signaled me to sit down and keep on writing.

  “If you get too frightened you won’t be able to keep your appointment,” he said. “A warrior must be calm and collected and must never lose his grip.”

  “I’m r
eally scared,” I said. “Moth or whatever, there is something prowling around out there in the bushes.”

  “Of course there is!” he exclaimed. “My objection is that you insist on thinking that it is a man, just like you insist on thinking that you talked with a coyote.”

  A part of me fully understood his point; there was, however, another aspect of myself that would not let go and in spite of the evidence clung steadfast to “reason.”

  I told don Juan that his explanation did not satisfy my senses, although I was in complete intellectual agreement with it.

  “That’s the flaw with words,” he said in an assuring tone. “They always force us to feel enlightened, but when we turn around to face the world they always fail us and we end up facing the world as we always have, without enlightenment. For this reason, a sorcerer seeks to act rather than to talk and to this effect he gets a new description of the world—a new description where talking is not that important, and where new acts have new reflections.”

  He sat down by me and gazed into my eyes and asked me to voice what I had really “seen” in the chaparral.

  I was confronted at the moment with an absorbing inconsistency. I had seen the dark shape of a man, but I had also seen that shape turn into a bird. I had, therefore, witnessed more than my reason would allow me to consider possible. But rather than discarding my reason altogether, something in myself had selected parts of my experience, such as the size and general contour of the dark shape, and held them as reasonable possibilities, while it discarded other parts, such as the dark shape turning into a bird. And thus I had become convinced that I had seen a man.

  Don Juan roared with laughter when I expressed my quandary. He said that sooner or later the sorcerers’ explanation would come to my rescue and everything would then be perfectly clear, without having to be reasonable or unreasonable.

  “In the meantime all I can do for you is to guarantee that that was not a man” he said.

  Don Juan’s gaze became quite unnerving. My body shivered involuntarily. He made me feel embarrassed and nervous.

  “I’m looking for marks on your body” he explained. “You may not know it, but this evening you had quite a bout out there.”

  “What kind of marks are you looking for?”

  “Not actual physical marks on your body but signs, indications in your luminous fibers, areas of brightness. We are luminous beings and everything we are or everything we feel shows in our fibers. Humans have a brightness peculiar only to them. That’s the only way to tell them apart from other luminous living beings.

  “If you would have seen tonight, you would have noticed that the shape in the bushes was not a luminous living being.”

  I wanted to ask more but he put his hand on my mouth and hushed me. He then put his mouth to my ear and whispered that I should listen and try to hear a soft rustling, the gentle muffled steps of a moth on the dry leaves and branches on the ground.

  I could not hear anything. Don Juan stood up abruptly, picked up the lantern and said that we were going to sit under the ramada by the front door. He led me through the back and around the house, on the edge of the chaparral rather than going through the room and out of the front door. He explained that it was essential to make our presence obvious. We half circled around the house on the left side. Don Juan’s pace was extremely slow. His steps were weak and vacillating. His arm shook as he held the lantern.

  I asked him if there was something wrong with him. He winked at me and whispered that the big moth that was prowling around had an appointment with a young man, and that the slow gait of a feeble old man was an obvious way of showing who was the appointee.

  When we finally arrived at the front of the house, don Juan hooked the lantern on a beam and made me sit with my back against the wall. He sat to my right.

  “We’re going to sit here,” he said, “and you are going to write and talk to me in a very normal manner. The moth that lurched at you today is around, in the bushes. After a while it’ll come closer to look at you. That’s why I’ve put the lantern on a beam right above you. The light will guide the moth to find you. When it gets to the edge of the bushes, it will call you. It is a very special sound. The sound by itself may help you.”

  “What kind of sound is it, don Juan?”

  “It is a song. A haunting call that moths produce. Ordinarily it cannot be heard, but the moth out there in the bushes is a rare moth; you will hear its call clearly and, providing that you are impeccable, it will remain with you for the rest of your life.”

  “What is it going to help me with?”

  “Tonight, you’re going to try to finish what you’ve started earlier. Seeing happens only when the warrior is capable of stopping the internal dialogue.

  “Today, you stopped your talk at will, out there in the bushes. And you saw. What you saw was not clear. You thought that it was a man. I say it was a moth. Neither of us is correct, but that’s because we have to talk. I still have the upper hand because I see better than you and because I’m familiar with the sorcerers’ explanation; so I know, although it’s not altogether accurate, that the shape you saw tonight was a moth.

