Carlos Castaneda (1925–1998) - American anthropologist whose books, recounting dramatic training with an Indian-Mexican sorcerer, set forth a philosophy of existence that became especially popular among representatives of Western “youth culture” of the late 60s and 70s 20th century
Very little is known about the official life of Carlos Cesar Arana Salvador Castaneda. But even what is known is intertwined with ambiguity and mystification, the emergence of which he himself often contributed. Even the exact date and place of his birth are unknown. According to one version - entries in immigration documents - he was born on December 25, 1925 in the Peruvian city of Cajamarca, according to another - on December 25, 1931 in Sao Paulo (Brazil). Only after reading his books, which tell about a certain Don Juan, can we get some idea of Castaneda the man. It is known that in 1951 Castaneda emigrated to the United States from Peru, and before that his family lived in Brazil, from where they fled to escape another dictator. It is unknown what he did before coming to the United States. In the USA, judging by the “transcript” of his dialogues with Don Juan, he worked as a taxi driver, wrote poetry, studied painting, and sold alcohol in a store. It is also known about his desire to penetrate the Hollywood environment.
It is known that he attended San Francisco Community College, taking courses in creative writing and journalism, then entered the University of California at Los Angeles in 1955 and seven years later received a bachelor's degree in anthropology. He taught at the university, was a teacher in Beverly Hills. In one episode, he describes how he went to prestigious cinemas in Los Angeles with a special card from his girlfriend, the daughter of a Hollywood boss.
In 1968, Castaneda gained fame. He was 37 or 43. Having integrated into the environment of the free-thinking intelligentsia, he was full of strength and ambitious aspirations. His ambitions were channeled by a grant from the University of California for his anthropological research. Under the terms of this grant, he went to central Mexico, where for several years he was engaged in “field work”, which ended, however, not in a scientific discovery, but in a completely unusual novel, new for that time, “The Teachings of Don Juan: The Way of Knowledge of the Yaqui Indians.” Castaneda's literary and scientific endeavors were appreciated, and in 1973, C. Castaneda received a PhD and became a professor at the University of California, defending a dissertation on anthropology there, almost identical to his third book, Journey to Ixtlan (1972). The appearance of the first books, “The Teaching of Don Juan” (1968) and “A Separate Reality” (1971), made the author a celebrity, and “Tales of Power” (1974) and “The Second circle of power" (The Second Ring of Power, 1977) also became bestsellers. The sixth of the books in this series, “The Eagle's Gift,” was published in 1981. The books were published in millions of copies and were translated into 17 languages, including Russian.
The texts of Castaneda’s works themselves claim to be a detailed presentation of the impressions and experiences of the author (under the name “Carlos”), received while studying with an old Yaqui Indian, Don Juan Matus, who allegedly knew some kind of higher revelation, and his assistant Don Genaro. Carlos, as a fact-finding graduate student, undergoes a bizarre course of study that is designed to change the way he perceives the world so that he can see, think and live completely differently than before. The training consists of performing a sequence of ritually assigned actions while taking narcotic herbal remedies, which don Juan gives and recommends. In addition to the natural hallucinogens that Carlos initially takes for his transformation, the old sorcerer emphasizes the importance of certain physical exercises, such as squinting the eyes for altered vision or "walking the force" for moving safely at night through the desert. The result of the training was a complete transformation of the hero's personality and his entire perception of reality (which is quite natural for a person who has turned into a drug addict). Criticism has always doubted the real existence of Don Juan, and not without reason. Castaneda did not show the world a single proof of the existence of his Don Juan and in 1973 he “sent” him along with a group of characters on a magical journey from which they never returned. However, Castaneda's students and admirers believe that the question of the authenticity of his stories has nothing to do with the problem of the truth of the “path of knowledge” proposed by don Juan.
It is known about the personal life of Carlos Castaneda that he was married. He divorced six months later, although he finally separated from his wife in 1973. There is a man who calls himself his son, Adrian Vachon (C. J. Castaneda), but whether this is really so is unclear. Castaneda died in Westwood (California, USA) from liver cancer on April 27, 1998. In the last period, he led a “healthy lifestyle”: not only did he not drink alcohol and drugs, to the glorification of which he devoted his work, not only did he not smoke, but he did not even drink tea or coffee. The best-selling producers exploited his “mysterious passing” for some time, claiming that he was “burnt up from the inside,” even though he was routinely cremated and his remains were transported to Mexico. Castaneda was supposed to remain a mystery. After all, based on the teachings of the unmercenary Don Juan, its author left behind a perfectly functioning industry with a multimillion-dollar income. His estate after his death was valued at $1 million (quite modest for an author whose books sold a total of about 8 million in 17 languages). All of it was donated to the Eagle Foundation, established shortly before his death. The estimated total capital of the fund was 20 million.
Carlos Castaneda
Collected Works [volume 2]
7 Book. Fire from within
Preface
My previous books were detailed accounts in which I described my apprenticeship with don Juan, an Indian magician from Mexico. Don Juan wanted me to understand and master concepts and practices that were completely foreign to me. Therefore, I had no choice but to present his teaching in the form of a narrative of what happened, without changing or adding anything of my own.
Don Juan's teaching method was based on the concept of two types of human awareness. He referred to them by the terms “right side” and “left side”. Don Juan said that right-sided awareness is the normal state of human consciousness, necessary for adequate functioning in everyday life. Left-sided awareness contains everything that is mysterious in a human being. Left-sided awareness is a state of consciousness in which one acts as a magician and seer. According to the classification of types of awareness, don Juan divided his teaching methods into two parts - a technique for training the right side and a technique for training the left side.
Don Juan gave me all the instructions for the right side when I was in a state of normal awareness. My previous books are dedicated to describing precisely this part of training. Don Juan told me that he was a sorcerer while I was in an ordinary state of awareness. He also introduced me to another magician, Don Genaro Flores. From the relationship that had been established between us, it logically followed that they took me on as a student.
This apprenticeship ended with an incomprehensible action for which don Juan and don Genaro prepared me. They made it so that I could jump from the top of a flat mountain into an abyss.
Everything that happened there at the top is described in one of my books. This was the last act of the drama that was don Juan's teaching for the right side. It was played by don Juan, don Genaro, two of their students - Pablito and Nestor, and me. Pablito, Nestor and I then jumped from the top into the abyss.
Years passed during which I was sure that to suppress the rational fear that arose in me in the face of real destruction, only my absolute faith in don Juan and don Genaro was enough. Now I know that this is not true. The secret of my incomprehensible act lay in don Juan's teachings for left-sided awareness. I now realize the enormous discipline and perseverance that was required to impart this teaching to me.
Ten years passed before I was able to remember exactly everything that happened when don Juan taught the left side, which resulted in the feeling of an urgent need to perform such an incomprehensible action as jumping into an abyss.
It was in the teaching for the left side that the main meaning of what don Juan, don Genaro and their assistants actually did to me was contained. And it was there that the clue to who they really were lay. They did not teach me magic at all, but they conveyed to me the teaching of perfect mastery of the three aspects of ancient knowledge that they themselves possessed. Awareness, stalking and intention are the names of these three aspects. Don Juan, don Genaro and their assistants themselves were not magicians. They called themselves seers. And don Juan, in addition, was also the Nagual.
Don Juan explained much of what related to the concepts of “vision” and “nagual” to me back in the teaching for the right side. As far as I understood then, vision is the ability of a human being to expand the field of its perception to a state in which not only the appearance and image is perceived, but also the inner essence of any object and phenomenon. Don Juan also told me that seers see a person as a field of energy forming a luminous egg-shaped object. For most people, this egg is divided into two parts. However, some men and women have four or three parts. These people are more resilient than ordinary people. By learning to see, they can become Naguals.
