His eyes were so shiny, so utterly crazy and mischievous, that I ended up laughing myself.
"I have insisted to the point of exhaustion that there are no procedures in sorcery," he went on. "There are no methods, no steps. The only thing that matters is the movement of the assemblage point. And no procedure can cause that. It's an effect that happens all by itself."
He pushed me as if to straighten my shoulders, and then he peered at me, looking right into my eyes. My attention became riveted to his words.
"Let us see how you figure this out," he said. "I have just said that the movement of the assemblage point happens by itself. But I have also said that the nagual's presence moves his apprentice's assemblage point; and that the way the nagual masks his ruthlessness either helps or hinders that movement. How would you resolve this contradiction?"
I confessed that I had been just about to ask him about the contradiction, for I had been aware of it, but that I could not even begin to think of resolving it. I was not a sorcery practitioner.
"What are you, then?" he asked.
"I am a student of anthropology, trying to figure out what sorcerers do," I said.
My statement was not altogether true, but it was not a lie.
Don Juan laughed uncontrollably.
"It's too late for that," he said. "Your assemblage point has moved already. And it is precisely that movement that makes one a sorcerer."
He stated that what seemed a contradiction was really the two sides of the same coin. The nagual entices the assemblage point into moving by helping to destroy the mirror of self-reflection. But that is all the nagual can do. The actual mover is the spirit, the abstract; something that cannot be seen or felt; something that does not seem to exist, and yet does.
For this reason, sorcerers report that the assemblage point moves all by itself. Or they say that the nagual moves it. The nagual, being the conduit of the abstract, is allowed to express the spirit through his actions.
I looked at don Juan questioningly.
"The nagual moves the assemblage point, and yet it is not he himself who does the actual moving," don Juan said. "Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that the spirit expresses itself in accordance with the nagual's impeccability. The spirit can move the assemblage point with the mere presence of an impeccable nagual."
He said that he had wanted to clarify this point, because, if it was misunderstood, it led a nagual back to self-importance and thus to his destruction.
He changed the subject and said that, because the spirit had no perceivable essence, sorcerers deal rather with the specific instances and ways in which they are able to shatter the mirror of self-reflection.
Don Juan noted that in this area it was important to realize the practical value of the different ways in which the naguals masked their ruthlessness. He said my mask of generosity, for example, was adequate for dealing with people on a shallow level, but useless for shattering their self-reflection because it forced me to demand an almost impossible decision on their part. I expected them to jump into the sorcerers' world without any preparation.
"A decision such as that jump must be prepared for," he went on. "And in order to prepare for it, any kind of mask for a nagual's ruthlessness will do, except the mask of generosity."
Perhaps because I desperately wanted to believe that I was truly generous, his comments on my behavior renewed my terrible sense of guilt. He assured me that I had nothing to be ashamed of, and that the only undesirable effect was that my pseudo-generosity did not result in positive trickery.
In this regard, he said, although I resembled his benefactor in many ways, my mask of generosity was too crude, too obvious to be of value to me as a teacher. A mask of reasonableness, such as his own, however, was very effective in creating an atmosphere propitious [* propitious- likely to result in success] to moving the assemblage point. His disciples totally believed his pseudo reasonableness. In fact, they were so inspired by it that he could easily trick them into exerting themselves to any degree.
"What happened to you that day in Guaymas was an example of how the nagual's masked ruthlessness shatters self-reflection," he continued. "My mask was your downfall. You, like everyone around me, believed my reasonableness. And, of course, you expected, above all, the continuity of that reasonableness.
"When I faced you with not only the senile behavior of a feeble old man, but with the old man himself, your mind went to extremes in its efforts to repair my continuity and your self-reflection. And so you told yourself that I must have suffered a stroke.
"Finally, when it became impossible to believe in the continuity of my reasonableness, your mirror began to break down. From that point on, the shift of your assemblage point was just a matter of time. The only thing in question was whether it was going to reach the place of no pity."
I must have appeared skeptical to don Juan because he explained that the world of our self-reflection or of our mind was very flimsy and was held together by a few key ideas that served as its underlying order. When those ideas failed, the underlying order ceased to function.
Carlos Castaneda
The Power of Silence