  “And now, you’re going to remain silent and thoughtless and let that little moth come to you again.”

  I could hardly take notes. Don Juan laughed and urged me to keep on writing as if nothing bothered me. He touched my arm and said that writing was the best protective shield that I had.

  “We’ve never talked about moths,” he went on. “The time was not right until now. As you already know, your spirit was unbalanced. To counteract that I taught you to live the warrior’s way. Well, a warrior starts off with the certainty that his spirit is off balance; then by living in full control and awareness, but without hurry or compulsion, he does his ultimate best to gain this balance.

  “In your case, as in the case of every man, your imbalance was due to the sum total of all your actions. But now your spirit seems to be in the proper light to talk about moths.”

  “How did you know that this was the right time to talk about moths?”

  “I caught a glimpse of the moth prowling around when you arrived. It was the first time it was friendly and open. I had seen it before in the mountains around Genaro’s house, but only as a menacing figure reflecting your lack of order.”

  I heard a strange sound at that moment. It was like a muffled creaking of a branch rubbing against another, or like the sputtering of a small motor heard from a distance. It changed scales like a musical tone, creating an eerie rhythm. Then it stopped.

  “That was the moth,” don Juan said. “Perhaps you’ve already noticed that, although the light of the lantern is bright enough to attract moths, there isn’t a single one flying around it.”

  I had not paid attention to it, but once don Juan made me aware of it, I also noticed an incredible silence in the desert around the house.

  “Don’t get jumpy,” he said calmly. “There is nothing in this world that a warrior cannot account for. You see, a warrior considers himself already dead, so there is nothing for him to lose. The worst has already happened to him, therefore he’s clear and calm; judging him by his acts or by his words, one would never suspect that he has witnessed everything.”

  Don Juan’s words, and above all his mood, were very soothing to me. I told him that in my day-to-day life I no longer experienced the obsessive fear I used to, but that my body entered into convulsions of fright at the thought of what was out there in the dark.

  “Out there, there is only knowledge,” he said in a factual tone. “Knowledge is frightening, true; but if a warrior accepts the frightening nature of knowledge he cancels out its awesomeness.”

  The strange sputtering noise happened again. It seemed closer and louder. I listened carefully. The more attention I paid to it the more difficult it was to determine its nature. It did not seem to be the call of a bird or the cry of a land animal. The tone of each sputter was rich and deep; some were produced in a low key, others
in a high one. They had a rhythm and a specific duration; some were long, I heard them like a single unit of sound; others were short and happened in a cluster, like the staccato sound of a machine gun.

  “The moths are the heralds or, better yet, the guardians of eternity,” don Juan said after the sound had stopped. “For some reason, or for no reason at all, they are the depositories of the gold dust of eternity.”

  The metaphor was foreign to me. I asked him to explain it.

  “The moths carry a dust on their wings,” he said. “A dark gold dust. That dust is the dust of knowledge.”

  His explanation had made the metaphor even more obscure. I vacillated for a moment trying to find the best way of wording my question. But he began to talk again.

  “Knowledge is a most peculiar affair,” he said, “especially for a warrior. Knowledge for a warrior is something that comes at once, engulfs him, and passes on.”

  “What does knowledge have to do with the dust on the wings of moths?” I asked after a long pause.

  “Knowledge comes floating like specks of gold dust, the same dust that covers the wings of moths. So, for a warrior, knowledge is like taking a shower, or being rained on by specks of dark gold dust.”

  In the most polite manner I was capable of, I mentioned that his explanations had confused me even more. He laughed and assured me that he was making perfect sense, except that my reason would not allow me to be at ease.

  “The moths have been the intimate friends and helpers of sorcerers from time immemorial,” he said. “I had not touched upon this subject before, because of your lack of preparation.”

  “But how can the dust on their wings be knowledge?”

  “You’ll see.”

  He put his hand over my notebook and told me to close my eyes and become silent and without thoughts. He said that the call of the moth in the chaparral was going to aid me. If I paid attention to it, it would tell me of imminent events. He stressed that he did not know how the communication between the moth and myself was going to be established, neither did he know what the terms of the communication would be. He urged me to feel at ease and confident and trust my personal power.