In his teaching for the left side, don Juan revealed to me the complexity of the concepts of “vision” and “nagual”. To be a Nagual, he said, is something much more capacious and significant than simply being a particularly viable person who has learned to see. To be a Nagual means to be a leader, a teacher, to be one who leads and shows the way.
As the Nagual, don Juan led a group of seers. According to tradition, such a group is called a detachment or party of the nagual. Don Juan's party included eight female seers - Cecilia, Delia, Ermelinda, Carmela, Nelida, Florinda, Zuleika and Zoila; three male seers - Vicente, Silvio Manuel and Genaro; and also four couriers or messengers - Emilito, John Tuma, Marta and Teresa.
Don Juan not only led his team, but also taught and led a group of disciple seers. This was the new command of the next Nagual. It consisted of four young men - Pablito, Nestor, Eligio, Benigno - and five women - Soledad, La Gorda, Lidia, Josefina and Rosa. I was the nominal leader of the nagual's new team, together with the female nagual Carol.
To be able to perceive don Juan's teachings for the left side, I had to enter a very special state of piercing clarity of perception. This state is called a “state of heightened awareness.” Don Juan introduced me into this state. During all the years of our communication with him, he used a special palm strike on my upper back for this purpose.
As don Juan explained, in a state of heightened awareness, the student can behave as naturally as in ordinary life, but his mind is able to concentrate on anything with amazing strength and clarity. However, an inherent property of the state of heightened awareness is that it is not associated with right-sided memory. Therefore, upon returning to his normal state, the student is unable to remember anything that happened while he was in a state of heightened awareness. In order for the properties and powers acquired by the student in a state of heightened awareness to become part of his normal state, he must remember everything. And this requires many years of effort associated with constant, often destructive stress.
What happened between me and the nagual's team is a clear example of the difficulties associated with recalling information received in a state of heightened consciousness. Only in this state did I contact everyone who was part of it. The only exception was Don Genaro. Therefore, in my daily life, I could not remember any of these people. They didn’t even appear to me as shadows in my dreams. The way we met with them every time became a kind of almost ritual. I always came to don Genaro's house in a small town in southern Mexico. Don Juan immediately joined me and don Genaro, and the three of us went through some part of the teaching for the right side. Then don Juan changed the level of my awareness and only after that we went to the neighboring town where don Juan himself and the other fifteen seers lived.
Each time I entered a state of heightened awareness, I was continually amazed at how different the two sides of my being were. It always felt like a curtain was rising before my eyes. It was as if I was half-blind and suddenly instantly became sighted. I was overcome by an incomparable feeling of freedom and all-encompassing joy. It was so unlike anything I had ever experienced. And at the same time, this feeling contained a frightening feeling of deep sadness and longing. They were inseparable from freedom and joy. Don Juan said that without sadness and longing, completeness is unattainable. Without them there can be no completeness, for there can be neither kindness nor balance. And wisdom without kindness and knowledge without balance are useless, don Juan said.
Carlos CASTANEDA BOOK 2. SEPARATE REALITY.INTRODUCTION
Ten years ago I was lucky enough to meet a Yaqui Indian in western Mexico. I called him "don Juan." In Spanish, don is a term of respect.
My acquaintance with don Juan took place under the following circumstances. I was sitting with Bill, my friend, in a bus depot in a border town in Arizona. We were very calm. In the afternoon, the summer heat seemed to be behind us.
“There’s the man I told you about,” he said in a quiet voice.
He nodded significantly towards the entrance. The old man had just entered the room.
- What did you tell me about him? - I asked.
- This is the same Indian who knows about peyote, remember? - I remembered how Bill and I once drove all day by car, looking for the house of an “eccentric Indian” who lived in that area. We did not find his house, and I had the feeling that the Indians we asked about him were deliberately giving us the wrong direction. Bill said that the man was an “herbalist” (a person who collects and sells medicinal plants) and that he knew a lot about the hallucinogenic cactus - peyote. He also said that I should meet him. Bill was my guide to these places while I was collecting various information about medicinal herbs used by the Indians.
Bill stood up and walked over to the man to say hello. The Indian was of average height. His hair was gray and short and hung slightly over his ears, emphasizing the roundness of his head. It was very dark. The deep wrinkles on his face gave him the appearance of a very old man, but his body seemed strong and collected. I watched him for a minute. He moved with an ease that I would have thought impossible for an old man. Bill motioned for me to approach them.
“He's a good guy,” Bill told me, “but I can't understand him.” His Spanish, in my opinion, is mangled and full of rural colloquialisms.
The old man looked at Bill and smiled. And Bill, who knew only a few words in Spanish, uttered some absurd phrase in this language. He looked at me as if asking if this phrase had any meaning, but I did not know what he wanted to say; then he smiled shyly and walked away. The old man looked at me and began to laugh. I explained to him that my friend sometimes forgets that he doesn't speak Spanish.
“I also think that he forgot to introduce us to each other,” I said and told him my name.
“And I, Juan Matus, am at your service,” he said.
We shook hands and were silent for a while. I broke the silence and spoke about the task ahead of me. I told him that I was looking for any kind of information about plants, especially peyote. I continued to speak forcefully for some time, and although I was almost completely ignorant on this subject, I nevertheless told him that I already knew a lot about peyote. I believed that if I boasted about my knowledge, then he would be interested in talking to me. But he didn't say anything. He listened patiently. Then he nodded slowly and stared at me: his eyes seemed to glow with their own light. I avoided his gaze. I felt uncomfortable. I had confidence at that moment that he knew that I was talking nonsense.
“Come to my house sometime,” he said, finally taking his eyes away from me. - maybe we can talk more easily there.
I didn't know what else to say. I felt uncomfortable. After some time, Bill returned to the hall. He understood my discomfort and didn't say a word. We sat in tense silence for some time. Then the old man stood up. His bus has arrived. He said goodbye.
- Didn’t it go very well? - Bill asked. - Yes. Unbearable. Suddenly Bill leaned over and touched me - were you asking him about plants?
- Yes, I asked, but I think I asked the wrong way.
- I told you that he is very eccentric. The Indians in the area know him, but they never talk about him. And that's already something.
- Still, he said that I could come to his house.
- He tricked you. Sure, you can go to his house, but what does that mean? He will never tell you anything. Even if you ask him for something, he will hesitate, as if you were an idiot talking nonsense.
Bill said with conviction that he had met people of this type before who came across as very knowledgeable. In his opinion, he said, such people are not worth bothering with, since sooner or later you can get the same information from someone else who does not pretend to be hard to get. He said that he had neither the time nor the patience to unravel the fog of old people, and that perhaps the old man was only pretending to know something about herbs, when in reality he knew no more than anyone else.
Bill continued talking, but I didn't listen. My thoughts were still occupied with the old Indian. He knew I was lying. I remembered his eyes. They really were shining.
A couple of months later I returned to visit him, not so much as an anthropology student interested in medicinal plants, but as a person with an inexplicable curiosity. The way he looked at me then was unprecedented in my life. I wanted to know what was hidden under that look. This was almost a sticking point for me. I thought about it, and the more I thought about it, the more unusual it seemed to me.
Don Juan and I became friends, and I visited him countless times throughout the year. I found his manner very confident and his sense of humor excellent; but above all, I felt that there was a hidden content in his actions, a content that was completely invisible to me. I felt a strange pleasure in his presence, and, at the same time, I felt a strange discomfort. Just his company forced me to make a huge re-evaluation of my behavior patterns. I was brought up, perhaps like anyone else, to accept man as, in essence, a weak and fallible creature. What struck me about don Juan was that he did not give the impression of being weak and defenseless, and simply being around him gave rise to unfavorable comparisons between his lifestyle and mine. Perhaps one of the most striking statements he made during this period was about our innate differences. Before one of my visits I was feeling very unhappy with the general course of my life and with a number of pressing personal conflicts that I had. When I arrived at his house, I felt in a bad mood and very nervous.
We talked about my interest in knowledge, but, as usual, we went down two different roads. I was talking about academic knowledge that conveys experience, while he was talking about direct knowledge of the world.
- Do you know anything about the world around you? - he asked.
“I know all kinds of things,” I said.
- I mean, do you ever feel the world around you?
- I feel as much in the world as I can.
- This is not enough. You must feel everything, otherwise the world loses its meaning.
I made the classic argument that I don't need to taste soup to know its recipe, and I don't need to electrocute myself to learn about electricity.
“You're making it sound stupid,” he said. - as far as I can see, you want to cling to your reasons, despite the fact that they give you nothing. You want to remain the same even at the cost of your well-being.
- I do not know what you're talking.
- I'm talking about the fact that you are not whole. You have no peace. - this statement irritated me. I felt offended. I thought that he was not qualified enough to judge my actions or my personality.
“You are infected with problems,” he said, “why?”
“I’m just a man, don Juan,” I said, as if it were a matter of course. I made this statement with the same intonation that my father used when he said it. When he said that he was just a man, he always meant that he was weak and defenseless, and his statement, like everyone else, was full of an immense sense of despair.
Don Juan stared at me the same way he did when we first met.
“You think too much about yourself,” he said and smiled. - and this gives you a strange fatigue that makes you close yourself off from the world around you and cling to your arguments. So problems are all you have. I'm just a person too, but I don't mean what you mean here.
- What do you mean?
- I got rid of my problems. It's too bad that life is so short that I can't grab hold of all the things I'd like to grab hold of. But it's not a problem. It's just a regret.
I liked the tone of his statement. There was no despair or self-pity in him.
In 1961, a year after our first meeting, don Juan revealed to me that he had secret knowledge of medicinal herbs. He told me he was a "brujo". The Spanish word brujo can be translated as magician, healer, sorcerer. From that moment on, the relationship between us changed. I became his student, and for the next four years he tried to teach me the secrets of magic. I wrote a book about this apprenticeship: “The Teachings of Don Juan: The Way of Knowledge of the Yaqui Indians.”
Our conversations took place in Spanish, and due to don Juan's brilliant command of this language, I received detailed explanations of the complex meanings of his belief system. I called this complex and well-systematized branch of knowledge magic, and he himself - a magician, because these were the categories he himself used in informal conversation. However, in the context of more serious coverage he used the terms "knowledge" to denote magic, and "man of knowledge" or "one who knows" to denote a magician.
In order to teach and transmit his knowledge, don Juan used three well-known psychotropic plants: peyote lernornoru williamueil; Datura datura iNoxia and a species of mushroom belonging to the genus psyloseva.
By separately ingesting each of these hallucinogens, he produced in me, as his disciple, certain curious states of disturbed perception or altered consciousness, which I called “states of extraordinary reality.” I used the word reality because a central point in don Juan's belief system was that the states of consciousness produced by taking any of these three plants were not hallucinations, but integral, if unusual, aspects of the reality of everyday life. Don Juan behaved towards these states of non-ordinary reality not as if they were not real, but as if they were real.
Classifying these plants as hallucinogens and the states they produce as non-ordinary realities was, of course, my own invention. Don Juan understood and explained these plants as vehicles that should lead and deliver a person to certain impersonal forces, and the state that they produce as “meetings” that a magician must have with these forces in order to gain control over them .
He called peyote “mescalito,” and explained that he was a volunteer teacher and protector of the people. Mescalito teaches “how to live correctly.” Peyote is usually taken at a gathering of magicians called "mitots", where participants gather for the express purpose of receiving a lesson in how to live correctly.
Don Juan considered dope and mushrooms to be forces of a different kind. He called them "ollies" and said they could be controlled; in fact, the magician gained his power by manipulating the ally. Of these two forces, don Juan preferred mushrooms. He claimed that the power contained in the mushrooms was his personal ally and he called it "smoke" or "smoke".
Don Juan's procedure for using mushrooms was to let them dry into a fine powder while they were kept inside a small jar. He kept the jar sealed for a year, then mixed the resulting powder with five other dried plants to create a mixture for smoking in a pipe.
In order to become a man of knowledge, you need to “meet” an ally as many times as possible. You need to become “familiar” with the ally. This task consisted, of course, of smoking the hallucinogenic mixture very often. The process of “smoking” involved swallowing a fine powder that did not burn and inhaling the smoke of the other five plants that made up the smoking mixture.
Don Juan explained the profound effect that the mushrooms had on the perceptual faculties as "the ally removing the body."
Don Juan's method of teaching required extraordinary effort on the part of the student. In fact, the degree of participation and involvement required was so great and intense that towards the end of 1965 I was forced to give up my apprenticeship. Now that 5 years have passed since then, I can say that at that time don Juan's teachings began to pose a serious threat to my “idea of peace.” I began to lose the confidence that we all have that the reality of everyday life is something that we can take for granted.
At the time of leaving I was convinced that my decision was final; I didn't want to see don Juan anymore. However, in April 1968 I received the first copy of my book and felt obliged to show it to him. I visited him. Our teacher-student connection was mysteriously restored, and I can say that from that time I began the second cycle of my apprenticeship, very different from the first.
My fear was not as acute as it had been in the past. The general mood of don Juan's teaching was relaxed. He laughed a lot and made me laugh. There seemed to be a conscious intention on his part to minimize the overall seriousness. He joked at the really critical moments of this second cycle and thus helped me through experiences that could easily have become obstacles.
His starting point was that a light and calm disposition of spirit was necessary in order to assimilate the pressure and foreignness of the knowledge that he taught me.
“The reason you got scared and ran away is because you felt so damn important,” he said, explaining my previous departure. - a sense of self-importance makes a person heavy, clumsy and empty (in vain). In order to become a man of knowledge, one must be light and fluid.
Don Juan's special interest in the second cycle of my apprenticeship was to teach me to "see." Obviously, in his system of knowledge it was possible to make a semantic distinction between “see” and “look”, as between two different modes of perception. “Looking” meant the ordinary way in which we are accustomed to experience the world, while “seeing” involved a complex process by which a man of knowledge could directly perceive the essence of the things of the world.
In order to present the intricacies of this learning process in a digestible form, I have condensed long strings of questions and answers and thus published my original field notes. However, I believe that this time my presentation does not diverge from don Juan's meaning. The editing was aimed at ensuring that my notes flowed like a conversation flows, so that they had the content that I wanted; in other words, I wanted to convey to the reader the drama and direction of the field situation through reportage. Each of the sections, which I have designated a chapter, is a session with don Juan. As a rule, he always ended our conversation on a broken note; thus the dramatic tone at the end of each chapter was not my own literary invention, but was characteristic of don Juan's conversational style. Apparently it was a memory device that helped me retain the drama and importance of the lessons.
However, in order to make my report understandable, some explanation is necessary, since the clarity of the material presented depends on the coverage of key concepts or key units that I want to emphasize. This choice of emphasis is based on my interest in the social sciences. It is quite possible that another person, with a different set of goals and expectations, would have identified concepts completely different from those that I myself had chosen.
During the second cycle of discipleship, don Juan made an effort to convince me that the use of a smoking mixture was a necessary condition for "seeing." That's why I have to smoke it as often as possible.
“Only smoke can give you the necessary speed to catch a glimpse of that current world,” he said.
Using a psychotropic mixture, he produced in me a series of states of extraordinary reality. The main feature of such states in relation to what don Juan seemed to be doing was a state of "inapplicability." What I experienced in these states of altered consciousness was inconceivable and impossible to interpret by our everyday method of understanding the world. In other words, the state of inapplicability entailed the disappearance of coherence in my worldview.
Don Juan used this state of inapplicability, or state of non-ordinary reality, to introduce a series of previously learned new “units of meaning.” The units of meaning were all the individual elements characteristic of the knowledge that don Juan was trying to teach me. I called them units of meaning because they were the basic conglomerate of sensory data and their explanations from which more complex meanings were constructed. One example of such units of meaning is the way in which the physiological effect of a psychotropic mixture is understood. It produces numbness and loss of motor control, which was translated in don Juan's system as an action performed by a smoke, which in this case was called an ally, in order to “remove the body of the participant.”
The units of meaning were grouped together in a special way, and each group thus created was what I have called a "sensory interpretation." Obviously, there could be an infinite number of such possible sensory interpretations essential to magic that the magician must learn to create. In our daily lives we encounter countless sensory interpretations related to this. A simple example that we no longer use as a conscious interpretation is the structure we call a “room.” Obviously, we have learned to interpret the structure "room" in terms of room; Thus, the room is a sensory interpretation because it requires that at the moment we name it, we should be aware in one way or another of all those elements that enter into this construction. The system of sensory interpretation is, in other words, the process by which the practitioner becomes aware of all the units of meaning necessary to make inferences, inferences, predictions, etc. About all situations related to his activity.
By "practitioner" I mean a participant who has adequate knowledge of all or nearly all of the units of meaning included in his particular system of sensory interpretation. Don Juan was a practitioner. That is, he was a magician who knew all the steps of his magic.
As a practitioner, he tried to make his system of sensory interpretations accessible to me. Such accessibility in this case was tantamount to a process of desocialization in which new ways of interpreting information received through the senses were inculcated.
I was an “outsider,” that is, one who did not have the ability to make intelligent and coherent interpretations of units of meaning related to magic.
Don Juan's task, as a practitioner making his system available to me, was to destroy a certain certainty that I share with everyone else: the certainty that our "common sense" views of the world are final. Using psychotropic plants and precisely targeted encounters between myself and alien systems, he succeeded in showing me that my views on the world cannot be final, since they are only an interpretation.
For the American Indians, perhaps for thousands of years, that empty phenomenon which we call magic was a serious, valid practice, occupying roughly the same position as our science. Our difficulties in understanding it no doubt arise from the foreign units of meaning with which it deals.
Don Juan once told me that a person has predispositions. I asked him to explain this statement to me.
“My predisposition is to see,” he said.
- What do you mean?
“I like to see,” he said, “because only through vision can a man of knowledge know.”
- What kind of things do you see?
- All.
- But I also see everything, and I am not a man of knowledge.
- No, you don't see.
- I think I see.
- I'm telling you that you don't see.
-What makes you say that, don Juan?
-You're just looking at the surface of things.
“Do you mean to say that every man of knowledge really sees through everything he looks at?”
- No, that's not what I meant. I said that a man of knowledge has his own predispositions. Mine is simply to see and know; others do other things.
- Well, for example, what other things?
- Take the Zacatec, he is a man of knowledge, and his predisposition is to dance. That's why he dances and knows.
- So, the predisposition of a person of knowledge is something that he does in order to know?
- Yes this is correct.
- But how can dance help the Zacatec to know?
- You can say that Zacateca dances with everything he has.
- Does he dance the same as me? I mean, the way they dance?
- Let's say that he dances the same way as I see, and not the way you can dance.
- Does he see the same as you?
- Yes, but he also dances.
- How does Zacateca dance?
- It is hard to explain. It's a special kind of dance that he does when he wants to know. But all I can tell you about this is that if you do not understand the ways of a person who knows, then it is impossible to talk about vision or dance.
-Have you seen how he dances his dance?
- Yes. However, it is impossible for anyone who looks at his dance to see that this is his special way of knowing.
I knew Zacatec, or at least I knew who he was. We dated, and one day I bought him beer. He was very polite and said that I was free to stay at his house whenever I needed it. For a long time I entertained myself with the thought of visiting him, but I did not say anything to don Juan about it.
At noon on May 14, 1962, I drove up to the Zacatec house. He told me how to get there and I easily found the house. It stood on a corner and was surrounded on all sides by a hedge. The gate was closed. I walked around the house, looking to see if I could look inside somewhere. The house seemed empty.
“Don Elias,” I shouted loudly.
The chickens got scared and scattered around the yard, cackling terribly. A small dog approached the fence. I expected her to bark at me; instead she just sat there, watching me. I called again, and the hens burst into more clucking. The old woman left the house. I asked her to call Don Elias.
“He’s not here,” she said.
- Where can I find it?
- He's in the fields.
- Where in the fields?
- I don't know. Come in the evening. He'll be home around five.
-Are you the wife of Don Elias?
“Yes, I’m his wife,” she said and smiled.
I tried to ask her about the Zacatec, but she apologized and said she didn't know much Spanish. I got into the car and drove away.
I returned around six o'clock. I drove to the door and shouted the name of the Zacatec. On this occasion he left the house. I turned on my tape recorder, which hung from my shoulder like a camera in a brown leather bag. He seemed to recognize me.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said, smiling. How's Juan?
- He is healthy. How is your health, Don Elias?
He didn't answer. He seemed nervous. Outwardly he was very collected, but I felt that he was uneasy.
- Did Juan send you here on some business?
- No, I came myself.
- But for what?
His question seemed to betray very genuine surprise.
“I just wanted to talk to you,” I said, trying to make the question sound as natural as possible. - don Juan told me wonderful things about you, I became interested and wanted to ask you a few questions.
Zacateca stood in front of me. His body was lean and wiry. He wore a khaki shirt and trousers. His eyes were half closed. He seemed sleepy or maybe drunk. His mouth was slightly open and his lower lip was hanging down. I noticed that he was breathing deeply and seemed to be almost snoring. The thought occurred to me that the Zacatec was undoubtedly out of his mind. But this thought seemed very inappropriate, because only a few minutes ago, when he left the house, he was very alert and fully aware of my presence.
- What do you want to talk about? - he said finally.
He had a very tired voice. It seemed that he was squeezing words out of himself one after another. I felt very awkward. It was as if his weariness was contagious and was taking over me.
“Nothing special,” I reported. - I just came to chat with you in a friendly way. You once invited me to your home.
- Yes, I invited you, but now it’s not the same.
- But why not?
-Didn't you talk to Juan?
- Yes, I did.
- But then what do you want from me?
“I thought maybe I could ask you a few questions.”
- Give them to Juan. Doesn't he teach you?
- He teaches, but still I would like to ask you about what he teaches me and find out your opinion. That way I would know what to do.
- Why do you want to do this? You don't believe Juan?
- I believe.
“Then why don’t you ask him to tell you what you want to know?”
- That's what I do. And he tells me. But if you also tell me what he teaches me, then maybe I will understand it better.
- Juan can tell you everything. Only he can do this. Don't you understand this?
- Understand. But I also want to talk to people like you, Don Elias. It's not every day that you meet a person of knowledge.
- Juan is a man of knowledge.
- I know it.
-Then why are you talking to me?
- I said that I came so that we could be friends.
- No, that's not why you came. There's something different about you this time.
I wanted to explain, but all I could do was mumble unintelligibly. Zacateca was silent. He seemed to be listening carefully. His eyes were half closed again. But I felt that he was looking at me. He nodded slightly. Then his eyelids opened and I saw his eyes. He seemed to be looking past me. He unconsciously stamped on the floor with the toe of his right foot just behind his left heel. His legs were slightly bent, his arms hung limply along his body. Then he raised his right hand; his palm was open and perpendicular to the ground; the fingers were spread out and pointing at me. He let his hand waver a couple of times before he brought it to my face level. He held her in this position for a second and then said a few words to me. His voice was very clear, and yet I could not understand the words.
A second later, he dropped his hand along his body and remained motionless, taking on a strange pose. He stood leaning on the ankle of his left leg. His right foot curved around the heel of his left foot, and its toe tapped softly and rhythmically on the floor.
An unexpected feeling came over me - a kind of anxiety. My thoughts seemed to be incoherent. I thought about irrelevant, meaningless things that had nothing to do with what was happening. I noticed my discomfort and tried to straighten my thoughts, bringing them back to reality, but I could not do this, despite great efforts. It seemed as if some force was preventing me from concentrating my thoughts and thinking coherently.
Zacateca didn't say a word, and I didn't know what else to say or do. Quite automatically he turned and left.
Later I felt obliged to tell don Juan about my meeting with the Zacatec. Don Juan burst out laughing.
- What really happened then? - I asked.
“Zacateca was dancing,” he said. - he saw you, and then he danced.
- What did he do to me? I felt cold and shivering.
- Obviously, he didn’t like you, and he stopped you by throwing a word at you.
- How was he able to do this? - I exclaimed incredulously.
- Very simple. He stopped you with his will.
- What you said?
- He stopped you with his will.
The explanation was unsatisfactory. His conclusion sounded like nonsense to me. I tried to question him further, but he could not explain the incident to my satisfaction.
It is obvious that this case, like any case in this alien system of sensory interpretations, can only be explained or understood in terms of units of meaning belonging to this system. Thus, this book is a reportage and should be read as a reportage. The system I was recording was not acceptable to me, so any claim to anything other than reporting would be misleading and untenable. In this respect I adhered to the phenomenological method and tried to treat magic in my writings only as phenomena that I encountered. I, as the perceiver, wrote down what I perceived, and while writing it down I tried to refrain from making judgments.
PART ONE. PREPARATION TO THE VISION
1
April 2, 1968
Don Juan looked for a second and did not seem at all surprised to see me, despite the fact that it had been more than two years since I last visited him. He put his hand on my shoulder, smiled and said that I had changed and looked fat and soft.
I brought a copy of my book. Without any preamble, I took it out of my briefcase and handed it to him.
“This is a book about you, don Juan,” I said.
He took it and ran his hand over the pages as if it were a deck of cards. He liked the green color of the binding and the height of the book. He felt the binding with his palms, turned it a couple of times and then handed the book back to me. I felt a great surge of pride.
“I want you to keep it,” I said.
He shook his head in silent laughter.
“I’d rather not,” he said, and then added with a wide smile, “you know what we do with paper in Mexico.”
I laughed. I thought his light irony was beautiful.
We were sitting on a park bench in a small town in the mountainous region of central Mexico. I had absolutely no way of letting him know of my intention to visit him, but I was confident that I would find him, and I did. I waited only a short time in this city before don Juan arrived from the mountains, and I found him in the market at the stall of one of his friends.
Don Juan told me, as a matter of course, that I was here just in time to take him back to Sonora; and we sat down in the park to wait for his friend, the Mazatec Indian with whom he lived.
We waited for about three hours. We talked about various unimportant things, and towards the end of the day, just before his friend came, I told him about several incidents that I had witnessed a few days ago.
During my trip, my car broke down on the outskirts of the city and I had to stay there for three days while it was repaired. There was a motel across from the auto repair shop, but the suburbs always had a depressing effect on me, so I stayed in an eight-story hotel in the city center.
The delivery boy told me that there was a restaurant in the hotel, and when I went down there to eat, I discovered that there were tables outside on the street. They sat quite nicely on a street corner under a low brick arch of modern lines. It was cool outside and there were free tables, but I preferred to sit in the stuffy room. As I entered, I noticed a group of shoe shine boys sitting on a log in front of the restaurant, and I was sure they would follow me if I sat at one of the outside tables.
From where I was sitting, I could see this group of boys through the glass. A couple of young men took a table and the boys surrounded them, asking them to shine their shoes. The young people refused, and I was surprised to see that the boys did not insist, but returned and sat down in their place. After a while, three men in business suits got up and left, and the boys ran up to their table and began to eat the leftover food. Within seconds the plates were clean. The same thing happened with the scraps on all the other tables.
I noticed that the children were very neat; if they spilled water, they blotted it up with their own shoe-cleaning flannels. I also noted the totality of their cleanup of food items. They even ate ice cubes left in glasses, lemon slices from tea, peels, etc. There was absolutely nothing that they left behind.
During the time I was in the hotel, I discovered that there was an agreement between the children and the owner of the restaurant: the children were allowed to hang around the establishment in order to earn some money from the customers, and also to eat the leftover food on the tables with the condition that they won't make anyone angry or break anything. There were eleven of them, ranging in age from five to twelve, but the oldest kept himself apart from the rest of the group. They deliberately alienated him by teasing him with the ditty that he had pubic hair and was too old to be among them.
After three days of watching them pounce like vultures on the most unattractive scraps, I became genuinely sad and left town feeling that there was no hope for these children, whose world was already crushed by their daily struggle for a piece of food.
- Do you feel sorry for them? - don Juan exclaimed in a questioning tone.
“Of course I’m sorry,” I said.
- Why?
- Because I am concerned about the well-being of the people around me. These boys are children, and their world is so ugly and shallow.
- Wait. Wait. How can you say that their world is ugly and shallow? - don Juan said, mimicking my expression. -You think your world is better, don't you?
I said I thought so and he asked me why. And I told him that compared to the world of these children, my world was infinitely more diverse and rich in entertainment and opportunities for personal satisfaction and development. Don Juan's laughter was sincere and friendly. He said I was careless with what I said, that I had no way of measuring the richness and possibilities of these children's world.
I thought Juan was just being stubborn. I really thought he was taking the opposite view just to annoy me. I sincerely believed that these children did not have the slightest chance for intellectual growth.
I defended my point of view for some time, and then don Juan calmly asked me:
“Didn’t you tell me once that in your opinion the greatest achievement for a person would be to become a man of knowledge?”
I have said and repeated again that, in my opinion, to become a man of knowledge is one of the greatest intellectual achievements.
- So you think that your very rich world will ever help you become a man of knowledge? - don Juan asked with slight sarcasm.
I did not answer, and then he asked the same question in other words - a turn that I always used with him when I thought he did not understand.
“In other words,” he said, smiling broadly and obviously seeing that I was aware of his game, “can your freedom and your opportunities help you become a man of knowledge?”
“No,” I said with emphasis.
“Then how can you feel sorry for these children?” - he asked seriously. - any of them can become a man of knowledge. All the people of knowledge I know were children like the ones you saw, eating leftovers and licking tables.
Don Juan's argument gave me an unpleasant feeling. I did not feel sorry for these underprivileged children because they lacked food, but I felt sorry for them because, in my calculations, the world had already condemned them to intellectual inadequacy. And yet, according to don Juan's calculations, each of them could achieve what I considered the pinnacle of human intellectual achievement - to become a man of knowledge. My reasons for feeling sorry for them were unfounded. Don Juan definitely tricked me.
“Maybe you’re right,” I said. - but how can you avoid the desire, the sincere desire to help the people around you?
- How do you think we can help them?
- Making them easier to carry. The least we can do for the people around us is to try to change them. You're doing this yourself. Is not it?
- No. I don't do that. I don’t know what to change, and why change anything in the people around me.
-What about me, don Juan? Didn't you teach me so that I could change?
- No. I'm not trying to change you. It may happen that one day you will become a man of knowledge - there is no way to know - but that will not change you. Someday you may be able to see people on a different plane, and then you will realize that there is no way to change anything about them.
- What is this other plane of seeing people, don Juan?
-People look different when you see them. A little smoke will help you see people like threads of light.
- Threads of light?
- Yes, threads, like a thin cobweb. Very fine fibers that circulate from the head to the navel. Thus, a person looks like an egg of circulating fibers. And his arms and legs are like luminous prominences bursting out in different directions.
- And this is what everyone looks like?
- Every. In addition, a person is in contact with everything else, not through his hands, however, but through a bundle of long fibers escaping from the center of his abdomen. These fibers connect a person to everything around him; they maintain his balance; they give it stability. Therefore, as you will someday see, man is a luminous egg, whether he is a beggar or a king, and there is no way to change anything, or rather, what can be changed in a luminous egg, eh?
2
My visit to don Juan marked the beginning of a new cycle. It took no effort for me to fall back into the old groove of enjoying his sense of drama, his humor and his patience with me. I definitely felt like I needed to visit more often. Not seeing don Juan was indeed a great sacrifice for me, and besides, I had something of particular interest to me that I wanted to discuss with him.
After I finished the book on his teachings, I began to sort through my field notes that I did not use in the book. I left out a lot of data from the book because my attention was directed to states of non-ordinary reality. Looking through my old notes, I came to the conclusion that a skilled magician can create the most specialized area of perception in his student simply by manipulating the "public keys." My entire construction concerning the nature of these manipulative procedures was based on the assumption that in order to create the necessary area of perception, a leader is needed. As a concrete test, I took the case of peyote meetings of magicians. I accepted that in these meetings the sorcerers came to an agreement about the nature of reality without any exchange of words or signs, and so I came to the conclusion that a very sophisticated code was used to get the participants to come to such an agreement. I had developed a complex system to explain these codes and procedures, and so I returned to visit don Juan and ask for his personal opinion and advice regarding my work.
May 21, 1968
Nothing unusual happened during my journey to don Juan. Temperatures in the desert were over 100 and very tiring. After lunch, the heat began to subside, and when I drove up to don Juan's house in the early evening, a cool breeze blew. I wasn't very tired, so we sat in his room and talked. This was not a conversation I wanted to record; in fact, I didn't try to put much meaning or meaning into my words. We talked about the weather, the harvest, his grandson, the Yaqui Indians, the Mexican government. I told don Juan how much I liked the special feeling you get when you talk in the dark.
He said that this pleasure of mine was based on my talkative nature; that it is easy for me to love chatting in the dark, because chatting is the only thing I can do at such a time, sitting next to him. I countered that it was more than the simple act of talking - something I liked. I said that I enjoyed the soothing warmth of the darkness around us. He asked me what I do at home when it gets dark. I replied that I always turn on the light or go out into the illuminated streets until it is time to sleep.
“Oh...” he said in disbelief. - I thought that you learned to use the darkness.
- What can it be used for? - I asked.
He said that darkness (he called it "darkness of day") is the best time to see. He emphasized the word “see” with a special intonation. I wanted to know what he meant by this. But he replied that it was too late to go into this matter.
May 22, 1968
As soon as I woke up in the morning, without any preamble, I told don Juan that I had constructed a system to explain what takes place at the peyote meeting - mitote. I took my notes and read him what I had developed. He listened patiently while I tried to explain my scheme.
I believed that a secret conductor was needed in order to tune all participants in such a way that they would come to any given agreement. I pointed out that people attend the mitote to find Mescalito and its lessons regarding the right way of life. At the same time, all these people do not exchange a single word or gesture among themselves, and yet they are in agreement regarding the presence of Mescalito and his specific lesson. At least that’s how it was at the meeting I attended: everyone agreed that Mescalito had appeared before them and given them a lesson. In my personal experience I found that the form taken by the individual appearance of Mescalito and its subsequent lesson were remarkably uniform, although they varied in content from person to person. I could not explain such homogeneity otherwise than by accepting it as the result of a hidden and complex adjustment.
It took me almost two hours to read and explain to don Juan the circuit that I had constructed. I ended by asking him to say in his own words what the actual procedure was for bringing the participants of the meeting to agreement.
When I finished, he grimaced. I thought that he must find my explanations challenging; he seemed deep in thought. After a decorous silence, I asked him what he thought of my idea.
My question suddenly changed his grimace into a smile, and then into a roar of laughter. I tried to laugh too and nervously asked what was so funny.
“You have gone astray,” he exclaimed. - why would someone try to set someone up at such an important time as Mitot? Do you think people always fool around with Mescalito?
For a second I thought he was being evasive; he didn't actually answer my question.
- Why would anyone tune in? - Don Juan asked stubbornly. - You were at the meeting. You should know that no one told you how to feel or what to do; no one except Mescalito himself.
I insisted that such an explanation was impossible, and again asked him to tell me how the agreement was reached.
“I know why you came,” don Juan said in a mysterious tone. - I cannot help you in your difficulty, because there is no tuning system.
- But how do all these people agree that Mescalito is present?
“They agree because they see,” don Juan said dramatically. - Why don’t you attend one more meeting and see for yourself?
I felt it was a trap. I said nothing and put my notes aside. He didn't insist.
Some time later, he asked me to take him to the house of one of his friends. We spent most of the day there. During the conversation, his friend John asked me what became of my interest in peyote. Almost eight years ago, John gave me peyote bars during my first experience. Don Juan came to my aid and told me that I was making progress.
On the way back to don Juan's house, I felt obliged to make a comment regarding the question asked by John, and I said, among other things, that I had no intention of learning anything further about peyote, because it required a kind of courage that I did not have. , and that when I said about my decision to finish my studies, I really meant it. Don Juan smiled and said nothing. I continued talking until we arrived at the house.
We sat down in a clean place in front of the door. It was a warm, clear day, but in the evening there was a noticeable enough breeze to feel pleasant.
- Why do you have to insist so hard on this? - don Juan said suddenly. - How many years have you been saying that you don’t want to study anymore?
- Three.
- Why are you so worried about this?
- I feel like I'm betraying you, don Juan. This is probably why I talk about this all the time.
- You are not betraying me.
- You were deceived in me. I ran. I feel like I'm defeated.
- You do what you can. Besides, you haven't been defeated yet. What I have to teach you is very difficult. At least I found it perhaps even more difficult than you.
“But you held on to it, don Juan.” My case is different. I gave up and came to see you not because I want to study, but only because I wanted to ask you to clarify some points in my work.
Don Juan looked at me for a second and then looked away.
“You have to let the haze take you away,” he said forcefully.
- No, don Juan, I can't use your smoke anymore. I think I'm already exhausted.
- You haven't even started yet.
- I'm too afraid.
- So you're afraid. Fear is nothing new. Don't think about being afraid. Think about the wonders of vision.
- I would sincerely like to think about these miracles, but I can’t. When I think of your haze, I feel a kind of darkness coming over me. It's as if there were no more people on earth, no one to turn to. Your smoke showed me the depths of loneliness, don Juan.
- This is not true. Take me for example. Smokey is my ally, and I don’t feel such loneliness.
- But you are different. You have conquered your fear.
Don Juan gently patted me on the shoulder.
“You’re not afraid,” he said softly. His voice carried a strange accusation.
“Am I lying about my fear, don Juan?”
“I don’t care about lies,” he said sharply. - I care about something else. The reason you don't want to study isn't because you're afraid. This is something different.
I persistently pushed him to tell me what it was. I argued with him, but he didn't say anything; he simply shook his head, as if unable to believe that I did not know this myself.
I told him that maybe it was inertia that was holding me back from studying. He wanted to know the meaning of the word inertia. I read him in the dictionary: “the tendency of matter to remain at rest if it is at rest, or, if in motion, to remain in motion in the same direction unless acted upon by some extraneous force.”
“If there is no external force acting on it,” he repeated. - These are perhaps the best words you found. I have already told you that only a leaky pot can take on the task of becoming a man of knowledge through his own efforts. A person with a sober head must be led into the teaching by cunning (tricks).
“But I’m sure there would be a lot of people who would gladly take on such a task,” I said.
- Yes, but they all don’t count. They usually already have a crack. They are like earthenware khums (large water jugs), which look intact from the outside, but will flow the minute you apply pressure to them, as soon as you fill them with water. I once had to introduce you to the teaching by cunning, in the same way that my benefactor introduced me. Otherwise, you would not have learned what you know now. Maybe it's time to use the trick on you again.
The trick he recalled was one of the most stressful parts of my apprenticeship. This happened several years ago, but in my brain it is all still as vivid as if it had just happened. Through very skillful manipulation, don Juan once forced me into a direct and terrible confrontation with a woman who had the reputation of a witch. The encounter resulted in deep hostility on her part. Don Juan used my fear of this woman as motivation to continue my teaching, arguing that I must study beyond magic in order to protect myself from her magical attacks. The end result of his “cunning” was so convincing that I honestly felt that I had no choice but to learn more and more if I wanted to stay alive.
“If you want to scare me with this woman again, then I simply won’t come again,” I said.
Don Juan's laugh was very cheerful.
“Don’t worry,” he said encouragingly. - Tricks with fear will no longer work with you. You are no longer afraid. But if necessary, cunning can be used on you anywhere. You don't even have to be there.
He put his hands behind his head and went to bed. I worked on my notes until he woke up a couple of hours later. By this time it was almost dark. Noticing that I was writing, he sat up straight and, smiling, asked me if I had checked myself out of my problem.
May 23, 1968
We talked about Oaxaca. I told don Juan that I once arrived in this city on market day, a day when crowds of Indians from all over the area flock to the city to sell food and various small items.
I mentioned that I was particularly interested in a man selling medicinal plants. He carried a wooden tray, in which there was a whole row of small jars, with dry crushed plants; he stood in the middle of the street, holding one jar and shouting a very funny song:
“Composition against flies, mosquitoes and ticks.
Formulations for goats, cows, horses and pigs.
Medicines for all human diseases.
Heals cough, lumbago, rheumatism and acne.
There are medicines for the liver, heart, stomach, and chest.
Come closer, ladies and gentlemen.
Composition against flies, fleas, mosquitoes and ticks.”
I listened to him for a long time. His advertisements consisted of a long list of human diseases for which he claimed to have cures; in order to give rhythm to his song, he paused after listing every four diseases.
Don Juan also sold medicinal plants in Oaxaca when he was young. He said he still remembered his promotional song and shouted it to me. He said that he and his friend Vicent used to do duets.
I told don Juan that during one of my trips to Mexico, I met his friend Vicente. Don Juan seemed surprised and wanted to know more about it.
I was driving through Durango that time and remembered that don Juan once told me that someday I would have to see his friend who lived in this town. I looked for him and found him and talked to him for a while. Before I left, he gave me a grid of several plants and a series of instructions on how to plant them.
On the way to the town of Aguas Calientes, I stopped the car. I made sure there was no one around. I kept an eye on the road and surrounding area for at least 10 minutes. There was not a single house in sight and no cattle grazing near the road. I stopped at the top of a small hill, from here I could see the entire road ahead and behind me. It was deserted in both directions as far as I could see it.
I waited a few minutes to get my bearings and remember Don Vicente's instructions.
I took one of the plants, went to the cactus field at the edge of the road and planted it there, as Don Vicent had told me. I had a bottle of mineral water with me, which I intended to water the plant with. I tried to open it by breaking the neck with the piece of metal I was using to dig the hole, and a shard of glass touched my upper lip, causing it to bleed.
I walked back to the car for another bottle of mineral water. As I was taking it out of the trunk, a Volkswagen stopped next to me and the driver asked if I needed help. I said everything was fine and he left. I went back to water the plant and then immediately walked back to my car.
When I was about 30 meters from her, I suddenly heard voices. I hurried up the slope onto the highway and saw three Mexicans standing by the car - two men and one woman. One of the men was sitting on the front bumper. He was probably about 40 years old; he was of average height with black curly hair. He carried a bundle on his back; he was wearing old trousers and a worn pinkish shirt. His shoes were not tied and were perhaps too big for him. They seemed sloppy and uncomfortable. He was sweating profusely. Another man stood about six meters from the car. He was thinner-boned than the first and shorter than him. His hair was straight and combed back. He carried a smaller bundle on his back and was older, perhaps about fifty years old. He wasn't sweating at all and seemed distant and uninterested.
The woman also seemed to be in her forties. She was thick and dark. She was wearing a black skirt, a white sweater and pointed shoes. She didn't have a package, but she did have a transistor receiver. She seemed very tired and her face was covered with drops of sweat.
When I approached, a woman and a younger man turned to me. They wanted a ride. I told them I didn't have room in my car. I showed them that my back seat was fully loaded and there really was no room left. The man suggested that if I drove slowly, they could sit on the rear bumper or ride lying on the front hood. I found this idea unfeasible. However, there was such urgency in their request that I felt very uncomfortable. I gave them money for bus tickets.
The younger man took the money, thanking me, but the older man turned his back to me with hostility.
“I want a lift,” he said. - I'm not interested in money.
Then he turned to me:
-Can you give us some food and water? - he asked.
I really had nothing to give them. They stood there for a moment, looking at me, and then walked away.
I got into the car and tried to start the engine. The heat was very intense, and I apparently over-pumped gas. The younger man stopped when he heard the grinding of the starter, went back and stood behind the car, ready to push it. I felt great discomfort. I began to breathe heavily. Finally, the engine started and I drove off.
After I finished my story, don Juan was silent for a long time.
- Why didn't you tell me about this earlier? - he asked without looking at me.
I didn't know what to say. I shrugged and told him I never thought it was anything important. “This is damn important,” he said. - Vicent is a first-class magician. He gave you something to plant because he had his own reasons for it. And if you met three people who seemed to pop out of nowhere right after you planted it, then there was a reason for that too. But only a fool like you will not pay attention to the incident and will believe that nothing important happened.
He wanted to know exactly what happened when I visited Vicente.
I told him that I was driving through the city and passed a market. The idea occurred to me to look at Don Vicente. I walked into the market and approached a row where they were selling medicinal plants. There were three tables in a row, but three fat women were selling there. I walked to the end of the aisle and found another counter around the corner. There I saw a skinny, thin-boned, gray-haired man. At that moment he was selling a birdcage to a woman.
I waited until he was free and then asked if he knew Don Vicente Medrano. He looked at me without answering.
- What do you want from this Vicente Medrano? - he asked finally.
I said that I had come to see him from his friend and told him don Juan's name. The old man looked at me for a second, and then he said that he was Vicent Medrano and that he was at my service. He asked me to sit down. He seemed happy, very relaxed and genuinely friendly. I told him about my friendship with don Juan. I felt that a bond of sympathy immediately arose between us. He said that he had known don Juan since they were both 20 years old. Don Vicente had only words of praise about don Juan. Towards the end of our conversation he said with a tremble in his voice:
- Don Juan is a true man of knowledge. I myself have only been a little involved in plant powers. I have always been interested in their medicinal properties. I even collected botanical books, which I sold only recently.
He was silent for a minute. He rubbed his chin a couple of times. He seemed to be searching for the right word.
“You can say that I am just a man of lyrical knowledge,” he said. - I'm not like don Juan, my Indian brother.
Don Vicent was silent for another minute. His eyes sparkled and looked at the ground to my left. Then he turned to me and said almost in a whisper:
- Oh, how high my Indian brother soars.
Don Vicent stood up. It seemed that our conversation was over. If anyone else had made statements about the Indian brother, I would have taken it as just a cheap cliché. However, Don Vicente's tone was so sincere and his eyes were so clear that he captivated me with the picture of his Indian brother soaring so high. And I believed that he said exactly what he meant.
“Lyrical knowledge,” don Juan exclaimed when I told him everything. - Vicent is a brujo. Why did you go to visit him?
I reminded him of his words that I needed to visit Don Vicente.
“This is absurd,” he exclaimed dramatically, “I told you that someday, when you know how to see, you will visit my friend Vicente.” That's what I said. Clearly you weren't listening.
I objected that I saw no harm in visiting Don Vicente, that I was charmed by his manners and his kindness. Don Juan shook his head from side to side, and in a half-childish tone expressed his surprise at what he called my “blind luck.” He said that my visit to Don Vicente was comparable to entering a lion's cage armed with a twig. Don Juan seemed excited, and yet I saw no reason for this. Don Vicent was a wonderful man. He seemed so fragile. His strangely hunting eyes seemed to make him almost ephemeral. I asked don Juan how such a wonderful man could be dangerous.
“You are an incurable fool,” he said and looked harshly for a second. - By itself, it will not cause you any harm. But knowledge is power. And if a person has taken the path of knowledge, then he is no longer responsible for what may happen to those who come into contact with him. You should have visited him when you knew enough to protect yourself; not from him, but from the power that he concentrated and which, by the way, does not belong to him or anyone else. Hearing that you were my friend, Vicent concluded that you could protect yourself and gave you a gift. He probably liked you and gave you a great gift and you didn’t take advantage of it. What a pity.
May 24, 1968
I pestered don Juan almost all day, asking him to tell me about don Vicente's gift. I showed him in a variety of ways that he should take into account the differences between us; what is self-evident for him may be completely imperceptible for me.
- How many plants did he give you? - he asked me finally. I said four, but I didn't really remember. Then don Juan wanted to know exactly what happened after I left don Vicente and before I stopped by the road.
“The number of plants is important, as well as the order of events,” he said. - How can I tell you what kind of gift it was if you don’t remember what happened.
I tried to visualize the sequence of events without success.
“If you remembered everything that happened,” he said, “then I could at least tell you how you threw away your gift.”
Don Juan seemed very upset. He impatiently hurried me to remember, but my memory was completely empty.
- What do you think I did wrong, don Juan? - I said just to continue the conversation.
- All.
“But I followed Don Vicente’s instructions to the letter.”
- What of this? Don't you understand that following his instructions was pointless?
- Why?
- Because these instructions were for someone who can see, and not for an idiot who escaped from the situation without losing his life only due to luck. You came to see Vicent without preparation. He liked you and gave you a gift. And this gift could easily cost you your life.
- But why did he give me something so serious? If he is a magician, then he should have known that I know nothing.
- No, he couldn't see it. You look like you know, but you don't really know much.
I said that I was sincerely convinced that I had never pretended to be anything, at least not consciously.
“That's not what I mean,” he said. - If you were pretending to be something, Vicent would have seen it. When I see you, you look to me as if you knew a lot, and yet I myself know that this is not so.
- What do I seem to know, don Juan?
- Secrets of power, of course; knowledge of brujos. Therefore, when Vicent saw you, he gave you a gift, and you acted with this gift as a dog acts with food when its belly is full. A dog pees on food when it doesn't want to eat anymore, so that other dogs won't eat it. So you pissed on the gift. Now we will never know what really happened. You've lost a lot. What a pity.
He was calm for some time. Then he shrugged his shoulders and smiled.
“There is no use in pity,” he said. - Gifts of power are so rare in life; they are unique and precious. Take me for example; no one has ever given me such gifts. And I know very few people who have ever received such a gift. Throwing something so unique is a shame.
“I see what you mean, don Juan,” I said. - Is there anything I can do to help out the gift?
He laughed and repeated several times: “return the gift.”
“That sounds great,” he said. - I like it. However, there is nothing that can be done to return your gift.
May 25, 1968
Don Juan spent most of his time today showing me how to assemble simple traps for small animals. We spent most of the morning cutting and clearing branches. I had a lot of questions running through my head. I tried to talk to him while we worked, but he joked, saying that out of the two of us, only I could move both my hands and my mouth at the same time. Finally, we sat down to rest, and I exploded with questions:
-What does it mean to see, don Juan?
He began to talk about vision as a process independent of ally and the technique of magic. The magician was a person who could command the ally and thus manipulate the ally to his advantage. But just because a mage commanded an ally didn't mean he could see. I reminded him that he had said before that it was impossible to see unless you had an ally. Don Juan calmly noted that he had come to the conclusion that it was possible to see and not command an ally. He felt that there was no reason why it should not be so; because vision has nothing to do with the manipulative technique of magic, which serves only to influence the people around them.
- How is it that the vision technique does not affect the people around him, don Juan?
- I already told you that vision is not magic. And yet, they are easy to confuse, because a person who sees can learn to control an ally and become a magician almost immediately, without spending any time. On the other hand, a man may learn a certain technique for commanding an ally and thus become a magician, and yet he may never learn to see. Moreover, vision is the opposite of magic. The vision makes it clear that all this is unimportant.
- Doesn't matter what, don Juan?
- The unimportance of everything.
Don Juan dropped the whole conversation by saying that the vision he was talking about was not simply looking at things and that my lack of understanding stemmed from my insistence on speaking.
A few hours later, don Juan returned to the topic of ollies. I felt like he was somehow annoyed by my questions, so I didn't press him any further. He then showed me how to make a rabbit trap; I had to hold a long stick and bend it as much as possible so that he could tie a cord to the ends of the stick. The stick was quite thin, but it still required considerable force to bend it. My arms and head were shaking with tension, and I was almost exhausted by the time he finally tied the cord.
We sat down and he started talking. He said that it was clear to him that I could not understand anything until I talked it over, and therefore he did not mind my questions and was going to tell me about the ally.
“Ollie’s not in a haze,” he said. - the smoke takes you to where the ollie is, and when you become one with the ally, you will no longer need to smoke. From now on, you will be able to summon your ally at will and make him do whatever you want. Ollies are neither good nor bad, but are used by magicians for whatever purpose they find them useful for. I like the smoke as an ollie because it doesn't require much from me. He is constant and honest.
- How do you see an ally, don Juan? The three people I saw, for example, looked like ordinary people to me; what would they look like to you?
- They would look like ordinary people.
- But then how can you distinguish them from ordinary people?